Reading Notes: Hird, "Animal Trans"

[rax]

This is one of the two I'm planning to bring detailed note on for class. IT IS CALLED ANIMAL TRANS. HOW COULD I NOT. And it leads off with a Haldane quote!

Hird says that we should "Exercise caution when the behavior of nonhuman living organisms is cited in the service of discussions of human socio-cultural relations." She points out that we tend to call animals "natural" when they do things we like and "animalistic" when they do things we don't. (So we use animals with our rhetoric as well as all of the other ways.)

Apparently there are female barnacles with thousands of tiny male barnacles living inside them. That's... that's badass.

Term I bet I need to know: "Briefly, new materialism attends to a number of significant shifts in the natural sciences within the past few decades to suggest agency and contingency... within the living and nonliving world." ... "Only a minority of feminist studies analyze how physical processes, and particularly nonhuman processes, might contribute to feminist concerns."

Hird wants to consider using these processes in particular in talking about just how subversive being trans is. "These debates tend to occur within cultural analyses, as though assuming trans is a distinctly and exclusively cultural phenomenon." THANK YOU. Interested in trans not just with regard to sex but with regard to various types of classification. Oh man, this woman is gonna drop some science.

"Tamsin Wilson argues that transsex women represent a 'shallow' reading of the body resulting from an uncritical endorsement of Cartesian dualism." I'd argue that Tamsin Wilson represents a 'shallow' reading of transsex women but that's just me! Anyway, Hird takes this down by pointing out that Wilson uncritically assumes that the phenomenological (menstruating) and corporeal (vagina) elements of a female-sexed must be paired, and that a vagina constructed unable to give birth is not a vagina at all. Wilson thinks it's socially and materially artificial.

Trans and queer studies "employ trans as a key queer trope in challenging claims concerning the immutability of sex and gender." OK... "Kate Bornstein argues transpeople are not men or women" Kate Bornstein, do you think you could kindly not do that?? [0] "Although queer theory contests the attribution of any character to masculinity and femininity, performing or doing gender seems to principally consist in combining or parodying existing gender practices." Later Butler apparently clarifies that drag is not necessarily subversive just because it's drag. Hird leaves this kind of open and moves on to: Non-Human Animals!

"The diversity of sex and sexual behavior amongst (known) species is much greater than human cultural norms typically allow." Some fun facts:

• 5% of mammals form lifetime heterosexual pair bonds
• "Amongst non-human living organisms, day-care, fostering, and adoption are common, as are infanticide... and incest"
• many animals have sex for pleasure
• "many animals practice forms of birth control through vaginal plugs, defecation, abortion through the ingestion of certain plants..."
• "more than half of mammal and bird species engage in bisexual activities"
• "Sexual behavior between flowers and various insects is so commonplace that it is rarely recognized as transspecies sexual activity."
• Apparently there is a fungus called Schizophyllum that has more than 28000 sexes.
• The platypus has five X chromosomes and five Y chromosomes. (Wow.)
• A sufficient number of fish change sex that there is a special term for fish that do not change sex during their lifetimes. ("Gonochoristic.") Maybe I should use "gonochoristic" to describe people who get all "Well I don't identify as cis you don't get to call me that."

In conclusion to this section: "Thus, in so far as most plants are intersex, most fungi have multiple sexes, many species transsex, and bacteria completely defy notions of sexual difference, this means that the majority of living organisms on this planet would make little sense of the human classification of two sexes, and certainly less sense of a critique of transsex based upon a conceptual separation of nature and culture." <3 <3 <3 <3

"To the ethologist, the coral goby fish experiences life as a female coral goby when she reproduces. To suggest that the coral goby is only female if and when she reproduces would be the equivalent of reducing human experiences of womanhood to sexual reproduction, something feminist scholars and activists have argued against for over a century." <3 <3 <3 <3 <# <3 <3 <3< 3< 3< 3<#<3<#<3<3<3<#<#,#<3<#<3<#
Seriously, after the last few papers, this isn't just "Yes, I agree," it's reached the point in my head of "oh thank god someone out there is standing up for me." I mean, I know there are other people out there doing this who just aren't in this collection of readings, but daaaaaamn.

