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You got your cue line
Jan. 12th, 2018 10:32 am
Speaking of the multiple personality thing: there's a person I have been acquainted with who identifies as transgendered, who, for some reason, it only struck me yesterday identifies as transgendered in a way I have otherwise never heard of, in the sense that I don't know of any other examples of it: this person identifies with both genders and sometimes performs one and sometimes the other. I'm not sure whether this is typical of many people, though I imagine it is of some, who identify as genderfluid, because this person's performances are so strictly binary. Actually, as far as I'm aware, this person performs the gender conventionally corresponding to his/her biological sex the vast majority of the time (although it's possible that that is no longer the case, as I am no longer personally acquainted with this person), but notwithstanding the particulars of this person's particularity, it strikes me that someone like this person could easily be described as having multiple personalities or a dissociative identity; conversely, it strikes me that categorizing people as multiple or dissociative has normally (at least in pop-culture presentations) precluded their being categorized as transgendered, i.e., if you are biologically male, categorized as dissociative, and have an alter who is a girl or a woman, you would not normally be called "transgendered" because what explains, or is being called upon to explain, your girl/woman gendered performance is dissociativeness, not transgenderedness.
Related to that, a couple of notes on gender essentialism: first, this person's transgenderism may be an interesting counter-example to the essentialism of a lot of contemporary discourse about transgenderism, in that this person's gender-performances are so explicitly performances. Whether, or the extent to which, the performances reinforce the binary by enacting it or undermine it by making its artificiality explicit, though, is, I guess, a complicated question.[1] There is also the fact that by explicitly always performing one gender or the other, every behaviour becomes gendered, and the gendered-ness of every behaviour becomes its most salient feature.
Second, according to an article in Forbes a few months ago (which I heard about from Under the Influence on CBC radio), the fastest-growing profession in the US, on the rebound after suffering a steep decline from the androgynizing '80s through the 2000s, is barbering. (Which reminds me of another thing I read somewhere a while ago [ETA: here it is], about the overwhelming gendered-ness of toys these days, which argued that that mostly comes down to marketing, and among other things means that if you have a boy and a girl you have to get the boy thing for the boy and the the girl thing for the girl rather than getting them one thing to share.)
[1] No? Yeah.
Currently at Havelock: 5. High today: 8.8. In freefall toward -18 tonight. Will have been above freezing for about 30 straight hours ... my claim to having spent The Coldest Winter Ever in an un-winterized cottage is looking much more secure than it did last week.
Related to that, a couple of notes on gender essentialism: first, this person's transgenderism may be an interesting counter-example to the essentialism of a lot of contemporary discourse about transgenderism, in that this person's gender-performances are so explicitly performances. Whether, or the extent to which, the performances reinforce the binary by enacting it or undermine it by making its artificiality explicit, though, is, I guess, a complicated question.[1] There is also the fact that by explicitly always performing one gender or the other, every behaviour becomes gendered, and the gendered-ness of every behaviour becomes its most salient feature.
Second, according to an article in Forbes a few months ago (which I heard about from Under the Influence on CBC radio), the fastest-growing profession in the US, on the rebound after suffering a steep decline from the androgynizing '80s through the 2000s, is barbering. (Which reminds me of another thing I read somewhere a while ago [ETA: here it is], about the overwhelming gendered-ness of toys these days, which argued that that mostly comes down to marketing, and among other things means that if you have a boy and a girl you have to get the boy thing for the boy and the the girl thing for the girl rather than getting them one thing to share.)
[1] No? Yeah.
Currently at Havelock: 5. High today: 8.8. In freefall toward -18 tonight. Will have been above freezing for about 30 straight hours ... my claim to having spent The Coldest Winter Ever in an un-winterized cottage is looking much more secure than it did last week.
