Tag Archives: queer as in 1995

you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’

i’ve been talking about this for many years now (here, here, here, and even here – rejection emails not included).

but here we go again:

the main structuring fact of so-called trans healthcare is that the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the best” (cohen-kettenis, for instance) have decades-long collaborative relationships with the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the worst” (zucker, for instance). those two, for example, regularly co-author academic and clinical papers, textbook chapters, and such, and have for as long as they’ve been working in the field.

and what these supposedly “good” doctors’ practice (always remember: practice is purpose), especially when it comes to young people, is the same old gatekeeping with shiny liberal rhetoric. wanna get a trans clinic to question whether you should be there? all you need to do is let them find out you’re wearing a kind of underwear that’s marketed to your originally assigned gender group! (this recent example taken from one of the “best” clinics in the u.s.)

Continue reading you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’

lesbians, fascists, & Bears (o my!)

i just finished watching a 2015 anime series, and now i Have Thoughts.

none of this will make much sense to anyone who hasn’t watched Yurikuma Arashi – Love Bullet [“Lesbianbear Storm”], which i’m not going to try to explain because it would take about as long as watching it (~4 hours). yes, really: kunihiko ikuhara doesn’t really direct things that summarize properly (and the wikipedia page will hand you a ton of spoilers without really helping you make sense of what happens in the show – just like this little essay!).

Continue reading lesbians, fascists, & Bears (o my!)

tsvishn tsvey dibukim, oder in der krizis iz arayn a dibek

i don’t often use this space to just write my way into things, but it feels like the right thing tonight.

to be clear from the top: this is a deep appreciation of the kultur-kongres’ centennial production. they did an amazing job under less than perfect circumstances and i enjoyed the hell out of it. and because it was a good, solid, well-thought-out production, af mame-loshn, it reminded me what i actually want from yiddish theater, and from yiddish productions of our classics.

i want a queerer dibek.
i want a trans-er dibek.
which is how ansky wrote it.

Continue reading tsvishn tsvey dibukim, oder in der krizis iz arayn a dibek
war-lesbian wrote:

it’d be good to have an explanation for why, at least in my experience, you tend to see more camab nb people in certain ~queer~ scenes and social circles (usually cafab trans dominated ones), compared to “binary” trans women. 

i guess i would speculate that

  1. cafab people like to have a monopoly on womanhood (even when they dont identify as women)
  2. it’s probably easier to convince camab nb people that they have privilege over u since they’re less likely to understand their experiences through the lens of transmisogyny (and this is no doubt a deciding factor in “qualifying” for these spaces)
  3. there’s a decent chance that these are trans women who have yet to come to terms with their womanhood, or are even being pressured away from identifying as women, so they are probably hurt and confused and everything else that comes with being closeted, making them more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation
  4.  camab nb people are possibly(?) more likely to present in a visibly gender non-conforming “queer” (but ultimately feminine) way, meeting the rigorous aesthetic (read: fuckable) standards imposed by these sorts of groups
  5. related: dont have that “camab person who started taking estrogen after puberty” bod non trans women are obviously so uncomfortable with
  6. and, most importantly – in my limited experience, are more likely to identify as bi or exclusively male-attracted
radtransfem replied:

We leave
(read: driven out)

and then i chimed in:

i partly agree with @radtransfem. but/aaaand, there’s also this inconvenient thing where nb trans women are pretty actively unwelcomed from most social spaces set up specifically by/for trans women.

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on fem

is “femme refers exclusively to lesbians” a white thing or no?

what tf am I missing

– alder-knight –

trying to write this quickly, if i can… my sense, fwiw, is that “fem” (i use joan nestle’s spelling, not the frenchified one) as a term is in a state of almost total incoherence right now, because there are at least three or four versions of it in circulation, all with quite different histories behind their different meanings and breaking down to some extent along racial lines.

Continue reading on fem

kids will not be pawns

building on a critique of the ‘think of the children’ strategy that liberal trans organizing has adopted (another layer of toxic on top of the ‘born that way’ rhetoric imported from the liberal gay/lesbian world):

beyond the strategic problems, another thing that the focus on ‘trans kids’ does is pushes kids towards an extremely restricted set of gender options.

we know from the world around us that some male-assigned kids will end up being binary-identified, conventionally feminine trans women; some binary-identified, butch trans women; some genderqueer trans folks of a variety of gender presentations; some fem gay men (cissexual, but not cisgendered); some butch gay men. and we know that folks may move among those positions many times in their lives. we also know – from our own lives and those of our friends – that kids who wind up in all of those places at, say, 28 years old, often express ‘cross-gender’ desires.

when what we do with all those kids’ cross-gender expressions is either track them as ‘trans kids’ towards binary-identified, conventionally feminine trans womanhood, or dismiss them as ‘not really trans’, we’re not supporting their self-determination, we’re obstructing it.