from a review essay by Heather Love

Odd. Had I held off on my last posting for a few hours, I'd have had all this useful cite-age I could have deployed. That said, this speaks very eloquently to reason #3 for abandoning that term that I'd used (in my previous post). I've added some bold to indicate the points that seem most pertinent. 

This is all taken from; 

"'The Right to Change My Mind' : New Work in Trans Studies" 

by Heather Love 

in Feminist Theory 2004 5:91

In the contemporary academy, it has become a reflex to sift all representations, behaviour, self-conceptions, political positions and ways of life into the rough categories of subversive and hegemonic. The struggles that trans subjects face serve as a stark reminder of the limitations – both methodological and ethical – of such habits of mind. In a recent article on transgender studies, Cressida J. Hayes writes,

. . . so much academic literature over-determines and erases the agency of the trans subject in favor of the grasp of technology, medical discourses, history qua regimes of power, or false consciousness. On the other hand, so much popular literature is clearly naively essentialist in its understanding of transsexual experience: tropes of wrong body, being ‘born that way’, ontological necessity and historical and cultural universality tend to be grossly under-theorized and easily feed into other essentializing discourses about sex and gender. (Hayes, 2000: 178–9)

In such accounts, critics fail to attend to the complex and often highly critical stance that transsexual and transgender subjects adopt in relation to both the medical establishment and the discourse of gender. Some of the most interesting recent accounts of the medical construction of sex and gender have come from the work of trans people who have been actively engaged in a struggle for agency with doctors and psychotherapists.

While I would not want to suggest that the project of thinking critically about trans subjectivity or politics ought to be abandoned, it seems clear that the epistemological pressure on the figure of the transsexual needs to be reduced. Academics will continue to interrogate the ideological stakes of transgender and transsexual identity; to ask questions about the meaning of belonging; to redefine the limits of materiality and the human. However, such questioning needs to be offset with an awareness of the kinds of self-questioning and lived experiments currently taking place in the trans community. The new work in transgendered studies has a great deal to teach contemporary criticism – not only about the ‘meaning of gender’, but also about finding a balance between the need to be exemplary in one’s identifications and behaviour and the need for survival, for authenticity and for an expanded sense of agency. (94-5)