Eyes to meet you! @abtrusion - Tumblr Blog

Announcing 'Attack Dogs' by Talia Bhatt and M Zakharuk!

Inspired by works such as 'Gundam: The Witch From Mercury' and 'Ghost in the Shell', our new project is sure to be of interest to fans of 'Gunmetal Olympus' and the mechsploitation genre!

Stay tuned for more information and previews on the Patreon, and we'll see you in August :)

prognostichannya

Everyone go read The Third Sex by @taliabhattwrites right now.

abtrusion

What if you’re bad at making mats? Do you just get called AGP?

Estro Junkies Review

I'm not normally a fan of "normal" literature (I prefer sci-fi/fantasy), but Estro Junkies captured my attention from around the third or fourth chapter onwards, rolling me into a hot mess of college-setting lesbian character drama interwoven seamlessly with biting commentary on racist and transphobic dynamics in LGBT and transfem spaces. The book is absolutely worth the time as literature; it starts with an interesting and vaguely ridiculous premise (a Ranked Competitive Breast Growth [RCBG] competition between cis men) and takes it seriously, connecting it to the absurd brainworms real-life trans women tend to have, and then works that out into a deep representation of how LGBT social dynamics can help and hurt people. But despite that, the book is fundamentally optimistic: it's the story of four young trans women learning to stop pretending to be men, growing to want things, and (hopefully) escaping the rancid hell of self-denial that the RCBG competition represents. Despite their varying degrees of success, the points where they succeed and fail feel real, sympathetic, and deeply compelling. It's a very good book.

So that is the quick review! The longer one (light spoilers for first half) is here. Estro Junkies is a story about four roommates -- Jeff, Kathy, Nichole, and Rashmi -- all nominally college-age men who join a Ranked Competitive Breast Growth competition. The competition is only open to men, but as you can tell from the characters' names, almost everyone in the story is actually a trans woman in some sense or another -- they just deny it. Did you seriously expect men to grow breasts for money? As a result, in and outside the competition, Estro Junkies follows a group of deeply awkward trans women who, while actively transitioning, constantly doubt themselves and each other while also kissing sometimes, like some sort of college soccer drama about a bunch of DL lesbians fucking each other while having boyfriends in a tangled het prisoner's dilemma. Coming from mostly reading SF/F, which is more concerned with worldbuilding settings, I think Estro Junkies is less interested in the minutia of the server. The book is first and foremost a well-written character drama, and the characters all have different ways of negotiating their half-in-denial trans womanhood -- Jeff becomes a straight woman, Kathy plays card games, Nichole gets hot, and Rashmi is a very good son. Throughout all of this, the fact that almost all of these characters are lesbians (except Jeff) is very obvious, and it is a major thing that smashes them into each other and into the supporting cast of cis and trans lesbians, who all have their own issues but are at least willing to be very open about it.

The other main thing Estro Junkies is interested in is in tracking circuits of trauma and how people hurt each other in transfem/lesbian spaces. Characters in Estro Junkies do awful things for nominally good (or at least explainable) reasons, from Katherine trying to sabotage Nichole's transition, to Jeff having sex with Rashmi in some horrible orientalism-comphet chimera, to Rashmi shunning her transfem childhood friend in order to preserve her Good Son status with her family. Almost every awful thing that happens in the book has a (often equally messed up) reason for it, and I think Estro Junkies does an excellent job of explaining the drivers for hurt/abuse without excusing it, and it also eases all that with a steady drip of real care and companionship between the characters. The result is a blunt representation of the ways people do this shit in community, while still making the reasons for it clear.

