👁️🍄 (home/journal/talkingsex.html) talking about sex ◢

🌷 talking about sex

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Tao, the trans girl from コンカフェ嬢は恋を着る / The Concept Café Girl Wears Love by Uhana Ririka

hari calico (bloomfilters)

this is a quickly (and messily) written piece that talks about "biological sex" and its alternatives, and is part of a larger research project that will have crisper, more comprehensive writing. i still have a bunch i have to read on sex. please consider this a mapping of a blog post for what might be to come!

sex

From our early days, we're made to think of sex as something that is "a part of us". You'll get varying answers by people on "where" their sex is located (what it is that makes them "their sex"), usually pointing to genitals, reproductive structures, chromosomes, or sometimes hormones. Sometimes some combination of these things. These "parts" of a person are often taken as not just synonymous with sex but constitutive of embodying a particular sex. Through this little trick of scale and ontology (let's leave the details of what constitutes the parts as similar and different as an exercise to the reader), we're left with a situation where all of humankind can thus be neatly, perfectly divided by sex, not as a frame but simply as "the natural order of things". This is the standard model, and it's what conservatives of all stripes tend to mobilize around "in defense of sex". However, not only is this model overly simplistic, and based on a particular privileging of what functions must "naturally" embody "sex", but the act of identifying what constitutes the "truth" of sex is in fact a political decision, one that hides the underlying ideology of what sex actually is, and how the naturalization of sex in this way, often disconnected from the science it claims to stand for, smuggles in both a heteronormativity and misogyny. The supposed "stable realness" of sex and the "objective fixity" of sexual difference therefore becomes a prisonhouse for human desire and embodiment, including in the ways sexual similarity and sexual difference may coexist both between and within any one, two, or many people.

I offer an alternative framework to think about sex. Let's call this sexing the body, borrowed from the title of Anne Fausto-Sterling's book on medicine's construction and violent enforcement of a sexual binary against intersex people. For brevity, I will omit talking about the scientific details of how what is often called biological sex is in fact a collection of moving parts, which I have no doubt is something at least somewhat familiar to the reader of this piece at this point. I also encourage readers to take a look at Juliana Gleeson's recently-released Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation to learn more about the social and political dimensions of the ongoing history of intersex people's struggle for bodily autonomy. Sexing the body is a framework of sex that is as follows:

You do not have a sex, you are weighed by and against a societal structure we call Sex (capital S). People, bodies, and body parts, "inherently" sexless ("inherently" nothing), are weighed against Sex, and through this are sexed (male or female).

The act of sexing the body is to wield Sex as both a yard-stick (a tool of measuring Sex - how close to the "societally defined ideal" of Male/Man or Female/Woman you are) and a night-stick (a tool of enforcing Sex through violence - ensuring that you must follow your expected "reproductive role" to birth children, you must not alter your body, you must be your Sex first and human second). This serves to police, such as when femaleness or maleness is inscribed upon a woman's body as justification or explanation for misogynistic attacks upon her and her flesh. I use both examples here because sexing the body is a process of control. Femaleness is invoked when children are girl-ed as justification to dispose of them, or when abortion is prohibited because of pregnancy's "necessary role". Maleness is invoked to justify the "monstrous masculinism" of racialized women, or the ostracization, medical & social violence, and invisibilization of intersex women from wider society, or the physical & sexual violence, and femicide of trans women for being "falsely female", or possessing particular genitals, or so on. Never because they "are" ontologically "male" but because their deviance from a "required function" of femaleness (often pregnancy in service of the racial family, and the necessity of the possession of a working uterus) in combination with presumed indeterminate sex marks them as unfemale. You can see how a woman, to varying degrees, becomes simultaneously weighed against femaleness (the standard of her ability to be the female instrument) and against maleness (the presumed impossibility of being able to embody herself as The Man, thus acting as a mechanism to mark her deviance against femaleness), or in other words, against Sex itself.

