Baudrillard is cissexist

Nelson 15. Maggie, writer, The Argonauts, 2015, p. 80-81 edited for
ableist language
[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of
the symbolic as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal powerall of which cannot
help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it. Given
that one-third of American families are currently headed by single mothers (the census doesnt even ask
about two mothers or any other forms of kinshipif there is anyone in the house called mother and no
father, then your household counts as single mother), youd think the symbolic order would be showing a

For a more disorienting take

on the topic, I recommend Jean Baudrillards The Final Solution, in which
Baudrillard argues that assisted forms of reproduction (donor insemination, surrogacy,
IVF, etc.), along with the use of contraception, herald the suicide of our species,
insofar as they detach reproduction from sex, thus turning us from mortal,
sexed beings into clone-like messengers of an impossible immortality. Socalled artificial insemination, Baudrillard argues, is linked with the abolition
of everything within us that is human, all too human: our desires, our
deficiencies, our neuroses, our dreams, our disabilities, our viruses, our
lunacies, our unconscious and even our sexualityall the features which
make us specific living beings. Honestly I find it more embarrassing than
enraging to read Baudrillard, iek, Badiou, and other revered philosophers
of the day pontificating on how we might save ourselves from the
humanity-annihilating threat of the turkey baster (which no one uses, by the
way; the preferred tool is an oral syringe) in order to protect the fate of this
endangered sexed being. And by sexed, make no mistake: they
mean one of two options. Heres iek, describing the type of sexuality
that would fit an evil world: In December 2006 the New York City authorities declared that
few more dents by now. But Kristeva is not alone in her hyperbole.

the right to chose ones gender (and so, if necessary, to have the sex change operation performed) is one
of the inalienable human rights the

ultimate Difference, the transcendental

difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something
open to manipulation. Masturbathon is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered
subject. Fatally estranged from the transcendental difference that grounds
human identity, the transgendered subject is barely human,
condemned forever to idiotic masturbatory enjoyment in lieu of
the true love that renders us human. For, as iek holdsin homage to
Badiouit is love, the encounter of the Two, which transubstantiates the
idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper. These are the voices
that pass for radicality in our times. Let us leave them to their love, their
event proper.

**Bonus Baudrillard is transphobic stuff**

Baudrillard essentializes trans bodies by interpolating
metaphorical interpretations of gender and sex into his
framework of bodies fails to account for the inherent
instability of gender and the rupture of transness from
the symbolic
Sares 14
(James Sares is a writer for The Crimson. He completed his AB degree from Harvard University
in 2012. Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Numbers 12
http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/1/1-2/61.full.pdf cVs)

For Jean Baudrillard, transsexuality symbolizes alienating postmodern

transformations across economics, aesthetics, and politics. We are all
transsexuals symbolically, he argues, as the body is reduced to a mere canvas
on which the traffic of gendered signs is grafted or torn in antipolitical play
(2009: 23). Baudrillard understands the postmodern body as the extended site of
integration into networks and circuits of superficial political action and
cybernetic capitalist complicity. Similarly to Fredric Jameson, he employs the spatial
metaphors of depthlessness and flattening to emphasize the subjects reduction
to artifice. These metaphors reveal postmodern cultural production as
underpinned by the disruption of mere appearance from identity or inner
desire. The disruptive element of postmodern aesthetics underlies the
denaturalization of sign from referent, such that the technologies of gendered
and sexed transformation reveal the symbolic systems through which
categories of gender and sex gain meaning. Thus the modernist aesthetic is
put into crisis when the body, moving through time and space, is no longer
the site of a stable, natural, and objective referential truth of gender or sex,
despite the search for new relationalities constructed out of that very
ontological denaturalization (Stryker 1999: 17071). Baudrillards analysis falls into
unsubstantiated fatalism because he emphasizes meanings liquidation, while
postmodern aesthetics shifts the grounds for understanding meaning through
subjective rupture itself. The technologies and discourses of transsexuality
reveal the tensions of transforming the body and its adornments across ,
between, or outside the policed confines of a gender/sex binary while also being
reinscribed into multiple discourses of fractured referentiality. Some discourses
appeal to an unchanging sense of gender identity and relocate a truth of
gender to be revealed from within the body, while others emphasize dialectical movements of identity
and embodiment or otherwise challenge the ontologized terms of gender identity and desire. Tensions
among these multiple narratives are salient in the uneven ethical-material
topographies of corporeal transformation across which conflicts of late
capitalist modernity play out, including state and medical apparatuses and
other trans community spaces. In these spaces, the boundaries of authentic
transness are often policed by appeals to deep relationality between
materiality and inner desire or identity , regardless of its stasis or dynamism, against merely
superficial drag or the unfettered play of gendered signs. Yet all of these references to corporeal mutability
emerge from particular conceptual constellations that reveal sex/gender as regimes of coding and
producing bodies. These possibilities appear with the production of the subject as a form of rupture.

