With gender as the contested territory
From a 2013 piece by Delilah Campbell at Trouble and Strife about the [cough] tensions between feminism and trans activism:
It is notable that the policing of what can or cannot be said about trans in public is almost invariably directed against women who speak from a feminist, and especially a radical feminist, perspective. It might be thought that trans people have far more powerful adversaries (like religious conservatives, the right-wing press and some members of the medical establishment), and also far more dangerous ones (whatever radical feminists may say about trans people, they aren’t usually a threat to their physical safety). And yet a significant proportion of all the political energy expended by or on behalf of trans activism is expended on opposing and harassing radical feminists.
It is indeed; it’s very notable, and alarming. Religious conservatism and the right-wing press roll along happily, unbothered by trans activism, while feminism is being plowed up and sown with salt. It’s just barely possible that this is not entirely healthy for feminism.
But this isn’t just some misunderstanding, Campbell says. It’s basic.
When trans activists identify feminists as the enemy, they are not just being illogical or petty. Some trans activists refer to their feminist opponents as TERFs, meaning ‘trans-exclusive radical feminists’, or ‘trans-exterminating radical feminists’. The epithet is unpleasant, but the acronym is apt: this is very much a turf dispute, with gender as the contested territory.
At its core, the trans struggle is a battle for legitimacy. What activists want to get accepted is not just the claim of trans people for recognition and civil rights, but the whole view of gender and gender oppression on which that claim is based. To win this battle, the trans activists must displace the view of gender and gender oppression which is currently accorded most legitimacy in progressive/liberal circles: the one put forward by feminists since the late 1960s.
Aaaaaaaand that’s what I (for one) think should not be displaced.
Views of gender are already contested, Campbell concedes, but all the same –
But in fact, the two propositions about gender which trans activists are most opposed to are not confined to radical feminism: both go back to what is often regarded as the founding text of all modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic The Second Sex, and they are still asserted, in some form or other, by almost everyone who claims any kind of feminist allegiance, be it radical, socialist or liberal. The first of these propositions is that gender as we know it is socially constructed rather than ‘natural’; the second is that gender relations are power relations, in which women are structurally unequal to men. On what exactly these statements mean and what they imply for feminist politics there is plenty of internal disagreement, but in themselves they have the status of core feminist beliefs. In the last 15 years, however, these propositions—especially the first one—have become the target of a sustained attack: a multi-pronged attempt to take the turf of gender back from feminism.
Among the prongs are gender essentialism (e.g. Simon Baron-Cohen and Steven Pinker) and libertarian ideas about choice.
Across the political spectrum, it has become commonplace to argue that what really ‘empowers’ people is being able to choose: the more choices we have, and the freer we are to make them, the more powerful we will be. Applied to gender, what this produces is ‘post-feminism’, an ideology which dispenses with the idea of collective politics and instead equates the liberation of women with the exercise of individual agency. The headline in which this argument was once satirized by The Onion—‘women now empowered by anything a woman does’—is not even a parody: this is the attitude which underpins all those statements to the effect that if women choose to be housewives or prostitutes, then who is anyone (read: feminists) to criticize them?
So choosy choosers choose their own flavor of gender, and if that’s being Michelle Duggar, well that’s their choosy choice.
Current trans politics, like feminism, cannot be thought of as an internally unified movement whose members all make exactly the same arguments. But although there are some dissenting voices, in general the views of gender and gender oppression which trans activists promote are strongly marked by the two tendencies just described.
In the first place, the trans account puts little if any emphasis on gender as a power relation in which one group (women) is subordinated to/oppressed by the other (men). In the trans account, gender in the ‘men and women’ sense is primarily a matter of individual identity: individuals have a sovereign right to define their gender, and have it recognized by society, on the basis of who they feel themselves to be. But I said ‘gender in the men and women sense’ because in trans politics, gender is understood in another sense as well: there is an overarching division between ‘cisgendered’ individuals, who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth, and ‘transgendered’ individuals, who do not identify with their assigned gender. Even if trans activists recognize the feminist concept of male power and privilege, it is secondary in their thinking to ‘cis’ power and privilege: what is considered to be fundamentally oppressive is the devaluing or non-recognition of ‘trans’ identities in a society which systematically privileges the ‘cis’ majority.
That. That’s the idea that’s been swallowed whole by The Community of Trans Allies, and it’s verkakte.
I gotta go. More later.
*ernf* What a headache. Is there any other human rights movement which demands not only fair treatment but agreement with a worldview?
“So choosy choosers choose their own flavor of gender, and if that’s being Michelle Duggar, well that’s their choosy choice.”
Are you saying my son chose to be a boy?
Are you saying your son chose to be born?
Natalism involves denying the ethical failure of causing people to come into existence without their consent.
From there, a parent/natalist can move on to denying other things, such as their overwhelming control over their children’s “choices”.
Are you saying your son didn’t choose to use male pronouns, have a “male” name, dress “like a boy”? Are you saying that because he’s a boy, he has no choice in his “flavor of gender”?
Nope, that’s not what’s being said. Read it again:
The point is that post-feminism dispenses with social analysis and focuses on “choices,” and this seems to be the politics that (some) trans activists–apparently the ones who are in ascendancy right now–embrace: “the trans account puts little if any emphasis on gender as a power relation in which one group (women) is subordinated to/oppressed by the other (men). In the trans account, gender in the ‘men and women’ sense is primarily a matter of individual identity…”
Emphasis added.
Jesus Christ. You all think my son, around the age 2, thought to himself, “Golly, being a boy sounds ever so nice! It’d be so much fun to be a boy! Oh, how I wish I didn’t have to be a girl; if I could only choose. As whimsically as I’d choose a candy cane over broccoli, or an adult might choose to be Michelle Duggar (seriously, wtf?), I’d *choose* boyhood!”
Kevin K why did you ask me that? Surely it’s obvious that I’m not talking about children in this post.
Jesus christ yourself, Kevin. We’re talking about adults and their ideology, not children.
And besides that you’re misunderstanding what I said – the bit you quote is about choosy choice feminism, not trans-ism [for want of a better word].
This is erasure. Fuck it. Fuck all the benefits of doubt; all the “these are smart people, but coming from a constrained vantage point”.
A high school less than 50 miles from where my son will be attending high school had a fucking walkout yesterday. The walkout was in protest – nearly an entire student body of kids “bravely” standing up to the quiet girl who had the audacity to suggest she should be allowed to use the girls room like all the other girls. On a day that started with that news article, this was probably not the time to come across a quote like this,
Holy fuck with people I respect being so utterly callous and deliberately ignorant; holy fuck what a world awaits.
X-post, Ophelia, reading your clarification
Do you have a link for the high school story? I’d like to blog it – that sounds hideously cruel.
Found it.
Re: comment #11: I feel terrible knowing that a student body is singling out somebody in order to treat them in a discriminatory fashion, as that’s what you’ve described. I hate schools and the ways they interfere with education.
I feel more terrible knowing that this still won’t stop natalism. People will still reproduce and cause children to be born *with no possible way to consent to such an existence* and those children will have to endure lifetimes of suffering and discrimination. If only people would look at all of this horror, and realize that it’s wrong to make more victims come into existence in the midst of it, to come into lives which might be attacked for being transgender, feminist, homoexual, atheistic, or any other non-conforming quality.
The solution is anti-natalism and extinctionism, but that’s only tangential here. It’s a great solution, a simple solution, to end the suffering in the world, but nearly everybody will denounce it, and most will ignore it.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/hillsboro-high-students-walk-out-over-transgender-dispute/article_be488fab-d239-5944-9733-32f569dcdc32.html
And, timing is always such – I need to head out for prior obligation. Apologies if I’ve misconstrued anything written. I don’t think I’d realized how much that story had been under my skin all day (literally hitting close to home), so I am sorry if I lashed out unfairly.
The two block quotes preceding the choosy choosers remark were explicitly about a choice between one “flavor of gender” versus another, i.e., “gender essentialism (e.g. Simon Baron-Cohen and Steven Pinker)” versus “libertarian ideas about choice.” So, the remark “choosy choosers choose their own flavor of gender” is clearly NOT a remark about choosing one’s own gender.
This is the eleventy billionth time I’ve seen someone read Ophelia’s words with an apparent predilection to find “TERFy” elements where there are none.
That’s ok Kevin. The story is a mean one.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/bullying-in-hillsboro/
The *classmates* are choosing to exclude the trans student. This is not a good choice, although many of them probably find it feels empowering to them.
(Dear Ophelia, please feel free to delete this comment if you think it won’t promote the kind of discussion you aim for on your blog).
Dear KK@ #2
“Are you saying my son chose to be a boy?”
Well, what is a boy?
(BTW, since we haven’t corresponded before, I’m not saying that as some kind of trick or trap. I don’t have predetermined answers that I’m itching to unload).
I suppose though, if we know what the components of ‘being a boy’ are for a particular person, then we might have some idea of whether or not aspects of these can be chosen to some extent.
I’m not attempting to interrogate your son’s ‘being a boy’, or sense of it, or suggest that take place here. (As in, I’m not asking ‘why does your son think he is a boy, I *demand* answers’.)
My view is this – I’d like to live in a society where, whatever traits or interests your son has that make him a ‘boy’, he is allowed to be that person and participate in those interests*, whether or not he is born male, and whether or not he is recognised by others as a boy, and whether or not he recognises himself as a boy. I don’t think it should have been necessary for him to have been ‘born that way’ – ie recognised as having male genitals, or viewed as ‘really being a boy’ for him to just be himself. But unfortunately in our current society it seems that one or the other seems to have to be perceived to be true by others, in order for someone like your son to be free to be himself.
I’m coming to this topic from the point of view of a middle-aged woman who has had a very personal interest in gender, and whether one can or should choose it, since I was a very small child. And who observed at least one of her other small-child friends to be grappling with this issue also. My five year old friend told me she wanted to be a man when she grew up. I wanted to be treated *like* a man, rather than like a woman. Now that I’m older, would it be easier for others to recognise me for who I am, my traits and interests and abilities, and not punish me for being who I am, if they perceived me as a boy or a man? I think the answer is highly likely to be yes. However I know that I have a female body, and consider that I am not essentially masculine or feminine by birth. I also know that whether people thought of me as a man or as a woman, I would still have traits and behaviours that would be considered gender non-conforming. It is just that as a man in my area of experience, I would be honoured for those traits rather than being viewed as something not quite right.
So to the question of choosing. As an adult I would prefer to be a man, but would not choose to be a man for a number of reasons, which do not include feeling at all uncomfortable at the idea of having a male body. As a very small child, if I could have chosen to be a boy or a girl from the moment I knew what those categories entailed socially, I would have chosen to be a boy.
Can a small child choose to be a boy? I suspect one can depending upon social attitudes. Can a small child choose not to be a boy, if they feel strongly that they are a boy? I suspect not, depending somewhat upon social attitudes. Can a small child *want* to choose to be a boy? I say from experience, most definitely.
(*unless of course being a boy or a man means performing masculinity and validating ones own sense of masculine identity by exploiting or abusing others, for example. I’m not talking about those kinds of interests or behaviours).
‘Now that I’m older, would it be easier for others to recognise me for who I am, my traits and interests and abilities, and not punish me for being who I am, if they perceived me as a boy or a man? I think the answer is highly likely to be yes.’
That’s really succinct and well put, and summarises a lot of my experience. I’m also a middle aged woman, who works in a ‘male-dominated’ field and participates in a few ‘male-dominated’ activities (and even if I participated in ‘female-dominated’ activities, in a lot of these being a man would make me stand out, gain me praise and respect, and result in less competition and criticism of my performance and ability). When I was younger I had no idea how much sexism had affected my life, but now that I’m middle aged, and watching my male age cohort progress along their ‘expected’ career paths to develop into well respected experts while I struggle to even remain employed in a field that is ostensibly clamoring for people like me*, I’m really coming to realise how much easier, in a lot of ways, my life could have been.
*Not that it should be relevant, but I’ve never had children or taken a career break.
Thank you for your reply, guest@ #21!
What you write, sounds like my experience of my own life.
I think there are several reasons for it: First, there’s everywhere a tendency to criticize and challenge women and feminists more strongly. Second, there’s a reasonable expectation that categories of people who are themselves oppressed and marginalized (especially when it’s for overlapping reasons) have a better chance of finding compassion and solidarity, and a sense of shock when they seem self-defeatingly callous (there was a similar discussion of misogynistic gay men a few years ago…). There’s little such expectation of those on the Right, so less time is spent on trying to enlighten or engage with them and more on trying to protect people from them and limit their power to do harm. Third, some (radical) feminists have in fact explicitly gone after trans people and worked for their continued oppression. That’s not imagined – it’s a real thing that’s happening.
This might be true of some activists, but in general in my experience is wrong. And I’m sure trans activists have as little patience for these generalized presentations of “the trans struggle” and what “trans activists” want as I do of similar hostile characterizations of what “feminists want.” Similarly, the idea that this is at root a turf war between feminists and trans activists is untrue and unhelpful. This business of “the two propositions about gender which trans activists are most opposed to” and the like is tiresome and gets us nowhere.
Sigh. At some point, these feminist arguments took a seriously bad turn. I suggest that they start arguing with the actual arguments of actual trans activists. Quote them, engage with them. The rhetoric on display here has the effect of treating the very existence of trans people advocating for recognition and rights as a threat to feminists or women. (In some cases, as we saw on the thread on the former B&W, there’s such a deep core of bigotry that rational argument will be as unproductive as engagement with religious-misogynistic bigots, but it can’t hurt anyone to open up an actual dialogue with people rather than battling with the fearful specter of an imagined trans or feminist politics.
There is no “trans account.” These two contentions aren’t mutually exclusive. And it’s not true in my experience that trans activists put little if any on gender (as) oppression.
Again, if these feminists who are so concerned about a contemporary “trans agenda” would make more of an effort to talk, discuss, and argue with trans people – including those with whom they strongly disagree – progress could be made. Of course I’m not suggesting that this go in only one direction: trans activists also need to be open to dialogue (it is difficult when people are actively pushing for the denial of your basic rights and denying you simple human respect – that tends to make anyone prickly; at the same time, it’s difficult for people who believe that the gains from decades of work challenging essentialism are dangerously under threat…so everyone could try to be a bit more understanding and self-critical and to chill out a little – there are so many bases for solidarity and ways we could work together).
Meh. I think this is true of activists in any movement to the extent that they’re acting in that role specifically. “Even if feminists recognize the anti-racist concept of white privilege, it is secondary in their thinking to male privilege…” To some extent it’s unavoidable – it’s difficult for a movement to take on multiple axes of oppression at once in practice. The important things to keep in mind are the shared bases of the different axes of oppression and the ways they intersect, and especially to try not to contribute to one form of oppression while fighting another.
Again, I think many of these arguments imply that today’s trans struggles for recognition, respect, and rights as such contribute to male power and privilege, but I don’t think that’s the case. Some particular arguments or approaches might, and those can be challenged specifically. In other cases, these struggles can be not only compatible but mutually reinforcing.
Salty @ 23 –
Well quite – but why should feminists be expected to put up with it – or rather embrace it – coming from fellow progressives?
Or to put it another way, I know that, of course, but that’s my point – this is just more anti-feminist misogynist bullshit, dressed up as progressive. It’s not cool.
Salty @ 23 again –
What is the referent for “this”? What is the “this” that is not a turf war between feminists and trans activists?
Late to the party, but the quotes are describing a trans activist movement that is unrecognizable for me, and since I’m someone who is able to speak with and listen to trans people and even *gasp* trans activists for five seconds without getting into a flame war, I figured my observations might be helpful.
The standard, party line among trans activists and the trans community is that the gender binary is socially constructed, and that it is insufficient and oppressive to everyone, even those who feel aligned with a binary gender, cis or trans. The standard, party line is that sexism and oppression of women/female/feminine people is very much a real thing, even if it’s not the only power relationship going on once you add in the experience of trans and/or gender nonconforming people.
Things get murkier when you move on to the slippery, overused term “identity,” but as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the belief isn’t that people choose their genders, but that everyone should be allowed whatever gender expression they like and given room to experiment, change their minds, and explain the way they experience their gender without judgment. It’s not that what people say about their gender is the only reality, and it’s also not that transgender people are definitely trans because of some sort of simple “X brain in Y body” medical explanation that relies on gender essentialism to make sense.
There isn’t a clear party line about why some people are trans and others aren’t. There is a lot of discomfort with any sort of medical explanation that coexists with wishing for a clear medical explanation. I’ve noticed a lot of resistance to making clearly defined categories of things like “man” “woman” and “transgender” that include some people and exclude others based on any sort of objective, externally observable criteria (behavioral or otherwise). The trans community often seems to want it both ways- to say that gender is entirely socially constructed but also that being transgender is not a choice and can’t be treated in any way other than transition.
