A substantial cohort of self-identified feminists
Catharine MacKinnon Exploring Transgender Law and Politics:
For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means. Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.
She must have watched a different movie from the one I’ve seen.
And for some time, escalating since 2004 with the proposed revisions in the UK Gender Recognition Act,[1] a substantial cohort of self-identified feminists have opposed trans peoples’ existence as trans.
No, not existence as trans. What we oppose is the insistence – backed up with every form of punishment available – that men who are trans are literally women in every sense. We oppose the intrusions and thefts and insults that stem from that insistence. We oppose the punishments meted out to us for disagreeing with the dogma that men literally are women if they say they are.
Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women. Honestly, seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling.
Really? Really? How can we challenge the imperatives and limitations if we don’t know which people are subject to them and which people get to impose them?
Would MacKinnon say the same thing if there were a fad for trans-racialism, and a lot of privileged white kids started bullying and punishing non-white people for declining to accept the white kids’ “identity”? I don’t know, of course, but I strongly doubt it.
One might think that trans women—assigned male at birth, leaving masculinity behind, drawn to and embracing womanhood for themselves—would be welcomed.
I tried to look at it that way for a time. It does make a kind of sense. But it was always an attempt, I never really succeeded, and over time the lack of fit just became too obvious. They didn’t leave masculinity behind. They put their masculinity in a skirt and bullied us harder than ever.
Almost assuredly not. The subordination of women is so invisible that even to make the comparison strikes people as illegitimate and insulting. The last few times I’ve spoken about drag’s similarity to blackface minstrel shows, my interlocutors were bewildered, nearly scandalized. It was like dealing with actual, real-life crimestop and doublethink. It didn’t really go any better than this clip.
Funny how the “social justice” crowd is all vocal about how we’re all unwittingly oppressive, but they refuse to entertain any suggestion that they are.
Didn’t Catherine MacKinnon use to be a feminist? Or do I have her confused with someone else?
Internalized sexism is so deeply entrenched in our society. It baffles me to no end that so-called progressive thinkers refuse to expand their definition of “masculine” to include the traits of boys and men whose physical characteristics, thoughts, feelings, sexual orientations, personalities, etc., are simply less prominent among the males they know.
Just because a trait is (seems) uncommon (to you) doesn’t make it exclusionary!
Encountering a trait in a male which happens to be fairly common among the females you know doesn’t mean that person is feminine. IT MEANS YOUR DEFINITION OF MASCULINE NEEDS UPDATING!!
And, of course, the same holds true for females who possess particular traits that are relatively uncommon among the females you know. They are not masculine; they simply possess feminine traits that are less common within your limited experience.
How is all of this not right-in-front-of-your-face obvious to everyone!?
“Trans people have been illuminating sex and gender in new and insightful ways.”
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!
(Pause.)
You’re serious?
“Much of the current debate has centered on (endlessly obsessed over, actually) whether trans women are women.”
Well, that’s kinda the whole fucking point isn’t it? I mean, if they’re “women” or just guys who want to act out stereotypes of femininity while collectively committing acts of violence at more or less the same rate as other guys, should be an important question.
“Honestly, seeing ‘women’ as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling.”
I seem to recall some TRA’s doubting Kathleen Stock’s “womanhood” because she wore pants and sat a certain way.
MacKinnon’s screed (I read about a third of it before giving up in disgust) is heavy on the politics and propaganda and very light on the logic and the precision of language.
Well, that says more about you and what you think “makes sense” than it does about feminism.
And right here, we have something that makes no sense. Trans people (can we have a definition, please?) are mostly saying that the physical, material, biological basis for the oppression of women means fuck all, and can be “identified” into and out of willy nilly. Men can become women, and women can become men. While certainly “new,” it’s not so much an “illuminating insight” into the meaning of feminism as its complete negation. This is at the heart of “feminism is for everyone.” Game over, case closed, turn out the lights when you shut the door.
The implication being that these “self-identified feminists” aren’t really feminists at all. Yet being a feminist only requires that a woman espouses and upholds a particular set of beliefs and principles grounded on the idea and goal of the liberation of females from patriarchal oppression. You’re attempting to deny that they are feminists by unilaterally redefining what the word “feminist” means. Well congratulations; you’re making their point for them, as men who claim to be “self-identifed” women can only be so by redefining what the word “woman” means.
