on being gwyneth

I live on the fringes of a community that has internalized identity politics to the point where your politics defines your identity. If, within a given subgroup, your ideological gestures fall short of local requirements, the very first thing that comes under scrutiny is your legitimacy, not only as a fellow traveler, but as a kind of person.

And the tool they use to police these boundaries is language. Every exchange is a question of control, and even topics that allegedly are not about specifying who is and is not a tribe member turn out to be little else, in-group and out-group language and supposedly unique concerns strictly circumscribing a territory defended at first by glib condescension – so much lazy reliance on rote phrases – then by shunning and hostility.

Among the less-committed, thoroughgoing leftists have a reputation for being control-freaks… an attitude that confuses and even enrages those of us on the left who believe we actually seek freedom, not constraint. But the longer I am in contact with a certain strain of ideologically-determined, discourse-enforcing, self-limiting boundary maintenance, the more I sort of get the point.

You know, where I come from, what is now apparently always “derailing” was known as “carrying on a conversation.” Tangents, arguments, etc. were a feature, not a bug. Ideological commitment to a political language of oppression has reduced what could be meaningful, informative exchanges to lecture and applause*, with critical consideration of the premises dismissed as not merely moot, but actively harmful.

Needless to say, I think this is utter bullshit, and resist the increasing reliance on orthodoxy over inquiry.

(* Consider the increasing number of replies to be found on the web that consist of little more than a partial quote and the emphatic word “THIS!”)

The reduction of self to the suffering object, sometimes with the goal of enhancing (especially moral) credibility in a peer group.

It’s a pathology. You get shat on enough, wearing shit on your head becomes a claim to identity.

Genderqueer assholes and crossdressing tourists who can’t inhabit the transsexual mind and so it doesn’t exist.

Identity police, the doglike keepers of the narrative, ill-informed, ill-willed and belligerent.

And in the middle, borrowed repetitious rhetoric, leftist mad libs in lieu of critical, independent thought.

The valorizing of obvious psychosis, let batshit reign because fierce is cool and it serves the purpose.

And there’s only one kind of transsexual isn’t there – yours, and culture and self-knowledge and even the right to be *un*certain be damned, we’re all just women, right, because what could possibly worse than to be *actually trans*, the thing itself, and that there be a world for that.

And I didn’t transition to conform to your certainties, your ideologies, your exacting critera of what makes a good ally, woman, person.

Your rationales as thin as your skins are thick, as rice paper while you hold your torches at the ready and just go ahead and

Burn.

words have consequences.
and sometimes “shut the fuck up” will achieve exactly that.

i really don’t have the energy to comment at length on this, but it seems to me that applauding julia serano on the one hand – and i think she really has done a masterful job of critiquing a class of gender anxieties – while wistfully musing about the “end of gender”, is missing the point. it’s the easy way out, and strikes me as just another capitulation.

at the same time, however, this has its punk-ass charm:
Read more

connect the dots.
because the enemy will,
whether you do or not.

“Has anyone else ever watched C-SPAN cover a three-hour House debate on cloning? What a scene. Two hundred six Caucasian males in blue suits, white shirts and red ties all declaring their all-out opposition against cloning.”

- daily kos