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I couldve saved myself some trouble by coming out as trans in college; instead I became a Sedgwickian. I've thought abt this switchpt a lot & was curious to see what this piece wd have to say. Now having read it, I dont think this is a helpful approach. https://grace.substack.com/p/sedgwick
Eve Sedgwick often wrote abt herself "as a gay man" but did not ID as trans. She occupied a self-consciously impossible position, & insisted on living w/in & exploring it. Out of this tension grew a body of work abt impossible positions--fantasy, unrequitedness, non-consummation.
If she had lived longer, I wonder if that would have changed--if she would have attempted to change the conditions that undergirded her own impossibility by experimenting with some form of gender transition. Presumably it would at least have been a question.
But, at least publicly, she didn't & it wasn't. IMO we need to acknowledge both the brilliance & irreducibility of the position she carved out, & the way it held some of us back. She was briefly my teacher & a huge influence, but I'm angry abt how her work helped me get stuck.
Instead of probing these contradictions, GL's piece argues that EKS was a proto-terf, based on a dubious reading of "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" as an anti-trans polemic. GL seems to think the subtext of that essay is, "If you let yr kids inhabit gender nonconformity safely...
then at least they won't resort to becoming trans!" Even more dubiously, GL suggests that, for EKS, the looming threat for parents was the possibility of medical transition. But trans meds weren't even on the table for most queer & gnc kids in the 90s, when EKS wrote that piece.
I guess this feels personal bc I was dismayed to find, last year, that 20+ years of noisy queer self-identification did NOT make the process of coming out as trans to my parents any easier. To the contrary: it revealed how much homophobia they'd never worked thru to begin with--
& apparently thought they'd never have to, since I'd read merely as a Sedgwick-style excessive fag hag rather than a proper fag. I wished they'd grappled in the 90s w the insights of "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay." It wouldn't have been everything, but it would've been a start.
