I've uploaded my 1982-vintage unpublished book, The Amazon's Brother, to my theory web pages.
This was my first attempt to put these ideas into writing and reach people. Have an effect on the world.
Well, actually it wasn't my first. The first attempt was handwritten and was scribbled down in excitement, much of it written in the middle of the night. It didn't go over well; the most tangible outcome of that was being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
So it's more accurate to say that The Amazon's Brother was my first serious attempt to say these things carefully with a considered effort to make sense to people.
The first half of it, titled "Sissyhood", was -- like my current book, GenderQueer -- an attempt to use my own experiences as an "Exhibit A" example. The second half, "Patriarchy", was social theory.
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Saturday, November 30, 2019
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Bookstores and Libraries and Community Centers, Oh My!
Having given approval to the formatted manuscript and the covers (back and front), I've now effectively switched effort-gears from "getting book published" to "getting people to read the book", even though it hasn't rolled off the Sunstone Books presses yet.
At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.
I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.
Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.
To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.
Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.
My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
At this phase, where the book's availability is predicted but still slightly off in the future (January 2020, for benefit of the curious), the focus is on women's and gender studies programs at colleges, and LGBT community centers. I can be booked to speak at such venues even before it's possible to show up with a stack of the books on the table in front of me.
I actually did some of that in 2016-2017 when I had previously thought my book was on the verge of coming out. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Learned a lot, too. When I next have an opportunity to present, the presentation is going to be more closely focused on my specific type of gender identity and what it brings to the table. People like the "Gender 101" introductory material but I think I can encapsulate it in a much smaller portion of my talk.
Later, once the book can be purchased, I will add libraries and bookstores to the list of targets.
To be sure, a library or a bookstore, theoretically speaking, could also have a presenter or speaker before their book is available for purchase. But in the case of bookstores in particular, my research thus far indicates that they aren't much for "events", or at least not the kind of event that revolves around a gender-variant person discussing gender identity. Some of the new age and mystical / spiritual book stores do host events but they're most often focused on chakras and healing and the sale of gems and oils and other non-book substances that they market along with books on the subject. University bookstores generally don't do events at all, of any sort, and the remaining balance of independent bookstores mostly want the author's book to be available for purchase first.
Meanwhile, my publicist, John Sherman of Sherman & Company, is going to have an additional focus: getting my book reviewed. That, surprisingly enough (for me at least), is something that needs focused attention before the book's release date. Some important reviewers won't review a book once it comes out.
My day-job skills as a FileMaker database developer are again serving me well, just as they did for the querying process. For this publicity effort, I have 11614 records in my database (with many of them containing multiple contact persons to fire emails or snailmails or phone calls off to). Of those, 864 are college campus women's and/or gender studies programs; 412 are LGBT community centers, a mixture of on-campus and independent. Then I have 1552 academic libraries and a whopping 7263 public libraries, any and all of whom could theoretically acquire a copy of my book for their shelves. I have no experience pitching this possibility to libraries, but with any luck I will learn as I gain experience. Then I have 32 LGBT-focused bookstores (a declining phenomenon, unfortunately, although part of the decline may be that the subject matter is more mainstream and more often carried by mainstream bookstores), and 1351 other (generic) independent bookstores. The independent bookstores and libraries are dual-opportunity: they could book me to speak, and purchase copies of my book to stock and sell as well. Finally, I have 139 reviewers, bloggers, booktubers, and individual people who asked me to alert them when the book becomes available.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, November 15, 2019
Friday, November 8, 2019
TERF Wars (Part Two)
If you’re a radical feminist and you’ve raised objections to transgender women being in certain women-only spaces – separatist feminist groups, perhaps, or other events designated for women only – please do me a favor and list the times and places where you have written about or spoken about transgender people as a challenge or a noncompliant response to patriarchal definitions of sex and gender.
If you can’t—if you never refer to transgender people except to accuse transgender women of invading women’s or feminists’ space—you’re a bigot. You could easily enough define a group or an event as being for people who have endured the experience of being, being seen as, and being treated as women and girls for a lifetime, without rejecting transgender women’s self-identification as women.
