#Susan Stryker

[hiiragi7]

Recently started Transgender History by Susan Stryker, and was pleasantly surprised to see intersex be given about a page and a half of text in the Contexts, Concepts, and Terms section of the book. There are some parts of it which I think are good, some "good enough", and some which I feel miss the mark a bit. Overall, I think Susan Stryker did a pretty decent job here and I'm happy to see intersex included, though I do think there's room for improvement and criticism.

A note I'd like to make here is that this book was originally published in 2008 and revised in 2017, and I'm unsure how much this section in particular was revised since the original publish date - If anyone can find that out I'd be very interested to hear about it!

I'm going to be copying the text from the book here and giving my thoughts on it.

Intersex: Typically, being an egg-producing body means having two X chromosomes, and being a sperm-producing body means having one X and one Y chromosome. When egg and sperm cells fuse (i.e., when sexual reproduction takes place), their chromosomes can combine in patterns (or "karyotypes") other than the typical male (XY) or female (XX) ones (such as XXY or XO). Other genetic anomalies can also cause the sex of the body to develop in atypical ways. Other differences of sex development might take place during pregnancy or after birth as the result of glandular conditions that contribute further differences in the typical development of biological sex. Some of these anomalies cause a body that is genetically XY (typically male) to look typically female at birth. Some bodies are born with genitals that look like a mixture of typically male and typically female shapes. Some genetically female bodies (typically XX) are born without vaginas, wombs, or ovaries. All of these variations on the most typical organization of human reproductive anatomy -- along with many, many more -- are called intersex conditions.

Starting off with examples of intersex variations rather than giving a definition first followed by examples left it hard for me to follow exactly where Stryker was going with it, but that could be a writing style preference; personally I think I would've been a bit lost if I didn't already know what intersex was. Overall I think this starts off pretty solid, gives a good overview of the massive spectrum of sex we're dealing with when we talk about intersex - it doesn't fall into the same "mix of male and female, ambiguous genitals" trap that many other definitions do which I appreciate. The use of typical/atypical (instead of, say, disordered) is good. I also do appreciate the preference for differences of sex development over disorders of sex development.

Intersex used to be called hermaphroditism, but that term is now usually considered perjorative. Some intersex people now prefer the medical term DSD (for Disorders of Sex Development) to describe their sex status, but others reject this term as unduly pathologizing and depoliticizing. Such people might use DSD to refer instead to "differences of sex development," or they might hold on to the word intersex -- or even hermaphrodite, or the slang word herm -- to signal their sense of belonging to a politicized minority community.

This is also good! Really feel like we're addressing the elephants in the room here. Hermaphrodite is perjorative, some intersex people use Disorders of Sex Development but other intersex people consider it unduly pathologizing and depoliticizing and instead use differences of sex development or just intersex (or reclaim Hermaphrodite), and we belong to a politicized minority community. Very cool! Lots of things were said here that other authors are often too afraid to touch on, if they even mention us at all.

Intersex conditions are far more common than we tend to acknowledge; reliable estimates put the number at about one in two thousand births.

Actually, it's more like 1-2 in 100 births, my guess as to what's being referenced is actually the statistics for those born with ambiguous genitals ("The estimated frequency of genital ambiguity is reported to be in the range of 1:2000–1:4500" [Link]), which is disappointing. I do appreciate Stryker going against the "intersex is rare" myth, though.

Intersex doesn't really have all that much to do with transgender, except for demonstrating that the biology of sex is a lot more variable than most people realize. This becomes significant when you have cultural beliefs about there being only two sexes, and therefore only two genders.

Stryker lost me here. Intersex doesn't have much to do with transgender except as a demonstration of the variability of sex? I'm tired of people saying intersexuality's only relation to transgender is this when there are many more connections to be found between the two. It's exhausting to have your community be constantly stripped down to a singular point or a debate tool for someone else's use. Didn't like this part.

These beliefs can lead to intersex people becoming the target of medical interventions such as genital surgery or hormone therapy, often while they are still infants or young children, to "correct" their supposed "abnormality". It is being subjected to the same cultural beliefs about gender, and acted on by the same medical institutions, through the same body-altering techniques that give intersex people and transgender people the most common ground.

This part is better, and I do like the connection between intersex and trans people here. I do believe that acknowledging that both communities are impacted by much of the same systems and techniques is good and should be further talked about.

