What is it to exclude?
Some people were chatting about the LGB Alliance.
But what does that mean, “exclusionary”?
All groups “exclude” some people, necessarily, because if they don’t they’re just “everybody.” They may be open to all who want to join, but they still “exclude” those who don’t want to join.
This is ok. It’s allowed. It’s not automatically evil. Of course there can be exclusion for bad reasons, but exclusion by itself is neutral.
The LGB umbrella has been expanding by adding letters for years, so much so that it’s an easy joke, but there are in fact substantive reasons to ask if the expansion really makes sense. The reality is that being trans is not the same thing as being same-sex attracted, and in some ways the two conflict. Cotton ceiling, anyone? Lesbians don’t necessarily want to have sex with men who identify as women, and they don’t much want to be bullied for that preference, either.
It’s not obvious that it’s evil or phobic or “exclusionary” in the pejorative sense for LGB people to want a group for just them and not also trans people.
But never mind all that, just keep repeating “exclusionary” until the rocks melt into the sea.
Right? Being T excludes being cis. In fact, just witness the utter disdain with which cis people are referred to, especially if the bad taste to be born white (or woman god forbid). I mean, I know that there is privilege adhering to being cis, white and male. That doesn’t automatically make CWM people evil, wrong or even misguided. That happens at an individual level, not a category level. The whole oppression argument used by TRA’s against those who dare to question their narrative is both fundamentally wrong headed, while containing just enough f a grain of truth to sway those who are either uninformed or incapable of objective thought on the issue.
I don’t actually believe there is any privilege adhering to being cis. I can agree that it’s more comfortable to have gotten used to one’s sex over time, but I don’t think that amounts to privilege in the political sense. Just think how much safer women would be if we could identify as men in emergencies.
But then I also don’t think “cis” is a real category.
And as I keep pointing out, the Genderspeak definition of “women” (assuming for the sake of the argument that a non-circular definition could be provided) by necessity excludes anyone who fails to think or feel the required way about “themselves”. But of course when it comes to those people non-exclusion is the bigoted position, and only a monster could possibly think otherwise, right?
The dogma is that there’s no such thing as “same-sex attracted” — we’re attracted to same or different genders. So collecting people into a category which must surely have been artificially invented to deny reality is meant to provoke and spread bigotry. Of course.
I have been informed, however, that “The Cotton Ceiling” is a myth. As I recall, the essay I was pointed to defined it as “ trans lesbians are always raping cis lesbians.”
It might be more than just complaining about being “excluded,” more than just a failure to acknowlege different and conflicting needs and interests. I think there may be an element of surveillance and control, not to mention paranoia, involved. If “T” is in on everything, then nobody can organize against them, or even talk amongst themselves without the approval and permission of TRAs. How do you articulate your own wants and needs if the agenda has to include others who do not share them, who actively oppose them, or who even deny those wants and needs even exist? Big Brother is Watching. I’ll bet Owen Jones has no issues with T talking amongst themselves “exclusively,” without the participation, permission and approval of LG & B.
YNNB @5 wrote:
Of course not. Oppressed groups are always entitled to organize on their own behalf. And the T is the most oppressed group possible.
Ophelia, in the interests of brevity I didn’t spend any time outlining my full position. The tl;dr version would be:
(1) cis is defined by the lack of transition or identifying as trans). Nothing more. Therefore all people (98%+) who are cis have nothing in common other than not being trans.
(2) The privilege pertaining to being cis is therefore only that accorded to 98%+ of the population that to one extent or another conform to at least some of society’s norms; as opposed to rejecting at least one of those norms when declaring oneself trans.
So, any privilege, such as it is, is relative and weak. I think for instance that the privilege I have by being white, male and tall in a society that values those things, hugely outweighs any cis privilege, both individually and collectively. In the normal run of daily events cis privilege accords me no favours or benefits.
Funny, I was thinking about “tall” privilege too, earlier, in one of the moments when I was fretting my brain on the subject. It’s not politicized the way the core privileges are, but it’s not nothing. As you say, cis is a lot closer to nothing than tall is.
The alphabet soup of LGBT… even sometimes includes numbers and symbols as well. Perhaps they’ll exhaust the ASCII set and have to delve into other regions of Unicode.
However, the “LGBT” part does seem to have achieved fixation unlike the more controversial other characters, so I can see where people are coming from when they say starting an “LGB” organization is “exclusionary”, though this implies a sort of ratchet effect such that once a letter has been fully accepted in the initialism, no reduced subsets of it will ever be tolerated as groups pursuing separate interests.
