Trans Theory Quotes

“...the end goal of feminist revolution must be...not just the elimination of male privilage but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to "name"), which her culture imposes in blindness, 'Sapphire' might after all rewrite a radically different text for female empowerment.”
― Hortense Spillers, Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe : An American Grammar Book

“Herein lies the material basis of trans femininity: a cis woman might be a sex worker and both proletarian and bourgeois standards for female respectability have long been defined in contrast to the figure of the sex worker, but trans femininity has been positioned by police and cultural producers in a categorical relation to sex work since the late nineteenth century. This is a feminist theoretical conclusion that trans feminine lives reveal and trans women politicize.”
― Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Volume 27)