The Poison Woman

On Being Bad & Ruining Love

“I’m evil! I'm bad! I'm evil! Do you hear me? I'm bad! Angel, I’m bad! I’m bad. Do you hear me? I’m bad! I’m bad! I’m bad! […] Angel, please just do it. Just do it. Just kill me.” – Faith Lehane, character in the television series Angel, episode titled “Five By Five”

At a certain point in my life, shortly after I started presenting in public as a woman, the largely barren desert of my romantic life bloomed and filled to bursting with the fruits of male attention. Where the predominantly white gay men of my Canadian upbringing were largely indifferent to (and in some cases, even repulsed by) an effeminate gay Chinese boy, the supposedly heterosexual men of that same society expressed an at times frighteningly intense attraction to a young transsexual Asian woman.

The effect on my psyche was both intoxicating and disorienting: Intoxicating because at long last, I finally had the external validation of my physical attractiveness that I so deeply desired. Disorienting because even though I now had the ability to attract love or something like it to me, I so rarely had the ability to make it last – and when it did last, something strange, something disturbing, always seemed to happen. The men who stayed eventually became distant and withdrawn, or chaotic and emotionally unstable, or worst of all, violent and aggressive.  What did that say, I wondered, about the attractiveness of my soul?

***
In many narrative traditions around the world, poison is associated with women and the feminine, as well as intimacy, sexuality, wickedness and corruption: The evil queen tries to slay her rival, Snow White, with a poison apple; so too does the evil fairy in the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Medea and Circe, famous witches of Greek mythology, use magical poisons and potions to inflict their will upon various men for the sake of love and vengeance. In ancient Sanskrit literature, the Vishankanya, or poison damsels, are girls raised from childhood on a diet of toxic substances, transforming them into deadly assassins them capable of killing with a kiss or a touch.

Even the Christian figure of Eve, the First Woman, may be said to have poisoned Adam by enticing him to eat the Fruit of Knowledge, thus corrupting him with sin – and by extension, condemning all of humanity for the rest of time.

The connection between femininity and poison as a motif, or storytelling trope, is undeniably misogynist when viewed through a contemporary critical lens – the result of patriarchal attitudes towards women and the role of the feminine in social relations. In essence, this is about the societal fear of feminine power. Fear of feminine sexuality. Fear of feminine desire and feminine agency, fear of feminine expressions of longing and choice.

In archetypal narratives, the corrupt and toxic feminine is often juxtaposed with or even pitted against a pure and virtuous feminine – the virgin princess battling the wicked fairy, or the faithful wife waiting for her sailor husband as he is seduced by an island-dwelling witch. Such stories enforce sexist ideas about how “good” women are supposed to conduct themselves while inducing fear, shame, and judgement about the ways that women transgress the subservient role laid out for them in a patriarchal society.

Yet on another level, the opposing archetypes of the Pure Woman and the Poison Woman resonate with a certain kind of poetic truth about the experience of being alive – not only as a woman, but as any kind of person trying to understand how to navigate the mysterious intensity of being alive and in love with other people. We both fear and crave the painful intensity of intimacy and attachment. We both fear and hope that love will infect us, corrupt us, destroy us, transform us – we fear and crave our own capacity for love, which is to say, the poison and potion inside of ourselves.

***

The timing of both my gender transition and my coming of age as a young adult happened to coincide with the groundswell of third-wave intersectional feminism and social justice politics in popular culture in the early 2010s (the backlash to which was, of course, soon to come). As an emerging writer at the time, the confluence of my personal experience and the cultural moment provided me with compelling explanations for my lifelong struggles in the arena of romantic attachment, explanations that I wrote about at length in various publications:

As a feminist, I wrote about the ways in which toxic masculinity conditions men to treat women and gender diverse people with exploitative disregard and entitlement to emotional labour. Surely this was why the men I dated so frequently shared intense traumas with me, had sex with me, and then abruptly ghosted. As an anti-racist, I wrote about how white privilege encouraged my white partners to re-enact the history of colonial geopolitics upon the Orientalized landscape of my haunted Asian body. As a trans woman of colour – that most potent of queer revolutionary figureheads – I wrote about how the dominant culture norm of transmisogyny cast me in the role of a sexually deviant yet erotically alluring monstress, causing men to swing wildly between violent revulsion and intense fetishization of women like me.

I still stand by those pieces of writing and the painful social realities they sought to bring to light. I still believe that it is impossible to separate the personal experience of romance and sexuality from the larger cultural forces that shape our attitudes and beliefs about who is deserving of pleasure, kindness, consideration, and love. Those writings were my small contribution to a lineage of literature and art that seek to map the ways that cruel systems of politics and power affect us in the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of our lives. The maps made by feminism, anti-racism, and queer liberation saved me in many ways, and continue to save and support my psychological survival today.

