I know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.
Maggie NelsonThere's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.
Maggie Nelsonlabels can be fun! Some people are like, "As a card-carrying bear, where I also have a little bit of fairy in me..." People have fun collaging these; there's a fun people have with their identifications. The irony of them can be lost if you're just wholeheartedly anti-identitarian.
Maggie NelsonI have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.
Maggie NelsonOur kids just aren't living in the same generation, and if they're not introduced to gender identity as a problem, they won't internalize them as a problem. Which isn't to say they won't meet bigotry in their lives.
Maggie NelsonI love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.
Maggie Nelson