Detailed Notes On How To Overcome Any Sort Of Phobia In Step By Step Order

Trading in Your Hammer for a Clipboard

Synopsis: Many carpenters will one day take on the role of project manager, which requires a new set of tools: a clipboard and pen, or any other record-keeping device. Keeping detailed notes of project requirements keeps a volume of information clear and under control, and helps manage meetings with clients and designers and bolster communication between carpenters and clients.

Most project managers start out as workmen, at least on the residential side of construction. If you’re a young carpenter with a modicum of intelligence and reasonable people skills, you will likely one day be asked to step into the role of lead carpenter and, eventually, project manager. For many of us it’s not a conscious decision—it just happens. One afternoon you realize that your hammer hasn’t come out of it’s loop all day because you’ve been yakking and pointing and calling and counting since 7 a.m., so you take off your tool belt and hang it on a nail. And there it stays. Congratulations—you’re a boss.

The material you will be working with in your new role isn’t wood or steel or concrete. It’s information. Just as you gathered an assortment of physical parts and organized and shaped them into a coherent assembly, you must now do the same with the mandates that come down from the decision-makers above you— the designers, the owners, and the contractors. Then you must communicate that information to the crews, the subs, and the suppliers. It all sounds very logical, but in the chaos that is a building job, you will be doing most of this on the fly. That’s OK; if you were able to concentrate on framing a wall when there was snow falling and the nail gun jammed and Donny never showed up, then you’re no stranger to confusion. The main thing is to keep calm and fall back on familiar steps: Double- check the RO dimensions and figure out a lifting strategy for the manpower you have. In other words, never stop flying the plane.

But now you have a new assignment with different equipment and tricks, so you’ll need to figure out which tools work best for you. Some of that is generational. I had my own business long before smartphones arrived, so I’m comfortable with paper-based systems. I can write faster than I can peck at a keypad, and I like having the ability to toggle between writing and drawing without switching applications. But I can see the advantage of having everything stowed away in one brightly lit phone or tablet. I’m sure there are digital versions of the paper “devices” that I depend on—a clipboard and a memo pad. If they work better for you, by all means use them, and understand that the advice that follows is just as applicable regardless of whether you are old school or new school.

The shortest pencil beats the longest memory

The first and most important hurdle to overcome when transitioning from hands-on to managerial work is to understand that you will be processing a much larger and more fluid volume of information. As a carpenter, you might be able to keep the details for a particular task in your head. But now you are gathering information for many tasks to be done by many people. As a result you must write (much) of it down. I say “much” because the reality is that you can’t write it all down. There will be times when the pressure is such that the best you can do is pass along a directive by mouth and trust that it gets done properly. But the less you depend on your own memory to deliver the message—and the hearer’s ability to remember and interpret that message—the better off everyone will be. Yes, jotting down a note on paper or in your device takes a few minutes, but avoiding one serious mistake will pay for those minutes many times over. “She wanted an outswing entry door? I could’ve sworn she said inswing…”

So, whether you write on a clipboard or a tablet, in shorthand or chicken scratch, in English or Spanish —just write it down. When I’m cruising the job, I assign places on the page for the most common lists so I can sort details as I go. For instance, “Questions for architect,” “Supplies from yard,” and “Tasks for laborers” will almost always have entries. Sorting them at the gate saves time untangling them later.

The chief limitation of a clipboard or tablet is when you need both hands for carrying something or climbing on a scaffold. That’s why I carry a memo pad in the inside breast pocket of my fishing vest. As a carpenter, I used the memo pad for measurements and sketches, but now I use it mostly to capture those elusive thoughts that might not stay in the front of my brain until I get back to my clipboard. It’s also a quick way to snag the contact info of a tradesman or a potential customer when I bump into them on the street.

By the end of the day the clipboard will be a mess. There will be many items that didn’t fall into the usual categories, as well as sketches, receipts, and product literature. If left in this condition, a clipboard soon becomes useless. To freshen it, the first step is to file away the collected paperwork to the appropriate subfolders in the job file, such as “Stairs,” “Kitchen,” and the like. Then you need to convert today’s incoming notes and lists into tomorrow’s outgoing e-mails and work assignments. Instead of doing this in the afternoon (when I’m tired), I tackle yesterday’s notes first thing in the morning as the birds chirp and the java courses through my system. Then it’s easy for me to see who needs to answer what questions and who needs to accomplish what tasks. If I have to compose an e-mail, the words come easily.

Manage the meeting

Meetings with clients and designers are essential to a happy outcome, but they can be difficult to arrange and are costly in terms of lost production. So as the pivotal person in a meeting, you need to come in fully primed and loaded. All of the questions that couldn’t be resolved by e-mail should be waiting on your clipboard as a carefully combed-through, typed list. Double-spacing the list gives you room to make notes. Incorporating probable choices into the wording of the question is helpful so you can quickly circle the winner instead of writing: “The front door should be in-swing or outswing?” Whatever the method, record the answer somehow. You think you will remember, but you won’t.

The order of questions should be in sync with a walkthrough that you have already planned in your head. At each stop on the tour, the questions should be prioritized, moving from the major thorny issues to the minor items.

