The 1AC is a construction that exists only within Narnia, an epistemic delusion that requires the naturalization of violent hierarchies. The legitimacy of ‘problem’ or ‘solution’ itself is defined by cisness, which precludes state-inclusive solutions.

A 1998 British Broadcasting Channel production. Text appears on the screen: London 1940. The four children walk up to their home on break from school for the holidays, greeted by the prim and proper Mrs. Macready, wizened hair and gray (or grey; this is, after all, the UK) suit, standing regal, bespectacled. The children leave their bags just beyond the entrance and are told that the servants will take them. “That is their function,” Mrs. Macready says. “One must not be deprived of their function. Everyone has their part to play.” I think: there are some whose function is one that disallows others’ functioning, some whose function is cast outward toward disabling others’ flourishing. The part some have to play, a part they decided for themselves and a part that, like bossy children wanting the biggest slice of cake, puts them at the pinnacle of the social order, is a part that might cause trepidation. And fear. And harm. What happens when your part is frightening to you, a part given to you that you do not want, a part that others who have had your part demand you represent flawlessly or you get kicked out of the performance for good, a part that is not only frightening but does not fit you, a part that you have grown out of or never fit to begin with or know fits no one and makes others deeply, deeply uncomfortable, unable to play their parts, unable to act anymore, unable?

The patriarch comes into the room. The Professor. He instructs the servants to bring the children’s meals to their rooms, for they do not wish to converse with an old man upon their arrival. Mrs. Macready disagrees, thinking it improper to dine in one’s sleeping quarters. All things must have their proper place, I suppose. The Professor puts his foot down. “Whatever you say, Professor. Your word is law,” she responds, demurely. And law it is, Professor. Your word, as patriarch, is quite literally law, a discursive and juridical mandate emerging from patriarchal power codified over eras of, indeed, the discursive and juridical mandate that has emerged from you.

The children get settled and play hide-and-seek. Lucy, the youngest girl, hides in an old wardrobe. Rummaging past old sweaters, she finds herself in a mythical land, covered in snow, and she meets Mr. Tumnus, a pleasant faun. He is baffled as to why a human girl would be in Narnia, asking if she is the “daughter of Eve.” They chat. Lucy worries about getting back to her siblings to tell them of the wondrous time she had in this new land. Upon sharing the news with them, however, they do not believe her. “Why don’t you admit it was all a story?” Susan asks. Lucy is disheartened, so she tries to show them, only to enter the wardrobe and meet its back—hard wood and far from a vast land of snow and mythical creatures. Admit it was all a story.

But the disbelief does not last long, as Edmund, the younger brother, finds his way into Narnia, unbeknownst to him. He tries to call out for his sister in order to apologize, to share in a mutual delight, but she is not there. His calls in Narnia go unanswered, so of course it is “just like a girl. Sulking. Won’t accept a fellow’s apology.”

He is met by the White Witch, who is initially peeved at his ignorance as to who she is, but, once finding out that he is a human, a “son of Adam” (because apparently one is only the child of the parent of the “same” gender; one is never the son of Eve or daughter of Adam), she instructs him to fetch his siblings, lure them into Narnia, so he, on her promise, can become king. He does just that, though such is only the beginning of the story.

Narnia has long intrigued me, ever since I first read C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in sixth grade. It was the first book I had read cover to cover, and I was enchanted. As I understand it, Narnia is a magical place where only a privileged few are granted access. To gain entry, one must in fact disallow critical knowledge: that it exists, that it is a world among other possible worlds. Its entry depends on an epistemological ignorance of the very possibility of worlds outside of its confines, the complexity and existence and texture of the space and people who are not permitted inside—or the people who have gone of to live in ways that do not attest to Narnia’s singularity. One must also, as the White Witch implies, hold this other world outside of Narnia in contempt, as it poses an imminent threat to Narnia’s existence. When apprised of Edmund’s point of entry into Narnia, she is overcome with fright: “This may wreck all,” she gasps. Non-Narnia’s knowledge of Narnia could wreck it, not only because Non-Narnia might breach Narnia and fundamentally alter it, but also because Narnia would then be forced to seriously grapple with how they do things in Non-Narnia. With how Narnia might deserve the threat.

Narnia touts itself as on the right side, indeed the only side.

They bust open the wardrobe to a Narnia of worlds that The Cisgenders have monopolized for far too long.—Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard, “In Defense of the Trans Villainess,” 2018

Narnia. It is a land constituted by an orchestrated construction it must obscure in order to tout itself as natural. Its hierarchies must remain divinely ordained; its citizens must be in the places proper to them, bestowed by a law out of anyone’s control. Narnia, it thinks, is detached from the fanciful flights characterizing those not under its fold—indeed, does not even consider others as possessing the capacity for knowledge, for reality, for legitimate existence. Narnia does the cartographical point-plotting; Narnia decides what counts as a body, what counts as the locus of bodily legitimacy, what counts as a problem to that legitimacy, a solution, here, there, nowhere. Narnia, in all its haughtiness, possesses the hubris of an origin: that all that exists refers to, learns from, is valued in light of it. But Narnia is no longer, and never really was, tenable. It, like the hubristic requisite of alignment, of remaining on and asserting valid knowledge only from and as this side, of cisness—my analogic connection to Narnia, as they are bound together in texture and rhetoric, in purpose and presumption—thinks itself the only vantage from which to encounter life. From which, indeed, to emerge into life. All reality begins from it, and in this beginningness (the arrogant assumption of a kind of divinity, as the biblical In the beginning, God . . . echoes re- soundingly here) it disallows other beginnings. No other vantage can hold sway; indeed, there are no other vantages.