marsupilami

If we have the weakest sense of smell, we are still the weakest in a pretty strong pack.

(btw the myth that humans have poor sense of smell has been debunked)

*makes things more restrictive than they have ever been for trans people* there that seems like a compromise to me. let alone like, i’m a woman and trans - those two things don’t have competing needs to be compromised imo (of course, you obviously dont think of it the same way, because yr framework is cissexist)

Like you are talking to someone who like started biomedically transitioning before the age these people are talking about and got married at the same age (and also tried to get hormones 4 years before that, only to get blocked!). Your perspective makes no sense - its misogynist insofar as you have a belief system set up around women not being able to make choices for themselves (not to mention that most of the people yr talking abt aren’t even women).

it’s authoritarian along medicalized and patriarchal controlling lines that really will probably just end up with restricted abortion access and possibly even adult women being unable to get on birth control (which is guess what? hormones!). The purpose of these treatments is specifically to change someone’s life - there are far more people esp in the UK who wish they could have gotten hormones and surgeries earlier than there are who thought they got them too early.

all of this comes from an anxiety of people having autonomy over their own bodies and also a desire to disappear trans phenomena. Maybe if you were arguing that people shouldnt be gendered for their secondary sex characteristics, this wouldnt be necessary the same way. Maybe if cis society didnt treat having androgens in yr body as a tragedy for women then there wouldnt be the same anxiety about ‘mistakenly’ going on hormones or having surgery. But you obviously don’t want to consider that restricting hormone (or blocker) access will result in a ton of women being forced thru negligence to have androgens in their bodies because you are more invested in supporting and preserving the current misogynist gender schema than like actually encouraging its dissolution.

i know that the asker of this is in reasonably bad faith but I’m just pointing out for other people who wildly misogynistic and conservative any thinking like this is - like, it may be trans people who are the wedge case here but a much larger issue is percolating here. while people are arguing ‘this is only happening around trans people because of cissexism’ i think that there’s some truth to that but a much larger cultural project of controlling gender and sexuality (and behavior generally) is being pursued here. of course, like i mentioned, under th guise of ‘protection’

you’re not off-base at all. the term “identity politics” is used very differently in different contexts--it was originally (I’m quite sure) coined by the writers of the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977 to refer to the political knowledge that can come out of “identity” (in particular, gender and race), & to the necessity of understanding and reckoning with the full complexity of “sexual politics” as they interact with race & class in Black women’s lives in order to produce a truly radical politics:

Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy... no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. [...] Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. [...]

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.

like a lot of language coined by Black women in political movements, this has kind of been warped beyond recognition through subsequent misapplication & oversimplification. imo there’s nothing in the term itself that implies simplistic “identitarian” politics (where the criticism is that these politics are essentialist, claim that a radical political vision comes automatically out of identity or that a person of x y z identity always holds q position or always must be listened to on p subject, argue for getting people of x y z identity into power rather than changing power structures themselves, &c.)--in fact the Combahee River Collective Statement is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist--but that kind of identitarian stance is what a lot of the opprobrium against “identity politics” criticises. and I can understand the criticism insofar as a lot of people do misuse identity politics (the term and the concept) in this way & try to reincorporate them into liberalism.

some critiques that are, imo, sensitive to both the value and the potential for misuse of identity politics include:

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional critique of the potential to ignore in-group differences in “Mapping the Margins”

“Identity, politics, and anti-politics: a critical perspective”

“Who is Oakland”

Kenan Malik, “Not All Politics Is Identity Politics”

Asad Haider, “White Purity”

Salar Mohandesi, “Identity Crisis”

see also Adolph Reed, “Tokens of the White Left” (tho’ he doesn’t use the term)

but a lot of people of colour have started to notice the phenomenon you’re talking about, wherein a supposedly intelligent & nuanced criticism of “idpol” is in fact hiding a refusal to engage with issues of identity at all, an attempt to silence anyone who’s talking about racism in any capacity as a distraction from class struggle, or an implication that people of colour are (as I put it a couple years ago) uniquely susceptible to identitarian politics. some things that mention this phenomenon:

"A Hostile Environment”

this poste via @quoms

a poste of myne

see also my /tagged/identity politics

KS: I’m building on arguments that black feminist theorists made in the 1980s that gender is a racial structure. Womanhood is not a universal category, but instead is an aspect of whiteness that was positioned by definition as unobtainable for nonwhite women, specifically black women. I looked at the scientists who were inventing and codifying the idea of sex difference in the 19th century— not just the cultural role of gender, but the idea of physiological and anatomical sex difference, the binary of a male and female body. Those folks argued that full sex differentiation was only achieved by whites. No other races have achieved the level of evolutionary specification where they were able to differentiate between the distinct roles of men and women.

This is super-surprising, because we assume that the idea of male and female as two opposing categories is universal— at least in Western thought. But before the 19th century, male and female bodies were described as more alike than different. For example, in the 18th century, the vagina was often described in medical textbooks as an internal penis. It’s not arguing that bodies are identical, but it’s arguing a fundamental similarity.

