But let’s talk about precarity
Nancy Kelley urges us to read…Chase Strangio. Really?
Strangio’s “brilliant and devastating thread” is unhinged.
“bills to make trans survival harder…banning health care for minors…That we should not get health care. That we should not survive.”
Unhinged…and dishonest. Strangio is talking about surgeries and puberty blockers to change the physical manifestations of a person’s sex, which is not health care but something else, which doesn’t really have a name yet. It’s medical tweaking to try to swap “gender,” and has nothing to do with physical health at all. Psychological or emotional health maybe (but the trouble is it could be bad for mental health, especially long term, instead of good for it), but not physical. The bills are not efforts to make trans people not survive.
Unhinged.
I.e., being a woman in a deeply misogynist world? I can understand how he feels that way!
I keep getting mail from the ACLU asking for contributions, and I keep sending them back their request with FIRE CHASE STRANGIO written on it and the postage paid by the ACLU.
She! I meant she! I think this really was a typo! Or maybe my keyboard is a secret TRA.
Chase Strangio is a great name for a creepy groomer.
Why they are so desperate to dismantle children I will never quite understand.
I can imagine there must be a strong psychological appeal to believing that your very existence is under attack, such that merely getting up in the morning, going to work, and generally going about your life like the rest of us schlubs makes you a stunningly brave fierce warrior standing up to dark and hateful forces.
I think it’s some of the same attitude that underlies a lot of right-wing conspiracy-mongering. It’s probably pretty satisfying to believe that just flying an American flag, driving a gas-guzzling SUV, and owning a gun are brave acts of defiance.
We all tend to fancy ourselves as the star of our own personal stage show, but mine is more of a dark comedy, not an epic melodrama.
“Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.” – King of the Swamp Castle
Funny, but it never occurred to me to chemically castrate and physically mutilate my sons or daughter whenever they played with their dolls, or dressed up as princesses, or lined up their trucks, or climbed trees. Nor did I feel that I was thereby depriving them of healthcare. Male or female, children all wore T-shirts and dungarees, played with every kind of toy, weren’t colour-coded, and had hair whatever length they liked. That’s because it was the eighties, and everybody was fighting against sex stereotypes in play and education.
On the one hand, we have grown adults demanding that we perceive them as the opposite sex, despite dressing in the conventional manner of their actual sex, because to do otherwise is ‘transphobic’; on the other hand, those same adults are demanding we destroy children’s bodies and stunt their mental and physical development in the name of ‘healthcare’. Which is it? Are ‘trans’ lives ‘valid’ regardless of presentation? Or not? Why is Ms Strangio so eager to make lifelong patients of previously healthy children?
Yes, I know that I wished that I didn’t have to go through female puberty. And I still think that it would be wonderful if people could change sex if they wanted to. But they can’t. No mammals can change sex, and we don’t live in a world, or a universe, where that is possible. Ms Strangio seems to think that we do. If I had known about radical feminism when I was younger (what it is really about, and not the scaremongering lies put about by patriarchal institutions), I probably would have avoided a lot of self-hate and dysphoria. Let’s change society to be more accommodating of personality foibles, instead of insisting that children who don’t want to fit in their allocated boxes have to change their bodies.
tigger, your last sentence is what I think GC’s are arguing. Sex is real, gender is confining.
Or not. I learned about radical feminism relatively young, and even all these years later, I still struggle with body dysphoria. It is, to me, more about not feeling like I belong in this body than that I feel like I should be in a body of the opposite sex. I can’t even look in a mirror, which is difficult in motel rooms where the mirror is right across from the bed, or using the bathroom where the mirror is often the most prominent thing in the room. I go up my stairs with my face slightly averted because I have an enormous mirror hanging there. Why? Because it belonged to my grandmother and it is the only place in my house it will fit properly. I just don’t look…I learned a long time ago that looking at my feet could spare me a lot of grief when I pass mirrors, so I buy shoes that do make me feel like I belong in them, and I survive.
