Status Updates From Gender Outlaws: The Next Ge...

"46. Can you choose whether or not to think of your gender as a political or social construct?"

In what fucking universe is this a CISGENDER PRIVILEGE??? What's the implication here, exactly? As if cis people are the originators of the concept. Oh my fucking god this book is unreadable at varying intervals.

Ryka Aoki says 'if two men have just attacked you, there had better be cops to call' and like 50 pages later Sassafras Lowrey says "My friends were beat up in the streets and we knew better than to call the cops". Gender Outlaws contains multitudes.

There are a lot of people in here who seem pretty goddamn mad about gender studies. Gender Studies, Grrrr. I don't have a strong opinion on this other than that it seems pretty funny. What was up in 2011 Gender Studies courses?

"SBB: I don't want to set it up though like people who are green-haired gender resisters are somehow this advanced life form, and those who see a comfortable place for themselves in the binary are just a little dull, or aren't brave enough."

S Bear very wisely knows that all forms of transness and gender non conformity are radical, which is cool given how mad people get about "hierarchies of subversiveness" & shit.

Most of this anthology would not have saved 12 year old me from becoming a hateful little reactionary child, but Glitter, Glitter On The Wall actually goes pretty hard. I could have used someone telling me "the construction of biological sex as two exclusive binary categories is total bullshit" and ngl a lotta people still could. Not bad.

"I find the patriarchy not guilty by reason of insanity." Please please please be a joke.

Anyway there's a throughline with a specific few of these authors, a "much ado about subversiveness" that really perks my ear these days. This shit is fucked, how long is this one essay???

"It does not seem to me, however, that shouting "Down with the police!" makes our lives better. It is tempting to hate police indiscriminately, but if two men have just attacked you with knives and you need to call the police--there had better fucking be police. It's more constructive to work with the police and help them begin to be more compassionate toward us."

Stunned and speechless at this take from Ryka Aoki.

"Sometimes the ouches come from older transfolk who don't like seeing the binary they invested in get dumped out and turned into a hat by nineteen-year-olds." t. S Bear Bergman, this line goes so hard.

How could they put Julia Serano in here? How could they do me like that??? It's so wild because it reads like Nevada plagiarised this entire writeup ("Performance Piece", ha ha) and just reprinted it as narration. Lmao.