The

postmodern aesthetic must be itself denaturalized as a particular regime of

meaning-production rather than as meanings mere liquidation or as the
revelation of meanings true form. The multiple articulations of subjective
rupture become myth when concepts are ontologically essentialized rather
than revealed as historical and social productions and abstractions that
mediate each other. The denaturalization of both sex and gender as social
constructions offers possibilities to refigure embodiment, but the conceptual
disjunctures between materiality and symbolism , being and thinking, or body and desire
threaten to ontologize and reinscribe authenticity through rupture itself. The conceptual
mediation and latent unfolding of such categories denaturalizes rupture as a
tenuously policed construction between concepts: sexs referent as body
meets the bodys materiality as symbolic, aesthetic, and interpersonal;
genders referent as social action, role, or symbolism meets the materiality of
these processes produced out of and on to the body; identitys referent as
inner desire or mind meets these terms as interpersonal and corporeal. Appeals
to trans authenticity through statically constructed bounds of sex, gender identity, and gender
performance thus encounter the body as site and product of deep relationality and that relationalitys own
latent unraveling. The deployments and subversions of these ontological layerings reveal tensions in
ascribing through them authenticity of corporeality and embodiment. The production and unraveling of this
relationality constitutes the dialectic between nonconceptual materiality and its signification into concepts.

Baudrillards reduction of transsexuality to the symbolic realm presumes

appearance as domineering the essence of the subject, such that the subject
is hollowed of authentic content. Yet Baudrillard produces the very meaninglessness he
critiques by hypostatizing the concept of the subject as form of rupture without reflexive critique of its

He thus ignores, as Theodor Adorno emphasizes throughout

Negative Dialectics, the inadequacy of concepts in fully capturing the
nonconceptual experiences and materiality to which they refer. The referents of
historical and social construction.

concepts are irreducible to their conceptual signification, as concepts are abstracted moments of the

the very concepts of concept and

nonconceptual materiality pass into each other rather than reduce to each
other. Thus rather than being objective descriptions or symbolic reflections of
reality, concepts of gender, sex, and subjective rupture are deployed as
power-laced abstractions constituted through various discourses and
technologies. The struggle to produce meaning in the face of meanings own conceptual inadequacy
dialectic of meaning-production; in selfcritique,

and consequent mediated liquidation engenders political confrontation around life as somatic/technological

the deep political

questions about meaning thrive through these tensions: What is the very
nature of being gendered/sexed? Should sex and gender remain categories
through which to classify and produce bodies? How do uneven conditions of
structure and life as ethical question. Contrary to Baudrillards lamentations,

meaningproduction open possibilities for resistance, change, or integration into various political and
economic apparatuses? In imagining queered forms of labor, value, and materiality ,

it is necessary
to confront spatial metaphors of superficiality that continue to haunt analyses
of postmodernism. Thus far critical queer responses to the projects of Jameson and Baudrillard have
left these metaphors unchallenged, perhaps in fear of slipping back into modernist aesthetics of
authenticity based on the mimetic reproduction for subjectivity of a stable, material objectivity that lies

The tension between critique and appropriation

of postmodernism synthesizes, in Jack Halberstams work, as the reclamation of
superficiality, which he claims may not be a symptom of a diseased political
culture but a marvelously flat and uninhibited repudiation of the normativity
inherent in deep political projects (Halberstam 2005: 124). Halberstam explores twooutside the subject (Stryker 1999: 164).

dimensional transgender art as anticapitalist resistance but, in assuming the unidirectional gaze of the
surgeon or the artist, flattens the body to a mere mimetic canvas on which technologies operate. He thus
objectifies and alienates representations of the body from the shifting acts of embodiment and
performance that catalyze conflict over the very terms and alignments of identity, aesthetics, and politics.

it is necessary to reveal the competing metaphysics of

desire, ontological layering, and appeals to authenticity that enable dynamic
conflict over trans subjectivities. Moving forward, we do not need to
reclaim superficiality from such analysis as much as recognize that depth
has never left these struggles in the first place, manifesting instead in the
debate over superficiality itself.
Against such static analysis,

