queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
I've never been a fan of "born this way" as a defense for queerness and I think it really buys into ideas that your rights and validity are dictated by the circumstances of your birth
and that should be obviously a bad way to go
likewise to insist on dysphoria for something like being trans misses the whole point and reduces it down into something that must be "fixed" instead of just an accepted part of freedom over your body/identity
queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
one of the things I thought a lot about during my own "egg days" is the idea that having spent most of my life but just living as a man but also generally accepting of my identity of being a man, even given the serious discomfort I felt around masculinity, meant that there's many aspects of misogyny that I just didn't notice because they weren't directed at me
but to reduce womanhood to being oppressed by misogyny is insulting and undesirable
queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
I don't find my blackness through that which I have suffered but through a shared history and culture of perseverance through that suffering
black people would just be as noble and deserving of basic human dignity if white supremacy or the slave trade or colonization had never existed
and that's an important thing so that black people are not reduced into being defined by their victimization
queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
it's similar to why there's an increasing preference for "enslaved person" versus "slave"
the first term describes a person who has had something done to them, while the second reduces that person down into their existence under slavery
queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
anyway, I just think that any time you make something as a birth right instead of a (possibly undesired) inheritance, it leads to essentialist ideologies like transmedicalism
it's not really that people are great necessarily because of who they are as a fate of their birth, but who they may become through their own actions
queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
maybe in a way, becoming who you want to be should be just as valid a goal as being exactly who you are
re: queer narratives, racism/nationalism, transmedicalism
@chimerror a counterpart rant, preaching to the choir here;
I'm not sure if you're old enough to have seen this but there used to be a LOT of gatekeeping with trans identity - a lot of having to be sure (or at least TELL the therapist you were required to have before you could get GRS/HRT) you were a girl back in childhood, and you had to say you wanted to/were trying hard to pass as a feminine cis woman. Hopefully this has eased up some.
I obviously see this as fallacious; why should something as complex as transness manifest in only one way? Where this is personal; for years I discounted the possibility that I was trans because I bought into this completely, and I don't hate my penis (I completely detest my beard and body hair!).
I feel like with a lot of identifiers there is a hard-coded genetic heritable aspect to it - but if there is such a thing the amount is pretty variable, it's not like Queerness or transness is this toggle switch where you ARE Queer or Trans by biological definition in only one way.
That it's so obviously an attempt to defend *a choice* is specious. Obviously ethnic stuff is a counterpart; our society wants ethnicity to be a nice tidy toggle switch, has tried to force anything that isn't an easily defined heritable break into the format of such - and completely flips its shit faced with how squishy and indefinable gender and orientation are, such that we're obligated to use this completely wrongheaded argument. Equivalent to how freedom to have an abortion has to be argued as a health thing rather than look, sometimes people are just not and may never actually be up for parenthood.
Last, my counterpart to Blackness here is Jewishness. Sure, bits of my appearance are definitely true to Middle Easterners, maybe some of how I think, but ultimately for me to say I'm Jewish, in a world where that can be a death sentence, has to be my *choice*, and the idea that no matter what I might do, I can never be anything *but* Jewish by unshakeable biological definition has some extremely terrible recent connotations.