"It might be counter-argued that sex dimorphism is a characteristic of higher life forms and sex diversity is reserved for lower organisms. To my mind, this hierarchical taxonomy invokes the worst kind of anthropomorphism... the almost complete hegemony of ethology and sociobiology within neoDarwinism has asserted a rigid separation between human and nonhuman organisms, not only of degree but of kind." Wait, symbolic communication by honeybees? (Griffin, quoted in Margulis and Sagan, 1995) --- have to track that down. "Furthermore, the homogenization of nonhuman animals shifts attention away from contemplating the possible similarities of organisms, and more disturbingly, the possible 'superiority' of nonhuman organisms in certain respects." Hird goes ahead and goes there: Is two sexes actually better, evolutionarily? Wouldn't a broader variety of sexual and reproductive options actually increase diversity? A quote from Fausto-Sterling: "multicellularity provided evolutionary advantages and sex came along for the ride."

"The specific regulation of technology inthe case of transsex becomes a more transparently moral exercise" when Hird takes a description of GRS and points out that all the same language could be used to describe heart surgery or healing a burn victim. AUTHOR used Rhetoric! It's super effective! She also points out that reproductive technology exists in, say, termites. Wow. She pokes at queer theory, too, saying that maybe it's not that barnacles are polyandrous as distinct from the assumption of monogamy, but that many of us are insufficiently barnaclish. "Perhaps given its prevalence amongst living matter, we should be concerned with how infrequently humans transsex."

I... actually I want to go back to the "blah blah queering the idea of queer and the idea of theory my peniqueer is bigger than yours" paper now with this lens of "maybe our being all heterosexual and monogamous is the thing that's queer on the scale of all species; being perverse is no big thing." Also I am in an amazingly good mood now.



[0] The first comment to this hugely problematic blog post is another thing Kate Bornstein should kindly not do.

Comments

[rivenwanderer]

Neat stuff! Nature is full of strange-to-me lifecycles, like Symbion pandora. There was a panel I went to at Wiscon that was sort of about "why don't we see weirder sex and gender in sci fi?" but I didn't take notes on it and don't remember the recommendations (which were mostly fiction any and probably not useful to your current work).

[rax]

That life-form is amazing.

[tixagon]

This makes me very happy. Thank you for sharing it. :D

(also, the Platypus just got more awesome, which I didn't think was possible.)

[sixolet]

Ooh, neat. I feel like I should read that paper if it's in a register I know how to deal with (as in, sufficiently lay). I've picked up Amanda's copy of Evolution's Rainbow which makes some of the same arguments, but with too little rigor for my tastes.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

many animals have sex for pleasure

That one's my favorite fun fact. It makes me think of how (some) whales breach, and zoologists are like, "It is not known why whales breach. Perhaps it helps them herd their prey, or perhaps slapping themselves down on the water surface removes parasites from their skin." Well, how about 'cause they like it?!

This sounds like an awesome course, just gotta get that out there.

crepidula fornicata

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

I imagine that you must have heard of this, but it is too good to not pipe up with....the slipper shell snail! (which is the main study of one of the labs in my department). Lives in stacks attached to rocks and things. the ones on the top of the stack are male; the ones in the middle of the stack are intersex, and the ones on the bottom of the stack (which are also the oldest) are female. as the females age and die, and new males join the stack from the top, each snail ends up progressing from male to female.

Re: crepidula fornicata

[rax.livejournal.com]

I knew there were animals that changed sex as they aged, but didn't know the names of any! And now I do, thank you :)

[kelkyag]

I am amused that this is the first set of your notes that I was able to follow easily. I expect that says much about me.

"many animals practice forms of birth control through vaginal plugs, defecation, abortion through the ingestion of certain plants..."

Re-absorbtion of fetuses, eating their young or killing those of others, at least some (kangaroos, for one) have the ability to put a pregnancy "on hold" at an early point if circumstances are poor ...

Wait, symbolic communication by honeybees?

There's some data out there on the "dances" honeybees returning with nectar do to guide others members of the hive to where they were. At least as interpreted by humans, it's pretty abstract, though I'm rather fuzzy from what little I've read on how well we're interpreting.

Also I am in an amazingly good mood now.

Yay!