Some trans people who think that their need to cross gender boundaries has a biological cause consider themselves to have an intersex condition (current theories favor sex-linked differences in the brain), and some people with intersex bodies also come to think of themselves as being transgender (in that they desire to live in a gender different from the one they were assigned at or after birth).

I think that there is... quite a large difference between the two groups suggested here, in a way that makes the comparison uncomfortable. Additionally, I did also notice the difference in "trans people" vs. "people with intersex bodies"; it leaves me wondering why they were referred to differently, especially when "intersex people" was used further up in the passage. Perhaps it's to contrast with, for lack of better words, trans people who consider themselves to have differently-sexed brains which make them intersex?

Still, it's best to think of transgender and intersex identities, communities, and social change movements as being demographically and politically distinct, albeit with some areas of overlap and some shared membership.

Complicated thoughts here. Yes, there are differences in our movements and communities, and yes, we are distinct groups - this is important, especially when a lot of people still try to conflate intersex and trans as being the same. However, I think "some areas of overlap and some shared membership" is really underestimating things; While I believe it's pretty safe to say that most trans people do not identify as intersex or participate in intersex communities or advocate for intersex issues, the opposite doesn't appear to be true - a report from Trevor Project found that "58% of intersex youth identified as transgender or nonbinary or were questioning their gender identity". [Link] (PDF)

These are all my current thoughts, going back to reading the book now.

[t4tbian]

"Lesbian Generations—Transsexual… Lesbian… Feminist…" by Susan Stryker; from Feminist Studies Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 377 (2013).

[femmepathy]

Susan Stryker

[the-apparatus]

i just to hear from ur dabi trans allegory please

Okay, I'm going to assume very minimal knowledge of trans theory just so I can give a very thorough explanation. First, I would recommend reading My Words To Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix by Susan Stryker. I don't know if she was the first person to make the comparison between The Creature from Frankenstein and trans bodies, but she definitely does a very good job at explaining it. Key points are essentially that since the trans body is built from medical science, the experience of being trans can be compared to the experience of The Creature. The Creature is shunned from society because its body is a creation of technology, and this isolation and violence against it brings such a rage within them that they enact violence against the initial factor which abandoned it (Victor Frankenstein). Stryker says that living in a trans body (regardless of weather or not they have undergone any modification of their vessel, because the transgendered body is considered monstrous either way) fuels such a raw rage within an individual that can be turned against the oppressive and violent society.

Now how does Dabi come into this (spoilers ahead ig)?

Lets examine his backstory, although I find it less important than just the way his body is presented. In his childhood, he was pushed to fulfill a societal expectation of his body (quirks being a biological phenomenon and the social pressure that came with having a very powerful quirk) and his social upbringing (being the son of the #2 hero). He then becomes fixated on this idea, pushing himself further and further to fulfill this societal expectation on him until it breaks him. His body is destroyed by the very part of him that fueled the pressure: his quirk. His body is stitched back together, creating a miracle of medical technology. Dabi's body is stitched together in the same way The Creature is stitched together, in the same way that the transsexual body is stitched together and manufactured.

Dabi's backstory lends itself to a transfeminine reading of it: the factors of societal pressure to live up to one's father in hero work (masculinity) is one that makes sense within a transfeminine allegory. However, I think Dabi's body itself is what creates the trans allegory. The process of Dabi's body being built out of the burned chunks of his former self is the same as a trans person who builds themself and creates someone who is monstrous, but necessary for survival. Like the trans person, Dabi turns his rage toward the factors that pushed him to the breaking point, he enacts violence against Endeavor and Hero Society, in the same way that a trans person will feel rage towards the way they were raised and against the society that renders their body monstrous. This is why I don't say that Dabi is trans in the way I think Bakuguo is trans -- I think Dabi is an incarnate of the trans experience (or at least a section of it).

[charliejaneanders]

Writers With Drinks is BACK this Tuesday at 7 PM at Strut (470 Castro St) for #bannedbooksweek.

Readings by Maia Kobabe, Jaime Cortez, Susan Stryker, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Tara Sim and Annalee Newitz. FREE, donations to Strut encouraged. Masks required. Book sales by Fabulosa Books 😍

SEE YOU TUESDAY!

[frankensteinofficial]

(from My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker)

A monster is that which eludes gender definition. Ways of knowing are gendered — visual information intake as male and auditory information intake as female — so the monster problematizes gender because “he” is visually disturbing but verbally eloquent. I am thinking so hard right now

[loganhowlet4t]

My words to Victor Frankenstein by Susan Stryker

[theoutcastrogue]

Mayhem

"Between 1949 and 1966, when the medical ethics of transsexual surgeries were first widely debated in the United States, doctors routinely objected to ‘sex-change’ operations, along much the same lines that doctors now object to self-demand amputation. [...] Doctors and lawyers argued that such procedures were in fact illegal insofar as they contravened mayhem statutes, which forbade the ‘willful removal of healthy tissue’. This was the position explicitly advanced by California Attorney General Edmund Brown in 1949, in the first legally significant attempt in California to conduct genital transformation surgery for the purpose of what might be called ‘self-demand’ change of sex (rather than genital surgeries carried out by the state as part of eugenics programmes, contraception, attempts to eradicate homosexuality, or the normalisation of morphologically ambiguous genitalia). [...]

Mayhem statutes in the United States have their roots in English common law, which, in the pre-modern period, held it a crime punishable by death for a man of fighting age to cut off the fingers of his sword hand, thus rendering himself unfit for military service – while continuing, no doubt, to pursue most other activities in life. Interestingly for the sake of our argument here, a male’s loss of genitals was specifically not classed as mayhem, for this did not interfere with the ability to bear arms.

Historically, then, it appears that the legal question of mayhem emerged not in reference to dismemberment per se, but rather in reference to a form of bodily transformation that compromised a particular body’s ability to be integrated into a particular social field as a resource for the exercise of sovereign power. This mayhem is an act that aims to preserve life itself for the body that lives it, rather than for the instrumentality that claims it – an act of resistance to being consumed, rather than becoming the victim of sovereign violence. It was, moreover, not a crime committed against an individual, but rather one committed by an individual; as Elizabeth Loeb has recently noted, ‘the demand that bodies remain available to discorporation solely at the prerogative of the sovereign has deep roots in Anglo law’.

Mayhem is thus a crime against sovereignty and the collective body politic, one that simultaneously dismembered the pacts and covenants binding together bodies of flesh, bodies of knowledge, and social bodies. As such, we contend, mayhem is a somatechnology that can queer or skew the relationship between individual corporeality and the body politic. Or as Hobbes might have put it, mayhem precipitates confusion, disorder, disability, and the disintegration of leviathan. In short, mayhem constitutes an act of war – civil war – which augurs a war of all against all. It is, in effect, cutting off one’s member to thereby cut off the head of the king."

– Susan Stryker and Nikki Sullivan, "King’s Member, Queen’s Body: Transsexual Surgery, Self-Demand Amputation and the Somatechnics of Sovereign Power", in Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies, edited by Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray (Ashgate, 2009)

[fragbot]

I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

- from "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Susan Stryker (x)

[llyfrenfys]

Y llyfr heddiw yw 'Transgender History' gan Susan Stryker, a gyhoeddwyd yn 2017.

Hanes pobl drawsryweddol yw'r llyfr heddiw. Mae'r llyfr yn cofnodi'r hanes pobl drawsryweddol (yn bennaf yn yr Unol Daleithiau) a'r hanes pobl drawsryweddol yn Oes yr Internet.

Ydych chi wedi darllen y llyfr hwn?

/

Today's book is 'Transgender History' by Susan Stryker, published in 2017.

Today's book is a history of transgender people. The book records the history of transgender people (mainly in the United States) and the history of transgender people in the Internet Age.

Have you read this book?

[baravaggio]

susan stryker on the relational body, shifting meanings of transness, and transness as a practice of freedom

[autolenaphilia]

I’m very happy to see some discussion on my dash of the original Frankenstein novel. It's one of my favourite books. And it reminds me how much i hate the anti-science reading of Frankenstein so much. You know the one. Frankenstein’s crime is that he strives for knowledge and power that belongs only to God/nature. The quest for knowledge man is not meant to know, power man is not meant to have. It’s a downright reactionary argument. And of course 70s hippies recuperated anti-technology/science arguments from conservatives and made them supposedly “leftist” or “progressive, as I discussed before. So naturally we get cringeworthy “feminist” anti-science interpretations of Frankenstein. It tends to go like this: Victor is suffering from womb envy. He can not create life the natural way, so in his hubris he does a monstrous imitation of it via technology.

Of course, there is an obvious bio-essentialism to this feminist interpretation of the novel. Womanhood is identified with a (fertile) womb. And there is a kind of cultural feminism to this interpretation, where gender roles are reaffirmed but the feminine role is upheld as superior to the male one. So women are identified with motherhood and nature, and men with science and technology, but it’s feminist because science and technology are seen as evil.

So if you are capable of critical thinking, you might notice this kind of “feminism” smells terfy. Like actually gives off terf vibes, not in the “talking about misogyny is terfy” sense. And you’ll be right. So let’s talk about Mary Daly, who was one of the original terfs. The foundational statement of it as an ideology The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymondoriginated as a dissertation with Daly as a teacher.

Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology explicitly makes the above “feminist” reading of Frankenstein as part of her broader anti-technology argument, where ecological destruction is due to “male” technology inherently being a destructive “boundary violation” analogous to rape. I discussed before how it’s a “feminist” and “environmentalist” restatement of reactionary catholic writing.

In Daly’s reading Victor Frankeinstein’s “character illustrates the hysteria of the manic mother-mimer who experiences his inherent male sterility as unbearable barrenness.” And in that “hysteria” he tries to become a “technological father” and “scientific sire.” In Daly’s words, “The Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent in… phallocratic technology.” And she of course takes this argument to its natural transmisogynistic conclusion, arguing that “Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes.”

This conclusion is not an aberration, but inherent in the anti-technology and anti-modernity premises Daly works from. If technology is evil and produces only destruction and abominations, perversions of what is natural and thus beautiful, medical transition technology is not an exception. The transsexual body is thus a disgusting aberration. Transphobia and transmisogyny follow naturally from an anti-technology stance.

That is exactly why reading Frankenstein as an anti-science text is dangerous, especially if you argue for that reading as progressive and feminist. There is certainly space for that reading in the text, but it remind us of the dark side of romanticism. Not the gothic horror side of romantic literature, but the reactionary irrationalism and anti-science currents that inflamed so much romantic nationalism and lead to the nazis, who were violently transmisogynistic. If that is all you get out of Frankenstein, that science and knowledge is bad, that is not a progressive or feminist statement, but a reactionary one.

And it’s worrying that a lot of supposedly feminist writers do run with that interpretation, making a repudiation of “male technology” central to Shelley’s novel as a feminist text. It’s even become part of how Frankenstein is viewed as the orgin of science fiction as a genre. The excellent essay Mother Frankenstein by Sabine Sharp has an excellent criticism of such “feminist science fiction history-telling.” In order to refute misogynist claims of science fiction as a male genre, Frankenstein is viewed as the original science fiction novel, and it was written by a woman. This is despite the history of the genre, and indeed Frankenstein’s genre placement being far more complex than that. In such a history, earlier books viewed as science fiction are often dismissed as “fantasy” while carving Frankenstein out of the gothic horror genre.

As Sharp explains “The recognition awarded Frankenstein by feminist science fiction critics is often accompanied by readings of the text as a critique of science, technology and progress…. Science fiction is shown to have a foundation in challenging not only the male dominance of literature – Mary Shelley being one of few women writers in her day – but also of science. “

This reading of Frankenstein and it’s implications for the SF genre are of course bio-essentialist in a Daly-esque manner. “Frankenstein’s spawning of a new genre thus also bolsters a critical feminist position on reproduction and production. Just as Victor Frankenstein is seen to misappropriate the supposedly female reproductive role, so too are subsequent male science fiction writers seen to adopt and dominate the field of science fiction, failing to pay due respect to their maternal ancestry.“

Sharp also criticizes the cultural feminism of such readings of the novel and genre. “This reading of Frankenstein also consolidates the view of science as an inherently masculine realm, a false and shallow substitute for pregnancy and birth” Sharp paraphrases the argument of feminist sf-writer Pamela Sargent who already in 1975 pointed out that this view “has problematic consequences for women’s engagement in science, technology and science fiction.“

So to the extent we read Frankenstein this way, it has to be a very critical reading. But that is not the only reading possible of the text. The interpretations I quoted so far have focused on Victor Frankenstein, and his motivations and hubris in creating the monster. It’s Victor who sees his creation of the monster as his major tragic mistake.