More to the point, radical feminism in particular has identified masculine behaviors, masculine priorities, masculine value systems, and the rest of what constitutes the identity “man” in this patriarchal society, as politically and socially harmful. Radical feminists have shown that these personal, individual-level traits and characteristics are reflected and writ large in our institutions, where they represent a threat to all life on this planet and are responsible for imperialism and colonialism, slavery and racism, hierchical authority and autocratic concentration of power, the obsession with control and the fondness for coercion, and the myriad forms of oppression that our species has suffered from for millennia.
In light of that, it’s extremely difficult to shrug away your complete lack of recognition and interest when significant numbers of male-born people have tossed aside the identity “man” and opted to join women instead.
Radical feminism has indicted males for being men. It has refused to excuse male behavior as natural and therefore inevitable. I grew up hearing this. I grew up nodding along with it, agreeing, because I, too, found these behaviors and attitudes and values detestable and inexcusably wrong. I grew up male. It’s the body in which I was born.
I’m not asking you to call me “woman”. I’m demanding that you recognize my situation, regardless of what label gets attached to it. You’ve demanded that males change, that they cease to behave as men. You need to come to some kind of terms with males who reject an identity as men, since a hypothetical success in your overall endeavor implies exactly that outcome, does it not?
Surely you do not believe that someone born male has an inherent nature different from your own (and inherently patriarchal in its effects)? If you think the set of social problems associated with men that feminism has identified are inherent in people born male, if you think patriarchy is that nature writ large, you’ve declared an Enemy. You’ve declared us inherently evil, our presence intolerable on a biological level. If that’s actually what you think, feel, and believe, then...
Own it, embrace the vision as espoused by Valerie Solanas, but be honest about it and where you’re coming from.
But most of you, you don’t. Most of you aren’t in this space, this world-view. You just aren’t inclined to point fingers at any sisters who might be; you don’t want to divide women from women. As I said last week, when I was blasting transgender people who only speak of radical feminists in order to label them TERFs,
Most radical feminists do not hate males categorically, nor do they regard anyone or anything as their enemy. This is obvious to me from reading and listening. But be that as it may, “most” is not “all” and you do have among your tribe those whose hatred for patriarchy and for the ways and behaviors and institutions of men goes on to exist as a categorical hatred for male people, and, with it, the belief that we are innately your enemy and that it is inherenly in our nature that you cannot trust us. You know it as well as I do; you’ve heard your sisters say so just as I have. Of course a good feminist has better things to occupy her time and energy than to spend it criticizing her sisters and being divisive. If legitimate and understandable anger gets warped into hatred sometimes, so what? Look at all the people and institutions that have chosen to treat radical feminism as their enemy! Yes, I get that. But that does not mean you should join your voices to theirs, and it does not mean you don’t really and truly need to come to terms with our existence.
By “come to terms” I mean in a non-kneejerk fashion, a nuanced consideration of transgender women as women, of antipatriarchal males as people who are not men, of people assigned and treated as male being activists who speak within the feminist tradition.
Gender is socially defined; that process of defining is very much a PLURAL process — that is to say, Joe Jones and Sue Smith do not each define gender inside their own heads as if in a vacuum, but rather instead they do so in interaction with the culture of which they are a part.
Out of all the Joe Joneses and Sue Smiths of the world, there are some for whom it is true and correct that WHO THEY ARE is at odds with the gender expectations of the world around them but the plumbing, the bodies themselves, is not at issue, because FOR THEM gender as they apprehend it in their minds leaves room for them to be who they are (despite being at odds with expectations) and be physically the sex that they were born as. Then there are some for whom gender and plumbing are irreconcilable; WHO THEY ARE is not only at odds with other folks' expectations but also cannot be apprehended in their minds as making sense in the bodies in which they were born.
In between, perhaps, are those who might accept that in some hypothetical alternative reality, where their biological sex would NOT have the social meaning it has to everyone around them that it does in this reality, who they are might NOT be at odds with the world's gender expectations, but that's not the world they get to live in.