Unlike feminism, which any woman can claim as her own, there are no beliefs or principles that a man can hold which will make him a woman. He might as well (and with as much success) claim to become invisible through sheer force of will. A man can no more identify into being female any more than he can identify out of maleness. Maleness is a life sentence into which one is born, a condition as ineluctable as being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons of ordinary matter. One is no more “assigned” maleness any more than one is “assigned” one’s molecular structure. That’s not how these things work, and to pretend otherwise is delusional. This is the “illuminating, insightful” view of sex and gender that trans people have to offer? It is a narcissistic fantasy. Utter bullshit. To defend such a nonsensical view and enforce others’ adherence to it is wicked and harmful.
Because the material state of reality is forever out of reach, trans identified males have nothing but the costume, cosmetics, and mannerisms of patriarchal “femininity” to proclaim as the essence of “womanhood.” They’re like the brutalized rhesus monkeys clinging to the ersatz terrycloth covered wire “mothers” for some semblance of comfort, and god help anyone who tries to explain that their wardrobe and comportment do not make them “women.” If they weren’t so bloody-minded and bullying in their demands for access to female single-sex spaces, one might almost feel sorry for them.
I know — isn’t that silly? I mean, even if we grant that transwomen are men, so what? They’re men who want into women’s spaces, men who demand that women agree they’re women, men who want to date lesbians and win women’s sports trophies and end up on lists as “first woman to __.” That’s clearly not a problem. Feminism is about men, too, and letting them live their dreams, too.
People who argue that the debate over “whether trans women are women” isn’t the issue when it comes to dealing with the transgender issue should be required then to concede that transwomen are men and then try to make their case. If doing this suddenly gets very sticky, then let’s go back to obsessing, okay?
Should that be “femininity,” and not “women,” as the “set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, etc.?” If it’s not, then how do we describe “femininity?” A categorical and immutable fact of nature?
Without seeing it she’s highlighted the divide between the fact of sex as a physical reality and state of being (the position or “turf” being defended by feminists), and gender, the “set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended.” Yet in siding with trans ideology she’s opting to defend the regressive gender stereotypes that feminists have been trying to burn down for years. It would take a Butlerian level of mental gymnastic ability (and its attendant obfuscatory verbiage) to square this with actual feminism.
Sastra @ 6
Excellent formulation.
This is gibberish. How about neither?
Women are not territory to be defended nor are we a “set of imperatives and limitations.” I mean, really, MacKinnon?
Anyway. She won’t be embraced by TRAs once they figure out she opposes pornography.
Papito @ 2 – she very much used to be a feminist (and would say she still is). A celebrated one: she collaborated with Andrea Dworkin and both of them were seen as the radical cutting edge of feminism. That’s what makes her credulity about trans ideology so astounding.
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John Reed:
Well, it can mean that, depending on actual distribution of traits. But that’s the thing: it’s the distribution of traits that determines whether they should be classified as feminine, masculine, or neutral. If a trait is overrepresented in females, then we are entitled to call it feminine; if a trait is overrepresented in males, then we are entitled to call it masculine.
Sexists, both the old fashioned kind and the new cryptosexists who call themselves progressive, get the Euthyphro exactly backwards. For them, a trait is feminine therefore girls have it and boys don’t; a trait is masculine, therefore boys have it and girls don’t. They demand that our concepts of man and woman be made to conform to their inverted understanding, so that even traits exclusive to females are allowed within an updated definition of “masculine”.
How do transwomen “leave masculinity behind”? How did, say, Adam Graham leave his masculinity behind in the space between his conviction on multiple counts of rape in January this year, and his appearance at the sentencing hearing in February, when he announced he had become a woman named Isla Bryson? There’s no evidence he actually did anything besides make an announcement at a convenient time.
(I’d genuinely like to ask Catharine MacKinnon about Graham. He’s a good example because he’s a shocking one, but nevertheless he’s almost unversally accepted as a woman by academic gender apologists like MacKinnon, so I’d like to hear her explain why.)