And as the examples above show, a lot of this shit is both POV and non-POV characters being racist. This is woven throughout the entire book, but is maybe most explicitly considered in Rashmi's arc, which entwines her own familial situation with her partial isolation relative to the other POV characters. Rashmi's a good son, and scared and judgy as hell, and she hurts both Tahani and Rupali (two non-POV desi lesbian characters) because of it. Her POV feels very real; it's a deep mess of desi familial expectations, "hardworking STEMperson" type repression, and a dash of religious trauma for good measure. And while she's not excused for the things she does, she's also treated very sympathetically throughout the book, mainly because she is constantly used as raw material for the other POV characters' transitions. This is most clear with Jeff, who actively uses Rashmi as a strong man to reinforce her own (straight) womanhood, but Kathy and Nichole just do shit constantly, not to even mention the back half of the book. As a result, when she got to have her fairytale moments near the end of the book I felt like screeching like a small flightless bird (also because it is very lesbian as well!). Racism in Estro Junkies comes in a shit sandwich of different, awful flavors; it has structural effects on how characters move and interact in the story; it is often opportunistic or fueled by characters' trauma, but the book is also utterly uninterested in excusing it. It is deeply interwoven in the story -- Rashmi is the POV character maybe most at risk of becoming a John 50 given her planned life, her need for familial approval, and her straight up arranged marriage (to a lesbian, but she doesn't know that), and all of that is inflected by her often-strained interactions with the other POVs. It feels so blisteringly real, and watching Rashmi slowly break out of it all is a treat.

So ultimately, Estro Junkies is a story about repressed, vaguely traumatized trans women and lesbians (and both!) growing out their breasts in a nameless college town. There is a lot of pain to go around here, but I think the book does a good job at easing it with real moments of community. Three of the four POV characters get a more or less happy ending, at least for now, and even as they hurt each other you can really feel them growing through it. If I have any problems with the book, it's mainly that (1) the book starts slow, taking ~3 chapters to really catch me, (2) the RCBG "competition" element of the story is relevant in pretty short bursts -- it's more present than it was in the web serial, but this is still first and foremost a lesbian character drama. Still, as a character drama, it is an extremely compelling one. Despite not usually being interested in this sort of literature, I was hooked around the third chapter, and about halfway through I finished the rest in one long, long sitting. The characters are just so delightfully messy in a way that lesbians rarely get to be, let alone trans lesbians, and this book has so damn many of them that Tahani, Rashmi, Nichole, and Katherine can all be different and opposing kinds of hot mess. It's a book I absolutely recommend, especially if you've read the serial -- Estro Junkie does what RCBG does tighter and better structured with a lot of fundamental rewrites that, to me, made the story really and truly come together.

#estro junkies #transfem #trans fiction

56 year old butch "Robe Milly," so named because at parties she fucks women on a laid-out robe that she wears everywhere she goes. The texture must be insane.

#lesbian #pride month

Kadji Amin calling straight trans women more real was really not on my 2026 bingo card. After 30 years, trans studies is finally getting straight again?!

Attraction to men was a precipitating factor for downward mobility among trans women, precisely because it disposed those with transfeminine desires to actually live a transfeminine life.

(Amin 2026, "Transfemininity and Class Mobility")

#transmisogyny #lesbophobia #transfeminism

helsinore

someone needs to connect the dots between, like, transfeminism and tlhod, in a way that isn’t just like “well tbh it’s not that big on the whole genderless society concept” bc actually i think the idea of it as having no relevance or being bad at dealing with the concept of gender is like. wrong.

helsinore

Okay let me try to carve out this idea a bit. On Gethen the “default” sex is “sexless until kemmer (fuckin’ time).” Genly is treated as an aberrant because he has physical features that are associated on Gethen with the male sex, and thus because his perceived sex deviates from the hegemonic default, he is hypersexualized/assumed to be a pervert who is constantly in a state of (morally incorrect) lust. Genly’s experience here doesn’t concretely map onto our world — you can’t just 1:1 and say “Genly is treated like [x identity] exactly 100%” because Gethen is a fundamentally different place where any sign of sexual characteristics (no matter if they are labelled male or female) outside of designated times/spaces are considered to be “perverted deviance.” It wouldn’t matter if Genly Ai was Femly Ai, we would get the same results in terms of perception on Gethen.

Genly does come from Earth, a place where his sex/gender and those associated characteristics (male) are perceived as the default gender. While penises are surely sexualized on earth (lmao), I think there’s something to be said for how, like, “female” characteristics are said to be seen as like, invoking lust or having a taboo (“female presenting nipples” considered mature on tumblr 💀 for example) surrounding them. Then you also add in our world how trans people are treated — like, for example, the idea that a transgender woman might only be transitioning / wearing women’s clothes / etc. because she finds some kind of sexual pleasure in it — and then you look at how Genly is perceived, as if his existence by inhabiting a sex [and being visibly as such] is in of itself an act of sexual gratification rather than just an alternate (on Gethen) mode of being.