But then why is it perfectly fine for trans organizations to exist?
Whatever “exclusion” means, it’s certainly not throwing someone out of a bar in the middle of winter without her coat for identifying her sexual orientation on her tshirt.
Ophelia @8, the ways in which we consciously and unconsciously discriminate against others (and therefore in the converse confer privilege) are legion. Over the years I’ve seen references to studies showing that height and birth name confer a striking degree of privilege (see discussion about ‘black’ name spelling). An interesting non-privilege item that struck me back near the beginning of my working career was that people look more favourably on written work filled with jargon and abstract phrasing, even when the result was that they were not sure what was meant. That struck me as a real tension as we were being encouraged to use a more plain language style of writing to improve understanding for a wider audience.
It can be a twisted world…
Not that I’m any expert on sexual politics, but I get the impression that the T very much rode on the coattails of the already established LGB movement. Appending themselves to a movement that had already done much (if not most) of the heavy lifting was a masterstroke, as they probably would have not gotten as far as quickly without the work of others. This gives people who haven’t thought about it very much, or who would not really be affected by the demands of TRAs, the idea that trans “rights” are the same as those of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and is a logical progression of them. Another oppressed minority to uplift and champion. That these “rights” now often seem to take the form of coercive demands for unquestioning and enthusiastic validation, affirmation and concession to plain untruths that impact the rights and safety of girls and women, is unknown, ignored, or seen as a feature rather than a bug by far too many. I’m far too jaded and wary to accept any TRAs description of LGBA as a hate group, given how low the bar for what constitutes “hate” and “violence” is in what passes for discussion and debate in the realms of queer theory and trans ideology.
Granted that the gay rights movement probably gained a lot from witnessing the struggles of civil rights and feminist activists, they did not attach themselves, limpet-like, to these other movements. Even though sexual orientation is quite different from gender “identity” (not least by the relative ease with which one can define the former compared to the latter), trans activists have successfully insinuated themselves into this movement, to the extent that simply leaving off the “T” (which was added when?) is seen by some as the height of hatred and bigotry. TRAs have become the shrieking cuckoo in the nest, pushing its unsuspecting, erstwhile siblings over the side, while loudly declaiming their “most oppressed” status, demanding that all and everything be “centered” on them-or else.
PZ Myers would disagree with you, and isn’t PZ always right? So right that he can declare that people who disagree with him are to go away and not even comment on his blog?
PZM, well yeah. I don’t claim to have a razor sharp mind or be a philisophical genius (or any other kind for that matter), but PZM has demonstrated himself to be as subject to faulty and motivated reasoning as any of the religious he made his name castigating. It’s a shame. I’m sure this started out as a genuine desire to support the underdog and give them a voice. Now, it’s just looking… i dunno. I can’t figure out if he’s drunk the coolaid, can’t admit to being wrong, is afraid to loose his horde? Any combination of the above plus other factors. I’m deeply disappointed that he can’t bring himself to even discuss the very real and genuine concerns feminists have with this debacle.
People can depict whatever they want and organise how they choose but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out depicting Mohammad (PBUH) seems deliberately provocative and seems to send a clear exclusionary signal
Taking an innocuous thing and declaring it offensive is yet another page from the religion playbook.
Surely the only trans people excluded by the LGB Alliance are those who identify as ‘straight’. So-called ‘lesbian’ transwomen and ‘gay’ transmen would, by their own definition, fall under the LGB banner, and those who identify as trans and straight would not, so if they really believe their own claims there should not be an issue at all.
Transgender is not an issue of sexuality so what could be more transphobic than a group representing LGB interests to include transgender as a matter of course? That would be suggesting that to be trans is to be either L, G, or B, whereas the T insist that this is not the case. It makes as much sense to include the category ‘trans’ in a LGB interest group as it would to have a National Union of Bus Drivers and Trans, or a Mystery Writers and Trans Club.
@Acolyte of Sagan:
Wouldn’t it be the opposite? The LGB Alliance is gender critical, and a Trans Identified Male who considers himself a “ lesbian “ and a Trans Identified Female who identifies as a gay man would both be excluded ifrom the LGBA because, biologically speaking, that counts as “straight.” Trans people who consider themselves straight would be eligible, but, well, they’re offended by someone saying they qualify.