The delicate dance of communication

Once you have the answers, you need to pass them on to the crew. A task list is a good place to start, but don’t depend on it to get stuff done right. One picture is worth at least ten thousand words, so a sketch, even a crude one, will help to form a picture in the mind of your carpenter that aligns with the image in your head. Don’t be shy about making notes on the sketch to stress fine points or avoid pitfalls: “Front edge of gutter must align with plane of roof!” What happens to the sketch after you hand it off is important, too. You don’t want it stuffed in a pocket and forgotten about. I often mount sketches and printed drawings on scraps of plywood that can be tacked to the wall for easy viewing. Spray adhesive works well for mounting the paper, and you can preserve the board by laminating it with clear packing tape if moisture is an issue. This may sound overindulgent, but it sends the message that you need to get these details right.

After providing a list and a drawing, you still need to talk the job through. There’s an art to cross-examining a carpenter to make sure he or she “gets it” without making him or her feel like an idiot. It takes time and patience. You may be running late for a meeting and have a million other things on your mind, but you need to create a safe space where confusion can be expressed and ideas exchanged. Everybody benefits. My carpenters often point out subtleties I’d overlooked. We discuss any special tools or processes, and I try to remember to mention where I left those toggle bolts (note: write it down). We chew on the plan for a few more minutes until the conversation peters out. For now my job is finished. I have loaded my rider’s saddlebags and set him on a swift horse. It’s time to let him run.

From Fine Homebuilding #286

More about managing a construction business

How to Grow a Construction Business – The goal of many construction businesses is growth, but undisciplined growth will put you out of business or stunt your growth just as fast as running out of money.

3 Ways to Price Construction Projects – Construction is a cost-based business. Use these three methods to determine the correct price for your construction projects.

Construction Schedule Templates – Using a Gantt Chart for your overall company schedule and project schedules will ensure your construction business operates efficiently and your projects run smoothly.

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Toward a Trans* Feminism

Image: At the 2014 Marcha de las Putas in Ecuador / Wikimedia Commons

Feminism and trans* activism have been at odds for decades. They don't need to be.

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have called myself or been called a variety of names: queer, lesbian, dyke, butch, transgender, stone, and transgender butch, just for starters. Indeed, one day when I was walking along the street with a butch friend, we were called faggots! If I had known the term “transgender” when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I am sure I would have grabbed hold of it like a life jacket on rough seas, but there were no such words in my world. Changing sex for me and for many people my age was a fantasy, a dream, and because it had nothing to do with our realities, we had to work around this impossibility and create a home for ourselves in bodies that were not comfortable or right. The term “wrong body” was used often in the 1980s, even becoming the name of a BBC show about transsexuality, and, offensive as the term might sound now, it at least harbored an explanation for how cross-gendered people might experience embodiment: I, at least, felt as if I was in the wrong body, and there seemed to be no way out.

The hatred of trans* people by some second-wave feminists continues to present a stumbling block for coalitions.

At the time when I came out in 1980, some white feminists were waging war on transsexuals, whom they saw as interlopers into spaces that women had fought hard to protect from men. I remember attending a feminist theory workshop while I was in graduate school at which cisgender feminists wanted to do “gender checks” on people attending the workshop to make sure that no “men in drag” tried to infiltrate the meetings. Separatism was a thing, and women’s bookstores and coffee shops and bars organized around a very narrow politics of womanhood. Within such a climate, it was hard to express my butchness at all, and even as I embraced the sense of community that feminism offered me, I felt confused by the emphasis on womanhood. In the end, I had to part ways with this version of feminism in order to embrace my masculinity, and it took a long time for me find my way back to a meaningful relation with gender politics.

For my part, I now prefer the term “trans*” because it holds open the meaning of the term and refuses to deliver certainty through the act of naming. The asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender-variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations.

Though these past two decades have given us better terms for who we are, they have done less than one might hope to heal the vexed relationship between feminism and trans* activism and theory. Indeed, last year’s Women’s March on Washington was plagued by accusations of trans*phobia. In response to these concerns, some event organizers for this year’s anniversary marches, taking place this weekend in multiple U.S. cities, are encouraging participants to forgo the pink “Pussy Hats” that came to symbolize last year’s march, acknowledging that the emphasis on “pussy”—despite its ironic and playful inflection—excluded trans*women who may not have conventionally female genitalia. Such rifts, as last year’s march showed, present real impediments to the political alliances that are so desperately needed in our time of extended crisis.

In what follows, I review some of the lesser-told history of alliances between feminists and trans* folk. Through this I arrive at the suggestion that contemporary trans* theory needs to reset the terms of the debate: rather than remaining invested in an identitarian set of conflicts that turn on small differences and individual hurts, trans* and feminist activists should instead work together to oppose the violent imposition of economic disparity, a renewed and open investment in white supremacy, and U.S. imperial ambitions transacted through the channels of globalization.

• • •

A strand of 1970s anti-trans* white feminism, which found its loudest voice in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), accounts for the origins of much of the contemporary suspicion of feminism within trans* groups. Raymond’s book was a deeply transphobic text, full of paranoid accusations about transsexual women invading and populating “women’s” spaces. The language of empire in her title referred to the way in which she understood transsexual women to be literally invading, even “raping,” female-born women. But she also, contradictorily, blamed transsexual women for being complicit in the production and consolidation of conventional femininity.

An obsessive focus on the radical feminists who rejected trans*women has caused us to overlook the majority who embraced trans*women as integral to the struggle.

However, the sentiments that Raymond expressed in The Transsexual Empire were representative of only a fairly small—albeit vocal and powerful—group of women in the 1970s, which also included Sheila Jeffreys and Mary Daly. Tragically, this antipathy between some second-wave feminists and trans*women has significantly contoured the terrain of contemporary trans* activism, presenting a stumbling block for coalition building in the United States. It has come at the expense of embracing the many radical feminists from the 1970s and ’80s, such as Andrea Dworkin, who did not see trans*women as enemies, who understood the category of “woman” to include trans*women, and even in some cases advocated for free hormones and surgery.