And then you have Estraven one sidedly (for most of the book) glomping onto Genly, and I feel like the reason Estraven could look past Genly being A Pervert (and An Alien) is because Estraven violated the hegemonic social contract in similar ways (his incestuous vow of kemmering with Arek and then Arek’s resulting suicide, even like - iirc, you’re not supposed to vow kemmering to someone a second time? But he still tried with Ashe.) Like, Estraven is not having the exact same experience here (his sexuality is more “deviant” than his gender/sex) but maybe it is similar enough for him to immediately lock on to Genly beyond any urge towards perverse fascination.

I don’t know, I guess I just think the book does in fact do a decent job at creating a different world than ours wrt a different gender/sex system, and even so there’s like…relevant/connected stuff going on here. shrugs shoulders noncommittally…

helsinore

additionally there is something transgender as hell going on wrt to how genly has a hard time trusting estraven because he is unsure of whether estraven is a man or woman (and that answer being both/neither)….not that estraven himself is trans within his own society but genly’s distrust of estraven is a bias that is a product of the society genly grew up in, where not being able to tell if someone was a man or not is, uh, not well regarded — and there’s no, like, further signifiers here in terms of hierarchy, like, while on earth you’d have patriarchy, estraven is not getting slotted into a socially disadvantaged category on gethen based on gender. estraven is the default gender. and that in of itself is antithetical to how genly’s world works where men have the systemic advantage.

frankly i wonder if that’s why they didn’t fuck. or if you headcanon that they did fuck and genly didn’t keep any record of it. like, the reader (irl and i guess for the latter in universe) might then make snap judgements on estraven’s “real” sex/gender once estraven has A Sex in relation to genly, or something. and then their relationship might get slotted into straight/gay when it wouldn’t be either of those things (well i mean to me it’s gay regardless but yknow what I mean).

helsinore

another obviously thing i forgot to mention as shifgrethor as something comparable to masculinity, and how genly doesn’t know how to navigate it at all in part because it isn’t defined by gender at all

(and something interesting about shifgrethor is that you can be like “hold up let me be real with you for a second” to at the very least you friends/allies by “waving shifgrethor” which … I mean yeah you probably wouldn’t say this directly but in terms of masculinity performance … you may be able to trust there are people who you can just “speak directly” (express emotions, etc.) to, instead of having to perform?)

+ another thought i’m taking on is (i don’t remember if this is in the left hand of darkness itself or ‘coming of age in karhide’ [i think that’s the title?]) but the idea of “perverts” (those who are just kinda stuck in the form of one sex, presumed to be horny all the time because going specific sex mode is associated with going into heat basically and having intense enough sexual desire that you have union mandated fuck leave) being marginalized and thus having specific places in society (host of a kemmerhouse, being part of a spiritual ritual).

helsinore

the one sex by talia rem ir bhatt

.....that is a very dumb joke. but apparently i'm rereading my tlhod tagged posts today and genly really does get third sexed on the no sex planet??? like they literally gawk at him and/or censor his existence. and the gethenians like him (those that are permanently stuck as A Sex) are "venerated" (involved in religious rituals, but also relegated to the edges of society/deemed as inherent perverts). crazy things to consider for those who have eyes to see.

abtrusion

So circling back to your question about how this is relevant to transfeminism… tlhod mostly has Genly as a POV character, who is a misogynist (rip), so Estraven is transfeminized in part because Genly is really interested in being able to want a man-then-woman (and to see Estraven as a woman too). I think the Estraven POV chapters are designed to offset this, but frankly they aren’t very good at it — the “genly you fucking idiot” parts are great (imo a highlight of the book in the first estraven POV) but the rest falls flat. There’s no gender, so the Genly Gender takes over, and he’s got a one track mind! Between this and Estraven becoming homo sacer in the eyes of the nation-family, he’s awkwardly more transfeminized than Genly is half the time?? Despite being repeatedly called a pervert Genly doesn’t seem to get treated as malicious very often. Very strange book.

