Read on Twitter
. @bathr0bespierre is a friend & specifically a friend i made last year who wound up being an important early person in my transition process. i've also been adjacent to the editorial process on her n+1 piece & advocated for it. so for everyone who's like, "n+1 needs a
trans editor," you can actually blame me, i'm the trans editor (newly on the ed board--i guess this is my announcement haha). i think there are a lot of great things abt this piece. the early memoir section sounds like nabokov & is dope. the piece also includes a fascinating
synthesis of work in the history of medicine that is way more complicated than some vague gesture of "calling things neoliberal." it's also one of the most serious engagements i've seen with @andrealongchu's work (who is on a well-deserved break from twitter).
there's an irony on the attacks on danielle in this regard: andrea got yelled at for her nyt piece arguing that trans ppl deserve access to trans medicine even if they acknowledge an abject relationship to medical transition. danielle, who's been deeply influenced by alc's work,
raises questions abt that piece in her own essay, but they're not the familiar ones; instead, she suggests that alc positions trans med access in a kind of ethical vacuum that overlooks the way trans (and all) medical care in the US is administered—ie, via our life-destroying
healthcare system—& much of the piece is a thorough attempt to historicize the regime under which patients are made responsible for their own care. many ppl told andrea she was obsessing abt her individual neuroses at the expense of other trans ppl's care; many are now telling
danielle she is being flippant abt experiences like andrea's. i'm actually not sure there's so much a full-fledged disagreement btw these thinkers as a difference in emphasis. it's axiomatic in dc's piece that trans ppl deserve trans-specific healthcare; it's axiomatic, too—
as plenty of trans ppl & partic trans sex workers have said (tho dc shd have cited more of them)—that the distinction btw trans & cosmetic medical procedures *as medical procedures* is abt who & what they're for, & that even this distinction sometimes feel hazy for those of us
who undergo such procedures. the intervention of the piece is not to dispute or originate either of these points, but to argue instead that *when healthcare is treated as a commodity, the burden is placed on patients to justify why their surgery is the real one, the good one,
the necessary one.* she takes, in a sense, a forking path from andrea's argument: instead of saying, "all trans ppl shd be able to get their meds covered on demand, regardless of their affective relationship to those meds," she is questioning the stakes of shifting that burden
of proof to patients, period. what if medicine was decommodified so that the stakes of asserting identity in order to receive care were much lower, bc care was abundant? & what questions abt allocation wd come up in the maintenance of such a system?
i think these are great qs, tho the piece is often tortured in its approach to them. imo some of that torture actually comes from the attempt to do this utopian imagining w an implied horizon of socialized medicine in a still-capitalist society, & thus one still obsessed with
redistributive tradeoffs (my surgery is your waiting list). i hear in it the madness of a would-be communist trying to soberly imagine how we're going to make things work when we all get cabinet posts in the bernie administration--i remember the madness well! anyway, i think
that's one issue w the piece, & there are others, but i simply don't see it as transphobic.
that said: @HarronWawker wrote a thread i found really helpful in thinking abt how, even if not transphobic in general, it may still be transmisogynystic in the way it
that said: @HarronWawker wrote a thread i found really helpful in thinking abt how, even if not transphobic in general, it may still be transmisogynystic in the way it
elides the experiences of trans and cis women, from the meaning of beauty standards to the seeking of medical care. i'll let harron's thread do the rest of the talking. https://twitter.com/HarronWawker/status/1275989167563030528?s=20
