I so very much loved this conversation, the whole discussion, the memories and experiences, but especially the way you both talk/think about gender. And these two bits here, one from each of you, are for me pretty much perfect expressions of what *gender* is and should be (be conceived as, be *lived*)…..
‘The difference between a wave and a localized object in science is exactly that the wave is everywhere, that if you're thinking of a wave on the surface of water, it's hard to pin down exactly where it is. And it’s in its nature that it has some variation. That sense of expansiveness, I think, is really worthwhile as a starting point, the image of ebb and flow, of being sort of big and all encompassing and also malleable, because fluids are malleable’.
‘But anytime I read a “detransition story”, it's often about someone who's just living life on a spectrum and then exploring other parts of themselves, or evolving as time passes and it's like, wow, how dare they do that. This feels worth mentioning to me, because I think if people weren't so pressured to have medical proof of their gender, and could exist and explore their bodies in the way that they wanted to, without all this sense of finiteness and permanence, then there would be more freedom to allow yourself to change over time’.
I so very much loved this conversation, the whole discussion, the memories and experiences, but especially the way you both talk/think about gender. And these two bits here, one from each of you, are for me pretty much perfect expressions of what *gender* is and should be (be conceived as, be *lived*)…..
‘The difference between a wave and a localized object in science is exactly that the wave is everywhere, that if you're thinking of a wave on the surface of water, it's hard to pin down exactly where it is. And it’s in its nature that it has some variation. That sense of expansiveness, I think, is really worthwhile as a starting point, the image of ebb and flow, of being sort of big and all encompassing and also malleable, because fluids are malleable’.
‘But anytime I read a “detransition story”, it's often about someone who's just living life on a spectrum and then exploring other parts of themselves, or evolving as time passes and it's like, wow, how dare they do that. This feels worth mentioning to me, because I think if people weren't so pressured to have medical proof of their gender, and could exist and explore their bodies in the way that they wanted to, without all this sense of finiteness and permanence, then there would be more freedom to allow yourself to change over time’.