helsinore

the one sex by talia rem ir bhatt

abtrusion

One thing I do want to add to this is that Estraven is pretty shoehorned into a “scheming eunuch” role and so is oddly transfeminized by the narrative despite the he/him pronouns. There’s a retrospective Le Guin has on LHOD where she tries using she/her pronouns for the characters and stops after Estraven because it apparently would make him too frivolous / promiscuous for the story! It’s an interesting book I think especially because Le Guin seems interested in her own failures in making a “genderless world,” but I’m not sure if it succeeds at being genderless, given that you could say the same thing of a book with no female characters and just a bunch of guys — sexuality (and therefore gender) only exists implicitly in the narrative because we only see the gender that matters.

abtrusion

Like I guess to add on this, under greek patriarchy “woman” is arguably more of a sexuality than a gender because it is what happens when you cannot leave the privatized kemmerhouse (the household), living in privatized sexuality so to speak, while men can do gender and be public at the same time. I think it’s interesting how important communal kemmerhouses are to sort of breaking that parallel up (i.e. the relationship between sex-gender and property ownership is weakened), but there are still ways that gender seems to reassert itself anyways in presumptions of public sexuality, because woman is also the thing that forms a public-private contradiction when viewed outside the home.

abtrusion

Wanted to circle back to this with actual book quotes. While Genly's relationship with Estraven changes over the course of the book, from the start he's framed in terms of "effeminate deviousness" -- naturally impossible to think of as a woman, but not quite a man either, insidiously effeminate, lurking and plotting with it. This is of course mostly Genly's own baggage -- he sees Gethenians "first as a man, then as a woman" (this order is not a coincidence), and Estraven kind of serves as an embodiment of the inscrutability of the Other -- but because Genly's the POV character it's still the main mode that Estraven exists in for the first half of the book. To him Estraven's femininity exists as a sort of falsehood, an imposture, and so that is how it is marked on him. And it's a gaze that transfeminizes Estraven, marks his femininity as a poison-in-manhood and also just as a poison, a lack of substance coiling in his skin.

And it's a poison that breaks, too! If Estraven was the Ear to the King, and the kingdom was "run like a family," his betrayal of it to Genly was a betrayal of the family itself. However third-sexed Genly might be by his nature, very few people are frightened of him; he talks to children and chases them down in Gorinhering; he dines with the King like a man. Estraven is the one blamed for Genly's failures, cut from society as his scheming boils over, cast out by the national family, and while some of that scheming madness is associated with Karhide people in the abstract, the way the King talks about him is much more personal. He's betrayed the Family, stolen and betrayed shifgrethor itself for Genly's insane ideas.

And for that, when Genly sees Estraven again, it's as "a woman as well as a man." Manhood is assumed in Estraven; womanhood is seen at once, lurking like a poison; being a woman is something that is gifted to Estraven only when Genly really trusts him, and also conveniently when he realizes he wants to have sex with him. And then Estraven is shot to death by his own nation-family as Genly meets with the king, betrays his promise to clear Estraven's name, and leaves him a traitor. The nation might only indirectly transfeminize Estraven by rendering him homo sacer, utterly abject from the family, but Genly is much more explicit, and to the last he's much closer to a chaser than to someone that could really give a damn about Estraven. And because he's the POV character, that's most of what we see.

helsinore

the one sex by talia rem ir bhatt

abtrusion

helsinore

the one sex by talia rem ir bhatt

abtrusion

taliabhattwrites

It is impossible to identify as non-binary because by doing so you instantly create a new binary: those who are non-binary and those who are not.

Categories invent their own complements, their own negations, their own nulls, and therefore... We Are All Binary

helsinore

that's it i'm going back to my pre-colonial roots and becoming the expansive third gender of non-non-binary. which is an identity exclusively defined by having sex with men AND it's gay sex BUT it's not, like, gay gay sex. it's normal decolonized ephemerally gender deviant sex. where the man will get extra man points from having this kind of sex. because no one is calling the man gay. but the sex is gay. because women aren't real.

