Amy Marvin

For the testosterone-injecting manosphere podcaster Man and Woman might as well be memes.

There's also a play of a priori gender as common sense in this video. For Joe Rogan man and woman aren't empirical categories with crossover or complication related to biological & social processes, they are categories conceived through public reason as eternal mutually exclusive roles and destinies

Julia Serano has some essays about it!

the thing about autogynephilia is that historically some trans people were open to the idea since it was initially put forward by clinical sexologists, but then after Bailey published Man Who Would Be Queen it became clear that it *is* primarily a tool of transphobia / casting us as sexual monsters

it's kind of weird to live in a society that both doesn't believe transphobia is real and fosters anxiety about getting called transphobic

There's also something I'm wondering about the practice of white bourgeois British masculinity where perhaps agency gets redirected into devotion towards preordained codes of propriety (including propriety of sex/gender). But I lack the empirical basis to take this beyond conjecture!

This is also related to contempt for a foolish / merely consumable / polluted class of sex-gender. Someone like Benjamin Ryan who has an obvious seething rage about us that might disqualify him in other contexts is transmuted into the neutral observer and all his opponents become 'trans activists'

I think transphobia also frequently acquires a consuming desire to see trans people fail, which is where it takes on some its legislative / journalistic obsession forms. Interest about us is there, but our ends must take a tragic-redemptive form.

Finally got to reading this! I think there's a deep fear that categories might relate with human agency rather than encountering a totally prearranged world, which maps to several of the dynamics that you point out in the other set of paragraphs. Transphobia is partly a fear of the unmoored self.

I like Martha Nussbaum's "Professor of Parody" essay because when someone shares it I know not to take them seriously

Cat Power is going to be performing the entirety of The Greatest just an hour away but sadly I am a You Are Free person

Trans Women Writers Collective Booklet Series #12 - Lohana Berkins - Selected Writings : Lohana Berkins, Jamie Berrout : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Selected Writings by Lohana Berkins. Translated by Jamie Berrout. Published as part of the Trans Women Writers Collective Booklet Series.

I put some new stuff up on internet archive this morning, including Jamie Berrout's translations of the late Argentinean travesti theorist and organizer Lohana Berkins.

archive.org/details/loha...

Alex Byrne is kind of giving "passing quote that Beauvoir dunks on during Second Sex"

Byrne kind of throws his agency in the garbage during the Introduction: this is not a political book, it's just analyzing confused concepts. Then him writing for the Trump administration is just a matter of making sure the argument is right. So it's also a strategy of totally ceding responsibility.

I'm really happy to have started the unit about Byrne with Beauvoir's chapter on biological data, because she both (1) affirms the importance of the body, which is obviously important to me but also (2) emphasizes agency, change, and responsibility.

I'm teaching Alex Byrne right now and the thing that stands out to me most is he wants the world to be very simple. Humans are biological creatures which is a straightforward situation, sex is grounded in the simplest kernel of gamete distinctions, and patriarchy just naturally emerges out of these.

You could try one of the novels! I like The Mandarins as a post-WWII story about the politics of publishing and literature scenes. Ethics of Ambiguity is shorter than Second Sex but I find Second Sex a bit more immediately accessible to students.

I would have a nobody under 35 rule, you need to have one saturn return and at least one divorce

or even better - Trans Elder Zine

When people bring up something like 'you can't even define what a woman is' I always think about the moment when Socrates returns to the cave and can't give simple accepted answers anymore so people kill him. Beauvoir wrote that sex is a simple question for those who like simple answers.

we should put together an anthology called 'Trans Elders' that's essays by people who have been around for awhile that also pokes fun at the idea of a 'trans elder'

arrived via Subaru to my office at a private liberal arts college so I can prepare my lesson on Women's and Gender Studies while listening to The Hours soundtrack in the snow and rain (doing gender)

wow that is NOT awesomesauce

oh shit it's out! I hope I sound smart

very bittersweet to be healing past the trauma I endured in the 2010s within an atmosphere that wants to drown me

it's a shame that nobody ever realizes *I'm* the mean one (Philly accent)

excited to finally be teaching a Lugones essay that is not the world-travelling one

attempting to stoke a panic about how well trans girls in the US are being treated during this exact moment sure is a choice

i feel strongly that anyone that thinks that there is a nefarious cabal of surgeons and doctors Transing people should be forced to try and schedule one (1) transsexual procedure

It's so weird that because of the word "trans" he thinks we're trying to do what he's trying to do