5 Questions with Sumarlinah Winoto
Sumarlinah Winoto is a community organiser and creative who is interested in exploring how we negotiate our relationships to our bodies and to spaces. They have studied human geography and trained as a dancer.
Their most recent project, transomatics, is a soft body awareness practice that aims to help trans and gender non-conforming people who are grappling with gender dysphoria.
Have a listen to the freely available series at www.transomatics.com.
No.1
What prompted the creation of transomatics?
transomatics is a practice I developed over twelve months, and I think on some subliminal level, one I have been practicing for many years. I used to run community dance classes that were designed to remove as many barriers to movement-based practice as I could. I found that even though people enjoyed the dance classes, there was always an underlying uncertainty that I couldn’t seem to reach.
I find that we tend to grow quite distant from our own bodies—we are trained to see it as a product, a tool, an object. With this distance comes distrust, and I think this is the first bridge we must rebuild in order to become closer to ourselves, closer to understanding our full selves.
In particular, as trans people, our bodies are politicised and objectified in ways that erode the trust we have in our selves—if we are not recognised as who we say we are, how can we be sure [of ourselves]? Why can our bodies betray us like this? Practicing any sort of movement requires a bond between the body and the self. So transomatics is about building and strengthening that bond. I hope that it can help trans people grow closer to their bodies by feeling things only they can feel, experiencing things only they can experience. I hope these experiences can help us strengthen the notion that bodies should only be defined by the person who lives in it.
No.2
In the trailer for transomatics, you say, “I want to offer a practice where we can sink into our bodies, instead of trying to flee it.” Can you speak more to this?
Experiencing gender dysphoria is a feeling of dissociation where the body you see in the mirror does not feel like your own. A perfectly natural response to that is to try and flee it, to dissociate. On many occasions, I have wanted to flee my body. I often still want to. And yet, I cannot. Even if I had all the money in the world and could afford every bit of gender-affirming surgery I could wish for, I would still be in the same body, even if it’s tweaked. I would still be scared of it betraying me someday; I would still hold all these memories of being misgendered and unsure of myself.
To be clear, gender-affirming surgery and hormones are important and necessary for many trans people, and I am not trying to undermine that fact. But I want to suggest that even with hormones and surgery, there is the possibility that dysphoria doesn’t go away. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that addressing gender dysphoria should involve reassessing our relationship to the body. For me, somatic practices like transomatics can help us see our bodies as the physiological assemblages they are, omitting the gendered and politicised framing. For those of us in the community who cannot afford to seek medical treatment (whether financially, socially, culturally or otherwise), I hope that transomatics can help ease dysphoria.
transomatics focuses on experiencing the functionality of various organs and muscles of the body, going beneath the superficial surface and thus, sinking into the body instead of fleeing it.
No.3
The five episodes you present as part of transomatics feel like it’s made with so much care and tenderness. It’s personal yet communal at the same time. What were your own experiences with realising that this type of somatics practice worked for you?
I think this practice was something I was lucky to develop through my training as a dancer. Ballet is a demanding practice, and requires the body and the mind to work together to be a strong and reliable team. It took me a long time to recognise the aspects of dance that had helped me understand the importance of somatics practices for navigating trans experiences. But when I did begin to understand how it had shaped me and acted as such a crucial support in my own gender journey, I knew I had to develop something I could share with other trans people.
Dance taught me how to be present in my body, how to listen to it and look after it—things I see reflected in somatics practices. For me, focusing on the functionalities and simple sensations of the body keeps me centred and present. It also keeps me in tune with what my body needs from me, and what I need from my body.
No.4
“Mindfulness meditation” is something that we see a lot more of now. And being in touch with one’s corporeal body feels especially crucial in a global pandemic where we’re not only disconnected from one another but possibly feeling even more dissociated than ever.
How do you think you combine the somatics work that you draw from—Hellerwork, the Feldenkrais and Hakomi methods, the Skinner Releasing and Alexander Techniques, and Do-In—to bring out the “sinking in our bodies” feeling you mention?
Yes, creating this recorded series was in part instigated by the lockdowns happening in Naarm (‘Melbourne’). I wanted to make something that could be freely available to trans people everywhere, and which might help them if they were in difficult living circumstances and in absence of community support. I hope that transomatics offers a few minutes of being present inside oneself, acknowledging and holding space for oneself during these straining times where we are living increasingly through digital realms.
I combined various ideas and exercises across the somatics field with simple stretch exercises that I felt would most accessibly and tangibly prompt a feeling of presence in the body. Many of the stretches are designed to elicit feeling in parts of our bodies we don’t often feel—the gut, or the muscles running up the side of our torso. Others are geared towards sensing the interconnectivity of the body: how the breath seems to move with every inch of skin, or how raising your arm can elicit feeling in your pelvis.
Raising our awareness of the body in this way lets it take up all of our attention, so we can practice co-existing with the body. I try to treat my body as an equal and my counterpart: as someone who is responsible for me, and who I am responsible for in return. I hope this is a concept transomatics can inspire in others too.
No.5
What kind(s) of conversations—be that within the trans and gender non-conforming community or otherwise—do you hope will come out of transomatics?
I hope we can continue to explore different ways of diffusing gender dysphoria that don’t require having plenty of disposable income and jumping through cis-normative medical loopholes. I hope that we can continue creating trans friendly spaces where we can learn to be vulnerable with ourselves, and build a strong relationship with our bodies—a relationship that grows with us however we change our physical appearances. More than anything, I hope this practice helps people be in conversation with themselves. Our bodies are so strong, so interesting, and so strange. Humans are so strange! It is a never-ending conversation to get to know your body.
transomatics is the soft suggestion that another approach may also be possible—to become closer to the body we live in.
Listen to the trailer below: