The patriarchy that oppresses us all
Yet another – sorry, I hope to change the subject after this one.
Yes but that’s a different sense of “defined.” A very different sense. Feminism has not been fighting for over a century for women to stop being women or stop being called women; it has been fighting for women to stop being limited and confined by their sex.
But wait, it gets worse.
To what end? We’ve seen to what end. Look at Rachel McKinnon and the other male athletes competing against women to see to what end. Look at Jessica Yaniv to see to what end. Look at Morgane Oger. Look at men in prison transing so that they can live among women instead of men. Look at men getting elected Women’s Officer in universities and political parties.
But even more to the point…if the boundary between female and male is arbitrary, what can she possibly mean by “patriarchy”? What is it? What does it do? How does it oppress us? Why should we take it down?
“Homo Sapiens?” I refuse to be defined by my biology. That is what all those centuries of Humanism has been fighting for.
The Patriarchy oppresses women because of the way they think, feel, and behave. That is why people who are assigned “woman” at birth but have male brains can transition right out of patriarchal discrimination and male violence.
The reason the Patriarchy started oppressing female ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the first place has nothing to do with biology. It’s because a lot of very bad people were filled with hate, back then.
“I refuse to be defined by my biology.” That’s nice, yet you are a chordate, a vertebrate, a mammal, an endotherm, a primate, an etc. etc. regardless of your desire. Creationists object to the primate thing, but it is as true of them as anyone else, irrespective of their refusal of that fact. Likewise, women are female and trans women are male.
Feminism has not been fighting to oppose biology per se, it has been fighting to oppose that biology determines personality traits, skills, likes, hobbies, clothing, hairstyle, profession… You’re still female.
‘I refuse to be defined by MY biology. That’s what more than a century of feminism has been fighting for.
‘I will be defined by MY values, MY ambitions, the company I keep, the work I do, the mistakes I make, the entertainment I enjoy and the people who love me.’
At least she appears to admit she has a ‘biology’, though she appears to prefer to be without it. One notices that it is first of all by ‘MY values, MY ambitions’ that she would be defined, and then by a few things that ‘I’ do or enjoy, and in last place by ‘the people who love me’, by which, one can only suppose, she means people who agree or, perhaps out of politeness or fear of getting an ear-full and being de-friended on Facebook, do not publicly disagree with her. Much like Donald Trump. What of those people who look on with disenchanted (which is not synonymous with ‘hostile’) eyes? One is not, first of all, defined by oneself. Even Lorna Slater lives in a social world, where, like it or not, you are constantly being judged by others (and judging others). Your ‘self’, your values, your ambitions, etc are not your inalienable property, existing in some vacuum that you can shape merely by assertion. One has the sense that that Lorna and those many others who behave like her are merely clamouring in the echo-chamber that consists in the remarkably solipsistic idea of the self that she entertains, an echo-chamber within which one feels all-powerful.
I hardly think that more than a century of feminism has been fighting for what Lorna Slater asserts it has been fighting for. But of course, stuck in the little echo-chamber of her self, she doesn’t have to take account of history or anything else beyond her own infantile assertions.
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