Episode 37 - Living Your Truth (feat. Tamsin Kimoto)
Transcript
David: 0:06
Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán.
Ellie: 0:09
And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
Ellie: 0:14
who are also professors,
David: 0:15
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:19
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, I'm looking at the hashtag #liveyourtruth on Instagram right now. And it has 434,000 posts.
David: 0:40
Okay, give me a minute. Let me type it in. Live your truth. Um.
Ellie: 0:47
Look at you on Instagram, rare occurrence. Okay. So this hashtag #liveyourtruth, what are you seeing? Oh my gosh do you see this one yellow one, Repeat After Me? Click on it?
David: 0:59
Clicking on it. The one by Instagram user @shaidaeshraghi?
Ellie: 1:04
Yes. Okay.
David: It's a mantra: 1:06
Repeat after me. I'm allowed to do what's best for me, even if it upsets other people.
Ellie: 1:14
Yeah, and okay. I'm really interested in this caption.
Let's click on the caption: 1:18
living your truth isn't selfish, it's our most accurate measure of courage, prayer emoji, hashtag #livebold, hashtag #liveyourbestlife, hashtag #liveyourtruth, hashtag #speakup, hashtag #live. That's my favorite one. Um, okay. There's a few other hashtags including #lioness, but maybe we'll leave it at this. What do you think of Shaida's post?
David: 1:40
I don't know, this sounds like the sort of thing that people might post to justify potentially sociopathic behavior.
Ellie: 1:47
Yeah. And let's just paint the picture for our listeners too, although I'm sure you can find this yourself. It has 134 likes. The post has a sort of like bland abstract yellow background of like little hexagons and other yellow colors. So it's just like, as David said, it's kind of like mantra-like this brief word of wisdom.
Repeat after me: 2:06
I'm allowed to do what's best for me, even if it upsets other people. Okay. David, what kind of situations are you seeing where this admonition to live your truth is not going to be so great?
David: 2:17
So just from looking at this and at some of the other posts on Instagram, it seems as if people use it in connection to their everyday life and in connection to habits they might have that bother other people, but that they want to justify as part of their intrinsic way of being in the world, right? Like this is just who I am, don't expect me to change for other people, because that would be a capitulation of sorts.
Ellie: 2:44
Well, and I mean, I will say, like, this seems benign to good advice in a lot of situations, right? So like, if I'm speaking up against an injustice, the idea that I'm allowed to do what's best for me, even if it upsets other people, you know, like those in my workplace who are accepting this injustice without speaking up about it, could be really good. But then of course, on the other hand, what if I'm the one perpetuating the injustice. I could equally use this advice because I'm allowed to do what's best for me, even if it upsets other people.
David: 3:17
Yeah. So go back to the main list of live, hashtag #liveyourtruth entries.
Ellie: 3:23
Isn't this so fun, listeners, just overhearing two people look at Instagram posts that you cannot see. Okay. Go ahead. And let's paint the picture.
David: 3:32
Uh, it's like the new version of The Circle, where just people talk about social media. Um, so do you see the one with the pumpkin?
Ellie: 3:41
Oh, my God, of course there's one with pumpkins.
David: 3:43
I know it. So you click on it. It is-
Ellie: 3:45
I don't see it, but just give it me.
David: 3:47
It's below. It's like number 20, whatever. So it is by Rena Sauter from Edina, Minnesota.
Ellie: 3:54
Oh, I found it. I found it. It's like a graphic of pumpkins. You all, these aren't even real pumpkins. They're like little drawings of pumpkins.
David: 4:01
Yes, with a very light pink pastel background. And it says the only voice you need to worry about is your inner voice, which again, I think it's a sort of thing that if you're the person committing the injustice, you could claim to be living up to this.
Ellie: 4:18
Yeah. So this one doesn't even have to do so much with living your truth, although she did put the hashtag on there of course. So perhaps Rena's suggestion is that your inner voice is going to be the one that's guiding you to live your truth. And I have to say this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, who says, let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love. I might be like slightly butchering that quote, but it's one that's really stuck with me for a long time. I think it is stunningly beautiful. And it's helped guide me through some moments when I have been sort of inclined to live out what the Buddhist call a cocoon mind mentality of just like being cozy and not really letting myself be drawn by like something that I truly love, like writing, more than watching Netflix for yet another night in a row. Although, of course I like Netflix too. So anyway, that's like a very long winded way of saying I kind of agree with this. I don't know how I feel about the pumpkin graphics, also seems very random, but I guess it is fall.
David: 5:18
I know. So a lot of these have, I mean, for starters, the look is a little bit like Hallmark inspirational card, like the look and the aesthetic and the font. And so it seems like morsels of insight that, to be honest, are not developed and are vague enough that they allow people to project whatever they want on to them. So they're flexible enough that a lot of people can see themselves as potentially living out this mode of life.
Ellie: 5:51
Yeah, which is something we talked about in our astrology episode with a lot of horoscopes. I have to say, yeah, like I'm actually surprised there isn't more here coming from an LGBTQIA+ perspective, um, not that there's like a single- the whole point of that acronym is that there are more than one perspective But you know what I mean, from that, that taking that kind of lens because that's one thing that I really associate with living your truth. But I do see here that there are a number of posts about Demi Lovato. So a lot of pictures about Demi Lovato.
David: 6:22
Oh is thata who that is?
