Been a while, but my discussion group was on break for the holidays and shitty weather.

Alright, so if you don’t know the drill by now, I’ve been reading Transgender Marxism, a collection of essays by trans Marxists, the PDF for which is here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf

On the off-chance that I could spark a discussion or help someone to learn something along with me, I’ve been keeping notes of my initial read-through of each essay here on Lemmygrad. Just pulling quotes I’d like to talk about and jotting down a few of my own thoughts.

The discussion about the editors’ introduction, and the links to all previous essay discussions, can be found here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378

Feel free to ask questions, add your own thoughts, and generally just read along (or just read the quotes I pull if you’re not into looking at an entire essay right now). I hope we’re all able to learn a little something.

This essay is Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology by Nathaniel Dickson.

Nathaniel Dickson is a queer writer, communist and graduate student in the University at Buffalo’s English Department where he is dissertating on collective desire, futurity, and apocalypse.

  • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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    41 year ago

    “Commodities are imbued with a mythical relationship to one another that bears no trace of the labour of human beings. In just the same way, gender is imagined as having an explanation that bears no trace of human effort.”

    “As trans people, we threaten this apparent effortlessness. If gender is not easily revealed by the apparition on an ultrasound screen, or the spit in a tube, but instead laboriously produced, then the certainty of the whole narrative comes into question. The work that goes into the production of gender becomes embarrassingly visible.”

    • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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      41 year ago

      In order to preserve the essentialist, inherent narrative of gender, society strives to define transness along a specific line, attempts to relegate trans experience to a self-contained anomalous identifier, seeks to craft a medical pathology or genotypic reasoning for transness.

      Meanwhile, the means of production of gender, the tools by which the labour of gender performance is crafted, are kept out of reach of trans people: bureaucratic stalling, submission to professional evaluation, financial requirements are all thrown up as obstacles between trans people and their gender.

      • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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        51 year ago

        “To use them, we must first submit our reality for inspection and garner the approval of a number of friends, partners, parents, judges, psychiatrists, clerks, nations, doctors, and more. We receive epistemological licences, with restrictions. Break the rules, lose the licence and the access that it affords.”

        “As trans people, we are often required to replicate the formal conventions of a bloody medical discourse in order to access medical resources. If you want access to hormones, you must submit to diagnosis; if you want access to surgical care of any kind, you must produce a resume for your gender as a pathology necessitating intervention. Because the integrity of gender is vital to maintaining and reproducing the conditions that capitalism requires to operate, any attempt to intervene in the process of producing gender must be articulated in a way that leaves that integrity intact, or else be denied entrance.”

        • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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          41 year ago

          Dickson lays out three frameworks commonly used to describe the “objective” reality of gender:

          1. “In its biological determinist form, as a characteristic of a biologically fixed feature that is defined by genitals – a binary, predetermined, and genetically verifiable fixed gender.” (this would be a genotypical understanding of gender, one which is itself subverted by the very existence of non-conforming karyotypes and the necessity of propping up genotypical frameworks of gender with specifically phenotypical, and thus mutable, characteristics)

          2. “In its dualist form, as a purely social construct that is to be juxtaposed with the biologically fixed feature of sex – a social relationship between objects where the valuation is changeable but separate from its underlying, fixed biological basis.” (this is an appeal to a genotypical binary, but with a superimposition of gender, with gender as a purely social construct that derives its meaning from the biological. In such an understanding, the role of womanhood is separate from the “female” genotype but still reliant on and derivative of it)

          3. “In its medicalist form, as a trait that is itself biologically determined but variable from genitals – the quest for neurological evidence of difference that justifies the existence of a transgender person by identifying some fixed observable trait that simultaneously makes sense of the trans person while protecting the integrity of gender itself.” (this framework seeks to define some “condition” that is diagnosable as “transness.” This is the search for a “trans gene” that will allow us to understand that apart from the anomalous expression of trans identities, the “normal” and immutable truth of a fixed binary is still safely intact. This framework is employed vociferously against intersex people, for they are mere “deviations” from the binary, a simple “medical condition” that serves as an exception to what is otherwise a biological rule)

          • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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            31 year ago

            “In none of these will you encounter the idea that a constructed thing can itself be material, that its value might reside in the people doing the making, or that it can be transformed by the process of making itself”

            • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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              21 year ago

              “Transition is estrangement. By estranging, I mean that it bears that same character that the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky claimed as the most vital capacity of art; to add difficulty to the seeming naturalness of things, and in doing so prolong and make strange our perception of the everyday so that we might see it anew.”

              Transitioning is a personal journey, but one that is explicitly tied to the reciprocal. Gender is a societal role, and to transition requires labour to transform your place from one role to another. That labour requires the participation of the other: it is only by being seen by the other that the self is made manifest as distinct. Only the relationships between us define who we are. And so transitioning requires not only a personal examination of what gender means, but a societal examination, in which those people we interact with must reconsider that which they take to be “natural” or beneath notice, and bring it into the light of recontextualisation.

              For the self, the estrangement comes in the examination of our own presentation, how we see ourselves, how others see us, and what needs to be reshaped in order for us to fit that which would bring us closer to the gender role that we wish to inhabit.

              • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                31 year ago

                “This grappling with our connection to gender does not occur in isolation, because transness is not a category that stands separate from the exigencies of race and class. To move towards a trans epistemology does not therefore mean to assert a special and exclusive claim to any activity or history; experiences and practices intersect, and the liberatory political potential of a trans politics that ignores those intersections is negligible.”

                “What I am suggesting is that transness draws attention to, and estranges, the social relations that produce shared oppression – while simultaneously providing an opportunity for resocialisation, and thus a potentially better model for relating to others. I am also suggesting that attention to that process of resocialisation and its implications can help make us better Marxists.”

                “Most trans people are familiar with the difficulties of choosing a name. A trans epistemology doesn’t demand fidelity to a given name, but rather to the process of naming itself. A given name should be a gift and not a catechism; kept if it’s useful, and given away if it’s not. To name yourself is to assert your active participation in shaping our shared reality. To claim a new name is to resist the call to submit to language as a vehicle for carrying (someone else’s) objective meaning, and instead insist on meaning as a relationship, in this case made real by imagining and labouring towards a future self.”

                • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                  31 year ago

                  The act of naming is literally the foundation of shaping thoughts. We’ve discussed this before, but one of the foundations of philosophical discussions is the linguistic core of epistemology itself. As Deleuze explained that philosophy was the answer to the scream wrought by a need for understanding, that answer first comes in the form of the word. By giving name to the concept, it can then be shaped, refined, and taught. Thus at the foundation of thought itself is the process of naming.

                  This is integral to transition. The concept of gender, the concept of man, of woman, of that which exists outside either, all are shaped by the naming and the concept that these names represent. Society reproduces our understanding of concepts through the propagation of names, and only through a collective shaping of the meaning of the name can a concept be mutually understood.