The Other Sarah

“Again with the trans related posts!”, I hear you say. When you spend so long hang­ing around with fem­i­nists and trans peo­ple, you can’t help but think about trans issues and fem­i­nism a lot. And one of the issues that came up quite a bit while I was at a party with some cool trans peo­ple and fem­i­nists ear­lier this week was Rad­Fem 2012, the upcom­ing “rad­i­cal fem­i­nist” con­fer­ence in Lon­don. But how­ever good it sounds, it has a hor­ri­ble policy:

In turn we ask that Rad­Fem 2012 be respected as a space where women born women liv­ing as women are able to meet and share infor­ma­tion in a peace­ful and safe environment.

Rad­i­cal fem­i­nism, as it’s com­monly under­stood these days, is a continuation/evolution of second-wave fem­i­nism sep­a­rate from third-wave fem­i­nism. This, in turn, belies a prob­lem: com­ing from the strong roots of the sec­ond wave (indeed, some view the third wave as revi­sion­ism in the Marx­ist sense), it can’t adapt itself well to the ideas of the twenty-first cen­tury (as opposed to the ‘60s through ‘80s). One of the most obvi­ous flaws is the reac­tion to men in the move­ment. And when I say men, I gen­er­ally mean any­one born with a penis.

Now, obvi­ously fem­i­nism will, and should, remain a woman-centric move­ment. But the game has changed. From the orig­i­nal ideas of the patri­archy, now come the ideas of kyr­i­archy and inter­sec­tion­al­ity, which under­stands that there is not just male priv­i­lege, but also white priv­i­lege, reli­gious priv­i­lege, straight priv­i­lege, cis priv­i­lege, and so on. And they all inter­sect in ways: for exam­ple, CeCe McDon­ald, as I posted, was dis­ad­van­taged and oppressed both as a trans woman and a black woman. And most peo­ple are aware of this fact: you often hear left-wing peo­ple com­plain­ing about leg­is­la­tures being full of old white Chris­t­ian men, or right-wing peo­ple com­plain­ing that  jobs are going to the myth­i­cal black les­bian in a wheel­chair (they don’t).

There are two points to make here: men and trans women (and trans men, for that mat­ter) can both bring per­spec­tives on patri­ar­chal oppres­sion that a cis woman can not. Both sets of peo­ple, after all, are brought up in a soci­ety that expects toxic mas­culin­ity, and your gen­der and or sex­u­al­ity is ques­tioned if you don’t con­form (“You don’t like foot­ball? What are you, a poof?”). Dou­bly so for trans women, which expe­ri­ence both toxic mas­culin­ity to start with, and as they tran­si­tion, become also oppressed as women through the usual avenues, and oppressed as trans when their gen­der iden­tity is denied recog­ni­tion. And of course, they are then expected to con­form to the sub­mis­sive fem­i­nin­ity demanded of women.

The argu­ment for a women-born-women space comes pri­mar­ily from the argu­ment that as trans women grow up with and ben­e­fit from male priv­i­lege, then they shouldn’t be in spaces meant for those who have been oppressed. Also in the list of rea­sons include that abusers could “claim” a female iden­tity to infil­trate spaces (although this doesn’t really hap­pen), that trans peo­ple unnec­es­sar­ily entrench the gen­der binary, and, even worse, that trans women are actu­ally men. But a space for cis women only doesn’t com­pare to the clas­sic idea of a safe space for one sim­ple rea­son: cis women are privileged.

Spaces for the oppressed or minori­ties exist as a way to col­lec­tively group against their oppres­sion. That’s the rea­son why there is a Black Police Organ­i­sa­tion but not a White Police Organ­i­sa­tion, why there are Women’s Offi­cers in stu­dent unions but not a Men’s Offi­cer, or a LGBT Soci­ety but not a Straight Soci­ety: because they don’t need them, as the wider pop­u­la­tion sees their issues as the norm. Hell, even trade unions are an exam­ple, where the work­ers group together to col­lec­tively power against their man­age­ment. If any­thing, there should be a trans-only space where trans men and women meet to dis­cuss oppres­sion, not the other way around.

Because, let’s face it, trans peo­ple are oppressed even within the fem­i­nist move­ment. There’s an idea that trans women rein­force the gen­der binary in sev­eral ways: for exam­ple, they tran­si­tion to feel “straight”, or they are too ultra-feminine or ultra-masculine. But the first one erases the ideas of les­bian trans women and gay trans men, and the lat­ter erases the ideas of femme trans men and butch trans women. And they’re forced into ideas of ultra-femininity because that’s what soci­ety expects of them, not often because of any choice. Of course, any fail­ure to be fem­i­nine also raises ire from peo­ple who claim they’re not true women.

The idea of “true women” is, how­ever, incred­i­bly essen­tial­ist, and not even con­sis­tent. One exam­ple where the idea falls apart is in women with com­plete andro­gen insen­si­tiv­ity syn­drome. These are women who have XY chro­mo­somes but, due to their body’s inabil­ity to process andro­gens, exter­nally resem­ble women (to the point it often isn’t realised until puberty), and are hor­mon­ally female, are brought up as female, and are often quite wel­comed into cis-women-only spaces despite their Y chro­mo­some. So, some­times, are clos­eted trans women, as the organ­is­ers of the Michi­gan Womyn’s Fes­ti­val know well.