To gain a more complete picture of what less famous second-wave feminists felt about trans* people, we can turn to the archive of 1970s and ’80s women’s magazines. It may come as a surprise to many that, in a quick survey of feminist zines and publications gathered in the University of Southern California’s ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, I found multiple issues of journals dedicated to sympathetic approaches to trans* experiences.

In a 1973 issue of the Brooklyn-based journal Echo of Sappho, for example, we find several articles on gender transition, including a letter from someone who identified himself as a “female to male transsexual” and who suggested that the magazine “leans a little too hard on men.” The issue also includes a piece titled “The Nature and Treatment of Transsexualism: When a Woman Becomes a Man” by one Mike Curie. The piece discusses the privileges and advantages of becoming a man but concludes: “I enjoy my status as a male, yet I realize that I don’t have to prove my maleness by getting laid by women. I consider women my equals and hope to become a man who does not oppress them.” On the next page begins an article titled “WHY WOMEN WANT TO BECOME MEN_________AND ONE WHO DID________!!!!” In this piece, the author explains how he got a mastectomy, the troubles he had getting a legal name change, his experience with a hysterectomy and hormones, and his near-death experience in the hospital, where he was poorly treated and subjected to an unsuccessful bottom surgery. The author distinguishes between himself and lesbians as follows: “A lesbian is a woman who is pleased to be female and whose love object is female. A Transsexual loves females but feels trapped in the female body of her own.” The author clearly expected to find a sympathetic and interested audience in this magazine, and the magazine devotes considerable space to his story.

Subsequently, we find an essay by trans* activist Virginia Prince, who had been working with Harry Benjamin, the pioneering sexologist, for fifteen years. She reported that while Benjamin had begun his practice with fifty-four patients a few years before, he now had a thousand. Both Prince and Benjamin discuss funding sex reassignment surgeries through Medicaid, and Benjamin cautions against irreversible changes, stressing that “no man is 100% man and no woman is 100% woman.” A final article in this issue of Echo of Sappho is written by a female-to-male transsexual about to go through sex reassignment surgery.

Intersectionality is an important tool for understanding the relationship between trans* people, feminists, and the queer community.

Rather than presenting a uniform position of feminist trans*phobia, the articles remind us that transsexuality was debated, scrutinized, discussed, and accepted or rejected by different feminists at different times. And while white academic feminist discourse by Raymond, Jeffreys, and others seemed committed to combating transsexuals and keeping them out of “women’s spaces,” many other venues—for Echo of Sappho was hardly alone—treated trans* people as a permanent presence within women’s communities.

New discussions under the heading of “transfeminism” have begun to remedy some of these disconnects between feminists and trans* activists. In Whipping Girl (2007), for example, Julia Serano reminds us that any new take on feminism must be capacious enough to include, recognize, and celebrate the femininities of women who were not born female. Not only that, but the often precarious femininity of trans*women should be seen as the centerpiece of new feminisms and not as a negation of feminist politics. Serano writes, “Until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it—weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality—those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.” Recognizing that femininity is co-constructed and co-inhabited across bodies that are male and female, trans* and cis, Serano calls not just for an inclusive trans* feminism but one that actively embraces femininity, rather than leaving the concept stranded as a synonym for weakness, dependence, and fear.

Serano’s work is important because it brings attention to how feminism has managed to be about women and has worked hard to expose gender hierarchies, but has done so without reinvesting in femininity. Indeed, many versions of feminism have viewed femininity with suspicion, characterizing it as pure artifice, as theater, and, in the work of Judith Butler, as performance. Serano, however, like many trans* theorists, resists the notion that femininity, and gender in general, is a performance (“If one more person tells me that ‘all gender is performance,’ I think I am going to strangle them”). Although she recognizes that trans*women co-create femininities with cisgender women, Serano and others worry that adopting a theory of performativity implies that trans* is not real, material, authentic. Yet this resistance to the notion of gender performance has set up another site of antagonism that operates alongside the radical versus trans* feminism divide—namely, queer theory versus trans* theory.

Within trans* theory, Butler’s most influential idea is that all bodies must submit to gender norms but that some bodies can repeat those norms to the point of absurdity, shaking loose from some of the confinement that those norms enact. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler rewrote liberal feminism and even parts of Western philosophy by making the gender-variant woman the subject of each. While the masculine woman, Butler claimed, was unthinkable within French feminism because of its commitment to a gender-stable and unified conception of womanhood, a gender-variant woman was similarly unthinkable for continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. But Butler never implied that gender variability meant gender flexibility. Indeed, Gender Trouble offered gender as a site of constraint, not flexibility. In the book that followed in 1993, Bodies That Matter, Butler responded to various misreadings of her earlier work, precisely around the topic of flexibility, and attempted again to emphasize the inflexibility of the gendered condition, its resistance to voluntary action, and its availability for only discrete re-significations.

While in Gender Trouble the butch body made mischievous trouble for all stable understandings of the category “woman,” Bodies That Matter deployed that body to make trouble for understandings of masculine power that could not conceive of masculinity without men. In neither book, however, was gender a choice; rather, it was the inflexibility of a female commitment to masculinity that signified the thorn in the side of feminist and psychoanalytic conceptions of the phallus. Finally, in Undoing Gender (2004), Butler returned to the entwined interests of transgenderism, intersexuality, and transsexuality to argue that gender stability plays a crucial role in the production of the category of the “human.” Indeed, many of our understandings of the human proceed from and presume gender normativity as a foundation for other modes of being. In this book she calls for “recognition” for trans* modes of being.

