An otherwise reputable publication
A NOTHER one. This time, jarringly, in or at The Atlantic, where it stands out like a sore thumb gender marker.
So I opened it up so that I could start banging my head against the wall too.
So. Let’s get to it.
The Atlantic has it filed under Technology, and the subhead is:
After they were banned from Reddit, trans-exclusionary radical feminists became the latest of many toxic communities to simply build their own platform.
But it’s not really about the technology.
Kaitlyn Tiffany (yes that’s really her byline) starts by explaining the feminism of MK Fain as if it were an exotic plant.
After volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter and experiencing an abusive relationship herself, she committed to some of the radical feminist ideology most often affiliated with the second-wave icon Andrea Dworkin, which is focused on the roots and prevalence of male violence. Eventually, her beliefs radicalized further: She became convinced that gender is fixed, trans women are men, and trans-rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy.
Yes, it’s so terrifyingly radical to think that men are not women.
Then Fain found gender critical Reddit.
Among other online feminists, the common name for this group Fain found is “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs. The name the community has chosen for itself is the somewhat more palatable “gender critical,” though, as other feminists often point out, that name means nothing; all feminism is critical of gender.
All genuine feminism is, yes, but the kind of feminism that puts men who identify as women front and center loves gender and wants to have its babies.
TERFs constitute “a minority of a minority of feminists,” says Grace Lavery, a UC Berkeley literature professor and writer.
Kaitlyn Tiffany (KT henceforth; I can’t call her “Tiffany”) neglects to mention that “Grace” Lavery is a man who identifies as a woman. He doesn’t get to rule on who is a proper feminist.
Nevertheless, this tiny group has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the past several years, in large part thanks to social-media platforms. Anti-trans feminists have a presence in many mainstream online spaces, including Twitter, “radfem” Tumblr, the Black women’s beauty forum Lipstick Alley, and the British parenting forum Mumsnet.
One – trans people are tiny group, and they get a ludicrous amount of attention, and of rewards and favors and prizes. Two, we’re not “anti-trans” – we’re critical of the fatuous ideology behind it.
On these sites and others, they use many of the same trolling tactics as other internet-based fringe political movements to disrupt conversation, skew reality, and make the internet another dangerous place for trans women through doxing and harassment.
Oh yes? Paid any attention to the way trans women talk about us ever? The threats, the images of dripping axes and female corpses and burning witches?
There’s more of this kind of drivel, and then a triumphant boast that Reddit got rid of the gender critical subreddit. I suspect the attention of most Atlantic readers is long gone by now.
Fain framed the ban flatly as persecution. “They use the label hate speech to silence speech they don’t want,” she told me.
Hello, KT, saying “they silence speech” is not the same as saying “this is persecution.”
After that it’s just ever-more-boring sludge about internet groups.
I gotta re-paper that wall now.
Why the fuck would you quote Grace Lavery there, especially if you aren’t going to identify her as trans? She’s identified as a UC professor of literature and a writer, as if that gives her any credentials to opine as to who represents feminism and who doesn’t. I could understand if she was a women’s studies professor, or a sociologist, or something else that involves studying of the feminist movement. But what makes Lavery relevant in a way that some random firefighter in Iowa wouldn’t be? Of course, articles do often quote more or less random people as part of a “person in the street” reaction, but this quote isn’t about Lavery’s personal beliefs or reactions, and even if it were, then the most salient fact about her is not her job.
Surprised that an editor let that through.
I think the way it works is, Lavery is relevant because Lavery is a Trans Woman, which counts even though KT doesn’t say that Lavery is trans. KT doesn’t say it of course because it’s a poke in the eye to all those extremist radical crazy feminists who think that men are not woman to just pretend Lavery is a woman full stop.
Okay, KT, repeat after me: GC feminists do not believe that gender is “fixed”. We believe that sex is fixed, determined by biology, and not changeable. Gender we believe is a social construct consisting of a set of rules that we are fed from birth as to what makes someone “masculine” or “feminine”.
TRAs state that gender is innate, that it is real, that it is determined by some essence in the brain, which they are not clearly articulating what exactly that is, and that sex is not real. They believe that the very concept of two sexes is a social construct made up by Western imperialists and forced on everyone else (including lions, tigers, and bears, oh my – not to mention fish and spiders).
