Transgender History (Seal Studies)

by Susan Stryker

we just go about our everyday business without cause to question the unexamined assumptions that form part of our working reality.

language structure usually happen very slowly and pronouns are among the linguistic elements most resistant to change, so trying to speed up a change of usage can sometimes sound forced or strange.

it is often the most privileged elements of a population affected by a particular civil injustice or social oppression who have the opportunity to organize first.

“The Woman-Identified Woman” famously begins with the statement, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

White feminism often (and often unconsciously) claimed its moral strength based on some concept of “purity”—notably (especially in the first wave), some notion of female sexual purity, but also, more abstractly, on the idea of an essential womanhood to be recovered or restored from the taint of patriarchal pollution.

Sex-positive feminism had the disadvantage, however, of regarding trans as an erotic practice rather than an expression of gender identity.

Gayle Rubin’s influential article “Thinking Sex,”

Rubin’s article most famously noted how early second wave feminism floundered when it tried to apply the economic concept of “class” to the category “woman,”