So I can see why TRAs consider it exclusive, and not just a special interest group branching off from the main organization. They’re challenging the underlying dogma.
It’s the other way around though. Lesbians and gays aren’t a special interest group branching off from the main organization, they are the main organization (or set of initials, at least) which over time added B and then T and then Q and then ever more specialized initials. People are trying to insist that the process can’t go into reverse, that there’s a ratchet in place, that once the T is added it can’t be dropped. They’re wrong.
@Ophelia #19;
You’re correct, but as long as the LGB group is excluding T for ideological reasons, it’s not wrong to say it’s exclusionary. An example of the process simply going in reverse would be an LGB group which happily agrees that TIM lesbians and TIF gay men are welcome, because a lesbian is a lesbian, a gay man is gay, regardless of biology. Only straight trans people can’t join. They’ve thus “ dropped the T” AS T.
I’d of course prefer to say LGBA is centering homosexuality the right way. Which just leads to the main argument: is a trans woman a type of man, or a type of woman? And is a trans man a type of woman, or a type of man?
Rob, re PZM:
Me too. I find it baffling.
I held out hope for him until the last time he attacked Ophelia for terfery.
He’s turned into a courtier for the trans emperor.
By the way, there was a wonderful group on Facebook called The Boxer Ceiling. It was for gender critical gay men (and allies). It was witty, well-reasoned, and civil.
It got taken down a few days ago. Permanently.
Of course it did.
Sastra @ 20 – but is it fair to call it “ideological reasons” for people to fail to agree that men who say they are women are indeed women? I think it makes more sense to say people who want to decouple LG issues from trans activism are trying to get away from a new, peculiar, aggressive ideology that has nothing to do with LG issues but instead derails them.
So do I, but, as I understand it, that’s derived from an ideological stance, also: Truth Matters.
Hmm. That’s an opinion, a belief, a claim, a commitment of sorts…but I don’t think it’s an ideological stance.
Thinking about it.
Maybe I could agree that there are opposing ideological stances: one that says it’s ok to force the rest of the world to endorse one’s personal fantasies about one’s personal self, and one that says it’s not. But, I dunno, I think the first one is too dopy to amount to an ideology, and the refusal is too ad hoc and specific to the occasion to do so.
I think a big chunk of this is that there is a difference between “Hey, if it is between consenting adults and you’re not one of them, it isn’t really your business,” vs “hey, if you don’t find me sexually attractive you’re a bigot.”
A lot of the conflict within the LGBT movement seems to have been trans individuals thinking they were entitled to access to lesbian genitals, and that is a serious issue with consent.
There is a similar issue within anti-racism where not being attracted to people of another race is seen as racism, despite the fact that honestly, who you are attracted to is nobody else’s business unless they happen to be the one you’re attracted to.
To a large extent it is one of the commonalities between the feminist and the LGB movements that consent is quite central to both. It is the right to engage in consensual sex with people you’re attracted to, and not be forced to engage in sex with people you’re not attracted to. There is more to both movements, but I think this is a very important part of both movements.
And it is a sticking point when it comes to trans activism with regards to both movements. The fight for lesbian rights is a fight for the right to say “no” to sex with male bodied people, and trying to play lesbians not wanting to date people with penises as bigots undercuts the underlying right women have to not be pressured into sex with anyone.
So far as I’m aware there is no element to the LGB movement that states that straight people have to find LGB people sexually attractive, or they’re bigots. There doesn’t seem to be an argument that “you’re a bad person” if you don’t want to have sex with someone of your own gender.
The same issue came up a few years back with regards to inter-racial relationships. People who weren’t attracted to members of other races being called racist – but at the end of the day who you’re attracted to is nobody else’s business and it undercuts the right to say “no” to pretend otherwise. To believe otherwise is in a word, “rapey”.
And that is not to say you’re not a lesbian if you’re a woman in a relationship with a trans woman, or you’re not gay if you’re a man dating a trans man, or any sort of judgement in that situation, consent is the rule and you do you, but rather that there shouldn’t be political pressure being applied to people’s sex lives at all (With the obvious proviso being that all people engaged in it should be consenting adults).
So this is an issue that absolutely needs to be dealt with in order for an alliance to really work, because it is something that is at cross purposes for members of the said alliances. Inclusion requires that everyone be on the same page at least on this issue, and right now, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
For Lady M #22 and Ophelia #23 — The Boxer Ceiling is back! They explain what seemed to be a 48-hour Facebook ban here.
Yessssss.
Yay!