My personal frustrations with trans activism and the trans rights movement seem to be the opposite of yours: I see a community that’s too reluctant to look to scientific evidence that touches on what the differences between men and women might be once you get beyond sociocultural conventions and power dynamics, or to ask what might cause some people to be transgender when others aren’t. I see a community that shies away from defining terms lest those definitions exclude someone or make them uncomfortable, and a community with a touchy-feely anti-science stance that too often values supportive twaddle over intellectual engagement. But, what this community is not, is essentialist or supportive of the binary. In fact, they often complain that “gender critical” feminists are essentialist, with at least as much cause in the form of cherry picked data points and an eagerness to lump all of their “enemies” together and only react to the least intelligent ones.
TL;DR The article you quoted has the facts totally wrong, which makes your reaction to it also wrong.
They/we shouldn’t. It’s (to the extent that that’s what’s a play – note that I suggested several other reasons for this attention) a product of a hierarchical society.
But of course the same could be said about these feminists’ focus on trans people. A small, marginalized and oppressed segment of the population who for decades have been pressed to perform society’s gender roles in order to obtain needed services, recognition, and safety – so it’s not at all surprising if some have adopted and even championed them, just as it isn’t that some cis women have. It’s bizarre and unnerving that they – a subset of trans activists or that subset mistakenly generalized to all trans activists or trans people – should be such a focus for feminists, even to the point of stoking physical fear about them in certain spaces, especially when we could all be working together on common ends even as we continue to discuss and debate different perspectives within and between feminist and trans activism(s)). It’s a monumental misdirection of concern and aggression. (Again, that’s not to say that bad arguments of trans people/activists have to be ignored, but some perspective would help.)
The whole complex of interactions. There is no turf war in reality. There might be some distinct subsets of feminists and trans activists who see things that way, but I don’t believe there’s anything in the basic nature of trans activism or feminism that makes them inherently incompatible. I’m amazed that anyone would think that conceiving of or presenting these relationships as a turf war would ever lead anywhere positive or liberating for anyone – I don’t see this any more than I think the attacks on Natalie Portman for her comments on Holocaust education are correct or fruitful.
If there is no turf war in reality, what is all the yelling about? If there is no turf war in reality, what does “TERF” mean? If there is no turf war in reality, why is there so much hostility?
I don’t either, but that’s not the issue. There does seem to be quite a lot in the contingent nature of trans activism and feminism right now that makes them contingently incompatible. That’s all I’ve been talking about. (We could split hairs about that I suppose – I might agree that I think there’s something in the inherent nature of particular claims, etc etc, but that still wouldn’t mean that the activism is inherently anything.)
What perspective, how much perspective? The subset weren’t “such a focus” for me until a subset of their allies went into full-on attack mode because I criticized some of the coverage of Caitlyn Jenner. I’m not sure I’m the one who needs a lecture on perspective.
I think we’re arguing on different registers. When I say there’s no turf war in reality I mean, first, what I said above – “I don’t believe there’s anything in the basic nature of trans activism or feminism that makes them inherently incompatible” and in fact I believe they’re mutually constituting if more completely understood – and that there are subsets of people, or perhaps one subset of people, who see things as a turf war [ugh – I keep writing “terf war”] and act accordingly. This has happened in many other struggles in the past, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
With all due respect, I think things seem this way to you because you’ve interacted for a while with feminists who see things this way and present the “trans agenda” in these terms. I think it’s a mischaracterization of the arguments of trans activists in general – again, there are rarely if ever quotations provided with any sort of adequate context or intellectual engagement, so I’m not sure who they’re talking about most of the time. I’ve read the arguments of trans activists for a long time now, and I haven’t seen them taking the positions ascribed to them by these feminists. (And as I’ve said more than once, trans women for years have been among the most vocal spokespeople for feminism in the online spaces I’ve been in, so I’m particularly irked by portraits of trans activists in general as hostile to feminism or women.) Of course, there could be trans activists making those arguments, but they’re not what I’ve seen.
What I have seen from some trans activists: in many cases, a strong and committed feminism; perhaps some amount of fear, which is understandable if not greatly productive, about tackling certain subjects in certain spaces; in some cases, a profound ignorance about feminism and a tendency to make unfounded and irresponsible attacks rather than to seek to engage and understand; justified outrage at bigots, including feminist bigots; and in recent months some real assholery and piling on, which long preceded any discussion of trans people specifically at FTB and certainly has no inherent connection to the substance of any trans or feminist positions.
Like I said, I think it would be far better to engage with the actual arguments of people – trans people, feminists, transfeminists, anyone – with whom you (the general you) believe you have substantive disagreements, and in a spirit of engagement and understanding, rather than going after what often looks like a caricature of trans activists. Which of course doesn’t preclude continuing to call out the shitty behavior.
Trans people have been a focus of hostility for one subset of feminists for a while now, as you of course know.
Trans people? All trans people? No, I don’t “of course” know that, and I don’t think it’s true.
It is true. I’ve been reading their public statements for several years, and I’m sure the focus preceded my awareness. I’m confused by your reluctance to acknowledge this. In any case, let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s not the case. I think I’ve made my suggestions for stepping back from the antagonism and moving forward in a cooperative and productive spirit pretty clear, so I don’t think continuing on this thread would be a good use of my time.
Ophelia, all trans people, of course, yes. This is a subset of feminism that believes that since gender is entirely 100% socially constructed, then it logically and inevitably follows that trans women are (socialized) men whose male privilege is what allows them to get away with threatening women’s safe spaces and co-opting their experience, which they do for reasons of power and sexual predation (which they were socialized into, because they’re men), and who must be opposed in every possible way as the rapists and aggressors they truly are.
