Reviving the Newsletter
Regular Posts to Begin Next Sunday
Hello everyone,
It has been a long hiatus, but I have decided, after some thought, to revive this newsletter. It is a decision in regards to which I have had some concerns, primarily the prevalence of transphobia on this platform owing to Substack’s highly problematic early courting of Jesse Singal, whose sole writerly achievement seems to be an article designed to exploit the fears and prejudices of cisgender parents. For some time, I toyed with the possibility of writing a response to his demagogic work, but have decided that he is not worth the effort. The time and energy that would go into writing a refutation of his pseudo-sceintifically veiled prejudice would only distract from the better work of affirmatively being that of which he is terrified. And make no mistake, it is clear that, on an ontological level, he is afraid of transgender being insofar as said being makes uncanny the taken-for-granted status of gender as inborn, binary, and immutable, and therefore he finds it necessary to assert just another tired variation of the “it’s a phase” argument to reassure his misplaced sense of ontological stability. But thankfully other writers have long since taken up the work of refuting him factually, among them Emily Gorcenski—whose scholarly thoroughness puts Singal to shame—as well as the GLAAD Accountability Project and Mey Rude of The Advocate. That said, if any of his supporters show up here in the comments, as they have in the past and may well in the future, they will be summarily removed, banned, and have their emails recorded—because whatever they may say about free speech, their goal is its opposite.
Over the next several weeks, I will be posting essays and parts of essays from my work as a master’s student, as well as providing links to some of my other publications. Each newsletter will be published on Sunday morning, not out of any deliberate irreligiosity but on account of that time usually being a lull in the news cycle. As I finish essays this semester and receive comments on them from professors, they will also be added here, although they may have to be abridged or broken into parts due to length. The next two I have planned to publish are my essays from courses last semester in Normativity and Trans Theory, and investigate some of the implications of the idea of forgetting, not in the normal sense in which we forget past moments of our lives, but in a philosophical sense of not noticing what is hyper-present, or always too easily taken-for-granted. Both essays apply the concept to our sense of the normal and through it to questions of Queer experience. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a long practice that will not stop at academic essays but will also include writing on topical subjects.
Your Transgender Gadfly,
Rose Pelham