Great ideas. I love how this is being addressed.
I might have some bookclub ideas and could suggest some reading also on the whole body politic area and feminist reading on that. Been focusing on some of this stuff in my studies, especially on things like gender, body & biomedicine.
Thank you for bringing up the weight thing. I have been meaning to effort post about this for some time, but haven’t dared do it yet.
I think there is also an issue with a kind of trust in a linear progress of modernity when it comes to medical professionals and medical science that maybe comes from privilege. There are also all kinds of neoliberal self-control/self-betterment things that I have seen here that ignore the systems we live in and how they are different for non-normative bodies. These have made me very uncomfortable as a person with an uterus especially. The treatment fat bodies get in this world and from medical experts especially is systemically violent and the “issue” of fatness itself can be contested. For example NovoNordisk funds the researchers in o*esity and it’s just a huge thing of racism, pathriarchy and medical violence that leftists should do better with.
This for sure is one of the more unwelcoming things here for me personally.
Yeah it makes sense.
I also wonder if in a space like this the high number of maybes reflects the gender in flux that sort of isn’t either ready for a signifier or just fully refuses one, which I think my own identification is becoming. So there could be a lot of people in motion in there who might have at one time answered differently or might answer differently somewhere else.
Plus I think leftism itself helps people to reconsider things like gender so in leftist spaces I would assume people will be selecting more open categories.
Also techically I at least am one of those “has lived a life of a cis woman” who answered “maybe” types that might be able to voice that maybe only in a space like this. I am thinking of a kind of autigender thing and the way women mask and have to mask their identities.
What an eye opening read that answered a question I’ve had for years on why sucdem equality discourse driven countries, like the one I live in, have seemingly been so open to giving queer people marital rights and at the same time still heavily marginalizing them.