Feminist update: The transgender wars wage on!

Left: from postmodernbarney.com by way of lovely Lisa!



Yes, fight fans, it has not abated since I had my last big thread during the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in August of last year. A few stand-offs, a few truces, but recently--a brand new conflagration.

The problem with cataloging blogwars is: who started it? In this case, I suppose we could accurately say the whole thing started back in... ohhh, I don't know. Long time ago.

This round appears to have been started by a thoughtful post at Maia's blog, titled Transphobia and Radical Feminism - A challenge:

I found that transgenderism / transsexualism is not the weird fetish of disturbed freaks, but a genuine - and very difficult - lived reality. I looked at some of the statistics for mental health and suicide rates among transpeople - both those who transition and those who do not. I read the blogs of transfolk, mainly transwomen - some who are out in real life, some who are not. I looked into medical evidence about the causes of transgenderism and found that there is no certainty about the true cause - whether it is physical / biological or whether it is mental / emotional / social or whether the individual cause varies from person to person. Sometimes intersex biology is relevant, sometimes not. From all this I learned that gender identity is a real phenomenon, even if we do not all consciously experience it; and I learned that gender dysphoria (where gender identify does not match biological sex attributes) is a real phenomenon, even if few of us are unfortunate enough to experience it.

What I found is that the definition of class Woman is not a simple matter, and I am not the person who can define what a woman is.

Radical feminists - especially those who are separatists or who advocate (as I do) the need for woman-only space - often struggle with this. We often act as though we know exactly what a woman is, and that a transwoman is not a woman. Even if we recognise that the question is not straightforward, we still struggle with the inclusion of transwomen in women-only spaces.

Sometimes our exclusion is expressed by straightforwardly characterising transwomen as men, so that it is then self-evident that they should be excluded from woman-only spaces. This really isn’t a very profound analysis.

I agree, it isn't.

My own process mirrors Maia's in many ways. My deepest, sincerest compliments on her honesty and willingness to ask the hard questions:

I do get that this is hard. I get that - especially for women who have been traumatised by men, women who have good reason to fear men, women who do in fact (as I once did) view transwomen as just men in drag - this is very hard indeed. Doing the right thing is often hard. It is still the right thing.

I keep making a connection in my mind with people who have suffered in war or conflict who are then asked to make peace with those whom they identify as their (former) enemies. We can understand if a person who suffered and was traumatised by long years in a prison camp, a rape camp, a concentration camp, if this person cannot forgive the group of people responsible for the suffering, is intensely distrustful and triggered by the mere presence of a person who looks like those people or shares their nationality… We understand, but understanding is not the same as condoning the organisation of, say, racist mental health spaces from which even innocent members of that group or nation are excluded - even members who were themselves traumatised, who fled as refugees, who reject their birth nationality and claim citizenship in their place of asylum…

I understand that this is hard. We want to protect those among us who have been hurt, who are still hurting. The question is not whether we want to protect women who are asking for safety. The question is whether we can actually achieve that by the exclusion of transwomen, and whether it is even acceptable to offer such protection when it comes at the expense of transwomen, by perpetuating the poorly analysed othering of transwomen, by ignoring the hurts and the violence that transwomen experience precisely because of their (desire to have) membership of class Woman. I don’t think so.

There is one more argument for trans-exclusion that I want to cover. It is touched upon in the Ogyn quote about “females who were raised as girls.” The idea is that transwomen, because they were raised as boys, cannot understand female oppression, that they have absorbed a degree of male entitlement that is impossible to reconcile with radical feminist women-only spaces. This is a big fat stereotype. If you tell a radical, young, woman-loving transwoman of colour that she is too dangerous and privileged to be allowed into your radfem women-only space then she will, if she is strong enough, laugh in your face. Rightly so.

The quandary for radical feminists: Are transwomen (people assigned "male" status at birth, but now identify as women) "really" women? Should feminists treat them as ex-oppressors or comrades-in-arms?

And why are transmen (people assigned "female" status at birth, but now identify as men) totally INVISIBLE in this conversation? What is to be gained by simply ignoring them, as many of the anti-trans radical feminists do?

Why such acrimony, viciousness and rancor from radical feminists? All out of proportion to events, IMHO.

And now, we bring you the greatest hits of this round. First, at Questioning Transphobia, we have the hoopla over the word CISSEXUAL, a handy-dandy word in these discussions. CISSEXUAL simply means "not transsexual." However, some trans activists have defined the word as: one who's genitalia "match" their social gender. Some feminists become rabid at such descriptions, since they have been mistaken for men or have been very butch; they feel this term erases them. A better description would be: one who's genitalia "match" the gender they feel themselves to be.

Is there such a thing as "cissexual privilege"?