Yet maps, as the cliché goes, are not the terrain, and the truths revealed by social justice theories about my love life were conspicuously missing essential aspects of the emotional geography of my relationships: namely, my own contribution to the dynamics I found so painful and unstable. Comforting as it was to lay blame at the feet of the racist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, and as true as the insights provided by that perspective felt, there were harsher and more complex truths that I could sense at work below the surface of my political analysis.

Social justice theory could explain, perhaps, the reasons that some of the straight men who dated me chose to keep me a secret from everyone else in their lives, and why they were afraid to be seen with me in public. It had no answers, however, to why my response to mild standoffishness from a boyfriend could sometimes evoke the sensation of an emergency in my body so intense and corrosive I might spend the entire night sweating, shaking and feverish, desperately waiting for him to text or call me back.

Feminism and critical race theory could not explain why, in the presence of prolonged tenderness from a sexual partner, my body would sometimes suddenly and inexplicably shut itself off from sensation and erotic desire, no matter how much I tried to summon it back. The most articulate and trenchant political analysis in the world could not tell me why normative romantic struggles – mismatched libido, wondering if a new partner liked me as much as I liked them, petty conflicts over texting etiquette, being dumped by someone who just wasn’t that into me – could cause eruptions of intense and agonizing emotion within me, or equally intense abrupt shutdowns and icy numbness. Social justice could not tell me why my body seemed to be allergic to my own experience of desire, longing, and connection.

Perhaps most frustrating and shameful of all, even the sharpest political analysis could explain or transform the shadowy impulses tucked away inside me like the venom sacs hidden in the body of a snake:

My neediness and my clinginess, so empty and so hungry, a nest of maggots wriggling in the heart. The rage I kept sedated and smoldering in the basement of my self, yearning to awaken and spit acid at a moment’s notice. The reflexive people-pleasing intertwined with noxious resentment, an unstable combination of elements always threatening to explode.

Social justice theory could not purge me of the belief rotting in my bones that I deserved the instability of living in a transphobic world, deserved the fear of being harassed by strangers, deserved being abandoned by the men I wished would love me, deserved even the domestic violence and sexual assaults, that I had somehow corrupted them, that I was asking for it. The secret terror that it wasn’t the men but me who was toxic, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was an emotionally poisonous being who brought out the worst nature of everyone around her.

***

In the ancient mythology of southern China, there is a magical poison called gu, which is created by imprisoning snakes, spiders, scorpions, and other venomous creatures in a jar, locked in mortal combat until only one remains, infused with the poison of all the rest. From this final survivor, the gu toxin can be derived, a powerful and deadly alchemical substance containing a malevolent shapeshifting spirit that could possess, control, and consume the human body.

According to the legend, gu can be used for many purposes, but is most frequently associated with vengeful women who used it to bewitch and seduce wayward lovers in a terrifying process that most frequently ended in madness and death for the poisoned. The poisoner, on the other hand, might herself be transformed into a gu spirit, fated to roam the other as an otherworldly, voracious being for eternity.

***

Even as I was going through my activist coming-of-age, I spent most of my twenties training, and then practicing, as a social worker-psychotherapist with a focus on trauma. In that time, I became familiar with the language of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and attachment theory, concepts that offered me a different perspective on my experience with intimacy.

As fate would have it, the psychological perspective, like intersectional social justice shortly before it, would soon rise to a certain kind of cultural ascendancy among my peer demographic, finding widespread popularity in the form of “wellness Instagram” and “mental health awareness TikTok” among other platforms. Unlike social justice, the culture of wellness, therapeutic language, and self-help offered maps to the relational landscape that sought to locate the source of distress not in broad external social forces, but in the subterranean forces lurking unconsciously in the body and the mind.

As I slowly began to despair of social justice’s ability to cure me of my romantic suffering (which, to be fair, was never a promise that any activist actually made), I found myself increasingly attracted to the transformative powers of psychotherapy, somatic life coaching, and holistic health – thrilled to discover ideas that not only seemed to directly address my internal world, but also offered concrete ways to change it.

I learned, for example, that my intense and at times irrational fear of sudden abandonment was the result of adverse childhood experiences and the resultant development of an insecure attachment style. I learned that the “emergency in my body” was not a phenomenon unique to me, but in fact hugely widespread, and the manifestation of a dysregulated nervous system acting from a state of dorsal vagal activation (an idea derived from neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ wildly popular but also scientifically controversial polyvagal theory).

I learned (and often breathlessly imparted to my therapy clients) that the experience of oneself as “toxic” and “poisonous” is the result of psycho-biological safety strategies that develop in response to post-traumatic stress and complex post-traumatic stress, among other interpersonal and social conditions.

I learned that these experiences could be changed through psychotherapy, bodywork, meditative practice, and a vast array of other, more esoteric forms of healing. I learned that I could change the way I related to my body and its wild, unpredictable bursts of sensation. I learned how to understand my impulses, fears, and cravings with compassion, and how to offer that same compassion to the fears and cravings of others. I learned, to an extent I had never believed possible, how to be in deep relationship without losing my sense of who I am, how to calm the emergency in my body.

