A set of contingencies that can be played with
Grace Lavery back in June explaining how it really really is true that you can change sex.
Berkeley News: Your work in trans feminist studies focuses on the belief that transition works — that it is truly possible to change sex. Can you talk more about what you’ve found in your research? Did you begin to explore the idea during your own transition?
Grace Lavery: I suppose, on some level, I’m bound to cop to that: Research is me-search, as they say. I think what my research has come to demonstrate is that for the past 150 years or so, roughly since the time that people started performing transition or transitioning or whatever you want to call it, there has been this enormous public effort or attempt to produce a cast-iron reason why it doesn’t work or why it is suspicious.
It doesn’t work for the same reason it doesn’t work to “perform transition” or “transition” or whatever you want to call it to a horse or a table or Mars. It doesn’t work because fantasy is fantasy, pretending is pretending, the mind isn’t magic.
There is a kind of conservative feminist position that argues that sex is set in stone, is assigned at birth. And I don’t agree with that. Most scientists I’ve spoken to seem pretty comfortable with the idea that sex, like any other biological category, is not a cast-iron law, but rather a sort of set of contingencies that can be played with and culturally reinforced or not culturally reinforced.
Oh yes that definitely sounds like how scientists think. Everything “can be played with” and once you’ve played with it long enough and whimsically enough, the magic happens and the biological category is…something else.
Conservative feminist position? Maybe, but also anybody else who has an elementary understanding of biology. You don’t have to agree, but you would be wrong not to. Denying immutable facts about the world is unwise.
You mean that if I really, really, really, love my velveteen rabbit enough that someday it will really will become real?
That said, the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a classic and deservedly so, because it shows how human love and affection can be imparted to what is an inanimate object in a fictional tale, and it’s impossible to read that story to a child without there being a bit of a tear in one’s own eye. We humans are capable of feeling affection for animate beings like puppies and kittens and by extension their inanimate imitations.
Children though don’t then believe that veleveteen rabbits really do become real. They do however understand the fictional truth of the story of how the velveteen rabbit has a happy life with the boy until it is discarded and to be burnt (which is truly a horrible end) and then have the velveeteen rabbit saved by magic because of the love the boy had for it as a toy. That by magic it then becomes a real rabbit makes for a very happy ending.
Now getting back to my first sentence and why fantasizing about changing sex doesn’t actually change sex, to cut to the chase it’s about making a category error where wishes are held to be actual fishes. While one can certainly pretend to be something they’re not, or mimic it to the extent they appear to be something they’re not, they still aren’t the sex they’re not because reality isn’t a fiction and philosophers as well as scientists tend to be a bit tetchy about such things. Q.E.D.
Heh, I see I now have created a fictional “Velveeteen” rabbit, which I hope doesn’t get used to make grilled cheese sandwiches.
[…] a comment by J.A. on A set of contingencies that can be played […]
Ugh, Joseph Lavery.
1930 was 150 years ago?
No, “assigned at birth” is the TRA position. We Biological Realists believe that sex is, um, determined (is that the right birth?) at conception. This guy’s head is so far up his ass that even when he’s trying to exress his opponents’ position, he can only express it in terms of his own group. It reminds me of the Christians that say: “The atheists think that Jesus wasn’t really a god, but rather that he used black magic to perform his miracles.” They can’t imagine (really, they can’t imagine) that anyone would say: “Maybe Jesus didn’t perform miracles, and the story is made up?”
The Velveteen Rabbit is a horrible story about love and loss and death, with a Deus ex Machina pasted on at the end so that little kids will go to sleep instead of lying awake in existential horror.
I’d rather read Sartre. At least he’s honest about it.
Well, to be fair, Sartre is more to the taste of adults and children’s stories are more to the taste of children.
(I haven’t read The Velveteen Rabbit myself so can’t comment on the specifics.)
@3 Which makes me wonder now if I cared about my Velveteen Welsh rarebit enough. Probably not. :P
Me-search? ME-search? ME-search? How narcissistic can you get?
“Tell us, Mr. Darwin, what is this theory of evolution you’ve developed?”
“Well, really, it’s all about how eons of change in geography and biology have all conspired to create me.*”
“Mr. Newton, can you explain your theory of gravity?”
“Yes, you see, essentially what it says is that all objects in the universe are attracted to me.”
“Euclid, your geometrical proofs are so elegant.”
“Yes, but more importantly they describe just how perfectly my nose is shaped.”
*With apologies to Calvin.
WaM, that fits with what I wanted to say, but you said it so much more effectively than I was going to. What about all the scientists working on global warming, biodiversity, or curing diseases they don’t have? Do they do it only to make sure the future will work for them? Not me. I don’t expect to live long enough to see much come of what I’m doing. I am 61, and still working on problems that won’t be solved (if at all) until way past my demise.
iknklast,
Clearly y’all are in it for the money.
Oh, my. How many fallacies can we pack into a single sentence?
1. Appeal to Authority (“Most scientists I’ve spoken to”)
2. Slippery Slope (if it’s not a “cast-iron law”, then it is culturally determined (“culturally reinforced or not”))
3. Conflating gender (culturally determined) with sex (not so)
4. Confusing fantasy (“played with”) with a biological category (“sex”)
“… like any other biological category…”
Oh? Please give some examples of these biological categories that can be played with and transformed from one to the other. Shark? Elephant? Animal? Leg?
“conservative feminist position”?
Feminism is not a conservative position.
That works well, as long as you don’t speak to the large number of scientists that disagree.
Yes, the burden is on the people who don’t believe people can’t change sex and not on those that do.
Because it’s all a social construct. Sex categories, I’ve been informed, are obvious examples of a social construct. Why think that sperm is the male gamete? We invented “male,” and “gamete.” And “is.”
Genuine confusion between the name of a thing, and the thing named.
This guy’s a professor? Is California a loony bin? I can’t find out whether to laugh or cry
I’m going to start thinking Ascertained ${SEX} At Birth.
@12: Given the context, I think a better selling would be “phallusy”.
“…there has been this enormous public effort or attempt to produce a cast-iron reason why it doesn’t work …”
That seems to be the perfect place for a truly good interviewer to ask “well, how does it work? How does somebody who is as male as any other male become or be female?”
Yeah, the problem is, the interviewer who wants to keep being employed knows better than to ask upsetting questions to somebody from the group that is the current precious pets of the Elites.
catalepticonion, yes he is, and a Berkeley professor at that. In English though. Maybe he’s just telling us all a story.
I wonder how this question was phrased, given the response Lavery says it elicited. “Is it true that women were born to fulfil the homemaker role?” would be one way of getting a scientist to give an answer favourable to the position that sex is malleable.
Regarding the social/cultural expectations angle, I don’t know that ‘women: behave how you want, wear what you want, have any adult that will have you as a partner’ is conservative at all. That’s much more in line with the conservative view of being a man; it seems highly unconservative to open this up to women as well.
Well, if they’re lucky, they might have a disease or syndrome named after them….
I clicked through to the article….holy fuck. The pouting. The posing. It must be exhausting to be so phony every time someone points a camera at you. His “authentic” self is a simpering caricature. The Pythons in drag made better and more respectful “women” than this clown ever will.