It wasn’t the end of the problems with Daly. For starters: Daly hated on trans people something fierce. This has been sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate “real” women, and to assign “men” all “authentic” female functions. She also said that they were like whites putting on blackface (yeah: Lorde might have been right, about the whole appropriating-other-people’s-oppression thing?) and implied that they should have bodily violence done to them, or at least should be physically intimidated, by “real” feminists, so that they could not enter the feminist movement or feminist space. Let’s not be coy, here: no matter whether she believed this for her entire life, no matter whether she privately got over it later, she published it, without apparently ever publishing a retraction, as far as I can tell. This is hate. This is privilege. This, right here, is the face of the oppressor.
And I’m not saying this to defile Mary Daly’s grave. I’m not saying it because I get a dirty little thrill out of tarnishing the legacy of a fallen feminist. I’m not saying it because I want to start a fight. I’m saying it because, for much of my young life, Mary Daly was my favorite feminist author, meaning that I believed this shit, too. There are still women who believe this, and these women often call themselves “radical feminists.” Because queer-bashing and misogyny are just so fucking threatening to the Patriarchy, apparently. I believed it, because Mary Daly published it, and I believed in her. And, let me tell you, I have worked like Hell Itself to get over that, and to get over the privilege that allowed me to place such emphasis on my own oppression that I could go around blithely oppressing other folks because clearly I had won the Whose Suffering Is Most Important game, and to be an actual functioning ally. Some encouragement from Mary Daly – some retraction, some statement of accountability – would have helped. It would have slapped me out of this unbelievably gross way of thinking with one blow, rather than making me go through life hurting people and being an asshole and having to receive many, many less powerful slaps until I got my shit straight.
Daly and I were both Catholics, at one point, so I know both of us understand the power of Confession – not the version handed out by the church, where you say it and apologize for it and have all your guilt magically wiped away by the hand of God, but the version that actually works in the real live world, where you admit to being wrong and you take your consequences like a grown woman and you do your acts of contrition and your assigned penance, for the rest of your life, by living with those consequences and not repeating the actions that caused them in the first place. People might forgive you; they might not. The point is to value doing the right thing, for the sake of the right thing, more than you value your own personal comfort.
I’m exerpting this from the rest of the essay because I think this will be an important dialogue for feminists to have, and to continue to have, until the particular forms of transphobia which are fostered by the radical feminist movement die a long-awaited death. Mary Daly’s passing provides fodder for this conversation — a starting point — but it’s not really the core of what needs discussing.
Feminism is, still, used as a tool of oppression against trans people. Those who perpetuate this violence toward fellow human beings should feel ashamed. If they, like Mary Daly, have an investment in the imagery of the church — they should confess and repent. If they, like me, have no such investment, then they should apologize and stop hurting other people immediately.
Also, rest in peace Mary Daly and thank you for the good work you’ve done, but that’s just a footnote to this conversation.
Mary Daly is the reason I don’t identify as a feminist. There are a number of feminist ideas I value, but I can not group myself with people who accept her as one of them.
I don’t know whether the transphobia wasn’t there in the books of hers I read, or I just wasn’t sensitive to it. What I did see was pervasive misandry. She presented men as evil non-human simulacra. It’s a shame, but the only way I could get value out of her work was to reconfigure to assume that her ideas about a passionate life applied to all people rather than half of them.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was both a misandrist and a trans-hater.
A slightly edited version of what I posted at Feministe:
I devoured Beyond God The Father and read–I don’t remember if it was the whole thing–Gyn/Ecology in the early to mid 1980s. Both books were profoundly important to me more for what I think I understood then as their descriptive accuracy in terms of patriarchy rather than the solutions Daly proposed in them. I was back then completely ignorant of Daly’s transphobia–nothing even remotely resembling trans issues was anywhere close to being on my radar at the time–and only vaguely aware of the questions about race and racism in her work raised by Audre Lorde. Even though I have paid little or no attention to Daly’s work since I first read it, and have, frankly, left behind a lot of what I originally thought about it–mostly because of what I think of now as the undigested anger that pervades it (something along the lines of what Nancy Lebovitz is talking about, though I don’t know if I agree with her entirely)–it is good to have a more rounded picture of work that was as important to my development back then as Daly’s.
From what people have said, it seems like her opposition to transsexuals was related to her opposition to men. She viewed transwomen as being men who were pretending to be women, and saw this as a seamless male threat. Am I off base with that?
In her final, backward glance over the linear history of “her” feminism, she repudiated separatism in the form that not only existed but that she had largely midwived.
She felt that it had produced a partiarchal matriarchy, with women filling the roles of men as oppressor and hed become largely exclusory rather than inclusory.
Which is why she didn’t make quite so much headway in European feminist academe’ .
Nonetheless, she saw what she had brought into being, the outcome, and pointed out its inherent discriminatory and frequently anti-women nature, a discordant element in feminism and the sort of thing that my own mentor decried; “I tell you Chica that no greater abomination exists than women denying their spirit of sisterhood and instead becoming the oppressor.” -Rebeca, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Daly saw what had happened, she did renounce it. Not trans-discrimination by name, but the root of trans-discrimination, an elitist, purist , “more feminist than thou” heirarchal structure that become as much as an oppressor within our ranks as the patriarchy had been.
And Mary had the academic honesty and integrity and sense of personal morality to repudiate herself.
MauraHennessey: Where did Daly do this? I would be very curious to read it. Thanks.
While this is good and all, I would think it might have been more useful for her to specifically apologize for and repudiate the hate speech she perpetrated.
I’m just saying.
