Astrid, your questions about my last essay on Ma Vie en Rose were really great, thank you so much. I've finally found the time to write some answers.
1. Have you read Julia Serano's 'whipping girl'?
I have read some of Julia Serano's text. Honestly I didn't finish it, because at the time I found it a little hard to read, both in terms of clarity and in terms of the emotional response it evoked in me. Also the cover of the book really turned me off, although I've heard she disliked it herself. I remember singling out a specific line in which she was talking ostensibly scientifically about the relationship between testosterone and aggression. I don't think the best biology we have confirms that there are any such definitive, or even “on average” links between sex hormones and behavior. Have you read Natalie Angier's 'Woman?' I really recommend it. I think it's arguably one of the most important books for feminism since The Second Sex
2. [Whether there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity...”] ...would seem to be another place where faith comes in. or...hmm, that doesn't seem to fully grab it. there does seem to be a point where believing in something (a self, i am thinking here, one's self) can no longer even be described as believing because the conviction is deep enough to warrant feeling a knowing, (cont...)...which translates into a more passionate (read: effective, affecting [?]) action)
I think you're right here, about the faith to knowledge transformation. You make a good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the issue of trusting in other people, temporarily bracketing the question of self-relationship: If we could absolutely guarantee the other person's continued existence, or if there were some definitive plan which could guarantee someone being trustworthy, then “trust” wouldn't be required to begin with.
In a sense I think what is usually called “circular reasoning” is useful here. It does not work on paper, but what works on paper doesn't always work off paper. I think that it is not only true but necessary of identity that it not be knowable in a fixed way – in order for it to really exist and thrive, not in order to discount the idea. The assumption I am making is that we make a provisional leap, a faith, like you're saying, which allows us to perform the action of identification which creates the identity to begin with. I believe that identities (including gender identities) are knowable and real the same way a law is. What is important to me isn't destroying the basis for belief in the self (like you find in Buddhism, say), but on the contrary, simply emphasizing that it is always open in the future to revision, if one should want that revision. Which brings me to the next question.
3.“Even though i realize your discussion involves self-conception, it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions. while i acknowledge that you may not intend to frame things this way, .it seems like your essay implies that the only good that comes out of cross-gender (-sexed? potentially?) identification (not mentioning, that i saw, body modification), is binary-smashin', or rather, moving that we might move again later. this seems like a circular exercise used to get someone out of the habit of stagnation and into a habit of movement, of productivity. it ignores the very specific intents of most trans people, the ends to which are usually personal peace.”
I can't make any claims about what is right or wrong in someone else's identity. “The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered—and more than one!” In that sphere, and as I often do, I think an aphorism or two from The Gay Science is helpful --
"One thing is needful.— To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:—it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,—if only it was a single taste!— It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.— Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned:— they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy."
Also, Astrid, what do you mean more specifically when you say “it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions?” What else do you think is involved?
5. Obviously no individual person is responsible for helping everyone else see the binary smashed through their own personal lifestyle. i just feel like the "can be" above is...dangerously vague. (which may only be because of the slew of feminists that have held trans people, and queer people in general to strict double standards).
Your point about double standards is a good one. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to be honest and possibly politically incorrect here, but I think the result will be helpful, because I think these kinds of dialogues are helpful. I think these double standards against transwomen exist because of a fear of antibiotic-resistant sexism, to put it as simply as I can. It is really, really difficult for a woman to see any woman who lives “the dream” of the 1940's housewife and grant them their “feminist” freedom to determine their own path. And sometimes, I think, in asking themselves questions about their own identity, transwomen, like all women, look to popular culture for images through which to find the identity they feel they share with other women. To begin the long task of finding a self-concept that gives them peace of mind. This is really what my essay was about – the possibility that sometimes trans identity or queer identity can be just as sexist or dangerous as any cissexual or heterosexual identity.
The important thing for me is not to legislate any protocol specifically for trans or queer people. I want to talk openly and calmly about what is a huge question: Do we have the freedom to give up our freedom? When do we stop exercising freedom in choosing an identity (housewife, for example), and start becoming totalized by that identity? To what extent does the totalized/unfree identity of one woman negatively impact those around her? Does that impact mean we have an obligation to be free, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all women?
There is, and I'll be frank, a fear among many feminists of the transwoman as a “symbol,” in some parts of the feminist community. I need to be clear: I do not think this symbol has anything to do with transwomen at all. It's just as ridiculous as any symbolic image of women -- virgin, whore, and all the rest. However, what I think this specific fear may be growing out of, is the fact that the patriarchy is an “enemy which has outposts in our own minds.”
