Boys will be … Bois?: Or, Transgender Feminism and Forgetful Fish

Abstract

My whimsical title for this chapter references two sets of discussions which will, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, help me to re-frame what has become a rather tired argument about whether transgender men and women can and should be feminist, whether feminists have helped or hindered transgender activism, and how feminism might build upon the utopian potential of transgender embodiment. The first part of my title ‘ Boys will be …. Bois ’ engages with the rigid and persistent identity politics that have emerged alongside a more open-ended discussion of the impact and meaning of transgenderism within postmodernism. By referring to the new trend for androgynous lesbians to side-step both feminism and transsexual politics in order to produce boi-culture,1 I suggest that the new ‘ bois ’ give the impression of polyvocality, fluidity and radical politics but actually they tame the exciting potential of a merger of trans and feminist politics. The new boi culture is an outcome, in many ways of a traditionally Oedipal process by which one generation supersedes the last by casting it as traditionalist and anachronistic. In this first section, I seek to find different models for generational struggle and I ask about the future of queer cross-gender identification. The second part of my title refers to a bold recent book by Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, which recasts the Darwinian narrative of evolution by giving alternative interpretations of intermediate genders, cooperative behaviour and competitive struggle in the animal world (Roughgarden, 2004).