—Myca
Then I guess you must not identify yourself with any group of people whatsoever, because in any group of people, there will be those who express repugnant views. However, I’ve noticed that it’s usually only “feminism” that is held to this impossibly high standard.
I am disturbed that someone like Ted Kennedy received a glowing post on this blog upon his passing, where his substantial misdeeds were glossed right over, yet all the knives are out for Mary Daly, whose sphere of influence was relatively small compared to Kennedy’s. I wish Great Men were held to the same high standards as feminists. If they were, the world would be a better place.
*rolls eyes* I didn’t write the obit for kennedy. and plenty of feminist blogs gave the glowing review. but way to be selective, very useful of you.
Robert, I haven’t seen anyone other than me make a connection between Daly’s attitude about men and her attitude about transexuals. Do you have sources?
YellowMarigold, here’s something I was thinking about posting anyway…..
I count myself a libertarian– maybe my psyche only has room for one problematic identity. I just believe I’m getting it right, and libertarians who believe in border restrictions are getting it wrong.
Daly wasn’t just a feminist, she was an influential and respected feminist.
What’s more, I was tempted to being smug about my Superior Emotional Perceptiveness about Daly until I remembered how much I’ve been into Ayn Rand (details if you like about what I do and don’t agree with from her)[1], and how I still don’t see the emotional stench that’s obvious to a lot of people from her writing.
Elsewhere, I’ve seen a defense of sorts that any feminist, no matter how mild, will be accused of hating men, so any accusation of hating men might as well be ignored. I’ve actually seen very little that I’d call hatred of men other than in Daly. (Hothead Paisan might count, though I saw that as amusing revenge fantasies, and was shocked at how much some of the letter writers got into it.)
Maybe I’ll go read some more Susan Bordo. She’s so sane she doesn’t seem to get famous.
[1]She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure– one that was part of the larger society. Signy Mallory (captain of a big spaceship) doesn’t have the same emotional effect, I’d say.
Actually, if comments count for you — and they must, since what you’re criticizing here was a comment, not the original post — then I don’t think you can fairly claim that Kennedy’s misdeeds were glossed over; they were substantially discussed in the comments of that post. On the other hand, if comments don’t count, then you shouldn’t be criticizing this blog by quoting a comment posted here. You can’t have it both ways.
There was also a follow-up post linking to Shakesville focusing on Kennedy’s misdeeds.
Plus, as Mandolin pointed out, it’s not like the two posts were even from the same writer.
Finally, if you want to judge the blog as a whole, it’s ludicrous of you to use a sample size of two posts. There are plenty of great women who have been praised on “Alas,” and plenty of great (or “great”) men who have been criticized.
In the Star Wars EU, Leia runs the galaxy.
How’s that for major infrastructure?
“dealing with the fallout of changing an emphatic political view that many people still agree with”
As a disabled woman, I am very, very uncomfortable with the use of being ill or otherwise disabled as an excuse to say “I won’t own up to my mistakes.” But that’s OT. So I’m going to point to what Sady said in the original post:
Also, see White [cis] Women’s Tears. Because it’s ALL about the pain that Daly might have gone through if she’d said sorry. Yup.
At Mandolin’s request, I’ve moved the comments that seem to be primarily focused on fictional depictions of women running infrastructure to the new thread set up for the purpose.
I’ve always had issues with Daly, ever since reading Gyn/Ecology. I have no problems identifying as a feminist because of that – hey, she was one person, not the whole movement. However, the accusation of misandry is often thrown at feminists, and in 99.9% of cases it’s complete bullshit, but in Daly’s case, honestly, it’s true. She genuinely hated men, as a group. And I do think that her hatred of transpeople, particularly transwomen, was based on their having the taint of the penis upon them. It’s good that her transphobia is getting some attention, but I really think that as a movement we ought to be publicly repudiating her loathing of men too. Some of the things she wrote about men were completely inexcusable (in terms of her proposed solutions to the man problem in particular). I’ve honestly never understood how so many feminists can read some of the stuff she wrote about men and not stop and go, wait, this is going much too far. And I don’t mean going too far in the sense of being too radical, I mean in the sense that she sounded bigoted and irrational when she wrote or talked about men. No matter how much good work she might have done, her writing about men was always tainted with this wierd inflection, this sort of visceral loathing, which in my opinion seriously compromises it’s usefulness. She sounded like a perfect caricature of what anti-feminists like to imagine feminists are all about.
Let’s face it; Daly was guilty of blatant misandry. She advocated allowing only 10 per cent of the world’s male population to survive.
Can you imagine the outcry if some white intellectual or academic had advocated allowing only 10 per cent of the world’s blacks to survive?
And anyway, who would determine which 10 per cent of men would be allowed to survive? Appalling.
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I think it was Theodore Sturgeon who wrote that 90% of everything is crap. However, Daly seemed to want to apply that to only half the human race. I myself have days when I want to remove 90% of the world’s population, but not having the knowledge to be absolutely sure which ones to keep, I don’t send my thoughts in that direction much.
Daly’s blatant misandry was a reaction, however primitive, to millennia of officially sanctioned misogygny. She just laid it out the table a little more clearly. Various religious leaders, and their secular replacements, may have not called for a 90% genocide of women, but they spewed every other kind of viciousness. That someone like Daly ever got the spotlight, and kept it even after majorly jumping the shark, just shows how bad that situation was.
But I get right tired of all this scapegoat stuff.
Can you imagine the outcry if some white intellectual or academic had advocated allowing only 10 per cent of the world’s blacks to survive?
If a black female academic feminist advocated that only ten per cent of black men should survive, it would be an imagining because it hasn’t happened. Co-incidence?