helsinore

anyways my tldr of we are all nonbinary is like...[mouthing in horror] what the fuck was that... Okay, but to be serious for a second: Kadji Amin is attempting to (re)invent a third sex in the West, specifically for "feminine male-assigned persons" whom he assumes are attracted to men. He 'deconstruction' of the "heterosexual/homosexual binary" is to argue that before homosexuality vs. heterosexuality was defined, cisgender masculine men were allowed to have sex with 'gender variant' male individuals without fear of their manhood being under attack. His 'deconstruction' of the "cis/trans" binary is more or less an insistence that while butch flight isn't real, the only two options in the Post Hetero/Homo Cis/Trans world is to either transition, or be a masculine gay man, because "trans" is a category on Grindr, and gay men are masc4masc. No, I'm not kidding: "Tellingly, not a single ‘‘tribe’’ on the gay sex app Grindr names feminine gay men or those who might desire them; ‘‘trans,’’ by contrast, is a named tribe. Feminine men have become erotic nonentities, desired, more often than not, despite rather than for their femininity. They are fallouts of both the cis/trans and the homo/hetero binary: if, during the early twentieth century, any normal man might have desired them, now no heterosexual man is permitted to, and few gay men find themselves so moved." (p.112) He argues that it is men being afraid of seeming gay that causes acts of transmisogynistic violence: "If, before heterosexuality, any normal man might have desired a fairy without any diminishment (and even with a potential enhancement) of his manhood, now heterosexual men who are attracted to trans women may commit acts of extreme transmisogynist violence to protect their heterosexual masculine status. Extraordinary acts of transmisogynist violence may therefore be one consequence of the homo/hetero divide." (p. 111) (1/2)

helsinore

He argues that 'cisgender' does not exist: "When they do find feelings about manhood and womanhood, these feelings are likely to be extremely ambivalent—how could they not be, since these terms are artifacts of patriarchal gender expectations and racialized civilization distinctions? While they may have heard trans people talk about gender dysphoria, they will search in vain for the feeling that indicates cisness. For there is none. The reason is that cisgender—the notion of an alignment so exact between one’s personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint—is and has always been a fantasy. Nobody has ever felt that way. We trans people invented the fantasy of cisgender as the opposite to the extreme gendered and sexed discomfort we have experienced. We are the ones responsible for the idealization of cisgender, and it falls partly to us to undo it." (p.114) ...and frankly views into an academia-speak version of trender discourse: "For if, according to the law of opposites, one must either be nonbinary or binary, and, in an extension of the popular misreading of Gender Trouble, it is radical to be nonbinary and normative to be binary, then more and more people are choosing and will continue to choose nonbinary identity. This is particularly true since non-binary identity costs very little. All that is required to be nonbinary is to identify as such, and nobody will be attacked, imprisoned, thrown out of their home, or discriminated against merely for identifying as nonbinary." (p.115) These last two are linked to each other, because his goal is to argue that "cisgender" does not really exist as a category, since he claims that no one 100% perfectly aligns with their assigned birth sex. There are trans people, and there are people who do not desire to transition. Cis people, according to Amin, who are now not really cis, and who are ambivalent about their gender and/or have some 'cross-gender' feelings, now all start identifying as nonbinary. According to Amin, nonbinary is basically just when you say you are nonbinary and nothing else, which to him does not count as a real option for these "feminine male-assigned persons." Also he thinks that being nonbinary isn't progressive enough -- "It is therefore difficult to imagine an identity more provincially Western and less decolonial than contemporary nonbinary identity." (p.116) -- yeah. So if you're not trans, but you're also not cis, but you can't be nonbinary.....uh.......what do you do? "We can drop the notion that gender is purely psychic and work instead toward creating a livable, valued, and legible social category for feminine male-assigned people (given the high cultural and erotic value of masculinity, a space for masculine female-assigned people will likely always exist)." .....third sex 2: trouble in las genderas. The problem with this - okay there's a lot of problems with this but I feel like I've ought to focus on my actual responsibilities so I'm keeping it short - is that categories like "cisgender" and "heterosexual" are broad and overarching, not meant to describe people to the 100% exact terms of the definition. The problem is is that this entire paper is incredibly transmisogynistic in its assertions, and attempts to assert that there's some sort of "twink flight" occurring, where all the "gender variants" who aren't cis are just becoming trans, or are suffering from....not being fucked by men? That genuinely seems to be the major concern here. Not that institutionalized gatekeeping or narrow ideas of gender or, idk, patriarchal influence on society might, be like, preventing people from getting to live as people -- but that feminine men have been rendered less desirable goods in the eyes of men. The problem is also is that this paper is also enbyphobic, and this too is serving to prop up Amin's very specific aims. Kadji Amin is not deconstructing any binaries. This is just third sexing.

