Judith Butler | Performativity and David Reimer

My first defence of Butler comes on page 69 of the PDF where the botched operation to remove a problematic foreskin which thwarts urination is described. It wasn’t until a whole year after the botched operation that the parents had watched TV and encounter John Money, who offered the chance for child sex reassignment that would then lead to socialisation as a gender different from the one originally assigned at birth.

If gender is performative and we learn scripts from an early age, some I have bought up before, for instance:

The idea that mimesis is an ‘automatic’ tendency present in humans from birth is supported by the pioneering work of psychologists Meltzoff and Moore (1985), who studied newborn babies of even a few hours old mimicking movements of tongue and lips.

Further evidence comes from studies of the ‘delayed imitation paradigm’ featuring infants of a few months old (Meltzoff and Moore 1999; Bauer et al. 2000; Nelson 2007:94). Here the psychologist shows a child, usually with a number of repetitions, a series of three- or four-step action sequences, e.g., moving some toys in a particular order. Some weeks or months later, the baby is brought back and given the same toys to play with. Nine month old children tend to repeat some part of a sequence they were shown a month ago. And children who were 20 months old at the start of the experiment can still repeat a sequence two years later. It seems unlikely that any conscious recall is involved here: these do seem to be cases of ‘implicit memory’, of unconsciously imitated patterns becoming incorporated over time.

One year is well within the time frame as these experiments have shown for David to have embodied being a boy/male/masculine, as the script performance was not introduced until after the surgery.

Wtf! Jeez! That sounds completely demented.

Could you tell me more? I think these things are like a foreign language to me. I think I may be viewing people as objects.

I have a really interesting question for you.

It might sound childish but isn’t supposed to be.

I often hear trans people or whatever, or some gay people even saying they are something else inside than what they were born as.

So in the view of many people, are they actually really talking about some kind of substantial ghost image figure that is not matching up with their physical body?

Are they talking about spirits? They seriously seem to be talking about spirits or ghosts much of the time.

That they are a ghost woman in a man’s body.

Now I have a ghost too in this case, meaning a feeling of having something inside which is not perhaps totally visible but only kind of comes through.

The thing is, for all that is often associated with men and women, the thing inside of me does not seem so focused on either, in fact it seems to reject anything very strongly asdociated with humanity at all.

Form seems to be the last thing of interest to this thing, it is more interested in something like transformation or destruction or change.

I have since I was little been interested in characters like Venom, or the shapeshifting Hroa of Sauron.

In both cases though their manifestations were Weaponized, they were able to change based on the effect they wanted to have on things in order to cause something, to give a message in specific ways.

This seems to resemble talk of demons taking various forms, then talk of Gods, and finally, talk of God who is said to take on some forms or by others, all forms whatsoever, imaginary or otherwise, controlling the bodies of all things, in order to cause an undeniable impact and message to be delivered to everything else and itself.
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The question? If people can be girls with penises, can I be a demon?

The answers: sure, why not? Or No, demons can only be what I say they are or how I interpret an official seeming book like a dictionary.

Haha, I just wondered if gender is as abstract as that or can be or what exactly any of it refers to.

I thought its just a thing people say, that a male is a person with a penis generally, a female with a vagina or womb for womb-man.

I thought women typically have menstrual periods and bleed out of their vaginas and men generally are born with some sort of testacles and penises and both can be identified by certain traits that are biological.

Then there are cases of some kind of strange or unusual things, but also those who state that they are something else inside that doesn’t match up with their birth genitals or sexual or biological traits, but may at times match up with their sexual preferences or something, like people saying “I am a hetero sexual woman inside so I am attracted to the opposite sex”.

I have met many people who are homosexual who seemed to have an incident where they were molested by family members or sometimes others but there isca lot of resistance as well to the idea of something happening like that and many say they were very young while they first felt different.

In my case, I don’t recall having any real attraction to anything except I’ve heard stories of me being a very little infant or baby and getting aroused seeing I like big butts and I can not lie.

I masturbated or touched myself for the first time maybe to movies on cable channels withbsex scenes when I was 11 and no sperm came out, sperm first came out at 13 when someone told me to check out Warez which had tons of naked stuff when I first got a PC computer after years of having a mostly useless seeming macintosh experience. I think the picture in that case may have been a fake one with Britney Spears head on a spread legs vagina woman. I strongly dislike Britney Spears face so its funny if its that one.

Now of interest is getting more bang for your buck by having pornography with men who look like women with breasts but have kept their penises and have sex with women. That way you get 4 breasts and a penis to empathize with. The penis is important because it is the thing a penis wielder lives vicariously through in the pornographic experience in many cases.

The psychology involved with pornography is really fascinating to me and the cultural differences and interests in various genres or repeated traits or order of things.

Form seems to be the last thing of interest to this thing, it is more interested in something like transformation or destruction or change.

As @”thetrizzard” put it to me earlier –

It’s only essential in the sense that ‘forms’ have become stable over time giving the appearance of being fixed when this is clearly not the case in reality…all is process, in flux