Be sure not to CODDLE VIOLENT OPPRESSORS
A strange conversation, or constellation of conversations, on Twitter this morning.
It started with a piece Alice Dreger wrote yesterday, How to Be An Ally to Cis-Women. She tweeted a link to it. Later she retweeted and commented on a reaction to her piece.
Alice Dreger @AliceDreger 7h7 hours ago
Alice Dreger retweeted Zoé S.
I commit “structural violence” by asking we be allowed to talk/joke/write/sing about the bodies we were born with.Zoé S. @ztsamudzi
I’m so aghast at @AliceDreger’s list. But at this point, she and others are far too invested in structural violence to believe otherwise.
Too invested in structural violence? What can Zoé S mean by that? I wondered, so I looked at the whole long string of tweets about Alice Dreger’s piece. It’s full of that kind of thing.
Like this one:
Zoé S. @ztsamudzi 7 hours ago
Trans women don’t need to be an ally to us cis women because it isn’t incumbent upon them to CODDLE VIOLENT OPPRESSORS.
What VIOLENT OPPRESSORS? Why is Zoé S claiming that cis women are VIOLENT OPPRESSORS? What can she possibly mean by saying that?
Why are so many people, including cis women, so enraged at cis women? Why are they claiming we are VIOLENT OPPRESSORS?
And this:
Zoé S. @ztsamudzi 7 hours ago
Fellow cis women, be lucky that “TERF” is all you’re being called: violent patriarchal transmisogynistic abusive gatekeeper comes to mind.
And this:
Zoé S. @ztsamudzi 7 hours ago
I don’t have any well-reasoned thing to say anymore. Just shut up with this violent understanding of sex & gender, leave trans women alone.
What is a “violent understanding of sex & gender”?
And this:
Zoé S. @ztsamudzi 7 hours ago
We cis women owe our trans sisters OUR support because we are directly responsible for the state & interpersonal structures abusing them.
How? How are we directly responsible for that?
Maybe the answer is depressingly simple – we’re not, but it’s easy to rage and shout at cis women on Twitter while it’s much more difficult to do anything about state & interpersonal structures.
It’s easy, yes, but is it productive and useful? No, it’s not. It creates hostility where there doesn’t need to be any. Trans people need much better allies than this.
So do these folk ever bother talking about trans panic, stuff like that scene in Sense8 where Nomi gets permanently scarred in the boys’ locker room, or the actual, significant harm that dudes inflict on transwomen?
Or is taking a dump on feminists while same time trying to slot themselves into accepted patriarchal womens’ roles the only worthy goals for trans-activism?
Much better allies in my mind would be rational ones that understand that non-transgender women are also an oppressed class, that by including females in “cis privilege” it lumps them with the truly oppressive group of men which isn’t fair nor accurate, that feminism does the exact opposite of maintaining patriarchal systems, and THAT fact is actually one of central beefs of the extreme transactivist movement. Also… that it is not “punching up” for trans activists to dump on non-trans women and accuse them of the violence that only men visit upon them… the same men who are violent to non-trans women. It is SO much easier to punch down though… and scapegoat another oppressed class.
No sensible person would deny that anti-trans bigots include women, or that those who support and defend violence against trans women include women. But she is not talking to those women!
So you’re saying Oolon would blend in seamlessly in that tribe?
Cis is a way of directly pairing men and women as oppressors and removing the class of women as oppressed. It provides another gold medal in the Oppression Olympics. It erases the experiences of lesbians. There is no privilege for women in being labelled cis, all it does is give post modernists and trans activists another bat to beat women about the head with.
I’m deeply tired of the ranting of immature post modernist care taking liberal feminists who feel some deep seated Catholic need to be penitential in the face of TW activism. Mea culpa, mea culpa, we beat our breasts for all the privileges that come our way by enduring the gender we were assigned at birth.
The logical end point of this seems to be to declare that trans women are women and cis women aren’t. I don’t think I’m buying that.
Can we use this sort of logic to convince everyone at FTB that it’s oppressive and wrong to be an atheist? After all, there are seriously oppressed, endangered and suffering groups (e.g. Syrian refugees, the Rohingya in Burma etc.) who are Islamic; obviously it would be terribly wrong and exclusionary not to believe everything they believe.
This sort of extreme “cis women” = “violence against trans women” nonsense surely isn’t indicative of actual trans women’s lives. Is it? Because this whole “cis women must apologize for their very existence” attitude isn’t any different than the patriarchy we all know and don’t love. I don’t need to hear it from other women.
