People Need To Know Who I Am

It Is Always Brave To Insist On Undergoing Transformations That Feel Necessary And Right Even When There Are So Many Obstructions To Doing So, Including People And Institutions Who Seek To Pathologize Or Criminalize Such Important Acts Of Self-definition. I Know That For Some Feels Less Brave Than Necessary, But We All Have To Defend Those Necessities That Allow Us To Live And Breathe In The Way That Feels Right To Us. Surgical Intervention Can Be Precisely What A Trans Person Needs – It Is Also Not Always What A Trans Person Needs.

I Must Say, I Feel The Reception Of My Work Is None Of My Business.

Gender Is Not Something That One Is, It Is Something One Does, An Act... A "doing" Rather Than A "being". There Is No Gender Identity Behind The Expressions Of Gender; That Identity Is Performatively Constituted By The Very "expressions" That Are Said To Be Its Results. If The Immutable Character Of Sex Is Contested, Perhaps This Construct Called 'sex' Is As Culturally Constructed As Gender; Indeed, Perhaps It Was Always Already Gender, With The Consequence That The Distinction Between Sex And Gender Turns Out To Be No Distinction At All.

Maybe We Need To Start With The Rethinking Of What Is "west" And What Is "non-west." It Seems To Me That There Are Any Number Of Populations Who Already Cross That Divide, And We Could Probably Point To Several Existing States That Belong Exclusively Neither To One Category Nor To The Other. Do We Use These Terms To Designate Geographical Realities, Geopolitical Ones, Or Perhaps Sites Of Power, Exploitation, Orientalism That Move Through Space And Time In Ways That Have To Be Tracked Historically.

I Do Not Mean To Say That Such Institutions Act Unilaterally On Psychic Life, Or That They Determine Certain Psychic Outcomes. Rather, They Exploit Forms Of Fear And Insecurity That Are There For Any Population - No Political Organisation Of Life Could Ever Fully Do Away With Fear And Insecurity; But Some Work To Intensify, Accelerate, And Make More Acute Forms Of Fear, And To Provide Ideological Focus For Such Intensified Fears, At Which Point Critical Thinking Has A Fierce Rival. The Critical Analysis That Shows Precisely How Those Forms Of Fear Are Promulgated, And For What Purpose.