Here Are Things I Think about On Liking Women

you can read the original essay here here.

Here's my thoughts in a bulleted list:

• I'm interested to read more of Chu's work, and I'm curious how she responds to the somewhat-attenuated version of Sheila Jeffreys et. al. paranoid bigotry that seems to be increasingly mainstream in conservative politics


• The core of her ideas, though, about desire and aesthetics and how they underpin the Self and Being are really resonant. And it's interesting because something that counter-culture always runs up against is how and how much to separate itself from the mainstream culture (and perhaps even whether that's really possible). If the mainstream culture, inflected as it is by Christianity, sees desire as something which at least needs to be managed and controlled, if not outright feared and suppressed, then that may well seep into the consciousness of the counter-culture, whether it knows it or likes it or not. And I don't mean to be a "guy who's only seen boss baby seeing his second movie" about this, but counter-cultural/alternative/revolutionary ideas having undertones of Christian morality seems to happen frequently (at least to me).


• But back to desire - looking at this essay from my current perspective, it's interesting to think about this from the perspective of "am" vs. "want to be". Trans Women Are Women, Trans Men Are Men has been a pretty standard rallying cry for years now, and is offered as a rhetorical counter to TERF-inflected ideas and statements about gender and transness. I'm not convinced it does anything, because presenting a rhetorical and logical counter to paranoid bigotry based on cultivated disgust is like presenting a banana to an erupting volcano. Transphobes will believe what they believe because they want to believe it, and want is not really something you can easily argue with (if you can argue with it at all). And by the same token, my want, my desire, to adopt the aesthetics and aspects of femininity and womanhood and dyke-ness, can't be argued with either. And certainly, in a self-reflexive context, that desire makes much more sense to me than any notion of innate BEING.


• AM is very hard to understand or prove (maybe that's the autism but maybe it isn't), WANT is like breathing on a clear fall day (easy and pleasant, I am fortunate not to have allergies). And Want or Desire has been my companion through this whole journey - I desire what I have become (even if what I have become is genderfucky and nebulous, perhaps especially if that), that desire kept me company on long nights in adolescence, that desire was around every corner in young adulthood, that desire made me change my name and come out to people and make doctor's appointments and change my wardrobe and romantically entangle myself with others. If I AM a woman it's because I WANT TO BE a woman (and again it's more complicated than that but for the sake of argument we'll use this).


• The meat of the body is the same but rearranged. The mind is just the mind and efforts to prove some kind of dimorphism in its structure and function fall apart under scrutiny. Hormones do all kinds of crazy shit to a body. Binaries crumble, anyone who truly believes The Science comes to accept that sex, gender, chromosomes, anatomy, every aspect of the human animal, has asterisks upon asterisks appended to any category you could give it. There is no AM, but there is WANT TO BE. I am as much the product of my desires as a Republican politician who aims to destroy bodily autonomy. Terrifying, no?


• The difference is in our actions and how we view others and what we fear about ourselves, I think, and there are many choices to be made there. I can only make those choices for myself, and I choose not to fear my desire, and I choose to love others as they are as much as possible, and I choose to sometimes wear pretty dresses (when it's practical, I need pockets and I'm frequently around things that stain or have moving parts). And that's all I have to say about that (at the moment).

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