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I used to be part of the no longer existent Ms Boards, back in the dark ages of the web (2003 or so). It was a active and fun forum for feminists, found on Ms Magazine’s website. Eventually, of course, it turned into a morass and grudges and anger, because that’s how the internet works. (But we didn’t know that yet).
But before Ms Magazine mercifully pulled the plug, and before things went bad, the Ms Boards were really important to me. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the boards, discussing, socializing, arguing.
What most hastened the Ms Boards’ decline was when the largest contingent of radical feminists on the boards (who called themselves “radfems” for short) became openly dedicated to rejecting transsexual women.
It was a wave of ugliness and sometimes gleeful bigotry that I responded to with my reflexive “keep it mild, keep civil, try to see all sides” approach. I really regret that now; from my position of privilege, it took me too long to understand how gross and damaging that group of radfems were to our trans friends and the entire community.
Over the time, that genre of radfem developed into what’s now called TERFs – short for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” – and, much as they poisoned the Ms Boards, they’ve poisoned much of radical feminism. A feminism that stands for bigotry against one of the most oppressed and marginalized groups in society is not viable.
Of course, many radical feminists – including some of the best known, such as MacKinnon, Dworkin, Judith Butler and (eventually) Gloria Steinem – have rejected bigotry against trans people. Being anti-trans is by no means a universal position among radicals
In the early seventies, some feminists thought lesbians needed to be excluded from feminism. That view was eventually rejected from feminism, and I believe trans-exclusionary feminism will go the same route.
This cartoon is a straightforward expression of my anger at what TERFs have done to some of feminism. But artwise, it’s my little tribute to the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” in the proportions of the figures and in the use of the treehouse setting. I also experimented with using a rougher brush, to get a bit closer to the wild and awesome lines Bill Watterson uses.
Of course, I can’t draw nearly as well as Watterson, one of the greatest cartoonists in the world. But it was sure fun trying to ape his style.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
PANEL 1
This cartoon is colored mostly in a desaturated orange, except for dark orange shading and white highlights.
On a woody hillside, a light-haired woman in a black tank top and a skirt stands in a crude treehouse, which is nestled in the crook of a tree, ten feet or so above the ground. Slats are nailed to the tree trunk to form a crude ladder up to the treehouse. The light-haired woman is talking to a black-haired woman wearing glasses, who is standing on the ground looking up at the treehouse.
GLASSES WOMAN: I want to join your radical feminist club! But only if it has no Jews.
TREEHOUSE WOMAN: What? NO! That’s NOT what our radfem club is about.
PANEL 2
GLASSES WOMAN: To be radical feminists, we must put WHITE feminists first and sideline feminists of color.
TREEHOUSE WOMAN: No, NO! WE might DO that, but never EVER say so aloud!
Panel 3
GLASSES WOMAN: As radical feminists, it’s our duty to align with the Christian right to oppose lesbian and gay rights!
TREEHOUSE WOMAN: STOP this! Our radical feminist club does NOT stand for bigotry!
Panel 4
In contrast to her stern, angry expressions in the first three panels, the treehouse woman is now smiling broadly, opening her arms in welcome.
GLASSES WOMAN: TRANS PEOPLE ARE GARBAGE!
TREEHOUSE WOMAN: Except for that bigotry. Welcome to our club!
Small kicker panel at the bottom of the strip:
A new character, a woman with short hair, talks to the treehouse woman. The treehouse woman yells back at her.
SHORT HAIRED WOMAN: Lots of key radical feminists are pro-trans! Look at Andrea Dworkin.
TREEHOUSE WOMAN: Dworkin was a FAKE feminist!
At least radfems have remained consistent unlike the intersectional third wave feminists trying to keep their cake while they eat it.
What does this mean?
What does this mean?
For a example silence about increasing rape and sexual harassment in Europe because its caused by their “allies”.
While radfems just see it as just another form of patriarchy.
Totally off-topic, Jokuvaan. If you want to discuss sexual violence in Europe, take it to an open thread.
Further comment by Jokuvaan removed. “Take it to an open thread” wasn’t a complicated instruction, Jokuvaan.
That cartoon would make more sense if it showed a non-Jewish person showing up to a Jewish treehouse and demanding entry because “I have a Jewish soul”. Trans women are members of the dominant sex caste regardless of their identity. Casting them as the “people of color” to cis women’s “white” makes no sense at all.
People can and do convert to Judaism, and if they do then they’ll be accepted as Jews by the vast majority of Jewish congregations.
A trans woman who passes as cis is treated like any other cis woman is, including having to deal with sexism and misogyny; I don’t think that’s being a member of the dominant sex caste.
And a trans woman who cannot pass for cis is in significant danger of being harassed, attacked or even murdered because they are trans. I don’t think that’s the treatment they’d get if society treated them as the dominant sex caste.
By the logic of your last paragraph, no gender nonconforming man has male privilege. No gay man is a member of the dominant sex caste. He may be, after all, attacked, harassed and murdered for being gay.
