Dear all,
Per suggestions on this board, I read 'Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue' by Leslie Feinberg and I really enjoyed the variety of perspectives brought forth and the clearly enumerated link between capitalism and trans oppression. That said, I had an issue with a lot of the dated understanding of sexuality, gender, and terminology for both of those aspects of human indentity. Or rather, I applaud Leslie for hir for having an incredibly accepting, compassionate, and progressive presentation, but holding this book up today as the end-all-be-all and litmus test for allyship feels reductive. In particular, the aggressive commands to read the book have been particularly off-putting as has the flippant use of the b-word (although that's mostly my personal grievance). I think this attitude and presentation is unconstructive and worse I think could actively alienate comrades who have not reached sufficient development in terms of consciousness and compassion for trans oppression.
In terms of my own exploration and self-understanding as a transfemme person, I have found Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano to be a more focused and stronger help for understanding transphobia, trans misogyny, and my relationship to femininity. I realize that book is focused on the transfemme perspective and I am obviously thus biased. I also think it is important to highlight the voices of transmasc people and have started recommending Trans Liberation more, too, since their voices are so little acknowldeged and represented. I have also learned a lot from Heath Fogg Davies' 'Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?' which does a good job of exploring the harms of gendered institution and interrogates the role of gender in public life—a sort of abolitionist position even! While his solutions are ultimately very beurocratic and liberal, he does a lot of work to present trans issues to a skeptical and liberal audience. Importantly, his arguments are very comprehensive and could be good tools to have in our arsenal when explaining this issues to allies or people we are trying to convert. Finally, while it is really really academic, Lise Vogel's 'Marxism and the Oppression of Women' is a really comprehensive analysis of why misogyny is necessary to capitalism and could aid the understanding of the queer and feminist struggle.
I bring up these other books not to seem pretentious, but just to point out that Beyond Pink and Blue is not a monolith and in particular treating it as the end-all-be-all for the trans liberation struggle and allyship I think is harmful. I am glad that all who have gained a better understanding of themselves or their queer friends, and the nature of the struggle have been able to do so and do not mean to diminish that experience.
I also hope that this can serve as a constructive example of dialectical debate and 'struggle session starting'. I've had a lot of issues with people providing a (dumb) take, not elaborating or mentioning some other part of site discourse, and just saying 'discuss'. This isn't Twitter, folks! I believe that that presentation of discourse fosters cliqueism and creates a lot of defensive feelings which do not create a stronger line or better-informed people.
Re: using a throwaway In general, I do not like to have accounts on social media platforms since I struggle with internet addiction and it is not healthy for me to invest myself heavily in a community since it will encourage an unhealthy amount of screen time for me. That said, in the frequent times I have messed up and gone back online it has been to the comfort of this website and the generally good content herein. I think that perspective as a comparative outsider without a lot of investment, but someone who has been back fairly frequently since mid-summer has given me the perspective to identify a trend I see as harmful and reductive.
I think you made an important point about unity of messaging, and I agree! I'm glad more people are increasing their understanding and I think this book is a helpful component of that. I guess my main critique was the increasingly insistent pushing despite what I perceived as the book's datedness and speech fix-up approach.
So my take is that I intended for Trans Liberation BPOB to be a solid entry point. It's a quick read and still pretty accurately summarizes trans struggle despite its datedness. It was certainly easier to ram down people's throats than the encyclopedia that is Whipping Girl, haha. A lot of the time I find that cis people don't understand that they uh... have gender too... for lack of a better description and BPOB does a really great job of explaining that trans liberation applies to everyone, not necessarily just trans people.
I also find that Leslie was extremely driven and had an incredible ability to rally the troops to be more proactive about fighting on behalf of others. There is a reason I consider them to be my personal hero and I strive to have that same drive and ability regardless of how callous I have to be to do it. :P
I didn't think TC69 was recommending the book as an "end all be all". Specifically, when the book was put forward in the initial book club months ago, it was because 1) the book/author were special to TC69 and 2) the subject was about liberation struggles for one group being the same struggle for every group.
Noticed the language myself when I read the book and mentioned it and TC and I had a few comments back and forth about it, it was great. Talking about the book was the point of the book club and asking questions was expected, actually demanded. Its also a book that is 25 years old ( I think) and the sections were from speeches and interviews that were older. I found this kinda interesting to me seeing how the terms changed over time. Also, there are people alive today, who are old enough to have used those same terms to identify and describe themselves. So, maybe a good thing to remind those of us who aren't trans or involved in trans spaces, that there's going to be a point where a word or term that isn't in favor today might be used and it will be completely okay in that specific context.
The aggressive nature of TC's renewed recommendation for reading "Trans Liberation" wasn't just out of no where. They were kinda angry at this place not being what they had thought, there were people who felt that this place was becoming unwelcoming, and that us normies weren't doing enough to show our support as well as taking part in overt anti-trans antagonism. I'm kinda inclined to view the aggression as justified as chunk of us earned the ire.
Sorry if our failures caused collateral damage.
Hopefully, at least for a while, nobody will have to crack any whips to keep us lazy libs in line.
OP's book recommends, because they are buried in text and my old eyes are tired.
Heath Fogg Davies’ ‘Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?’
Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano
Vogel’s ‘Marxism and the Oppression of Women’
that's a shit ton of wordswordswords to tone police how the book was recommended, but you never actually critiqued the book itself except to call it "outdated"
i am unimpressed. but i will look into the alternate suggestions you made
Did you read what they wrote? It was 1 paragraph saying they didn't connect with it as much as other books, and then some detailed recommendations. Why are you being so dismissive.
"i didn't connect with it" is not "a critique"
the closest OP came to a critique was "I had an issue with a lot of the dated understanding of sexuality, gender, and terminology for both of those aspects of human indentity" out of 642 words.
OP never elaborated either other than to further complain about "a dogmatic turn", so this really does feel like a thinly veiled excuse to criticize the administration of the book club
The slew of posts criticizing the way tc69 advocated for the book is definitely aggravating even though I think they were made in good faith
I hadn't seen any others. Sorry if I'm jumping on a dogpile; that wasn't my intent. I liked the initial presentation and bookclub but feel like things had taken a dogmatic turn.
I don't think you've done anything wrong.
There has been a lot of petty pushback on this site to anything related to trans people, so even well intentioned and constructive criticisms can feel tarnished by that
Here are pirated audiobooks for the books mentioned above. They're torrent hashes from Audiobookbay.
Whipping Girl: dc94604b38ac3e22c41d5ae428b0ff358aeb1112
Beyond Trans: 9f391310498b4d609bb405945b0359258a91325d