[q10.livejournal.com]

There's some data out there on the "dances" honeybees returning with nectar do to guide others members of the hive to where they were.

that's also my understanding. some basic overview can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication#Communication).

[eredien]

Basically, from what I understand, they signal the position of the sun with what vector or section of the hive they dance in, and something about the amount or type of pollen/flowers from the way they wriggle. Type "bee dance" or "bee wriggle" into google. There's a lot of research on this; I am suprised you didn't know all the stuff about reabsorbing fetuses in rabbits, etc. They recently also found by accident that cuttlefish have a tentacle language of sorts.

[sethg]

"Sexual behavior between flowers and various insects is so commonplace that it is rarely recognized as transspecies sexual activity."

Is this referring to pollination, or something else?

(Wow, if you imagine that the little busy bee is motivated by the apiary equivalent of lust, you can read this poem in a whole new light, eh?)

[rax.livejournal.com]

I believe it's referring to pollination, yes.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

"Kate Bornstein argues transpeople are not men or women" Kate Bornstein, do you think you could kindly not do that??

What I've read by and heard from Kate Bornstein (amittedly a long time ago - I saw her do a reading from "my gender workbook" when it was new) was that _Kate_Bornstein_ is not a man or a woman. Which is an entirely fair statement for Kate to make about herself. But of course this gets back to things you were saying in previous posts - people tend to generalize a lot from their own experience. I certainly found it wonderful to hear Kate say that as it validated my own experience. The idea that it is possible to be neither a man nor a woman is still radical (ridiculously so in my opinion). And at the time when I heard Kate talking about this I DID think it was true for everyone (I even wrote something about this once (http://plymouth.livejournal.com/798931.html)). But I'm pretty sure this was my immature distortion, not her saying it. Maybe her more recent work is more problematic?

And that comment by Kate? That seems to be very much Kate talking about Kate, which is what Kate does best. And is, I think, the most legitimate thing for Kate to talk about.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I think it's awesome when people aren't men or women and I'm often unsure about whether or not I want to claim such an identity; the best I've been able to come up with for myself is that being a woman is necessary but not sufficient. I think Kate Bornstein has done awesome work and written books that have helped a whole lot of people, and I'm glad that they helped you; I wish more people came out and said that they didn't feel like men or women. I also wish she wouldn't generalize, like you said. :) As far as the post goes, I think that the way she talks about herself in that post is very condescending, though, and sets herself up as someone who cannot be argued with:

"I'm old school, pal. I was taught butch and femme in the late 90s"

The late 1990s is not "old school" for butch and femme identities. The fifties would be "old school" for butch and femme identities. The late 1990s is "late to the party" for butch and femme identities.

"That's when I have to breathe, sit back and trust I've done my best to teach my children well."

Your... children? I dunno. I guess if I had more positive associations, I wouldn't find this quite so presumptuous. But this skeeved me out.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I guess I take both of those as just being Kate-style over-the top-camp (have you ever met her in person? she's a riot). But after I wrote the above comment I went back and read some of the other comments on that post and I think I have a better idea why her comment is problematic.

[sethg]

Once upon a time I was a copy editor for a company that published a bunch of telecommunications-related newsletters. Most of my job involved taking corporate press releases and rewriting them so they would sound like, well, newsletter articles instead of press releases. “XYZ Corporation, the world’s most innovative developer of foobar frobnicators” became “XYZ Corporation, a leading foobar frobnicator company”.

Perhaps as a result of this experience, every time I encounter marketing hyperbole, I am so good at rewriting it in my head—“the Web will fundamentally change the way we do business forever” becomes “the Web will lead to some interesting tweaks to the way we do business”—that when someone else reads the same sentence and says “WTF?! This is such overblown bullshit!”, I do a double-take and say “what’s the problem?”

[sethg]

“Parenting” is at the pinnacle of the revised hierarchy of needs! (Guess who took it upon themselves to make the revisions....)

[waywind.livejournal.com]

What a depressing pyramid! It says that if I'm not interested in having a mate or a baby, and if I don't care about what other people think of me, then I'm reduced to survival alone, a despicable condition. Clearly I am a dysfunctional caveman huddled in a dark lonesome cave, and if I ever come to my senses, I should run off and dominate some people and then have babies, like evo-psych says I should do!