And trans women who pass for cis – most don’t – don’t face all the same things as cis women: they weren’t raised the way girls are, they will never give birth to an unwanted child, they aren’t forced into isolation during their periods, they don’t have their clits cut off to prevent them from enjoying sex, they don’t die of diseases that are under-studied because only females get them, and so on.
You seem to think that gender-critical feminism will die out, but I think you’re underestimating how many terfs started out accepting trans women as women, putting aside our misgivings over trans ideology’s reliance on conservative stereotypes because we didn’t want to be mean and who knows, maybe there are brain differences, and then started changing our minds. There were the demands that lesbians force themselves to overcome their homosexuality and learn to like dick or risk being labeled a disgusting vagina fetishist. There was the denial that sex-based oppression exists. There were the demands that women not make reference to their genitals at women’s rights marches. There was the insistence that trans women be centered in the reproductive justice movement even though their reproductive abilities are not exploited.
And then, for me personally, there was meeting trans women in person for the first time and noticing with surprise how incredibly male they were and then watching some of them post MRA rants and thinking: oh, I see who you are now.
Bigotry sure does die hard. When it bothers to die at all.
I’m really irritated with the idea of transphobic bigots claiming “gender critical” feminism as their euphemism. Actual gender critical feminists shouldn’t work as border guards to maintain the gender caste system.
It’s not a euphemism; it’s perfectly descriptive. And in what way are we maintaining the gender caste system? We’re not the ones promoting the idea that ladybrains actually exist and that women have a feminine essence.
And many Jews do believe that converts are people who were meant to be Jews, but had to find their own way there. But their souls were present at Sinai. And the Talmud specifically says that, once someone converts, they must be accepted as Jewish — saying stuff like, “Well, what would he know, he’s a convert” is expressly forbidden (although, all too common.)
I was wondering why I got dirty looks when I all I say at the door is “Identify as a female or just someone that respects them? C’mon in.” by a few of the women I know. Like I pissed in their corn flakes or something. Coincidentally, they’re the same ones that get pissy at me when I blame my migraines on Trump
Medea:
That is so offensively reductive and insultingly dismissive that it hardly seems worth responding to except to point that out. It’s not my thread, but I am a moderator, so I will simply say—since it doesn’t seem like you’re here to have a discussion—that it’d be nice if you took your bigotry elsewhere.
Fine, this will be my last comment. I just want to say that: I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested in a discussion, I don’t know how you can say that I am being “offensively reductive” when trans people are the ones using the exact term “female brain,” and you will never know how it feels to read an article telling you that all of your favorite 18th and 19th century female writers were probably men because the quality of their writing indicates a “male brain.” That’s coming from the left, not the right.
Media, I think you can stay, and it’s my thread, so my opinion here outranks Richard’s. :-) But try and avoid obviously snide and dismissive language (i.e., “ladybrain”) from now on.
I think you’re referring to the whole “I have a female brain in a male body” (or vice versa) framing, which, at least from trans people, is not very common now (but still exists, especially among older trans folks). But I often heard trans experience being described that way, including by many trans people, a couple of decades ago.
I don’t think attacking the “female brain” framing of transsexuality is a good critique these days. First of all, because it is outdated. Nowadays, almost no one uses the “female brain” framing when describing what transsexuality is. Here, for example, is how Grace defined transsexuality in her Trans 101 post:
In my experience, Grace’s definition of transsexuality is a widely-accepted one today, while the “female brain in a male body” framing is now an outlier.
Some trans critics – both radfem and on the right wing – refuse to acknowledge how thinking about transsexuality has changed and advanced. It’s a form of attacking a strawman – by refusing to acknowlege that the thinking has changed, trans critics get to retain their now outdated critique. Or perhaps they’re just unaware of how things have changed, which is possible for people who don’t read writing from transsexuals other than bits which are cherry-picked by other anti-trans critics.
Secondly, the critique doesn’t recognize that the “male brain in a female body” framing, and all the related ways of thinking about gender, didn’t arise in a vacuum. It came about because, for decades, cis gatekeepers required trans people to adopt that way of thinking in order to get help.
Which brings me to Dean Spade’s article Mutilating Gender, written in 2000.
The article admits forthrightly that transsexuals – and, particularly, transsexuals seeking help from the medical community – have been extremely dedicated to maintaining and supporting gender stereotypes. (Again, published in 2000.) However, that dedication is a response to the desires of the medical community. Doctors, in effect, latched onto a biography of “the life of a transsexual.” In this biography, little Billy Pre-Transsexual was Always Miserable as a boy. He was No Good at sports (because he’s a girl inside, and we all know girls are never good at sports). Little Billy played with dolls and makes drawings with lots of flowers and hates his penis… and, eventually, Little Billy gets the surgery he wants without any ambiguity at all and becomes happy Suzy Transsexual, a woman who is entirely feminine and not even slightly butch, since we all know butch women aren’t real women.
If you wanted gender confirmation surgery (GCS) (which back then was called sexual reassignment surgery), then you’d better have a biography just like little Billy Pre-Transsexual’s (or just like his opposite-sex counterpart, little Wendy Pre-Transsexual). The doctors will test and interview you to make sure you have little Billy’s biography; and if you don’t have it, then they won’t help you.