In the emerging landscapes of power and domination, we need to situate sexual and gender minorities carefully rather than claiming any predetermined status of precarity or power.

Despite her rigorous critique of foundationalist notions of the gendered body, Butler has sometimes been seen as having questionable views on trans* politics. In particular, Butler’s idea that gender is performative has been rejected by a number of trans* theorists as being a denial that some trans* people need to undergo sex reassignment surgeries. The most complex articulation of transsexual suspicion of Butler occurred in Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998). Prosser asked what effect a theory of gender performativity had had on an emergent understandings of transsexuality. He also argued that, for all our talk about “materiality” and “embodiment,” it is precisely the body that vanishes within ever-more abstract theories of gender, sexuality, and desire. Prosser also took issue with the way the trans* body came to stand in for bodily plasticity in many poststructuralist discussions of gender. He wrote:

Queer’s alignment of itself with transgender performativity represents queer’s sense of its own ‘higher purpose,’ in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme devalues. Namely, there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be constative, quite simply, to be.

Prosser’s work was enormously influential, for it articulated many of the misgivings that trans* theorists felt about queer conjurings of gender flexibility, gender plasticity, and gender performance. This emphasis on the real for trans* people was a valuable intervention in the late 1990s, coming at a time when they were often viewed within medicine and psychology as delusional and pathological. And Prosser was not alone in his critique of gender performativity. While his critique of Butler was theoretically dense, a version of it could be found in all kinds of trans* work and activism, by people such as Stephen Whittle, Jason Cromwell, and Viviane K. Namaste. The thrust of these rejections of poststructuralism concerned a misreading of “performativity” as “theatricality.” This notion of a theatrical performance of self, some trans* activists felt, clashed with the sense of “realness” that they struggled to achieve. Of course, these readings of performativity depended upon a prior mischaracterization of performativity as flexibility. Misreading Butler in this way allowed for a trans* backlash against both radical feminism and poststructuralist feminism and the field quickly became polarized.

More recently, however, trans* theory has swung back around and, in the work of J. R. Latham and Micha Cárdenas, new understandings of “transrealities” have emerged alongside deep engagement with notions of performance and performativity. The tension that seemed to animate Prosser’s early critiques of Butler have now been dispelled within the discourses of trans* feminism, which borrow from early trans* narratives and Butlerian gender theory alike. Latham’s work, for example, argues not simply that trans* people are “real,” but that the concept of reality itself requires an update thanks to the expanded gender norms that have resulted from a newly visible trans* community. Latham’s work is nuanced, drawing from extensive ethnographic research on trans* experiences with surgery, psychiatric treatment, sex, and family. Cárdenas also focuses upon an amplified understanding of “realness” and she has written texts on what she calls “The Transreal.”

Butler’s concept of “gender performativity,” despite becoming the target of so many trans* critiques, actually furnished trans* theorists with the theoretical framings necessary to push back on essentialist accounts of normative identities and the fetishizing gaze so often directed at trans* bodies. In her first two books, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler did the philosophical heavy lifting that allowed us to rethink bodily ontologies separate from the concept of a stable and foundational gender. Arguing that sex, the material of the body, is gender all along, she proposed that bodies are produced by discourse rather than being the sources of discourse. Once our understanding of the relationship between reality, materiality, and ideology has been remapped according to these inversions, it becomes possible to think about gender transitions in a way that doesn’t depend on a linear model of transformation, in which a female body becomes male or a male body becomes female. Butler’s work enabled eccentric narratives about being and becoming and nudged male masculinity out of the heart of our philosophical inquires. We all stand in the space she created.

Butler’s work enabled eccentric narratives about being and becoming and nudged male masculinity out of the heart of our philosophical inquires. We all stand in the space she created.

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, the standoff between radical feminism and trans* feminism continues to represent a live and urgent issue. In May 2016 the Transgender Studies Quarterly, in an issue dedicated to “Trans/Feminisms,” featured an introductory essay by managing editor Susan Stryker and longtime trans* scholar and activist Talia M. Bettcher. In this piece, Stryker and Bettcher express dismay about new forms of “anti-transgender backlash” in feminist circles, citing a book by Jeffreys and a few articles about Caitlyn Jenner in support of their claim that we are witnessing “an escalating struggle over public speech.” Ultimately, however, and to their credit, Stryker and Bettcher are more interested in outlining a trans* feminism that has emerged from within trans* movements than in continuing to invest in a potentially counterproductive argument with feminists such as Jeffreys, who prove to be unrepresentative of a new generation of feminist thought and activism.

Stryker and Bettcher note, for example, the importance of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality to an emergent trans* feminist position, and they mention the biographies of several trans*men and trans*women of color who represent very different trajectories of gender nonconformity than the standoff between white trans*women and white feminists might imply. Intersectionality remains a very important tool within any attempt to understand the historical arc of relations between trans* people and feminist and queer communities precisely because, while white women were often exclusively focused on issues of womanhood, people of color could not afford a singular focus. The Combahee River Collective is exemplary in this respect, and many scholars have recently turned back to their manifesto for the model it provides of intersectional and politically labile organizing. Stryker and Bettcher turn also to the life of trans*woman and Stonewall Riots leader Sylvia Rivera as evidence of an articulation of feminist principles from within a burgeoning trans* liberation movement.

