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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