Alyson Escalante's critiques of the trans community's reliance on gender essentialism and a proposal for a radical negation as the solution to gendered alienation and oppression. To be included in the upcoming anthology Fuck Your Gender Neutral Prison! A Nihilist Insurrection Against Gender.
Note that this version has been augmented with an excerpt from an addendum by the author which addresses some limitations of the original.
I'm looking to use this in a debate case however I am unsure on how to present the source of this. Is there any way I could receive qualifications and a name on this work?
This is great; an excellent "politics" that really understand what Foucault meant with "resistance is a trap". Thanks for putting this so clearly into words!
I suggest PMing the person who uploaded this. But it was tagged as "anonymous" so whoever wrote this may want to keep it that way?
I think there is another solution and thats to turn what is now considered identity into a direction, rather than saying one is something instead say one is orientated towards something. It becomes clear from that one can be orientated towards several things, some of these things are being and others are doing. For example one could be orientated towards being one sex and orientated to doing another sex role or the things connected with it, each direction meets different obstructions. The thing wrong with todays identity politics is how its looked at, the sense of everything being about being rather than doing, and the need to defend what one is from others words as opposed to focusing instead on where the real obstacles are peoples opinions vs actual material reality. Instead of hanging around and debating who qualifies to call themselves masculine, its better to look at the fact many want to go in a direction coded as masculine in a society where its only ok to do so if you are read as male, etc.The direction could be wearing certain clothes, playing a certain sport or holding a certain job and finding one gets backlash or approval based on anatomical features for pursuing it.
One may have an orientation towards femaleness but not towards femininity, or a fluid orientation around male or femaleness but a fixed orientation towards masculinity. Its hard to prove one is something, but its easy to show one has an orientation towards something.
Masculinity and femininity are all constructs and whats defined as either is subject to change, in general though expressiveness is coded as feminine and instrumentality is coded as masculine. The reason for instrumental and expressive roles being allocated based on biological anatomy is because they are based on the idea people are suited to roles based on how they reproduce physically. We all experience having both masculine and feminine aspects bc we learn some traits we have are masculine or feminine and we learn which parts of ourselves to cultivate or suppress based on this. Many of us dont comply with this once we learn it, but most people still have learned a common idea of what belongs where.
One may have an instrumental orientation or an expressive orientation, a fluid orientation in terms of genderality. Along with an orientation on the biological level towards the biologically determines ways of being.
Insofar as I'm relatively sympathetic to this, and feel strong gender abolitionist tendencies myself, I would have to qualify any endorsement of the piece with that I deem valid the surgical corrections to our anatomies that would alleviate my discomfort and the discomfort that those like me have with them, and would disagree with any implications that would deem them invalid.
Antifoundationalist
yeah, I would agree with this completely
There's a new response to this article on the Automatic Writing blog: https://automaticwriting1.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/an-annotated-critique-of-alyson-escalantes-gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto/