In re-building the railing on our front ramp, a few things about gender identity have come to mind.
One could say that I have the performative identity of a home handy-man. I’m not a tradie, but I have the nice but cheap Bunnings versions of many of the tradie tools (I am very fond of my Ozito gismos), I have worked with tradies as a labourer (something not a few sessional academics are want to do in order to feed their families), and I have a pretty reasonable understanding of basic materials and what to do to them, with what tool, to get the result I am after. So ‘being’ a home handy-man – like any task-defined identity category – is indeed a performance. Handy-man is as handy-man does.
Yet, even at a performative level, the difference between fantasy and reality must be respected. As you can see from the pictures, I have now replaced the railing and four posts, and it is all structurally sound. I am about a month away from completion, however. Next on my to do list is disassemble the whole thing (I use screws and bolts so that I can put it up and down) and paint all the bits that will not get protected if I paint it assembled. If I don’t paint under the posts and in the joins, the railing and posts are going to get rot in them (again) at these vulnerable joining points. The original tradie didn’t bother about that, which is why it fell apart after 30 years. After I have painted the unseen bits, I will then re-assemble it, and then do the sanding and filling to finish it nicely. Then I will fully repaint it with three coats of durable outdoor paint. Finally, I will fit the cables underneath the railing so that any munchkins don’t walk underneath the railing and over the side. At that point, the job will be done properly, and the railing will be good for the foreseeable future.
Working in the real world requires a respect for reality, and enough knowledge of reality to work with it rather than against it. For the fact is, trying to work against reality never works in the long run.
Should I just believe in my handy-man performative identity, but not actually know how to use my tools, or how my materials behave, or what my materials require to achieve what I want from them, believing in my performative identity in itself is not going to make me a good handy-man. A proper respect for reality is necessary for success in the real world. And then, of course, there is a relationship between what identity I want to perform and the question of whether reality itself precludes my identity wish. Should I want to perform being an owl, I can pretend to fly about the house at night-time and make owl noises, but if I thought I would actually become an owl by doing owlish things, I would be mad. The trans activist slogan “sex is as sex does” is simply mad. No matter how much I might want to be a woman, if I am male, performing what I take to be the actions of ‘being a woman’ won’t make me female. Being a reproductive human female is not something a human male can perform.
The most amazing thing about all this is that it is so obvious, and yet it needs to be said. So why can we no longer tell the difference between identity fantasies, and reality?
Well this brings gender philosophy back to tin tacks.
Nice work mate. Looking good.