There are people who believe the British royal family are actually shape-shifting lizards and promulgate the idea all over the shop. You don’t see the Royals trying to stop publication on the grounds that it’s erasing their humanity.
It’s a deeper problem than the trans narrative I think. Perhaps our identities are now so amorphous, based as they are, in the shifting sands of social media, that it’s only by policing those unseen boundaries, that our personalities don’t disintegrate like a badly-tuned TV.
Was it Lacan who characterised individuality as a shifting intersection of cultures - that there is no real “I”, only a fiction constructed of competing narratives.
This idea that you can only exist if others constantly validate your being, even if they’ve been dead 200 years, is the ultimate post-modern expression of existence.
But that makes an awful sense if you are forced, (or choose), to live in a way which is in denial of material reality. That construction will depend on external acceptance and validation because their is no congruence between feelings and reality. Which is kind of the definition of mental illness I suppose.
This is Martha Jane Canary, the original Calamity Jane, who worked as a tracker and scout, wore men’s clothes and also married and bore children.
In the musical, Doris Day performed her own stunts, injuring herself in the process. Calamity Jane is not about a transwoman, it’s about a woman who makes her way in a man’s world through skill and personality. I’ve always thought it significant that at the end of the movie, she goes to the party in stereotypical female clothes, but she hangs onto her greatcoat.
Unlike those who want to convert her narrative, Calamity recognises that her outfits are only signifiers of social expectation, and she’s worked out that she can navigate those expectations, but remain herself.
You will only trans Doris Day and Calamity Jane by prying them out of my cold, dead hands.