To Say That Gender Is Performative Is

When We Say Gender Is Performed, We Usually Mean That Weve Taken On A Role Or Were Acting In Some Way And That Our Acting Or Our Role Playing Is Crucial To The Gender That We Are And The Gender That We Present To The World.

I Never Did Like The Assertion Of The "innate" Inferiority Or Women Or Blacks, And I Understood That When People Tried To Talk That Way, They Were Trying To "fix" A Social Reality Into A Natural Necessity. And Yet, Sometimes We Do Need A Language That Refers To A Basic, Fundamental, Enduring, And Necessary Dimension Of Who We Are, And The Sense Of Sexed Embodiment Can Be Precisely That.

I Agree Completely That Nothing Is More Important For Transgender People Than To Have Access To Excellent Health Care In Trans-affirmative Environments, To Have The Legal And Institutional Freedom To Pursue Their Own Lives As They Wish, And To Have Their Freedom And Desire Affirmed By The Rest Of The World. This Will Happen Only When Transphobia Is Overcome At The Level Of Individual Attitudes And Prejudices And In Larger Institutions Of Education, Law, Health Care, And Kinship.

Whether One Wants To Be Free To Live Out A "hard-wired" Sense Of Sex Or A More Fluid Sense Of Gender, Is Less Important Than The Right To Be Free To Live It Out, Without Discrimination, Harassment, Injury, Pathologization Or Criminalization - And With Full Institutional And Community Support. That Is Most Important In My View.

There Is No Gender Identity Behind The Expressions Of Gender... Identity Is Performatively Constituted By The Very 'expressions' That Are Said To Be Its Results.