دانلود کتاب تغییر جنسیت

Gender—that ubiquitous and overdetermined concept, amorphous to the point of meaninglessness and thus in need of thoughtful delineation— changed for me one early spring evening in 2023. It’s changed a lot more since then. It needs to change further still. On the typically brisk and bright Northern California late afternoon of March 1, 2023, I’m leaving my office in the low-slung, earth-toned Mission-style building that houses Stanford University’s Humanities Center. I’m at Stanford for a year on a visiting fellowship, ostensibly to finish up a tome I’ve been working on for longer than I care to admit about transgender history in what’s now the United States from the colonial period to the present. The sun’s already started sinking toward the horizon as I walk across Santa Teresa Street to a quaint old turn-of-the-last-century wood-frame structure called the Fire Truck House. Once upon a time, that building actually housed fire trucks, but its second floor now houses QSpot, a campus center for trans and queer students. Established in 1971 by an outgrowth of the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian liberation movement called the Gay Academic Union, it’s one of the oldest continuously operating LGBTQ+ student centers in the world. A pleasant young woman wearing loose-fitting natural fabrics positions herself between me and the building’s interior as she greets me at the door. Before allowing me any farther, she asks for my name, to check it against the sheets on her clipboard to make sure I’m on the list. I am. “Oh, hello, Dr. Stryker, welcome!” she says, smiling, as I introduce myself. “Thanks for coming to our Community Care gathering tonight—it means a lot. There’s no program or presentations—we’ll just be hanging out in safe space together. There’s vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free catered Indian food upstairs, and nonalcoholic beverages. And we have trauma counselors on-site if you’re feeling triggered and need emotional support.” Something in my face must signal that I’m silently thinking curmudgeonly boomer-generation thoughts about the hypersensitivities of “kids today” and all their safe space and triggered lingo, because she rolls her eyes, nods knowingly, and says, “I know, I know, admin required us to have the trauma counselors.” That’s higher education today in a nutshell, I think as I tromp up the stairs: a glorified exercise in risk mitigation. Between a sometimes suffocating neoliberal culture within academic institutions that wants everything here to be safe, and disruptive political attacks from the outside that paint everything that happens here as dangerous, the space for truly free learning, thinking, and teaching feels squeezed to the vanishing point. I’d become disenchanted enough with all the headaches associated with being a full-time professor that I’d taken early retirement as soon as I could afford to, so that I could concentrate on the things I truly enjoy—there are many ways to teach and learn beyond the academy. But I’m thankful for the visiting fellowship I’ve been offered at Stanford, which is allowing me to focus solely on researching my book. Though I resist the “safe space” mentality, I do understand the need for it. The world’s become an increasingly abrasive place for many of us. Back in my younger days, most of the problems we trans folks faced had to do with malignant neglect from a world that couldn’t care less whether we lived or died, whenever it deigned to notice our existence. Now our antagonists are actively gunning for us (and the world mostly still couldn’t care less). Retreating into a nurturing conviviality behind closed doors can be one element of a survival strategy, however much I prefer to focus my attention on whatever danger hurtles directly toward me. The second floor of the Fire Truck House is a spacious room filled with bland institutional furniture. Couches are arranged into a conversation pit in the center, long tables with computer workstations line one wall, and a bookshelf filled with queer memoirs and novels and works of nonfiction is off in the corner. The place is packed—a couple of university staffers, a faculty member or two, but mostly students, dozens of them, all trans or queer or somehow adjacent thereto. They are trying to balance, in one hand, plates filled with fluffy mounds of basmati rice topped with bhindi masala or palak paneer, while holding cans of LaCroix sparkling water in the other as they nosh and mingle and chat. I load up my own dinner plate and say hello to a couple of colleagues, including the ones who invited me to come tonight, who introduce me to some of their students. As a visiting researcher with no teaching responsibilities, I’ve had very little contact with Stanford students. Many of those at QSpot tonight have never heard of me because they’re nineteen or twenty years old and the work I’m best known for I produced before they were born. I’m just another old-timer they might google later to learn why they’re supposed to care that one of their profs seems to think they should meet me. Some are a little older, in PhD programs in robotics or biomedical engineering or artificial intelligence—this is Stanford, after all —and they just happen to be trans or queer and don’t engage with the kind of humanities-oriented work I do; for them this is mostly just a campus networking opportunity with free food. But for others I’m a revelation. Some are only now coming out as trans or queer after only recently leaving their family’s home. It’s enough for them simply to know that an OG trans historian like me, or something called trans history, exists. Being a presence for them is a form of labor I still gladly undertake, however fraught the university environment can feel. Others are a little starstruck because they’ve read things that I’ve written, or they’ve seen films that I’ve made or been in. Those are the students eager to make a personal connection with someone who represents not just a living connection to the past, or who can offer studious insight into the roots of the present, but also the tangible possibility of long-term survival as an openly trans person in a world that’s increasingly hostile to our existence.