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rewrite-the-wrongs · 5 years ago

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introductions / howdy, pardner

My first short story was about a fishboy and his human best friend. They battled a mutant piranha (whose name I think may have been Mutant Piranha, such was the monumental daring of my creative endeavor) and his army, who were out to destroy a mountain that held a whole planet together. The boys won singlehandedly, because scale was apparently a bit of a mystery to me.

This was the second grade. My teacher--who held me every day as I cried for weeks, confused and miserable and stranded in the throes of my parents’ divorce--understood before I did that I create to a ploddingly slow and steady drumbeat. A sentence is always so much more in my head than I’m able to let out, at first; I have to pore over it again and again, fleshing and flourishing (and often correcting) it, the same way I often have to reread paragraphs or pages or whole books to truly capture their meaning. In a word processor, this back-and-forth is as easily said as it is done; on double-wide ruled paper with dashed-line handwriting guides, the task is magnitudes more time-consuming, especially for somebody as messy as I am. So, while nearly everybody else played at recess on the sandlot and the jungle gym around us, a select few stragglers laid our reading folders on our laps and finished our stories.

My villain, that dastardly Mutant Piranha, found himself in prison at the story’s close. Awaiting trial, I guess; I never ventured that far ahead, seeing the big fishy bastard for a coward. “When no one was looking, he stabbed himself.” That’s the last line, stuck in my memory, not for its own sake, but for my poor teacher’s horrified face as she read my final draft there on the playground.

A mom volunteered to type up the class’ stories and get them printed and bound. For years afterward I reread that collection, always proud to have written the second-longest piece therein. I felt the weight of the pages, inhaled the tiny but acrid breeze that came from rapidly leafing through them. Knew it was a whole smattering of worlds inside, that one of those worlds was wholly mine, and I had the power to show it to people however I wished. Yes, I thought, I want this.

I’ve been introduced to writing many times over, by many people. Don’t get me wrong--I nightowled the first several chapters to many half-baked novel concepts all through my youth. But teachers have a way of showing a thing to you from new angles.

The first person to impact me as such was a high school teacher who was essentially given carte-blanche to construct a creative writing workshop in the English curriculum. The first semester was structured--you practiced poems, short fiction, humor and essay writing, drama, the gamut. Every semester after, the carte-blanche was passed on: A single assignment due a week, each a single draft of a poem or a minimum of two pages’ worth of prose. Forty-five minutes a day to work, and of course free time at home. By the time I graduated, I’d finagled my schedule such that I was spending two periods a day in the computer lab, and several hours after school every day working the literary arts magazine before I went home to get the rest of my homework out of the way and write some more..

My next big influence came in the form of a pair of writers who taught fiction at my university, a married couple. One had me print stories and literally, physically cut them up section-by-section as a method of reworking chronologies. Told me stories happened like engines or clocks or programs--pieces that meshed differently depending on how they were put together, rules that held each other in place. The other showed boundless confidence in me, listened happily to some older students who recommended I be brought on board for a national arts mag. They both encouraged me toward grad school, but toward the end of my junior year I began to stumble, and by senior year I was, to be frank, a drunken asshole. Time I could be bothered to set aside for writing began to dwindle. I limped through the editorship with the help of my extremely talented, utterly more-than-worthy successor--and come to think of it, I’ve never truly thanked her. Maybe I’ll send her that message, now that I’m feeling more myself.

On feeling more myself:

That drunken rage was brought on by a myriad list of factors, the primary ones being 1) I am the child of recovering alcoholics, and our inherited family trauma runs deep, 2) An assault that will likely be mentioned no further from hereon in, as I have reached a solid level of catharsis about it, 3) Some toxic-ass relationship issues, and 4) I was a massive egg and had no idea (or, really, I had some idea, just not the language or understanding or even the proper empathy to eloquently and effectively explore it).

I had a recent relapse with drinking, technically--a mimosa at Christmas breakfast at my partner’s parents’ home--but I’m not honestly sure I can call it a legitimate relapse. I’m not in any official self-help group, I’ve never engaged in the twelve steps or a professional rehabilitation. I had a very wonderful therapist for a few years but reached a point at which I could not pay her any longer and we parted ways--I miss her dearly, as she truly became my friend and confidante; she was the first person I came out to, and very well-equipped to handle it, lucky for me--but I’m still on behavioral medication. That tiny smidgen of alcohol pushed my antidepressants right out of my brain, and I became terribly anxious and angry and sad all at once, and briefly lashed out during a conversation with my partner behind closed doors. Not nearly the lashing out I’ve released in the now-distant past--more on that maybe-never, but who knows, as I am obviously a chronic over-sharer.

