About The Second Awakening

What is the Second Awakening? (Besides the obvious: a blog.) The Second Awakening is a feminist blog. It is also a trans blog. It is a blog implacably opposed to unearned privilege everywhere. What does the Second Awakening mean to you on a moral level?

And that is the essence of the second awakening. I cannot claim to know, to feel what it is like to have been the target of misogyny my whole life; I'm not sure I can even claim to know what it's like to feel transphobia my whole life--it is difficult to make evaluations like that when you're in the closet. I have no doubt that I will make a lot of mistakes in the future as I continue my mission to discover what a feminist life will look like for me. Which is why I am so glad for the women I've found in the feminist blogosphere, for Liss and her Shakers, for Pam and her Blenders, and especially for Sady and her Beatdowns--because it was Sady who gave me the template for the kind of blog I wanted to write, one that was mostly impersonal (I am anonymous, after all) but still came from a deeply personal place of passion and outrage, to create something that wasn't just reportage or even opinion, but my own work of art, a monument to my implacable fury.

Why the Second Awakening?

That's when I got to thinking about The Awakening, Kate Chopin's 1899 proto-feminist novel. And while it's not everything I want--I mean, Edna ends up killing herself after her attempts to break society's constraints--it still captures something important for me. Like Edna, I had a middle-of-life revelation about who I am and what I want; and if my feminist conversion in the days before my transition was my first awakening, then this is my Second--my transformation from gender ally to gender guerrilla. I've woken up again. Eager, this time, for the fight.

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