Mostly it is women who pay the price
Another excellent post from Diana at Neopythia.
I want to talk about something I find offensive and morally repugnant. It is the notion that trans women, who have arrived at a gender critical position, or simply accept certain realities are self hating. I know this is a popular meme. It’s an easy rationalization for those who hold certain political ideologies, or those too consumed by irrational fear to think. It is completely without merit and harmful [to] women and trans women alike.
I think I know what political ideologies she means, and I think I know of several people who hold them.
Literally nobody identifies as a terf*. It is a term which has moved far beyond whatever usefulness it once had, if it ever had any. It is a slur thrown about indiscriminately to silence those certain people disagree with. I wish it was just a twitter thing, confined to largely meaningless internet squabbling, but increasingly there are real world consequences. Mostly it is women who pay the price, but isn’t that usually the case? Anyway, I don’t even label myself a feminist. I wouldn’t presume to, though I ally myself with women to the extent I am able.
*Going forward where others would use “terf,” I will use “women” to illustrate just how ridiculous this is.
That’s something I’ve been wondering about a lot, especially over the past few weeks – the fact that mostly it’s women who pay the price. Why is that? Why is it women, and specifically feminist women, who get trashed and shunned and demonized over this issue? Why is so much fire and brimstone called down on women while men are left alone? Why is feminism the enemy? Why do so many women join in with this pattern? Why do so many feminist women join in with it? Why don’t they notice the gender imbalance and the bad effects on feminism?
The self hatred meme goes something like this: a trans woman regrets her transition and is consumed by self hatred. Devious women, always preying on the weak and disillusioned, pounce, exploiting this self hatred to turn them into token women. The newly minted tokens parrot all of the hateful rhetoric and work from the inside to bring down transwomen. What the token gets out of this, I don’t know.
Aside from sounding like something out of a horror story, I hate all of the implications of this. It is puerile, delusional thinking. It removes any personal agency from any individual transwoman and lays the blame squarely at the feet of women.
And laying the blame squarely at the feet of women is just the same old shit – the same old misogynist patriarchal shit. Why would trans women want to perpetuate that? It’s sort of like wanting to join a club so desperately that you fight with every single member before you join.
Nobody lured me. Nobody preyed upon my weakness or insecurity. I made the decision on my own. I chose to listen to women, really listen. I read their words and witnessed their testimonials. I read books and blogs that challenged the way I think, not just those that reinforced it. I read these with a critical, but not defensive mind. I started to look honestly at who I am, about my past, and how the world shaped me. For the first time I talked honestly with others, and myself. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes the truth is painful to confront. But the truth is this: I was born male. I transitioned to live as a woman. I am legally and socially accepted even if I am still learning what that means and still struggling to bury my male socialization.
It’s supposed to be the height of terrible to say that trans women have had some male socialization…and yet in all other contexts we agree that gender socialization is pervasive and unavoidable, even for people who reject it at a conscious level. If that’s true…how can it be anything but true that trans women have had some male socialization?
If you listen to transwomen, you’ll hear how dangerous and poisonous testosterone is. What you won’t hear is how dangerous masculinity is, except in purely descriptive terms such as dress. Gender is insidious. It shapes us from birth in unseen ways. It can be toxic to the way we think, especially in how we view women. Socialization is very difficult to unlearn. We are unaware the extent to which it permeates us. To believe [that because] we have transitioned, started to transition, or “feel like a woman” we are immune to our male socialized thinking is dangerous and delusional. While not immutable, it will forever be part of our experience.
Right? How could that not be true? Nobody is immune to socialization (unless raised by wolves).
Trans women share a venn diagram of experience with women. Our experiences overlap, but are not universal. To use a poor analogy: Even if you live in another country for decades, you will never experience it in the same way as someone who is from there. You can learn the customs and the language, even pass as a native, but there remains a level of experiential knowledge which is unobtainable, and that’s ok.
I know this. I’ve spent a lot of time in the UK, I’ve lived there for extended periods, I’ve learned a lot of customs and idioms, but that’s not at all the same as being born and growing up there.
The dirty secret is that, far from hating myself, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. By accepting certain basic, biological truths, and accepting how much about “being a woman” I don’t know, and can never know, I’ve found peace. I cannot tell you how liberating this is. I never realized how much energy I spent maintaing the delusion until it was gone. I look back and am able to reconcile the person I was with the person I am. I don’t have to pretend. I haven’t always been a woman. I’m a transwoman, and I’m fine with that.
I hope soon things can shake out so that that will be the usual and available way of thinking about it.
