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I couldve saved myself some trouble by coming out as trans in college; instead I became a Sedgwickian. I& #39;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 ">https://grace.substack.com/p/sedgwic...
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& #39;t & it wasn& #39;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& #39;m angry abt how her work helped me get stuck.
Instead of probing these contradictions, GL& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;d never worked thru to begin with--
& apparently thought they& #39;d never have to, since I& #39;d read merely as a Sedgwick-style excessive fag hag rather than a proper fag. I wished they& #39;d grappled in the 90s w the insights of "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay." It wouldn& #39;t have been everything, but it would& #39;ve been a start.