The expectation that women - by way of sexing the body - ought to have less hair, be physically weaker, be thin, have a uterus and be able to bear children, be cis, be in passive service to men, and outwardly signpost the exaggerated symbols of sexual difference, aren't simply givens of a "natural" sexual difference but a sexual difference that is actively constructed, maintained, and replicated, through the strategic, often contradictory prohibition of body modification and expectation of body modification contorted as allowable only with a woman's agency being to serve herself up as an item for Man (big M, the asymptote of a manhood that all men and all people are expected to aspire to be as a neutral), the Subject of History, so he can throw her around with her brothers and use her up. To many women, shaving so often becomes an act of sexing the body (recreating sexual difference) at the same time of it being the negotiation of the body being sexed (women are treated worse for having body hair). I situate this as not simply "gender expectations" because this often downplays the degree to which the biological and the social operate in tandem as the bio-social, where sexing the body is an act in reinforcement of the gender structure but also that sex becomes maintained by and through gender itself. The infinite possibility of body modification - the freedom to change the body how you want - is thus constrained by the limitation that patriarchal expectations place upon acceptable and unacceptable modification. Furthermore, it becomes constrained by enforcing the teleology of reproductive function: not only that males and females are two sexes, but that any "deviance" from the expected reproductive role (such as, for example, being infertile) is a "deficiency against a template", a fault, an error. You'll see that this quietly-smuggled idea of "intelligent design" is more theological than scientific in craft.

Thus, sexing the body isn't just the instance of talking about sex alone, but is the active process of gendering, degendering, and regendering the flesh, particularly through regimes of legal, social, familial, physical, and sexual violence. Sexed by docs, sexed by cops, sexed by Mom & Pop. Sexed here, sexed there, sexed everywhere - it becomes impossible to escape the panopticon that is Sex. Sex does not naturally arise from the "pre-discursive, observable facts" of the natural body, but is endlessly moving the goalposts, and exists in a social context where particular body forms and functions are given social relevance, with the objective to turn (instrumentalize, weaponize) human beings into tools (objects). The extension of this frame to nature itself ("nature Herself") works to eternalize this state of affairs. Subsuming the act of sexing the body into the natural state of Sex also seeks to naturalize the way in which we sex our own bodies in strictly a patriarchally permissible way - we weigh everything against the standard of "cisness" - and are expected to upkeep this to maintain the illusion of naturalness. This is true for everybody, but the position women, trans people, the gender oppressed, and all such "inferiors of Sex" take creates a sphere of existence that is constantly seeking to constrain these sexed individuals to exist as nothing beyond the sexing of their bodies. Homo sapiens becomes Homo heterosexualis, with two mutually exclusive forms. Through sexing the body, the woman must eternally walk the tightrope between becoming female or unfemale before she can be (hu)man.

The toolbox that the tools are imprisoned in is the ideology of heterosexual sexual difference, or perhaps simply the ideology of Sex, an operative instrument of patriarchal relations and its Heteronormative Regime. We don't have to think of the Heteronormative Regime as another abstraction of patriarchal relations, but understand it through the interweaving of concretes: the family, property, inheritance, and labour relations. The replication of the heterosexual and patriarchal kin-group, or the family, becomes the locus for the continued persistence of a patriarchal arrangement: the symbolic emphasis of bodily reproduction as defining and constituting sex - how body parts can never be anything more than their role in heterosexual reproduction, and how the act of having sex becomes synonymous strictly with heterosexual reproduction - all of this is not simply connected to an abstract "natural desire of humans to reproduce", but the centrality of heterosexual lineage as a social institution. Marriage (as an economic relationship) and having children (as a guarantee for the future of property or labour). Property remains privatized and heritable, the work of caring and maintaining other human beings and their spaces is privatized to operate solely within family units, mothers and wives must serve the patriarch and maintain the house, and children are abused into being "the future of the family" or kicked out entirely.