You are perhaps unimpressed with the transgender phenomenon because you perceive it as people hopping the fence and fitting in on the other side, leaving the fence intact. I understand that sentiment too, but unless you intend to point fingers at each and every person who makes concessions to the things they don’t have the power to change, it’s an uncharitable jump from there to rejection and condemnation of transgender people. It harkens back to the 1970s and the hostility of some early feminist activists towards women who wore makeup, lived as stay-at-home moms, or married wealth and live ensconced in jewels and furs as some male’s trophy. You outgrew that. Outgrow this. People do what they decide they must do.
Aside from which, you’re way out of date if you think of transgender people strictly in binary “male to female” (or “female to male”) terms and the imperative to “pass”.
It’s just a matter of time before you have to take a principled stand. Phyllis Schlafly was born female and Camille Paglia was both born female and chooses to identify as a feminist. I think I’m not being unfair to posit myself as a better feminist ally than either of them.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
If you can’t—if you never refer to transgender people except to accuse transgender women of invading women’s or feminists’ space—you’re a bigot. You could easily enough define a group or an event as being for people who have endured the experience of being, being seen as, and being treated as women and girls for a lifetime, without rejecting transgender women’s self-identification as women.
More to the point, radical feminism in particular has identified masculine behaviors, masculine priorities, masculine value systems, and the rest of what constitutes the identity “man” in this patriarchal society, as politically and socially harmful. Radical feminists have shown that these personal, individual-level traits and characteristics are reflected and writ large in our institutions, where they represent a threat to all life on this planet and are responsible for imperialism and colonialism, slavery and racism, hierchical authority and autocratic concentration of power, the obsession with control and the fondness for coercion, and the myriad forms of oppression that our species has suffered from for millennia.
In light of that, it’s extremely difficult to shrug away your complete lack of recognition and interest when significant numbers of male-born people have tossed aside the identity “man” and opted to join women instead.
Radical feminism has indicted males for being men. It has refused to excuse male behavior as natural and therefore inevitable. I grew up hearing this. I grew up nodding along with it, agreeing, because I, too, found these behaviors and attitudes and values detestable and inexcusably wrong. I grew up male. It’s the body in which I was born.
I’m not asking you to call me “woman”. I’m demanding that you recognize my situation, regardless of what label gets attached to it. You’ve demanded that males change, that they cease to behave as men. You need to come to some kind of terms with males who reject an identity as men, since a hypothetical success in your overall endeavor implies exactly that outcome, does it not?
Surely you do not believe that someone born male has an inherent nature different from your own (and inherently patriarchal in its effects)? If you think the set of social problems associated with men that feminism has identified are inherent in people born male, if you think patriarchy is that nature writ large, you’ve declared an Enemy. You’ve declared us inherently evil, our presence intolerable on a biological level. If that’s actually what you think, feel, and believe, then...
Own it, embrace the vision as espoused by Valerie Solanas, but be honest about it and where you’re coming from.
But most of you, you don’t. Most of you aren’t in this space, this world-view. You just aren’t inclined to point fingers at any sisters who might be; you don’t want to divide women from women. As I said last week, when I was blasting transgender people who only speak of radical feminists in order to label them TERFs,
in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives.
Most radical feminists do not hate males categorically, nor do they regard anyone or anything as their enemy. This is obvious to me from reading and listening. But be that as it may, “most” is not “all” and you do have among your tribe those whose hatred for patriarchy and for the ways and behaviors and institutions of men goes on to exist as a categorical hatred for male people, and, with it, the belief that we are innately your enemy and that it is inherenly in our nature that you cannot trust us. You know it as well as I do; you’ve heard your sisters say so just as I have. Of course a good feminist has better things to occupy her time and energy than to spend it criticizing her sisters and being divisive. If legitimate and understandable anger gets warped into hatred sometimes, so what? Look at all the people and institutions that have chosen to treat radical feminism as their enemy! Yes, I get that. But that does not mean you should join your voices to theirs, and it does not mean you don’t really and truly need to come to terms with our existence.
By “come to terms” I mean in a non-kneejerk fashion, a nuanced consideration of transgender women as women, of antipatriarchal males as people who are not men, of people assigned and treated as male being activists who speak within the feminist tradition.
Gender is socially defined; that process of defining is very much a PLURAL process — that is to say, Joe Jones and Sue Smith do not each define gender inside their own heads as if in a vacuum, but rather instead they do so in interaction with the culture of which they are a part.
Out of all the Joe Joneses and Sue Smiths of the world, there are some for whom it is true and correct that WHO THEY ARE is at odds with the gender expectations of the world around them but the plumbing, the bodies themselves, is not at issue, because FOR THEM gender as they apprehend it in their minds leaves room for them to be who they are (despite being at odds with expectations) and be physically the sex that they were born as. Then there are some for whom gender and plumbing are irreconcilable; WHO THEY ARE is not only at odds with other folks' expectations but also cannot be apprehended in their minds as making sense in the bodies in which they were born.
In between, perhaps, are those who might accept that in some hypothetical alternative reality, where their biological sex would NOT have the social meaning it has to everyone around them that it does in this reality, who they are might NOT be at odds with the world's gender expectations, but that's not the world they get to live in.
You are perhaps unimpressed with the transgender phenomenon because you perceive it as people hopping the fence and fitting in on the other side, leaving the fence intact. I understand that sentiment too, but unless you intend to point fingers at each and every person who makes concessions to the things they don’t have the power to change, it’s an uncharitable jump from there to rejection and condemnation of transgender people. It harkens back to the 1970s and the hostility of some early feminist activists towards women who wore makeup, lived as stay-at-home moms, or married wealth and live ensconced in jewels and furs as some male’s trophy. You outgrew that. Outgrow this. People do what they decide they must do.
Aside from which, you’re way out of date if you think of transgender people strictly in binary “male to female” (or “female to male”) terms and the imperative to “pass”.
It’s just a matter of time before you have to take a principled stand. Phyllis Schlafly was born female and Camille Paglia was both born female and chooses to identify as a feminist. I think I’m not being unfair to posit myself as a better feminist ally than either of them.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Friday, November 1, 2019
TERF Wars (Part One)
If you have sometimes called someone a TERF (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist), do me a favor: list some non trans-exclusive radical feminist activists, radical feminist writings and books, etc. Describe the radical feminist insights and concepts you find most inspiring. Tell me which radical feminists you respect the most.
If you can’t – if you only use the phrase “radical feminist” as part of the larger phrase “trans exclusive radical feminist” – you’re trolling. You could have just said “transphobes” and left it at that, without throwing hostility vibes at radical feminism.
If you encountered a person of color who was heavily involved in racial justice politics, and you discovered they had transphobic attitudes and didn’t want trans people participating, would you call such a person a “Trans Exclusive Race Activist”? If you went to a discussion of economic stratification and found the socialists in attendance there to be hostile to transgender people and inclined to bar them, would you launch a tirade about “Trans Exclusive Marxist Socialists”?
Yes, I’m fully aware that gender is a central concern for radical feminists: unlike racial justice activists and marxist socialists, they are specifically organized as women, speaking about gender inequality and patriarchal oppression. And therefore that excluding transgender women is specifically about excluding transgender women from the definition of “women” around which radical feminists define themselves. So, fine: if you want to be a part of that, say some affirmative things about the feminist actions, insights, accomplishments that make you want to be a part of it.
You should want to celebrate radical feminism. We all should. I tend to view patriarchy deniers as being as out of touch with reality as holocaust deniers. Patriarchy is our past and defined a great many of our ways of understanding things, including our mores and moral values and beliefs and assumptions about many things. We're coming out of it but that is something that is still in process. And the vanguard of social change-makers who showed us how to think in those terms and see beyond our entrenched patriarchal world-view, they were radical feminists.
Now, meanwhile... radical feminists have effectively indicted male people for the spectrum of behavior and priorities and worldview called masculinity, in other words for being MEN. They have said that no, this is not males expressing their innate built-in bio characteristics, this is political. So radical feminists are hardly in a good position to object to males coming forth and bailing on the identity “man”.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives. For instance, let’s say there were some inner city residents who were motivated by a desire for social and economic equality, and there were other inner city residents who wanted the best possible outcome for people living in the inner city. For as long as the inner city area is an economically depressed area with a lot of socially marginalized people, there’s no reason to pit these two factions against each other, not when they’re pretty obviously going to be working towards the same immediate objectives, right? But now suppose over a long course of time the inner city becomes gentrified, schools improve, services get vastly better, safety is excellent, and wealthier people and socially successful people move in. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for real conflict of interest between those who want whatever is best for the inner city and whose who want social and economic fairness overall.
