voidchildada

[voidchildada]

frontiers are not discoveries out there awaiting encounterment they are the direct product of an act, or acts, of enclosure.

[voidchildada]

Ghost gang (Defining this style is hard tbh. Punk lolita? Impractical biker school delinquent lolita in green, orange, yellow and black with a Pokémon twist? Idk)

[voidchildada]

gender essentialism

there might be something to the whole transgenderism is repressed homosexuality thing. lets' run through the argument.

it may be traced back to the attic greek conception of masculinity re: nude wrestling, pederasty; the notion of physical dominance and homosexual sex as the result. but sexuality is more complicated than that. for instance, i am a verse bottom. when i dom as a bottom my thoughts are of taking *back* power. dominance is about subservience, and vice versa. but dominance still plays the first part in my mind. if *i* win the physical exchange that results in sex, i don't top, i still bottom. it's not a notion of subservience to me; and perhaps that idea of the traditionally subservient female is what drives the argument. i think what this fails to grasp is that we live entirely *outside* the graeco-roman tradition that defines Western culture. what we're doing is something *radically different* - yet something that has existed the entire time. you see statues of hermaphrodites go around in viral posts, and it makes sense to conceptualize these as trans women, but attic greeks likely thought of these as idealized forms of the results of subservience. athens was so deeply misogynistic that when they thought of men as the losers of their dominance signalling game they *objectified* them and said they had the spirit of women - of submissiveness and servitude. even in the mixture of aphrodite and hermes, the *manhood* is what won out.

but, can trans identity have existed the entire time? the notion of trans identity is *new* and relevant to our *current time and place.* it's a postcolonialist narrative by its very nature. yet it's easy to imagine people who would, by today's standards, be called transgender. yet at the time they were not. the concept didn't exist. even in pre-colonial cultures the notion was different. are we to be trans essentialists? i think this puts us in a sticky position. if we are to say that trans people as we understand them have always existed, what are we really saying? are we erasing native gender identity?

let's define transgender identity as: (1) "any gender identity that exists outside of the dichotomy of male-as-penis/female-as-vulva." but this doesn't take into account intersex people. where do they fall? the simple fact is that they have no place within this binary and are often given unwilling surgery as children so as to be "fixed" in accordance with the binary. If that is the case then intersex people are born transgender. yet this does not seem to be the case... they were assigned a gender at birth and may not always choose to live by a different gender. this would make them cisgender and intersex, yet outside the binary.

let's revise our definition. (2) "any gender identity that exists outside of the male/female binary as defined by traditional practices." are we then to describe gender identities that don't align with the male-penis/female-vulva dichotomy as transgender? No; each culture has their own understanding of gender, and each gender as assigned through traditional customs is *not* transgender insofar as it does not constitute a living *outside* of traditional gender roles. Scholars of Native American non-binary genders have been critical of calling their gender roles transgender or non-binary, since it places them within the framework of the Western tradition.

so let's revise again. (3) "any gender that exists outside of the traditional gender roles as defined by cultural practices." Here we lose the notion of non-binary identity. Non-binary identity then must be a part of the Western tradition, as a part of the dissolution of traditional western gender roles. Yet, we the term transgender originated for e.g. MTF/FTM binary transgender people in the English speaking world. They originally went by what I think is a more descriptive term. Transsexual. Although transsexuals transcend the traditional notions of gender-sex association, they do not transcend the Western tradition of gender identity, rather merely placing themselves within a role not traditionally assigned. Thus they transcend sex, but not gender. To transcend gender must be to transcend all notions of gender identity. And if so - what use does the notion of gender lend us?

Gender perhaps provides us an understanding of social roles given the cultural history one resides in. Gender then is a social construct. It is dependent on historical time and place - and if we can't be gender essentialists, we can't be trans essentialists either.