If You Speak [ About Violence Against

If We Think About Sexual Life For A Gender Life, It Seems To Me That We Have To Allow For Certain Kinds Of Changes Or Certain Kinds Of Ways Of Reconceptualizing Ourselves.

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.

There Are Surely Many Ways That [media Select And Contextualise Events Determine The Boundaries Of Public Thinking] Happens, But We Can Note At The Most Obvious Level The Way In Which Forms Of Resistance Or Violence Get Cast As "conflicts" That Assume Two Sides That Are Fighting Only Against One Another.

We Form Ourselves Within The Vocabularies That We Did Not Choose, And Sometimes We Have To Reject Those Vocabularies, Or Actively Develop New Ones.

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.