Re: On the Transgender Issue

Thanks for your typically thoughtful response, Pharmakon. While I would agree that how we understand the trans issue is deeply connected to how we understand feminism, I would say it is more fundamental -- indeed, even more fundamental than the disguised attack on the whole notion of masculinity. (Interesting, incidentally, that there are feminists out there -- and not a few of them -- who are as uneasy about the trans business as I am. Who are these people who will never get pregnant or have to cope with that as a possibility, who will never be susceptible to breast or ovarian cancer, who never had -- except through their own deliberate choice -- to face having to cope with society's definition of what it is to be a woman -- who are now insisting that we treat them as women and who are prepared to marshal police power into punishing those who refuse to get with their program? I have to say I have a lot of sympathy with these feminists.) The ultimate issue here -- and I guess one could read Halperin as saying this -- is the way we are being coerced/tempted into being ripped away from everything that makes us individual, distinct human beings. So that we end up as completely interchangeable things -- commodities if you will -- stripped of any identifiable individual human signifiers -- where we come from, whom we love, and of course what is in our DNA. Disrupting the nexus of loyalty to family and friends; to disrupt the very formation of families and male groups, of any and all forms of human connection that are not dictated by totalitarian, bureaucratic power -- that is the ultimate objective as I see it. I'm not stating this well because I'm groping to see the underlying reality. But I sense the war on pederasty, the war on the male group and male identity, the on-going destruction of individual loyalties, the notion that one's body is infinitely plastic -- I see these as all related; stemming from the same source. I keep harking back to Andriette because he seems to have had a clearer vision of the issues at stake than any other writer I've encountered (or at least any writer who concerns himself with "our" issues.) SR