"second nature" is said with a certain glibness. nature ought to be only first. but second nature is literal — it discursively attaches to a person, and they cannot escape it. they are thought of as having nature that has been built upon. we are always told that what has been built can be unbuilt, but we are only ever told the mechanisms of construction. a person has not only an existence but an existence through time. who they were grows outwards as an umbilical cord, always connecting them back to the womb, to nature. there is only the stretching and building, and never a cut or destruction or freeing.
one can always assume that a trans woman was male socialized. "was male socialized" should not be taken as a past-tense predicate. a trans woman is a person who was male socialized. the copula subsumes this stretched past into the present. she is her second nature. that is her nature as a thing existing now. there are only things that exist now. notice the move: she was, she is a thing that was, she is. and she certainly was; her protests of "it was not that" are irrelevant to the total knowledge of children's upbringing.
Shulie tells us that
the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it
we must add that the 'human' is not necessarily our value, and that the new nature, second nature, social nature, also cannot justify this sex class system. we do not believe those who seek to uphold nature just so long as it is after birth when they tell us that they are following Firestone.
nature naturalizes itself, and second nature does too. how might one change nature? "evolution" answers the eugenicist. how might one change this new nature? "social evolution" (in many names). as such, the single organism, the person, must be content with their nature and their second nature. perhaps their children will not be socialized as they were, but their own umbilical cord will not be cut. socialization is transmitted just like the gene. small, or rarely large, changes may occur, but it comes from the parents. the family gives you your blood and your personhood.
man is a thing that is done to women. socialization is an education in doing this. no one is in the dark about how to do man; it is the doing of it that distinguishes us. and we do not carry with us how to do it! we do not look down our umbilical cord to a part marked socialization. we learn it in every setting as we do it or it is done to us. man is also a thing that is done to men. it is the thing that teaches them, in the moment, how to do man to women.
but, of course, men do build a skill for doing this thing. this is not because their connection to the past grows long and is filled with ways to do it. they cling to the past and loop it back upon itself. they tie knots in it to keep track and they pull themselves along by pulling on the past. they become men, noun. man becomes a thing that is done to men, by men, by oneself. again, not because they have the instructions somewhere back there, but because they continually teach themselves these instructions and keep sight of them. second nature requires effort and the strength to pull. when one becomes sickly and weak, it becomes overwhelming. sometimes you lose your grip, and everything unravels.
feminists must destroy nature. to this end, we must create technologies of destruction, which unravel the personhood of ourselves and others. we must not allow a social gene.