These people also believe that trans men are opportunistically jumping ship in order to gain male privilege, and should be shamed or prevented from doing so. (Side note: To my way of thinking, if gender really were 100% socially constructed then all women really should just transition to male post haste and then we’ll have full equality for everyone in no time. What’s the point of having any women in the first place if all being a woman means is that you’ve been given a lower spot in the hierarchy? Why not just do away with womanhood once and for all, and Bob’s your uncle. This idea is not a popular one with anyone, and it makes me question if anyone really truly believes this 100% socialization crap. I think we’re all essentialists, and I’m just brave enough to cop to it.)
Anyway, that’s what we’re arguing about and those are the stakes.
You’re confused by my reluctance to acknowledge what you’ve been reading? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what you’ve been reading.
The fact that you’ve been reading it for several years doesn’t mean that I have. Different people read different things. You seem to be assuming it’s universal knowledge. It isn’t.
And I don’t know who the “their” in “their public statements” is, either.
As for your “suggestions for stepping back from the antagonism” – what antagonism? Unless you mean my antagonism to Melby and people like Melby? Which I’ll “step back from” when they step back from their hounding of me.
The people correctly called TERFs are ones who think that feminism is incompatible with anyone being transgender, not that certain trans activists beliefs are incompatible with feminism. There is an awful lot of tarring all feminists of a certain age or style of feminism with the TERF brush, but there really are people who see acceptance of trans people in any form or fashion as incompatible with their view of gender as 100% socially constructed.
There are, of course, other ways to reconcile the ideas. I mentioned one- all women should simply transition, all girls should be raised as boys and given testosterone at puberty, and the woman problem is fixed within a generation.
Ok, I do know that – that there are people correctly called TERFs. I didn’t know they think feminism is incompatible with anyone being transgender, because I thought they focused more on trans women.
Prepare to be amazed: http://dirtywhiteboi67.blogspot.com
Ick.
Just think, someday it’ll be my pictures up there. Makes sense why people get so intensely emotional and afraid around this stuff, even if you think, as I do, that too many people are being called TERFs prematurely and way more can be done with persuasion and patient dialogue than is currently happening.
A well-crafted rewording of Salty’s point.
If you pay attention, you’ll also notice that trans men are almost always painted as the sad/crazy/attention-seeking victims of transition and the trans rights movement, while trans women are intentional actors/aggressors. An interesting manifestation of thinking that’s been thoroughly warped by sexist conditioning is what I’d call it.
‘To my way of thinking, if gender really were 100% socially constructed then all women really should just transition to male post haste and then we’ll have full equality for everyone in no time. What’s the point of having any women in the first place if all being a woman means is that you’ve been given a lower spot in the hierarchy? Why not just do away with womanhood once and for all, and Bob’s your uncle. This idea is not a popular one with anyone, and it makes me question if anyone really truly believes this 100% socialization crap. I think we’re all essentialists, and I’m just brave enough to cop to it.’
I”m not an essentialist, and I feel like your comment trivialises something that has deeply affected me, and I think everyone else who lives in a patriarchal culture. Reasons why ‘just be a man then’ wouldn’t have worked for me:
Too soon old, too late schmart. When I was younger I was certainly aware that there were sexists in the world, but as young people do I felt like I was immune. And in some senses I was—I got a good education and (eventually) a reasonable career, and was very lucky not to have been pressured into a lot of things many women feel compelled to do. I used to tell funny stories about my ‘sexism’ experiences—‘and then the dude said ‘I want to talk to the man in charge’, and it was ME! Hahaha!’ That was the limit of my understanding of how sexism affected me. It’s only been recently, due both to being older and to there being more available to read, hear and learn, that I’ve started to get a grasp of what sexism has done to me, both in the past and now. I can look back and see where I was ignored, inappropriately criticised, shunted aside, expected to do the low-level jobs even when I was in a senior position, etc.; if I’d noticed these things at the time I ascribed them to my personal inadequacy, not to the context in which I was attempting to make my way in life. I had no idea then how much easier my male counterparts had it. And as I wrote above, it’s only now that I see that the expectations I had about my life and career, what ‘people’ were told they could expect if they achieve and accomplish and do everything right, apply only to men.
In our culture we grow up with stories about ‘people’ who happen to be men. I think we internalise these stories as if they’re about ourselves, and a lot of us just don’t realise we’re not ‘people’ until well after our gender identification is established, and by that time for most of us we feel like we really can’t do anything about it. I’m still working on learning the lesson that I can’t expect ‘people’ to apply to me because I’m female.
Transitioning would involve intrusive actions on my body that I don’t know if I’d have been prepared to undertake, even if I’d known early on how my life would go as a man compared to as a woman. I don’t have tattoos, or pierced ears, and have been extremely lucky not to have had any major medical interventions (but I”m not getting any younger—I’m afraid I’m going to go to pieces when it’s time for the hip replacement or whatever) and the idea of altering my body deliberately terrifies me.
Patriarchy hurts men too. Those of us at the top of the hierarchy do pay a price, in any number of ways. In a lot of ways it may be a better deal to be a man, but not all of us would be willing to live with the pressure, the fear, the repression, the latent violence, or the constant competition.
Sure, #44, it’s a bit late for you, personally. I get that. This isn’t a plan that could be phased in overnight- like I said, it would take about a generation.
Some people will feel too old to change, fine. But if gender is a simple matter of choice and social conditioning that reinforces an oppressive hierarchy and nothing more, then shouldn’t a caring parent raise every one of their children as boys, regardless of their birth sex, and if they’re female start them on testosterone at puberty? After all, the only difference will be that they have more privilege and better outcomes- this is why people send children to private schools, so surely a social gender change is justified.
