Trans

I offer these examples to make sense of the powerful nature of naming—claiming a name or refusing to and thus remaining unnameable. Indeed, this book uses the term “trans*,” which I will explain shortly, specifically because it holds open the meaning of the term “trans” and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming

a new rendering of transgenderism as a desire for forms of embodiment that are necessarily impossible and yet deeply desired, all at once.

The movement of transgender identification from pathology to preference, from a problematic fixation to a reasonable expression of self, follows the route from problem to social identity that has described the history of homosexuality in the twentieth century.

While reported physical abuse of transgender people is high, we have to factor gender, race, and class into these analyses. Poverty, sex work, and race remain significant variables

With recognition comes acceptance, with acceptance comes power, with power comes regulation.

the visibility of transgender must be seen as part of a larger shift in habits and customs

What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism.

What has happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive overhaul of our understanding of and language for gendered embodiment? And how have people responded to new definitions of sex and the gendered body?

queer communities today, while we fight about words like “tranny,” worry about being triggered, and “call each other out” for our supposed micro-crimes of omission/inclusion/slang, we are, like the People’s Front of Judea, trying to fight power by battling over the relations between signifiers and signifieds while leaving the structures of signification itself intact.

the linguistic actually already a symptom of these large systems