Author: Trans Kids Should Be Free To Change Sex #TYT

Andrea Long Chu argues that kids should be able to get permanant sexchange therapies. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks. | Your Support is Crucial to the Show

Get the Progressive battle plan

Watch TYT LIVE on weekdays 68 pm ET.

Read more HERE

"One often hears today that gender is a social construct. The idea is sometimes credited to the book Gender Trouble, published in 1990 by a handsome young philosopher named Judith Butler. In fact, sociologists began thinking of gender as a social achievement distinct from sex as early as the 1960s. What Butler proposed was more radical: that the repeated citation of gender norms — things like wearing heels or drinking Scotch — produced the illusion of a biological sex just waiting to be infused with meaning. For Butler, gender was performative, a term they borrowed from the philosophy of language, where it referred to sentences that seem to do things: “I promise,” for instance, a phrase that literally makes a promise. Gender, too, was a kind of promise — “It’s a girl” — one that, because it was not anchored in biological sex, had to be constantly reaffirmed through performative acts, thus allowing the dominant norms to be renegotiated or even subverted. Butler’s example was drag performance, which, by exaggerating the normal rules of gender, acted as an allegory for the way everyone performed gender every day.

These ideas were tremendously influential in the formation of gender studies. But two principal criticisms of Butler soon arose. The first was that they had effectively denied the reality of biological sex; after all, there was a big difference between a drag queen and your average woman. The second was that Butler had made gender sound like something you could voluntarily opt into. Butler would spend the better part of their career trying to acknowledge the materiality of sex — even as they downplayed its relevance — while fending off the idea that gender could be assumed through a spontaneous act of will. It was not as if, they wrote, one simply “woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night.”"

***

The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET.

Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks▶

SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE☞

📬 Newsletters

If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network:

The Watchlist

Indisputable with Dr. Rashad Richey

Unbossed with Nina Turner

The Damage Report ▶

TYT Sports ▶

The Conversation ▶

TYT Investigates ▶

#TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews

240314__TB02TransKids