The eagerness to police sits at odds with the liberatory lip-service. You can become part of the Class Whose Testimony Is Permitted, but that requires explicit (read: conventional) declaration of loyalty. The groups and thus expressions that are protected are those that are Recognized As Threatened, with an emphasis on the recognition part.

Are you being careful to avoid words like victim as not to appear right wing?

I can feel a shift , an adoption, speaking ‘as a’ as someone who was raised an irish catholic etc

These people are hurting, we have to amplify their voice. This requires appeasing the system (marketing their pain) and that involves simplifying then amplifying their distress for the greatest impact. But what might that leave out?

it's the inverse of the fame and desire hierarchy, the same sculpting and glossing over and concealment. How status position and audience forces us to hold parts of ourselves back and foreground others

but its obviously not the case that this adoption invalidates the experience. sometimes modelling and more confident portrayals are needed for others to step across the line, learn the ropes
 

beiser

Well-known member
"Girls with tanned abs and Tiffany charm necklaces were always vomiting into koi ponds and things"

my kind of party
you've cropped out the important part of the quote—"Sidwell Friends"—the school where the Obama kids went, with the peculiarly secularized-yet-devout focus on a traditional quaker conception of justice, the strange and distorted funhouse of a place—where the traditional Quaker values are emphasized, "Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship", yet full of wealth, the children of warhawks and lying politicians, atomized, socially segregated. Daddy lobbies for Exxon. Hard to ignore that Quaker doctrine is against voting also, yet who could imagine that being emphasized. Of course you have the Tiffany charm necklace and of course you have the tanned abs and of course your life at home is so extreme and fucked, and the view it gives you of the American elites is so depressing that you become unhinged, lose all faith in the existence of a future. How could you not? Adderall is the drug of choice because it represents a dual commitment, to labor and to euphoria; you take it for one, you take it for the other.
 

beiser

Well-known member
@beiser I think this piece does a decent job of portraying the "either open the gender floodgates or narrow them, but you can't have it both ways" dynamic: https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42


The eagerness to police sits at odds with the liberatory lip-service. You can become part of the Class Whose Testimony Is Permitted, but that requires explicit (read: conventional) declaration of loyalty. The groups and thus expressions that are protected are those that are Recognized As Threatened, with an emphasis on the recognition part.

I thought this was a great piece, but it has the feeling of a piece that's too good, too direct, too central and direct of a driveby to go down well in the discourse. I enjoyed it fully but I'm sure there's a backlash in full gear, I can't quite imagine it, my best guess is that people will argue that it's fiction—that it's too clear, too perfect, too poetic to be real. That the author must actually be a man, the thoughts of transness fictionalized, although there's no way to really determine that at all, and even with the author in front of us we wouldn't be able to tell.

There's a cannier corner of the discourse where people a few years ago started saying things like "you need to stop basing arguments on who's cis because some people won't be out and it's not safe for you to force them out of the closet," and although it of course usually centers on post-transition people, it's always seemed to me like a veiled drive against the stupidest kinds of reductio-ad-hominem.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I am told there is something specialsomething ineffable — about Female Friendship. I am told that I could not understand or experience this
This argument - or feeling or whatever it is - always seems self-defeating to me. You can't possibly know what I feel has a corollary that I can't know what you feel... so how do I know that you're not experiencing it?
Edit: I didn't write that very clearly. The last clause should be more like "how can I know you're not feeling what I feel?".
 
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beiser

Well-known member
I think this "liberatory lip-service" question is part of what makes Andrea Long Chu so compelling, that she's willing to stand outside of the conventions of the genre in some kind of symbolic way, and through a savvy routing of rhetoric hasn't been crushed for it yet.
 

luka

Well-known member
Who cares though? Does it matter? Let the freaks be freaks. Nothing to do with me I'm normal, a mans man. Leave em to it. Wear a dress. Have confusing thoughts. I never think about it. I don't try and grasp the issues. I knew a couple that switched. It didn't bother me. I'm pulsing man. I don't understand it. I'm pure testosterone, surging electric masculinity. But it doesn't threaten my man world.
 
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luka

Well-known member
For me to try and think about it, why would I? I'm the manliest man. But everyone is different, I don't care.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I got hairs on my chest. I'm very tall and powerful but what's it to me? I don't need a position. Do what you need to do. It's irrelevant to me. I like the ones I know. On a personal level. I don't find it threatening, I never think about it. Don't care. I don't think it's threatening western civilisation. There's a few kinks they need working out but the likes of me, a mans man, I'm not involved.
 

luka

Well-known member
I smoke fags and drink beer. Love banter. Proper lad. But if someone else is confused, let them be confused, that's their business. That's my official
Position. As a man.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I'm suspicious of anyone that's not involved but is over concerned. It's not your thing. Relax. Smoke a fag. Drink a beer. Ogle some tits. Not our problem.
 

luka

Well-known member
luxuriate in the fact that it's not your problem. Have some regressive banter with your man mates. Chopping your nob off lol that's weird not for me don't understand it mate lol. I'm a proper lad love my nob so proud of it. But beyond that, I don't need a philosophical position. I'll sit here, legs splayed, man spreading, blissfully unconcerned
 
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