Surely Binationalism Is Not Love, But There

Let Me Say One Thing To Clarify My Position. I Think We Can Take Distance From Norm But I Think We Are Also Mired In Norm, "empêtrés", I Think You Say In French. And I Think The Choices We Can Make Are Only In A Certain Struggle With The Norms Out Of Which We're Constituted.

The Important Thing Is To Think About Theory In Life In That Way. And I Think We Don't Have To Be Theorists, We Don't Have To Have Gone To The Academy, Or To The University To Learn Theory And To Be A Theorist Of Gender.

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 Accept A Wide Variety Of Positions On Gender. Some Want To Be Gender-free, But Others Want To Be Free Really To Be A Gender That Is Crucial To Who They Are.

I Do Know That Some People Believe That I See Gender As A "choice" Rather Than As An Essential And Firmly Fixed Sense Of Self. My View Is Actually Not That. No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives.