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.
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