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

[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.