If the category “woman” is not “turf to be defended” so long as it refers to biological sex — if the sex category is so useless, so worthless, so pointless, that it’s nothing but “a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended” then I guess it’s laudable that a violent serial rapist can credibly claim to be a woman now — can actually be one: all the better to “transcend” the “imperatives and limitations” of such an obsolete category. By MacKinnon’s logic, that’s progress! It’s no matter that Adam Graham didn’t actually do anything to “leave masculinity behind” — the mere fact that Adam has claimed womanhood despite having repeatedly committed the least feminine acts imaginable is all the more reason he should be “welcomed” into womanhood, so as to dismantle those old, outdated ideas about biological sex playing a part in predicting people’s behaviour. Amirite?
Well, about half of what MacKinnon says seems to back that argument. Her piece is full of impenetrable gibberish, though. One thing I can make out clearly through all that tedious academic riffing — her jargon-laced sprinklings of idea fragments she never orders into cogent arguments — is that she’s kind of two different people when it comes to the question of what a woman is:
When she’s describing feminists defending woman-as-a-biological-category, she’s hypercritical and dismissive: by sex-realists’ definition, she sees no value in womanhood at all; the whole endeavour is gross and oppressive. When MacKinnon looks at the biological sex cateogory of females, she sees a shabby old piece of furniture that should be left by the curb with a sign taped to it that says, “Free — take me.”
But once MacKinnon turns to the topic of men who want to be women, her words get suddenly rather flattering and sensuous — transwomen are “illuminating” souls who are “drawn to and embracing womanhood.” Woman as a biological sex category is dreary; woman as whatever it is that men suddenly want to be… well, maybe that’s worth something after all. How “insightful” (her word) of these transwomen, to finally find some value in this elusive non-biological state of womanhood — whatever it is.
And whatever it is, MacKinnon’s not very clear about it. She’s extremely forgiving of the people — the men — she’s offering up, who make vague attempts to define woman-as-gender rather than woman-as-sex: men like the notorious Andrea Long Chu, who she cites by name — who, remember, came right out and said he’s a misogynist and a fetishistic masochist, for whom the combination of hating women plus hating himself gives him great sexual pleasure when he acts out his “transgender woman” performance. (And who now has a Pulitzer.)
MacKinnon the sober, skeptical cynic towards sex-based feminists suddenly gets all peace-and-love In the face of men’s hazy, or even nonexistent, justifications for their supposed womanhood, as if the pot brownie just kicked in and she’s found enough trust to go around for everyone, so long as you’re not one of those buzzkill sex-based feminists.
So how do men such as the serial rapist Adam Graham define their “womanhood”? I guess the answer is… Who cares — they’re men doing it. That inherently makes it interesting and meaningful, and by extension, imbues the category “woman” with value. Whatever “woman” means, the “woman club” now has males in it — and that shot of (literal) testosterone is just the thing women apparently need. Powerful fugures unencumbered by wombs and pregnancy and on-average-smaller bodies and constant sexual objectification by (other) males… yet simultaneously “womanly.” I guess that’s one way to empower women — just infuse some men into the category!
I don’t even think she realizes that this is what she’s saying. Her sentences are jumbled and messy, but her emotions speak clearly: women and sex-based boundaries are bad becase it’s challenging to face the fact that females are on average physically weaker than males. Offering men membership into womanhood can be seen as a solution to this inconvenient biological truth. But that’s so stupid because it’s perfectly possible for females and males to achieve social equality despite our body differences, and the woman-as-gender position actually serves to undermine that. Smart people know that to truly treat men and women equally as people, we need to account for our bodies’ biological differences rather than deny or try to hide them.
FIgures. Every single time we stray even a tip-toe away from the biological definitions of men and women, this is what we get. Every. Single. Time. If we don’t make it clear that the category woman cannot be tampered with by men, there will be tampering, and it will only benefit men.
Artymorty,
I looked for her reference to Chu. My gawd; genuine gibberish! Something about sexual reassignment surgery in lieu of combatting global warming. Nonsense.
A strong whiff of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” here.