T is for trans, for tangle, for Trojan Horse
Men in Ewes’ Clothing: The Stealth Politics of the Transgender Movement
by Karla Mantilla
Backlash is everywhere these days. Its latest manifestation is the transgender movement, which is wreaking havoc among lesbians, liberals and other so-called progressives. It comes right on the heels of (and is no doubt born of) postmodernism. Once again, we’ve been had. This movement presents itself as radical–indeed, as the most radical thing going–but it is really an insidious form of paralyzing liberalism which translates into ultraconservatism in action.
I know these are strong statements, but the transgender movement has been taken so unquestioningly to heart by so many lesbians, feminists, and progressives, there is such dogma surrounding it, and there is such a taboo on challenging it, that I am unwilling to fudge even a little on how dangerous it is to feminism and women.
Although the transgender movement is far from a unified whole, I think some of the analytical confusion surrounding it has been due to thinking of mtfs (male-to-females) and ftms (female-to-males) as part of the same phenomenon. I believe these two parts of the transgender movement (like gay men and lesbians) are conceptually distinct and have different ramifications. As I talk about this movement I will address these two phenomena separately for clarity.
mtfs invade michigan
Look at what happened at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival last year. Apparently, pre-op mtfs entered the festival and disrobed by the showers where women were also naked preparing to shower. If these wannabe “women” had any real understanding of what it is to be a woman in patriarchy they would have respected, not violated, women’s space, and they would have understood what a horrific violation it would be for a woman to be confronted with a strange naked biological male, penis and all, when she herself is unclothed and vulnerable. The mtfs’ concern with their own movement and liberation came at the expense of women trying for just one week in one remote corner of the United States to feel completely safe from male violence. To me, the worst thing about the fact that mtfs have violated the women-only space at the festival is that now you never know whether there might be a man, in one form or another, there. One of the most important things women get from going to Michigan is the feeling of complete safety from men and patriarchal rape culture. Now that safety has been eroded. Now even if a man isn’t there, there is in our minds the possibility of violation–that a male could be there.
How in the world has this come about? And how is it that so many well-meaning lesbians have bought into the arguments for inclusion of mtfs at michigan? Clearly, transpeople (like all people) deserve basic human rights, such as access to jobs, health insurance, respectful treatment, and freedom from living in fear of hate crimes and violence. But do mtfs, at any stage of transition, have the right to be at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival?
identity as stealth politics
First, one of the ways transgender mtf activists have managed to confuse lesbians who know that there is something wrong with letting men, however altered, into Michigan is through framing their position as one of identity. The argument is that they are, in some fundamental way, really a woman inside a male body. That is their identity. It is taken as a given that one must not question another person’s assertion of his or her own identity.
But what does it mean to “be” a man or a woman? Radical feminists have long been the ones accused of being essentialist, that is, reducing the cause of human behavior to innate essences. Radical feminists have been misconstrued as saying that men are competitive, aggressive, and violent because they are men. (This is one of the many examples where radical feminists are attributed with some idea that they in fact do not hold and then smeared for it.) In truth, radical feminists are among the only ones arguing that being a man or woman is a matter of profound socialization (not of biological or hormonal origin). However, many (but not all) transgender people explain themselves in essentialist terms.
But an intellectual sleight of hand occurs over this matter of identity–explaining oneself in this way neatly avoids dealing with the political implications of one’s identity. If identity is held as a given, it is off-limits to criticism or analysis. If, for example, I hold catholicism as my identity rather than my choice, then I avoid moral accountability for the various beliefs and political stances that go along with it. And if I demand that other people respect my identity as a catholic, then I demand that they accept without protest the politics that I choose along with my catholic identity, even while I pretend my catholicism is not a political choice, only a matter of identity. Identity politics is a stealth maneuver that demands, in the name of tolerance, that others do not challenge my politics.
Rather than accepting that a person just is transgender as a matter of identity, I believe it is imperative to examine the politics of being mtf. I maintain that there are politics inherent in the choice to be mtf, that is, there are ways of looking at the world, at gender, at identity, and at power relations in that choice. Yet identity politics disallows political analysis or criticism of identities which are profoundly political. The tactic of holding identity as separate from politics and above analysis is a politics in and of itself–and it is generally a politics of conservatism to hold areas as off limits for scrutiny.
Leslie Feinberg, in Trans Liberation, admits s/he has heard transwomen being criticized for “taking up too much space or being overbearing because they were socialized as men,” yet s/he says that it is “prejudiced” for nontrans people to make this observation (by the way, that is a misuse of the word prejudice; it is not pre-judging, it is simply making an observation). In this manner, the power implications of taking up too much space are ruled exempt from critique.