There is also hoopla over the term transphobia--just as back in the day, there was consternation over the term homophobia. Some of you may remember the righteously indignant bleatings of various right wingnuts: "Phobia? I ain't skeered of no fucking fags!" Rush Limbaugh was one of the main wingnuts offering this line back in the early 90s.

At one point, I jumped in the fray. (Eh, I've done better.) You don't have to read all 120 posts, but keep in mind, I am UNBANNED by the end! (((bows)))

Belle sums up admirably:

well, it interests me, because it's coming up at the same time that the argument is supposedly y'know that they're going for this expansive sisterly communion, radical feminism (by the lights of people like this) is all about Class Woman, all 3+ billion of us, you know, we are strong, we are powerful...which is why the stakes are so high, because it's a -universal- movement, not just another little political faction or clique.

AND at the same time, there is an insistence that the -real- danger that transfolk pose to the women-only space is that they threaten the "safe space."

Safety.

This is, in fact, what's on the table; this is what's being so passionately defended when the author (and others) start talking about "radfemphobia" as a counter to the term "transphobia" (which is simultaneously being rejected and mocked as invalid).

“I want the ability to be with like-minded individuals and only like-minded individuals.”

The response:

Here’s a question: why? And, what do you mean by that exactly?

Because that’s very telling, to me. You’re not even really interested in mystical sisterly communion, much less political effectiveness, so much as being around people who you don’t have to argue with. Like, at all.

“Birds in their little nests agree…”

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but: even if you do manage to purge your community of all dissenters on transpeople (much less the transpeople themselves), sex work/prostitution, femme accoutrements, BDSM, and so on and so forth, there’s -still- going to be something that’ll tear you apart. Does. Hell, I can see it happening from here. Yeah, it happens to everyone, we all have fights, often over stupid shit, but y’all…I gotta tell you, from where I'm sitting? you really put the “fun” back in “dysfunctional.” This goes a good way toward explaining why.

It’s, like, a -betrayal,- isn’t it, when your “sister” suddenly turns out to be, -not- an extension of yourself, but -a completely whole other person-. -Different.- This isn’t what you signed up for! You came for the merge! This was supposed to fix everything! Why, it makes you feel so, so…*alone*. Again. And terrified.

Welcome to life.

Welcome to adulthood.

And featured below, more links to more arguments, and replies to arguments, and offshoots and derails of even more arguments, from Jack and Witchy Woo. Priceless! A must-read.

Witchy, of course, has edited all 'unpleasant' and non-adoring remarks from her blog, like the good Stalinist censor she is. So, for the whole exchange, check out Jack:

Recent blogwar in a nutshell.
Terrible people are TERRIBLE people
You are, actually, like the right wing.
[Opens up dictionary] *Ahem*
No, you're wrong. Sorry if that deeply troubles you.

Yes, it certainly does trouble them. They go on and on and on, then forbid arguments in response. (Because of course, they can't reply, or they wouldn't be afraid to allow an open discussion.)

Stay tuned, fight fans... I'm sure this won't be the last installment!

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Listening to: Talking Heads - The Girls Want to Be with the Girls
via FoxyTunes

A case of the cutes

...was an expression employed by this blog's namesake, my grandmother. She did not mean it as a compliment. My grandmother dripped contempt for certain feminine excesses, thus precociously prepping me for the cold-showers-and-root-canal ideology of 70s radical feminism. (Sometimes you can still find this philosophy in certain corners of Blogdonia, but I digress.)

To have a case of the cutes was to be cuter than the damn dickens, oozing cute from every pore, the veritable personification of Brady-Bunch CUTENESS. When rude boys made fun of cute, my grandmother-the-gender-cop snorted her approval, thereby sending me mixed messages. Cute was bad, but one could be nauseatingly sentimental, particularly if talking about Jesus or anyone He may have known personally or been distant kin to. In fact, my grandmother's sentimentality annoyed the hell out of me, and I was as dogged in making fun of it as she was in lambasting my periodic Cases of the Cutes.

The Sentimental Epoch of her life was the Silver Bridge Collapse, which had been fairly close to her family home. (We'd all been across it many times.) This event prompted her to purchase awful collector dinner plates, bad country/western records and unreadable books cobbled together by local historians. I now realize the bridge was not simply the bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio, but the bridge connecting North and South. It's collapse obviously signified something very personal to her, possibly symbolizing the psychological break she made with the South. (If you saw The Mothman Prophecies, you saw the dramatization of this collapse. Some of the film's terrifying rural sequences were set near my grandmother's family home, where I had always refused to stay overnight as a spooked, spoiled city kid!)

