Recanting & Mea culpa for "the trans effect"

"mea culpa"
google->image

In a couple of earlier posts, I used the phrase "the trans effect" and even made a label [meta tag thingy] for it. But, even as I offered up that term, and designated what I meant by it, I had some lingering and as yet unarticulated qualms. So, before I go on a brief stint of revisionist blogging (and either change it, or maybe just delete the label), I want to explore why this term deserves the recanting and the mea culpa.

So what was it that I was referring to? just that, because notions of M/F are so overtly and covertly foundational for so many small, medium and large scale bodies of knowledge and practice that the material being of trans people has the effect of unsettling that which had seemed so notionally solid. As I talked about this only a couple of night ago with my dear sister, "You take some body of knowledge that feels nice and solid" (right hand held out as if gripping a large invisible rock) "and you take a trans person" (left hand held out as if holding something) "not that you need an actual person, just the recognition that they exist… and you bring the one into close proximity - conceptually - to the other, and suddenly…" (making surprise face and wiggling right hand fingers) "…the supposedly solid one has gone all squishy."

This does seem to 'work'. Trans subjects do pose fascinating and complex challenges to all manner of knowledge-regimes. But, I do not wish to use the phrase any more for the following reasons, even while I still find the "effect" worth returning to again and again.

1. It risks sounding a bit cute, or worse, it risks giving the impression that this is what makes trans people value or meaningful or (ugh) useful for theory, rather than the inherent value they have as human beings, as subjects with desire, etc. 

2. Given 1, I'd rather not have that phrase linked to my name as I am interested in doing theoretical work which will have some relation to extant trans issues and theories.

3. As noted in an earlier posting, I do not wish to fall into the pattern (played out with many different sorts of subjects in academic, theoretical and philosophical history) of positioning trans people - as a group - as if they were in some specific sense "the privileged subjects of history."  I've argued against such claims in other areas and I do not wish to replicate that very tempting error. & most importantly, while it might be perceived by some as a positive valuation of their lives, it seems just as likely to put an unreasonable and ultimately coercive demand upon the choices of individuals such that each must accord with some unspecified radical and transgressive intent. Such a move, I would argue, both diminishes the worth of many activities that may have little political charge by themselves and further, it could also make recognizing that which truly is radical that much more difficult, through having a pre-existing template for what counts as socio-politically radical.

Mea Culpa sour cherry rakija
from Belgrade

So, to conclude and bid adieu to my unfortunate choice of terminology, let me say that while I think the term does point to something with a certain "reality" - that it is to be hoped that as time passes, it will seem harder and harder to discern this effect until there is no longer any referent for that phrase. Perhaps I am being utopian? it is not as if we have dispensed with racism or sexism or ableism or however any other biases. But, has no progress been made? To quote a source I rarely make use of (Allen Ginsberg);

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

...no need to limit to "America" tho...