Under capitalist modernity, the family, household, and its borders extend to the entirety of the nation itself (the "national family") and the "citizen families" - the ideal families (the ideal of the Family) obfuscating divisions of race, sex, and class - constituting its ideal granular units. The state, capital, and its institutions crystallize to become an international, biopolitical regime of sexing the body through direct and indirect means. The family and the nation come together through the historical structure of racialization, and so the ideal family becomes the standard of the White family under a global racial system, or the standard of the family of the "national people" to constantly "produce" more national workers by getting that national birth rate up (even at the cost of the autonomy of women and trans people) and reinforce territorial borders of "household and country" against "deviants, migrants, racialized, underclassed strata". Thus, sex is inevitably racialized. The modern history of sexing the body expands colonially as patriarchal relations expand - through exchange and conquest - and modern Men and Women are sculpted out of the bits and pieces of pre-colonial societies, either mixing with existing pre-colonial patriarchies or imposing new ones. Indeed, while sexing the body has existed wherever patriarchal relations have, the consolidation of a capitalist world-system in early modernity entailed the modernization and biologization of sexing the body, as C. R. Snorton describes in Black On Both Sides, by the violence involved in sexing the bodies of Black slaves. Thus, the biopolitical regime of sexing the body operates to sex individuals in a national and familial system that exists in a globally historical civilizational regime in its constellation of capitalist nation states arranged from the core to the periphery, where deviations to sexing the body are treated as "uncivilized". The ideology of Sex is thus inextricable from the history of "global" civilizational regime of anti-Blackness. Modernity consolidates all the myriad pre-capitalist patriarchies through capital flows and anti-Blackness to consolidate a global system of race, sex, and class.

sexing trans

The point at which sexing the body as female and unfemale often meet becomes the point at which transmisogyny operates as a process that perpetually "generates" a population: the transfeminized, trans women, the unfemale yet all-too-female "doubly-sexed" fetish-object that cannot reproduce the family and so is cast out of the "house" to be the "woman of the street", that is exchanged between Men in private as tied to All Of Them, as a historical and social framing of subjectivity, against which the fiction of perfect heterosexual sexual difference is perpetually reinforced (by eternally exploiting, beating, killing, and sexually violating the transfeminized, or any person mistaken for her). This process exists as long as sexing the body does in various pre-capitalist patriarchies and contemporary patriarchies, and under the civilizational regime all transmisogyny becomes tethered to transmisogynoir by way of anti-Blackness.

In the hands of patriarchal society, "sexing the tranny" becomes an act of deliberately byzantine contradictions. While the full breadth of describing transfeminine subjectivity (transfeminine "socializations") is beyond the scope of this work, it's not just what the trans girl is but what she isn't that becomes incorporated into the mechanism of how she is sexed. It's generally taken for granted that the "default path of growth" for a boy is to become a man, but this tends to obscure the steps taken - rituals of Man-hood - that push "boys" into moving towards the perpetual pursuit of Man-hood. A trans girl's presumed "deviance", where she doesn't care to pursue Man-hood, or struggles and ultimately actively refuses it, or is simply unsocialized entirely, is in another sense her refusal or inability to aspire to being a Man by not differentiating how she sees herself (how she embodies, how she sexes her body) from "the girls", whether or not she may explicitly understand herself as a girl or not at the time. The path-dependency of this life trajectory has her sexed through girl-ness when, like all those who are girl-ed, it becomes impossible to "be one of the boys" (she is just a girl-fag) and she negotiates the expectations that girls do, and yet also sexed through boy-ness to "differentiate and isolate her from the real girls" (she's "like a male girl or a feminine boy"). She can be punished for the things women do only to be locked up among the guys as their collective object, trapped in the maze of a body that is sexed.

