I make paper sculptures, handmade paper collages, and prints that harness an unmediated life force that weaves together embodiment, misrecognition, and language to form an understanding of an affective trans body. Reading through Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, I’m struck by their attention to intuition as embodied knowledge specifically cultivated to navigate the world. Finding myself in a body, whose existence is routinely questioned, or outright denied a place in public life, asks me to consider intuition as a necessary tactic for survival. Choosing processes such as papermaking or wire weaving that hinge on their own sense of tactility and connection to craft, movement and repetition are funneled through intuition to form work that senses the world. Weaving, collaging, patterning, and reassembling are used to form a new substrate for feeling. After all, to be trans is to be a theoretician of the senses.