And yet.

While my romantic life was undeniably improved by therapy, the same haunting voices still seemed to whisper inside me, a small but steady trickle of venom in my bloodstream. Though I had learned (for the most part) how to tend to my emotions, and how to not act out in ways that would escalate their intensity, the primal fear remained firmly embedded in my body: That there was something wrong with me, something poisonous, and sooner or later that something would corrupt every relationship and every love.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, since I now had the ability to curb my emotional intensity, I began to discover that I actually missed the extremes – that somehow, all of that trauma and drama was also a part of how my body had learned to feel fully alive. I began to discover that I was afraid of who I would be, and what my life might look like, without it.

Here, the therapeutic world began to fail me, largely because of its insistence that I was one who had failed: If only I had done more somatic resourcing practices, if only I had attended those Codependents Anonymous meetings, if only I had found better modalities, if only I did more polyvagal theory-informed yoga asana practice, if only I weren’t so lazy, so unenlightened, so addicted to drama, so stupid, so fucked up, so broken, so hysterical, then I would have been able to heal myself fully. I would have purged the Poison Woman and her insane, toxic patterns and cravings, from my body and replaced her with the spirit of a lady bodhisattva sweetly praying on a lotus.

I would have found the perfect spiritual warrior-prince to sweep me away to a sacred mountaintop rather than finding myself repeatedly drawn into relationship dynamics where I felt scared and alone and ashamed.

Part of the problem, of course, is that in some ways the social justice world had been right all along in ways that the self-help world could not hope to answer for: All the somatic resourcing practices in the world cannot change the fact that the majority of straight men on this planet are too afraid to hold my hand in a coffee shop but also enjoy “shemale” pornography at least occasionally in private. A decade of psychodynamic psychotherapy could not change the fact we live in a society where women in love are expected by default to act simultaneously as unpaid housekeepers, social secretaries, sex dolls, and therapists to their partners. We live in a crazy-making machine that is designed to suck the life from our bones, and self-help is not the answer.

Another part of the problem, however, is perhaps that the Poison Woman inside me is not something I can cure. Perhaps the problem is that being a trans person, or being a woman, or being a person in love is not something that we can fix. Perhaps the problem is that love – much like being alive - is at times extremely painful despite its many splendors, and that alchemical blend of joy and suffering and all it produces in me is not something that I am meant or even want to escape.

***

The Poison Woman is symbolic of feminine power – the power to corrupt and destroy, yes, but more fundamentally, the power to influence and be influenced by another’s living body. This power is, of course, the essence of intimacy, which is in turn the foundation of love. As queer theorists have so viscerally pointed out, the body is a leaky vessel, prone to porousness and infection. The very permeability that allows us to flow into one another in transcendent union is the same vulnerability that threatens to dissolve us entirely as we consume or are consumed by the essence of the beloved other.

That is to say, to make loving contact with another body is to open ourselves to the possibility of both transcendence and destruction. Though intention, capacity, and skill can allow us to titrate the risks – much in the way that manipulating the dosage of an intoxicating substance can allow us to dance the line between medicinal potion and deadly poison – it is impossible to eliminate the risks entirely. The Poison Woman teaches us that power, sexuality, ecstasy and intimacy require us to embrace risk in order to access transcendence. There is no other way to love.

***

Somewhere deep in the chambers of my heart, there is a Poison Woman. When she was a little girl, to appease the wrathful gods, her family buried her beneath the ground in a pit full of vipers, scorpions, centipedes, spiders and poisonous frogs. Yet the girl refused to die. She clung to life through the strength of her longing and the power of her rage. For one endless night that lasted years, the girl and the beasts struggled with one another, locked in agonizing mortal combat until only the child was left, feasting on the venomous remains.

When she emerged, the girl was fully grown, a Poison Woman who burned with eerie, unnatural beauty and skin, hair, lips and saliva all glistened with a toxic sheen. Whomever the Poison Woman touched, kissed, or breathed on immediately succumbed to the effects of her power. Some died instantly. Others fell into an eternal sleep filled with terrifying, ecstatic dreams. Still others were transformed into horrific monsters who new bodies matched the shape of their souls.

The Poison Woman walked into her family’s ancestral home and climbed the stairs to the highest room in the house. There, dressed in flowing white, was her sister, a Pure Woman who had been raised on a strict diet of sacred spring water and herbs. This, too, had been done to appease the gods. Though everyone who laid eyes upon the Pure Woman fell to their knees in pious fervor, she lived a lonely life.

The Pure Woman raised her eyes to meet the Poison Woman’s. She immediately recognized her sister, who had been chosen to be sacrificed in her stead, and was filled with shame and dread. She rose to her feet and stood face to face before the Poison Woman. “So,” the Pure Woman said, “You’ve come for your revenge.”

The Poison Woman shook her head. “No,” she said, and her eyes were sad and full of love. “I’ve come to set you free.” And she kissed the Pure Woman on the lips.