Category: gender

A Few Words about Essentialism

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

**CAVEAT: IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THE FOLLOWING, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH ME ON THE TOPIC. Maybe you think I’m being far-fetched, that I’m making false equivalences. Too bad.  Suck it up, and move on, because I do not debate subjects that involve my friends being negated from existence if your side “wins.” Trans rights are human rights, full stop. Thank you.**

Everything Solnit writes makes me think. Even when I agree with her completely, her words add new levels of understanding. Her recent repost of her 2020 Guardian article lead me to rattle off the following:

Accents of pronunciation suggest that what many of us take as physically innate is often very malleable. No one is born with an accent. We are merely born with the capacity to make sounds, and we train our bodies (mouths, lungs, vocal cords) to produce the sounds that endear us to our environment. Children mimic their adults’ speech patterns, whatever those happen to be.  Adults pick up local accents without any intention to do so.  It’s what we do, and we’re built to do it with whatever speech patterns exist in our environment.

And we change our accents. Maybe not to the point of indistinguishability, but we alter our speech all the time. If you think you would never change the way you speak, and certainly never to “impress someone,” tell me right now you use the same language at the bar with your best friends that you use with your grandmother. Very few of us can say yes. Just like you don’t scream “FUCK” in church (if this is the sort of thing you do happen to scream in your church, lemme know, I have questions) you maybe don’t drop as many ‘aitches’ or slur your vowels when you’re sitting in front of a university admissions panel.

Our voices are part of our bodies. They don’t come from our brains alone, but from an interaction between our brains and bodies.  Our vocal chords, which we can reshape at will. Reshape your body at will.

What’s my point?

That we change our bodies.

All the time.

On purpose.

Things about ourselves which seem physically unchanging, aren’t, and we change them on purpose.

Our performance of gender can be one of those things. 

And clinging to the illusion of gender essentialism is a waste of everyone’s time.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 1: ‘Orlando’ by Virginia Woolf

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

I was perhaps nine when I read Orlando. My mother was a literature major, and our house was chockers with Penguin Classics with their orange and black and pale green spines. I’m confident that in letting me read whatever books I liked, she did not intend to implant in me the idea that one could just…become another gender.

Becoming ‘other’ was already a given in my mythology. Animals become heroes.  Ordinary children become mighty kings and queens. Wardrobes become portals, and the very best parties turn into treasure hunts.  As long as you know where your towel is, the rest will work itself out, more or less. I was thus very comfortable with the idea of waking up one day as someone else and it all being perfectly manageable and not at all like hell (Kafka aside).

The matter-of-factness in Orlando is one of its strengths. Though the book is about gender, it is not really about trans identity, which at the time of its writing was certainly extant but not under such terms as we know it today. Orlando doesn’t consciously surrender their gender. It is instead taken away by unspecified means, which are beside the point as Orlando goes on to navigate their new gender while retaining the perceptual filters of their first.

Can I confess to remembering very little otherwise? Adult attempts at reading Woolf have been troublesome. Her style of writing is an effort to read, and I am generally disinterested in domestic dramas, so there go most of her plots. This book is however iconoclastic, and is up there with Voltaire’s Candide and Orwell’s Animal Farm as a literary classic worth trying to get people to read when they’re far too young.

Can’t be arsed reading? There’s a film… https://www.indiewire.com/2012/09/heroines-of-cinema-tilda-swinton-and-sally-potters-orlando-44615/