If we’re holding girls back by conditioning them as female and there’s nothing for it but to stop raising anyone as female. No one will ever need to know who was originally female and who wasn’t, except perhaps when it comes time to have children. That will be well into adulthood, after the conditioning has taken place, so we don’t need to worry about it, especially since now it will be the high status men getting pregnant, who can then leverage their privilege into things like maternity leave and better health care.
Now, yes, there are harmful effects of patriarchy on men as well, as you mention. But when everyone is a man, then these suddenly equal people can determine for themselves how to evolve without needing to prop up this traditional hierarchy. Freed from gender, the male men and the female men can work together to get rid of whatever remnants of patriarchy are harmful for them, since they’ll no longer have any purpose.
Isn’t that what some of us tried to do in the ’70s? That’s the way I was raised–as a boy, if you will. I don’t think it dawned on my parents that being female would hurt my life chances; we’d got rid of all that sexism stuff so our kids could be whatever they wanted regardless of gender. (As long as they were white and had plenty of money, of course.)
As I said, though, peeling back the gender conditioning, both internally and as it affects my interactions with other people, has taken me a lifetime so far without any end in sight. How do we even know how we’re affecting other people with our own ingrained gender assumptions? I taught engineering for several years…and it turned out to be true that I paid more attention to the men in my classes than to the women. It’ll take more than a generation to weed all that out.
Right- that’s why it would be important to raise all the female children as boys and start them on testosterone at puberty so that they’d look like boys. That way, the most sexist person in the world would never know to treat them differently.
Now, to be clear, I think this is a bad idea because it wouldn’t work- an unacceptably large number of the female children would experience the profound sense of wrongness that we call dysphoria, which would have a very negative impact. But if you don’t believe they’d experience dysphoria, what’s the rationale for not just doing it/recommending it for everyone?
Perhaps the effects of testosterone administered to females over a lifespan aren’t well-understood enough to say it would be safe just yet… But how about in ten or twenty more years? Isn’t it a reasonable goal be to stop our girls from being treated as second class citizens by whatever means necessary? Sure, changing society is arguably a better goal, but that is a very difficult and slow process. For anyone who has a daughter now, shouldn’t they just do what’s best for her?
And…I just had an insight (this is the kind of thing that makes it worth my while to have written conversations with people I’ve never met and never will) that my parents DID raise me as a boy. Which is why I avoided a lot of the gender-conforming behaviour many women get pressured into (for example, I’ve never worn makeup during the day, shaved my legs except for stage performances, worn dresses except to special events, worn heels at all, been on a diet, been pressured to find a man or have kids, trained to be nice/submissive around men), have been learning my lessons in sexism so relatively late, and why it continues to shock me that I don’t count as ‘people’.
But, re your argument…. I have occasionally worked with the Deaf community, among whom there has been a debate over cochlear implants. Wouldn’t it be better for every Deaf person to have an implant, and thus be no longer disabled? Those of us who aren’t Deaf might think so, but lots of Deaf people value their culture and language, and while they don’t underestimate the challenges they face as disabled people in the societies they live in they don’t want to become not-Deaf. Should every parent ensure that their child can hear, whether born Deaf or not? That’s an ongoing debate.
I know you’re not seriously proposing that half of humans would be better off with intensive medical intervention, so I don’t really get where you’re going with this (I may be too much of a literal-minded engineer to appreciate the thought-experiment nature of your ideas).
It is similar to the cochlear implant discussion, you’re right. Another version: if parents could prevent their children from being born gay, would that be a terrible tragedy or a sensible way to ensure they weren’t discriminated against?
I suppose I lean towards saying that, while Deaf adults should be free to continue their culture and raise their own children however they like, hearing parents shouldn’t hesitate to get their kids cochlear implants. Also that, if no more children ever grew up to be gay or lesbian it would make no difference to me either way (I’m a notorious assimilationist as an LGBTQ journo: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/09/08/gay_culture_i_look_forward_to_its_extinction_dialogue.html).
Parents do get their children cochlear implants, though. And I think we can probably agree that many would prevent their children from growing up to be gay or lesbian if they had that option. But, since adult women are 50% of the population, then I guess if they feel the same sentimentality that leads gays and Deafs to want to preserve their cultural identity the chances are slim that girls will be freed from female socialization in such a simple manner. Oh well. Maybe a few kooks will do it eventually, and then we can see if the girls experience dysphoria. Like those feral children who provided some of the evidence we now have that language is most likely an innate ability that can be lost if it’s not acquired in the right developmental window.
VR Urquhart @43
With the exception of course of those trans women who manage to present in a hyper feminine manner thus passing as conventionally beautiful women almost indistinguishable from ‘real’ women. In which case the media calls them wonderful and brave. Which may well be true in most cases, but also reduces their value (and everyone else by extension) to sexualised objects and ignores the reality of their humanity warts and all. It also not so subtly brands trans women who don’t/can’t meet that standard failures and intensifies their othering.
Rob- I was only talking about the way TERFs, who are supposedly feminists, talk about trans people, not the media or the public. The media and the public do seem to be much more interested in trans women, whether it’s ones who look like men in dresses or ones who look like beauty queens.
TERFs seeing trans men as victimized women and trans women as men making predatory choices is interesting to me because I feel it betrays an underlying sexism they can’t quite get rid of. To these so-called feminists, trans men can’t be agents, they can’t be intelligently (or deviously) choosing to gain privilege (although this would seem to follow from their worldview)- they have to be victims or crazies. That’s how they see anyone with a female body- weak, vulnerable, unable to make their own decisions. Meanwhile, anyone with a male body is just a sex criminal waiting to happen.
Ah, right. I’d missed that you were being that specific.
