A chairdre!
I know I haven’t been posting, I’ve been developing and immersing myself in a new curriculum of feminist and transgender studies (hit me up for book recommendations).
For those who don’t know me, I’m Seanchaí (shawn-a-key), a grassroots educator and trans feminist.
In my absence, I’ve noticed we’ve had some new comrades join, and we’ve even had some coming outs (<3). This is wonderful, and also makes this the perfect opportunity to help prevent any tensions from cropping up by bridging the gap through education.
A few months ago we did a little question thread, and it went swimmingly. I would like for us to do the same again.
In this thread, I want people to ask whatever questions they have regarding gender, sexuality, feminism, intersectionality and any issues connected thereto. This will be a judgement free thread. These conversations can be fraught even amongst ostensible comrades, however I believe that a genuine engagement and education is the best way to build solidarity.
For that end, I will be personally responding to every question. This may take me some time! Be patient with me, I am a very busy lady and I want to make sure I give each and every one of you a thorough, researched answer with recommended reading for deeper understanding.
Anyone else is encouraged to answer as well in the meantime, of course! But I must ask, questioners and answerers alike, to extend each other grace, and as comrades with a genuine interest in building coalition and solidarity to engage each other with the utmost respect and in the best of faith.
This is a thread for learning new things and getting answers to questions you may otherwise be afraid to ask, or may not know where to direct yourself to finding the answers. I don’t want anyone to feel out of place for the limits of their knowledge, and I don’t want discussions getting shut down because these are tender topics, and conversation around them is so often unproductive due to the hostile climate of reaction.
Which books/videos/audios/etc have you found to be the most educational and helpful?
That really depends on the topic you’re wanting to learn about. A few that were particularly impactful for me on a broad range of subjects:
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici was a really great analysis of the division of reproductive labour and the persecution of women (and queer people/sexual deviance) as a form of controlling accumulation during the transition to capitalism.
Border & Rule by Harsha Walia was a very in-depth look at the ways that borders are leveraged to create sources of hyper-exploitable labour, and the ties between movements of reaction and racist nationalism. The precarity of vast swathes of humanity, and the violence imposed on them is made possible through the buttressing of mobile, militarized borders.
We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba is a hopeful examination of restorative and transformative justice practices and the quest to craft an equitable society free from the violence of the carceral punishment system.
Transgender Marxism is a fantastic collection of essays by many different writers that shows the wide array of socialist currents in transgender organizing, and that helps to situate trans liberation within a wider socialist liberatory struggle.
Abolition. Feminism. Now. and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis are both fantastic looks at the necessity of prison abolition in feminist movements. There is no feminist victory within carcerality, and there is no freedom from carcerality within patriarchy.
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith can help to situate the intersection of feminist action and Indigenous sovereignty, with a look at the ways that sexual violence were integral to the colonial project, and how the women’s movement shifting to “pro choice” as a defining single-issue of struggle left out the ways that “choice” can not exist for women in a racist colonial class system that deprives large portions of women from exercising any “choice” over their bodies at all.
Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba is a collection of articles by Leslie Feinberg about Cuba’s queer rights movements, and it’s super good for getting an inspiring framework for understanding how a worker’s state can offer true liberatory possibilities for queer people. Especially the articles detailing Cuba’s response to the AIDS crisis are incredibly moving.
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler is a bit of a deeper philosophical read, and unless you have somehwta of a grounding of psychoanalytics you might not get much from a lot it (you can read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex as an intro to feminist takes on psychoanalysis, but I don’t agree with most any of her conclusions and am not really into psychoanalytics). However, Gender Trouble also had a massive influence on feminist philosophical currents, and builds really well on Simone de Beauviour and Michel Foucault in analysis the social construction of gender, and further, the way that sexual dimorphism and a biological sex binary is itself a social construct.
Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue by Leslie Feinberg is a collection of keynote addresses that can be quite emotional looks into the early development of gender deviant movements in the US.
Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg is part autobiography, part trans history, part class analysis and part Marxist call to action. It explores hir own life as ze came of age as a masculine female during the McCarthy era, and then through hir labour in a factory grew consciousness regarding the exploitation of workers before finally joining a Marxist party, embracing communism, and spending hir life advocating for socialist revolution and trans liberation. It also charts early communal societies and the sacred role that trans people often played, and the arrival of anti-trans, and anti-homosexual sentiment as wealth accumulation began and class divisions first cemented. As well are snapshots of trans and gender deviant people throughout history.
Thank you so much!
It’d be good idea to pin this post / reading list to the community.
Hmm, yeah, not a bad idea. I could also maybe do a larger reading list with a little explanation like these ones have so people can tell if the book is something that catches their interest. I’ll consider it
Do you have any Chinese sources or knowledge for whats going on in China regarding trans issues? I personally haven’t done any academic searches, only asked some friends. I was originally looking for Chinese language discussions. They sugested wechat tongyulala and biedenuhai (which also have web sites) as well as 汪欣蕾Lacey video logs. Both said that transgender people/discussion was not very common in mainland China.
I have only done some bare-bones research on feminism in China, where I don’t know the language and it isn’t my focus. However, it’s been making huge strides lately in increasing access to medical care for trans individuals. There was a study published in BMC Public Health regarding discrimination and perceived discrimination of various LGBT individuals in China. It largely found that the biggest hurdle to LGBT acceptance is from family, where queer participants ranked discrimination from family to be the most prevalent, which coincided with heterosexual participants being least accepting of LGBT people in their own family, but largely accepting of LGBT people otherwise.
This same study also found that gay men and trans people are the most likely to stay in the closet. However, medical interactions were found in this study to be the least discriminatory, which is incredibly heartening, as access to medical care is the first and most crucial stumbling block on the road to trans acceptance. China has been taking a very science-based stance on this, and has been pushing for medical care regardless of cultural acceptance.
It was also found that an increase in a region’s economic prosperity led to a decrease in LGBT discrimination, meaning that as people’s lives improved they were less bothered by the gays down the street.
In 2021 a documentary “A Day of Trans” directed by trans filmmaker Yennefer Fang released, which interviews four trans individuals of different generations. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202111/1239389.shtml
One of the people interviewed, a trans man, won a discrimination case against his employer back in 2016, when he became a public face in the fight for systemic protections.
In 1995 Jin Xing was the first person to openly have gender confirmation surgery. She’s a famous dancer, choreographer, and tv presenter that is shown nation-wide, and has been since before most western countries would allow a trans person on tv as anything more than a punchline about degeneracy and prostitution.
Here’s a link to Yennefer’s documentary (it’s missing a few lines in the translation, because Yennefer did the captioning personally)
A YouTube link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same video on Invidious, which is a YouTube frontend that protects your privacy:
