If you looked at a lot of literature of the transgendered community (and by the way, they should probably be termed transgendered and not transsexual), you will find the idea of an essential nature of being a man or a woman is not common. Read the works of Kate Bornstein, for an example. Or essays by Sandy Stone. Or any other countless writers and theorists from a transgendered perspective. Indeed, it is the not the transgendered people who so often make arguments of being trapped in the wrong body, but the medical establishment that regulates who get the surgery and who doesn't. In order to get the surgery, a trans person is often expected to recite a certain a narrative, to explain certain feelings. Often these have little to nothing to do with what the trans person feels or has experienced. Sandy Stone's classic essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A PostTranssexual Manifesto" (which can be here http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~sandy/empire-strikes-back ) details some of this.

On the other hand, the Mary Dalys and Janice Raymonds of the world seem completely fine with gender essentialism. Their problems with trans people seem even to be how it destabilizes our notions of gender.

Don't you think that jokes like these come across as more than a little homophobic? Or at least, to use a less common word, heteronormative?

That was a fascinating find!

I also wanted to suggest a book: Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. While I am not sure the second section of the book will interest you, the first has to. While published in 1987, it reveals a lot about what has driven our policies following 9/11. Most importantly, she connects torture with war. I think when we talk about our desire to be the biggest and the toughest and make others humble and submissive, we have to see the connection of our policies promoting torture with our war policies. We *know* that torture does not provide accurate or useful information. If anything, torture is most likely to provide inaccurate information that hurts our efforts, and yet we have this entire 24 culture promoting torture. We also have an administration that has clearly carried these policies out, and has fought for the right to continue to do so. Why? It is for exactly the same reason as with war, the need to humiliate an "enemy." The need to restore our strength following the attacks on 9/11.

Aravosis presents his article as having two main points. One is a tired game of pretending to be a truth-teller to the p.c. police. The sort of game played by someone who claims that everyone really agrees with him, but everyone is just too damned cowardly to say it. The other point is also tired, that we have to have a practical politics.

But the whole point of the article is one that I have seen too often in activist organizing, the honest to god belief that there is not enough justice to go around for everyone.

And if there isn't enough justice to go around for everyone, then we have to get our slice of the pie as quickly as possible. If there isn't enough justice to around for everyone, then others had better wait and try to get theirs on their own. Which is why our civil rights movement so often used sexism, and the suffragette movement so often used racism. And yes, they made gains. Suffragettes using ads about immigrant men having the right to vote and good white needed the vote so that we wouldn't be overwhelmed by the votes of the dark horde worked. But the feminist movement was fractured. And to this day both the civil rights movement and the feminist movement have been weakened by these splits. Peace overtures were made, people worked together. But distrust is still there, and the movements were actually weakened in the long term.

I think the most revealing moment in Aravosis article came when he compared to leaving out rights about gender identity to the Right's attempt to destroy abortion rights in this country. In a way I cannot agree more with this comparison. But somehow I think that resembling the Right and their cultural goons isn't very appealing to me. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of what a black woman, writing to white feminists about continued racism in the women's movement, had to say, "The master's tools can be never used to pull down the master's house."

And you are wrong, by the way. The Right isn't winning the culture wars. Oh, they know how to make a nice wedge issue and they know fear and they know how to win the occasional election cycle that way. But the liberal movement, both in the institutions we have built and in the way we have fought racism and sexism in this country. Our institutions still remain very popular, and rights have changed this country in fundamental ways. Isn't that why the Right started using fear of gay marriages, because the Southern Strategy of making whites fear African Americans have started paying lower dividends? We're winning, and we keep winning as long as we continue to demand justice for all.