I realize the point you’re making, but I think it’s overstated. I haven’t seen anyone here argue non-essentialism to the point of denying that having a female body has no existential impact on a person.
I’m probably being too literal and derailing, but I can’t help but notice that your modest proposal doesn’t actually challenge bigotry; it just internalizes it and attempts an end run around its effects by eradicating the characteristics that identify the lower caste.
Maybe racism could be “solved” by using medical science to make black children look white. Why not?
–And if you object to that, are you claiming that there are essentialdifferences between black and white people, (a few superficial physical traits aside)?
That the cultural differences that exist between the two groups are somehow innate?
And whether or not gender is entirely socially constructed, why eradicate women? Why assume that their gender is dispensable? Why should the female-bodied people be the ones subjected to painful and invasive surgery?
Eesh. Should read, “to the point of claiming that having a female body” etc etc.
Women are not a problem to be fixed.
learie, I think the problem is that women are expected to exhibit femininity, whilst men aren’t; after all, absent physical difference, that’s how gender is determined.
And men are expected to exhibit masculinity, whilst women aren’t. Don’t forget that.
Lady M,
First off, in our real world, many black people straighten their hair, some have plastic surgery to alter their features to more closely resemble the white standard of beauty, light skin is already prized, and some do attempt to lighten their skin. Asian people have operations on their eyes to make them look more like caucasian eyes. So, I think it’s a mistake to conclude that marginalized racial groups don’t attempt to look more like the group currently in power, or that members of those groups wouldn’t go even further if the technology to do so existed. It’s something people in those communities feel strongly about, people argue about, but it’s hardly unthinkable or beyond the pale for black Americans to attempt to look as white as possible- it happens every day.
Why does it feel like I’m suggesting eradicating women, if women don’t really exist in any meaningful sense? Surely all I’m suggesting is eliminating the ability for men to oppress women by making it so that men would be unable to identify women as such in the first place? If gender is 100% socially constructed then women don’t exist as anything but one half of a power relationship- woman has no meaning independent from men, and the meaning they have in that relationship is a negative one. Would it be better to eliminate the need for one group to oppress the other? Of course. But, practically speaking, if the oppression is eliminated and the oppression is the only “real” thing there is, then isn’t the most important thing to eliminate that oppression by whatever means necessary, allowing everyone an equal playing field on which to build a new cultural reality that no longer relies on a gender hierarchy as one of its key organizing principles?
Surgery would be unnecessary- testosterone is really all that’s required in order to pass as male with clothing on. (As a side note- part of realizing that I might be transgender was realizing that looking like/becoming a man wasn’t something every woman secretly wanted. Before a certain point I experienced femaleness as this hated burden that had been forced on me, and I assumed other women felt similarly and would rather be men if they had the option. I didn’t know how well testosterone works on female bodies or I’d have been thinking transition much earlier.)
Waaaaaaait a second – it’s very much considered “beyond the pale for black Americans to attempt to look as white as possible” by a great many people. It’s considered self-hating and tragic at best. Yes, it happens, but lots of awful things happen; the fact that they happen isn’t the same as being not beyond the pale. The whole point of black pride was and is to get rid of that kind of self-hatred.
Yes, one way of dealing with marginalization is to try to be more like the centered, but another way is to decenter the centered, i.e. to make it so that there is no “center” in that way – no center and no margin.
Obviously you know that, but I’m disputing the way you slipped that claim in there.
That’s not a conclusion of mine. What I said was:
Emphasis added.
Only if you conflate gender with sex. Note that I am speaking hypothetically here–I am taking the “100% socially constructed view” for the sake of argument. You still have “women” (defined as adult biologically female humans) and “men” (adult biologically male humans.)
(For the record, I don’t know how much of gender is socially constructed. I suspect it’s a lot, but not 100%.
But it’s plain to see how dramatically notions of womanhood or femininity or whatever you want to call it have changed just in the West in the last century. And it’s clear that any statistical differences found between the sexes are smaller than variations between individuals.
So “gender” seems a fuzzy catagory to me. Of course I believe people should be free to express themselves, and their self-experienced gender, however they please.)
So, doesn’t this bring us back to where we came in? If Gender is fuzzy, how can you have 100% identity to a particular gender? To be clear, I don’t dispute the right of anyone to live there lives as trans/cis or somewhere anywhere on the spectrum of maleness/femaleness/otherness either. What leaves room for uncertainty is that when we find defining the gender fuzzy, what does that say about an absolute claim to identify as a particular gender? Sure the person can identify that way, but what does it actually mean to do so?
Rob, yes, that’s what it seems like to me.
Weird objection, from my point of view. There are shades of color between red and orange where it’s hard to say exactly which is which, and there are other colors like purple, but that doesn’t stop us from identifying clear reds or oranges.
Oh, and I suppose I should answer the racism question. It’s not up to me to say what a racial minority I’m not a member of should or shouldn’t do, but the fact is that if you could reliably make black Americans look exactly like white ones a lot of black Americans would choose that for themselves and/or their children. There are other ways to “fix” racism that have been proposed that get at similar strategies- for instance, with enough intermarriage everyone would become a similar shade of brownish, and we could no longer reliably distinguish between black people and white ones. I’m certainly in favor of that.
As for whether race is less socially constructed than gender- I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s far more so. But, it’s a little complicated because black children have black parents, so sharing a cultural experience works in a much simpler, less ambiguous fashion. Women, generally speaking, have males as parents. Gays, generally speaking, have straight people as parents. Any given family could have all boys naturally, and there’d be nothing strange about it. So, switching the girls to boys would be a much less radical proposition, as they’d have a similar experience to half their parentage. Or even to all their parents, if mom also transitions.