With hindsight, the result of this medical requirement was predictable. Sooner or later, everyone wanting GCS learns that there was only one set of “right” answers doctors wanted to hear. Of course, some patients really did have a “little Billy” or “little Wendy” biography. But other patients learned to manufacture those same biographies; tell the doctors what they want to hear, and the doctors will give you the medical treatment you need. From the article:
In effect, medicine said to transsexuals: “Be as conservative about gender as you can. Conform to all the gender stereotypes you can think of; if you want to be a woman, be a stereotypical woman, if you want to be a man, be a stereotypical man. Wipe all traces of ambiguity from your life story. And if you do that, medicine will be willing to help you.”
Spade goes on:
Even those of us who support GCS can — and should — question the way that the medical community has used GCS to enforce very conservative views of gender on patients. Gender is a spectrum — and everyone, trans or cis, should be free to place themselves where they want on the spectrum. Nothing about being, or allying with, transsexuals requires anyone to deny that.
Having the personal qualities associated with masculinity versus the personal qualities associated with femininity is a spectrum. What trans activists are doing is declaring that certain personalities are male and others are female, while also declaring there’s no such thing as a male or a female body – as I’ve had explained to me, “nonbinary and genderqueer people aren’t just floating brains!” – and biological sex is merely a social construct and doesn’t matter (I know opinion is divided on that among trans people, but I’ve seen increasing support for the position). As someone who is oppressed because I have a female body and for no other reason, I resent that.
I also resent the idea that women are inherently feminine, which is the basis of many trans women’s identities – feminine, therefore female. I read Janet Mock’s book Realer Than Real. She survives a tough childhood and wants to be a girl from an early age, starts to present as one in adolescence, so far so good, who wouldn’t want her to be happy – and then at the end she she says something like “I was declaring my womanhood every time I stepped out into the sun looking femme” – and there it is. What the hell am I declaring every time I step out looking unfemme, my manhood?
Womanhood isn’t a social role. It’s not a mentality or a spirituality. It’s the experience of living in a female body. Perhaps you could cede the word and decide that it does describe a social role, but now we would need a new word to describe existence as a female.
Eh. Womanhood is a social role.
Either that or people with biological differences are majorly fucked by your theory. I live in a female body (by the terms we’re using) but I am not always part of “the tribe that bleeds,”* and my body is unlikely to be healthy enough to grow a fetus. If womanhood is flesh, then I, and many of my sisters through history, are devalued as less than other women. This has certainly been a historical view, but it’s usually a patriarchal one.
*I’m very maturely and not at all grumpily still irritated by a comment on I Blame the Patriarchy positing this as equivalent to womanhood.
I honestly have no idea how the idea of gender identity works. Gender is mysterious and obnoxious to me. But people tell me they have a strong sense of it. I see no reason not to believe them.
People keep telling me they identify as straight or gay, too, even though I have no idea how monosexual orientation works on an intuitive level. Why care about male or female in a partner? I don’t. But other people tell me they do.
Anyway, if being female (by the definition you’re defending) is the experience of being in a female body then – why are trans people any threat to that? Some people prefer to use the word woman, the pronoun she, and to do things/present in ways that are responsive to local/contemporary social meanings of womanhood. None of those things should be threatening. They’re all social constructs, after all. And you have already divorced social constructs from your concept of womanhood — so it shouldn’t matter what social behaviors people pursue.
If your complaint is only that the words “woman” and “female” should be reserved for cis (fertile? womb-bearing? non-intersexed?) women/females (or possibly infants in general that are assigned female at birth), then this is literally semantics. Terminology changes sometimes—now you need a few words to convey precisely what you mean when it used to be that people would make correct assumptions about your meaning when you used only one. This terminology change is not a threat to your belief system. Words are social constructs, and you’ve already ceded these as separate from your concept of womanhood—so let the social construct go, and use a few more words when you want to express sentiments that only apply to a particular subset of women.
Medea:
Medea, your complaint has been noted, and the guilty will be censured. We strive for conformity. Please continue to treat the Trans Collective as a single monolith which speaks and acts with one voice. That is entirely in accordance with the observable evidence.
/mordant.humor
Medea:
I can’t know what you look like, how you present, or how you experience your gender. From what you’ve posted, I’m guessing that you’re female-assigned, have a reasonably typically female body, and identify as female. I’m also going to guess that you have never actually presented in such a way that you were routinely perceived by others as a man (as opposed to occasionally hearing “sir”). Because I’ve talked to trans men who pass as cis but still have typically female bodies, and they tell me that male privilege is awesome. In other words, they’re no longer being oppressed for the bodies they have when they are perceived as gender-normative men.
I suspect, very strongly, that the oppression you experience stems from two sources: others’ perception that you are a woman (and therefore presumptively have a female-typical body), and others’ perception that you are not performing the role to their satisfaction (by acting, in their eyes, insufficiently femme). Both bigotries are ultimately rooted in misogyny.
Medea:
I think you may mean Mock’s Redefining Realness.
