Trans Megathread for the Week of 10/21 to 10/27
Trans Megathread for the Week of 10/21 to 10/27
Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XI is the eleventh numbered installment in the… Okay, you know what it is, I’m just going to tell you about one of the storylines!
During the Wings of the Goddess expansion, adventurers will be sent back in time to experience the events of the Crystal War, a cataclysmic event that is the foundation for conflicts of the modern-day timeline. Should an adventurer choose to serve the Kingdom of San d’Oria, they will be immersed in the story of the Young Griffons—a group of children who would see themselves knights, many of whom grow into prominent characters later in life.
Among the Young Griffons, the player will find Bistillot, a shy boy who doesn’t like to be seen. With his penchant for engineering, shy demeanor, and lack of combat potential, Bistillot prefers to spend his time inside of an orcish war machine that he was able to repair to working condition.
He is often seen before he is heard, with his signature phrase, “HAAAALLOOOOOOOOO” being used to hail the adventurer. Through the course of the story, Bistillot finds his way, even contributing to the war effort with his engineering skills.
However, when another member of the Young Griffons is kidnapped and taken to the present day, the adventurer must return to the present day and reunite with the Young Griffons’ present selves! The adventurer’s first contact in the present day is Bistillot. When the adventurer hears the signature “HAAAALLOOOOOOO,” Bistillot approaches the player, but what the player sees is… a woman?? She introduces herself as Bostilette, a “friend of Bistillot.”
After the rescue mission, Bostilette comes clean. She is, of course, the very same Bistillot who was a little boy twenty years earlier. She explains that she was very sick as a baby, so her parents gave her a boy’s name so that she would be stronger and survive the illness. Once she overcame the illness, she was comfortable to reclaim her name and gender. Well, that closes the book on that story, except… I’ve decided that’s bullshit!
I have unilaterally decided that Bostilette is trans, the sickness she had was dysphoria, she stayed in the orcish war machine because she was an egg, and I hope you all agree!
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this might be a silly question, but, about the gender accelerationist manifesto... (cw discussion of transphobia etc)
As discussed earlier, performativity requires you to actively accept the class you’re assigned to by gender. This is a strength of gender because it forces you to be complicit in your own oppression, but it’s also a weakness. Since your class is based, in part, on your active acceptance of it, this creates the path to active rejection. Indeed, if enough people reject the gender assigned to them, gender cannot function.
and trans people are those rejecting their gender, saying “no” to gender. This is a modern phenomenon which is subversive toward gender and presents us with a path forward. Here we find the core to the revolutionary potential of queer people. If everyone says “no” to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems. People fight capitalism through a refusal to work, a general strike against it. Similarly, a collective “no” to gender rejects the class system and allows us to take it to its knees.
This would be nothing but a revolution. It’s an overhaul of society which allows for queer people to take its reigns and remake it in our image. This act of class abolition by queer people, including a self-abolition of our own class, is a daring attack upon gender. It takes over society to transform it and eliminate class from it. This means that such a revolution would be the dictatorship of the queer.
I feel like there is not enough detailing about how cis and straight people can say "no" to gender. And some of the implications of the other things, such as the base of gender being the distribution of reproductive labor, could be read pretty easily to be implying that, for instance, someone who is doing non-reproductive labor is "materially a man" and someone doing reproductive labor is "materially a woman". i feel like the manifesto is really based in a lot of places but it kind of seems to reject identity politics too much? theres a lot of things that are fundamentally different between a trans woman who acts as a "breadwinner" and a cis man doing the same thing, even if both are huge assholes as well. and...
This is hardly done freely. The violence of the system is inherent and systemic. We perform these acts surrounded by the violence of gender. But we still perform them. Gender isn’t content with forcing itself upon us. Instead, it forces us to say “yes” to it.
This serves as a method of control and reproduction. Gender isn’t inherent, but it spreads by assigning us to a class and forcing us to say yes to that class. “Yes, I am a man. It is who I am and who I always have been. I cannot escape it or deny it. I am a man.” This is nothing but a lie we are forced to repeat. But by repeating it enough, we come to believe it. Gender becomes natural, inescapable, eternal. It ceases to be an imposed identity and becomes an eternal part of who we are. By objecting to my gender, you are objecting to that which is inherently me
I don't know how to read this except as an advocation of gender constructivism in it's entirety- But this can't be true, otherwise people who have been conditioned from birth to be a gender they don't vibe with wouldn't experience dysphoria, and that one twin test would have come out entirely differently. There's obviously something deeper to it and the labels that are also used to enforce power hijack that deeper thing, not entirely constructed out of whole cloth, just like how "sex" is a construct grafted onto real physical things that can affect people
it's a great read and i'd still recommend it to most people. i just don't think there's nearly enough ideological basis and/or defense against TERF-type arguments in it for a movement to be built on it alone. it needed to have spent more time examining why TERF ideology is wrong instead of merely gesturing at it being unnecessary and misinterpreting specifically trans people as bad (which leaves the fundamental reasons TERFs and many "progressive(appropriating) transphobes" believe what they do alone to do trouble).
The GMA's criticism isn't aimed at gender identity, it is aimed at gender as a class and that class includes that AGAB is enforced as being essential and immutable. It follows from this that any trans person acts inherently revolutionary towards gender, including those who have a binary understanding of their gender identity, and a gender performance that conforms to the societal expectations for that gender identity. Gay people also act revolutionary towards gender, because gender classes are inherently heteronormative.
Also, reproductive labor in the GMA means all gendered distribution of labor. If you're the breadwinner in a nuclear family, you are performing reproductive labor, specifically the kind of reproductive labor that is today associated with the male gender class. It does NOT follow from this that being a breadwinner means you're a man, the GMA specifically wants to abolish that association between this kind of labor and a male gender class.
The key to understanding this is that gender as a class is NOT the same as gender identity. It is a seperate dimension of the gendered experience, one that is not personal, but societal. The GMA's critique of identity politics is specifically that identity politics does not understand the class character of gender, but reduces it to characteristics of the individual. The GMA does not deny that there are individual, personal aspects of gender, it aims to seperate these from the superstructure and wants to enable people to choose them freely instead of these aspects being forced on them through their AGAB.
I agree that it goes into little detail about how cishets can contribute to gender abolition, but it's a text that advocates for trans liberation. We have enough cis-centric feminist literature about how to break up gender as a class for straight cis people. Ultimately, it boils down to the same seperation of individual choices from a restricitve superstrucutre that shoehorns people into gender classes. Under gender accelerationism, you can still be a mother as a cis woman and you can still be a breadwinner as a cis man, but these are no longer class based demands, but the free, individual decisions they should be.
Thank you, this is a great explanation. Very based stuff then