Welcome to the first week of reading Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue by Leslie Feinberg!
Each week we'll read one chapter and discuss it in the comments. There are 8 chapters, and each chapter isn't too long, so this will be relatively light reading for most of you.
Also, THIS BOOK ISN'T JUST FOR TRANS PEOPLE. Obviously the book discusses trans issues, but as I've said before, it covers discussion on gender topics that would be relevant to basically everyone. So I highly encourage you to join if you're interested, regardless of whether you're trans or not.
To get started, here is a list of resources taken from the previous reading group session:
pdf download
epub download - Huge shout out to comrade @EugeneDebs for putting this together. I realized I didn't credit them in either post but here it is. I appreciate your efforts. ❤️
chapter 1 audiobook - Huge shout out to comrade @futomes for recording these. No words can truly express my appreciation for this. Thank you so much. ❤️
chapter 2 audiobook
chapter 3 audiobook
chapter 4 audiobook
chapter 5 audiobook
chapter 6 audiobook
chapter 7 audiobook
chapter 8 audiobook
Also here's another PDF download link and the whole book on ProleWiki.
In this thread we'll be discussing Chapter 1: We Are All Works in Progress.
CWs: Discussion of transphobia, abuse, SA. I should also mention since this came out in 1998, some of the language used might feel a little dated (specific language used is also a good topic of discussion imo).
I'll also ping a discussion list each week. Since this is the first week, the ping list will only include the few who've mentioned they're interested, but please let me know if you'd like to be added (or removed).
This is my first time doing something like this, so let me know if you have any feedback for me. Thanks!
If you think about it, the suffragettes were really just transing their gender.
Not sure exactly what you mean so apologies if I'm way off base, but I would think that's more related to broad legal restrictions instead of an individual's gender expression?
That was a half-joking comment but only half since fighting to change what a gender as a class is legally or politically allowed to do is part of expanding individual freedom of expression, I think! Perhaps Feinberg would agree too since zie places trans liberation as a new frontier or continuation of the fight for the emancipation of women.
Ah ok, that makes sense and I definitely see those things as intertwined.
Or approaching this from a slightly different angle: if we are to be inclusive and regard any kind of gender deconstruction as being/becoming transgender, those women who said "we deserve to be educated and vote and work and dress how we like despite the social construct" very much qualify to be included.
Sorry for the very late reply to this. I agree with you and it's honestly something I've been thinking about all week. When I first read this the questions that popped into my head were more along the lines of "Are femboys, crossdressers, dragqueens, etc. trans?" but the case you bring up is very interesting. Obviously most people these days wouldn't see something like women wearing pants or having short hair as "trans" in any way, but it's true that at one point women dressing like this and taking on strictly male roles was seen bold act of crossing gender lines. In this case, they were able to successfully change social norms to the point where this is no longer something anyone even thinks about it, which gives me hope that we will eventually win and move past our current situation.
No worries, I appreciate your response even more now that I also had time to ruminate on this!
I personally think that any attack on the established gender system qualifies as being/becoming transgender. Two interesting consequences of thinking this way are, first, that the "third gender" role/class in some societies does not qualify as long as it is accepted as part of the established system and, second, that my dream of fully automated gay space communism necessarily involves the word "transgender" becoming meaningless because there will be no gender system in the first place.
The transition of transgender to meaningless will feel similar to what we are talking about right now – today it feels pretty meaningless to call early fighters for women's emancipation transgender because they have won and gender has successfully been transed (mostly, in certain parts of the world, caveat, caveat). In general, I think, it makes more sense to talk about transgender dialectically, i.e., as a process rather than a phenomenon, which deemphasises the "who is trangdender" and emphasises the "when and how is transgender".