Radicool Notions

“My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor, I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”

“To me it is really important to live in what I call the space in-between. Bus stations, trains, taxis or waiting rooms in airports are the best places because you are open to destiny, you are open to everything and anything can happen.”

“Why, for example, should individuals who have already paid a considerable price for their stigma be told not to pass; perhaps according to the rule that the less you’ve had the less you should try to obtain? And if derogation of those with a particular stigma is bad in the present and bad for the future, why should those who have the stigma, more so than those who don’t, be given the responsibility of presenting and enforcing a fair-minded stand and improving the lot of the category as a whole?”

“Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. […] When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his “social identity” […] We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. […] It is [when an active question arises as to whether these demands will be filled] that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. [These assumed demands and the character we impute to the individual will be called] virtual social identity. The category and attributes he could in fact be proved to possess will be called his actual social identity. While a stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind–in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a handicap. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are other types of discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, for example the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one, and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Note, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issue, but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be.”

“I’ve made it very clear that even though i’m born female in this society that I don’t go to or perform in any space that is titled ‘women born women only.’ I am very happy to go to a space that says ‘all women welcome’ because then it is drawing like a magnet all those who self identify, who want to be in women’s spaces, and I feel like all people who are oppressed or discriminated against in this society have a right to get together y’know whether that be a third world caucus or it be a women’s dance, whatever it is. But, I think that when you begin to set a policy that defines who’s gonna be a women, and police the boundaries of it, then it’s not only a threat to everyone who doesn’t fit that, y'know ‘gee her feet are kind of big, her voice is kinda low, look at that beard growth, what do you think about that one’ it sets up a unhealthy atmosphere. Who’s pure enough to decide who’s woman enough? And I think also that it reverts back to a biological definition of women, which, biological determinism, it’s always been the club used against women! You can’t suddenly lift that up as a liberating weapon. I think that that kind of definition ‘women born women, that we’re all women, that we have identical experiences, it’s innate,’ is a setback to the women’s movement. I have always said that the only time I’d go into a space that had been ‘women born women only’ is when I could go together with my transexual sisters”

“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”

“I had a feeling I had been in this place before. There were people who were different like me inside. We could all see our reflections in the faces of those who say in this circle. I looked around. It was hard to say who was a woman, who was a man. Their faces radiated a different kind of beauty than I’d grown up seeing celebrated on television or in magazines. It’s a beauty one isn’t born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice. I felt proud to sit among them. I was proud to be one of them.”