A giant in the field
UC Riverside has exciting news.
In a new book, sociologist Brandon Andrew Robinson calls for abolishing sexual identities.
Robinson, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at UC Riverside, knows it’s a provocative thesis. But they argue that discarding these labels is a critical step toward giving people the freedom to relate to one another on a deeper, more respectful, more meaningful, and more pleasurable level. Sexual identity, Robinson asserts, functions as a kind of prison, confining human desire and reinforcing a false notion of gender based on fixed, biological categories.
Someone should tell him that we already have the freedom to relate to one another on levels that have little or nothing to do with sex.
There’s also the fact that without sex there are no humans to do any relating. Sex is the way it is because otherwise there is no reproduction and so no fashion-obsessed academics telling us sex is dispensable.
“Identities limit us,” Robinson writes in “Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom.” “And the fact that we keep creating new identities — such as gynosexual, finsexual, sapiosexual, asexual, or pansexual — shows how these categories fail to capture the full complexities of gender, sexuality, and desire.”
Derp derp derp. Of course they don’t. They’re not meant to. That’s not what categories do.
The book, published Feb. 24 by the University of California Press, draws on hundreds of Reddit conversations about transgender women and their sexuality and dating experiences, as well as from 48 qualitative interviews conducted over Zoom with trans women and trans femmes — trans people who identify with a feminine gender expression.
Oh yay, an academic book about Reddit chats! This guy is right there at the coalface and no mistake!
The lunatics appear tohave taken control of the asylum. (Sorry, lunatics, for that insult.)
Interesting. For something that aspires to “liberate” humans from the tyrrany of sexual identity, this seems so to be strangely blinkered and unidirectional. Why aren’t trans-identified women ‘s “sexuality and dating experiences” being similarly polled? It’s not like any book like this is going to make people suddenly abandon the idea of sexual orientation, and indiscriminately start fucking anyone and everyone. The only point I see in this little exercize is to provide an intellectual underpinning to demands and pressure by trans identified males to be included in the dating pools of lesbians. This looks like it’s just a book-length rationale and justification for corrective rape.
the fact that we keep creating new identities — such as gynosexual, finsexual, sapiosexual, asexual, or pansexual — shows how desperate we are to be noticed and affirmed as special.
Finsexual? Does that mean someone who is sexually attracted to fish?
Or is it someone who likes to do sex fish-style?
Or people who like to combine sex with a fish dinner?
@4 I’m sorry to report that our local Green party, and other organisations that follow along, now use the acronym FINT (female, intersex, nonbinary and trans) as a catchall for anyone who isn’t, I guess, a self-identified male person. So we no longer have exhibitions, anthologies, shortlists, spaces, etc. for women, but rather for FINT (i.e. we have ‘male’ and ‘other’).