One of the political problems that I see with the whole notion of transgender politics is the idea that by changing one’s appearance, presentation, or body, one can change one’s gender. As a radical feminist, I believe that gender does not reside for the most part in our bodies–it resides in our heads, where gender socialization occurs. So for mtfs to focus on physically passing as women rather than on overcoming unwitting vestiges of internalized masculinity and power and control sidesteps the real problems with gender–how we come to feel and think inside. The fact that so much emphasis is on physical presentation instead of critiquing masculinity, power dynamics, and patriarchy shows little understanding of feminism.
a politics of individualism
If people are not born with a certain gender orientation, but instead are socialized into their gender, shouldn’t we then embrace mtfs into women’s space? After all, these are biological men who go so far to renounce masculinity that many actually undergo surgery to have their penises removed. This should be just what we want, more people wishing to join the social category of female.
That would be true, except it involves a very superficial understanding of socialization. Socialization, especially something as profound as gender socialization, cannot be totally overcome by a conscious or intellectual decision to be different. The idea that this could occur so easily comes in part from the extremes to which privileged people do not understand how deep oppression runs.
it’s a woman thing, you wouldn’t understand
I had a white friend who felt offended when, years ago, many african americans wore shirts that read “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.” He (along with many other white people) felt that he was being slighted, and that of course he could understand if it was just explained to him. As a white person, I believe there is no way to really “get it,” to really understand the insidious and pervasive way racism shapes entire biographies, the way subtle and constant acts of racism invade the hearts and minds of people of color.
How superficial, individualistic, and simplistic it would be for me, as a white american raised by a white family, to come to feel that I was really a black person inside, to change my skin color and other features to begin passing as black, and to demand to enter people of color space! In that case we could clearly see how outrageous… FULL ARTICLE
Stan:
I realize now that I am Black. I have wondered why I spend more time in the company of Black people, aside from the fact that three of my children are Black — since I don’t hang out with their friends, and I listen to Motown (I’m a fifty-something African American).
Henceforth, I will put that I am Black on all oficial forms. I will demand inclusion in any social, cultural, or political formation for Black people, where I will remind them that though I am Black, there is no such thing as Black, and that in struggling against the oppression of Blacks they have invented an injury against me by not recognizing my oppression at their hands — by the way they treat me — as a WtB.
Black as race or — worse — nationality is not a valid category, because it is constructed, and therefore nothing is really valid. Validity does not exist, and my authenticity is based on what I feel… that I am Black. The identification of a struggle for Black liberation actually constructs a Black-white binary that leaves me out, so Black people (like me, of course) should quit struggling against white supremacy, because whiteness is constructed, too. Anyone who disagrees with me is WtB-phobic.
Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know.
20 June 2006, 12:28 pmR.S. Morris:
I realize now that I am a Man. Problem is, I still don’t know what the hell that means.
…working on it–I’ll let you know if I figure anything out.
Randy
20 June 2006, 2:19 pmJulian Real:
Thanks for “coming out” Stan. Wink-wink.
I’m always nervous, politically, when people use oppressed races and ethnicities as a way to make “gender stuff” clear: to whom, I always wonder? To racist or anti-Semitic white people?
I cannot count on such a strategy of education working, as someone who knows racism and anti-Semitism, among other forms of ethnic bigotry and systematized hate and oppression, are not going anywhere fast. But what you wrote was damn clever, Stan, and I may end up sharing it with some folks.
I think the article you link to is excellent. I also think this idea that lesbians need to band together to fight patriarchy misses a point: who doesn’t need to fight patriarchy? Well, some would answer men. But which men? Men who have patriarchally traumatized wives and girlfriends? Men who have traumatized moms, sisters, aunts, and cousins, as well as daughters? (And I’m not making any assumptions about where the interpersonal levels of harm are coming from–they might be coming from dear old dad.) Why don’t men challenge BtMs (boys to men) on THEIR political choices???
I think that that essay BELONGS in Off Our Backs, and that as this community is not primarily lesbian, it is not for us to meddle in their struggles. As a supporter of the radical antiracism feminist project to completely transform CRAP, I fully support what we are now forced to call “female-bodied” women having separatist space, but let’s not kid ourselves: VERY FEW WOMEN have access to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and it is, after all, just a week out of a very patriarchal, man-dangerous, male supremacist, misogynist year.
Again, OOB ought to be discussing the place and implications of pro-trans politics in lesbian-feminist community.