(2/2)

acorpsecalledcorva

Like the idea that cisness is the diametrical opposite of transness is wrong is fine. I have issues with trans people who say it is, I have huge issues with the way cis people constructed transness to be this extreme fail state that only the most deranged can occupy. It's fine. But why are we talking about this like it's the fucking established dogma, a settled issue, debated in the gender mines many years ago and then trying to invent a new system from third principles when you can just say what it actually fucking is. A dialectic.

Cisness and transness have always been in conversation with each other, they push and they pull at each other creating tension and slack and respond to each other. One day trans and third sexed people are the saviour of the heteropatriarchy because they provide a dumping ground for deviants, the next day they're an ideological threat because it reveals the porosity of the boundaries. It's always changing, evolving, and adapting. Just fucking let it, that's all you have to do.

wiigiwaamcore

It’s been years since I read the article but I remember getting the vibe that was like, Amin is taking the most basic definition of cisgender as explained in a suburban midwest company’s LGBT 101 session and acting like that is the end-all-be-all of trans people’s usage of the term

ETA: and also in his mind it’s still 2017 or something and the people running suburban midwest company’s LGBT 101 session somehow have actual hegemonic power in society (which tbh given the speed of academic publishing maybe he did write it in 2017…)

tpwrtrmnky

Ok, first of all, I sent that ask because you said things I agree with and I thought you might agree with me. Fuck me for thinking I am allowed to express an idea. did I err in forgetting to ask my authoritarian overlords what to think? Moving on, part of how I know I am right is because you and other people reblogging my anon in order to "refute" it did not actually refute what I said... additionally at points you so deeply misunderstood what I said that you actually interpreted it an antithetical claim which is incongruent with my stance. But of course you are so aligned with anti-queer, anti-feminist politics that you believe "biological sex" is a real, mutable fact of life. Tell me, if sex is not a social construct inasmuch gender is, then what is it? (P.S. capitalism and american imperialism is the underlying structure that allows for injectable hormone treatments to exist so I am not sure why you think I "cannot imagine a world without capitalism".)

If you send someone a message, they're going to respond to the message and the contents within that message. You didn't just express an opinion, you sent that opinion to me, expecting a response. I responded.

People took issue with your rambling screed because of what the words said in the order you said them. If you were making a different point than what the words said, you should have proofread before hitting send.

As for "biological sex", I've been arguing that sex is a social construct all day, anon. The construct of sex is the thing that decides which bodily traits are sexed and prescribes that modifying them has a special status as something requiring extra scrutiny in the first place.

Finally, medical research is performed at publicly funded universities. Capitalist modes of production enter once the possibility of a saleable product has already been made for them. Sex hormone medications are as intrinsically capitalist as any other medication, which is to say not at all.

taliabhattwrites

Capital profiting off processes that are captured by private interests makes said processes inherently capitalist and worthy of abolition instead of being socialised. This is why we need to end medicine and agriculture. I am very Marxist.

abtrusion

Marx, famously a fan of *checks notes* reverting to a feudal mode of production.

tpwrtrmnky

taliabhattwrites

National Housewives -- from Phyllis Schlafly to Margaret Thatcher

Traditionally, we think of patriarchy in terms of a public-private distinction: men belong in the workforce, "good" women belong in the home, and "bad" women eke out a precarious existence through informal work that can easily be taken away. However, there are several cases where "good" women can serve circumscribed public roles -- as reformers, public speakers, and as activists -- without undermining patriarchy. During national crisis, when the state's ability to support the family and breed itself is threatened, women are allowed to act publicly in the state/national interest as home-makers, keepers of the national family. We will discuss how this has been done across roughly 150 years, from the 1920s US eugenics movement to the 1970s antifeminist movement to modern TERF mobilizing. In the end, Phyllis Schlafly and Margaret Thatcher and J.K. Rowling have one thing in common -- they suture the "public" nation and the "private" home together, working as a sort of national housewife.

