benjipwns
Banned
Bit of a cool piece on a debate I've seen mentioned in threads from time to time around here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2?currentPage=all
Invade my space and impose your definitions on me if old.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2?currentPage=all
On May 24th, a few dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Central Library, a century-old Georgian Revival building in downtown Portland, Oregon, for an event called Radfems Respond. The conference had been convened by a group that wanted to defend two positions that have made radical feminism anathema to much of the left. First, the organizers hoped to refute charges that the desire to ban prostitution implies hostility toward prostitutes. Then they were going to try to explain why, at a time when transgender rights are ascendant, radical feminists insist on regarding transgender women as men, who should not be allowed to use womens facilities, such as public rest rooms, or to participate in events organized exclusively for women.
The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said:
I will not call a male she; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title woman; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers names and in our own, we must not call him sister.
Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel femalethat, as some put it, they have womens brains in mens bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a female brain. They believe that if women think and act differently from men its because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is ritualized submission.
In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a womanand accept a correspondingly subordinate social positionthe fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement.
Radfem 2013 also had to switch locations, as did a gathering in Toronto last year, called Radfems Rise Up.
In response, thirty-seven radical feminists, including major figures from the second wave, such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, and Michele Wallace, signed a statement titled Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of Gender, which described their alarm at threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender. With all this in mind, the Radfems Respond organizers had arranged the library space as a backup, but then a post on Portland Indymedia announced:
We questioned the library administration about allowing a hate group who promotes discrimination and their response is that they cannot kick them out because of freedom of speech. So we also exercise our right to free speech in public space this Saturday to drive the TERFS and Radfems out of OUR library and OUR Portland!
(TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. The term can be useful for making a distinction with radical feminists who do not share the same position, but those at whom it is directed consider it a slur.)
Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. One read, /kill/terfs 2K14. Another suggested, how about slowly and horrendously murder terfs in saw-like torture machines and contraptions 2K14. A young blogger holding a knife posted a selfie with the caption Fetch me a terf. Such threats have become so common that radical-feminist Web sites have taken to cataloguing them. Its aggrieved entitlement, Lierre Keith told me. They are so angry that we will not see them as women.
In the book, Jeffreys calls detransitioners like Russell survivors, and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isnt immutable and thus doesnt warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists, she writes. It is radically destabilising to the transgender project. She cites as further evidence the case of Bradley Cooper, who, in 2011, at the age of seventeen, became Britains youngest gender-reassignment patient, then publicly regretted his transition the next year and returned to living as a boy. Jeffreys is especially alarmed by doctors in Europe, Australia, and the United States who treat transgender children with puberty-delaying drugs, which prevent them from developing unwanted secondary sex characteristics and can result in sterilization.
Throughout the book, Jeffreys insists on using male pronouns to refer to trans women and female ones to refer to trans men. Use by men of feminine pronouns conceals the masculine privilege bestowed upon them by virtue of having been placed in and brought up in the male sex caste, she writes. To her critics, the book becomes particularly hateful when she tries to account for the reality of trans people. Explaining female-to-male transition is fairly easy for her (and for other radical feminists): women seek to become men in order to raise their status in a sexist system. Heath Atom Russell, for example, is quoted as attributing her former desire to become a man to the absence of a proud woman loving culture.
But, if thats true, why would men demote themselves to womanhood? For reasons of sexual fetishism, Jeffreys says. She substantiates her argument with the highly controversial theories of Ray Blanchard, a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and the related work of J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Contrary to widespread belief, Blanchard says, the majority of trans women in the West start off not as effeminate gay men but as straight or bisexual men, and they are initially motivated by erotic compulsion rather than by any conceived female identity. The core is, its really exciting for guys to imagine themselves with female breasts, or female breasts and a vulva, he told me. To describe the syndrome, Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia, meaning sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as female.
There are young transgender-critical radical feminists, like Heath Atom Russell and Rachel Ivey, aged twenty-four, who was one of the organizers of Radfems Respond, but they are the first to admit that theyre a minority. If I were to say in a typical womens-studies class today, Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction, I would get called out, Ivey says. Other students, she adds, would ask, What about women who are male?
That might be an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The members of the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund, an all-volunteer group that helps to pay for abortions for those who cant afford them, are mostly young women; Alison Turkos, the groups co-chair, is twenty-six. In May, they voted unanimously to stop using the word women when talking about people who get pregnant, so as not to exclude trans men. We recognize that people who identify as men can become pregnant and seek abortions, the groups new Statement of Values says.
In the summer of 2003, Serano joined about a hundred people at Camp Trans, a protest camp near the Michfest site, which has run intermittently since 1994. Serano said that relations with Michfest attendees were often unexpectedly cordial. A few years ago, though, Vogel says, some protesters committed acts of vandalismstealing electrical cables, cutting water pipes, keying cars in the parking lot, and spray-painting a six-foot penis, and the words Real Women Have Dicks, on the side of the main kitchen tent.
Before Sara St. Martin Lynne was asked to leave the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp board, she hadnt identified closely with radical feminism. Yet, as the campaign against Michfestand against radical feminism as a wholehas grown, shes come to feel strongly about keeping the event womyn-born-womyn. She said, This moment where were losing the ability to say the word woman or to acknowledge the fact that being born female has lived consequences and meaning is kind of intense to me.
One of the trans women who showed up at the Radfems Respond conference, a thirty-five-year-old software engineer from California, with a tiny nose stud and long brown hair, agrees. She understands why trans women are hurt by their exclusion from Michfest and other female-only events and facilities, saying, Its not really wanting to invade space. Its a deep-seated wanting to belong. But, she adds, if youre identifying with women, shouldnt you be empathizing with women?
Sandy Stone shares this viewup to a point. Of the radical feminists position, she says, Its my personal belief, from speaking to some of these people at length, that it comes from having been subject to serious trauma at the hands of some man, or multiple men. She adds, You have to respect that. Thats their experience of the world. But the pain of radical feminists, she insists, cant trump trans rights. If it were a perfect world, we would find ways to reach out and find ways of mutual healing, she says. But, as it is, I am going to have to say, Its your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. Its not our job to avoid you.
Invade my space and impose your definitions on me if old.
