"What if feminists didn't reply to the charge that trans women are too sexual, or too feminine, by shrinking trans femininity to prove the accuser's bad faith wrong? What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra? Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. What if--
--trans feminism dedramatized and celebrated trans femininity as the most feminine, or trans women as the most women? How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?"
@Impossible_PhD I have met some trans men who are the absolute paragons of masculinity. Burning hot clean masculine power. So I don’t see why it can’t be that way for us too.
I know it's nitpicking at words, but I'd really like to challenge the idea that trans women and femininity are integrally linked. We need space to be extra, without being pulled down for it, but we also need space to be allowed to not have a meaningful relationship with femininity.
I know for me, I always felt trapped by the expectations of both masculinity and femininity, and I kind of resent them both. But that lack of having a sense of my own femininity, added a lot of doubt in to my own journey of self acceptance.
Giving us space to be ourselves means celebrating those of us who are extra, but it also means taking care to allow for all kinds of relationship with femininity
@ada You're not nitpicking, you're misreading, and missing context. Gill-Peterson spends over a hundred pages disentangling trans womanhood from trans femininity. The two are no more linked than cis womanhood and cis femininity.
@Impossible_PhD Ok, that's good to hear. I'm not familiar with her work, but that particular sentence I quoted made me concerned that she was equating the two.
Me being ignorant of her larger body of work where she explicitly challenges that idea is a good outcome, and one it sounds like I need to fix by reading her :)
@ada I mean, it's the core subject of her whole book. Her veey thesis is that MANY people get trans-feminized from the outside without their consent and lumped into a big, white-coded, standardized umbrella that doesn't fit their realities.
This the schism between trans woman and trans feminine.
@Impossible_PhD Ok, you've convinced me. I definitely need to read her. It sounds like something that would have been really helpful to me 10 years ago!
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