Ellie: 6:23
Yeah. Yeah. And Demi Lovato of course recently came out as non-binary. And so they're kind of becoming a queer icon now, after having spent an adolescence being sort of like the prototypical Disney star. So that's also part of it, right? I think there's this narrative that folks who are coming out about their gender and or sexuality are finally living their truth.
David: 6:47
Yeah. And I have to say a lot of this also reads very millennial-y to me because most of the people featured here would fall in the age bracket of millennials. But I am also noticing a lot of like pumpkin's and butterflies. I'm just missing, like the frappuccino mocha.
Ellie: 7:06
I'm living my truth by spending $7 on a super unhealthy tasty Starbucks drink.
David: 7:16
Today, we're asking, what does it mean to live your truth?
Ellie: 7:21
Is living your truth just a cheesy hashtag or a genuine path to personal liberation?
David: 7:27
Is there such a thing as authenticity?
Ellie: 7:30
We talk with philosopher and gender theorist Tamsin Kimoto about how living your truth has been used in trans theory and what its limits might be.
David: 7:40
For a lot of people, the phrase living your truth or the hashtag living your truth is appealing us a message for unabashedly expressing one's beliefs and values, especially when they go against a conventionally accepted set of norms. I am living my truth when I am who I am, when I say what I think and when I act in accordance to those beliefs, without holding myself back for other people, whether that be to fulfill their expectations or to avoid upsetting them.
Ellie: 8:21
Yeah, I think this is why the idea of living your truth is so appealing for folks who are coming out because a lot of people feel like it's a chance for them to finally unleash feelings that they've had for a long time and identity that they felt they had to hide, right.
David: 8:35
Yeah, and I love the word unleash cause I do imagine coming out as this like surge of energy that's just going to like drown, whoever is in it's path, um, I like the violence of it.
Ellie: 8:49
I mean, although for some, it might include getting leashed, coming out a to get leashed, right.
David: 8:56
Unleash the leash.
Ellie: 8:58
Uh.
David: 8:58
No, but, but you're right that for a lot of people in the queer community, which I will use here as a broad umbrella term for a lot of non traditional, you know, non-hetero normative or heterosexual sexualities. Yeah. The appeal of living your truth, I think is twofold. On the one hand, it's the focus on living. Truth is not something that you find or that you maybe invent, but it's something that's always already been there with you, in some part of you that now you get to let out or express, you get to embody it. So you get to proudly wear it on your sleeve. And the second thing that is appealing to it is the language of truth, right? That this is something that you know to be true about who you are. You have first person authority over any claims related to this part of your life that no other person can trump, right? No, mom, it is not just a phase. The hashtag Lady Gaga, I was born this way. Maybe we should start thinking about living your truth as Lady Gaga social theory,
Ellie: 10:06
Oh, my God.
David: 10:09
Uh, which is simply the idea that we are who we are and through the affirmation of our individuality, our truth, we attain the highest form of freedom, which is the freedom to be that which we are.
Ellie: 10:23
Yeah. And I think that the born this way view of living your truth has been appealing for a lot of people because it helps de-stigmatize non-normative genders and sexualities. If homosexuality, for instance, was for such a long time seen as perverse and therefore things like conversion therapy existed in order to make individuals conform to normative sexualities, the born this way narrative says, no, there is no way you can change me. This is who I am. And if this is who I am, that means that it is not morally wrong, right. And so it's a way of kind of normalizing through naturalizing a particular view of gender and or sexuality.
David: 11:02
Yeah. And I think the naturalizing language seems to be baked into the hashtag and not just the hashtag, but the epistemology around it, right.
Ellie: 11:11
Yeah, because this is not an episode to be clear about a hashtag. It is an episode about a concept that happens to have 434K posts on Instagram.
David: 11:19
And God knows how many on Twitter, um, and I myself have been drawn to that naturalizing maneuver, especially when I was young, right after I came out, which was my first year in college. So I was not really out out in high school. Some friends knew it, but then I decided that when I went to college, because it was this transitional period where I was moving away from home, I was going to be meeting new people, having new roommates, entirely new set of social relations, that it was the perfect moment for me to basically arrive at university and pretend like I was always already out. And so there, the rhetoric that I use to describe it to the people that met was biological and naturalist in that it did appeal to this notion that gay people are born gay people and that naturalness justifies the behavior. Totally overlooking maybe the problem of the is-ought binary or the is-ought dichotomy that we know in philosophy. But of course it has a lot of political power because it's something that is legible that other people understand. So it seems like we live in a world where there is this very reductive dichotomy where we can choose either a fully natural, like almost evolutionary, genetic account of sex and gender, where it was just there from the very beginning. Or you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum. And you present it as a choice that people are making that, in theory, they could be convinced to redirect if they were incentivized enough.
Ellie: 13:00
Yeah. Cause there's this false idea that if something is socially constructed, it's within the scope of an individual's choice. So I'm wondering David, because you said that you once bought into the born this way, live your truth narrative, but no longer do, where your thoughts are now, if you're seeing your sexuality differently?
David: 13:19
Yeah. So this is just as a heads up, I'm probably not going to be very clear because I think we lack the resources.
Ellie: 13:27
Don't tell listeners that, are going the episode off.
David: 13:30
No, I'm being honest. I'm being candid and-
Ellie: 13:33
Listeners. He's going to be super clear. Pretend you didn't say that.
David: 13:37
Yeah.
Ellie: 13:37
Ahead David.
David: 13:37
Let me just read this script. No, but I think the lack of clarity is not my fault. So I will say that I think it has to do with the lack of conceptual resources in our community for really talking about the social constructedness of sex and gender in a way that, again, doesn't lead down this slide into, well, therefore you can choose otherwise and I can convince my kid that it's a phase. So for me, and I have gotten into a lot of debates with other gay people, especially gay men for whom their liberation seems to be tied up with accepting a naturalized account of their sexuality, because one of the insights from Foucault that I incorporated into my self-understanding is Foucault's idea that the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s assumed that power is a purely repressive force that keeps you down. And that this source of resistance to power structures comes from within, by the liberation of some internal force of the subject that breaks through an existing power structure. And the problem with this is on the one hand that power is productive. It produces subjective identity.
Ellie: 15:00
Desires and sexual desires.
David: 15:02
Exactly. Power constructs the desiring subject, but more importantly, it presupposes that there is a genuine truth to the self that I have within me that I can access and that I can mobilize for the sake of liberation, and Foucault makes the claim that in fact, the notion that such a truth exists is itself a historically contingent fact.
Ellie: 15:26
And a somewhat dangerous one because the idea that we have this true self with these true desires that we just need to uncover can itself be really misleading and make us only legitimize those things that we can tie to some kind of inner self. So I think that the myth of the inner self is really the hinge point between this born this way narrative of coming out and the movement of living your truth more generally. Foucault, as you say David, is super suspicious of this idea of a true self that underlies our experience. And, you know, that's kind of where I am with the idea of living your truth. And I think one area that has really taken up this suspicion in super important ways in recent decades is in trans theory, where there are very active debates about whether being trans means that you were born this way and you were just assigned the wrong gender at birth, you're trapped in the wrong body. Or whether being trans actually means something pretty different, including the possibility that you may not have an essential gender, but are rather in a process of becoming a certain gender or resisting the very concept of gender identity altogether.
David: 16:42
And I'm really excited to hear what our guest today will have to say about. Dr. Tamsin Kimoto is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Goucher College, who works in the areas of women of color feminisms, queer and trans studies, health humanities, philosophy of race, and social and political philosophy. They are the author of various articles about trans identity and trans politics and one of the organizers for the seminal 2020 conference Thinking Trans, Trans Thinking.
Ellie: 17:40
We are so happy to have you on Overthink today. Welcome.
Tamsin: 17:46
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with y'all.
Ellie: 17:49
I feel like we all have a shared intellectual heritage by virtue of having the same dissertation director.
Tamsin: 17:56
Oh, actually. Yeah. I don't know if I ever told you this, David, but you were how Cindy recruited me when I was an undergrad, like convinced me to apply to Emory.
David: 18:05
Oh, really?
Tamsin: 18:06
Yeah.
Ellie: 18:07
What did she say?
Tamsin: 18:09
She's just like- she came to visit my school because my advisor was another former Emory grad. And like, she came to work with me on my senior thesis and I was working on issues of like race and identity. And she was so flattering in terms of talking about what you were doing in your work and like how I could totally work on those kinds of things at Emory.
Ellie: 18:32
Aw.
David: 18:32
Oh, that's wonderful.
Ellie: 18:34
David is an inspiration to us all. I definitely looked, I really looked up to him when we were in grad school too. Now I'm just like, oh, LOL. You're on.
David: 18:44
Oh, LOL. You're a mess. And I wish I had never idolized you. It just smokes and mirrors, smokes and mirrors.
Ellie: 18:52
No.
David: 18:53
That's my philosophy for academic life.
Ellie: 18:57
Smoke and mirrors. Um, well getting into some of the work that you do, Tamsin, I'm interested in what you think about the view that Talia Mae Bettcher calls the wrong body model. And according to Bettcher, contemporary philosopher, a lot of trans narratives in popular media, as well as in critical theory, follow this idea that one is born into the wrong body and only truly becomes who one is meant to be by transitioning into a body, namely of a gender that they were not originally assigned at birth. What do you think about this model of essentially being a different gender than the one that you were assigned at birth? And you've sort of always been that way, you were assigned the wrong body.
Tamsin: 19:45
Yeah, I want to be cautious in answering this because, uh, I know that for some people, this is absolutely how they experienced their sense of gender. Uh, I'll say that it's not how I experienced it at all. Um, and a lot of the people I talk to, it's not necessarily how they experience it. So I'm going to talk a little more structurally about the narrative rather than sort of like experientially and I'd want to connect to that to sort of a broader narratives, like the born this way, narrative that you hear oftentimes about sexuality.
David: 20:21
Yes. Which we mentioned just a few minutes ago, uh, with Lady Gaga. What I called Lady Gaga epistemology.
Ellie: 20:29
No, you call that Lady Gaga social theory.
David: 20:31
Oh, yes, yes. Sorry. Sorry.
Tamsin: 20:34
Yes. Well, yeah, Lady Gaga is social theory. A self knowledge claims, social ontology, um, I think is really prevalent. And I think that that's part of what underpins the oftentimes necessity to perform a kind of born this way, wrong body model narrative. A lot of trans people report feeling a lot of pressure to give that kind of narrative, right? Because, because of the way in which access to things like hormones and other medical interventions are heavily gatekept, sometimes giving that kind of narrative is the only way that you can guarantee access. So there's a lot of institutional and structural pressure to reproduce that narrative, even if it's not entirely accurate to how you experience it. And I think that there's something about this born this way narrative that serves in large part to shore up structures of cisness and heteronormativity by positing that to be cis or to be straight, right, is to have never questioned either of those things. And so questioning those things, feeling uncomfortable with the designation, uh, is posited as the fundamentally queer or fundamentally trans experience in a way that I think serves to shore up a lot of the anxieties of cishet people about their gender and their sexuality, right. I think one of the things that was interesting about the pandemic and especially teaching gender studies during the pandemic has been that a lot of people have come to question their gender, their sexuality, because they suddenly have this time to reflect. And I think that that sort of demonstrates how limited the kind of trapped in the wrong body, born this way, narrative can be. I mean, I still don't know what I want my body to be. And so I don't know what it would mean to be trapped in a body.
David: 22:28
And so does that then mean that you see the body more as a project that is constantly ongoing, project that we create in all kinds of ways, and that trans folks create in a particular way, but that we all independently of our gender and sex identity are constantly questioning and constantly recreating. Or maybe not constantly questioning, uh, since, as you point out, one of the ways in which cis centrism operates is by creating this narrative that some people never question their sex and gender, but then do you see the body and sex and gender more as projects that are in a constant process of becoming.
Tamsin: 23:13
absolutely. And I would say you used the word independent and I think that's the wrong way to go. They're fundamentally dependent on one another, right? Where you- we live in a world that has forever been altered by the discourses of gender, of sex, of sexuality, right. Thinking here with people like Lugones and Foucault. So where these things are constantly in dialogue in some way, it's impossible I think to get outside the body as a gendered sexual kind of project. And as a racialized one too. So I think, yeah, the body is a project, gender is a project, sex, sexuality as projects I think make a lot of sense.
Ellie: 23:55
Yeah. And I think that also gets to the cultural constructed nature of gender too. I'm thinking about one of the analogies that Bettcher uses in her article, where she talks about the wrong body model, where she says that it's kind of strange to think about one as innately being a man or a woman if we think about gender as constructed in the same way that it would be weird to think about myself as innately a bingo player, um, because bingo too is a cultural construction. And so she suggests here that, you know, if you were to claim that the categories of male and female aren't culturally constructed, then holding to the wrong body model makes sense. But if you think about the ways that gender and sexuality are culturally constructed through historical systems, such that our, you know, sort of innate feelings and sense of self aren't coming out of a vacuum, then it becomes difficult to understand trapped in the wrong body or the born this way narrative as, you know, as unproblematic, although I also hear your point Tamsin that, you know, for a lot of people, this feels right. And so we want to hold space open for the lived experience of folks who feel that this is right. It's really, I like the way you put it in terms of like a structural analysis of where this comes from.
Tamsin: 25:09
Yeah. And I think that that's often times really difficult, like maintaining that structural attitude and not like- I see this all the time on like the internet, Twitter, people getting into fights.
Ellie: 25:24
Yeah.
Tamsin: 25:25
And I think it's so unhelpful to do that. I don't see the point.
Ellie: 25:28
Um, and getting into fights around like what they innately feel versus cultural construction or?
Tamsin: 25:35
To which model is right. Like I think one of the things that I really appreciate about that the article that you're referencing is that Talia is really insistent that just because there are problems with the trapped in the wrong body model doesn't mean that we can simply throw it away.
David: 25:52
Yeah. And I suspect this has to do precisely with that practical function that this narrative, that the wrong body theory holds in terms of granting access, and even just making legible a certain experience to people who do not identify as trans, right.
Tamsin: 26:10
Absolutely. I mean the wrong body model though it does not bear anything in terms of how I actually experienced my gender. It was really useful, not just for getting access to medical interventions, but also to like coming out to my family. Like, it felt very comforting for them to have that sense of it. And it's like that isn't quite right, but you know, it's close enough.
David: 26:33
Um, yeah, well, and earlier when I reflected on my own coming out as a queer man, I also latched on to the narrative of the I was born this way, you know, when I was 17 and 18, because I found that that made sense to those around me, even though as time went by, it kind of didn't sit right with me and I had to slowly move away from that. But even in a queer sexuality context, it's still really difficult to talk about sexuality as socially constructed because it cuts against the grain of this expectation that you justify your sexuality along naturalistic, biological lines.
Tamsin: 27:17
Well and the way in which gender and sexuality interact in transition is, is super fascinating to me. So many trans people report their sense of their sexuality transitioning along with their sense of gender, right? Many people's sexual preferences, the sexual behavior, shift entirely through the course of the transition. That certainly is reflective in my own experience. Um, yeah. Again, ongoing projects.
David: 27:43
Tamsin, that's really interesting. And you have done some fascinating work around this question of transitioning. You recently wrote an article about the phenomenology of transitioning in which you suggest that hormonal transitions affect not just the appearance of the body, what one's body looks like, but also how the people transitioning feel about their bodies. So it has to do with the emotional aspect and the sense of identity. And I just want you to walk us through that argument. In what ways does hormonal transitioning bring about this more radical transformation?
Tamsin: 28:25
Yeah. And I would say it's not just how we feel about our bodies, but it can also be how we feel our bodies in the sense of like what it means to be a particular kind of body. I'll talk about this through some of my own experiences as I was starting the process of HRT and was starting to notice changes in my bodily morphology, right. I started to grow breasts and fat started to accumulate in different places on my body, like the literal shape of my body started to look different. There are a number of ways in which it changed how I felt about my body. So first was that clothes that I was wearing started to fit in different ways, right? So certain things became wearable in a different way or what it meant to wear it meant something different. Uh, and obviously there's the kind of social aspect, right? How we feel about our bodies is really a social phenomenon, right? Because part of how we feel about our bodies is how other people are receiving our bodies. So I started to get different kinds of reactions from people, right? So like, uh, and this is something that sort of continues and weirdly has caused an anxiety in a different kind of way, I think one of the anxieties I had early on was getting clocked, so getting recognized as trans when I would be moving out in public. And now one of the things that really concerns me how easily I seem to pass and not get read as trans in different kinds of spaces. So even the way I feel about this kind of social perception, I was really glad when I started to pass more reliably, right. To a certain extent, I've always had a kind of passing privilege even before I started HRT people were reading me in the way that I- HRT has allowed. I started to feel differently about my body on the basis of how other people were reading me. But I also started to literally feel what it meant to be embodied differently in the sense that I think one of the experiences that I've described elsewhere, right, is suddenly having budding breasts and the kinds of sensitivities that come with that. And so like hitting them on things or having someone elbow me, not realizing that there's a particular kind of sensitivity, right. And so that literally shifting how my body moves in the world, right. So even at a kind of pre reflective level, these kinds of shifts in feeling start to happen as a part of processes of HRT.
Ellie: 31:00
I found that description in your article of estrogen softening our bodies to be really illuminating. And so you write there, estrogen softens our skin and makes it more sensitive to external stimuli, like the feel of certain fabrics or the touch of another. And you also note there that the erotogenic zones of your body have shifted, right. And you write of having an increased sensitivity across your body as a whole.
Tamsin: 31:24
Yeah. I mean, it was something that was really surprising to me. So one of the things that's interesting about processes of informed consent and getting access to HRT is what doctors do tell you versus what they don't. So there's a lot of focus on the reproductive side of things. Like one of the consequences of taking testosterone blockers for a long period of time is that you lose fertility, right, in sperm. So there's a lot of concern about making sure that I knew that. There was not a lot of concern in terms of like these kinds of more erotic or pleasurable aspects of it, right? Like it didn't seem to occur to anyone to tell me that like nipple sensitivity for example, would increase and change.
Ellie: 32:11
Yeah.
Tamsin: 32:12
So it was very jarring when I learned that.
Ellie: 32:15
So then you're just like going around the world, like constantly turned on at all times because of this increased sensitivity.
Tamsin: 32:21
Or it would just come on suddenly because I would brush up against something and I was like, what's happening? Why is this happening?
David: 32:30
Well, and I, you know, I'm here thinking also about the concept of habituation that you use in your article, drawing on the philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that the way in which we carry our bodies over time builds some sedimented modes of behavior, right? What we call habits. I carry my body in a particular way. I move in a particular way. And over time I develop a certain schema of where my body is and what my body can do. And so as your body is changing and as your feeling your body is changing, you make the argument that that schema as a whole is altering. So it seems like part of transitioning on your account is not simply changing the appearance of the body or even changing how you feel your body, but it's this deeper almost ontological category of changing what is possible for you in light of what your body can and cannot do. So I'm just wondering how you reacted to those moments that sort of threw you back onto yourself and made you think about this change that you're undergoing, which is what ultimately led you of course, to write this article.
Tamsin: 33:48
Yeah. I mean, I would say, like, it's this weird thing of like simultaneously feeling a sense of affirmation. And then also the immediate sort of like, this is unpleasant, right? Um, I think there was a similar reaction and I still sometimes have this reaction to getting catcalled, right. Like catcalling was not necessarily new to me, but there's a way in which there's a moment when like someone on the street is harassing me that I'm like, oh, this is what I was aiming for, but not really.
David: 34:27
Thank you and F you at the same time.
Tamsin: 34:31
Yeah. Aww, how sweet, and also please die. Yeah, so these moments were really jarring. Um, and I have been working on this a little more specifically in terms of the phenomenology of orgasm. Like one of the things that really shifted, right, was figuring out how orgasms work in the process of these sort of erotogenic zones shifting, right. And it was strange to have to make something that had become reflexive in a certain sense, an actual project, right? Like it was something that took months to figure out how to make this happen. I then had to make it happen with another person, right. Like a lot of people compare HRT to going through second puberty. I really did feel like that in terms of having to make different parts of my body an active kind of project in terms of figuring out oh, you know, this feels this way. And then also having these things shift over the course of time, too, right? As the HRT starts to become- uh these changes start to become more fixed in one's body. So like, as the breasts moved from the really sensitive buds into more developed breasts, that kind of sensitivity of like even brushing, like that part has become lessened over time. So it's still this kind of ongoing process in many ways. So I think one of the things that this really did, right, was make me realize how weird bodies are in a way that I think we sort of pretend they're not, we sort of pretend that bodies aren't this weird thing, that we like know what we're doing with them. And I think one of the things that transition has shown me is like, we don't really.
Ellie: 36:22
Well, and I think that's so beautiful the way you put it too, Tamsin, because it, it makes me wonder whether we could describe that sort of shift in orgasm or orgasm as a project in terms of a non-essentializing approach to living your truth, right. I don't know if this resonates with what you're describing or not, but like this idea that maybe you're living your orgasm truth now, but it's not because there was this like inner core self that wanted to have a different kind of orgasm, but because you're like growing into this new self. I don't know.
Tamsin: 36:55
I don't know either. I mean, one thing that's interesting about the way you've put it right, is that it allows for the possibility that orgasmic function could shift again. And likely will, right. Like I'm thinking about all of the discourse around kink that has started to circulate, right? Like I think there's something similar happening in those kinds of conversations, right? Like recognizing orgasm as a kind of ongoing project. I don't know what that does for living your truth, but maybe there's something there.
David: 37:26
Hmm. Yeah, living your truth as discovering new truths, something like that, right? Where it's about maybe testing limits, exploring new possibilities, and embarking on a journey that doesn't have necessarily a fixed destination ahead of time.
Tamsin: 37:45
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. Like one of the ways in which I like to think about transition is less about an end point, because I don't know what an end point would be, for me. I know some people have very definite end points right from the get go. I don't know that I've ever had one. I don't know that I have one now, but I tend to think of transitioning as a process of moving away from some kind of original coercive designation and into this space of radical disorganization and reorganization at the bodily, at the psychic, at the political, at the social, levels.
David: 38:22
Oh, that's that's so well put and you know, early on, uh, Ellie asked you about the wrong body model, and you said that even though it is important to keep it in the conversation for those for whom it does important work, it's not necessarily how you think about trans identity. That's not necessarily how you experienced your own transition, your own ongoing process of transitioning, never ending process of transitioning. It just strikes me that one implication of not necessarily thinking about there originally being a wrong body is that you never get to a right body necessarily, right. That destination is not there either, but nonetheless, it seems like there is a directionality away from this original act of violence, which is the original designation of you are A, B, or C. So in that sense, there is an orientation, but it's open-ended as to its movement.
Tamsin: 39:22
Yeah. And it's like, it surprises me, the things I discover in transition continue to surprise me, the things that I want or come to want surprise me and the things that I no longer want surprise me.
Ellie: 39:35
I'm wondering how we might think about this in the context of the term authenticity, because I think the idea of an authentic self has been justifiably critiqued quite a lot by queer theory and feminist theory in the 20th century. I think a lot of queer and feminist theorists have wanted to move away altogether from the concept of authenticity. Do you think that there's space for holding on to the notion of authenticity in a trans context?
Tamsin: 40:06
Yeah. I mean, I have two thoughts when, so the first is that I think authenticity is oftentimes pragmatically necessary for trans people, right? Because again, of the way in which a particular kind of trans narrative has been institutionalized, I think this is especially important as trans people, trans rights, trans lives, trans politics, trans possibilities are under attack all over the US throughout the UK. I think at the more conceptual level, and this is a concern that's been raised by Viviane Namaste and a number of other trans thinkers and scholars is that one of the problems with how queer and feminist theory arrived at its conclusions about authenticity was through analyzing trans narratives.
Ellie: 40:57
Hm.
Tamsin: 40:58
So there's nothing authentic about gender because trans people change their gender, right. So turning trans people into this kind of conceptual counterpoint to undermine gender, right, is a kind of violence to trans experiences and trans lives, right. I am not like a- I'm not an eliminativist about gender in any sense. And so to that extent, like, I'm interested, I would love to hear what authenticity looks like conceptually articulated in a critical way, right. Like, I think there's probably a way to retain it.
Ellie: 41:36
Yeah, I think that's such a great way of putting it is sort of thinking about these other potential futures where authenticity could be envisioned differently. Thank you so much Tamsin, this has provided so much great food for thought. We're really grateful for you sharing your work and your ideas and wisdom with us.
David: 41:54
Yes. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. We thank you for coming.
Tamsin: 41:58
Yeah. Thanks for having me y'all.
David: 42:09
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other fellow listeners through our Facebook page and Facebook group or on Twitter and Instagram at @overthink_pod. underscore.
Ellie: 42:30
Wow, David. That was awesome.
David: 42:34
So good.
Ellie: 42:35
I loved everything that Tamsin had to say.
David: 42:37
I love everything about Tamsin, period.
Ellie: 42:40
I mean the philosophy of the orgasm, like, wow.
David: 42:43
I'm telling you an episode in the making.
Ellie: 42:46
I'm down. I'm totally down. So what did you think about what they had to say?
David: 42:50
Well, one thought in particular that stood out for me was Tamsin's claim toward the end of the interview that one of the ways in which transphobia operates is through this notion that it is only trans folks who have a problematic relationship to the body. So we construe the trans community's relationship to the body as a problem that only applies to trans folks, thereby implicitly presenting the bodies of non trans individuals as unproblematically related to their identity, whereas I take it Tamsin to be saying that the body qua body is always a problem and it is always a project, period, but not always in the same way.
Ellie: 43:34
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I was also really struck by their claim that although authenticity might be a problematic concept, it can be really pragmatically useful. And I really like this idea of what Gayatri Spivak in a totally different context calls strategic essentialism, which is idea that like, even if I don't think that there's an essence to something, in the case of our conversation with Tamsin, sex or sexuality or gender, even if there's no real essence to that, it can be pragmatically beneficial to organize around it because that will help with things like access and recognition, you know, in a mainstream social context that's consistently failing trans folks.
David: 44:16
Yeah. And the way in which Tamsin put that was also in terms of legibility, which can mean legibility for others to accept a certain narrative and make sense of it. But sometimes I take it also legibility for the self, right. We all reach for categories that maybe are socially constructed, that at various points in our lives we embrace as reflecting something meaningful and true about us, even if eventually we move away from that essentialist understanding of those categories.
Ellie: 44:45
Well, totally. And I think that takes us back too to your comments before our conversation with Tamsin, David, about sexuality, about how it was useful to you at a particular moment in time to identify as born this way, you know, as a gay man. And I'm wondering now whether we can hold onto the insight of living your truth without having some presumption of like an inner self that we're out there to discover.
David: 45:10
Here I would like us to return to the writings of Michel Foucault, whom I mentioned at the beginning of the interview.
Ellie: 45:15
Classic David move, a return to Foucault. It's always Foucault for you.
David: 45:20
Always. Foucault always and forever.
Ellie: 45:24
Well you and like every cool person who works in critical theory, like everybody's so obsessed with Foucault, and Adorno, who we mentioned a lot in this podcast too.
David: 45:31
Yeah, that, that speaks to our training and our background. But nonetheless, I still want to double down and go back to Foucault because it is in Foucault's philosophy that we find a pretty devastating critique of the notion of an authentic self, because for Foucault, that self simply does not exist. There is no trans historical form of subjectivity that you can find across all times and places. And one important point that Foucault makes in his writings, especially on the history of sexuality, is that our understanding of the self in the 19th and 20th and by extension 21st century has been tied to sexuality and to sex, right? We tend to think that this self that gets expressed is a fundamentally sexualized self. is why coming out narratives, whether they be about sexual orientation or about the sexed body are so central in something like hashtag living your truth, right? Because that truth that we want to express tends to have a sexual dimension to it. And Foucault says that obsession with sexuality is a very 19th century phenomenon. Before the 19th century, people were not worried about sexuality in the same way, and they did not connect it to the notion of a core self in the same way, either. Maybe they believe that there was a truth to the subject, but it did not lie in sexuality, in who they had sex with or how they had sex. That connection is a very recent historical phenomenon. But for Foucault, that problem is broader. It's just the notion of authenticity itself. There is no such thing as an authentic self, even if authenticity of course is an important concept in a number of philosophical traditions.
Ellie: 47:23
Yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking here about one of Foucault's predecessors who influenced Foucault heavily, and that is Friedrich Nietzsche. One thing that I really like in Nietzsche's work is his idea that the search for a true self, to sort of go back to a point that I implied earlier, is actually really dangerous. So Nietzsche writes that it's like a classic thing for humans who think they're like above the crowd to say, be yourself, but what does it mean to be yourself? What does it mean to find yourself such that you can even be yourself to begin with? And I want to read a passage from Nietzsche's essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator" here. He writes, "But how can we find ourselves again? How can the human being get to know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing. And if the hair has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times 70 skins and still not be able to say, this is really you. This is no longer outer shell. Besides it is an agonizing, dangerous undertaking to dig down into yourself in this way, to force your way by the shortest route down the shaft of your own being. How easy it is to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal." So there are two things that I think are really interesting about this quote. The first is what I described to my students when I teach this essay as the Shrek theory of selfhood, because Shrek says that ogres are like onions and the whole point of an onion, right, is that Shrek says we have layers and yes, onions have layers, but I really think, and Shrek doesn't quite go this far, but it's perhaps implied by his statement, that the thing about onions is that there's no core. Onions are very different from like an avocado or a peach that have a pit or kernel. Onions, once you get to the last layer, there's nothing inside. And so for Nietzsche, this is the second thing that I think is interesting about this. When we try and excavate that true self, what we're actually doing is self-harming. You might think about somebody who's kind of like going all in for therapy and or meditation or another sort of introspective practice, when it's actually pretty unsafe for them to do that. And so Nietzsche says that instead of looking within ourselves, our true selves lie above us, outside of us. They're something for us to aim for. And so I'll just say, I think if we think about living your truth that way, where it's not about excavating a core self, but it's rather about aiming and striving to live up to certain values, I'm pretty down with it as both a hashtag and a movement, which honestly surprises me, David, because when we decided we were going to do an episode on this, I was prepared to hate on the idea of living your truth. But I think it's kind of cool.
David: 50:07
I know, and you know, sometimes you and I disagree about things and a lot of times we also agree, and this is one of the latter.
Ellie: 50:14
Sometimes we disagree? Thank God, it would be such a boring know. podcast if we didn't.
David: 50:19
But if we think about it in a Nietzschean way, one of the things that I find very powerful about Nietzsche is his use of paradoxical thinking. And you see that at work in this quote, where he says your true self is somehow outside of you, which is paradoxical, right? Because your true self couldn't be something that is outside yourself, otherwise, how could it be yours? And so it's essentially an affirmation of our need to transcend that which we are, to constantly change, to constantly be on the move, to constantly be in a state of flux. And it is that flux that becomes our essence.
Ellie: 50:59
Yes, this is such classic and incredible existentialism here because that, actually, I think David is such a great articulation of the existential concept of authenticity, which I think gets misunderstood a lot. So there's this idea that comes sort of implicitly out of Nietzsche but really developed through Heidegger and the other existentialists of being authentic, living an authentic life. And sometimes when people think about living authentically, they think about living your truth and the way that we've been critiquing, which is about sort of like you do you and I do me and you find your own true self. And I find mine. And not only is that selfish to go back to our analysis of the hashtags, but it's also, we think, sort of metaphysically unsound, because we don't believe that there is some core true self behind things. If you think about authenticity in the way that Heidegger and the other existentialists really were conceiving of it, it's precisely about recognizing that I am always in process. I have the ability to create my own self because the self is not a core thing. And we create that self, not just by introspecting like, Ooh, what sort of person do I want to be, but by, to go back to that Rumi quote that I mentioned earlier, letting ourselves be drawn by the power of what we truly love. Heidegger describes inauthenticity as a way of being sort of lost in the general social milleu that we find ourselves in, we're going about our lives in a pretty mechanical way. We're not really taking a step back and recognizing our own freedom in the world. So actually the first step on the way to authenticity for Heidegger and the other existentialists is anxiety. The moment of existential angst where I realize, wow, things could be different. Also a plug for one of our very first ever episodes, which is episode three on existential anxiety, where we get into this. And when you have that feeling of anxiety, what you feel is exactly what you were describing, David, you feel that sense of yourself in process. And like that's kind of scary, which is why it manifests as anxiety, but it's also super liberating because it can lead us to what Heidegger calls resoluteness. And that's like the name of authentic existence according to Heidegger. When we are resolute, we are being authentic. And interestingly, the word here in German has pretty different resonances from authenticity in English. Heidegger uses the German word Eigentlichkeit. David, you were worried about not being clear for our listeners. We're just, just, they, all they had to do was wait until I started dropping the German Heidegger references.
David: 53:41
Ellie's like hold my beer. Hold my bier! I don't know what the, I don't know German for beer. Sorry.
Ellie: 53:48
Beer!
David: 53:49
Okay. That's what I thought. That's what I thought.
Ellie: 53:51
So the German word Eigentlichkeit, which is what we translate as authenticity, actually doesn't really have to do with a resonance between authentic or genuine versus fake. It is a noun form of the word Eigen, which means singular. And so to be authentic means to be basically living up to my own most potential, or I could like really go Heideggerian here, own most potentiality for being. And it, and it has to do with sort of accepting your own singularity and your own uniqueness, not in the sense that you're just like sheerly different from other people, because if I'm thinking about myself as different from other people, I'm still buying into the notion that I'm a thing in the world among other things, that sort of core self idea, but to really be living up to your own authentic life for Heidegger is actually to realize that what's singular about you is that you're not a fixed thing in the world.
David: 54:47
Yeah, and this is where the concept becomes potentially problematic, right? When it slips from that notion of the self as process, or even as Heideggerian resoluteness, which for Heidegger means resoluteness in the face of our own mortality, it means facing up to our mortality and our finitude rather than fleeing away from it.
Ellie: 55:07
Yeah.
David: 55:08
But we might put this in dialogue with the work of Theodor Adorno. I know you called me out as a Foucault-Adorno, but like, okay, fine. I'm going there too.
Ellie: 55:17
Classic. Not an episode can pass without Adorno.
David: 55:21
Never. Never. But Adorno wrote an entire book about this entitled The Jargon of Authenticity in which Adorno makes the argument that most philosophical appeals to authenticity, and this is true of Heidegger, he argues, are deep down appeals to a return to our rural, almost nationalistic image, of the good old times. You know, something like the idyllic, small town life of a country before modernization, before technology and so on.
Ellie: 55:55
That just happens to only be populated by white people.
David: 55:58
Yeah. By Aryans. Uh, so there is definitely an unconscious image in the background. And I think this critique that Adorno makes is that the jargon of authenticity tends to appeal to conservatives, to conservative parties, to conservative groups, because of this appeal to a simple life, which is ultimately very problematic either because of its inherent conservatism or because it can be very easily co-opted by neoliberal marketing strategies that claim to give you your authenticity to you in the form of a neatly packaged product to be consumed, right? Like Ikea, where you find who you truly are through whatever crappy couch you purchase.
Ellie: 56:43
I'm not one usually to defend Heidegger over Adorno by any means, or to like, just be like, yes, Heidegger's right about everything. But I think Adorno was wrong in this critique as you've articulated it. And this goes back to, I think the two ways that we can understand living your truth, either in an essentialist way or in a self-in-process kind of way. If you think about authenticity or living your truth as something that is about finding your passion, right? Like, Ooh, I am the video games geek then yeah. We are thinking about authenticity in the way that Adorno is. Or even I am the gay subject who's now going to go to pride every year and that's like my main expression of my identity. That plays into the neoliberal capitalist ideology that Adorno is so critical of. But if we actually think about authenticity as owning up to our own freedom, which for the existentialist is ultimately not determined or determinate, then it's a way of resisting this neoliberal logic of I need to fully identify who I am. It's a way of actually escaping labels rather than identifying oneself with them.
David: 57:52
So it seems like hashtag living your truth or live my truth has two faces to it. A lot depends here on what truth means. What is the truth of me? Is it an essence that I find through a process of excavation, kind of like an archeologist that finds a kernel of substance that tells me something about another culture or about my own past, or is it a process? Something to look forward to in time, something outside of myself, as Nietzsche would say. So the former requires looking inward, whereas the second implies that we're looking beyond the self, that we are surpassing.
Ellie: 58:34
As Nietzsche says, your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego.
David: 58:48
We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 58:58
You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.
David: 59:05
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. Like to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.
Ellie: 59:15
Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.