We live in a society which fetishizes lesbian identity as a trope that exists for male enjoyment, which attempts to reduce female identity to nothing but a conglomeration of sexualized imagery that has very little to do with the interior life of any human being. That reduced female identity is artificial in the narrow sense. It can be taken off and put on easily (as I did in that photo-montage), and in the end, I think, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with women at all. The women we see in mainstream pornography, for example: those are images "of men," in one sense, because misogynistic men are the ones producing the images. In this sense, ironically, I think there is some truth to that lunatic Republican politician's claim that "all pornography is homosexual." Where I disagree with him is that I think mainstream pornography is homosexual in a way that is reserved especially for the sadistic, misogynistic, heterosexual men who produce it -- and NOT the gay community at large.
Because of all this, is a scary symbolic value which I think some feminists mistakenlyattribute to transwomen. To take one example of how this fear can take form –- what if misogynistic men decide that, since they hate women's over-emotional, inferior minds, anyway, transwomen are actually superior to ciswomen, since they have “the mind of a man and the body of a woman?” One person I heard about actually said this. On a more formal level, plenty of historians have tried to suggest that Joan of Arc, who was nearly peerless among women in her time in terms of political resistance, had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. For those historians, this would mean that she was therefore, technically, "really a man," and therefore didn't threaten their concept of the inferiority of women -- although this theory has not been taken very seriously.
Obviously it does both transwomen and ciswomen a disservice to take this stance, because transwomen are women, not men in female bodies. I think that ought to be self-evident to most people, but right now political conditions are such that it generally is not. I think that what happens is that feminist ciswomen feel threatened by this "men in female bodies" possibility, too. I think, actually, they are threatened because of the same old “all women are your jealous competitors for male attention, not your allies, friends or lovers” trope that keeps all women in general from forming effective friendships, sexual relationships, or political alliances very often. The difference is that in this case the jealousy and antipathy and fear is directed at a specific group of women, i.e., transwomen, in a way that undermines their very right to be women, so it becomes the form of transphobia I described in the first essay. It's a painful, serious, and tangled situation that really needs to be remedied. The mortality rates among trans people are absolutely dismal; particularly dismal are the mortality rates as a result of violence.
6.
So, ultimately, my concern is that the re-evaluation of the gender binary that I'm talking about needs, to be consistent, an admission that if gender is performative, no one is --a priori, anyway -- “objectively” any gender at all. They can obviously identify with one very narrow gender identity and it will be quite certain and true that they do so, but this is something they are doing of their own freedom, and not because fate has forced them into it. Related to this "Fate" issue is the argument in pop culture that queer people deserve equal rights because “they can't help being gay, it's genetic.” I think this argument, while it might be politically expedient, is dangerous, because it implies that if they could help it, they would and should. And on some level it might be true that some people would prefer if they themselves were not gay. It's obviously not very easy in this society to be gay. But so long as the question is phrased this way, I think it leaves open the possible interpretation on the part of "well-meaning" moderates or republicans that queer or gender-variant identity is an immoral condition, even if it is not a choice.
On the topic of the gender binary, I want to say that destabilizing the gender binary doesn't mean, for me, that no one can choose to simply identify as 'man,' or 'woman.' The destabilization aims to do something very specific – to create a radical concept of freedom that doesn't destroy these choices, but actually includes them as some choices among many choices. In one sense, the structure of the basic concept of man or woman, in all its fabulous, caricatured glory, fundamentally untouched. The important thing is not whether they are presented as choices at all, but whether they are presented as the only possible choices. If we change that, these binary options lose their power to:
--impose horizons on anyone,
--to conceal their status as just that, an option,
--to thereby in their enforcement (an enforcement that in my opinion, functions and has reality the same way a law does) create a totalitarian effective reality.
7.
The biological question of sex can accommodate this. There is nowhere in biology any rigid, universal and absolute rule by which we have been able to reliably “distinguish between the sexes.” There is intersexuality, and all of the related biological diversities, in our own species. There are frogs that begin as one sex and spontaneously transition to the other over the course of their lives. There are worms for whom the male lives out his life as a small part of the female's digestive system.
We can try to say things about specific cases; we can generalize about numbers of cases that resemble each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you inject a chimpanzee (or preferably, bonobo, since they are the bisexual vegetarian matriarchal pacifist ones) sperm cell into the heart of a human egg cell, you could hypothetically create a viable human-chimpanzee hybrid (not that I am advocating this). We have cloned from single animals, or from two female mice. There is a potential evolutionary future in which we are a parthenogenetic species, as unlikely as it may be. Our biology in the end is as changeable as any “social construct,” and its horizons, as far as I can tell, are determined by the trends in the evolutionary accumulation of the stylistic choices all of us make, over time.
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