Countdown to
twitstweets from dogmatists splaining why we shouldn’t listen to Diana.James Billingham recently called those Trans Women who discuss gender in academic and critical terms as “Token Trans Women”, dismissing them even though he had earlier stated that he got his information and took his directives from trans women themselves, and believes everything that trans activists had to say. But to stay consistent one has to erase the legitimacy of the gender critical trans people in order to not feel like a hypocrite, despite the fact that labeling some of them as “token” and unworthy of thought and attention is indeed a hypocritical and terrible stance. It is safer and thus easier to support the stronger more aggressive group that will tell those who disagree to “go die in a fire”, “kill yourself” and subject disagreers to real world consequences, than to support those who just want a conversation and voice.
“This” being perfectly ambiguous here.
That’s now two very thoughtful and thought provoking posts thanks to Ophelia and Diana. They cut to the heart of the issue from the unpleasantness at FTB. All lived experience may be equally valid at a personal level, but that doesn’t make it right for one persons (or a small group of peoples) views to override another’s. This is where some intellectual rigour comes in useful. By first teasing apart the strands of experience you can spin the fibres of definition and understanding from which the whole cloth of robust Theory can be woven (to stretch a metaphor well past its tensile strength).
You know, it is possible that what is right for trans women as a whole (if there is such a thing) may not be right for women as a whole (again if there is such a thing), any more than what is right for women is right for men. To be very clear, I’m not advocating differential treatment based on class or category per se. Rather, because the lived experience of groups in society differs and the issues faced differ or manifest differently, different structures, processes or assists may be required.
If I sound a bit hazy about this it’s because I am. I’m a lay person when it comes to sociology. Sure I’ve lived the practical consequences all my life, but I lack the specialist language and concepts that comes from proper study and thought in the field.
In many respects this reminds me very much of any of the hotly debated arguments in the physical sciences in the 18th and 19th Centenaries. Too often opinion would polarise around two competing ideas, both clearly with merit. the protagonists of each would hotly argue that they and they alone were correct. As the decades passed it became clear that things were much more complicated than before and that invariably one theory was correct in certain cases, the other in others and neither in many cases where one or more entirely different process controlled the outcome. Again, the analogy is far from perfect but I’m sure you get my point. Shit is complicated and maybe in this case all/many/some trans women need to be accepted and treated as perfectly valid people with needs and behaviours that overlap with more binary men and women, but that differ from each. Trying to force all trans women to be feminine women (or pretend to be masculine men) is clearly wrong. Especially when not all women want to be boxed up as feminine women in the first place.
As for Billingham, token progressive if ever I’ve seen one. He’s skinned a lamb and is pretending he’s one of the flock.
Why is so much fire and brimstone called down on women while men are left alone?
During the “are trans women women” clusterfuck, I wondered where all the posts were demanding that PZ (for example) acknowledge that trans men are men. Are trans men invisible or are they fully accepted into “male” spaces?
Mind you, quite a few of PZ’s commentators were making dark mutterings about his defence of Ophelia and his shutting down of comment threads on Pharyngula that were being used to attack her. Even some weeks later there were the odd comments on other blogs from people who had clearly not entirely forgiven him. But yes, no one presented him with an “answer this! Yes or No!” ultimatum.
Diana’s conclusion of her journey to self-acceptance is rather beautifully expressed.
I don’t know about TERF being a useless term just because no one self-identifies as such. Pro-lifers would never call themselves forced-birthers, but the latter term is more accurate.
***
Transmen do seem to be much less discussed in these controversies, and there are multiple reasons why. I can think of a few off the top of my head;
1. Transwomen are walking into the target space of general misogyny. One hears frequently of violence against transwomen, particularly sex workers. Trans advocates focus on the risk to transwomen, yet violence against them takes space in the same framework as violence against women. I have not heard much about violence to transmen.
2. Feminists have worked hard on getting safe spaces for women, and there is some innate conflict between the needs of some women recovering from abuse or trauma who would be uncomfortable, and the needs of transwomen to be fully accepted in safe spaces. However, I think the innate conflict is not unsolvable. Safe exposure to a perceived threat is the best way to develop coping, and what could be a safer than a group that is meant to protect all women, which includes women AMAB? I think that one of the reasons dialog is important is so that practical solutions to this issue– such as holding events at places where there can be actual privacy– can be talked about.
