Feminism is everyone’s punchbag
Jeanne de Montbaston sets the record straight on Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement.
When Pankhurst made her speech, slavery labelled as such was illegal in the UK, but, within that relative (very relative!) legal freedom, women’s bodies had been commodified within Pankhurst’s lifetime. Indeed, when she married in 1879, the legal act that would make it possible for married women to own property – that is, to be financially enfranchised – was still three years in the future. The famous campaigner Caroline Norton, who died just a couple of years before Pankhurst’s marriage, had managed to stir up public sympathy when her husband refused to divorce her and also claimed her earnings as his property, leaving her unable to earn a living and banning her from seeing her sons (which was also his legal right). Lower-profile women, naturally, lacked both the influential friends and the wealthy context of Norton, and faced stark choices between starvation, prostitution, or resigning themselves to the ownership of their husbands (with legalised marital rape). Slowly, women like Norton and Pankhurst were beginning to challenge the structural violence that treated them as non-persons, as individuals whose earning power and legal rights were controlled entirely by men.
In other words women were literally enslaved in several senses, even though many such women were highly privileged in other ways.
There are two things that bother me about the way I’ve seen this controversy play out in the media and in discussions. One problem – which is common to an awful lot of feminist issues – is that we’re being encouraged to treat feminist foremothers as if they must be discredited, as if we should expect them to act as if they’re perfect citizens of 2015, not ordinary women living in their own times. Feminism, in other words, is everyone’s punchbag.
That.
What is that? Why is it that so many “progressives” are so ready and willing to attack feminism every chance they get? Why is it that it’s almost always women who are singled out for attack and demonization and ostracism? Why is “TERF” a thing when “TEMRA” is not? Why is “cis privilege” so seldom applied to men? Why are so many people who would call themselves feminists so hostile to feminism and feminists?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do know that I find the whole thing very disturbing and depressing…not personally, because my recent ostracism has actually ended up being a net benefit, but politically. In political terms, I think all this rabid hair-trigger hostility to feminism is a tragedy.
Re:
Well, for what it’s worth:
Because it’s so woven in. Because it’s so intrinsic to our very lives. Because it’s bred in the bone, begun at the cradle. Because we don’t think about it, can barely think about it when we even try. Because every would-be conscious and conscientious changer-of-worlds can barely even see it in themselves, as a consequence.
You could take it as dispiriting. And sure, it is. But it’s also a useful reveal. What has been internalized, what has been assumed. We can put the phrase ‘social constrruct’ around some of it, like we understand what that means, but that’s like saying we understand quarks because we can name them. The one does not particularly follow from the other.
On a larger scale, the mess that seems to follow trans activism is entirely expected. Given that it is so woven in, is it any surprise those who initially seem to subvert it will make a hideous mangle of the same?
But I am relieved it seems net benefit. I think I agree it is. From this, as yet, however, I have little idea where to go.
Definitely net benefit. A lot of very high quality new friends. No advertising cluttering up the pages. Etc.
As is so often the case, you speak my thoughts, too, Ophelia. I recognize the “net benefit” part, but I’m still mighty, mighty angry at a lot of former friends. I’m not over it yet.
Ohhhhhhhh so am I and neither am I. Don’t get me wrong. They did me a favor by accident, but I still think they’re horrible people.
John Stuart Mill described the position of married women in his own time as “the primitive state of slavery lasting on”. This wasn’t unreasonable. A married woman wasn’t considered a separate legal person from her husband until 1929 and a man could legally rape his wife until 1991.
People have very little concept of how much power men had over their wives or how women were seen as the property of fathers and husbands, even if a women over 21 did not legally belong to her father. I think that’s why people can stomach practices like brides being given away at weddings.
I feel like I can offer an answer for at least the “why is TERF a thing but not TEMRA” question…the first thing that comes to mind is that men’s rights activism is so overwhelmingly nasty towards women that the misogyny pretty much overwhelms everything else about the movement (it’s more of a feature of the movement than a bug), so that is what people focus on, rather than the other kinds of bigotry (though I still sometimes see articles on We Hunted The Mammoth about the racism, homophobia and transphobia that pops up now and again in the “manosphere”).