The 1920s Eugenics Movement: Women as the Body of the Nation

Do women "hold up half the sky," or are they assets to be used in sex and sold in marriage? The "woman question" has always operated on a sliding scale between these two extremes: "complementarian" perspectives which encourage domestic education and mutual contribution to the family, and more bare-faced "superiority" perspectives which emphasize managing and exchanging women as household goods. In the US, "superiority" was dominant until the late 1800s to early 1900s, when a combination of Reconstruction-era racial anxiety, the women's movement, and eugenics proposed a new, national gender complementarianism for women to serve the nation.

This was, first and foremost, a complementarianism of breeding. The core idea behind eugenics was that the quality of the mother influenced the quality of the son. At the time, "quality" here meant physical and mental fitness -- genetics as we know it had not caught on in the US, and so eugenics prioritized what we now call "epigenetic" factors. This meant that women could not just be abused and thrown around for the good of the family -- they had to be educated, and probably taken care of, and things like sexual assault could damage a future (male) child. The care of women became a collective racial problem, both among bare-faced white supremacists and Black eugenic theorists like DuBois and Frances E. W. Harper who prioritized "racial uplift" [1]. The management of women had turned from a private to a racial (public?) problem, and for ethnonationally defined states like the US, that made woman into a national problem.

This national gender complementarianism, by which women became the body of the nation, had been building ever since the Industrial revolution. As Silvia Federici argues, over the 16th and 17th centuries women became a kind of "new commons" for use by alienated men, a pseudo-natural reserve of free physical and emotional labor that could be tapped by the male collective and privatized via marriage. The "farming metaphor," which positions women as "a class planted with the male seed and harvested" [2] also expresses this logic. Sustainably governing this female commons, for the free use of a community of equal men, became the mandate of the democratic ethnostates which appeared over the course of the 19th century. Nationalism, as it appeared over the course of the 1800s, was centered on the rights of a given ethnoracial group to have a "nation" of their own. The coherence of this ethnoracial group depended on their ability to control "their" women; so women became the foundation of ethno-racial unity, the body of the nation.

This nationalization of ethnicity in general and of women in particular fundamentally changed the organization of women under patriarchy. The "woman question" was no longer a question for the head-of-household (how to use his private property?), and increasingly it was no longer even a communal question to be litigated through household "honor." It was a national question, almost akin to environmental preservation, of how to sustainably exploit women as a collectively-owned natural resource. Some level of privatization (marriage) was expected, but woman had acquired a public character as well, without losing owned-housewife status, as the publicly-owned resource of the state. This provided a route for women to be public while being respectable, using their "feminine virtues" to preserve sustainable access to women -- in short, a public housewife.

State/Public Housewives in the 20th Century

So what did this "state housewife" role look like? In the early 20th century, the increasing acceptance of female education meant that female "educators" running boarding schools, colonial Department of the Interior programs [3], and women's colleges could act publicly as stewards of the future national (female) body. The increasing shift from women's gender-role propagation from private spheres (mentorship in the home) to public spaces (primary schools women's schools) left a clear space for women in the public sphere; after all, men certainly couldn't be expected to teach women how to woman (except on a theoretical level, which they did often). Programs aiming to create a well-kept commons of white women from potentially assimilable partial Others -- lower-class, ethnically distinct (Irish/Italian), and indigenous children, -- were typically run by women themselves, and so in the early 20th century "public" womanhood was closely tied to education, social services [4], and the vice squads, all intimately tied to the social reproduction of gender.

A shakier avenue for "public" womanhood was war. Early 20th century trans men, who often passed during wartime, could legitimate themselves "as women" in this national manner. Jack Bean, a trans man who served in the colonial Philippine-American war of 1899, appeared in a 1900 article titled "My Life As a Soldier." As he noted, "I shopped for the soldiers, I acted as interpreter for them -- knowing Spanish -- I nursed them when they were sick" [5]. The classic Joan of Arc narrative, by which women could be men in times of national desperation, was sutured with a sort of "wartime housewife" narrative by which the home could be brought to the front lines of a national war. The confluence of a kind of female-sex essentialism with "male" roles (Jack was literally a soldier) also appears in the German and British fascist feminisms of the 30s and 40s, which often emphasized "women police" as the basis for national gender purity [6]. After all, only strong, educated women (who often liked to be called 'sir') could enforce gender roles and protect the innocence of the child. The highly circumscribed freedom that came with being a public housewife could enable pretty obvious transmasculinity. But this had real limitations: as Daniel Lavery notes [7], these "forced-masc" fantasies often consist of trans guys telling the world (the Nation) that they totally still have to be a man, seriously, totally...