Frankly, I don’t deserve my partner. She endured my past abuses, told me to my face I had to be better, and found it in herself to wait for me to grow. She’s endlessly and tirelessly supportive of me. She sat with me to help me maintain the nerve to start this blog tonight. I came out to her as a trans woman just under a year ago, now, and I’m happier than ever, and we communicate better than ever. Our relationship is, bar-none, the healthiest and stablest and happiest I’ve ever been in.

So, naturally, I apologized fairly quickly at Christmas, and continuing where I’d left off at two and a half years, decided I’m still solid without booze.

If we’re all being honest, though (and I’m doing my best to be one hundred percent honest, here, though I will absolutely be censoring names because no shit), I still smoke way too much fuckin’ weed. High as balls, right now. 420 blaze it, all day erryday, bruh. That self-medicated ADHD life. I should be on Adderall and not antidepressants, probably, but it’s been a while since an appointment and psychiatrists are expensive, so I’m at where I’m at for now. Sativas help a lot. It helps with the dysphoria, too.

I don’t have a legal diagnosis for gender dysphoria, but tell that to my extreme urge to both be in and have a vagina. I’m making little changes--my hair, an outfit at a time, no longer policing how I walk or run or how much emphasis I put on S sounds. If I manage to come out to my parents sometime soon--and it feels like that moment is closer every day--maybe I’ll tell y’all my real, full chosen name. For right now, call me Easy.

Anyhow. My goals here are pretty simple:

1) Share words, both those by people I like/admire/sometimes know! and occasionally words I’ve made that I like. See the above screenshot from my notes app. Steal some words if you want, but if you manage to make money off some of mine, holler at ya gurl’s Venmo, yeah?

2) Discuss words, how they work, and how we create them, use them, engage with them, and ultimately make art of them. I am not a professional linguist, but I went to undergrad for creative writing, so, hey, I’ll have opinions and do my best to back them up with ideas from people smarter than I am.

3) Books! Read them, revisit them, quote them, talk about them, sometimes maybe even review them, if I’m feeling particularly bold. No writer can exist in a vacuum, and any writer who insists they don’t like to read is either a) dyslexic and prefers audiobooks or b) in serious need of switching to a communications major (no shade, but also definitely a little shade @corporate journalism).

5) I added this last, but I feel it’s less important than 4 and does not deserve bookend status, and I am verbose but incredibly lazy, so here I am, fucking with the system. Anyway: Art! Music! Video games! I fucking love them. I’ll talk about them, sometimes, too. Maybe I’ll finally do some of the ekphrastic work I’ve felt rattling around in my brain for a while now. Jade Cocoon 2′s Water Wormhole Forest, looking right the fuck at you.

6) Ah, shit, I did it again. Oh well. Last-but-not-last: This is obviously, in some ways, a diary, or a massive personal essay. I will sometimes discuss people, places, or experiences that have informed my work just the same as other people’s art has.

4) Be an unabashed and open Trans woman. TERFs, transphobes, ill-informed biological essentialists not permitted. Come at me and my girldick and prepare to be dunked on and subsequently shown the door via a swift and painful steel-toed kick in the ass. Everybody who doesn’t suck, if I screw up on any matter of socio-ethics or respect for diversity, please feel free to correct me.

Punk’s dead, but we’re a generation of motherfucking necromancers. Be gay, do crime, fight the patriarchy, and fart when you gotta. May the Great Old Ones select you to ascend to a higher plane and learn the terrible truths of existence.

Much love--

Easy

#writers #writing #creative writing #trans #trans woman #fuck TERFs #writing about writing #writer #my writing #diary

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contemporarysex-blog · 7 years ago

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What Gender Studies is about

I had a fun debate on Twitter recently about whether "academia" is "increasingly dogmatically Blank Slatist" (i.e. denying biological influences on e.g. gender relations), which soon narrowed down to an argument about whether most contemporary feminist theory is built on Blank Slatist assumptions. Long story short, I'm not convinced that Blank Slatism is on the rise, let alone dogmatically adhered to even in academic feminism. I'm also not convinced that all insights from feminist theory are useless as a result of being based on Blank Slatism or postmodernist constructivism, mostly for reasons of supervenience. (That is, you can arrive at useful conclusions about society by studying social processes rather than their biological prerequisites; just as you can arrive at useful conclusions about biological systems by studying biological processes rather than the particles these are made up of.)

Still, this debate was useful to me in that it made me think hard about the scope and subject matter of Gender Studies.

Let's start by burning down two classic strawmen:

Biological Essentialist Strawman: "All gender differences are necessary and inevitable outcomes of biological facts, and are best understood at the level of (evolutionary) biology." This is obviously stupid and easily refuted by a looking at those differences between men and women that have shifted historically and are different across cultures (e.g. clothing, courtship, relative agency, etc.).

Postmodern Blankslatist Strawman: "All gender differences are socially constructed, and are best understood without taking biology into account in any way." This, too, is obviously stupid and easily refuted by looking at those differences between men and women that are stable in the mean across times and cultures (e.g. physiology, morbidity, childcare, etc.)

