the change in your heart

[descieux]

"'transgender rage'...is generated by the subject's situation in a field governed by the unstable but indissoluable relationship between language and materiality, a situation in which language organizes and brings into signification matter that simultaneously eludes definitive representation and demands its own perpetual rearticulation in symbolic terms....what lit the fuse to my rage in the hospital delivery room...was the non-consensuality of the baby's gendering....authority seizes upon specific material qualities of the flesh...and reads it to enculturate the body. Gender attribution is compulsory...we choose neither our marks nor the meanings they carry...a gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity...."
--Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein