I actually agree with radical feminists on most things regarding gender. This wasn’t always the case, though. lol
Before I had read much radfem writing on gender and how it pertains to trans as a phenomenon, I suppose I lazily considered radfem viewpoints (or any other trans-critical notions) to be transphobic. The thing is that once seen with the filter of mass cultural gender baggage set aside, there are many points raised by gender-critical analysis that are difficult to dismiss without resorting to a lot of desperate pretzel logic. The relevance of this to [the trans umbrella, or whatever] is absolutely huge, and I think that trans people reject it to our own detriment.
A lot of the screaming, honking, neon-flashing inconsistencies in the modern TG message are drastically clarified when looked at with an understanding of what gender is and how it works as a social, cultural, and institutional mechanism. So let’s say we’re confronted with a completely pre-transition (or non-transitioning) male who considers himself a trans woman, despite being 100% obviously male (and god, do they exist!). Mainstream TG policy is that we need to ‘educate’ people that this person is a woman because he identifies as a woman, and so his body is what a woman’s body looks like. This is played as a female empowerment angle; as a noble thing, when it’s actually a perversion of the feminist message that there is no one way for a female-born human to be in the world. It may seem subtle at first, but that’s actually a ginormous difference! One message tells women that their values, abilities, ambitions, and personal preferences are not dependent on or limited by their femaleness. The other message can only be supported by getting others to buy into the notion of ‘man-brain’ and ‘woman-brain’, each with their corresponding innate gender roles of course. And! Most of the same people pushing the latter message also somehow still argue that there’s no one way to be a woman or a man! So that’s how we get to where a pre-anything trans person must be acknowledged as their preferred sex no matter what. Talk about getting to eat your cake and still have it!
Trans people deserve the same human rights as anybody else, but that doesn’t mean we get to dictate how people perceive our bodies. If a trans person’s birth sex is clearly, unmistakably apparent, people are allowed to notice that. I don’t mean to say that any trans person deserves mistreatment or discrimination based on being noticeably trans, but I don’t consider it abuse to simply acknowledge reality. And the reality of sex does matter! Male crime and violence far outweighs female rates in both frequency and severity. People convicted of sex offenses are overwhelmingly male. Male socialization involves encouraging boys and men to disregard any sort of boundary. Boys and men are groomed to expect access to women’s bodies, whether that takes the form of mutual respect and desire, or through use of pornography, strip clubs, or prostitutes, or simply through blatant use of force. Obviously NotAllTransWomen™ are out to harm women, but as we are all male, male trends and patterns are applicable to us for sure, and it’s irresponsible for us to deny that and expect others to pretend it’s not the case as well. And all of this means that women have the right to speak about this, as the progress of the trans movement has been made largely by belligerence towards women and dismissal of their totally valid concerns. I think women have every right to be angry about that and to speak up about it.
Deeply interesting piece of work.
“…as the progress of the trans movement has been made largely by belligerence towards women and dismissal of their totally valid concerns. I think women have every right to be angry about that and to speak up about it.”