High theory fails to account for the intersectional nature

of body performativity that actualizes trans politics
Nagoshi and Brzuzy 10
(Julie L. Nagoshi, MSW, is a doctoral student in the School of Social Work, Arizona State
University. Stephan/ie Brzuzy, PhD, is chair of the Department of Social Work, College of Social
Sciences, Health, and Education, Xavier University. Transgender Theory: Embodying Research
and Practice Journal of Women and Social Work 25(4) 2010, cVs)
Transgender theory as a critique of queer theory developed from Roens (2001) ideas that transgenderism
included more than just an either/or conceptualization that accepted the fluidity of gender identity but

transgenderism also includes a

both/neither conceptualization of gender identity outside the male/female
binary, whereby transgenderism is seen as transgressing the gender binary ,
not necessarily as physically transitioning from one gender category to the
other. Monro (2000), in turn, argued for the need to understand the lived
experiences of transgenders and the limitations on the fluidity of gender
imposed by the body and biology. She pointed out that even the postmodernist
model fails to account for the sense of self or the impact of social structures
on the fluidity and plurality of gender expression . According to Connell and
Messerschmidt (2005, p. 851), the common social scientific reading of bodies as
objects of a process of social construction is now widely considered to be
inadequate. Bodies are involved more actively, more intimately, and more
intricately in social processes than theory has usually allowed. Bodies participate in
social action by delineating courses of social conduct the body is a participant in
generating social practice. An example of this view is Bornsteins (1994, p. 72) description of
transgender gender outlaws whose mere presence is often enough to make
people sick, that is, whose physical being is in itself a political statement.
There was thus a need for a theory of gender identity that would incorporate
both a fluid self-embodiment and a self-construction of identity that would
dynamically interact with this embodiment in the context of social
expectations and lived experiences. Tauchert (2002) agreed that an essentialist
view of gender as being based on the body (e.g., femaleness as derived from the potential
for pregnancy and childbirth) reinforces traditional stereotypes about gender and
gender roles. Nevertheless, she argued that conceptualizing gender as being solely a social construct
still retained the gender binary. Roen contended that

is also problematic in that it denies the sense of identity that comes from a body that continues to exist as
a seeming self between the social performances of gendered behaviors. The social constructivist approach
also undercuts any basis other than personal choice (self-construction) for feminine identity to counter the
political assumptions and consequent social dominance that are associated with masculinity. Tauschert
viewed the social constructivist approach as an assertion of the mental over the physical that is consistent
with the mindbody dualism that is the basis for Western thought, in which the mind is seen as being

a fuzzy gender
approach that recognizes the essential continuity between the body and the
mind, in which everything consists of shades of gray in moving between
more physical versus more mental aspects of gender. Such an approach still
allows for the recognition of the variations in gender identity and genderrelated behaviors and sexuality and acknowledgment of the range of
experiences, from physical or essentialist to wholly socially constructed, that
are associated with gender. Hirds (2002) history of theories of transsexuality similarly moved
separate from and dominant over the physical body. In contrast, she proposed

from essentialist to social constructivist to even more progressive ideas about the nature of gender
identity. Hird began with theories that were concerned with authenticity, in which transsexualism was
considered in the context of an assumed real, presumably biologically based and measurable, binary

Feminist theory spurred the shift

from an emphasis on authenticity to one based on performativity, in which
gender identity is seen as solely an expression of learned social behaviors
and cognitions (see, e.g., the previous discussion of Butlers, 1990, ideas). Performativity theories are
gender paradigm from which transsexuals were deviant.

based on the idea of symbolic interactionism, which challenges ideas of authenticity by not assuming that

The extent to which

transsexual individuals can pass as real men or women supports the
assertion that sex and gender do not naturally adhere to particular bodies.
personal identity is a stable, coherent, and morphologically based object.

Hird (2002, p. 578) proposed that transgender theories lead to notions of transgression, in which the
nature of the transsexual renders obsolete the modern relationship of sex and gender. Norton (1997, p.
144) stated that the m-t-f transgender who is attracted to men radically destabilizes the meaning of
heterosexuality, in that hir [sic] desire constitutes a homo-heterosexuality that deprives the regulatory

it is no longer
clear who it is that is desirous of whom, and in what kind of role relation.
Even more vertiginously, the pronominal function itself breaks down, since
the transgender antecedent is multivalent: it is not clear what s/he means.
Here, one sees that, of necessity, transgenderism must address the
intersectionality of gender and sexual identities.
homo/hetero binary of its force. Amidst the convolutions of transgender sexuality,