Fiona’s Reviews > Trans/Rad/Fem > Status Update

"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.

"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."