More motivation for me to be an active rebel instead of just a procrastinator.

That reading does sound awesome

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Totally random and not at all theory-related comments: my latest favorite totally-unproven theory is that dolphins communicate in 3D, by emulating sonar signals. They've been able to identify recognizable repeating patterns in dolphin communication, but so far not in comprehensible ways. One of the dolphin people thinks that, basically, we need to at least come up with a model of a dolphin body's interpretation of sound before we can comprehend their language, which I think is pretty cool. I do so hope the theory ends up being right.

When I was an eight-year-old 4H kid I was very proud of my trans rooster (not that I knew the word "trans" at the time.) I don't remember his name, but some time after we had butchered the other roosters, the lowest bird on the pecking order one day stopped laying eggs, started crowing and was accepted by the hens as a rooster, as far as I could tell with no questions asked. It was one of these things I could pull out at fancy dinner parties to show city-folk grown ups that they didn't know everything after all :-)

Re: That reading does sound awesome

[waywind.livejournal.com]

"Totally random and not at all theory-related comments: my latest favorite totally-unproven theory is that dolphins communicate in 3D, by emulating sonar signals."

This was the basis of a science fiction novel called "A Deeper Sea," by Jablokov. It's explored in much detail. Jablokov did superb homework, better than I've ever seen in sci-fi. Kind of reactionary to romanticism, though... which turned me off even as I understood that it was necessary to treat the subject matter accurately.

[oceanstater.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying your class notes (the parts I can understand), although I'm wary of both misinterpreting what I think I understand and commenting, because I might be using a colloquial English word or phrase that academics have defined as having a specific, possibly significantly different meaning. (And God forbid I use the wrong semantics and someone jumps in to ~EDUCATE~ me.)

I have some thoughts that I am foolishly going to share anyhow. :) While I'm guessing that your transsomatechnics class surveys the history of the field, a lot of the authors you cite sound... awfully regressive and old-fashioned? The menstruation-focused nonsense, etc.

As a "lay genderhead" (great phrase if you coined that!) I thought that the distinction between sex and gender was increasingly common, even amongst people who are not genderheads. Is it possible to use the human sense of gender for a non-human being? Confusing the issue is that fact that sex and gender are still used as interchangeable terms, which makes Wikipedia's article on dichogamy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichogamy) amusing to me.

Well, if we get to use terms from biology, how about one of my favorites: polygamodioecious. :) It's a word from botany that mean that a species is mostly dioecious (having separate male and female individuals), but with some individuals being monoecious and possessing both male and female flowers. True fax: the state tree of Rhode Island is polygamodioecious!

Plant sexuality is way more interesting than animal sexuality.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I think the sex/gender distinction is increasingly common but they still overlap a lot in general usage. I think whether you can use human senses of gedner for non-human beings is sort of up for debate; I would say mostly no since gender is culturally defined, although there may be other lifeforms with other cultures that might have something like our gender. (There have been some primate studies that suggest this might not be too far off for them, in particular, that are cited in a Lorber paper called "Neither Nature Nor Nurture" that I don't have time to dig up further right now.)

Also I didn't know the red maple was the state tree of RI! Well, I'm sure I memorized it in second grade or something, but then forgot.

Plant sexuality is way more interesting than animal sexuality, but... plants. :P (And google says "lay genderhead" is just me, so thank you!)

[kiya]

28 kilosexes beats my previous snarky comment when I'm arguing with pagans who insist that two sexes is an intrinsic part of NAYCHOOR. ("Slime molds have thirteen sexes.")

May I quote your gonochoristic snark elsewhere? I know some folks who I think would profoundly appreciate it. (Among others, the people who blog at Questioning Transphobia.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

Sure! Feel free to pass it around.

[q10.livejournal.com]

you left out my favorite ridiculous mammalian sex determination system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_lemming#Sex_determination).

[kelkyag]

That paragraph seems ... not quite right. Gametes should have only one of a pair of chromosomes, so they should be X, Y, or X*, not XX*. X*Y females producing only X* ova, okay, I buy that, but why wouldn't XX* females produce X and X* ova? They'd still have 3:1 female:male offspring.