Medea:
I think the passage you are trying to recall is this one:
That does not appear to me to have the meaning you attach to it. She is talking about many people conflating gay and trans people, and imposing the common gay coming-out-of-the-closet narrative onto her, even though she is not gay, and considers herself never to have been in the closet because “[she] never hid [her] gender”. And, through that lens, she is explicitly critiquing the more general problem of people making assumptions about other people by using flawed understandings, rather than, for instance, thinking to ask.
Medea:
Are you a man? Then, no.
Actions take place in a context, and the context matters. Many women who are trans, when we step out of the door wearing “neutral” clothing, will not be perceived as women, partly because our bodies carry visual cues which prompt people to assign us to the category “male” and partly because “neutral”, in this patriarchal culture, is male, the unmarked standard from which women are understood to vary. In such a context, women who are trans are, indeed, declaring ourselves — we are making a statement contrary to the conclusion most people would come to on a default basis. That statement is necessarily ambiguous, because we cannot perfectly control the message; some women who are trans are perceived as cis, and treated as women who are cis are generally treated, but other women who are trans are not perceived as cis, and they often get treated as effeminate men (which means some people treat them explicitly as defective men, aberrant and dangerous).
Women who are cis do not usually have this problem*; their bodies carry visual cues which prompt people to assign them to the category “female” even if they’re wearing “neutral” clothing. Since they’re cis, they’re okay with being understood to be female (though they may quite rightly struggle, as you apparently do, against the consequences of that assignment when it’s enacted upon them by people who have internalized our culture’s misogyny). So they are not declaring their gender assignment in the same way; people understand the same act differently depending on whether they think it’s done by a woman who is cis or a woman who is trans.
(*Though they sometimes do — google Khadijah Farmer.)
In my own case, early in my transition, I was careful to wear female-coded clothing, hairstyle, and at least a little makeup at all times. I had to, or no one I encountered would understand me to be a woman. I’m not a huge fan of makeup, and I didn’t feel great about the necessity of wearing it every time I was in public, but it was a necessary prosthetic. Once I was far enough along in transition that I passed routinely as cis, I had many more options; I could wear baggy jeans again, and didn’t have to wear makeup, and people would still assign me correctly in their minds when they saw me.
But I still feel the pressure to wear makeup, sometimes, because in one of my social spaces there are older people who knew me before I transitioned, and despite the fact that the rest of the world genders me correctly, they sometimes slip with the pronouns — and they slip less when I have eyeliner on. Since that’s a less painful day, for me, and eyeliner is easy, I generally wear the eyeliner. Again, context matters; if I were cis and they made that mistake, they would be all apologies, but since I’m trans, I hear a lot of, “Well, Grace, you have to understand that when I first met you…” (as though I don’t know that, and have to have it explained to me, yet again).
When I wear eyeliner in front of people who have always understood me to be female, it is a different act than when I wear eyeliner in front of people who once understood me to be male, even though, on my end, applying the eyeliner to my face is exactly the same act. Context matters, and what other people bring to the interaction turns out to be an important part of the context.
And yet, a child with, for instance, Swyer syndrome, will be assigned female at birth while having XY chromosomes and no ovaries, and such a child will be accepted socially without question in all quarters. Because their body, which is not typically female, managed to be typically female enough that they got assigned female at birth… and treated as such, socially, from the get-go.
In other words, you cannot completely separate the physical experience of living in a female-typical body from the social experience of being perceived as female; they interact.
I’m reminded of something Catharine MacKinnon wrote:
I’m also reminded of something Helen Boyd wrote:
Grace
[edited for formatting and clarity of attribution]
Mandolin: I Blame the Patriarchy — my god, I’d almost forgotten that blog. I used to read it because I valued Twisty’s incisive prose and acute observations, but hers seemed like a very bitter worldview, inaccurate because it was based on the idea that men are always in control of themselves and know exactly what they’re doing, moving in unison.
Whether or not you bleed or bear a child, you belong to the egg-producing type of person that has been reviled for bleeding and exploited for its ability to bear children. Ampersand mentions Andrea Dworkin at the bottom of his cartoon. I haven’t read anything but Right Wing Women, but here’s how she describes the common condition of women as a class in that book:
“Subordinate to men, sexually colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the general description of the social environment in which all women live.”
Grace says in her comment that she knows “trans men who pass as cis but still have typically female bodies, and they tell me that male privilege is awesome. In other words, they’re no longer being oppressed for the bodies they have when they are perceived as gender-normative men.” But is that entirely true? They may have escaped catcalling and belittling, but if they decide to get pregnant – if they still can – they will be affected by poor maternity care, for example.
I can tell you the exact moment when I thought that trans people, or more specifically the positions they argue, might be a “threat” to feminism: when I read the first demand that feminists need to *center* trans women in the reproductive justice movement.
I still need to to respond to Grace’s comment but I’ve run out of time, so I’ll come back later.
“Perhaps you could cede the word and decide that it does describe a social role, but now we would need a new word to describe existence as a female.”
This is a really good point. If I had to guess, any attempt to create such a word would just create another battle over the acceptable use of this new word.