Only…the pro-trans writers can’t say that, because it makes it clear that their position is nothing short of ridiculous. That they are building an impressive edifice out of smoke and mirrors. That men cannot in fact be women, because…well, a woman is about biology, not feelings.
“She became convinced that gender is fixed.”
I don’t know Ms. Fain, but I do know Terfcraft 101, and I think it’s safe to say that she does not believe anything of the sort. My educated guess is that she believes that sex is real and immutable. She likely further believes that females—who even in more egalitarian countries are valued (or devalued) for their looks, are disproportionately vulnerable to domestic and sexual abuse, are expected to shoulder the lion’s share of childcare and housekeeping, are widely considered to be intellectually and temperamentally unfit for certain professions, and often have limited access to birth control and abortion—are ill-served by the pretense that womanhood is a subjective identity that anyone can adopt and/or a social role that anyone can perform.
As for the claim that trans rights activism is just another weapon of the patriarchy . . . all I can say is that I, a lesbian, have been unironically told both by trans people and their allies that, although I technically have the right to exclusively date “AFAB” women (read: actual females), I am small-minded and selfish for doing so. If I were a better person, I would open my heart—and, implicitly, my legs—to all women, including women with penises. Now, I’m no professor of gender studies, but there does seem to be something just a wee bit patriarchal about the proposition that all vagina-people must be willing to make themselves sexually available to at least some penis people.
AtSRU, you are correct about what Fain believes about sex being fixed:
https://twitter.com/duncanm/status/1336365001884528641/photo/1
MK Fain posted the email exchanges between KT and herself. I think they speak for themselves….
https://4w.pub/my-whole-conversation-with-kaitlyn-tiffany-for-the-atlantic/
Sex vs gender.
The way the RTAs use the term gender is disingenuous as fuck. They know that the overwhelmingly dominant use is as a polite synonym for sex, but they use it primarily to refer to something else. I say primarily, because holding them to a single meaning is like holding onto a stream of water. One moment, it’s sexed social norms, the next it’s sex itself, and the next it’s something else entirely or some hybrid. They trade on this ambiguity to be able to always be able to claim that the opposition is guilty of misrepresentation or misunderstanding.
Now, the feminist decision to graft the “social norms” meaning onto gender is doing us no favors here, because again, the dominant use is as a synonym for sex. It means that every time we speak of gender, we have to clarify that we mean gender and not gender, and certainly not whatever gender is. It’s needlessly confusing.
@Nullius in Verba:
I think the term “gender” has always involved socially-constructed norms of “masculine” and “feminine.” A woman who enjoys mechanics and hates wearing dresses is called “gender-nonconforming,” not “sex-nonconforming.” What word other than “gender” would you substitute?
Sastra, what if I don’t like mechanics, and hate wearing dressed? But I do like building things…especially bookshelves (because I always need space for more books). I don’t like sports, but love science. I am good at math AND English AND theatre…and I tend more toward rational thinking than emotional, but like every other human can be derailed into irrational thinking all too often.
Wow. I can’t meet conforming status with EITHER gender. Guess I must be non-binary, huh?
@guest #6, thanks for posting that email exchange. I think it’s more interesting than the article itself, which was a bizarre hack job.
I like the quote she ends it with:
Nor should she.
@ iknklast;
I’d say you’re gender-conforming in some ways, and gender-nonconforming in others — meaning you conform to some social stereotypes but not others (and everyone is non-binary, because in reality nobody conforms perfectly to the expectations placed on their sex.) The term is useful because it identifies why some victims of oppression are being oppressed (“you’re acting like a sissy/ you’re too mannish”.)
I was just looking at a Parents’ Guide put out by Focus on the Family, that conservative religious group, and reading what they had to say about transgender issues in the schools. They don’t want gender ideology taught (fair enough) but their reasoning is interesting. Beneath a picture of that dreadful sexist “GenderBread Person” they complain that such lessons are “ teaching (children) confusing concepts that their gender in their head might be different in their bodies.” Note that they AGREE that there is “gender in the head” but think it must be the same as their sexed bodies.
Sastra, I was sort of kidding, but I don’t mind your analysis; it’s exactly the way I assess myself. In short, I do what I like, and don’t worry if it’s “for boys”. When I was a kid, we (my siblings and I) played together, and usually stuff that was “for boys” because my brother would not, could not, do sissy “girl” stuff. He somehow manages to be gender-conforming, but I suspect he has to work at it, though he would never admit that. We played with Legos and played soldier and played with cars and played ball and ran and shouted…no one told us to act like “girls”. My mother was a big believer in the gender dichotomy, and proper roles, but she didn’t see any reason why girls couldn’t run and shout and play ball. Which is why I found it odd when, two decades later, she nearly lost it when my son played dress up with my nieces.
I don’t think gender has always involved socially-constructed norms of “masculine” and “feminine.” For a few decades maybe, but not always.
I don’t think I realized it even meant primarily socially-constructed norms of “masculine” and “feminine” until the trans wars heated up. I used to use “gender” and “sex” interchangeably, and not really because “gender” is the polite synonym but because the word “sex” can be so ambiguous, i.e. do you mean the activity or the…er…gender? Like, if you title something “The Politics of Sex” or “Sex in the Boardroom” – it’s really not clear that you mean sex as in female or male, rather than sex as in Doing It.
guest @ 6 – thank you for that.
[…] been stalling on this one because I know it’s going to annoy me so intensely. Via guest, MK Fain’s exchange with Kaitlyn Tiffany while the latter was working on her “Radical […]
Until fairly recently, the term “gender” was restricted to language.
Well this discussion sent me down a rabbithole… anyone care to join me down here? Weather’s fine… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender ;-)
iknklast:
The etymology of gender is actually rather interesting. The tl;dr of it is it went from meaning category, to grammar, to sex in the 16th century. John Money, father of all this gender identity BS, introduced the social role sense in the 50s, and this sense was taken up by feminists in the 70s.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender#etymonline_v_1349
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
As for what word I would suggest using instead of gender to refer to social norms, stereotypes, and expectations associated with the sexes … Well, I wouldn’t. That is, sometimes clarity is more important than brevity. Instead of prioritizing convenience by using a single word, I would prioritize clarity of intent by saying exactly what I mean. To wit, sexed stereotype it’s a good starting place. If a single word were absolutely required, a neologism would avoid the ambiguity of reusing words with established meanings. I’m fond of portmanteaus (e.g., sexpectationsor sexeotype) but those often seem too “cute”. Coining a new word from foreign roots is always an option.
Nullius, I’m sort of confused. Are you responding to Sastra?
On the other hand, Ms. Tiffany’s article is such a blatantly biased hit piece that it may do more good than harm to gender critical feminists. For example:
How many new members will join Ovarit as a result of this exposure?
I’d forgotten who Grace Lavery was, but in fact we talked about him recently. Anyway, on searching on the web I found this: https://www.them.us/story/returning-to-france-post-transition, and was struck by the following sentence:
Now gout doesn’t care any more than Covid-19 does whether you’re black or white, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, Christian or atheist, but, unlike Covid-19, it does care whether you’re male or female: although women can get gout it’s very rare in real women, whereas men and, I suppose, trans-women get it far more often (10000 times more often, I think, but haven’t checked today)). If I’d been in Aix that day I might have seen him flouncing about in what he thinks is a feminine manner, but probably I wasn’t, as it’s been a while since I was in Aix.
I used to get gout myself when I was about 20, but it seems to have gone away without the help of drugs, permanently, I hope. Colchicine, which Grace Lavery mentions, is effective against the gout, but bad for the stomach.
iknklast: Sigh. It’s not the first time I’ve done that. Your profile images look very similar when I’m scrolling quickly, so your names also get mixed up like some variation of the Stroop effect.
It’s sad that gout didn’t recognize Grace Lavery as a woman. I guess gout is trans-exclusionary.
So is ovarian cancer. Poor Grace Lavery; she won’t get to experience that.
Twitter thread demonstrating Grace’s expertise in feminism (or, indeed, basic woman-ing):
https://twitter.com/yatakalam/status/1336396181648388100