Status Updates From Trans/Rad/Fem

“…heterosexuality-as-regime is set up to extract domestic, sexual and reproductive labor from those deemed women under its logics. Its definition of womanhood and the narrowness of her stipulated role in society is oriented around domestic confinement, in rigorously naturalizing a positionality of abjection and servility towards others.”

so well said. cf kate manne’s down girl

"Conservatism is an exclusionary ideology, by choice, by intent, by design. You cannot shatter someone’s worldview with an epic burn about imperfect classification, when their classification was never meant to be perfect."

"I’ve often observed that if a Gender-Conservative insists that trans people do not change sex, the well-meaning ally agrees implicitly, though is quick to remind that trans people do change our gender! Both the eradicationist and the ally are in agreement that transness is this superficial, social charade [...]" I've seen the effects of HRT and still hadn't thought about it like this; this is a much-needed kick.

"Liberalism is the erroneous belief that one can paper over systemic inequality with enough contract law, consent fetishism, and lip service to ‘individual freedom’. It is ruling-class propaganda that bamboozles people into thinking that token mass participation in the political process can outweigh the hoarding of wealth and privileges and control over the means of cultural production."

"Nor can a population so thoroughly stigmatized, impoverished, and routinely subject to patriarchal violence 'uphold' the very system stripping them of humanity and personhood." I think I need to be more explicitly walked through this thought because I don't agree with it/understand it.

This essay so far is my favorite.
"Systems of repression, ultimately, do not revise their most cherished imperatives based on democratic feedback. What they cannot extinguish entirely, they repurpose or recuperate."

"Are these non-Western third sexes 'refusing medicalization' by choice? Not once does Nanda care to interrogate whether inaccessibility, impoverishment, and stigma play a role in keeping the option of bodily transition out of reach. Not once does she care to simply ask whether, given the ability to avail of bodily transition, any of her subjects would do so."

"So I stand, cleft from two cultures that revile me, one whose abuses I had to flee from and one whose abuses I have no choice but to subject myself to. My feminist theory is explicitly from this perspective, adrift in these currents, where I do my best to shout over the din and give name to the ways in which my identity, my experiences, and my epistemic authority are all erased to serve others’ ends."

I think the more personal parts of this book, including this essay, are where her writing doesn't shine. The rest of her writing is good, sometimes great, if a little wordy in parts with awkward construction in others.

"Jess is now a closeted lesbian, moving through the world as a man, an experience that I would not wish on my most reviled foe, leave alone a marginalized woman simply trying to survive." Why not wish it on a foe? Is the implication that being a man is the worst thing possible, i.e. she looks down on men? I feel like a few ideas in these essays are not precise enough.

"Make no mistake about that final sentence, the end of that transmission: heterosexuality is contemptible, as every unjust regime predicated upon subjugation always has been and always will be."

"The master remains in fear of the day his slaves come to understand that nothing meaningful separates them from the master, that the master needs his slaves far more than the slaves have ever needed him. That all they need in order to rid themselves of his taint, his fairy-tales of imposed servitude and evangelical proclamations of essential difference, would be to remove him once and for all."

"Companies can portray a married lesbian couple on-screen, one engaged for nearly twenty-five episodes of a popular and acclaimed show, and still put out a statement calling a relationship absolutely central to the narrative ‘up to interpretation’. Such is the existential terror associated with lesbianism, with acknowledging its very existence." Is this really Witch of Mercury?

"Should a woman fail this singular imperative, should she fall short of the respectable ideal of male-owned broodmare, she becomes something … lesser. Something more abject than abject, reviled on top of being subjugated, her entire being subsumed into the conceptualized fallowness of bad soil, the charred and lifeless expanses of inhospitable wastes … barren."

"If navigating heterosexualism as a heterosexual is so painful, how do those who aren’t fare?" I assume the implication is it's painful for heterosexual women?

"There is a temptation to simplify the discussion by highlighting how heterosexuality is naturalized, is considered the only permissible sexuality under patriarchy, but even that much is an overstatement. Women, in some sense, have no permissible sexuality and have never been granted the license or liberty to express and embody any attraction, even to men." So only male heterosexuality is really naturalized.

"The patriarchal man may covet the sexually free woman to bed and may wish to trot out the modest woman at family gatherings, but he never quite manages to respect either. Cherish, perhaps, prize as a conquest or a tamed servant, even, but true, actual respect, the appreciation one engenders for a fellow person’s wit and charm and intellect and compassion [...] is only reserved for fellow men."

"Biological difference becomes social construct, a tangible distinction elevated to irreconcilable identities. In doing so, ‘woman’ becomes everything ‘man’ isn’t … and also, everything ‘man’ cannot be. Everything ‘man’ cannot sink to the level of." Is the implication here that a women being reduced to her reproductive ability is automatically lesser than a man so anything a man might do to be closer is sinking to?

"To love women, to really love them and be with them, you can’t not hate that which hurts them. A love that doesn’t inspire ceaseless rage at injustice, inequity, harm and dismissal isn’t much of a love at the end of the day."

"She kept her fire lit.
Until she couldn’t.
Thirty odd years is a long time, after all.
You have to tell yourself these things, I suppose. You have to tell yourself you were happy, then, you were always happy through the hard times and the harder times. You have to convince yourself that the man who slaved your existence to his own didn’t hollow you out [...]" Not a fan of this writing style.

"Anger is the fire that keeps you warm in the bitter cold of meandering, hazy roads, the bright, burning beacon that lights your way no matter how murky. Rage at your conditions, your treatment, your circumstances can keep you upright, keep you sane, keep you alive, keep you putting one foot in front of another when little else will."