Historically, Gender Studies has been flirting with the second strawman for three obvious reasons: 1) The subject of Gender Studies is gender, i.e. the social dimension that is added to the biological one. (You could say that the foundational insight of Gender Studies is that there is a social aspect to relations between men and women, over and above what is "required" by biology.) Overstating the importance of one's own field while downplaying the relevance of others is something that should sound familiar to scholars of all fields (including biology). 2) The academic field of Gender Studies is an outgrowth of feminism, which is a political movement with the explicit goal of changing gender relations. If you want to change something, you'll be more interested in the moving (and movable) parts (here: the social construction of gender roles) than in the static and unchangeable ones (here: the biological prerequisites). 3) Before Gender Studies, the biological essentialist position was the dominant mode of thinking about men and women. Gender Studies set out to change this, and overcorrected in a predictable way. Just as predictably, this was exacerbated by other scholars and pundits doubling down on biological essentialism in order to defend the status quo of gender relations (for extreme examples, look to the homosexuality debates of the 1970s-1990s).

This explains, as a first approximation, how Gender Studies got to where it is now. The more interesting question, however, is: where should it go from here?

There are two answers to this, an obvious and a less obvious one. The obvious one is that Gender Studies needs to become more empirical. This is not at all the same as saying that we need to just roll over and accept everything that people in other fields (such as behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology) are telling us. The principal domain of Gender Studies is society, and society is still best studied at the level of society, with methods developed explicitly for studying society, rather than at the level of sciences that believe themselves to be more "fundamental". (Note the critique of Gender Studies offered above under point 1 applies just as much to scholars from any other field, such as biologists who hold that there is nothing about human society that is not best explained by biological means, and who ridicule those working in the 'soft sciences' for using 'squishy' methods that are adapted to their particular domain.) That said, we do need to make sure that our specific models actually correspond to something in the real world in a useful and provable way. To do that, we need to derive testable predictions from our models and then test them, adapting the tools used by empirical sociologists to our own uses, and bearing in mind all the difficulties of establishing construct validity highlighted by the reproducibility crisis. If we are confident in our models of reality, we need to put them to the test in a rigorous and transparent way -- which also means that we need to be ready to revise them, for example by accounting for confounders that other sciences tell us we should expect. Sociologists can produce useful sociological results while accounting for genetic confounds; there is no reason to expect that Gender Studies cannot do the same. (I will write more about the intersection of qualitative methods such as ethnography and case studies with more easily falsifiable quantitative methods in a separate blog post -- suffice it to say here that qualitative methods can prove their value by informing models from which quantitative predictions can be derived and falsified.)

The less obvious answer, perhaps, is that the central mission of Gender Studies is orthogonal to the epistemological problems outlined above. Gender Studies is not merely an empirical science, concerned with understanding the world; it is also an inextricable part of the broader movement of feminism (or whatever you want to call it) that is concerned with improving the world. Some critics see this as a damning assessment and claim that such a "mission" is incompatible with scientific rigor, as science's only concern should be arriving at the truth. That seems like a noble aspiration, but it would equally exclude all of medical science (concerned with finding out the truth about human health in order to improve it), educational science (concerned with finding out what works in education in order to improve it), all engineering disciplines and most of sociology and psychology from the halls of True Science -- and frankly, if it ever came to a split like that, I for one know which company I would prefer. Of course there is a danger, in our eagerness to improve things, to ignore reality for the sake of convenient fictions. This, too, is not unique to Gender Studies; to avoid it requires the realization that you can only act effectively once you have a sufficiently realistic model of the world that you want to influence with your actions. This realization, in turn, reaffirms our focus on the social aspects of gender relations: what we want to change is society, so we need to study how society works. Human biology is only interesting to us insofar as it makes changing society harder in some ways and easier in others; it is a factor in our model, but can never be a replacement for the model itself. We do not set out to change biology, and neither do we fall prey to the fallacy (as some of our detractors seem to do) that the shape and organization of human society is necessarily determined by human biology. (This is the "is/ought" fallacy, and to be fair most evolutionary psychologists understand it extremely well -- quite unlike many of their fans and interpreters in the media and online.)

This insight into the function of Gender Studies, then, tells us exactly what we need to model, and what models we urgently need to validate. We are interested in the moving and movable parts; we need to understand how society can be arranged so that the current state of gender relations can be improved. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that both men and women face plenty of gender-specific problems, we need to ask: how can we contribute to improving all of our lots? Saying "we need to go back to the 'natural' way of doing things" is as unhelpful there as simply saying "smash the patriarchy!" Sure, let's go smash the patriarchy; but before we do, let's find out if our model of the patriarchy is a) correct and b) operable, and what parts of it we need to smash in what order and what ways so things can get better.

#gender studies #feminism #essentialism #science #sociology #gender

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