The rad­i­cal fem­i­nist oppo­si­tion to trans women is just trans­pho­bia. It’s evi­dent in the lan­guage used: “male-to-trans”, “men”, “tranny”, and so on, to refer to the trans women them­selves, and “hand­maid­ens” or “men’s rights activists” for their allies.  And, for trans men, they’re more than wel­come in women-born-women spaces. It’s a con­certed effort to deny a person’s gen­der iden­tity by claim­ing that it’s all a lie, and that they know bet­ter about someone’s gen­der iden­tity than that per­son them­selves. It’s sim­i­lar to the MRA idea of mansplain­ing, to the point it’s been termed cis­s­plain­ing. And it ignores what we know about gen­der iden­tity: that a) it’s fuck­ing com­pli­cated, and, more impor­tantly, b) trans­gen­der iden­ti­ties have existed through­out his­tory, even in non-patriarchal soci­eties. It’s not an impo­si­tion by the patri­archy, despite what oppo­nents claim.

Indeed, there’s an uncom­fort­able sim­i­lar­ity with con­ser­vatism in this respect: just as one of the cri­te­ria of a true woman is the abil­ity to bear chil­dren, so does a mar­riage, which is why trans peo­ple or same-gender cou­ples shouldn’t be recog­nised. But hey, women who have had hys­terec­tomies can marry, and like­wise too they are recog­nised as “true women”. There’s also the shar­ing of ter­mi­nol­ogy, from deroga­tory terms that only seek to lessen the iden­tity of trans peo­ple, to the old canard that they’re not “trans­pho­bic” because “I ain’t scared of trannies!”

“Such an Easy Mis­take to Make” by Barry Deutsch, CC-BY 3.0

Take for exam­ple,  Sheila Jef­freys, one of the keynote speak­ers of Rad­Fem 2012. In a recent pod­cast last year on the sub­ject of “mod­er­ate” fem­i­nism, she said trans­gen­derism is:

[A] prac­tice  in which per­sons who do not adhere to the  cor­rectly gen­dered prac­tices that have been placed upon the bio­log­i­cal sex are con­sid­ered to have some­thing called Gen­der Iden­tity Dis­or­der and they’re expected to cross over into the other sex. Not crit­i­cize the gen­dered sys­tem as it exists, because that’s unthink­able but to make some kind of “jour­ney” by muti­lat­ing their bod­ies and tak­ing dan­ger­ous drugs for the rest of their lives in order to sup­pos­edly rep­re­sent the oppo­site sex.

This is not some ran­dom rad­i­cal fem­i­nist: this is a keynote speaker and famous second-wave rad­i­cal fem­i­nist. When you look in the dregs of the inter­net, it only gets worse.

This is why trans­pho­bic fem­i­nism shouldn’t be regarded fem­i­nism. At the heart of all fem­i­nist thought is the one key idea: women have full self-agency which must not be breached on account of their wom­an­hood (and, as a corol­lary, this often extends to all gen­ders). It’s why you see peo­ple like Sarah Palin claim to be fem­i­nists, but they aren’t regarded as such, because no fem­i­nist would want to ban abor­tion in all cir­cum­stances. And like­wise, trans­pho­bia breaches a trans person’s agency by forc­ing them to iden­tify with which they would some­times rather die than do so, and even runs the risk of mar­gin­al­is­ing butch cis women because they don’t con­form to stan­dard ideas of being female. That, or trans peo­ple can’t dis­cuss oppres­sion effec­tively and are forced to keep silent lest they get ejected on a trans­pho­bic premise. In the end, it’s still oppres­sion of women — no mat­ter whether they are cis or trans — and we should not recog­nise any per­son who delib­er­ately makes trans­pho­bic state­ments as feminist.

There is, I believe, a sil­ver lin­ing. Given its link to the sec­ond wave, it’ll hope­fully start to become less rel­e­vant to fem­i­nist activism as time goes on. There’s a new gen­er­a­tion of fem­i­nist activists from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum, from lib­eral fem­i­nists (such as myself) to anarcha-feminists to Marx­ist fem­i­nists, there is reli­gious fem­i­nism and athe­ist fem­i­nism, and more per­spec­tives that you can shake a stick at and the move­ment is health­ier for it. I’m con­fi­dent that trans­fem­i­nism, cou­pled with the rise in aware­ness in trans issues over the past ten years, will be a major com­po­nent of the “fourth wave” when it comes, if it hasn’t already. As pop­u­larised by the won­der­ful trans­fem­i­nist blog­ger Natalie Reed (really, you should read her blog, espe­cially her posts on the fourth wave):

If fem­i­nism is the rad­i­cal idea that women are peo­ple, then trans-feminism is the rad­i­cal idea that women come in dif­fer­ent containers.