AngryTardis, I agree. I don’t like the cis label they try to stick on us either. Can’t we just say “not trans”, or “normal”?
No, we can’t say “normal.” I suspect that’s a trolling comment, meant to incriminate us all – or perhaps sarcasm.
Do read Dreger’s book. The gender policing by some trans activists has a deep background. What the bulk of trans-women actually thing about all this may be lost in the clamor of a handful of obsessives.
Still, it seems as though at least a few pseudo-feminists have justified the ‘TERF’ coinage. Weird rants about trans folk being Patriarchal Infiltrators into Wymmyn’s Space etc. etc.
Zoe S:
“Just shut up with this violent understanding of sex & gender, leave trans women alone.”
Or else what?
Once you’ve already denounced someone as hateful and bigoted and a violent oppressor, etc., you really don’t have any cards left to play, assuming you’re not willing to threaten violence. “Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!”
The problem with ‘cis women’ is that the definition doesn’t suit most women. That is, it’s supposed to be someone who identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth. But many women do *not* like the gendering of women. We may be okay with the bodies we were born with, but that does not make us okay with our assigned social roles, the personality traits demanded of us, the performative femininity required. I *cannot* identify as cis, because it implies I am at peace with, perhaps even complicit, in the subjugation of women in the patriarchy.
I *also* have actually adapted to a sexist world by actually *being* genderfluid. I read so much writing from a male viewpoint and absorbed so much of our culture’s celebration of masculinity that I am actually able to get into a male mindset, including changing my body perception, and it is something I do subconsciously, often in reaction to discomfort. I’m definitely not exactly cis by definition of consistently seeing myself as female-bodied, even. and I blame the patriarchy for this; I wasn’t born to be genderfluid, but it has written itself on the plasticity of my brain.
On the other hand, according to yet more trans activists, that makes me a phony-baloney transtrender because nonbinary isn’t a thing. I have to either be all the way cis or all the way trans.
So basically, it is beginning to feel like I’m being told to either shut up and act womanly, or ignore biology and be a transman, or just stop existing — by trans activists and allies.
Somehow, that doesn’t feel like inclusiveness. I’ll sit here with the RadFems, thanks, even if I don’t want a body part cupcake.
Samantha @ 12
Serious question. How do you know that you have changed your body perception to ‘male’? The reason I ask is that I know that my own perception of the maleness of my body has varied throughout my life and even over relatively short periods. I’ve certainly always considered myself to be physically less masculine than some men and more so than others (masculinity being some sort of proxy for degree of maleness).
If we are dealing with a broadly bimodal distribution of physical identity I can well believe that you experience your body as less female. I don’t know where you sit on the physical spectrum in general, so maybe that would push you well into the overlap of experiencing your body as male?
It’s strange that so many of these arguments seem to avoid the subject of the patriarchy altogether. It’s bizarre to think of women in a patriarchal system as an oppressor class. We need to fight this together, and people like this show a striking failure of empathy and solidarity.
Exactly. Trans women are treated terribly not because cis women are oppressing them but because patriarchy oppresses women. That oppression takes different forms when it intersects with other oppressions but the root oppression is still patriarchy. I don’t understand why it (patriarchy) keeps getting a pass in the discussion.
@ Samantha Vimes:
Body part cupcakes or not, I’m not comfortable with those RadFems who seem to be in agreement with the faction of trans women* (+allies) in supporting the idea that there is something inherently distinct about being a woman (though clearly they disagree on the qualifications for womanhood)
*At the risk of committing the “not all ‘X'” faux pas, I have to add the caveat that among the trans women I know are both those who agree and those who disagree with this concept. (And this may also be the case for Radical Feminists.)
#5
‘Cis is a way of directly pairing men and women as oppressors and removing the class of women as oppressed. ‘
CIS is a tool to get women to feel guilty while men are colonizing our spaces, our hard won culture, and our very bodies and minds. We have a word for the first oppressed class by sex: women.
‘It provides another gold medal in the Oppression Olympics. It erases the experiences of lesbians. There is no privilege for women in being labelled cis, all it does is give post modernists and trans activists another bat to beat women about the head with.’
Yes. It’s simply an invention to silence women so the ‘real women’ can exist. It erases women completely.
‘I’m deeply tired of the ranting of immature post modernist care taking liberal feminists who feel some deep seated Catholic need to be penitential in the face of TW activism. Mea culpa, mea culpa, we beat our breasts for all the privileges that come our way by enduring the gender we were assigned at birth.’
Me too. Men are not women. No amount of makeup, heels, or frocks will make a male a female.