NA: Could you say a little about Lamarck?

KS: Lamarck’s idea is that acquired characteristics can be transmitted to the next generation. The classic example he gives is that giraffes have long necks, because they’re always reaching upward to treetops for food. He also gives the example of the human penis.

NA: Really?

KS: It’s never cited, which I think is a missed opportunity. He argues that when you have a repeated sensory impression, a rush of fluid gets sent to that organ, enlarging that organ. Over time, that organ is going to get bigger, and the new size of that organ will get transmitted to the next generation.

People really embraced this idea that if they change the experience of the present generation—especially children, who are thought to be more plastic—that it would not only change their bodies, but would change their inheritable material and the generations after them. Race, and racial difference, was understood as the differential capacity to be plastic. Whiteness was fully malleable, fully capable of progress or decline, and blackness was at the opposite, barely plastic except for maybe a few years at the beginning of youth. This is the underlying scientific framework that holds children as key leaders for managing the racial body of the future.

This really matters now, because Lamarckian ideas are coming back. Epigenetics opens the idea that experience affects expression. It’s really important to look at the politics of that idea, and how easily that idea folds in with a eugenic fantasy that we can engineer the future by manipulating the experiences of children. I was actually thinking about writing a piece for a place like The Nation earlier this summer.

NA: Oh, really?

Note how urination is not a crime, but public urination is. ie it’s a crime to have bodily needs while also not having access to your own personal private in-home bathroom and not having the means to afford to use a “public” bathroom for example a pay toilet (more popular outside of the US) or business bathroom for customers only.

Apply the same to public drug use, public indecency, public nudity, public sleeping. If you get to enjoy your right to do something in your own home, you can’t make “but the children!!” claims until you’ve addressed the fact that the vast majority of people hit by these crimes again and again are going to be those without homes.

Making public existence a crime means the state gets to forcibly remove people it hates from the geographic space that “good” society occupies. That’s what jails and prisons are. That’s why it’s a massive queer rights issue when cops start wrangling up homeless trans street sex workers in the weeks leading up to Pride in major cities. That’s why it’s a disability rights issue when bathrooms are inaccessible. When public existence becomes moralized to encompass types of existences which are totally acceptable in private, it means that marginalized people must either hole up in private and never go out (see: having to plan excursions around whether bathrooms are available) or that they will be forcibly removed by being locked up for not having a private space to be.

Trans Pride Flag, but it’s a Jazz Cup

The Hebrew word tohu is usually translated in two ways. It can denote an arid wilderness, a desert, and it can refer to chaos. In this latter sense it is usually paired with bohu, which signifies emptiness, desolation, formlessness, confusion. Tohu-bohu, desert and desolation, chaos and confusion, or “without form and void.” Chaos itself denotes a vast chasm, an abyss; in other words, it is a gap. Yet can a gap be without form, since it exists as the opening between things, as the interval that separates? […] To announce that the earth is without form and void, then, is not to claim an absolute void of nonpresence but to make a more qualified assertion about the shapelessness of the earth before the creation. So, the abyssal chaos, which is also an arid wilderness, is far from being the vacuum of worthlessness it is often read as being. It is, instead, the ground of potentiality, the necessary generative stuff of creation. […]

An actual desert place is thus burdened with a double conceptual significance: it is read at the same time as evidence of an absolute void and as the place for boundless free play, and deserts invariably elicit responses of both terror and ecstasy, of disgust and liberation. The idea of a desert, then […] involves a cluster of notions including vacancy, expansiveness, and fearful potentiality. Not surprisingly, actual deserts carry the burden of this metaphorical overlay, a burden that manifests itself not just in the artistic responses to the physical space but in the institutional practices that govern its economic and political uses. The impact of this metaphorical construction of landscape is nowhere more pronounced than in the deserts of the southwestern United States.

The southwestern deserts still retain today something of the air of mystery and fascination they held in the early eighteenth century, when the alienness of the terrain prompted stories of mountains of salt 180 miles long and 45 miles wide a thousand miles up the Missouri, of mammoths, Welsh Indians, and the lost tribes of Israel (Morris 1926, 190). These days, mention of the American desert is equally likely to prompt speculation about crashed spacecraft, secret scientific experiments, government cover-ups, occult Indian ceremonies, and drug smuggling and other varieties of organized criminal activity. The stories have changed, but the perceived otherworldliness of the arid zone has remained.

The trope of the desert as without form and void enables the proliferation of all other tropes; the desert becomes the place of infinite metaphorical multiplicity.

… Yet this notional vacancy functions also as a form of selective blindness that eliminates consideration of native inhabitants, indigenous traditions … Speculators and aesthetes alike need the tropes of emptiness and uselessness in order to validate their construction of the landscape as available space. Do the Pueblo …, for example, see the terrain they have inhabited for thousands of years as a gap, a vacancy, a howling wilderness?

-