The existence of transness exposes the reality of identity; that it is imposed upon you. In addition to exposing this, it challenges its validity.
Replies
It leaves us with 2 paths forward. The first, and conservative path, is to maintain the old categories, and to maintain their validity as well, but to allow switching between them. It is a “progressive” view only in relation to the slightly more conservative view that you can’t switch between them.
aug 21, 2025, 7:06 pm • 0 0 • view
It is conservative because it is geared towards conserving the validity of these identities, and gives a residual share of validity to those who embody them.
aug 21, 2025, 7:07 pm • 0 0 • view
The second, and seemingly more unsettling, path is to follow the phenomenon to its logical conclusion; that all of these identities are equally invalid. They don’t serve us, they capture us, and they are doing bad job of it.
aug 21, 2025, 7:10 pm • 0 0 • view
Gender has become one of those things that is so far separated from its initial construction that we don’t treat it as a theoretical device but as a natural fact. We’ve built so much on top of it that undoing it will certainly cause things to collapse.
aug 21, 2025, 7:12 pm • 0 0 • view
But all that will collapse are just further intensifications of invalid capture. A gendered world exists only to reinforce invalid capture via gender.
aug 21, 2025, 7:14 pm • 0 0 • view