𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

It's the net effect of these things—my acquired social position as a woman—that makes it philosophically sound to call me a woman. The minutiae of how I achieve that end are not particularly relevant.

What it means to seem "like a woman" to the collective perception is, of course, in some sense to resemble a prototype—stereotype if you insist. But women are all individuals, and no one conforms perfectly.

The goal of my transition is merely to conform *enough* to elicit that mysterious "seems like a woman" perception. The "trans people think gender is stereotypes" argument ignores that most trans people are much less conforming than most cis people, and are attacked for that too.

Now, let's circle this back around to the politics of FFS before I spend the rest of my life writing this thread.

The "FFS is bad because it's conformist and trans is beautiful" argument strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. Because you could say the same thing about literally any other aspect of transition. But trans people only say it about FFS.

I think what's actually going on here is fucking neoliberalism.

This tweet by @theorygurl makes the interesting suggestion that non-conformity among trans people is perhaps insincerely vaunted as principled resistance to assimilation, when it is in fact often "wildly underfunded incompetence vis-à-vis the norm."https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1006019698474012672 …

For my own part, I'll say that if I could say a magic word and be able to look, sound, and act within some normal range of cis female appearance/behavior, I absolutely would. Any non-conformity on my part is the result of my own failures, and not of principled refusal.