on the inaccuracy of u.s. folks using the term "american"

[rkt]

i know.. no excuse....

but what will the WWII vets think if we drop the "american" and stick to a term more accureate? after all, germans call themselves european!11!


naturally, courtesy of that one community.


ETA: i'm critiquing the comments. not the OP.

Comments

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

I don't know why you torture yourself so with that community.

And you missed a really awesome lecture Thursday. It was a critique of feminist critiques of plastic surgery and from there went postie... I know you're not exactly a Foucauldian or a Deluzian, but it was a nice critique of feminist critics anyway.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

because it's there and i generally have problems controlling my mental masochism.

clags is giving adrienne rich an award next friday. and they're serving free wine and cheese.

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

Yes, Dean will be back in town for it. I feel fancy being in the same class as Dean, though Dean still smells like a woman, so I call Dean Dean instead of using pronouns because of the conflict between Dean's identity and Dean's pheromones.
Dean Spade, the famous tranny lawyer activist person.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

eh? it's one thing to use a person's name because you don't know/aren't sure which pronoun/s the person prefers, or because the name itself is just what the person in qustion prefers, but to utilize a name because your perception of the person's pheremones reads as 'female'? that's some transphobic shit.

http://www.makezine.org/letter3.html

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

It's because I often fuck up the pronouns of trans people who I still percieve on a pre-conscious level to be female (or male, which ev). It's not transphobic, it's that they still smell one gender or the other (surgery doesn't change phermonal makeup, nor does horomones). Not everyone who is trans (hell, not everyone who isn't trans) distinctly smells like one gender or the other, but in particular, there are a few who I consistantly fuck up their prefered pronouns because they do and it's opposite to their presentation. I'd rather just degender in a way by using first name than fuck up by using wrong gender.

why the hostility?

[rkt.livejournal.com]

what hostility?
your statements above don't entirely allign with what you've said in person.
furthermore, the written word, where proofreading before broadcasting a statement is possible, is generally an easy way to correct your phermonal prejudice, rather than continuing it.

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

PS. Dean is really annoying in person. Smart, but stuck up about it in a way that grates on me. Plus because of the star status Dean has, attention went from the class to Dean, like Dean's opinions are more important than any of ours, and that Dean's experience and the fact that the class is so below that level should make us humble or something.

If I ever got a coming out letter like that I"d be offended at how stupid the audience is made to be. I didn't use the word transgendered because I thought you'd be confused. Gee. Thanks for devaluing my ability to think and have a reasonable discussion just in case I did get confused.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

maybe it's the instructor you should be taking issue wiht. i've been in seminars with dean and have never experienced the special treatment or the show off-ness.

as far as the letter goes, it wasn't written to you. it was written to someone from an entirely different class, academic, and experiential background. i've had many discussions regarding the word "transgendered" with people who needed handholding due to their prior and current confusions.

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

Thats my point, discussions, not letters that take a holy than thou art approach. If my kid or friend or whoever came to me and said "I now identify as blahblahblah" I would want to talk about it, not get some letter that assumes I know nothing about whatever blahblahblah is.

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

Oh and Dean is doing this thing, a law professorship at UC Berkley, for most of the semester. So instead of waiting until the end of class to talk to the prof about taking the class anyway and having someone mail the taped lectures out to California, Dean decides to do this in the middle of class on the first day when the Prof is taking roll and she had already said specifically "If you are not registered or need to talk to me about any accomodations, talk to me after class". Patricia does NOT like to have her way interupted and was quite annoyed, until she realized who Dean was and then got gushy and lost her place. My situation was a lot more precarious, but did I call attention to it during class? Other people had other issues, too, but did they call attention to it during class? No. But Dean? Oh, well, Dean's special, so of course Dean gets to talk about the fancy professorship and how fancy it is to be a fancy legal analyst... that just grates on me and immediately turns me off to people.
Tranny or not, Dean bugs the shit out of me, on the ego alone.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

i've never seen such possessiveness of the term "american" outside of certain right/fundie/etc. circles. i know i should stay away, but sometimes i just cant help myself.

it seems to go through cycles and is back in a place it was a long time ago.

[amyannosu.livejournal.com]

I don't see anything wrong with what she said. But from my end, it's more the whole "We're Americans" while ignoring the fact that we are just a huge melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. I dunno, I've become very un-patriotic lately.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

it's the commenters i'm taking issue with.

as an aside, i'd say it's more closely a salad, than a melting pot. that's a separate discussion though....