We, here, are not lesbian-feminist community. Not even close. The heterosexism here is thick. I find this a place where I am struggling to be heard as a radical gay male, about THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE, for god’s sake. I’m being told by heterosexual married men that MY politics are wrong or off, because I’m not supporting THEIR hetero-male privileges! That’s fucked up.
We must also remember that “trans” folks are NOT ‘the enemy’. They are like all other binarily gendered folk: struggling to find a place in a world that won’t let people be, well, just plain ol’ human.
Our struggles here to highlight and organize against the harm of racist patriarchy, among other social/structural wrongs, means that we each need to be clear about where we stand, and who’s neck is under our feet as we stand there.
I know some trans folks. I consider “getting on their case” a form of horizontal hostility. White males are not systematically asked the numerous questions trans folks are about “Why are you choosing to become a man?” “Why do you want to be a woman?” Should we not ALL be asking ourselves those questions?
Why do you want to be a man, Stan? What about the other guys here? Why do the women here want to be women? Why do you dress in male drag, Stan? There is a burden of explanation put on trans folks that is disproportionate and unfair, given all trans folks are struggling with to get by.
This doesn’t mean I don’t challenge trans folks on gender politics, from a radical feminist perspective AS A GAY MALE. I just sent the linked essay to a FtM trans person I know, who was a lesbian-feminist. Per (gender-neutral pronoun alert!) once said to me: “I went into a heterosexual bar, now that I can more or less “pass” as male, and looked around, saw how awfully the women were being treated, how disgustingly the men were acting, and thought to myself ‘THIS is what you wanted to join in on???’” I find trans people infinitely MORE conscious of sexual politics and gender politics than I do WHITE HETEROSEXUAL MEN, by and large.
Trans-bashing is not something I think is politically wise, until or unless EVERY HETEROSEXUAL experiences PRECISELY the same level of interrogation about what makes them feel like a man or a women, or neither, and until EVERY HETEROSEXUAL “bio-male” MAN is challenged on HIS participation in and support of the institutions and practices of patriarchy.
I think lesbian women, especially, have every reason to take trans folks to task on their political positions and transitions SOMETIMES masked as personal-not-political choices.
But, we don’t have much choice, now do we? John Stoltenberg’s radical if problematic book Refusing To Be A Man, was a sincere effort to break through that damned stubborn belief that we are, somehow, naturally, “gendered”, it remains the case, made in the essay linked above, that there’s far more to gender than body-type and genes and hormones. He was addressing MEN, not FtM’s. Demographically, there’s a reason he made that choice. Close to 50 percent of the population ARE NOT “TRANS”. They ARE PATRIARCHAL BtMs.
There are institutions, industries, cultural products, media, values, habits, all selling and telling us who we are or ought to be, politically–without telling us it’s all political, and structurally rather sturdy.
One of many political points made by Karla Mantilla that I completely agree with, is that there isn’t anything “radically feminist” about being trans. But given the tiny percent of the population who IS trans, ought WE HERE not focus our attention on the BIG WHITE BOYS WHO RUN AND MAINTAIN THOSE INSTITUTIONS, and who reap the profits of the transgender “medical” industry, much to the economic ruin of some trans folks?
20 June 2006, 2:58 pmCyndi:
Dear Stan,
20 June 2006, 3:51 pmLast night I returned from New Orleans. I spent 20 days there working with Common Ground and Bayou Liberty Relief in Slidell. I even managed to find myself in Meridian, Mississippi, not a nice place. Every chance I had I left the other volunteers and made my way to the places I found the most comfortable. And that was in the company of Black people. I realize now that I am Black. All the other things like WtB and constructed whiteness and blackness, and white supremacy and invented injury I have to figure out, but today I understand more than I did 20 days ago. I already miss my brothers and sisters.
Your friend
Cyndi Garcia
Stan:
I have nothing personal against individual folks who identify as trans. I would never think of being disrespectful to anyone identifying as trans any more than I would get all orthodox on a fem-woman who has internalized a lot of her oppression. But part of respect is treating each other as equals, including the willingness to be critical and accept criticism.
This issue is addressed to the more general community of radicals — and they are in abundance on this blog, both active and lurking — in particular those who are, like me, coming from a marxist tradition, but other radicals as well. There is no real debate about whether white people or men have power, at least at one level, among these folks with regard to gender. But there is real confusion about the character of that power and how it operates; and the individualism inhering in exactly the POV critiqued by OOB has a great deal to do with that confusion.
I don’t think anyone owns a particular debate.
This weekend, I personally witnessed A WOMAN refer to “women’s issues” with utter contempt, out of this redefinition of gender as identity.
There is — as Ms. Mantilla points out — a point at which the politics of the individual, which can include seeing politics exclusively as a personal therapeutic process, or as a mere correctness of discourse, actually stands down the real struggle for power: the definition of politics.
One of the things my fellow marxists understand very well, and the point of entry so to speak at which I feel we can share a common language about gender, is in talking about another system of domination & subordination: economic class, defined materially by relation to the means of production, and existing now as a world CAPITALIST system.
White supremacy and patriarchy are not the only systems in operation here… class must be factored into any oacount of the others, as they must all be with each other; lest we commit the self-same error that many marxists did in assigning one aspect of the system — economic class — the highest priority. That exclusion was what made MacKinnon’s book, Feminism Unmodified, necessary when it came out. It’s time for a re-integration of these perspectives, and that of ecology, too, into a meta-theory of liberation that does not need to disaggregate these phenomena within our movements.
The issues raised by this OOB article mirror, in gender terms, the exact criticism that marxists level at postmodernism with regard to class. So this article is very valuable here in taking down that fence between radical feminism and marxism (I count myself in both categories), a preoccupation of mine. That is why I have posted it here on FS.
“Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory
Edited by Dave Hill ,
Peter McLaren ,
Mike Cole , and
Glenn Rikowski
(click to enlarge)
$34.95 Paper 0-7391-0346-6 November 2002 364pp
$90.00 Cloth 0-7391-0345-8 November 2002 364pp
Postmodernism has become the orthodoxy in educational theory. It heralds the
end of grand theories like Marxism and liberalism, scorning any notion of a
united feminist challenge to patriachy, of united anti-racist struggle, and
of united working-class movements against capitalist exploitation and
oppression. For postmodernists, the world is fragmented, history is ended,
and all struggles are local and particularistic. Written by internationally
renowned British and American educational theorists Marxism Against
Postmodernism in Educational Theory–a substantially revised edition of the
original 1999 work Postmodernism in Educational Theory–critically examines
the infusion of postmodernism and theories of postmodernity into educational
theory, policy, and research. The writers argue that postmodernism provides
neither a viable educational politics, nor the foundation for effective
radical educational practice and offer an alternative ‘politics of human
resistance’ which puts the challenge to capitalism firmly on the agenda of
educational theory, politics, and practice.
List of Contributors
Michael W. Apple, Jenny Bourne, Mike Cole, Ramin Farahmandpur, Ted Hankin,
Dave Hill, Jane Kelly, Peter McLaren, Michael Neary, Glenn Rikowski, Mike
Sanders, Geoff Whitty”
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2003w23/msg00131.htm
If we only see the individual ethical dimensions of hese questions, and do not wieghin on the systemic dimension, there is a tendency to slip into what might be called a kind of phenotype authenticity, with its first cousin, tokenism.
20 June 2006, 4:51 pmYolanda Carrington:
I also witnessed the disparaging remarks about “women’s issues†that Stan mentioned from this past weekend, and being acquainted with the woman who made the comments, I recognize that they came from a fundamental misunderstanding of misogyny’s role in anti-queer oppression. To focus too much about misogyny and the oppression of women in a forum about “gender†is seen by many “transgressive†queer folk as heterosexist and essentialist.
I’ve talked to way too many gender “transgressives†of numerous gender identifications who equate “man and woman†as if there is no power difference whatsoever. Underlying this description is a deep-seated CONTEMPT for biological women that goes completely unexamined and unchallenged. Talk about “horizonal hostility,†Julian. You have no fucking idea, dude.
20 June 2006, 5:39 pmlapetrov:
Why don’t they create at the Festival a space for “wannabe womyn” so the pre-op transexuals won’t shock anyone with their *penises* and will feel included in a group they want to belong to, identify with and support? However “unradical” transexuals may be to patriarchy, they shouldn’t be shunned at an event for being women in spirit only, just excluded from the space reserved for –I love it: the female-bodied.
I am with you, Stan, the Academy is a grave disappointment here. You would think all those Doctors of Philosophy arguing that “women” don’t exist in the abstract or absolute yada yada yada, would have learned in their extensive and drawn-out training something about Materiality. The idea that women don’t exist is true in the sense of PHANTASM/Platonic idea, not in the 3-dimensional world in which real people live. DUH!
That said, I am unwilling, resistant to and will argue against anyone who wholesale dismisses postmodernism. Marxism offers critical attention to matieriality, postmoderism decenters. For me they are, as De referred elsewhere, tools to be employed in the destruction of monoliths.
