Valorization vs Role/Desire

Infesting the minds of the transgender left like a parasite, the spectre of the TERF looms as an obsession, a fetish of pain like the Jew or Bourgeoisie. Entire communities emerge in order to bravely refute things posted on the enemy’s forums, which are obsessively watched in a masochistic emotional-abuse ritual. The routine goes like this: the TERF position is that the transgender woman suffers from insufficient reality in their identity. The opposite position is that this is untrue, for reasons determined entirely by the social truth of the transgender woman’s validity, even if such has to be forced or coerced. Inherent in the position of both is an unspoken belief in the nature of identity, obsessed with some form of valorization. For the TERF, womanhood is formed not by any feminine characteristics, but by a shared racial-type oppression, fused onto the skin in the same way as blackness. For the transwoman, the same is true, but ultimately on shakier ground. Either the transwoman has to be admitted as being trans before being a woman or that this valorization is not the truth of identity (the correct option). Being of leftist dogma, the transgender left is left defending their incomplete valorization with a double facedness. Identity is historical and valorized, except in the case of transpeople, where identity is arbitrarily affirmed as being determined self-declaratively, with no other heuristic. The TERF is able to latch on as such a large figure because the TERF poses questions unable to be answered under a leftist framework, because the position of the TERF is the same belief on the nature of identity the transgender left holds on all other types of identities, the transgender left requiring a double-ideology, one system for gender and race/class/ability/etc.

With womanhood being enclosed by valorization, becoming-woman is made impossible. As long as identity is affirmed through being valorized, feminism wins, and queerness loses. Becoming-woman requires fundamentally that identity be based in desire. Not to say that mere desire to becoming-woman makes womanhood, but that identity is a product of processes, one of which may be becoming via desire. Such a problem is shown in the leftist confrontation of race. That identity of the white, with no sanction as a valorized identity, must be informed internally, a desire towards one’s own historical continuity. Identity is only permitted as a valorized grafting, a penitential branding earned by inborn suffering. Such ignores the reality of identity-formation. Identities emerge as signs as the conclusion of a larger system of meaning. In the feminist tale of the construction of “woman” for the control of reproduction, this is recognized. The same is seen in the construction of any other race or gender or sexuality, where the label or identity itself only comes after desire and role form it in greater social contexts. Essential femininity thus lies in the same place as all other essential characteristics, the performance of a role that creates an identity as the conclusion. Such a framework allows for desire and thus for becoming-woman in a way that the left will never be able to accomodate.