Status Updates From Trans/Rad/Fem (Essays on Tr...

Oh look it’s my life but someone else is writing it

"Many relations of power are interwoven with(hetero)sexuality, cleaving differences between private and public women, between women you “take home to the parents” and women whose very identity marks them as lesser, as fit for little more than being consumed and then discarded by men."

“…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."