Feminism – including radical feminism – has included two overlapping contingents, both of them very much aligned with the same values and purposes for the most part (with many women, I suspect, not inclined to see any meaning in making this distinction): those who wish to bring the social system called patriarchy to an end and eliminate the oppositional polarization of the sexes, and those who want the best possible outcome for women and to promote women’s issues, eliminating sexist barriers to women’s activity. Now, patriarchy is no gentrified inner city by any means – it most certainly has not become the case that to be a woman is to be in a privileged class. (In other words, that's not where I was going with that analogy). But there has always been the potential for individual issues where women’s situation as women might not be directly improved by a specific dismantling of a sexually polarized distinction.
Mostly—to feminism’s overall credit—feminists have supported gender parity even on issues such as child custody and alimony and the military draft, recognizing that even when sexist laws or policies appeared to protect or benefit women, differential treatment as a whole did not.
But the question of who gets to speak as a feminist, to participate in defining what is or is not a feminist issue—that one spirals down into a paradox. Radical feminists have long believed that women’s experience gives women a vantage point from which to see matters in a way that even a well-intentioned man who ostensibly believes in sexual equality would not be so able to. And they know from history and experience that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that if “being a feminist” were a social role equally available to men, it could become the accepted conventional wisdom that the best feminists are men. It happened with gynecologists, didn’t it? It’s a frightening prospect, that the quoted voices representing feminism might be male, that the published works of feminist theory could be male-authored. What protection would they have against political taxidermy, of feminism being killed from within by being taken over by men, who would start as participants then become obsessed with being leaders, and end up being deferred to as the best and most leaderly leaders by a still-patriarchal general public?
I do think there is space in our definitions for radical feminists to organize and define themselves as those people who have had that lifetime experience, the experience of being, and being perceived as, and being treated as, girls and women. Such a definition does not, in fact, automatically include transgender women, but nor does it exclude them by misgendering them as non-women.
But radical feminism has been a home not only for women who think of men and masculinity as an outcome of social processing, an outcome of socialization that patriarchy nourishes in males; it has also been a home for women who tend to think of the “man” identity and of masculinity as males expressing themselves to a self-satisfied conclusion either because they can (that they are privileged, that they have the opportunity to become that way) or because it is intrinsically a part of their nature, that males are just like that. I’ll remind you of what I just said about movements not tending to divide their membership for as long as the difference doesn’t make a difference. In the absense of large hordes of males rising up to say “patriarchy has to go!” and declaring it their number one political priority, in the absence of people who were born, assigned, treated, and regarded as male saying they wanted nothing to do with this “manhood” thing, it was a distinction that didn’t matter much internally.
Well, now it does.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
If you can’t – if you only use the phrase “radical feminist” as part of the larger phrase “trans exclusive radical feminist” – you’re trolling. You could have just said “transphobes” and left it at that, without throwing hostility vibes at radical feminism.
If you encountered a person of color who was heavily involved in racial justice politics, and you discovered they had transphobic attitudes and didn’t want trans people participating, would you call such a person a “Trans Exclusive Race Activist”? If you went to a discussion of economic stratification and found the socialists in attendance there to be hostile to transgender people and inclined to bar them, would you launch a tirade about “Trans Exclusive Marxist Socialists”?
Yes, I’m fully aware that gender is a central concern for radical feminists: unlike racial justice activists and marxist socialists, they are specifically organized as women, speaking about gender inequality and patriarchal oppression. And therefore that excluding transgender women is specifically about excluding transgender women from the definition of “women” around which radical feminists define themselves. So, fine: if you want to be a part of that, say some affirmative things about the feminist actions, insights, accomplishments that make you want to be a part of it.
