Speaking as a trans* person....
March 3, 2014
In the latest edition of First Things, friend David Mills (one of a small group of loyal Roman Catholic readers of Ref21) comments on an article in the left wing Brooklyn paper, Indypendent, about 'transgender rock bands,' that the word trans now appears as trans*. The Indy explains this on the grounds that the term 'transgender' has served well for twenty years but is now coming to be seen as dependent upon the hackneyed old male-female binary.
We now know the answer to the age-old Latin proverb, Quis deconstructit ipsos deconstructores? The deconstructors do, of course, doomed by their own principles to a linguistic task of Sisyphean duration and absurdity. If gender was always a construct, detached from chromosomes and bodily appendages, then sooner or later it would itself need to be deconstructed, along with anything else built upon it. Keep watching, folks. Before you know it, 'transgender' will have become a part of hate speech -- and, when it does, remember: you heard it here first.
I am still so stone age in my tastes and musical philosophy as to find utterly incoherent the notion of putting 'transgender' and 'rock band' into the same sentence (yes, I know, there was Twisted Sister, but Dee Snider was just hamming it up, not having any surgical procedures -- and happily married to a person of alternative gender*).
I am also wondering if it is not time to deconstruct another oppressive category. Given that I
am routinely mocked, stereotyped, pigeon-holed, marginalised, numbered, bracketed, filed and otherwise oppressed as a 'transatlantic person' by people here (Pruitt, Byrd) and people there (Levy), might I now perhaps plead to be considered a trans*atlantic person? After all, the Atlantic is simply a floating signifier built upon the old fashioned binaries of 'here' and 'there'; and if, like me, you find the arguments of Irish philosopher DeSelby to be compelling-- that motion from one place to another is simply an illusion -- it seems time to drop the outmoded and oppressive constructs of a male heterosexual hegemony for something less heteronomous. Or should that be hetero*nomous?
We now know the answer to the age-old Latin proverb, Quis deconstructit ipsos deconstructores? The deconstructors do, of course, doomed by their own principles to a linguistic task of Sisyphean duration and absurdity. If gender was always a construct, detached from chromosomes and bodily appendages, then sooner or later it would itself need to be deconstructed, along with anything else built upon it. Keep watching, folks. Before you know it, 'transgender' will have become a part of hate speech -- and, when it does, remember: you heard it here first.
I am still so stone age in my tastes and musical philosophy as to find utterly incoherent the notion of putting 'transgender' and 'rock band' into the same sentence (yes, I know, there was Twisted Sister, but Dee Snider was just hamming it up, not having any surgical procedures -- and happily married to a person of alternative gender*).
I am also wondering if it is not time to deconstruct another oppressive category. Given that I
am routinely mocked, stereotyped, pigeon-holed, marginalised, numbered, bracketed, filed and otherwise oppressed as a 'transatlantic person' by people here (Pruitt, Byrd) and people there (Levy), might I now perhaps plead to be considered a trans*atlantic person? After all, the Atlantic is simply a floating signifier built upon the old fashioned binaries of 'here' and 'there'; and if, like me, you find the arguments of Irish philosopher DeSelby to be compelling-- that motion from one place to another is simply an illusion -- it seems time to drop the outmoded and oppressive constructs of a male heterosexual hegemony for something less heteronomous. Or should that be hetero*nomous?