Thus, I always feel I need to apologize for cute, because the fact is--(deep breath) I often like cute things. I suppress it, and it therefore bubbles up, blossoms forth, bursts into waking life, unbidden.... a MASSIVE CASE OF THE CUTES! My cup runneth over, and when I was surfing ye olde net today (trying to get into that Currier and Ives Seasonal spirit, and everything, particularly since I am in RETAIL) I saw something SO CUTE, well, I had to haul it over here. Just had to. I am helpless to resist.

Cute Overload!

2 Sweet
2 B
--
4 Gotten

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Listening to: The Kinks - See My Friends
via FoxyTunes

Bimbo Eruptions

Left: African Daisy Mandala by Susan Warner

Good Lord, sports fans! It's getting ugly over there at Feministe. My favorite sex- worker-blogger, Renegade Evolution, a bee in the bonnet of old-school radical feminists, posed a series of sensible and interesting questions in a sensible and interesting post. As a woman unashamed of her breast implants, as well as her buff, beautiful bod, she asked:

I understand that with conventional beauty standards it is important to instill in women and girls that there is more to body comfort and beauty that what the media dictates, because truth is, women of all shapes, sizes, ages, colors, and “styles” are beautiful and that wider realm of beauty and comfort should be encouraged to flourish and grow. No woman should feel ashamed of the way they look or what they wear, but I often feel as if perhaps this has spun slightly out of control in some aspects. When a woman who is naturally blonde or naturally thin is applogizing for it, it seems to me as if something his gone wrong here. It seems like an odd sort of backlash to what was supposed to be a mode of thought that would make women more comfortable in their own skins, no matter their shape, size, mode of dress, or alterations. One can read feminist lit of all types, from books to blogs, and see this odd backlash, feminist people calling women bimbos, porno barbies, sticks; women disdaining their own natural attributes that fall within the realms of conventional beauty, things such as being tall, or thin, or curvy or blonde…

And it makes me wonder whatever happened to women, all women, being happy with their bodies?

Or is this just one of those things I find myself pondering? And if so, what did I miss?

Shaggy-haired and thoroughly unfamiliar with mascara wands, I was one of the people who replied:

Well, I am harassed constantly, for 37 years now (since I turned 13) to “do something with myself”… I HAVE done something, and this is it, thanks. I am clean, well-scrubbed, not dirty or gross, but I am given the message virtually every day that I should “clean myself up”…if I did not work in an alternative business, I probably couldn’t obtain gainful employment.

All my life, I have been fussed at to wear makeup, cut my hair (or “do something” with it), wear traditional middle-class clothing, and so on. Women my age are expected to wear make-up, and I am constantly given advice I never asked for about that. Women my age are not supposed to have long, unstyled hair. We are supposed to have manicures, pedicures, wearing capri pants, etc. No thanks. MY FUCKING CHOICE. And yet, I am interrogated about MY CHOICES. I do not criticize others unless they start in on me, and then, yes, I will catalog for them all the chemicals they are absorbing into their skin. But only if they ask. (And no, that is not the only reason I don’t use it. I learned the names of the chemicals just to upset the interrogators.)

Until my choices are fully respected and I am LEFT ALONE by the busybodies (all women, interestingly enough), then I really don’t care about “feminist pressure” (where?) about make-up or shaving. Are you kidding? This is a joke, right? Feminists lost that battle; that ship sailed. The majority of women are all about make-up, hair-styling, dieting, botox, etc. So I am at a loss to figure out where this “feminist pressure” is supposedly coming from?

And these are rhetorical questions, not necessarily directed to Ren, with whom I have had this discussion before! :)

And for five minutes, at least, the discussion seemed to go pretty well. Magniloquence, for instance, made an interesting contribution:

What constitutes comfort? A well-made pair of heels feels good to me. I have a nice pair of 5 1/2 ” black stilettoes that are so comfortable I’ve worn them for a full day out at an amusement park (going on rides, wandering the hot asphalt, chasing my friends and everything) - they don’t hold me back, and they feel better on my feet than any pair of tennis shoes I’ve ever owned. (Or, for that matter, any pair of ’sensible flats’ that wasn’t flip-flops.) That has nothing to do with how they look and everything to do with how they’re made and how their shape interacts with my body. How do you know the woman in the baggy jeans and flats is really comfortable?

(For clarity: I’m not saying that all fancy/femme/dressy/complicated stuff is comfortable, and I do like wearing loose nondescript clothing periodically. My point is that comfort is every ounce in the skin of the wearer, not the eyes of the beholder. You can’t say ‘wearing comfortable clothes’ is better without admitting that people’s ideas of comfort differ widely, and that what is comfortable for you may be immensely awkward for me and vice versa. I like corsets; properly boned and laced, they feel great. That doesn’t mean that you have to.)

That’s the part that really bothers me. We conflate comfort and natural expression with rebellion, at this point. And in one sense, the philosophical, broader-movement sense, that’s right. The exhaust metaphor fits there. But the micro and the macro do not nearly so neatly coincide; you can’t go from the macro ‘this stuff hurts us overall’ to ‘you are a bad person’ or ‘you must be brainwashed’ or ‘you aren’t doing your part.’ You don’t know that.

And then, the whole thing blew up. Why? Well, why do you think? The amazing Ginmar, who is to radical feminism as Ernest Angley is to Christianity. One cringes upon their emergence from the fringes into polite debate/mass consciousness: please go away. Whimper. PLEASE?

Ha! Dream on, my little Dworkinites! Greatest hits from Ginmar, over on the thread in question:

That said, I know some pro-porn, sex pos, male kiss ass pseudo feminists who are all about the bitching at other feminists. I still don’t think it’s a feminist thing because simply speaking, kissing male ass and attacking other feminists is not feminists, and I’ve seen these women in action and they’re vicious. Whether they’re feminist—they sure protest enough—is not something I’d be willing to answer affirmatively. They’re feminist for themselves. That doesn’t make them feminist for others, and often they’re not.

I call ‘em like I see ‘em, Ren, and as you’re still saying that feminist criticism is mean and nasty and OMG unfair, you don’t have a leg to stand on. You want to do what you want to do, I don’t give a fuck. But I’m gong to talk about why I see a bunch of women doing it, and oh, by the way? Wanting to silence radfems from criticizing a practice you like to do cuz it makes you uncomfortable is your personal problem.

Well, when you bitch about feminists being OMG so mean to you maybe it’s better if you don’t associate with women who go around associating with trolls and gloating over others’ faux pas.

Kind of like this whole topic, actually.

Oh, and someone who has named themselves after a character on a LAW AND ORDER episode, Csquared, is also pretty interesting:

Again, I’m seeing this bizarre conflation of questioning with attacking. I do question Ren’s motivations; as someone literally employed by the patriarchy, she has a vested interest in maintaining a patriarchy-approved exterior, so her motivations totally come into question. Why should they be above reproach? Why should anyone’s?

I’m just mystified by posters here conflating attacking someone for their looks (i.e., “fatass!” “anorexic blonde!” which I don’t do) and questioning why they do the things they do (i.e., “I don’t think you would’ve gotten those implants if the patriarchal beauty standard was for a flat chest, so it’s pretty disingenuous to say you got them only for yourself” which, yes, I do).

Again, all I’m seeing from the anti-mean-feminist klatch is a demand for silence from feminists when it comes to personal grooming rituals. And… no. Not gonna do it. Sorry.

"Employed by the patriarchy"? If one believes that we are living in a patriarchy, then EVERYONE is employed by the patriarchy, unless of course they are UNEMPLOYED, in which case they are LIVING OFF the patriarchy.

Since LAW AND ORDER FAN is safely anonymous and does not disclose their occupation, one can't point at them and explain to them that THEY TOO, contribute to the patriarchy. (Which is, of course, why they are anonymous in the first place.)

Tangential issues are then brought up, including Ren's friends such as I AM CURIOUS BLUE, accused of harassing HEART. What this actually has to do with the subject at hand, is anyone's guess, but hey, this is war. And speaking of which, there is a thinly-veiled threat to out Ren, apparently a reprise of a Blogdonia-feud I missed some time ago.

The thread finally goes up in flames. Heavily-moderated, Ginmar accuses Ren of censorship in this serially-posted tirade:

Can’t you read? Oh, wait, Ren deleted my comment! And there’s a quote right there. Oh, wait, I’m a radfem, so let me guess—I’m making it up? Fuck you. I screencapped this asshole.

IACB you’re a porn-and prostitute-justifying man. If you talk to me any further, I’ll just pretend you don’t exist.

Let me guess, that one’s going to get deleted too. Oh, wait, do I get to use the “I was so upset” excuse? It seems to be awfully popular.

Oh, look, my comments go into moderation after their first appear! How strange.

And finally, disgusted, I said:

Ginmar, are you always an hysteric, or do you just play one on the internet?

Ginmar replied with an articulate "fuck you"... but you know, I remember Ginmar from the old days at Ms, and little has changed. She drove people away from feminism there, and she is busy doing the same thing here, too. Ernest Angley, Ginmar, what's the difference?

The thread is now locked after a record-587 posts, but threatens to open back up when Ren returns. Oh dear God, will it happen?

Stay tuned, sports fans!

ADDENDUM: Ren has just said on her blog that she is not re-opening the thread:

Lauren closed the comments on my Feministe post of ill omen. I sent her a note with a last statement, but nope, not bothering with trying to have the thread openned because its DONE. Anything of use or interest got bogged down in the bullshit, and is currently being misconstrued throughout bloglandia, but hey, what did I expect?

She says that honestly, she was not expecting such a reaction, and I believe her.

Can you say AMBUSH?