You should want to celebrate radical feminism. We all should. I tend to view patriarchy deniers as being as out of touch with reality as holocaust deniers. Patriarchy is our past and defined a great many of our ways of understanding things, including our mores and moral values and beliefs and assumptions about many things. We're coming out of it but that is something that is still in process. And the vanguard of social change-makers who showed us how to think in those terms and see beyond our entrenched patriarchal world-view, they were radical feminists.
Now, meanwhile... radical feminists have effectively indicted male people for the spectrum of behavior and priorities and worldview called masculinity, in other words for being MEN. They have said that no, this is not males expressing their innate built-in bio characteristics, this is political. So radical feminists are hardly in a good position to object to males coming forth and bailing on the identity “man”.
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that in any social movement, there’s a tendency to embrace the participation of people who come to the same conclusion for different reasons. This is especially true if the different reasons don’t appear to divide the people into groups who disagree about important goals and objectives. For instance, let’s say there were some inner city residents who were motivated by a desire for social and economic equality, and there were other inner city residents who wanted the best possible outcome for people living in the inner city. For as long as the inner city area is an economically depressed area with a lot of socially marginalized people, there’s no reason to pit these two factions against each other, not when they’re pretty obviously going to be working towards the same immediate objectives, right? But now suppose over a long course of time the inner city becomes gentrified, schools improve, services get vastly better, safety is excellent, and wealthier people and socially successful people move in. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for real conflict of interest between those who want whatever is best for the inner city and whose who want social and economic fairness overall.
Feminism – including radical feminism – has included two overlapping contingents, both of them very much aligned with the same values and purposes for the most part (with many women, I suspect, not inclined to see any meaning in making this distinction): those who wish to bring the social system called patriarchy to an end and eliminate the oppositional polarization of the sexes, and those who want the best possible outcome for women and to promote women’s issues, eliminating sexist barriers to women’s activity. Now, patriarchy is no gentrified inner city by any means – it most certainly has not become the case that to be a woman is to be in a privileged class. (In other words, that's not where I was going with that analogy). But there has always been the potential for individual issues where women’s situation as women might not be directly improved by a specific dismantling of a sexually polarized distinction.
Mostly—to feminism’s overall credit—feminists have supported gender parity even on issues such as child custody and alimony and the military draft, recognizing that even when sexist laws or policies appeared to protect or benefit women, differential treatment as a whole did not.
But the question of who gets to speak as a feminist, to participate in defining what is or is not a feminist issue—that one spirals down into a paradox. Radical feminists have long believed that women’s experience gives women a vantage point from which to see matters in a way that even a well-intentioned man who ostensibly believes in sexual equality would not be so able to. And they know from history and experience that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that if “being a feminist” were a social role equally available to men, it could become the accepted conventional wisdom that the best feminists are men. It happened with gynecologists, didn’t it? It’s a frightening prospect, that the quoted voices representing feminism might be male, that the published works of feminist theory could be male-authored. What protection would they have against political taxidermy, of feminism being killed from within by being taken over by men, who would start as participants then become obsessed with being leaders, and end up being deferred to as the best and most leaderly leaders by a still-patriarchal general public?
I do think there is space in our definitions for radical feminists to organize and define themselves as those people who have had that lifetime experience, the experience of being, and being perceived as, and being treated as, girls and women. Such a definition does not, in fact, automatically include transgender women, but nor does it exclude them by misgendering them as non-women.
But radical feminism has been a home not only for women who think of men and masculinity as an outcome of social processing, an outcome of socialization that patriarchy nourishes in males; it has also been a home for women who tend to think of the “man” identity and of masculinity as males expressing themselves to a self-satisfied conclusion either because they can (that they are privileged, that they have the opportunity to become that way) or because it is intrinsically a part of their nature, that males are just like that. I’ll remind you of what I just said about movements not tending to divide their membership for as long as the difference doesn’t make a difference. In the absense of large hordes of males rising up to say “patriarchy has to go!” and declaring it their number one political priority, in the absence of people who were born, assigned, treated, and regarded as male saying they wanted nothing to do with this “manhood” thing, it was a distinction that didn’t matter much internally.
Well, now it does.
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