Burn the Binary! - Selected Writings on the Politics of Trans, Genderqueer and Nonbinary

by Riki Wilchins

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An icon of transgender activism for three decades, Riki Wilchins is the author of four influential books on genderqueer, trans politics, and queer theory. Riki Wilchins has been a pioneering and influential thinker and writer for a quarter of a century. Now this single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected. Think of this as Riki Wilchin’s greatest hits!

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Ben Ace

5/24/2019

It’s been a while since I’ve read something by Riki Wilchins, but she certainly knows how to leave a lasting impression. Between her wide experience and knowledge base to pull from and her “Suck it!” attitude toward injustice, it’s hard not to stand out. This collection, Burn The Binary! just continues to prove that she’s not here to take cis bull shit and never has been. I typically have a tough time reading anthologies and collections. Once one part is over, my ADHD mind thinks the whole book should be over. So starting a new story/essay every few pages is rather frustrating, unlike chapters which are constantly building off of each other. However, this book is just one of the few topics that will keep my attention in just about any format! Reading this felt more like a biography that a collection of essay, which one could argue it is. A lot of these essays are just so personal. Even the ones that don’t focus on her own life show enough of her personality for anyone familiar with her work to pick it out in a stack. The collection is organized by where the piece was first published instead of chronologically or by topic. Yet the jumping around didn’t get too confusing for me. It felt natural to go from a recount of a specific moment in the transgender rights movement to a piece admiring Leslie Feinberg to a narrative about Wilchin’s bottom surgery experience. It definitely is a book full of her greatest hits. Final thought: Wilchins was one of the loudest voices in the transgender rights movement when it first started, and, although she might not be the first name we think of anymore, she certainly hasn’t slowed her efforts. Filled with history, passion, and first-hand accounts of the queer experience, Burn the Binary!

Jen Moore

9/5/2018

A collection of essays and excerpts from a genderqueer trans activist. There are pieces from as early as 1994, as recent as late 2017, and somehow they don't feel out of place next to one another. Reading the Advocate columns that span from 2002 to 2017 throws into sharp distinction how fast things are changing - terminology, issues, recognition - and also how much things stay the same. (Reading columns from early 2016 is just heartbreaking.) There's a lot of talk about intersex people (more than I'm used to even in trans writing, which is refreshing) and a wonderfully expansive inclusiveness to the idea of genderqueerness. The tone varies from chatty and conversational to crude to erotic to intensely theoretical. This isn't a single coherent history or theory of anything, but it's a fascinating and enlightening collection of thoughts, and a good introduction to a compelling and important writer.

Alex Carter

3/30/2018

Through collaboration, Riki has created an amazing and unique collection. The book is very different from a large number of trans* related books that I have read due to the fact that the stories have come from an older persons perspective. As a young, trans person the world is very different in how it treats trans* people today than it did 20, 40 years ago etc. and this book shows the progression over the years. It's easy to forget that things weren't 'always this way' and that there was a time period where majority of people didn't even know what 'trans*' meant. I would like to comment on the fact that if you are not comfortable with the use of the word 'transsexual' then this book may not be for you. The author goes onto explaining their reasoning for using this word instead of using transgender, so don't let it put you off.

Rachel Seissler

2/28/2018

Beautifully curated collection of essays by Riki Wilchins. This should serve as a primer for those ignorant, confused, or just curious about transgender people. Wilchins does an excellent job explaining the basics, while each part (there are three) escalates in intensity.

Cheryl Costello

2/21/2018

I read this book in one sitting last night and as someone who is non-binary and still figuring out what it means to not be cisgender, this book is powerful. Our stories are so important and finding so many of them in one collection made my heart sing, my soul feel a little safer and my mind a whole lot happier to know that this book exists. It’s not just powerful for me, but for the people coming into bookstores, libraries and other places where books live. This book is a great addition to a list of books to recommend to people looking to learn more, or know that there are spaces in the world to see and be seen for who they are. Great read!

ROM: I Was Recently Informed I Was No Longer Transsexual

I was giving my Gender 101 talk when I learned I am no longer a transsexual. I was defining the difference between ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ but was stopped by three young persons—two of whom identified themselves as nonbinary—who took strong exception.

‘We don’t use that anymore,’ they said. The term was objectionable because it ‘medicalizes’ transpeople and ties recognition of genital status—which is private—to gender identity.

So it was not only archaic, but offensive. I’d long known I was offensive—often intentionally so, more often unconsciously. But it was the first time I learned I was also archaic.

You could hear everyone stirring and their attention swiveling towards me, smiles gone, tense faces, that awful smell of gunpowder in the air as another explosion in the political correctness battle was about to detonate.

But who has the right to certain terms is not just about PC. It is deeply intertwined with our bodies and identities. It’s not just WHAT is said, but WHO does the saying.

It dawned on me that these individuals probably read me as another privileged straight white cisgender male. I always assume my transgender-ness is apparent, though in this room I was obviously wrong. I needed to come out.

So I explained that… ahem… I started my own transition to female in 1976 and that transsexual was indeed the term-of-art we used. Others used it, my wife-to-be used it. The book many of us read was titled The Transsexual Phenomenon. I co-founded a nationwide protest group called The Transexual Menace.

And, oh yes, I had my surgery before any of you were born.

Everything in the room seemed to freeze. The straight, white, oppressive cisgender male had morphed into… an oppressed marginalized transgender queer. So who is politically incorrect now, hmmm? The sex change was on the other foot…

FROM: Transgender Dinosaurs & the Rise of the Genderqueers

She was a lovely 13-year-old with long blond hair, hazel eyes, and round hips. Her bold smile betrayed none of the self-consciousness that I had when I began dressing in feminine clothing as an adult. Assuming she must be friend of the transgirl I was there to meet, I smiled back but then ignored her.

Never having passed as female I’d finally given up trying. Besides, it seemed somehow counter-revolutionary. The new transgender politics was increasingly built around exactly the kind prominent social visibility and defiant non-passing that my 1980s doctors assured me would signal my failure as a "sex-change. "

For 30 years my identity was built around memorial vigils for slain transwomen, picketing transphobic groups, public fights with TERFS, being evicted from women-only groups—all the experiences that made me who I was as a visible transsexual.

But, what if all that were wiped away? Who would I be? What would I have become?

Androgen blockers in puberty can now prevent all the painful, irrevocable testosterone effects which I dedicated a decade of my life trying to reverse—chest hair, beard, Adam’s apple, etc. And now they had made this lovely young person into an entirely non-visible transsexual.

She didn’t cross the same gender lines I did, or even rub up against them.

This is not to say that she will never experience any of the pain or dislocation I felt, But she has options for a kind of social acceptance of which I could never dream.

As androgen blockers are increasingly taken by adolescents, would we one day abruptly lose the visible transsexual? Twenty years from now, will that entire experience I understand AS transgender be gone? Will our memories, our accomplishments, our political movement, will all that seem irrelevant and antique, like the hey-day of radio. In 50 years, will it be as if we never existed?

"Feeling transgender” might become not just more acceptable, but one day logically impossible. Without knowing it, was I becoming a gender dinosaur?

Copyright © 2017 Riki Wilchins

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Riki Wilchins

Riki Wilchins is an author, activist and gender theorist. The founding E.D. of GenderPAC, she is the author of Queer Theory/Gender Theory: An InstantPrimer (Magnus Books) and co-editor of GenderQueer:Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary (Magnus Books). Her work has been published in periodicals like the Village Voice and Social Text, as well as Feminist Frontiers, Language Awareness, and The Encyclopedia of Identity. She has been profiled in the New York Times and Time Magazine selected her one of "100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century.”