In 1973, when Sylvia Rivera—Stonewall veteran and cofounder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)—fought her way onto the stage of the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in New York, after having first been blocked by antitrans lesbian feminists and their gay male supporters, she spoke defiantly of her own experiences of being raped and beaten by predatory heterosexual men she had been incarcerated with, and of the work that she and others in STAR were doing to support other incarcerated trans women. She chastised the crowd for not being more supportive of trans people who experienced exactly the sort of gendered violence that feminists typically decried and asserted, with her own characteristic brio, that ‘the women who have tried to fight for their sex changes, or to become women, are the women’s liberation.’

As Stryker and Bettcher astutely note, Rivera articulates a truly liberatory vision of womanhood, one around which, moreover, multiple feminist agendas could coalesce absent the seemingly inevitable standoff between lesbian feminists and those could-be and would-be trans* allies.

Notably, trans* feminisms in other parts of the world, such as Latin America, are less likely to arrive at such an impasse. Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, for example, has written at length about trans* feminism in Ecuador, which she describes as “a grassroots political project rooted in material politics” that understands trans* liberation as central to the fight against patriarchal systems. This particular version of feminism recognizes sites of shared struggle between trans* sex workers, homemakers, gang members, punk rockers, and others who share “subjacent symmetries,” a concept coined by Elizabeth Vasquez of Ecuador’s trans*feminist organization Patrulla Legal.

Trans* feminisms in other parts of the world are more likely to understand trans* liberation as central to the fight against patriarchal systems.

In an article titled “Transfeminist Crossroads,” Garriga-López tells the story of the compromises and conflicts, the shared visions and divided loyalties, that beset a trans* feminist activist group in Ecuador that tried to get a bill passed allowing people to list their gender instead of their birth sex on their identification papers. This struggle did not conclude with the desired outcome: although trans* people won the right to change their sex and get a special “alternative ID,” the group did not manage to persuade the legislature that the shift from listing one’s sex on government IDs to listing gender should be universal, applicable to all people. The goal here was to protect trans* people from the inevitable exposure they faced as they tried to change their sex on the ID, versus having the opportunity, along with everyone else, to list their gender according to their own dispositions. This right would have been truly transformational and represents a broad goal of trans* feminism.

Nonetheless, Garriga-López draws hope from the grassroots movement and uses it to show that “transfeminism is not a one-way flow of solidarity from nontrans feminists toward trans people” but instead that “trans activists have been at the forefront of feminist and LGBT struggles for many decades, and the category of ‘transfeminism’ signals the articulation of these practices into a cohesive political standpoint.” This point is crucial in any quest to move forward toward multiple visions of trans* futurity and away from the traps of internecine conflict. In other words, feminism has always been articulated by trans* activists and trans* activism has always been feminist. Garriga-López’s research broadens the scope of the conversation and reminds us of how narrow the landscapes of the United States and Europe are relative to more global understandings of the politics of trans*. While activists in the United States, the UK, and Europe have generally been content to call for “gender recognition,” keeping themselves narrowly within the politics of recognition that has fueled neoliberalism, as we see in the case of Ecuador, trans* feminism elsewhere articulates much more extensive goals that do not single out trans* people but rather extend from the experience of trans* people to everyone else. Here we can glimpse a trans* feminism that joins the experience of contrary gendering to other bodily forms that have been subject to discrimination.

In the new landscapes of power and domination that are emerging at the beginning of the shift from the neoliberal mechanics of inclusion to the post-democratic policies of violent exclusion and the enforcement of homogeneity, we need to situate sexual and gender minorities carefully rather than claiming any predetermined status of precarity or power. The goal of a global trans* feminism, after all, will not be simply the enhancement of opportunities for trans*women but the creation of a trans* feminism that works for all women. Accordingly, as trans* activists try to expand categories of embodiment beyond the binary, we should be reaching not for better and more accurate descriptions of who we are, but better and more diverse approaches to thinking about gender and poverty, gender and child-rearing, gender and labor, gender and pleasure, gender and punishment. Various models of feminism in the past have stopped well short of global solidarity and have tended to focus upon the most favorable reforms for white women and middle-class women. This is partly because of the myopia of liberal feminism and corporate feminism (lean in, for example) and partly because “women” make up such a huge category that finding common ground is nigh on impossible. Trans* feminism cannot necessarily overcome these obstacles either, but it can exert sufficient pressure on the category of “woman” to challenge and refuse its universalist tendencies. As we enter a new era of untrammeled patriarchy and racism embodied by the U.S. president, trans* feminism has a lot of work to do. It is not my intent to offer here (or anywhere) a clear program for a trans* feminist world, but I do believe that, like the feminists in Ecuador, we should operate on the assumption that the changes that would be good for trans*women will ultimately be beneficial for everyone.

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The Education of an Ambivalent Feminist

Image: Paul Stuart / Patrik Svensson

Tara Westover's best-selling memoir may reveal more about the place of feminism in contemporary U.S. life than any book in recent memory.

Educated: A MemoirTara WestoverRandom House, $28.00 (cloth)

Since Educated debuted at number three on the New York Times best seller list in February, Tara Westover has been catapulted to that rare sort of literary celebrity that seems to burst from nowhere and quickly saturates the culture. People are captivated by her journey from youngest child in a radical Mormon family of home-schooling, anti-government survivalists in southeastern Idaho to Brigham Young University at seventeen and then to Cambridge University, a Harvard fellowship, and PhD in History by the time she was twenty-seven-years old.

