Chase Strangio and accusations towards JKR around Genocide.

[CarnivorousYoni]

Chase Strangio, ACLU lawyer extraordinaire, has a little tweet thread accusing Joanne Rowling of genocide etc. in which Chase does not tag her, but calls her 'the Harry Potter person'. Quite apart from the majestic irony of obscuring her sex and defining her by her male character creation, the accusation of genocide support is astounding and in keeping with the usual tone from TRAs.

However, I particularly enjoyed the second of the tweets in the thread, for, verily forsooth, it did display that Chase knoweth many words thereof, but not how to use them coherently. See if you can help me parse this gem;

Situating the trans subject and the trans body in the contested discursive space the way she does pulls the conversation around transness into the posture of working to locate the legitimate trans subject.

I think Chase means that by talking openly about trans as a subject, and trans people's bodies, Rowling is encouraging people to think about what Trans actually means. I'm not certain, because, who would be?

I think Chase takes issue with this conversation because in the context of the thread, Chase is suggesting that talking about Trans people is basically encouraging society to commit genocide against them.

See if you can make head or tail of it.

mobile.twitter.com/chasestrangio/status/1287367457213161473

That was the phrase that really fucked me off.

Who in the world is most often on the wrong end of both the sex binary and enforcement of gender?

They appear to have admitted that sex is binary.

But only in order to claim that the only people oppressed due to their sex are trans people.

Does anyone else see the name Chase Strangio and think of cheese strings? It's not just me, is it?

@Greenandcabbagelooking

That sounds like what my Sixth Formers do when trying to wring more words out of a half formed idea.

Yes, I tell my students regularly, an error in writing is usually an error in thinking. Can't elucidate a malformed idea. Mr Strangio, Erasmus he ain't...

My goodness, those are certainly a lot of very special, special words. I think you need a very large dose of transitivity to understand them.

Does anyone else see the name Chase Strangio and think of cheese strings? It's not just me, is it?
It's not just you now
I'll never see that name the same way again.

I tried to do a diagram to explain it

The Contested Discursive Space is a place like a train station, and the body has a posture issue and Rowling put something around it. But where is it? That’s the diagram.
I put cake because everyone likes cake.

MAYBE IT IS A SPELL!

MAYBE IT IS A SPELL!

I think you've got it! Get the stresses just right (it's le-vi-o-sah), repeat enough times, and the nasty Potter person disappears, obviously.

My favourite so far

I'll admit I searched on 'contested discursive space' and came up with some other load of nonsense 'Gender, Place, Discursive Space: Where is Same-Sex Marriage? ' by some Prof. of Law from 2008. Usual load of old twaddle as far as I can see, that seems to think that by ' transgressive performances of gender roles' alone, you can effect change. Butler has a lot to answer for...........

Isn’t a discursive space just a (metaphorical) space where discourse (also known as discussion) happens? A contested discursive space is where people disagree in a discussion.

Really all Mr Strangio is trying to sat us that JKR is talking about stuff and she should stop it.

I imagine for Mr Strangio the level of hatred directed toward JKR and other women, is in direct proportion to theIr depth of need to validate a life choice, which must have come at enormous cost. I suppose the sunk cost, in a psychological sense.

DancelikeEmmaGoldman, I agree with your last sentence. The only way I have been able to understand the catastrophising reactions of so many trans activists to the gentlest of questioning is that it, in fact, doesn't feel like gentle questioning to them, but an actual violent assault at their innermost core.

What I still don't quite understand is why that core is so fragile and why it appears to require validation from every single person in the whole world.

None of us get affirmed in many aspects of our identities, after all. So why is this the one type of questioning that a person can't shrug off?

This makes debating the issues almost impossible, but given what is happening when that debating is not allowed, I see no real alternative to trying to defend women's very hard-won rights. And this means not erasing biological sex from language, science and so on.

@Ihaventgottimeforthis

...park life.

YES!!!!

@Ihaventgottimeforthis

...park life.