P.S. And while I may be censored for this, I also oppose the vilification of the phallus just because some people do violent and vile things with theirs (just as I stand against anyone who portrays vaginas as “devouring” or otherwise threatening). OK, I grant you the shock value of the naked penis and more than one in one place would be scary to me and I don’t mind them particularly, but really, are those pre-op trans there going to attack those women? They don’t even *want* their penises! Gurlz, puhleez.
20 June 2006, 7:50 pmStan:
I want to clear a few things up, just on my own behalf.
Postmodernism — before it became an academic orthodoxy — bears some important perspective, inparticular about gendr, and still does. Foucault almost made a career out of grappling with the implications of Marx.
Hornborg, who I never tire of trying to get people to read, does a good job of trying to effect a rapproachment between the objectivists and the constructionists.
It is the orthodoxy I object to, and the stand-down of a politics of solidarity and resistance, with individual performance posited as an alternative.
Nor do I have a single thing against trans folk. All of us are dealing with the contradicitons of living in a gendered world. I just can’t lay still for having “gender” as an oppressive social system redefined as an individual consumer choice.
Consumerism is a tremendous part of the problem, and it has now become what De might call a cultural meme… I would say almost an axiom… beyond critical reach.
It is not the penis that offended the women at this space. It was the jarring presence of a male, in a place where women wanted a respite from males… who, in the experience of all women, almost always carry the potential for danger, and in many cases a history of intimidation and violence. This WAS NOT ABOUT THE MAN that was there. It was about the women.
20 June 2006, 10:38 pmDeAnander:
The idea that women don’t exist is true in the sense of PHANTASM/Platonic idea, not in the 3-dimensional world in which real people live.
amen to that.
much of today’s economic theory takes place in a similar Flatland of fantasy. in fact Daly and Cobb chide the Chicago School economists for theories which require the construct of a sexless (ungendered) consumer — a case where “women don’t exist” in economic theory
but don’t tell that to a marketing dept that lives in the semi-real world of consumer behaviour: they know very well that gender conditions product choices.
a flight from reality characterises the academy of our day, and I associate it (cautiously) with the intellectual/cultural giddiness of the fossil fuel civilisational rush. the rich — royal families, emperors, and the like — tend to get a bit batty and out of touch with reality on the ground, and now we have cultures/nations where masses of people are rich beyond the dreams of even aristos of an earlier age (The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable). the elites of those nations, unsurprisingly, are (to borrow a phrase from Ran Prieur) batshit crazy — in the academy and out. or so it seems to me.
the insistence on severing theory from reality seems to me to echo the theological insistence on severing doctrine from physical life — the rejection of the physical world and a relentless focus on an imagined Heaven and its denizens. much of what passes for discourse in the academy today — whether marxist, neoliberal, pomo or whatever — seems eerily to me like serious discussions about the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin.
anyway, that said, most folks don’t have much choice about being girled and boyed in infancy. what we want is what we’ve been taught to want, for the most part, or a flailing rejection and denial of what we’ve been taught to want. we exist in tension with social rules that were wired into us from the cradle — people who research these things say that the differential treatment of female and male infants begins at birth with different speech patterns and physical handling for boy babies vs girl babies. and boy babies are privileged. sure, there’s a price to be paid for this privilege, but then there’s a price to be paid for being the Prince of Wales too — and I’m not crying too hard for the poor guy.
I’m with Yolanda on this one — it’s about power…
20 June 2006, 11:15 pmskol:
The GLBT community (LGBT? It keeps switching on me) tends to be ignorant of the underlying structure of homophobia, and only relate to it through its manifestations. They’re not much different than anyone else in regard to complete ignorance of there even being a broader structure (patriarchy & heteronormativity & other huge words). So of course their politics aren’t getting them anywhere (especially in HS). I guess that all goes without saying, but they’re a few steps closer..?
But given that, what are you going to expect from pre-op MtFs?…Actually, that whole thing jars me. I keep coming back to a strange lack of respect.
In the great homosexual debates of the internet, the one thing I’ve noticed is the total confusion on the part of homosexuals, their allies, and homophobes. It’s like this great mystery they’re trying to solve with arguing and making each other feel bad. Haven’t seen anyone succeed, go figure. Looks to me like an identity crisis crunch. Speaking of gender identity, what’s the connection to consumerism? I get the connotation, but I’m having trouble connecting the dots.
21 June 2006, 12:52 amStan:
Your question seems ot reinforce my point about consumerism’s axiomatic character.
This actually raisea a couple of other epistemological points, so while I’m gulping down my second large coffee, getting ready to start my work-day, I’ll sublimate all this caffeinated energy into this reply. (-:
A tiny bit of marxism here as a preface… on philosophical idealism. Not the same as the everyday use of the word “idealism,” which indicates a concern for chanign the world. In this case, it refers to the debate about IDEA vs MATERIAL, and so its opposite is materialism, which also means something different than Madonna’s “material girl” materialism — that concern with the acquisition of wealth.
The philo-idealists say that ideas precede matter, so to speak: this is in Plato, in Hegel, in postmodernism, in liberalism. We begin with the idea, and it is reflected in our day-to-day activity and in our economic and cultural “production”. The philo-materialists suggest the opposite. That what we think is actually a reflection of our lived (material) experience. Then there are the dialectical materialists, like Marx (and me), who se a recursive relationship between our lived experience (which is structured by social systems) and the way we understand. During the industrial take-off, for example, we began to see the universe as a machine… or as Carole Pateman notes, with the development of capitalist relations, we began to see everything as a “contract.”
In a society like the US, where the very material and econoimc reality is, we are now positioned in the world capitalist system (via dollar hegemony) to purchase and “consume” the stuff made by others around the world in order to ensure the “virtuous circuits” of capital (the self-expansion of “value”, ie, profit), there is the formation of a collective mentality that correpsonds to this. In fact, we are constantly hectored through ads to consume shit we really don’t need or that is really bad for us personally and the biosphere — a demand-creation industry.
So the economic patterns are reflected in the cultural patterns in the economic patterns, etc, in a self-reproducing feedback loop.
Part of that is the idea that (1) we are all just individuals walking around making free choices — though we are not “merely” individuals, and (2) the choices are circumscribed as a menu of consumer commodities. We begin to see all our choices through this consumer lens… now including “identities,” that even have brand names.
This puts a deeper and more complex notion of personhood out of our critical reach, and it substitutes the notion of personal choice for the analysis of power… the latter of which which turns things into a political argument.
21 June 2006, 10:37 amDoyle Saylor:
Greetings all,
Julien writes,
The heterosexism here is thick.
Doyle;
I think the way some people here talk about sexism lacks cogency. What exactly are people doing when they do sexism? One can generalize that sexism is system of unequal relationships, but what exactly is going on?
Yolanda mentions ‘transphobic’:
and ain’t nothing transphobic about it.
Doyle;
Phobia is a medicalization term for forms of sexist structures. The problem if one bothers to look at ‘phobia’ is that first a phobia is a mental disability. Not tied to any particular content. Secondly, while the term seems to address the feelings that bigots have, what exactly makes a bigots feelings only fear based? Third it is anti-disabled to claim sexism is ‘phobic’.
There then becomes in my view a great muddle about what is going on in a sexist society. In my view the womyns Michigan event glorifies segregation as the political solution to sexist society. That is counter to any sense of how to deal with social inequality by social change for the ‘whole’ system.
One has to have a functional way to describe what’s wrong that doesn’t anchor itself in one group of people. Ending patriarchy doesn’t mean switching over to female chauvinism.
Patriarchy is dependent upon family structure. Family structure is dependent upon manipulating feeling structure. When one crudely labels feelings of oppression as ‘phobic’ one ignores the more complex processes of the work that people put into family structures that ground patriarchy.
The lesbian Womyn’s Michigan event is a ludicrous exercise in sexism. Being offended by seeing a penis on transgender men is just the height of sexism. Their barring of men has long been a sign of their neo-liberal mentality.
One cannot address sexism without identifying where the work and structure is actually that builds inequallity. One cannot solve the issue with political social and economic segregation.
21 June 2006, 11:47 amthanks,
Doyle Saylor
Julian Real:
JR: Why do you want to be a man, Stan? What about the other guys here? Why do the women here want to be women? Why do you dress in male drag, Stan? There is a burden of explanation put on trans folks that is disproportionate and unfair, given all trans folks are struggling with to get by.
Yolanda’s reply:
Julian, first off, why the hell are you EQUATING the states of being Man and Woman? Women don’t “choose†to be women—everything that “woman†is defined to be is imposed from the outside by man-controlled patriarchy, and enforced through social pressure, coercion, and VIOLENCE. I’ve said this to you before, too—it ain’t a goddamn choice. And why the hell is it “disproportionate and unfair†to challenge transfolk on deeply entrenched misogyny, racism, and apoliticism? If you CLAIM to be radical or transgressive, you should expect criticism when you fail to practice what you preach. That is totally fair to me, and ain’t nothing transphobic about it.