3. Transmen aren’t really trying to out-macho the men, as far as I know. In fact, they are quite likely to bring a lot of “feminism hurts men too” concepts into discussion and try to get their male buddies to see a doctor when they need to. I’m not sure if any transwomen are trying to say what it is to truly be a woman, but sometimes it seems like the public atmosphere around transwomen transitioning in trying to push women back into boxes.
4, Transwomen have experienced some amount of socialization as boys and transmen have experienced some amount of socialization as girls. Some women have expressed a sense that transwomen are more aggressive about taking over spaces and events meant for women than is fair, and that this comes because of their experience of being taught to be dominant and competitive rather than seeking consensus, etc. Transmen, having been socialized female, probably are better than the average man at listening and thinking about other points of view rather than strictly self-advocating.
None of the above is meant to be true of all cases. Just some sort of statistically significant issues in the differences between people that lead to why transwomen are the center of the controversy.
Oh, let me add:
5. Because men have a higher position in society, it has long been understood that some women will seek to enter the male sphere of life in some ways, even in the most strictly gender-sorted societies. For the last century or so, our culture has been largely tolerant of this ambition and has approved of women mimicking men in behavior and dress.
And even if you’re raised by wolves, you got wolf socialization. :P
Samantha: There’s no such thing as a person assigned male at birth. There is no Gender Cop in the birthing room arbitrarily assigning these things. And maleness is not gender, it is sex. You’re born with it. You have it before you are born. If anything is assigned, it’s masculinity or femininity. But what goes on your birth certificate is neither of those things–it is the physical trait the doctor believes you were born with based on the available visual evidence.
If you want to label it Described Male At Birth, maybe, that might make more sense. That’s closer to what actually happens.
Now with AIS males they misassign. That’s because AIS males are born with externally female-looking bodies, because you have to respond to testosterone in the womb to develop external male parts. Absent that response to testosterone you develop as a sterile female. So THOSE individuals are mis-described, but karyotyping each newborn at birth along with all the other genetic testing they do would be a really good idea and a great way to get around this. Plus it would provide important information to the individual later on when they start thinking about having kids, or wondering why their period never started at age whatever.
There’s no real analog for females. There’s congenital adrenal hyperplasia but it doesn’t really make the girl develop looking like a boy. She will look more intersexed depending on how much testosterone she ran into in the prenatal environment. AIS males are more perfectly disguised.
Sorry, I geek out about these things.
Also, your remarks about traumatized women getting over their trauma by being exposed to the source of that trauma in a safe environment? Those are really gross. If you’re a transwoman, and I suspect you are but can’t be arsed Googling you at the moment, be aware that that kind of thinking is one of the reasons we don’t trust you. It’s guy thinking. Ditch it. We do not need you dictating to us when and how we decide to face our fears. That quite frankly is none of your business.
Transwomen can find safe spaces without butting into women’s spaces. Start some shelters for trans and queer identified people. Bam. Problem solved.
WE had to start OUR own shelters. Fair is fair.
“misassign” = Mislabel is a better word. It’s almost 3am and I’m almost not making sense anymore. Sorry.
Dana, the brain can be said to be a site of secondary sexual development just like the genitals, except the feminization or masculinization of the brain is not visible at birth (and even later requires complicated tests). My guess is that if we could see the sex status of infants’ brains some people who are now defined as female or male at birth would be defined as intersex (OK, I know that currently infants with ambiguous genitals are identified as male or female anyway, but this is a bad practice).
Trans women don’t belong in men’s spaces. They are not safe there. Nor are they a threat to women. Why can’t they just pee in peace?
It’s amazing to see transwomen who are pro-feminist allies (and my friends) being published but they are saying the same things that women are silenced (called TERFs) for saying. I think we need to ask why that is.
Everyone should read the whole post, it’s great and just plain refreshing to see.
There is no such thing as a women’s or men’s brain, we just have human brains with the same structure. They have not ever linked the minute differences between brains to behaviour, yet a postulated ‘female’ brain has been related to behaviour and been used to deny women basic rights like an education because they were considered ‘unsuited’. That one should have been put to one side years ago, yet it keeps on resurging. We are born with a body and a personality, that body does dictate some things – like if you are female you are the only sex that will get pregnant – but nothing of that dictates how a person could or should be in terms of human potential. Instead though, we all get slotted into boxes according to our sex and expected to behave in particular ways according to that. None of it really fits properly though.