As Grace pointed out, there is no single monolith of all trans people’s thoughts. There are 1.5 million trans people in the USA alone. So it seems odd to hold what you read one trans person say against the entire movement, unless you have good reason to think that those thoughts are representative.
A Google search turns up ONE example of a trans writer saying that trans women should be “centered” in the reproductive justice movement – an article on Everyday Feminism. And reading the article’s actual suggestions, it seems to me that the writer was using “center” to mean “included,” not to mean “made the highest goal above all other goals.”
There’s no reason to think that wanting trans women to be “centered” (meaning “made the highest goal, above the needs of cis women”) by the reproductive justice movement, is even remotely representative of what trans folks think.
Great comment, Grace!
But trans women do have the experience of living in a female body. Trans women do exist as female. And there’s no one trait you can refer to – not menstruation, not childbirth, not having a womb, not chromosomes – that is universally shared among cis women.
In practice, it really looks like you’re looking for a term that refers to all women apart from trans women. And there’s already a term for that – “cis women.”
So, I’m not sure this is accurate. This is actually why the word “cis” grates on me. I’m not “okay” with it; I’d just rather do that than any of my other available options at the moment.
I think this experience may be one that undergirds a lot of TERF responses. “I experience gender dysphoria, and have to deal with it because there is really no practical, current way for me to ameliorate it–so why shouldn’t you?”
Also, I think if the only way one can envision *not* experiencing dysphoria is if there is a major breakdown of binary social roles, then any chosen binary experience is going to feel unsettling or threatening. And, you know, that’s a basic problem that nonbinary people are just going to have until there’s some kind of cultural shift. There is major social clustering at two poles of gender, and that leaves some of us out in the cold. My preferred solution, honestly, is just to make gender one of those things which, of course, exists, but which our culture feels no need to comment on or consider marked–rather than something which defines our pronouns and our reception down to a very basic social level…
But this is *not* trans people’s fault. It is a fault of binary gendered thinking. Which is primarily a cis person’s problem. But trans people are a point where the cis system breaks down, which calls attention to the system; thus, they are an easy scapegoat.
Also, it seems to me that rather than there being a breakdown of gender where it’s simply not marked, we are (at least temporarily) seeing that people really like gender. They like gender, and they like labels. This isn’t actually surprising; it’s pretty part and parcel with how people react to things. So, there are going to be more boxes invented, and more people who fit into those boxes and thus feel less alienated–and other people who are still boxless. And that’s going to be frustrating, but it’s part of the evolution of the conversation.
I think there really may need to be a word that is neither cis nor trans. Right now, the non-binary community just doesn’t even have a consistent answer to, “Are you cis or trans?” And “no” is not an answer that feels comfortable, or that will even be accepted in all circumstances.
Being rhetorically eliminated from the conversation doesn’t just have the effect of erasure–though it does. It also doesn’t just have the effect of creating TERFlike flail responses to perceived threat–though I think some (not all) of the flail responses derive from that sense of being in an unacknowledged space (which doesn’t make it okay to be bigoted against trans people). It has the effect of making you feel like you’re standing over empty space, and there’s just nothing beneath you. Like being bisexual, it’s a place in which one can expect antipathy and suspicion from both of the polar communities–if they acknowledge your existence at all. This is associated with bad outcomes for bisexuals, and I can’t imagine it doing anything else for people who are nonbinary.
I’m not sure this is a priority. I’m also not sure it isn’t.
“People who were subjected to oppositional sexism that began with the assigning of female sex at (or near to)* birth” might be more accurate if I understand her categorization.
I still think this is actually a useful/relevant category for some types of discussion, but as long as TERFs are having tantrums, we aren’t going to be able to have that conversation while making sure there’s space, respect, and safety for our trans sisters and brothers.
*e.g. Money case
Grace: When I said “trans activists are,” I meant “multiple trans activists are,” not “every last one.” Even if not every trans person is declaring that biological sex doesn’t exist, enough are to make an impact. I can’t ignore them.
You’re right, it was Redefining Realness. I read it a while ago, and should have googled the title to make sure I got it right. Your explanation does give the line a different meaning.
The social experience of being perceived as female (assumed to have a female body, the kind traditionally held to be inferior in all regards, including the brain) is not the same as the social experience of being raised as a female and the physical experience of having a female body. They interact but they are not the same kinds of realities. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said as much when she stated that “trans women are trans women” in an interview, and she was excoriated for it.
I disagree with Catherine MacKinnon that “women is a political class,” and I’d like to ask which other groups of oppressed people are a political class, with membership open to anyone who identifies as a member.
Ampersand: the thoughts of trans people are communicated to me, not just by articles, but by Facebook, Tumblr, and irl interactions. Also, below the Everyday Feminism article on your google search you may have seen the other piece on nwcl.org in which one of the people interviewed says:
“These connections which I have spoken to above must be understood in the reproductive justice world, and trans folks, particularly Black trans woman, must be centered so that they are not excluded. By centering folks who are the most marginalized, we can work towards providing care for everyone. Access to birth control and abortion affects people across gender, and we must start honoring that.”
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Access to abortion does affect people across gender. It does not affect trans women. Trans men are the one affected. And then there’s this, in which the author equates choosing to take sterilizing hormones with having the choice to have children “taken away.”
I’m not looking for a term to refer to “all women apart from trans women.” I’m looking for a term that encompasses all AFAB people regardless of personal identity, as Mandolin said. It used to be “woman,” and then it was “female,” which you clearly reject. Jeffrey Gandee is right: any new word will create a new battle.
Is it possible to just not agree on who who or what should be “centered” within any given ideology? Isn’t it okay for some feminist to center native american women, other feminists to center people-born-as-women, while others center women in tech?
I really have no idea how acceptable this is in most social circles. Medea, if you tell fellow-feminists that your feminism is primarily concerned with advocating for the rights of people born as women, do you get push-back for this? Called a bigot? If so, I think that’s shitty so long as you aren’t criticizing what other feminists center as well.
To what degree we should hold people’s priorities against them is a thorny issue. Maybe I’m alone here, but I favor some degree of pluralism, even if this creates some sharp disagreements.
What’s wrong with “AFAB people”?
Appreciate this discussion. I’m female-bodied and identify as female and “cis” in that way, but I’ve rarely been “cis” in the more literal sense of feeling like I “pass” as a woman. I latched on to “tomboy” as an identity in about fourth grade, got my hair cut short as soon as I was old enough to decide that (it’s long now), and spent my teen years in angst over clothing, wishing I could fit in but hating to shop, and even when I did shop I felt like I bought the wrong stuff. Whenever trans folks are around, I feel less alienated and more at home. And the world feels less strange, more open to possibility. I can remind myself that it’s our culture that’s wrong, not me. In my personal experience, transgender folks have contributed a lot to feminism, and accepting their chosen gender identity (or even no identity, as some genderfluid folks do) is only appropriate.
Oh yes. I mean, we get called bigots for showing up to marches wearing pink pussy hats. Lesbians are called bigots for not being sexually interested in trans women. The “disgusting vagina fetishist” comments are the kind of thing you see on Tumblr. Julia Serano doesn’t use words like that, but she did write in the Daily Beast, in a piece on her difficulties dating:
Ruchama, not only is “people-who-are-assigned-female-at-birth” ridiculously unwieldy and indirect, part of the problem is that many trans women don’t even want to admit that it’s a meaningful aspect of a person’s existence. In that same Serano piece, she says that “trans male/masculine folks who claim a place in dyke spaces by emphasizing their lack of male genitals or their assigned-female-at-birth status royally screw over their trans sisters,” as if being female isn’t enough of a qualification for being in a dyke space.
There’s a tendency on all sides of this debate to try to declare the One True Meaning ™ of particular words. Women means this, gender means that, sex means this other thing. The definitions always seem to be driven by ideological dogma and fail to give due consideration the complexities of reality.
Why is it so hard for people to accept that words can have many meanings, even vague meanings, where the context has to be considers to determine the meaning? Why can’t man/woman (manhood/womanhood, etc) mean people born with penises/vaginas in one context and mean people who identify as such in another? Is it so bad for people to see either of these meanings as significant enough to socialise or organise around?
I suspect this is a key driver behind the war over words. If you constantly redefine words, you can deny people the words they need to give labels to particular boxes. It becomes much more difficult to organise around or even talk about boxes you cannot label. You don’t even have to rebut or even give thought your opponents arguments if they cannot put them into words.
Mandolin:
The problem with hoping for a cultural shift is that the social clustering is driven by gender. Humans are biologically wired to perceive other humans’ sex, and have different psychological responses and ultimately different social behaviours depending on the sex they perceive. The only way (assuming that it’s even possible) to prevent people from forming these social clusters would be to significantly suppress people’s biological instincts.
The problem with this solution is that most people are hardwired to care deeply about gender. It’s significant to romance, to family, to friendship, to almost every social relationship and interaction, to art, fashion, music and all forms of human expression, and almost every aspect of human life. The significance of gender throughout human cultures and history isn’t something that spontaneously appeared out of nowhere, it’s a reflection of a strong and consistent underlying biological drive.
That’s not to say people should be forced to care about gender or be criticised for not caring about it. However expecting a majority of people to stop caring about it seems quite unrealistic.
From despis –
That about sums up my feelings on gender. I often feel torn between the desire to preserve womanhood is something biologically special and to abolish the category altogether, which does go back to an earlier comment about having one’s cake and eating it too.
From Mandolin –
An easy scapegoat, but also a place where trans people become the champions of feminism’s multigenerational project to do away with biological determinism. That’s why I cannot go along with the idea that trans people represent a threat to feminism.
I feel like I kind of understand the point of view of lesbians who want vagina-only spaces. Or at the very least, since I’m not lesbian or trans, I don’t feel like I’m the right person to critique that. But I can’t see extending that to wanting to reserve terms like “women” or “female” to folks with vaginas.
“In that same Serano piece, she says that “trans male/masculine folks who claim a place in dyke spaces by emphasizing their lack of male genitals or their assigned-female-at-birth status royally screw over their trans sisters,” as if being female isn’t enough of a qualification for being in a dyke space.”