Not sure who’s objection you are describing as weird. Your colour analogy is almost perfect. Apart from clear biological differences (various forms of colour blindness) there have been many studies done asking the question “Do we all perceive colour the same?” This simple answer is yes and no. Yes, we all tend to see strong primaries pretty much the same. However, there is some evidence that men and women perceive colours differently and there is strong evidence that the language a person uses results in differences in colour perception as does the depth of your colour related vocabulary. So, not only do you and I almost certainly perceive colour differently from a PNG tribesman, but we may actually perceive colour differently over time.
Just so, some people see gender in a simple and clearly delineated way, while others see lots of shade, uncertainty and nuance. As you learn new ways to define difference you are more inclined to see difference.
Like I say, almost perfect analogy. I guess it’s what you do with the perceived difference that matters.
What do you think I’m objecting to?
What exactly do you think gender is? Which human characteristics would you assign to “women,” and which to “men”?
The extremes on both sides always seemed to me to be performing.
I think it’s pretty obvious that we don’t know the degree to which gender is socially constructed. Studies have shown that people treat babies very differently depending on the infant’s gender–and perceive/describe babies’ actions differently depending on whether they believe the child they’re observing is a boy or a girl.
Re my racism question–OK, thanks for answering the question.
I would not try to “fix” bigotry by making a marginalized group indistinguishable from the dominant. I think such an approach assumes that the dominant group is the more valuable one–the one whose ways should be perpetuated. That’s a problematic assumption–fractally problamatic, I’d say. But it’s late here and I’m typing letter by letter on a low-end smart phone, so I won’t elaborate right now. Will check this thread again tomorrow.
Good night!
Lady M, not you, I was responding to VRU at 66.
Eh, isn’t the point of the gender category woman so that men can have half of humanity designated to do ‘womens’ work’? To do the stuff that men don’t want to do, and for either little or no pay, and f-all recognition?
I can’t say I *know* what would happen if we turned all of our girls into boys as VRU is thought-experiment-proposing. But I expect society wouldn’t overnight start valuing ‘womens’ work’ with ‘mens’ work’, and sharing it around equally and fairly. We’d still need a group of people to do the shit work for little remuneration and recognition. So the burden would probably fall even more on other marginalized groups – people of colour, poor people, men perceived as being somewhat feminine or perhaps gay men.
And of course, it’s just possible that some people, maybe, would notice that some men could gestate and birth babies, and that those men would have been the ones taking testosterone from an earlier age. People in a community/society would pretty quickly work out who were the men and boys with the female sex organs, and who were not. Thus providing the basis for discrimination and assignment of inferior status.
Last days I was browsing through a lot of self-descriptions, written by the trans people. I found little uniformity (which, I guess, was only to be expected): different people, quite different descriptions. Still, it is my impression that “how can you have 100% identity?” is not a proper question to ask. Why should it matter whether it’s 100% and not – say – 92%? Do we really need such sharp boundaries here? What’s the point?
Here is a quote from a transgendered person, which I found on the net:
“Approximates to that close enough” – these are the final words. Now, the question is whether we really need anything better than that. Do you think that we do? If so, why?
It’s a tough one, isn’t it, this question of which characteristics can be ascribed to men and which to women. (This is responding to Lady M #69). I’ve given it a lot of thought, and engaged in a lot of discussion of this one.
Any differences on individual traits have to be statistical and overlapping- women tend to be more this, men tend to be more that. We know this because if there were starker differences that were universally present we’d have worked them out already. We also know that we’re all immersed in a culture that is not only sexist but rooted in sexism for countless generations- 300 years ago there were dark skinned people who had never felt inferior to whites because they’d never seen a white, but sexism (at least in all the dominant cultures around today) extends back thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands.
So, it’s impossible to just say “women are more xyz” without it also meaning “xyz is what makes women inferior”. It’s so completely baked into the assumptions and expectations that you can’t get away from it. It’s also impossible to think “maybe women are more x” without that thought being shaped by sexist assumptions of what women are supposed to be and what roles they’ve been forced into.
The best I can do is say that I think it’s impossible to really understand the subtle differences that accrue to make someone a man or a woman from a position of being stuck inside a sexist society, but that I also think there would be differences between the two beyond just bodily ones if we could somehow look at men and women outside of a sexist culture.
I know, Rob, I was responding to VR as well. I wasn’t sure what she thought I was objecting weirdly to.
Quite possible. They’d still be statistical tendencies, rather than an absolute “X ‘belongs’ to men, Y to women,” though.
#39
And what’s the problem with a lesbian exploring the bullshit of gender identity and posting research on what testosterone does to females? Oh right, it’s just more woman hating same ole, same ole. I believe y’all answered your own question ‘why is it only women that are being screamed at over this shit?’
Just posting a link and then saying ‘ick’ is not analysis.
Methinks you don’t want to critically analyze anything but expect others to be analytical when you make statements. Pot meet kettle.
No, Sally doesn’t have a point. Women are not ‘transphobic’ for wanting privacy rights and their own spaces. That’s a bullshit term made up by men to beat women over the heads with so we comply.
I’ll make this extremely simple for ya’ll.
Gender is a social construct, unless you want to go on about laydeebrainz, which you would then have to accept there’s such a thing as asian brains, black brains, male brains, mexican brains. Yeah, please try to go down THAT line of thinking.
Sex is NOT a social construct. It’s reality. Sexual dimorphism is a fact of our species.
Males cannot change sex. Sure they can wear makeup, dresses, heels etc. but that doesn’t make them women. EVER.
Nobody really cares what people wear. Nobody cares if someone named ‘Bill’ changes their name to ‘Sally.’
There is no real debate to be had here. Women are simply saying ‘you’re not women’ and men are using their power, money and privilege to no-platform, threaten and intimidate us women into submitting to a delusion that’s all in their heads.