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Re: 'Queering' puberty?
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-December-24 04:19:01, TuesdayIn reply to Re: 'Queering' puberty? posted by diogenes on 2024-December-22 16:22:30, Sunday
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All nature must be subverted to rational human will. I think you are misusing "subverted" here, or at least not using it in the same sense I was using it. SR asks here whether and how we can "escape orientation." In response, I wrote: Can I suggest that queering involves subverting the binaries that underlie our constructions around human gender and sexuality and replacing them with continua that better express our biologically and environmentally conditioned potential for diversity? I was repurposing here something I wrote, but apparently did not post, a couple of years ago. I intended it as a possible answer to SR's question, suggesting that a particular construction of masculinity is behind the idea of a sexual "orientation" and that reconceptualizing masculinity may be required in order to provide an avenue of escape. From this point of view (which may or may not align with any particular understanding of queer theory), to queer (or re-queer) masculinity (which I attempted in that post) or to queer puberty (which SR, perhaps correctly, suggested I might be doing in this thread) is not to deny that puberty or masculinity exists. SR seemed, in the post he noted I failed to respond to, to at least partly treat it as such a denial, asserting that masculinity "will not disappear." It won't but it can be understood as more of a continuum and less of a binary, and that might make orientation also seem less a choice between two extremes and therefore something easier to escape. (Perhaps the Kinsey scale already "queers" orientation in this way, though the notion that you must be either gay or straight seems to persist.) While my first impulse was to reject SR's claim that I was "queering" puberty, on reflection this seemed like it might be worth trying. Puberty, too, is often treated as marking a sharp divide between innocence and sexuality, even though we supposedly know better. This binary construction is what I suggested we might want to "subvert." You complain that I didn't explain why the binary conception of puberty should be subverted. I said it "is already scientifically and academically discredited," yet it "survives in popular imagination, and underpins the mythology of childhood sexual innocence." I thought those were two good reasons to subvert it. It's factually wrong and central to MAP oppression. (I chose "Pharmakon" as a nickname here because at the time I was struggling with Derrida, who uses the Greek term, noting it can mean poison, remedy, or even scapegoat. I never made much progress with Derrida, but if "queering" means replacing binaries with continua it is at least in some way related to deconstruction.) *** When you write, "To me, the body and nature belong to my identity as a human being, which I don't resent," I take that as expressing an absence of body dysphoria. But it seems unreasonable to conclude from this absence in your own experience that other people do not or should not experience it. Trans people provide copious testimony that they do. Whether we understand this as expressive of human gender and sexual diversity, or whether we understand it as a pathology, it exists independently of the development of medical interventions aimed at relieving the distress it causes. It's true that the medical industry (even outside the US) makes money from this distress. It also makes money from treating cancer. This does not support an inference that doctors are the cause of cancer. You don't begrudge others getting their cancer treated just because you don't have cancer. You "resent it when it goes wrong; when my body won't function or causes me pain." But when a trans person's gendered body isn't functioning for them, and is causing them pain, you fault them for resenting it and seeking appropriate medical care. Going back to the first trans surgery in 1906, doctors have mostly resisted, not exploited, the demand of trans people for interventions. In the 1950s in the US, doctors began developing interventions for intersex kids to "normalize" their genitalia. These were similar to circumcision, in that they were performed on infants without their consent. Trans kids had to demand that these techniques be used for their benefit, instead of being imposed on infants who didn't want or need them. This battle took decades to win. I am acutely aware that the same medical industry impulse to achieve conformity that motivated abusive interventions on intersex kids is operative in the trans context. I have repeatedly argued that doctors are the new priests, tasked with enforcing compliance with gender and sexual norms. That's why I support trans people having as much control over their medical treatment as possible. In contrast, you have argued that parents and doctors should be empowered to override a youth's desire to obtain medical interventions supportive of transition. The UK's program of providing supportive treatment has now stalled, having been criticized exactly for giving trans kids treatment just because they asked for it. But in my view that is exactly what it should be doing. What's happening now is that the larger medical community, under political pressure, has overruled the practitioners who were providing this care, reasserting its role as the new priesthood of gender and sexual normativity. The fact the UK has a socialized system of medical care is what allowed the NHS, until the current backlash, to provide patient centered care to the extent it did, while under the US system doctors served as gatekeepers, rationing out care only to the children of privilege, and only if their privileged parents demanded it. (Bruce Rind, in the chapter Manny linked to here, writes incisively about how politics determines the permissible scope of academic research and medical practice relating to gender and sex. If you have not already read this chapter, I highly recommend it. The short paper mentioned in my OC post linked below provides a welcome indication that trans youth are increasingly resisting pressure to identify as either male or female, and that kids who identify as nonbinary are less likely to feel a need for surgical interventions.) *** I find Mary Harrington's argument that trans is "Meat Lego Gnosticism" intriguing, but fundamentally flawed and tangential to her strong claim that contemporary feminism has failed working class mothers. We do bend nature to our will, and to the extent we can, we should. From a Marxist point of view, the history of our species is a record of our successes and failures at that task. hugzu ;-p  |
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