Secondly, feminism is much broader and more diverse than online “MRAism”, with more distinct branches and schools of thought – and there is one that uses their feminism as a bludgeon to target transgender people in a very specific way, which is what draws criticism from other feminists. The most obvious example of that is Cathy Brennan and her Gender Identity Watch group (and GenderTrender blog), who also has the support of a number of anti-trans feminists. They have had an impact both on legislation and mainstream perception of trans people.
Can I please post this again?
https://bitchmedia.org/post/the-long-history-of-transgender-exclusion-from-feminism
It feels like people are…reluctant to admit that this is even a thing. Isn’t it important to be able to call this out, even if they are feminists too?
Falcon – that’s a very unsatisfactory explanation (your first para). The idea is that MRAs are worse therefore they get a pass on transphobia, while feminists alone get a special label for it. That doesn’t explain so much as restate the question.
The first point kind of ties into the second one though…there isn’t really a specific “branch” of MRAs that picks on transgender people particularly, that I’m aware of. It’s mostly a misogynistic backlash to feminism. That’s its main feature.
(What do you think about the second point?)
So you’re claiming there is a specific “branch” of feminism that “picks on” trans people?
That’s just restating my point.
I am fully behind people being allowed to discuss gender. All people.
It is a very important subject.
It is important to read the words on that subject of as many people as possible.
It is also perfectly OK to be disappointed when people who should be the allies of all who are harmed by current patriarchal societal constructs turn on other people who should be equal allies in the feminist movement and treat them as less-than-human.
There might not be a strong movement within feminism to destroy trans people, but there are feminists, prominent and obscure, who would rather blame the lack of ‘purity’ in the movement on trans people than face the bigger problem of a patriarchal system.
They are the women who, to my mind, are the ‘chill girls’ of gender.
They pander to the patriarchy’s desire to keep everyone in specific boxes when they call trans women ‘men with beards and penises’. Sorry, they are women – ‘with beards and penises’ perhaps, but they aren’t men.
I didn’t just restate your point, I gave you explicit examples of how trans exclusive feminists have actively lobbied against providing medical access to transgender people and directly influenced negative mainstream public perception of trans people through books like “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male” (which, in the words of Carol Riddell, did not invent anti-transsexual prejudice but did more to justify and perpetuate it than perhaps any other book ever written):
Whether you mean to or not, the side effect of framing the terms “trans exclusive” and “transphobic” as a slanderous insult solely lobbed by misogynistic anti-feminists is to provide cover for the very real damage done by people like Brennan and Raymond. Many trans exclusive feminists actually have a large degree of social and political influence in their activism, largely because they dovetail nicely with conservative/patriarchal politics (The National Center for Health Care Technology under Reagan’s administration did not consult medical experts for their opinion on the healthcare and well-being of trans people, but instead consulted Janice Raymond.)
It’s not contradictory to say that feminism as a whole has both massively helped and hindered transgender people, and I don’t think it’s anti-feminist to criticize the parts of feminism that have done (and still try to do) the hindering.
But if we remove biology from the words “woman” and “man”, what’s left?
If what’s left are notions of gender-appropriate personality traits and interests, then reassigning people to the other sex can also be seen as a way “to keep everyone in specific boxes.”
I think there’s probably more to being trans gender than that. But it may also be true, as Bindel alleges, that some people get reassigned, who really would have been happier accepting themselves as “feminine” men or “masculine” women.
I don’t know. And here’s the thing: I don’t think anybody does, really. There’s just a lot we don’t know.
But shouting down and harassing critics, and even (as sometimes happens) researchers who publish work that doesn’t fit within the dominant trans narrative, can’t be the way to go. Claiming such critics are against trans people’s “human rights” or “right to exist” is frequently dishonest (frequently, not always: that may be true of some critics–right-wingers, say. I don’t believe it’s true of Julie Bindel.)
@tiggerthewing, I know you’re against no-platforming people, too. I’m thinking aloud, taking off from what you said, not arguing with you.
Even my quibble isn’t a full-hearted disagreement. I just don’t know. I see a conundrum there.
And I understand trans peoples’ desire not to have prejudices against them reinforced. But ultimately, silencing critics doesn’t help anyone.
Because you have info about Raymond and the HHS denial of healthcare I thought I would tell you about a barely functional website I created today, an old 1999 website, that has Raymond’s paper and the entire documentary file re: HHS illegal denial. see http://www.gendercare.org/raymond.htm and if you want to see any document that does not pop up and I will show you where it is. Lori