Gender Is An Identity Tenuously

When Some People Rejoin With “all Lives Matter” They Misunderstand The Problem, But Not Because Their Message Is Untrue. It Is True That All Lives Matter, But It Is Equally True That Not All Lives Are Understood To Matter Which Is Precisely Why It Is Most Important To Name The Lives That Have Not Mattered, And Are Struggling To Matter In The Way They Deserve.

Sometimes There Are Ways To Minimize The Importance Of Gender In Life, Or To Confuse Gender Categories So That They No Longer Have Descriptive Power. But Other Times Gender Can Be Very Important To Us, And Some People Really Love The Gender That They Have Claimed For Themselves.

I Reject Totally The Characterization Of A Transwoman As A Mutilated Man. First, That Formulation Presumes That Men Born Into That Sex Assignment Are Not Mutilated. Second, It Once Again Sets Up The Feminist As The Prosecutor Of Trans People. If There Is Any Mutilation Going On In This Scene, It Is Being Done By The Feminist Police Force Who Rejects The Lived Embodiment Of Transwomen. That Very Accusation Is A Form Of "mutilation" As Is All Transphobic Discourse Such As These.

We Have To Find A Way Of Understanding How One Category Of Sex Can Be "assigned" From Both And Another Sense Of Sex Can Lead Us To Resist And Reject That Sex Assignment. How Do We Understand That Second Sense Of Sex? It Is Not The Same As The First - It Is Not An Assignment That Others Give Us. But Maybe It Is An Assignment We Give Ourselves? If So, Do We Not Need A World Of Others, Linguistic Practices, Social Institutions, And Political Imaginaries In Order To Move Forward To Claim Precisely Those Categories We Require, And To Reject Those That Work Against Us?

I Don't Think There's Any Way That War Can Have A Place In Peace. I Think That Peace Is The Active And Difficult Resistance To The Temptation Of War; It Is The Prerogative And The Obligation Of The Injured. Peace Is Something That Has To Be Vigilantly Maintained; It Is A Vigilance, And It Involves Temptation, And It Does Not Mean We As Human Beings Are Not Aggressive. This Is A Mistaken Way Of Understanding Non-violence.