Monday, July 28, 2014

two articles (plus thoughts on autogynephilia as the transgender equivalent of slut-shaming)

note added 9-1-14 regarding point #2 in this post: The following week I had a chance to more thoughtfully and extensively reply to that Michelle Goldberg article. The Advocate ran my op-ed entitled “An Open Letter to The New Yorker," which is my formal response to the article. Following that, I published a blogpost called Final thoughts on that Michelle Goldberg article, faux journalism, and recognizing bias, which linked to other critical reviews of the Goldberg article and includes my closing thoughts on the matter.

Two things happened today:

1) I have a new article out on Ms. Magazine blog today called Empowering Femininity, wherein I revisit some of the ideas I initially forwarded in the chapter of Whipping Girl called "Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism." Check it out!

2) Some of you may be aware of a New Yorker article by Michelle Goldberg that came out today entitled "What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism." It is basically about how Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists (TERFs) are increasingly becoming marginalized within feminism, and it is mostly written from their perspective (e.g., about ways in which they have been personally attacked or "censored" by trans activists). Let's just say that it is not the piece that I would have written on the matter.

I do not have the time or energy to write a formal response to the entire piece, but since I am one of the few trans voices included in the article, I feel compelled to make a few points "for the record" as it were:

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Regarding “Generation Wars”: some reflections upon reading the recent Jack Halberstam essay

Jack Halberstam recently published an essay called You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma, and it’s been making waves on the activist internets over the last week. It felt like a bit of a “kitchen sink” article to me, in that it discussed a plethora of different matters (including Monty Python, historical debates between second- and third-wave feminisms, current controversies surrounding the word “tranny,” the recent proliferation of trigger warnings, supposed connections between expressions of trauma and neoliberalism, safe spaces, “It Gets Better” campaigns, and concerns about millennials being hypersensitive) and attempted to weave them into one nice neat coherent narrative. This narrative could be summarized as follows:

queer & trans culture and politics circa the 1990’s was strong, progressive, and fun!

whereas queer & trans culture and politics circa the 2010’s is frail, conservative, and a killjoy.

While Halberstam’s essay made a few points that are certainly worthy of further exploration and discussion, it also overreached in a number of ways, especially in its attempts to shoehorn a potpourri of recent events and trends into the aforementioned overarching narrative. Some concerns that I have about the essay have been addressed by others here and here and here and here (sorry, original posting of that response was here) and here