mallory_sinn

mallory_sinn OP , 7 days ago

We are living in absolutely chill and normal times when a law professor writes this in a academic essay:

"When I share these concerns with people, I do so out of hope that someone will give me a reason to doubt them. Instead, I get banal, unactionable platitudes. I am fully aware that constant despair is unhealthy and counterproductive, I am trying to talk myself out of it for exactly that reason, so being told once again that it is unhealthy and counterproductive serves no real role other than giving me another worthless emotion, guilt, for worthless emotions that I already feel. Then these same people who insist that my pessimistic predictions are farfetched act surprised when things not only happen more or less exactly as I predicted but somehow wind up being even worse."

-Sam Williams (The Jokerfication of Law, 2025)

mallory_sinn OP , 25 days ago

In rereading the works of some of our transcestors that were leading our fight in the 80s and 90s, I keep finding passages that reverberate for me right now. And while some of our living elders get discussed, it seems to me that a lot of our community has become disconnected from the words and lives of earlier generations. But people like Leslie Feinberg and Sandy Stone survived and fought against forces not unlike what we face now, with their lives often being legally limited or criminalized like we have been forced to face again.

By rooting ourselves in a community and lineage that has endured and made beauty for generations, I believe we can find strength for what we now face.

mallory_sinn OP , 25 days ago

"Within our community is a diverse group of people who define ourselves in many different ways. Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes - a wonderful problem to have."
-Leslie Feinberg, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come" (1992)

mallory_sinn OP , 25 days ago

"...I've heard the academic argument that transgender is a revolutionary tactic in the struggle against the patriarchy, but that transsexual men and women uphold the oppressive either-or categories of man and woman.

That's not true. And it's an example of a theory that pits transgender and transsexual people against each other...

And why does the attack on the right of transsexuals to live as women or men always seem to come from non-transsexual individuals who themselves identify as women or men? Holding transsexual men and women responsible for the man-woman binary is tantamount to accusing anyone who uses a public toilet with a gendered stick figure on the door of upholding patriarchal paternity and inheritance."
-Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1998)

mallory_sinn OP , 25 days ago

"I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and aim them at those who are already under siege."
-Leslie Feinberg, "Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue" (1998)