And I’ll say it again and again: MAN AND WOMAN AIN’T EQUAL, FOLKS! Women don’t run the gender system! We ain’t the problem dammit!
Here’s my approach to the problem. If anybody with ANY privilege relative to myself—Black man, White woman, transman, tranwoman (especially WHITE transfolk), rich fucker, corporate fucker, government fucker, or ANY WHITE MAN of any class/sexuality/political persuasion—tries to rationalize my oppression to ME, I cut the bastard down. No questions asked, and no quarter given.
Hi Yolanda.
I don’t think I do equate being a man and a woman, but acknowledge that my asking those two questions that way may come across like I do. HERE (and everywhere else) I am saying pretty damned clearly that women ARE OPPRESSED by men, in a male supremacist system which is sometimes called patriarchy. I don’t think you’ve ever seen me say otherwise, either. Thank you for calling me on my sloppy line of questioning. I don’t think you’ve EVER heard me say men and women are equals, but welcome you pointing it out if I have. I don’t think I’ve ever said being a woman is “a choice” either, although every human being makes choices, has agency, within systems of oppression, unless, of course, they don’t. Some women make choices to be feminists. Some women make choices to be lesbian. Yes, I said “make choices”, even though that goes against the liberal understandings of sexual orientation as natural, genetic, or the Devil’s work, depending on one’s political point of view.
I never said you don’t have the right to challenge anyone who threatens your existence, or who holds a position of power or privilege over you including, of course, whitemale me! You do call me out, and I welcome you to. I hope I am appropriately responsive, and if I’m not, you will likely call me out some more. I am a whitemale, after all. Isn’t the point that EVEN though we “are what we are”, we are also challenged to be more humane, more fiercely compassionate, in our struggles to end various forms of oppression?
And I also said I fully support “lesbian community” fighting against the misogyny of trans politics. I was trying to make the point that I think white heterosexual men calling out trans people seems a bit misguided in a world NOT RUN BY TRANS FOLKS. I’d promote Sheila Jeffrey’s book, Unpacking Queer Politics more if I didn’t think she was a racist. I would have said “the Queer community” except I don’t believe there is one, really. And I don’t especially “go” for that term, as it unifies groups of people who are not at all politically unified, even a little bit–unless its very privileged queer liberals fighting “the system” to get married, of course. Please! People can and do choose assimilation: I am well aware of its benefits and costs–they have played out historically against the Jews in atrocious ways–American and European Jews believing that assimilation = safety, and European Jews refusing to assimilate, and being targeted for being “outsiders” within an otherwise Christian nation.
My point in asking those questions is to point out that the questions that are asked of trans folks can be asked of most of us: we each make CHOICES every day in terms of how we present ourselves, in ways that more or less assimilate us into the gender binary world, a world where gender is only on surface made to appear as a natural or God-made binary, and is, of course, more dangerously a political hierarchy–a point I tried to make clear on another thread, that I don’t believe anyone wished to respond to: I clarified Stan’s use of MacKinnon’s meanings, about gender (re: difference and dominance). Seemed to me Stan was saying gender is difference FOR SURE and also dominance. Seems to me MacKinnon was saying gender is dominance POSING as difference, which is a distinction that merits clarification.
Let me clearly state, in case my language here has been mixed messagy, or confusing, or misleading, or fucked up: I BELIEVE WOMEN ARE AN OPPRESSED GROUP, oppressed by men, AND oppressed by systems of harm that hurt “male-bodied” children a lot, and hurt “female-bodied” children even more than “male-bodied” children. I wish I had used the phrase HBtBtM, as I think that is more accurately the case: human beings raised to be boys, being boyed forcefully or mildly but systematically, and part of that raising is teaching them they ARE NOT GIRLS, and OUGHT NOT BE girls, or else. (Or else they might suffer some of what girls and women suffer in patriarchy, albeit not systematically.)
I await your response.
21 June 2006, 12:52 pmNon Serviam:
There is some food for thought in this piece. Overall, however, I find that it’s in a poisonous spirit of identity politics. It’s really a case of familiarity breeding contempt: the identity politics of a few MTF’s apparently the identity politics of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, and have reached the point of mutual antipathy.