Sexing the body operates through the visual and spatial - "it looks like a girl, it acts like a girl, it moves like a girl" - while at the same time the act of sexing reinforces something being "like a girl" through feminizing that which is objectified by relativizing distance from what is acceptable to Man-hood's subjectivity. In this situation, femininity and masculinity are not abstract things, but feminization is a relative and arbitrary frame of sexing that is always juxtaposed against the shifting weight of Man-hood. What delivers upon the trans girl a subjectivity of her relationship to girlhood and womanhood is not only a relationship to embodiment by way of being sexed, not only how she may sex her own body (in assertion of how she is not Male), not only an affirmative desire to both sculpt herself on her own and a constraining desire to be legible, but her struggle, her negotiation of the conditions of being sexed through feminization, through femaleness, even if the sole source of this is her own dysphoria or sense of nihilistic, robotic emptiness and pure subservience, or even if she herself may not fully believe in herself yet. In this sense, socialization is a subject-formation, and a decentralized back-and-forth process, that constitutes an always changing and evolving subject negotiating and struggling against sexing the body.

A key aspect of this process is how the boys are sculpted by society to become Heterosexual Men: to be in pursuit of "true" Man-hood, one becomes required to engage in acts of sexing the body to police girls, police fags, police each other, and prevent the transfeminine, the girl, from not being anything beyond a being of pure abjection and fetishization as long as she emerges, provided she isn't immediately extinguished. A boy who does not engage in this, or has no interest to, or simply ascribes his sense of wanting to be a man towards different trajectories (such as affirming gayness or bisexuality or transmasculinity as processes of intimacy or self-creation) is no better than another fag under this state of affairs. It's here that young girls, fags, and so on of all kinds often face the unrelenting tide of being sexed by peers they once considered friends, who see "the girl" or "the fag" before the peer. While individual men may negotiate their relationship to gender and its failure in various complex ways of affirmation and subversion, the determined pursuit of such an ideal Heterosexual Manhood relies eternally on seeking the asymptote, carrying the night-stick, bonding through violence against the othered and the feminized while being eternally dependent on their labour, and making sure you never have a single thing in common with the girl. Sexing the body acts as the misogynistic, disciplinary process that keeps the Heteronormative Regime of patriarchal relations running smoothly.

However, it would be mistaken to simply treat individual men as sole wielders of the night-stick of Sex. Indeed, a primary impediment to the potential of feminist consciousness becomes the way sexing the body becomes a convenient tool to demarcate forms of "feminine respectability and legibility" among women through heteronormativity, cisnormativity, racialization, and class relations, and it is under these pretenses that political vehicles to organize women and the gender oppressed often begin to fragment and collapse. The retreat of 20th century feminist politics in North America lay upon, among many reasons, White feminism's peripheralization and betrayal of Black women, including the displaced Black trans women of the street, in favour of joining the "middle-class" of national families under a more "equal" heteronormative compact (even if homosexuality was allowed a brief but peripheral public coexistence, now today under threat). Here, sexing the body became retooled as a disciplinary instrument of (trans)misogynoir. Under this state of affairs, all are deputized - and often expected - to be engaged in acts of sexing the body to maintain position.

Thus, while being underpinned by constantly shifting history and social processes, the misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia of Sex persists. Today, states around the world have redoubled down on enforcing Sex at all costs.

What do we lose when talking about sex this way? Rather than affirming the continuity of bodily forms between people of "opposite sex" and the possibilities of sexual difference between people of the "same sex" as much as sexual difference of the opposite and similarities of the same, sexing the body constrains the possibilities of humans understanding their bodies and each others' bodies. Rather than an understanding of body modification and medical care as a system that can interface with the similarities and differences of individuals and whole communities on multiple scales and multiple senses of context, body parts are cut up and instrumentalized to be placed in a box of one (sexing the body against a universal Man) or two (sexing the body through the Heteronormative Regime's maleness and femaleness). People's bodies as a constantly shifting, alterable system of continuities and differences on relative scales becomes entirely lost to the limiting, commodifying vision of the social relations that underpin state and the market.

transing sex

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an incomprehensible chart. "the trajectory of gender in the 21st century" maybe. we'll see

So, what to do with Sex?

