{"id":839,"date":"2010-01-26T01:36:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-26T01:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/01\/839\/"},"modified":"2010-01-26T01:36:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-26T01:36:00","slug":"839","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2010\/01\/839.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

SHE APPEARS COMPOSED\/WELL, SHE IS, I SUPPOSE\/WHO CAN REALLY TELL?<\/span> Oh hi there! I\u2019m not super excited about debating transgendered identity issues on this blog, because it seems like it could easily become Well-Meaning Cisgendered Hour. And I\u2019m gay enough to kind of desperately dislike the thing where cute married Catholics debate our actual personal lives. Basically no matter how humble and philosophically open the participants are, they also always come across as self-absorbed. So while I\u2019m reading every email I get about the Jay Prosser<\/a> posts, and will reply to them (bc email seems even more tentative and one-squid\u2019s-opinion than an already-tentative public post), I probably won\u2019t post them if they are taking issue with transgendered identity. It\u2019s just\u2026 not my place, I think, to do that kind of \u201cdancing with myself\u201d dialogue.<\/p>\n

On another tentacle, though, a reader did bring up a point I think other people might also have wondered about. And since he\u2019s batting me<\/span> around because of one of my personal hobbyhorses, rather than e.g. Prosser, I shall reply!<\/p>\n

Thus, my anonyreader<\/span>:<\/p>\n

The one question I do feel competent to raise about your take is that I *think* that in stuff you\u2019ve written elsewhere (e.g. against \u201csincerism<\/a>\u201c) you\u2019ve expressed considerable skepticism about the accuracy or presumptive validity of people\u2019s self-understanding, raised the possibility they may be unreliable narrators of their own lives etc. (And even if we \u201ccome to ourselves\u201d in the Church and then authentically and reliably recognize who we always truly were, it won\u2019t necessarily be fully consistent with our best preconversion guesses of what that might be, right? So if we didn\u2019t really know what it would be like until we got there, maybe it\u2019s a good thing we just got dunked in water w\/ no scalpels involved?) So I would wonder what\u2019s different or special about someone\u2019s sense of their \u201cexperienced sex\u201d (when at apparent variance with the anatomy they seem to have) that would make it privileged and reliable and a basis for undergoing surgery or similar intervention, rather than simply a particular and admittedly peculiar instance of the sort of persistent self-deception we know humans are sometimes prone to. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And my reply<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Thanks!<\/p>\n

No, I think a) my anti-sincerism shtik is a stance, a caution, a reaction against certain kinds of \u201cyou can only ever speak in one genre\u201d therapeutic stuff. And transgendered people, perhaps because<\/span> they\u2019re under so much pressure to conform their narratives to a really rigid psychoanalysis-influenced pattern, tend IME to be pretty aware of the possibilities of different genres and different levels of irony, sincerity, self-revelation and self-protection. I should probably be more clear, in general, that the anti-sincerism thing isn\u2019t anti-the possibility of self-knowledge<\/span>\u2013I was a philosophy major!\u2013but more about expression.<\/p>\n

and b) therefore, I\u2019m actually not especially skeptical of people\u2019s ability to assess their own identities\/experiences unless there\u2019s a fairly clear conflict with something else I believe more firmly. I think people should be humbly open<\/span> to reinterpretation, but I don\u2019t, I think, approach most people\u2019s self-accounts with too<\/span> much of a hermeneutic of suspicion\u2026! Probably especially not when said people are neither coming from a privileged position [\u2026] nor, like, teenagers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This post<\/a> about objections to my Commonweal<\/span> piece on Gay Catholic Whatnot<\/a> might also be relevant.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SHE APPEARS COMPOSED\/WELL, SHE IS, I SUPPOSE\/WHO CAN REALLY TELL? Oh hi there! I\u2019m not super excited about debating transgendered identity issues on this blog, because it seems like it could easily become Well-Meaning Cisgendered Hour. And I\u2019m gay enough to kind of desperately dislike the thing where cute married Catholics debate our actual personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"SHE APPEARS COMPOSED\/WELL, SHE IS, I SUPPOSE\/WHO CAN REALLY TELL? Oh hi there! 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