I Am Much More Open About Categories

Bound To Seek Recognition Of Its Own Existence In Categories, Terms, And Names That Are Not Of Its Own Making, The Subject Seeks The Sign Of Its Own Existence Outside Itself, In A Discourse That Is At Once Dominant And Indifferent. Social Categories Signify Subordination And Existence At Once. In Other Words, Within Subjection The Price Of Existence Is Subordination.

The Pleasurable Part Of Public Mourning Can Also Lead To A Sense Of Self-sanctification That Justifies In Advance Any War Effort, Whether Or Not The Target And Destruction Are In Any Way Related To The Initial Event.

A Different Kind Of Pleasure Surfaced In The Aftermath, The Pleasure Of Seeing The Towers Fall Time And Again, The Experience Of Being Entranced By The Visual Spectacle, And Then Also The Very Graphic Forms Of Public Mourning For Exemplary Citizens (taking Place At The Same Time As The Refusal To Mourn The Undocumented, The Foreign, Gay And Lesbian Lives Lost There, For Example). I Am Not Sure That The Guilt Over The Pleasure Re-installed The Good Citizen.

Some Trans People Thought That In Claiming That Gender Is Performative That I Was Saying That It Is All A Fiction, And That A Person's Felt Sense Of Gender Was Therefore "unreal." That Was Never My Intention. I Sought To Expand Our Sense Of What Gender Realities Could Be. But I Think I Needed To Pay More Attention To What People Feel, How The Primary Experience Of The Body Is Registered, And The Quite Urgent And Legitimate Demand To Have Those Aspects Of Sex Recognized And Supported.

I Think We Have To Ask, Not, What "gender Trouble" Is Today But Where "gender Trouble" Is Today.