Would it be different if I were raised different? Not to think of myself as a grotesque mutant, not capable of being a woman properly? (No one suggested I was capable of being a boy; it was obvious to them that I was substantially inferior to my brothers, an assessment that still burns when I think how little my brothers ever accomplished, and what a brute my older brother is.) I don’t know, but I suspect most gender dysphoria is driven more by societal expectations than by our own bodies. If we didn’t think our body should be A, B, and C, we wouldn’t be disturbed when our body wasn’t A, B, and C.
That’s certainly how I understand it and feel personally. When I was a young teen in the mid ’70s I wore a lot of homemade and hand-me-down clothes. Nothing was fashionable and some of it was decade old sixties stuff. In the socially staid and conservative town in the (at the time) socially staid and conservative NZ, the heights of young male fashion was a grey, brown, blue or green sweatshirt, worn with blue jeans of just the right leg width and a pair of sneakers or nomads. Anything else much got you branded a poof, weirdo, or both with consequential ostracism, hazing and occasionally beatings. At that age I didn’t understand why this should be so. I knew I wasn’t gay. I also knew I didn’t fit the stereotype, although my god I wanted to just to make the punishment stop. By the time I was at University I’d earn money to be able to afford three changes of acceptable clothing, had become physically imposing enough to deter casual aggressors and removed myself from a good chunk of the social fuckwit circle. I remember lamenting to a female friend that it was unfair that men faced shit in their lives if they wore bright, colourful or flamboyant clothes. Ah well, I soon learned not be oblivious to the shit in women’s lives.
I’ve never had any problem with my biological sex. I briefly, consciously, examined my sexuality and decided I’m into women. I have always hated, and continue to hate, the way gender is the expected, coerced, and enforced default in society. I don’t think the trans movement, if you can call it that, does anything at all to weaken gender stereotypes. On the one hand they actually reinforce the regressive idea that certain modes of dress, makeup and behaviour are innately male and female; and on the other they treat it like a toy or performance to be played with. All the while we observers are told we must accept what they, the brave trans, say about gender in general and their gender identity specifically, while we must shut about our own views and experiences because we’re not special.
As others have noted more eloquently and with greater intellectual rigour, it’s shit.
“I keep getting mail from the ACLU asking for contributions, and I keep sending them back their request with FIRE CHASE STRANGIO written on it and the postage paid by the ACLU.”
It’s deeply embarrassingly to see what the ACLU has degenerated into. I remember reading this article from “Tablet” Magazine and feeling depressed as the once-brave organisation declined into the farcical group of Strangio and Anthony Romero :
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-disintegration-of-the-aclu-james-kirchick
E gads. It’s as if the mere possibility of someone who identifies as trans deciding to become comfortable with themselves and their bodies isn’t just impossible, but would entail the death of the soul. Yes, you’d be breathing and walking and working and playing — but it’s not YOU. Not ANYMORE. Nothing is more important than whether you’re a man, woman, neither, or both. Nothing.
If someone who’d been isolated on an island somewhere came across this agonized bit of scenery-chewing frothing-at-the-mouth, they’d assumed Hitler and the SS had returned with a vengeance.
@JA#2:
I’m so stealing that idea.
[…] a comment by Rob on But let’s talk about precarity, replying to iknklast’s “If we didn’t […]
“I hate engaging in these conversations…” I can’t prove this is a lie, but I bet it is. TRAs with a public profile as a general rule goddamn love lecturing and denouncing those that disagree with them, especially when the person is a woman. It allows them to indulge their martyr narrative while also giving them the feeling of a righteous high dudgeon.
iknklast:
Word.
I don’t have any dysphoria, as far as I’m aware, but I can’t bear to look in mirrors. Hotels always have a huge mirror right above the desk and I spent a couple of decades working from them. From hotels, not mirrors, I mean. Even writing about looking in mirrors makes me uncomfortable. Hate them.
Rob:
Spot on.
Strangio:
Oh fuck OFF.