Notes on “Transgender marxism”
Since this is divided in essays I’ll comment on the individual chapters. Sometimes it’ll be a summary for myself, others I’ll add something.
Social reproduction and social cognition
- The “socialization argument” comes from MacKinnon: womanhood as “coercion into heterosexuality”, womanhood as “experience of male domination”, forever indelible.
- Not only is it very rigid and hardly appliable to trans realities, but it fails to account for agency.
- “Social cognition theory” (terrible, undescript name, by the way) proposes a “triadic reciprocal causation” (love it) view of the construction of [gender] identity: personal, environmental an behavioural factors influencing each other through models, enacted experiences and direct tuition. Mutual aid and support groups employ these tools.
- Physical substance (ie: housing, medical accompaniment and other forms of substenance care) and unpaid care labour sustains these modes of social reproduction.
- “The structure of gender under capitalism is formed through violence in all cases. Trans people are not distinguished by our victimhood. It i in cases of cisgender identification that this coercion has been most effective.”
- This is interesting, if a bit restrictive, as one could be cis and yet find the expectations and standards of cis-ness opressive, aas any feminist will. Though that doesn’t necessarily prompt will of action towards any desired inner state of gender in confrontation to cis-ness, which is I guess the point of contention. Thus, a definition of cis-ness in these terms could be: the lack of desire of an individual to subvert their (self-)policed categorization within the gender system (?).
Trans work
- TIL that the “gay sailor” sterotype comes from feminised work in cruiser lines being done by racialized, queer male workers (as they were seen as emasculated/less men and thus suitable for this work).
- I’m reminded of the
Detransition, babyquote that went something like:
She had a funny-’cause-it’s-true joke that she liked to ask whenever she met a new trans girl. So which of the three transsexual jobs do you do? Computer programmer, aesthetician, or prostitute? Reese always hoped the answer would be prostitute, because prostitutes were the ones with a good sense of humor
- I mean, with remote work I get why most trans people would prefer to work in tech. It’s also one of the few well-paid jobs out there these days, and you don’t really have to be an engineer to be honest.
Judith Butler’s scientific revolution
- Gender as “something processual and relational”, a “contituted social temporality” instead of a naturalised autoritative ontology, a “coherent and stable substance”, is paralel to capitalism, “always-in-motion and always-contingent”. In a certain way, gender categories are reified, taken as natural categories when they are part of this flux of repeated acts.
- “The sexed body is also cultural”, as any biologist can tell you. I mean: we didn’t even know about chromosomes until relatively recently, and those are now a fundamental part of what we consider sex.
- Rosa Lee uses here this point to argue in favour of “transsexual” vs “trans” or “transgender”. Not buying it, though I agree with the sentiment.