Amusing system, though.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i hadn't noticed the ‘the X*X and X*Y females are fertile but only produce XX* ova’ bit - that must be a typo. i originally read about this someplace else but that was an easy-to-find link. i don't remember which kinds of ova X*X females produce.

[eredien]

This is a fantastic discussion. Can I steal your description of "necessary but not sufficient" re: gender? I don't know if I'd ever heard it before and it works fantastically well for me.

Some thoughts:
Hird says that we should "Exercise caution when the behavior of nonhuman living organisms is cited in the service of discussions of human socio-cultural relations."

What did she do in her own work to allay this concern? I note this:
"Only a minority of feminist studies analyze how physical processes, and particularly nonhuman processes, might contribute to feminist concerns." and see that she still seems to think it's ok, even laudable, to use analysis of aimals to contribute to human concerns. I am not sure that I disagree with her, but there is still something about the word contribute that sits strangely with me--it's not like the animals are doing a ERB approved study with disclaimer waiver. I think I would be happier w/it were there more feminists, or people in general, talking about animals' concerns and if there were not already a prevailing idea that we can take what we need from animals, including information, as long as it helps us as humans. Another way of using animals w/rhetoric?

She points out that we tend to call animals "natural" when they do things we like and "animalistic" when they do things we don't.

We totally do this to people, too.

Anyway, Hird takes this down by pointing out that Wilson uncritically assumes that the phenomenological (menstruating) and corporeal (vagina) elements of a female-sexed must be paired, and that a vagina constructed unable to give birth is not a vagina at all.Wilson thinks it's socially and materially artificial.

See my recent blog post on gender bending tampax ads.

Also, I read a fantastic article on sex research w/birds recently and will link it here.

[eredien]

Here is the article about the albatrosses (and other animals). It's about 10 pages long.

It's called Can Animals Be Gay?, but rather than truly trying to answer that question, the article really talks about the language that scientists use (or the language that scientists skirt around) in attempting to describe animals' sexual behaviors for a human audience. I found it fascinating.

(Why title that article with such an inflammatory headline? Their main goal was to get people to read that interesting article, and if they'd titled it "scientists talk about how they portray animals in same-sex couples in scientific articles without anthropomorphizing," a lot fewer people would have read it. A brilliant choice on their part.)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

This is so awesome, it is rocking my mind.


Also I could, sometimes, rock the "neither man nor woman" thing, but that's mostly because I'm coming around to objecting to "man" and "woman," to advocate basically the death of gender-as-we-know-it.

[hebinekohime (from livejournal.com)]

I dunno, while I like the idea of postgenderism I think that categories of identity have to be opt-in features. I'm not convinced that gender as we know it is oppressive, nor that people should be forcibly removed from their old identifiers.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that philosophy, in any of its manifestations, tends to come into sharp conflict with the lived experiences of trans* people.

Now, there are a lot of important inquiries: how much we lump under the titles of "man" and "woman" (certainly whether or not we associate "masculinity" and "femininity" with those categories), or whether it is a useful distinction in organizing societies, or that there ought to be more than two options, or that there are people for whom neither category is of any importance, just for example. Fundamentally, though, any theory that attempts to erase gender entirely will run into the counter example: there are people for whom not being a member of the category of "woman", for trans women, or "man", for trans men, is impossible, regardless of the difficulties involved in getting there and despite socialization.

Personally, I'm currently with Feminist Hulk: "HULK QUESTION CULTURAL PRIMACY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, BUT RESPECT FREEDOM TO SELF-IDENTIFY IN CONVENTIONAL WAYS." It is possible even to accept a biological component to "gender" without accepting that it is the, or even a, dominant force in the shaping of identity and behavior (that is, just because someone is a "woman", it doesn't mean we know anything about her other than that she is a woman.)

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Clearly "as we know it" was insufficiently precise: I meant to express something pretty much like what you just said. Thank you for the elaboration and the correction.

[bookofjude.livejournal.com]

I found this fascinating and want to reread it again later.

[baniszew.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Isabella Rosselini's Green Porno series? It's this amazing collection of short films about animal sex, done with fantastic costumes and puppets. Season 2 (the one about sea life) is the best, and it includes things like the barnacles.

http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/video/