Intersex is a huge red herring, the fact is humans sexually reproduce and the vast majority are typically fertile males or females and that there are a few infertile outliers doesn’t change this fact. Biology and the gametes we produce won’t change no matter how many people try and chant it’s all a construction. This is used typically to deny women, who are female, the right to define themselves using their shared biology and mean others can simply identify as such without having that biology or lived experience. There are in fact distinct differences in socialisation that females experience – being put in a lower social status, the expectation you will or should have a baby at some point, the simple fear of getting pregnant and so on. These are unique experiences and clearly the OP recognises that this doesn’t exactly align across the board even though some things are shared. Despite that women currently are not really allowed to have spaces of their own to share with others that have had those same experiences without those who are male or male socialised. That’s wrong, women aren’t stopping anyone from creating their own spaces and/or sharing other spaces where it is appropriate and their wishes should be respected to have some specific spaces they have fought for protected as they are not meant for the validation of others, but to give help and support for a specific defined group.
” I’m a transwoman, and I’m fine with that.” it could and should be as simple as that. You can have both things, some spaces shared based on similarities and others restricted to nominated groups and that should be OK for anyone and everyone. Instead you have huge campaigns about lesbian music festivals as though that having the intention of being for females is the human rights violation of the century. It’s not, and not a civil right to break through women’s (adult human females) defined boundaries over their protests that they have the right to organise together as other groups do. Interesting, you’ve also seen women’s colleges being protested as well, but not sure if I’ve ever seen a men’s college or space protested in the same way and there are more of those.
The women pay for failing to toe the ideological ‘line.’ Even when that line hasn’t been established by any reasonable process. Its rather similar to the way that the ‘real’ Bolsheviks had to be exterminated by Stalin in the name of ‘twue’ Bolshevism.
But why women and not men?
Rob @ 6
Yes but that’s not a very good example of trans activist & ally rage at a man rather than a woman, because what those commenters were muttering at PZ about was his insufficient rage at a woman. In other words it was actually about trans activist & ally rage at a woman after all.
I really do want to know why this is all about feminist women.
Ophelia @17, yes quite true.
I am actually physically female and I don’t believe that gender is anything but a cultural construct, but I try to be respectful of people with different experiences. I *also* am interested in intersex as a collection of physiologically unusual events, because medicine interests me. So yes, intersexed person can be assigned to a sex at birth, either through incorrect interpretation or the practice for a while of thinking surgery would solve social issues for the child.
It’s amazing how fast one person was to draw a whole bunch of conclusions about me based on my use of some people’s preferred terminology which harms no one.
@Dana
Really?
I don’t quite know how to say this. I am reading comment #10:
“It’s guy thinking. Ditch it. We do not need you dictating to us when and how we decide to face our fears. That quite frankly is none of your business. Transwomen can find safe spaces without butting into women’s spaces. Start some shelters for trans and queer identified people. Bam. Problem solved. WE had to start OUR own shelters. Fair is fair.”
And then i am thinking about two things which have been big issues around here recently.
1. Are transwomen women? Are transwomen “guy thinking” by trying to be “butting into women’s spaces”?
2. At some point, *solidarity* needs to be considered. If we balkanize into separate smaller and smaller subgroups for the sake of having safe spaces with safe boundaries, is this going to prevent us from working towards solidarity despite our gender differences?
I actually feel very sympathetic with what Dana was saying, but then those two points make me stumble. Sorry if my male gender, male privilege, cis-by-default privilege, or anything else about my own narrow viewpoint is contributing to my misunderstanding here.
Dana @10,
It’s guy thinking? Really? If it’s a bad idea, it can be critiqued on its merits, and this is true whether it’s “guy thinking” (whatever that is anyway) or some other type of thinking. No need to invoke tired gender stereotypes to do that.
So in the future is there any way you could ditch the gender stereotypes?
There was nothing fair about the fact that women had to start our own shelters. In a just world, that would not have been necessary. But for things like toxic masculinity, default cis male privilege, dominate heteronormative values and culture, etc. it would not have been necessary.
It would be more accurate to say “unfair is unfair.” What you’ve said here comes across a bit like: we had it rough, so it’s only fair if the next group has it rough as well… Not exactly ethical or convincing, IMO.
Why only women getting threatened and harassed online and irl?
Because the first oppression is the oppression based on sex. Not gender, but sex.
That’s why.
The first division is the division of sex. You can debate the peculiars but there it is. Every oppression women face they face it because of their sex. Gender adds a whole new layer of oppression but sex is the first one.
We suffer real consequences for menstruating, giving birth etc. These are all biological sex factors, not gendered ones.
And no, women don’t have to let men into their safe spaces, nor ask men for spaces to discuss issues we want to discuss.
I refuse to play into the delusion that men are actually women. They’re not.