Ok, but do you think identifying as a woman qualifies one to hang out in a woman’s space? Do you advocate for spaces that only allow “people born as women?”
I see a massive conundrum here. People want to form groups and coalitions centered around goals. Keeping these groups open to all can undermine the original goals of of the group. That’s bad. Closing these groups off to individuals for reasons beyond their control also seems bad.
A recent example that occured among my friends:
I kiteboard, and I’m close with the kite community where I live. My wife kites too, and she fucking rips. Anyway, a group of kiters invited me on a 4 day kite weekend out-of-state, but a stipulation of the trip was “GUYS ONLY.” The reason for this is that most of these guys don’t have wives or girlfriends who ride, and they didn’t want to deal with “spa days,” “nap times,” or miss out on “post session beers.” I asked if I could bring my wife since she’s actually a kiter. “No. Guys only.” I was pissed. My wife was pissed. She rides longer/harder than all these guys (and they know it) and never gets her nails done at the beach. She drinks beer.
The right course of actionseemed so obvious to me! If these guys want to organize a trip where it’s all about kiting, great. Just say that. “Dedicated kiters only.” Just exclude people who want to do other things at the beach, but don’t exclude people based on their genitals, right?
So why can’t there be a similar dynamic within feminist spaces, where people can organize based on goals, and exclude people who don’t share goals- but not exclude people who aren’t born with the right genitalia or skin color? Is it that too often, groups that organize in this way get subverted? Is it that people get shamed into accepting goals they don’t prioritize? Are the division between people with differing priorities so polarizing that they just don’t like or respect each other? Maybe it’s just the human tendency to despise most those that are almost like us, but just not quite.
Sorry if I sound super naive.
Jeffrey:
It sounds like they wanted a trip about being men (“guys”) as much as they wanted a trip about kiting. Having a woman on the trip, even one focus on kiting, would significantly change the social dynamics of the group simply by the psychological impact of her presence as a woman. Most people have some drive, some psychological need, to engage in homosocial behaviour, and its possible the guys of your kiting group don’t get sufficient opportunity in day-to-day life. It’s not about kiting, or beer or spa days, but about fundamental human psychology.
Desipis,
You may be right, and they didn’t bother explaining that to me because they knew I wouldn’t really get it.
It’s funny. I pretty much agree with you on gender and biology, including that we are hard-wired to perceive gender (I mean, how could that not be selected for in any sexually dimorphic creature living on this planet?). I think gender is much more than a construct, and attempts to change attitude on gender will always bump up against our nature to some degree. But I’m still really bothered because this kind of exclusion hurts feelings. These are guys she calls friends, telling her they don’t want her there. They knew I’d have to tell her that. I got to see it so clearly because it happened to my wife, but it happens all the time to women everywhere, and that sucks. Sometimes it will happen in more ambiguous ways, leaving women to guess. Ugh, that would suck. It happens to trans women all the time obviously, right? When does the realization that people feel hurt outweigh one’s desire for a certain social dynamic?
I guess there needs to be a middle ground between “We must be inclusive,” and “any desire to segregate is justified.” I’m especially afraid that the latter will lead to run-away atomization.
I realize I’m in the minority here, but…. That is so incomprehensibly bizarre!
Maybe they should have billed it as a “men’s retreat,” then?
Citation, please?
I feel no need for homosocial behavior.
I mean, I like hanging out with my male friends, but in pretty much the same way I like hanging out with any group of my friends.
desipis:
Medea:
I find those two quotes interesting to put next to each other. Because the issue clearly is not a simple linguistic one: Medea says that AFAB trans men should be allowed in lesbian* spaces. So you can’t reduce the question merely to people not understanding that words have different meanings in different contexts–the objection is also to the boundary that is drawn based on this linguistic choice. To me, it seems incorrect to say that AFAB trans men are, or ought to be, welcome in every lesbian space, although I’m perfectly happy that some lesbian spaces do welcome them.
* If I’m missing a subtlety between “lesbian” and “dyke” here, I apologize: I’m more comfortable using “lesbian” in this particular conversation.
Kristin:
Noting that this does not apply to all lesbians; some are attracted to vulvas, some to certain kinds of female presentation or female energy, some to breasts, etc. People are attracted to other people for all kinds of reasons, and trying to draw human universals in what people are attracted to just never works. And turning your personal sexual preferences into social categories for anything other than “who I, personally, sleep with” usually goes badly (see also: mainstream beauty standards for straight women). Also, to follow on the Julia Serano point posted by Medea above, you can acknowledge both the reality of your own attraction patterns and also that the social environment you were raised in probably affected what your attraction patterns are. (IOW, “you shouldn’t celebrate a lack of attraction to someone based on X” and “you ought to be attracted to someone based on X” are two different statements. Do some people say the latter thing? Are some people prejudiced and awful? Sure, but if “some of this viewpoint’s adherents are awful” was a reason not to believe the viewpoint, I couldn’t believe anything at all.)
