Perhaps The Promise Of Phallus Is Always

What Would It Mean If We Lived In A World In Which No One Held Out For The Possibility Of Substantial Political Equality, Or For A Full Cessation Of Colonial Practices - If No One Held Out For Those Things Because They Were Impossible?

I Am Much More Open About Categories Of Gender, And My Feminism Has Been About Women's Safety From Violence, Increased Literacy, Decreased Poverty And More Equality.

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.

Some Trans People Thought That In Claiming That Gender Is Performative That I Was Saying That It Is All A Fiction, And That A Person's Felt Sense Of Gender Was Therefore "unreal." That Was Never My Intention. I Sought To Expand Our Sense Of What Gender Realities Could Be. But I Think I Needed To Pay More Attention To What People Feel, How The Primary Experience Of The Body Is Registered, And The Quite Urgent And Legitimate Demand To Have Those Aspects Of Sex Recognized And Supported.

Surely Binationalism Is Not Love, But There Is, We Might Say, A Necessary And Impossible Attachment That Makes A Mockery Of Identity, An Ambivalence That Emerges From The Decentering Of The Nationalist Ethos And That Forms The Basis Of A Permanent Ethical Demand.