Talia Bhatt > Quotes

“An oft-overlooked factor in the appeal of hate movements is that they feel good. The politics of male grievance has wide appeal to men who, faced with an increasingly hostile world that is unashamedly denying them the economic security their fathers enjoyed, turn to misogyny as an outlet. Sublimating impotence, despair, and rage into organized hate, directed at a target you can actually hurt, who is actually within reach—unlike the faraway, untouchable concept of ‘the ruling class’—provides an immediate psychic relief that “class-consciousness” simply cannot rival.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“An interesting dynamic that cropped up was the sheer number of demands that were placed upon me by those in the server, while a bizarre degree of resentment and vitriol began to swell amidst some who were not. Strange accusations of exclusivity, reactionary sentiment, and imagined goings-on were fielded publicly, while privately the space remained an avenue for me to organize watch parties, speak to my friends scattered across time zones, and discuss the feminist theory I was familiar with and that I wanted to write. Over time, more and more was asked of me with regard to formalizing the pursuit of feminist work, feminist readings, feminist discussions, feminist writing—all of which was expected to fall upon me. The demands were many, the offers to assist few.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“That the label of “TERF” can be levied against a trans woman who insists upon her own sex is a function of the total cultural victory of the Gender-Conservative project. Feminism has been indelibly associated with transphobia, transmisogyny is considered a function of ‘misandry’, and the trans woman is instrumentalized as a voiceless pawn by a myriad of cultural forces that seek to exploit her symbolic significance. The conservative antifeminist can point to her as a consequence of leftist overreach threatening the most fundamental underpinnings of society’s (patriarchal) organization, while the liberal antifeminist can use her woes to bemoan how unfair and extreme feminism has grown towards men, advocating for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism even as abortion rights are undone and ideological investment in rape culture resurges. After all, that is one thing the conservative and liberal and even leftist man have always agreed upon: the woman’s rightful place, and the necessity of silencing her attempts to protest it.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“The tranny is constructed as a union of fag and whore.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“The tale of Brown’s eventual exit from the party is an unsavory one. Regina Davis, who according to Brown “held together the proudest of our programs, our school”, had been hospitalized with a broken jaw after being beaten by several men in the Party. Brown had called Huey P. Newton to inform him of this, only to be euphemistically notified that he had indeed authorized her “disciplining”. This compelled her to inform Newton of Davis’ many tasks and responsibilities, as Brown was sure he didn’t realize how indispensable a role Davis played, or was otherwise ignorant of how much she oversaw. She impressed upon Newton that Regina Davis managed everyone from the teachers to the cooks, decided menus and purchases, spoke to parents—“She is the fucking school.” If Davis had asked a male member of the Party to carry out a task and been refused, Brown stressed that she was well within her rights to verbally reprimand him, and the retaliatory violence Davis had suffered was both disproportionate and alarming. Newton’s response was simply that he already knew everything Brown had told him. “The Brothers came to me. I had to give them something.” [Emphasis mine.] Televised or not, it seems the revolution will not be gender-inclusive.”
― Talia Bhatt, Brown/Trans/Les

“The dismissal of feminism as too loud, too radical, and too misandrist happened during suffrage just as it happened during the second wave and the third wave and still happens today, despite how thoroughly lesbian feminists of all stripes have been relegated to the dustbin of history. So let me conduct an autopsy on the grand, decades-long, misguided heterofeminist experiment instead of further jabbing at everyone’s guilty consciences about how they treat those angry, ugly, unfeminine, man-hating dykes. It’s over, girl. You gave him everything he wanted, and his response was to demand even more, to find religion and talk about how nice it would be to have a tradwife who can’t vote or divorce him. Feminism cannot make straight men any promises that are more appealing than the depths of domination and depravity patriarchy has on offer, and the protracted, tortured, overdue reckoning with the fact that men demonstrate sex-class solidarity and will protect their collective sex-class interests—even if it means giving more powerful men more power over them—is what’s making women everywhere have a crisis of faith in feminism.”
― Talia Bhatt, Brown/Trans/Les

“This is also why the most common forms of transemasculative rhetoric beat the drum of the ‘mutilated girl’, itself an echo of the idea of damaged goods. Being a reproductive asset under patriarchy is not an enviable fate, but patriarchy, in the process of dehumanizing the transmasculine, still accords them—no, not humanity, don’t be absurd, but utility. The transmasculine can still be “of use” to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious ‘fertility’ and render themselves ‘undesirable’, unfit for reproductive exploitation.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“I would go as far as to call this a form of anti-intellectualism and epistemic injustice—that is, the devaluation of a knowledge-system, namely feminist epistemologies, in service of propping up hegemonic narratives. Because why is it that it’s always feminism that’s too reactionary, too rigid, too fragile and too homogenous and too frivolous to be a worthy pursuit for the colonized and imperialized? Why is it that discourses on race are assumed to contain within them no competing schools, no differing points of view or points of internal contradiction, but the existence of such within feminist disciplines is viewed as an invalidation of the whole subject?”
― Talia Bhatt, Brown/Trans/Les

“To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided; as Serano grimly notes of Nanda’s Gender Diversity in Whipping Girl, the “gender-diversity” of the Orientalized non-Western culture is a sacred cow for many academics who concern themselves with queerness and (supposedly) feminism, a crucial cudgel with which to beat and berate the “medicalized”, “Western” transsexual. Transition healthcare that is socio-economically out of reach for many Third World trans women is derided as “imperialism” while the transmisogynistic model of “Third-Sexing”, first imposed by our own cultures and then legitimized by Western academics, is simply considered scholarship. Many Westerners, it seems, would happily let my sisters languish without means or care just to reinforce their own worldviews.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem