Eyes are one of the most spiritually resonant symbols. Here's some things I've learned about them so far.
The bidirectional fascination between eyes and myself directly stems from my experience of transfemininity. In the time and place where I live, to be transfeminine is to be visible - fetish, perversion, faggot.
People get off to distorted ideas of us, but in private and ashamed. The first time I heard of trans women, it was as "chicks with dicks" on a poster hidden in a closet in a flash game.
Our own eyes are maligned. What is it that we want to see in the women's restroom? The second time I heard of trans women, people were making fun of someone for being ugly and describing herself as "a lesbian trapped in a man's body." Her sexuality was seen as predatory and gross. Would they have reacted the same if she looked like a porn star?
Cis people are very concerned with our appearance. We get compliments when we hew closer to gender norms - great job! You almost look like a real girl! Wow, can you do my nails too? My mother said I was a handsome boy but would be an ugly girl, stuck between two genders. (In a way, she was right; I've broken free and will never go back.) This in-between state is seen as inherently sexual and corrupting. People in positions of power say that by merely seeing us, their children will be perverted. What power we hold!
Yet still, so many say "I wish I could be like you, but I could never do that." We do our civic duty and talk to them, saying yes you can and you're already one of us. Sometimes I log back on months later and we have the same conversation again and a little piece of my heart breaks. I see the envy and longing and the futures that could be.
Eyes represent this projection of fear and disgust, admiration and desire onto our bodies. We watch them watching us. Step with me, dear reader, into the transparent eyeball of the airport dick scanner machine, part or particle of God.
There are eyes that project onto us, but also the eyes within and part of us. Our eyes are an apotropaic weapon, to look back at those who wish us harm and find them wanting. Are they staring? Good. Stare back, pop them like a soap bubble. Make them see a fragment of you truly, make them scared. They should be scared of you. You know something they never can. When they come bearing torches, remember you are a being born of flame.[1]
As much as the eyes of others attempt to strip us of dignity, as much as our own eyes are sharp weapons, eyes are made of osmotic love. Their primary function is to "interpenetrate and mutually define."[2][3] They capture the intimacy and immediacy of being seen truly.
I see you, all of you.
We are beautiful.
You're safe here.
We've been waiting for you. You're finally home.
Absolution can come through confession, but confession is unneeded when you see that I already see you: by my gaze we are both healed. Eyes are a liferaft, a hand reaching out.
It would be disingenuous to pretend the eyes of transfeminine beings always look at each other from a place of love.
If you just carve these parts of yourself like so - do your eyebrows, please learn to style your hair so it's not so frizzy, start tret - you'll be seen as a real woman. As it was given to me, I give you this knife. Cut until you bleed pink.
So often, I look at myself and am found wanting. What role does criticality play in self-refinement? What would I be without it? The eyes don't tell you the answers, but they represent the knife and witness the pain.
regardless of the prioritization of the eye, visual observation is often confirmed by touch[2]The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Sight is a privilege; we are all at best temporarily abled, and in possession of our bodies for a short time. Most of my friends are disabled in some way and our life expectancies are short; in this place and time, this is part of being trans. My sight and life are a blessing to use while I can, to share with and to see truly those that I love.
Eyes are sexual organs. To be "fixed in my gaze" is to be healed, pinned down, run through, penetrated, witnessed, home. Crying is often better than coming. Eyes are stripping - like x-ray specs or "undressing with your eyes." Both of these examples are coded male, and that's okay! In some sense, so am I! Fear is erotic - see the way someone's eyes open wide when you hold a knife to their neck. As Pallasmaa says, sight precedes and invites touch. However, "even the eye touches; the gaze implies... bodily mimesis and identification."[2]
Eyes see the truth. Neither the mechanistic rationalistic cold view of the world, nor the fuzzy intuitive god's-eye-view, but the clarity that transcends both of them. They represent oracle states.
Eyes are holes, portals, channels between the infinite within and the infinite without. They make you permeable to the world - resonator, vessel, conduit. You can give yourself new eyes with inks and paints and needles and blades. To do this is to scrape away accreted layers of muck, to reveal something that was there all along. Anamnesis - remember - you are a being of eyes.
I want to be perceived! To be seen! Eyes mean care and love and beauty. Having them on me makes others see me more clearly. I am already filled with eyes and they are spilling out onto my skin. The eyes of everyone who ever loved me fix me in place. They make me strong!
The eyesymbol stands in contrast to the surveillance state. Magnificent, terrible, legiblizing digital apparatuses are pointed towards us at all times. These reifying and totalizing eyes are spiritually dead, dehumanizing. Our eyes hum with power and life, an "incarnate part of the flesh of the world."[2] It is no contest at all.
Eyes are a self-executing prayer, a tool to chart the course to a better future, and a promise you'll be alive to see it. They're about triangulation, finding and fixing and narrowing; the metaphysical calculations to locate and carve a path to (future) friends' and lovers' safety and happiness.
Eyes are searching, beacons - odd numbers have a magnetism to find their missing half (halves). The magic has worked before; it will work again. I will find you! I will be found by you!
Through this symbol you can access something greater. In the transcendent eye of the moon, find your link to every trans woman that ever lived, that yet lives, that still has to be born. We are connected; we are whole together; immutable bonds forged of deep metal and living blood. Eyes join us across time and space and the seemingly-impassable gap between souls, direct connections, "searing, chimerical, thorough." I'm not the only one to have figured this out. We all hold part of the nascent goddess. (May these parts I've brought together serve hir immanentization.) Once you start looking for eyes (and teeth) in connection with transfeminine beings, they'll see you everywhere. They're nucleation points in a supercooled fluid, they're the center of every hourglass, they're orgasm and death and everything in between.
[1] Kai Cheng Thom, in I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girlβs Notes From the End of the World
[2] The Eyes of The Skin. Go read it. It's about architecture but because it's so good it's actually about everything. But especially eyes.
[3] To learn more about this function, consult Borges' The Theologians (p. 453). I prefer the Hurley translation. "It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person."
[4] The Ways of Seeing documentary talks about the introduction of perspective, a feature unique to European art. It doesn't have to be this way.