There is a particular argument that comes up from time to time, where the erasure of sex must mean the erasure of sexuality. I have already gone over the connection between the ideology of Sex and the Heteronormative Regime. So let's do some alternative talking about sex and think about sexuality beyond Sex.

Sexuality is, in many ways, the social dimension of gender, or how we understand desire gendered in a gendered world. Sexuality cannot exist without the social: sexuality is, by its own existence, communicative and negotiated at all times, as desire itself is. In many ways, gender is about sexuality, but not in the traditional, clinical and taxonomical sense of "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals". What I mean by gender being about sexuality is that if we understand sexuality as the entire individuality of who you want to have sex with, who you want to kiss, who you want to be friends with, filtered through particular contours of gendered desire and gendered embodiment, then a person's relationship to gender becomes inextricable from their relationship to sexuality. If Sex is the operative mode to frame human bodies as something reduced to reproductive social technologies, then sexuality beyond Sex is to release the body and its forms from having a unitary function. From the centrality of a heterosexual PIV penetration we move to sexuality as a decentralized relationship of whole bodies: holes, poles, penetration, circlusion, rubbing, grinding, touch, distance. It all envelops without hierarchy. The functions and relevance of functions of body parts become contextual and communicative. Body parts themselves are freed from their assumed fixities and are understood as continuities. Not only is the clit a little dick, but the dick is a big clit. Sometimes both, sometimes neither. The meaning becomes negotiated in the social dimension. This pointedly does not mean sexuality labels become irrelevant when they are important cultures of communicating desire in a gendered world to people, but the negotiation what it might mean to be gay, bisexual, lesbian, or so on, is a living process of building networks of sexuality subculture with one's own hands. What are the myriad of ways people who are gay, bisexual, lesbian, and others can desire embodiment? How do we build sexuality subculture that exists in similarity, replication, and difference? Will the yuri and the yaoi one day twist around each other like a double helix?

Sexuality then is freed from the endless taxonomy of the clinic, or its tethering to being a periphery in the pocket of the Heteronormative Regime, and regains its historicization as deliberately cultivated sexual subculture, always shifting and changing towards what the people wish for the future of sexuality to be. Rather than sexual difference being fixated on heterosexual, reproductive sexual difference, the continuity of million sexual differences and sexual similarities are allowed to proliferate, beyond taxonomy and towards the trajectory of connection. This cannot happen all at once, but is the active and collective process of struggling to affirm and subvert sexing the body into the Heteronormative Regime. This is the heart of both a feminist and queer politics of affirming desire against patriarchal instrumentalization.

The ways our bodies are sexed operate through patriarchal social relations, predominantly out of our control. Thus, sexing the body turns the complexity of human desire and embodiment into a singularity of gendered service. Sex traps gender upon the flesh, and the weight of Sex feels insurmountable. In opposition to this stands the possibility of transsexualizing the world. Rather than transsexuality being a medical diagnosis or a peripheral corner of existence, as homosexuality had become relative to the Heteronormative Regime, one ought to turn this on its head. A transsexual politics, transsexualizing the world, entails the possibility for all human beings to collectively hold the ability to reinterpret, renegotiate, and modify the body and the sexing of the body, taking this away from the autonomous alienation of capitalism and the patriarchal regime and situate politics of desire with the relationship of people and the myriad ways people can interface. This requires nothing more than the end of capitalism and the patriarchal regime, but it is a light that may potentially signal a way "through". The kernel of possibility lies in how, at all times, people affirm Sex and subvert Sex, people fail Sex and people transcend Sex. Sex is malleable, sex is mutable, sex has a history, sex can reconfigure, sex can restart, sex can end. Abolish Sex to free sex.

a basic bibliography on sex

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