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Binocular visibility

03/31/2022

Today is transgender day of visibility, and I happen to have developed a (hopefully temporary) visual impairment just in time for the occasion! Yesterday I spent all day in A&E trying to figure out why I'd been seeing double for the past week. It was intermittent at first, but by Tuesday it was a constant feature. The whole world now displays itself as two images laid on top of one another side by side, semi-transparent in the places where they overlap, moving closer and further away from one another smoothly like waves on a beach, and only resolving into a single world if I close one eye. This is defined as "binocular diplopia", double vision that only occurs when both eyes are open, caused by neurological damage to the eye.

There's something charming about the fact that it now takes physical effort to reduce perceptual multiplicity into a single world image. It is in a small way like the perceptual divergence that led me to work with interactive media - reducing all multiple possibilities into one in order to write a linear essay feels to me like arbitrary effort, compared to the flexibility and multiplicity of non-linear interactive writing.

In any case, now I'm seeing the world in binary, just like cisnormative people! With any luck, it's just a phase. Happy Transgender Day of Visibility.