People Need To Know Who I Am

No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives. So Whether One Wants To Be Free To Live Out A "hard-wired" Sense Of Sex Or A More Fluid Sense Of Gender, Is Less Important Than The Right To Be Free To Live It Out, Without Discrimination, Harassment, Injury, Pathologization Or Criminalization - And With Full Institutional And Community Support.

To Say That Gender Is Performative Is A Little Different Because For Something To Be Performative Means That It Produces A Series Of Effects. We Act And Walk And Speak And Talk In Ways That Consolidate An Impression Of Being A Man Or Being A Woman.

I Know That Some Subjective Experiences Of Sex Are Very Firm And Fundamental, Even Unchangeable. They Can Be So Firm And Unchanging That We Call Them "innate". But Given That We Report On Such A Sense Of Self Within A Social World, A World In Which We Are Trying To Use Language To Express What We Feel, It Is Unclear What Language Does That Most Effectively. I Understand That "innate" Is A Word That Conveys The Sense Of Something Hired-wired And Constitutive. I Suppose I Would Be Inclined To Wonder Whether Other Vocabularies Might Do The Job Equally Well.

The United States Are Such A Large Place. And There Are Some States And Some Cities Where The Questions Of Gender Or Sexuality Would Not Be Asked, Or Where Scholars Or Academics Are Working In Small Little Corners Of The Universities Trying To Raise These Questions And Being Told That Either That They're Strange Or Not Appropriate Or Being Actively Opposed. There Are Other Places Where There Is Very Active Scholarship Going On. Certainly On Gender.

I Never Did Like The Assertion Of The "innate" Inferiority Or Women Or Blacks, And I Understood That When People Tried To Talk That Way, They Were Trying To "fix" A Social Reality Into A Natural Necessity. And Yet, Sometimes We Do Need A Language That Refers To A Basic, Fundamental, Enduring, And Necessary Dimension Of Who We Are, And The Sense Of Sexed Embodiment Can Be Precisely That.