Hello hello hello, time for the next essay in Transgender Marxism!
The PDF is here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
The intro discussion with links to all the essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Feel free to join in on the discussion, I hope we all have a chance to learn something new together <3
Today’s essay is The Bridge Between Gender and Organising by Farah Thompson.
Farah Thompson is a Black, bisexual trans woman who lives in San Diego. She advocates for anti-imperialism, LGBT rights, decriminalisation of drug use and sex work, and self-determination of Black and colonized peoples. Her writing is found on longpaleroad.com
Edit: The discussion continues with an essay by JN Hoad here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/424986
heavy breathing
Getting hot and heavy with the queer theory
I love the “I probably don’t have a lot to say on this” every thread and then schzoop like 50 comments and I’m just like 😳
This is me being quiet lol.
Lmao 🤣 don’t ever be quiet, I love your threads!
I probably won’t have many notes on a lot of this: it’s a personal essay, rather than a writing on theory, so it doesn’t lend itself to too much of my commentary, where I don’t have the same experiences as Farah Thompson.
“But what gets through to people is a willingness to look into someone else’s eyes, and face them. And that hasn’t been easy for me. I can’t always get people to care or to see me, no matter how nice, smart, or hardworking I am. You’d think I’d just retreat inward, and live only for myself. But I can’t. Not while I’m still gendered. Not while I’m still deemed a body made for extraction and consumption”
“I was outed by my abuser when I moved out of my old home eight years ago. I left behind my journal, which she then exposed to my immediate family and others. It contained all of my private feelings about my identity, my hopes, my dreams. And a drawing of a woman with a penis”
That’s fucking terrible. Being outed, and not having the chance to figure that process out for yourself, is really trash. It can be so incredibly dangerous, too, as coming out is an ongoing series of conversations in which in every interaction you must judge for yourself the safety and comfort within the interaction and the level to which you can expose yourself and be vulnerable.
That journal does sound pretty great though. Dickgirls ❤️
"After I left, my abuser sent me a text message saying that my ‘aberrant’ behaviour is the result of me being possessed by a demon that leapt out of my grandmother’s VHS copy of The Crying Game"
Getting possessed by a trans demon that lived in your grandmother’s VHS collection is really a common experience, but cis people rarely understand it.
“She berated me, told me that my name is ‘a fetish’”
Deriving sexual satisfaction from being addressed by your name, the height of kink.
In all seriousness, transness is very often pathologised as a disordered fetishisation of gender performance whereby we’re accused of transitioning to fulfill a personal and disturbed type of extreme sexual gratification, and it’s used an excuse for a lot of violence, one of the most common of which is conversion therapy (often presented under the guise of legitimate mental health help, and frequently practiced by actual licensed professionals).
“I will probably be dealing with people who are like my mother, in varying degrees, for the rest of my life”
Oh my god, this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it was her mom all along, jeeeepers.
For many trans people, the parents are the first line of abuse, which has, obviously, very deep psychological and developmental consequences.
We’ve discussed before how many trans people create their own families and houses, with queer circles providing the nexus of social reproduction in absence of social reproduction through traditional families. Trans people face higher rates of homelessness, abuse, and estrangement from families than their cis counterparts.
“I approached things like Xena: Warrior Princess, Sailor Moon, fashion, and other sources of momentary release out of pure love.”
Xena: Warrior Princess is a powerful tool of queer liberation.