Published almost four years to the day since her dissertation’s approval, Westover’s memoir rings with the foundational U.S. stories of exceptionalism, rugged individualism, organic intellect, and pure hustle from Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Boone, and Horatio Alger to more recent iterations such as Hamilton: The Musical and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). (That Westover is the only woman among these figures is notable; that she is white like everyone but the actors playing Alexander Hamilton is business as usual.)

Educated may reveal more about the place of feminism in contemporary U.S. life than any book in recent memory.

Indeed, reviewers and interviewers have most commonly invoked Hillbilly Elegy when describing Educated, highlighting the authors’ shared tough but loving eye on poor white people, their values, and their problems outside the Northeast and coastal urban centers. As “native informants,” Vance and Westover appeal to a popular hunger for regional exotica and tales of weirdness, suffering, and violence lurking beneath the shine of “middle America.” They both temper the bleak with evidence of their individual overcoming through hard work and determination, thus leaving intact cherished beliefs in the American promise and democratic opportunity.

Like Hillbilly Elegy, Educated has found popularity that spans divides of politics, identity, and geography. And while Westover’s book shares none of Vance’s candidate-in-the-making policy vision or overt politicking, it has been embraced by the right, left, and center on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as an opportunity for casting new light on even deeper white reaches of Trump Country.

Westover makes no claim to providing these political and cultural insights, and her memoir’s narrative and voice actively work against it. But in her public appearances since, she seems most comfortable in the conservative social and political milieu of Vance—the milieu that celebrates individual choice and responsibility above all else.

She has insisted, for instance, that her memoir’s central takeaway on matters of schooling and education is that “you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.” Attributing the foundations for this belief to her anti-statist upbringing and parents’ rejection of public education for most of their children, Westover recently elaborated to Vanity Fair magazine, “we take people’s ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way. Any curriculum that you design for yourself is going to be better, even if it’s not the absolute perfect one.”

Similarly, the feminism Westover espouses is defined almost entirely as unqualified support for women’s “choices.” This includes her own choice not to identify with—or ever reference its existence in her memoir—the Mormon Feminist movement that began in the 1970s and has gained particular momentum (and censure from the church) in the last twenty years. Describing her inability to reconcile her womanhood and church doctrine, Westover quipped to The Guardian, “I tried to be a Mormon Feminist but that was exhausting.”

In the end, however, even if Westover and most of her fans don’t want to admit it, Educated may reveal more about the place of feminism in contemporary U.S. life than any book in recent memory.

Westover steps gingerly around the term ‘feminist,’ as has most of the coverage surrounding the book.

It is simultaneously the heroic and painful narrative of a woman being cast out of her family and her Mormon faith for rejecting the place both institutions defined for her and for refusing to remain silent about the violent abuses that place allowed. It is the story of a woman who stands alone and is unlike other women, including her own mother, sister, and sister-in-law who all choose to stand with the author’s abuser (an older brother), her father’s warped outlook and authority, and the church and communities faithful that support them.

Educated offers an indictment of patriarchy and the damage men do—and how both distort women’s and girls’ senses of themselves and the world. For Westover, the elite academic institutions she attended and her achievements there are not the main events of her memoir but the ambient conditions for her coming to awareness of patriarchy and what it means for her and her family, their faith, and her future. Education becomes a metaphor for consciousness, and Educated the story of how a woman woke cannot unlearn this knowledge, no matter how much she may wish to.

Yet Westover steps gingerly around the term “feminist,” as has most of the coverage surrounding the book. On both counts, Westover is representative of the dominant ethos of women’s equality in the contemporary United States where the real political and material benefits gained through feminist activism, theorizing, and educational work over time are often taken for granted while the category “feminist” is reviled, ridiculed, or drained of all complexity.

In the late 1960s, the Women’s Liberation Movement transformed feminism with the radical claim that “the personal is political.” The phrase explained how the seemingly mundane experiences of women, their daily indignities and private frustrations, were not individual or just “personal problems” but the systemic outcomes of patriarchy.

Subsequently spun through pervasive neoliberal rhetorics of privatization and the liberty of consumption in a free market, this radical feminist claim has been turned upside down, grotesquely reanimated as a celebration of women’s personal choices and individual gains as political acts in themselves. This is where Tara Westover’s Educated enters the picture.

•••

The book is divided into three parts: Westover’s childhood and teenaged years in Idaho, her time at BYU beginning when she was seventeen; and, finally, her move to Cambridge, England, for graduate school.

Tied to the progressive time of her formal education and increasing geographical distance from family in Idaho, the narrative within this structure is only thinly focused on academics and is more asynchronous and messy. Often horrific in its details, Westover’s stories dwell on bodily damage and pain—or the fear of it. One often wishes to look away from the litany of broken, burned, and concussed bodies.

The family avoided contact with the state, so the many accidents—in cars, on motorcycles, on wild horses, at construction sites, or in the family scrapyard—were treated by Westover’s mother, a midwife, with only herbal tinctures and essential oils. When the injured person was the mother herself, there was no treatment.

‘What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.’

Perhaps we are a bit disgusted with ourselves for being unable to look away, gorging on the horrific gore of children made to carve away the necrotic, burned flesh of a sibling or their father with no pain killers or antibiotics. In her event with Westover, fellow Vance confederate Amy Chua described a version of this feeling as a reader, and asked if all of it had made Tara stronger or better able to face challenges as an adult. “You’re certainly not an entitled snowflake,” Chua quipped, “Do you think it gave you resilience?”

