Personal Lens: The Body as a Citizenship Test

I possess a Green Card. It is a thick, holographic, heavy plastic rectangle, designed to prove to the United States government that I am allowed to exist within its borders. It is supposed to be a shield.

But I have learned, through the slow attrition of survival, that a document is not a suit of armor. A document is a theory; the body is the reality.

In the years since I crossed the Atlantic, leaving the Architecture of Control of my South African childhood for the supposed liberty of America, I have discovered that citizenship is not a legal status you hold; it is a performance you must pass every single day. And the judges are everywhere: the TSA agent, the bank teller, the insurance adjuster, the pharmacist.

You have already read what the scanner did to me at the airport. What I did not say there is that the airport is the easy case to explain. It has a machine in it. People understand machines. The harder thing to explain is that the same verdict is delivered, every week, by people with no machine at all, in rooms where nothing is being secured and nothing is at stake except a stranger’s certainty about what I am.

The Bank. This began in Pretoria, before I ever left. I had banked with the same institution my entire life. They held my first savings account and my bond. When I asked them to change my title from Mr to Ms, they would not tell me yes and they would not tell me no. Their systems, it turned out, were as rigid as my father’s worldview. So I moved my whole financial life to a competitor that promised it could handle the change.

I sat down across from the consultant with my new smart ID card, the one I had fought the state for years to obtain, the one that finally said Female. She updated the screen. Then the professional manner dropped away and she leaned in, her voice falling to the sort of whisper that carries further than speech.

“So,” she said, looking me over. “Why don’t you dress more feminine?”

I had come to move my debit orders. She was not finished. “Have you had the surgery?” she asked, in the tone people use for the weather. “Will you get boobs?”

I sat still. I wanted to ask whether she interrogated the man before me about his prostate when he opened a savings account. But I needed the account. I needed to function in the economy. So I gave vague answers, took the new card, and left.

At another counter, in another building, a different official held that same female identity card in his hand, looked at my face, and called me Sir for the length of the interaction. Sir, sign here. Sir, we need this form. I corrected him. He ignored me. Then, while stamping the paper, came the inevitable pivot to the body: “So, Sir. Did you have the operation?”

This is administrative violence, and it is worth being precise about what makes it violent. Nobody raised a hand to me. Every one of these people would describe the encounter, if asked, as routine. The violence is in the substitution: a clerk decides that their perception of my biology outranks the document the state issued me, and in that moment the law simply stops applying. My legal identity survived only as long as each individual stranger agreed to honour it. That is not a right. That is a permission, renewed hourly, at the discretion of whoever is behind the glass.

The document, in other words, was a paper shield. It existed. It was genuine. It was also, in the places where I actually needed it, decorative.

The Hospital: Necropolitics. And then there is the ultimate gatekeeper: the healthcare system. In 2024, my body betrayed me in a different way. I was diagnosed with colon cancer, a legacy of the Lynch Syndrome I inherited from my father, The Colonel.

In the United States, healthcare is not a right; it is a purchase. It is a negotiation between your body and a corporation’s profit margin. You have already read what happened when the wine store closed. What matters here is the shape of it rather than the story: the paycheck and the means of paying for treatment were the same document, so losing one put both at risk. I faced major surgery with no income and the knowledge that in this country the poor are allowed to die.

This is necropolitics. It is the politics of disposability. I spent the days before my surgery not just preparing my mind for the knife, but frantically fundraising, navigating insurance codes, and begging the system to see my life as worth saving. I realized that my citizenship was conditional on my solvency. If I could not pay, I ceased to be a person and became a “risk” to be managed.

The Threshold I write this from the other side of the surgery, cancer-free for now, but forever aware of the fragility of my safety.

We are told that if we follow the rules, get the proper papers, and work hard, we will be safe. But for those of us in the Survival Wing (the trans, the migrant, the disabled), safety is never a default setting. It is a daily negotiation.

My body is a borderland. It is where the laws of the state collide with the truth of my existence. And every day that I walk out the door, I am taking a citizenship test that has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with how much humanity the world is willing to grant a body that refuses to fit.

The Convergence. The terror of the polycrisis is that these tests are not separate. They are the same test. The same authoritarian logic that wants to revoke my Green Card also wants to deny my healthcare and criminalize my identity. They are all expressions of the same desire: to narrow the definition of who counts as “Human.”

To live in this body is to live in a state of constant, low-level treason against the Architecture of Control. I am too sick for their eugenics, too foreign for their nationalism, and too queer for their fundamentalism. But here is the secret they do not know: The test makes us strong.

But this strength is not solitary; it is drawn from the communities we forge.

Living at this intersection has taught me that safety is not something the state gives you; it is something you build with others.

We cheated on the test. We pass the answers to one another in the dark. We share the names of safe doctors like resistance codes. We map the safe bathrooms, the friendly landlords, and the lawyers who will fight for us pro bono. We build a “shadow infrastructure” of care that operates where the state has failed.

I have found more safety in these whisper networks of trans women and the shared resources of immigrant communities than I ever found in the empty promises of the state.

My body may be a failing grade in their system. But in the Thirdspace (the world we are building together), it is just a body: flawed, scarred, healing, and wholly, undeniably mine.