Supplemental Post #4 - Erin Cooney

I'll swing back around with a more real core post tomorrow, but I did just have to drop by after reading the Cvetkovich article to mention that its discussion of transness was a true nightmare! The idea that trans women and their "desire" to be women stems from a desire to "escape the problems that come with being black, gay, and poor" is ridiculous and such an uninformed perspective on why people transition and the relative privileges of trans people to cis people. The article then drops into the most basic transphobia, claiming that "the desire to be a 'real' woman implicitly rests on an essentialist conception of gender," which is such a classic TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) argument to make and generalizes and simplifies trans women, their identities, their expression of those identities, and so on in a really frustrating way. Also, if I ever have to read the phrase "the carefully deceptive transsexual" again, I will crawl into the ground and never be heard from again. Like, sure, it was the 90s, so I'm not even mad about the outdated language, but frankly, trans folks were writing and talking and etc. about gender more than ever in the 90s and publishing something like this reveals either a shocking lack of understanding of transness & a complete failure to seek out trans voices to illuminate the subject, or rampant and deliberate transphobia. Either way, it's bad! Just in case folks don't know enough about this topic to realize how rough this article is, I'm here to say that it sucks and everything that is said about transness needs to be deeply critiqued and contextualized and I really, really hope no one takes this article's perspective (specifically on transness) to heart.