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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
To Dysphoria, or Not to Dysphoria
If we reconsider, the inclusion of these categories, here are some authors and titles that might be helpful.
Trans-Theory:
Judith Halberstam. Female Masculinity
Viviane K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People
Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Pat Califia. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism
Holly Devor. FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society
Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors
Leslie Feinberg. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
Intersex Theory:
excerpts from: Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions
By Judith Kegan Gardiner
Sharon E Preves- Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self
As Nature Made Him (John Colapinto)
Susan Stryker Readings:
When we think of ourselves, I feel like it is pretty safe to assume that we think of ourselves as constantly changing and growing. For trans-people, we are similar in that we see ourselves as changing, but our goals are sometimes more physical and have a dysphoric depth that goes beyond the average self-critique. In addition, I think that perhaps far to often, we think that we are unfinished works, and that changing ourselves physically by taking hormones, or cutting of or adding parts on to our bodies will solve our problems. Nevertheless, trans-people can never just be, and if we do decide to go through with physical transformations, we struggle with the communities with whom we are allowed to identify ourselves. If we once identified with the queer community, do we stay close to them and bare with the endless commentaries about why we decided to turn to the “dark side”? or do we cut our ties with the queer community and live heteronormative lives?
In Stryker’s essay on Frankenstein she writes “I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”
Stryker, talks about the scars that mark her body, and describes a trans-body as “unnatural”. Well, I agree, our bodies are different, they are “unnatural” to the everyday eye. Trannies love when they can “pass” as the gender they identify as. For many trans people, including myself, we regress into the adolecents and children we once were, with our young insecurities and develop “fitting in” politics all over again. I know that it is human nature for our insides to run a frenzy within the walls of our body.
The hardest part to reconcile is the scientific explanations for trans-identity. Scientists report of the gray matter in our brain and diagnose us with gender dysphoria, so that we can go on our hormones faster and then choose the right gender, it only becomes a problem when we want to identify as trans, not male or female. In a world of back and white, it often becomes too hard to acknowledge yourself standing somewhere in a shade of gray.