It’s telling that the movie adaptations which focus on Victor’s hubris in playing god and creating life, reduce the monster to a largely non-verbal shambling mess. The epitome of this is not Boris Karloff in the 1931 Frankenstein film, but Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein from 1957. There Victor as portrayed by Peter Cushing becomes the 20th century pop culture stereotype of the mad scientist villain, fanatical and ruthless in his quest to create life. And the result of his efforts is a gruesome, non-verbal, violent stitched-together mess of a monster.

Yet the monster of the novel is a very complex figure. “Adam” is a highly intelligent and complex character whose monologue dominates large parts of the novel. And of course he is not born evil and violent. He is born innocent, a “tabula rasa.” and then he is made cruel and evil by being completely rejected by humanity, including Victor, his father. He does horrible things, but is also sympathetic.

In the original novel, the complexity of the monster as a character provides room for an alternative reading to the anti-science one. The tragedy of the novel is not that the monster is created, but that Victor abandoned him immediately after creation. It’s that act that puts him irrevocably on a tragic path. His flaw is not one of hubris, of creating life, but an inability to take responsibility for what he created. Victor’s refusal to raise his child turns the child selfish and violent, and with disastrous consequences for both of them. Victor Frankenstein is the ultimate literary deadbeat dad. If you wish to apply it to present-day concerns, take it as a condemnation of men who won’t pay their child support, not scientists doing in-vitro fertilization or trans healthcare.

The monster as a character opens up more interesting themes than the anti-science one. He is not some pale imitation of humanity, he is very much human in both his desires and flaws. The monster is in fact an exploration of the human condition. How the monster is born innocent yet made cruel reflects Shelley’s beliefs about how humans are born a “tabula rasa” and then made evil by how they are treated by a cruel environment. His confusion and rage at his abandonment by his creator is very much an analogy for the human relationship with God. The monster explicitly compares himself with Adam, and Victor with God. The novel is an expression of the questioning of Christian belief in God during and after the age of enlightenment. Frankenstein very much deals with “god’s silence” as Ingmar Bergman would later put it (Bergman could have directed an excellent Frankenstein movie adaptation). How if God exists, he seems to abandoned humanity, allowing humans to suffer. Frankenstein anticipates the existentialist writers thinking about how to live in a world without Christian faith.

The monster is not a mindless thing, but a very human figure. We are meant to see ourselves in him.

And of course, in response to how the figure of Frankenstein’s monster have been used against trans women, we have reclaimed it. The pivotal text in such reclaiming is Susan Stryker’s My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.

“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”

Stryker’s essay is a classic work of transgender theory, of trans women speaking about their own experiences. Just it’s influence on trans readings of the gothic is immense. I provided links to interesting works in this post, but this is the one you should read.

So after all that, let’s return to applying Frankenstein and its themes to present-day trans people. The monster is again an analogy for transness. Victor creating the monster becomes an analogy for doctors doing medical transition. And again it’s not there that Victor makes his mistake, but in afterwards abandoning his monster, and the continuing rejection by humanity the monster experiences. The message is not that creating life via science is bad, it’s that rejecting and mistreating the life created afterwards is evil. And if trans people are the monster in this analogy, the message is clear. It’s not medical transition that is evil, it is the transphobia and transmisogyny trans people experience afterwards, the rejection of trans people by cis people that is the true evil.

[t4tbian]

"Lesbian Generations—Transsexual… Lesbian… Feminist…" by Susan Stryker; from Feminist Studies Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 376 (2013).

[leehallfae]

“t is the difference between error and terror but fear not nothing is wrong it is not a mistake to cross lines that should not have been drawn in the first place i gottcher queer media right here she said what fool would think the medium’s a reflection smash the fucking mirror and remember cuts cut together just as cuts cut apart so cut new connections that alter the flow for fantasy’s meet-meat is carnality’s heart-beat so slice it up tear it up go baby go rip it up mix it up know baby know”

— susan stryker, “t time a queer media manifesto”

[the-apparatus]

Dabi from bnha is the most literal trans allegory that I have ever seen in media.

[charliejaneanders]

Just a reminder: I'm helping to organize TWO free events:

TOMORROW is the bookstore and chocolate crawl, starting at Noe Valley Bookstore (3957 24th street) at 1 PM, heading down 24th to Et Al., Adobe, Medicine For Nightmares

TUESDAY is Writers With Drinks x Banned Books Week, 7 PM at Strut (470 Castro St), featuring Susan Stryker, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Annalee Newitz, Maia Kobabe, Jaime Cortez and Tara Sim