This violent danger and its primary sources shifted for Westover with puberty. Bodies were still worrisome, at risk, unruly, and often disgusting. With gorgeous precision and economy, Westover describes teenage girlhood: “I was fifteen and I felt it, felt the race I was running with time. My body was changing, bloating, swelling, stretching, bulging. I wished it would stop, but it seemed like my body was no longer mine.”

This was when her older brother, then in his mid-twenties, turned his contempt for women toward her; motivated, Westover suggests, by his own sense of slipping ownership. “I saw you talking to Charles [a teenager from town],” he said one night driving Westover home. “You don’t want people thinking you’re that kind of girl.” The next day, after noticing her trying out makeup for the first time, he says, “I thought you were better. But you’re just like the rest.” He later calls her a “whore” for wearing lip gloss.

Her brother’s possessiveness and escalating degradations—mirrored in Westover’s description of his treatment of a girlfriend who is roughly her age—crackle with a growing frisson of sexual danger. A new kind of dread begins to fuel the memoir’s narrative momentum.

Worlds and themes collide shortly thereafter when Westover is woken up in the middle of the night by her brother choking her. He holds her off the floor by her neck, screaming, “Slut! Whore!” Her mother attempts to stop him, fearing that he is about to kill her. He loosens his grip, but taunts Westover as she gasps and weeps, “the bitch cries . . . because someone sees you for the slut you are?”

Westover’s mother tells her to leave in the car immediately, but her brother dangles the keys between his index finger and thumb. He then wrestles Westover to the ground wrenching her arm behind her back and bending her wrist to near breaking. “She’s not going anywhere until she admits she’s a whore,” he says.

Westover had resigned herself to the imminent snap of bone when something so unimaginable happens that she seems hardly able to believe it herself many years later. A different older brother, Tyler, who was the first of the Westover children to defy their father and leave for BYU, walks into the violent scene completely unexpected; he had not been home for years. He gives her his car keys and tells her to stay away for several hours.

When Westover returns home, her mother’s alone in the kitchen and acts as if nothing has happened. The abusive brother returns later, holding a gift of pearls as an apology, and explains how much he fears for her, that she’s losing herself. “You’re special, Tara,” he says, explaining that she always had been, but couldn’t stay that way on her current path.

This is a critical moment of revelation for Westover, that will become the start of her education. “Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered,” she writes. “It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.”

When Tara announces to her parents that she wishes to go to college like Tyler and will begin studying—which means learning from scratch—for the ACT exam, her father is livid. That evening, he walks into her bedroom, a notable event in itself, Westover says, as he has not entered the space since she was a young child, to say that God is angry with her for wanting to go to college “to whore after man’s knowledge.” Even her desire for an education is spun through the threat of promiscuous sexuality and Westover’s apparent refusal to become the sort of young woman her father and brother wish her to be.

•••

Westover describes her transition at seventeen to life in college and a large city as being just as difficult, unsettling, and terrifying as one might imagine. Any hope that her path might be smoothed by the fact that she was still in majority Mormon spaces is quickly dashed as the differences between her and other students only grow, not lessen, over time. No one was a Mormon the way she was—the way her father taught her to be—and she knew of no one confronting the same violence.

Throughout the second part of her memoir, Westover juxtaposes her time at home during every holiday, winter break, and summer with her discovery of the wider world and institutions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. At home, she continued to face abuse at the hands of her brother while her father designed physical demands in an attempt to punish her for leaving. What little information Westover revealed about herself and her family at BYU raised concerns and prompted attempts at intervention from roommates, professors, and bishops (the equivalent of Protestant ministers or Catholic priests in the LDS hierarchy).

‘Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir,’ Westover writes. ‘I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.’

But Westover’s description of one of the first of these attempts is almost as disturbing—and as revealing—as her accounts of domestic violence and torture. When Westover returned to school after her harrowing first summer home from college, she was still injured from an encounter with her brother. During her second Sunday at a new church, a man asked her to dinner, which she declined. A few days later a different man from the church asked her out.

“Again, I said no,” Westover writes. “I couldn’t say yes. I didn’t want either of them anywhere near me. Word reached the bishop that there was a woman in his flock who was set against marriage.”

She was summoned to the bishop’s office to discuss her “problem,” and he suggests that Westover embark on religious counseling so that one day she can enjoy an “eternal marriage to a righteous man.” By this he meant joining other women in a “plural marriage” with her husband in the afterlife, which has been doctrinally mandated for pious men to attain their highest order of enlightenment since 1890 when prophecy ended the earthly Mormon practice of polygamy.

Westover is frank about having left the Mormon church and no longer believing. Many of her reasons, including resistance to eternal or “celestial marriage” and the domesticity and obedience in life needed to secure that salvation, are detailed in her book; and nearly all revolve around her early feelings of inadequacy and inability to be properly a woman. “How could I be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things,” she asks—a question that would later become her educated refusal to be that woman.

•••

It is perhaps not surprising that Westover had no experience beyond negative associations with feminism in or out of her classrooms at BYU. The last part of her memoir, which opens with her arrival at Cambridge for graduate school, starts with her first conversation with a pair of self-proclaimed feminists. Their intelligence, warm likability, and easy identifications with feminism drive Westover to the library where she checks out every foundational text of the “Second Wave” in the United States that she can get her hands on.

“Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes. “I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.” It was all too much, Westover says, without offering more by way of explanation. She simply could find no way into those books or ideas.

For Mill, women’s freedom of choice, no matter how constrained or what the outcome, is the essence of their liberty. The argument rings today with terrible familiarity.

So Westover tries a different approach, skipping over U.S. feminists and key twentieth-century texts altogether: “I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first—Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood.”

As a scholar of the nineteenth century, Westover is most comfortable with that era's brand of feminism. John Stuart Mill resonated most for her and would go on to be significant to Westover’s dissertation research. Her affinity for the nineteenth-century English philosopher winds a subtle path through her memoir.

Like Wollstonecraft before him (see: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman from 1792), Mill argues that the status of women does not derive from their natures, but rather they must be trained—educated—to their inferiority and dependence. His Subjection of Women (1869) called for the reform of marriage and divorce alongside suffrage and formal education for women, and prompted a short correspondence with U.S. feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Indeed, despite his position in Westover’s chronology, Mill was very much a part of the “First Wave.”

Mill’s feminist theory was outlined most explicitly in The Subjection of Women, but he had been making similar arguments for years, including in On Liberty (1859) where his discussion of the inherent inequalities of marriage comes in the context of a tempered defense of Mormon polygamy. Mill saw the calls in the U.S. for the federal government “to send an expedition” against the Mormons in the Utah Territory “and compel them by force to conform to the opinions of other people” as a clear affront to the principles of liberty and freedom to choose one’s religion.

With characteristic adherence to white supremacy and hierarchies of empire, he notes that the aspect of Mormonism “which is the chief provocative” breaking “through the ordinary restraints of religious tolerance, is its sanction of polygamy; which, though permitted to Mahomedans, and Hindoos, and Chinese, seems to excite unquenchable animosity when practised by persons who speak English, and profess to be a kind of Christians.”

Westover’s education rejects analyzing the collective conditions of women, their diversity and intersectional oppressions across time and global geographies.

But polygamy presents a contradiction for Mill’s argument on behalf of individual liberty in that for Mormon women, he writes, “it is a direct infraction of that principle” and a “riveting of the chains of the one half of the community.” This would seem to engage his corollary harm principle holding that the only rightful exercise of power against another’s will is to prevent harm to others.

Mill resolves this contradiction by arguing, “it must be remembered that this relation is as much voluntary on the part of the women concerned in it, and who may be deemed the sufferers by it, as is the case with any other form of the marriage institution.”

The women’s freedom of choice, Mill concludes, no matter how constrained or what the outcome, is the essence of their liberty and must not be fettered by state intervention. The argument rings today with terrible familiarity.

•••

So much must feel familiar in Mill for Westover. His last work published posthumously in 1873 was an Autobiography detailing Mill’s intensive education from the age of three at the hand of his father, James Mill, and the utilitarian philosopher and English reformer Jeremy Bentham (perhaps most widely recognized today as the progenitor of the Panopticon).

Raised as an experiment in crafting an ideal Enlightenment subject of pure reason and known by his twenties as a “manufactured man,” Mill sunk into deep melancholy, which he described as a “crisis in my mental history.” He surpassed it by educating himself in the art and poetry of the Early Romantics and thus becoming his own man.

In the process of becoming her own woman, Westover finds comfort in the individual freedoms of Classical Liberalism and the Enlightenment. But these freedoms, which are presented and consumed as distant from history and context, are sheared of their foundations in empire, slavery, biological determinism, and the violent economies of extraction.

Westover’s arguments intersect easily with the conservative politics of personal responsibility and equality of opportunity—not outcomes.

Like everything else in her memoir, Westover’s education rejects analyzing the collective conditions of women, their diversity and intersectional oppressions across time and global geographies, activism and political change, or social justice. She sees little beyond her own experience, knowledge, and the freedom of her choices—sheared as they are of their foundations in the abiding privileges of her whiteness and Americanness and in the very same feminist texts and activism she describes rejecting. This perspective is utterly consistent with late capitalism’s apotheosis of individual choice as human liberty realized.

•••

In the end, even though she is so persistently linked to Vance, Westover shares much more with Gretchen Carlson, the former Miss America who made her career at Fox News as a self-proclaimed culture warrior denouncing feminists at every opportunity.

Carlson found herself in need and awkward alliance with such feminists in 2016 when she left Fox and sued the news organization’s late chairman Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Today, she is an advocate for raising women’s awareness of their legal rights in the workplace and is the first Miss America to lead the pageant organization, a position for which she was tapped after it was revealed that the all-male leadership consistently objectified and degraded contestants in emails. In early June, the Miss America Pageant announced that it would no longer feature its iconic swimsuit competition.

Similar to Carlson’s unlikely narrative arc, which recently saw her paired in the New York Times with feminist legal icon, Catherine MacKinnon, Westover has quite a bit to show readers about the state of feminism in the United States and the conditions that saw straight, white women vote in staggering numbers for the Republican ticket’s different poles of the same misogyny: one who brags of grabbing “by the pussy,” with no invitation and no censure, women who are strangers to him, and the other who, out of religious piety, refuses to be alone with any woman he is not related to.

Indeed, Westover’s arguments about self-construction through knowledge intersect easily with the politics of personal responsibility and equality of opportunity—not outcomes—espoused by Vance, Chua, and Fox News.

But Westover is clearly still on a journey—both personal and educational. There is nothing in her memoir that suggests Westover ever returned to the texts of twentieth-century feminism or ventured into the twenty-first century. But perhaps one day she will.

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