Assuming a Body

Just finished this for my queer psychology consultation group. It took us forever to get through, which was partially 2020, and partially this text. I'm not one of those people who have a low tolerance for post-modern academic writing: I read & loved Judith Butler in college. Butler was actually Salamon's dissertation adviser, and I don't want to be overly critical, but Salamon's writing is Butler-esque without the benefit of being, ya know, Butler. There are just so many textual flourishes that feel obfuscating instead of clarifying. I do think that Salamon's phenomenlogical point is a very important one: people like trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) fall into a error of wanting two incompatible things to be true at once, that gender is both a completely social construct and a fixed biological Truth (TERFs hold this untenable position by wanting cisgender women to break free of the wholly constructed category of “women” in a patriarchy, while denying that same freedom to transwomen because of their essentially and irrevocably “male” bodies - obviously this is a very harmful viewpoint for trans people, often in a concrete way, as well as intellectually sloppy). I appreciate her use of psychoanalytic texts to posit that all of us experience dysphoria about our bodies to some degree (like does anyone know anyone who is always 100% unsurprised and pleased by what they see in the mirror and/or photos/videos/audio of themselves), meaning that the trans experience, while of course unique in very important ways, is also part of a spectrum of human embodied experience. I just wish her arguments had been more clearly stated, and although this was never intended to be clinical reading, more closely linked to the lived experiences of trans people in a transphobic world, and more frequently and effectively using their voices to illuminate those experiences.