Burnwinter
Thanks for the great post and the excellent conversation. Turns out, it is possible to have!
Burnwinter The individual's body is the vessel in which the hormone supplements circulate.
As much as the individual exists at all, I'd argue they are the body in which they circulate. It's pedantic, but I insist it's a crucial difference.
Burnwinter The situation can be compared to the Pill after WWII—whatever your politics of sexual freedom, the availability of reliable contraceptives was going to change sexual expression. Not in wholly liberating ways, as the commercial availability of the female contraceptive did not just open the possibility of sexual encounters without concern about pregnancy, it also fostered demands for sexual encounters that were unwanted.
Excellent analogy. In fact, it seems clear to me that this is an extension of that post-war schema. I wouldn't go as far as you say that such pharmacological interventions are autopoietic, but they do seem to have the quality of sympoiesis to me. That there are downsides to any such intervention is normal and expected, just like there are downsides to (historically) heteronormative interventions like state-sponsored life partnership, and indeed, hormone replacement therapies.
Burnwinter It is inadequate, as are all representations of a society's particularity.
I get you, but in some ways, this is the very reason why it becomes the site of contestation. This is why I find the conversation always comes back to democracy, which for many is a majoritarian system that erases difference in order to produce harmony. This is why it so readily bifurcates into ideologies. I'm looking for a democracy that goes beyond recognizing difference - I want a democracy in which the stated goal, the vision, is to produce difference. It would not only allow, but encourage, discordant harmonics that do not cling to their historical sources.
Burnwinter As I've been saying in a few different ways in this thread, I struggle to tolerate commentary that simultaneously valorises democracy, and refuses to allow it to function as it's hypothetically supposed to.
I don't think democracy exists, in that I'm not sure we have any other choice but democracy. I don't mean it's the "least worst" form of government, but rather, I'm not sure it's a form of government at all. How, indeed, is it supposed to work? I'm not so clear on that front. I absolutely get you, and your frustration is totally justified, but I'm not sure there is anything but a Spinozan conatus behind the democratic impetus - is Ismaili terms, it is very much the pillar of jihad. This is the substance upon which any system or understanding is made possible, and as such, it cannot ever really work.
Burnwinter Being more on the Deleuzean side, I would frame it in terms of particularity (or haecceity) rather than lack. The dumbass gender critics operate with a perfect rationality, but by way of (mis)representations of "biological sex" and "socially constructed gender" that erase the manifest imbrication of these conceptual strata—there are no biological human bodies that are not social, and no human society not formed of human bodies—and also the empirical encounter with actual trans people, now and historically. Consequently the procession of gender-critical reason flits unstably from one fixed point to another in a kind of delirium.
Spot on. This is the problem with reason! It's ground is always axiomatic, and all axioms are false by their very nature.