Finally, counter-hegemonic national projects outside the US positioned state housewives as the flesh of an alternative national body. In "The Nation and its Women," Partha Chatterjee (1993) argues that Indian nationalism in Bengal, developed over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, positioned women as a kind of repository of culture. While men were expected to learn English, modernize, and use the material innovations of the British Empire to create an independent nation, women "must maintain the cohesiveness of family life and solidarity with the kin to which men could not now devote much attention." A central question of Indian nationalism was how to pull from modern science and social organization while remaining "inelecutably Indian," and the answer was a rather straightforward gendered science-culture split. If men were to draw from modernity and Western power, women were to encode national-cultural difference, learning to embody nationally-educated difference without westernizing. The project of vernacular (non-English) education in Bengal was also closely tied to this "woman question," focused on ways to educate women to be national women but not English-speaking Westernized women [8]. Educated housewifedom, seemingly a paradox between housewife status (private) and educated status (necessarily public) was therefore crucial to the project of creating a Nation, and "new women" like Kailasbasini Debi actively discussed managing the tension between their Westernized husbands, their own education, and "strategies to protect herself" from the implications of their own husbands' reformist projects. In doing so, these public "new women" served as public representatives of a "new patriarchal order" distinct from both the Westernized woman and the crude "common" woman [8], a neo-national collective good.

Conclusion

So modern TERFism sits in a long tradition of "public housewives," a national project that enlists good women to act publicly in service of an ethnonational gendered order. This has been quite explicitly stated by the new US administration, who has charged that "the erasure of sex has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system" [9] Women are the national body, and so the social reproduction of woman(hood) is the reproduction of the nation. In times of real or perceived crisis, the Nation enlists women to act publicly as protectors of the national home, creating "a socially acceptable way to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain" [2]. Evangelical women, antifeminist activist women, and the modern TERFs all draw on this legacy. Their tentatively-accepted public womanhood is allowed, not just because it is hateful and conservative, but because it is national. It links directly with nearly 150 years of state initiatives to create a coherent and collectively-owned national breeding stock, a project which has always provided a small set of women small freedoms as overseers and middle managers. Or, now, as cottagecore housewife influencers.

References

[1] The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

[2] Right wing Women (Dworkin)

[3] Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. Cram spends chapter 2 talking about the ethics of "reclaiming" "queer representation" by people working for the US Department of the Interior, which is a choice.

[4] Under the cover of kindness: the invention of social work

[5] From Female to Male (Lou Sullivan)

[6] Fascist Feminism: a Dialogue

[7] https://www.thechatner.com/p/wondering-whether-he-was-to-mount

[8] "The Nation and its Women," Partha Chatterjee

[9] US Executive Order 14168, Section 1.

#transfeminism #transfem #feminism

Book called “trans technologies” released (by Oliver L Hamison) and it has opinions about shinigami eyes! And many other wonderful things…

At the beginning of the Trans*preneurship panel, the moderator announced that one of the panelists was K. Kenneth Davis, known as The Trans Capitalist. Audience members expressed excitement about Davis’s presence in the virtual room, typing things like “The Trans Capitalist in the house!!” and “So glad Trans Capitalist exists.”

#trans studies

THE THIRD SEX (1995)

#transmisogyny

makkine

Hey everyone! I'm back with another original graphic novel!

Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the Isahek river is flooding again. When a tax collector is shot by its banks, the provincial court must respond to the rising violence. The members of the court vie for control, all the while their system of governance is on a steep decline. Malatona When It Rains story about environmental disaster, “rational” governance, and what it means to have power over death.

The comic is 375 pages long, and printed in 6x9 format.

I am currently raising funds for the print run of this comic! You can get your own copy HERE!

abtrusion

Been following this comic for a while -- slow collapse of bureaucratic hell world + the faces are GREAT.

abtrusion

It's also got trans rep! He talks down to women and executes their husbands. Representation win or something. He's happily married.

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