Jeffrey Gandee:
This does happen, to be clear. But there are plenty of the other to argue about. :)
This is really interesting to me. I definitely want both heterosocial and homosocial interactions in my life, and I feel like I’m missing out if I haven’t had a women-only interaction in a while. (Now trying to figure out where I think my nonbinary friends fit in this schema, and where they’d want to fit in this schema.)
Jeffrey,
Your male friends’ stated reasons for not wanting a female companion sound sexist, but I’m fine with the idea of men getting together with other men for kiteboarding. They can make different kinds of excursions during the year, after all.
You can create new spaces based on identity without demanding the elimination of female-only spaces, from swimming pools to shelters to sports teams.
Trying to think how to put this, while on Benadryl, caffeine and poor sleep.
Privilege, the invisible-backpack sort, is what you don’t have to think about having because it’s there like the safety mechanisms on an elevator. You don’t have to look before you step forward; you know there is an elevator there when the doors open, and that it will not plummet under your weight.
It seems like to me that, for someone who is trans, all the messages, spoken or unspoken, that would normally reinforce that person’s privilege or lack therof are likely to misfire, because they are aimed at someone the person in question is not. The safety mechanisms may be there, the elevator will not plummet, but the person does not trust their weight to it unthinkingly.
It’s a thing I just don’t get. Like Amp, I don’t see the difference between hanging out with male friends vs any other group of friends, whichever way you want to slice it.
I mean that I understand it exists. But I both know it exists and don’t get the draw. Why would I want to have time with only men? Or with only women? What’s the difference between them that makes that desirable?
I suspect that a big part of this comes down to the differences in the way that you and I view men and women. I think that another part of this is the difference between the people who are your friends and the people who are my friends. And somewhere, maybe on its own, maybe as a result of the two previous things I’ve mentioned, is the (probably) different way you and I interact with men and with women.
But for me, “Men only” or “Women only” seems exclusionary and mean to me.
They don’t necessarily seem mean to me. For example, I don’t think the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, or Soromundi (the Lesbian chorus of Eugene), are mean. (Neither has a cis-only rule.) And there are things like support groups, of course.
I don’t really feel any particular need to socialize in women-only spaces. One of my friends hosts women-only knitting/crafting/whatever things every once in a while, and they’re fun, but they’re no more or less fun than social events that also include men. Thinking back over my different friend groups through my life, they’ve usually been a bunch of women plus a few men (or a bunch of girls plus a few boys, when I was a kid), and usually one of those guys was one of my closest friends.
I wasn’t even thinking about organizations like that. I was stuck in the area of “guys only trip.” Or the time the lesbian separatist invited my ex and I over. I thought, since I didn’t know she was a separatist until she said, “Not you.”
And there’s also the fact that I’ve never had the slightest interest in joining a group like that (terrible singer and not needing a support group that excluded me).
So, yeah, you’re right that it doesn’t have to be mean.
The more I read and make comments on this post the less opinionated I feel about identity and exclusion. Im struggling to form anything like a rational basis for when it is and isn’t ok to be exclusive. I think most of us have a sort of gut feeling about when this is and isn’t justified, and much of that depends on how we model the mind of those doing the exclusion. I worry that much of the difference in opinion will actually boil down to debatable first principles- whether or not one is a consequentialist comes to mind.
Ampersand:
Why wouldn’t the same principles that apply to supports groups also apply to groups of friends, which often act as informal support groups?
I think a lot of it is in presentation.
If someone says “I really need some guy time. I’m inviting some of my guy friends to come with me, and we’ll kiteboard and have dinner and hang out,” that’s one thing.
If someone says “Kiteboarding trip! But we only want real kiteboarders here, not people who’ll be doing their nails, so NO GIRLS,” that’s something else.
You basically reinterpreted what (Jeffrey said) the guys said to make it more like the former. But, in Jeffrey’s account, what they actually said was the latter. The former is unobjectionable, on its face; the latter is sexist.
(There are nuances I’m not getting into – what if business relationships and deals are formed on such a trip? – for simplicity’s sake.)
I should emphasize that in my example, the guys really did justify “no girls” for the reasons I said. Whether or not they actually just wanted homosocial time or whatever, I don’t know.
But like all things this story exists in a more complicated context. My peer group is getting older and group trips to the beach like this happen with less frequency. This particular group of guys only gets out rarely, and the previous time I rode with them was at a kite-centric bachelor party- so again no women allowed. IOW, these guys planned two trips all year and excluded women both times. Are the women in our community supposed to think nothing of that? Imagine if the friends you share a hobby with keep telling you that you’re not welcome. It’s weird and upsetting to me. Maybe this is one of those “to be human is to be in conflict” kind of things where there really is no way to please all parties.
Just stopping by. I was Lightly on those old Ms. boards. Kept this site bookmarked all these years. Good to see this place keep thriving.
I remember those radfem meltdowns. These days that feels like it all happened in a different solar system.
These days in my corner of the world hunger games are the ones that underlie everything else. From the cheap seats where multitudes losing the hunger games are sitting, feminism is starting to look like it’s just a shiny new form of preening for the fortunate few.
Hi Lightly! Nice to see you. :-) I hope things are going well for you (apart from the world being the Hunger Games, that is.)