In particular, the deafening silence on consciousness and inflation of identities to this matter from which all things political flow is a hallmark of reactionary politics. Let’s take this, for example:
“Are ftms really facing what is wrong with masculinity and how it is the root of human misery and injustice? Are mtfs really about overturning patriarchy and moving away from the enormous destruction wrought by men in the world? Are intersexed and other trans people about overturning power structures, or do they just want to be free to do their own thing and get their piece of the pie?”
Substitute any of the terminology into “gay men” or “lesbian” and you have EXACTLY the same fucked-up line the RCP espoused on homosexuality in the 1980s: dismissive “it’s all just bourgeois decadence” redux. The existence of bourgeois transfolk no more means that being MTF or FTM is a bourgeois identity, any more than the existence of bourgeois feminism (which “invaded” radical spaces with far less fanfare) means feminism is bourgeois.
Especially odious, the charge that Les Feinberg is somehow a right-wing libertarian in disguise; apparently, we’re asked to ignore Feinberg’s contribution toward expanding the left’s consciousness on feminism, gender, and queer issues, and expanding the queer community’s consciousness on the first two topics. Feinberg’s identity is apparently all that there is, so much so that we chuck the collection.
21 June 2006, 2:55 pmStan:
In the contradiction lies the hope… I hope we can get beyond the most predictable straw men.
Who said that Leslie Feinberg is a right-wing libertarian? That is utter nonsense. Leslie Feiberg is a member of Workers World Party as is her partner, who I just spend five days with on the March to New Orleans… and where we got along quite nicely, thank you. No one is persoanlly disrespecting anyone. It has been repeated again and again here, at least by me, that the construction of feminism adopted by the left is too rooted in liberalism, which is the antithesis of our putative interpretive method. It is contradictory.
This method of argumentation that imputes an attack in every criticism is very much part of that tradition, and a part that needs badly to be done away with… because it bends inevitably toward orthodoxy.
If you can’t answer within the logics of the debate, then you invent an injury.
I won’t jump in to defend the points made by others, who are perfectly capable of doing that, and far better than I can.
Here is what the article actually said, before it was paraphrased into an attack by NS:
“Leslie Feinberg, in Trans Liberation, admits s/he has heard transwomen being criticized for “taking up too much space or being overbearing because they were socialized as men,†yet s/he says that it is “prejudiced†for nontrans people to make this observation (by the way, that is a misuse of the word prejudice; it is not pre-judging, it is simply making an observation). In this manner, the power implications of taking up too much space are ruled exempt from critique.”
This is a critical statement, carefully constructed, and there is not a whiff of personal animosity, nor any implication that she is right-wing or libertarian.
What the sister wrote was not that a “penis” was the issue, but that being confronted with a biological male unexpectedly in a women’s gathering “failed to understood what a horrific violation it would be for a woman to be confronted with a strange naked biological male, penis and all, when she herself is unclothed and vulnerable.”
How does this women’s event translate into a general program of separatism? Is the Black Radical Congress racist? It is just incredible to me that anyone on the left who is ostensibly dealing with the issue of systemic power in their political vocation refuses to engage this debate with the issue of gendered power as the nub of the matter.
Events where women caucus with other women are not sexist. This is a slippery liberal trope… reverse discrimination… no analysis of structural power ther at all.
Masculinity and femininity are not lifestyle choices. they are woven deeply and directly into the fabric of male power. We can say that without personally disrespecting anyone who manifests behaviors associated with these constellations, and understanding full well that we all struggle with them — and all the other things we struggle with — in the system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
21 June 2006, 4:11 pmlapetrov:
De: “gender conditions product choices” -ain’t that the truth! Take a good look at shaving cream differences (prices/sizes/marketing) at your local supermarket for an excellent example of the pure insanity of gender differentiation.
AND “flight from reality characterises the academy of our day” is, well, how to say it? … ! I’m left speechless. The “egghead in the sky,” “fantasy-world dweller,” “can’t touch me” distance the academy has with (take your pick):
a) itself
b) its students
c) its local community
d) people of color
e) poor folk
is OUTRAGEOUS! and, inexcusable.
And yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It IS ABOUT the women. Any woman has the indisputable right to create a safe space for herself and other women. No penis. Period. I would never argue otherwise, and frankly, I personally can’t understand what would motivate a pre-op transexual to disrobe himself and be in a “woman’s only” space. I didn’t quite understand what sh/e was thinking. I’d bet still thinking “like a man” (ie. “anything I want to do I can.” “The world is my oyster.” I am the master of my destiny.”).
BUT, I beg to differ that it isn’t also about the penises. Do they not mark a man as male? That piece of meat hanging there is what it is ALL about. Have one? Powerful. Don’t have one? Fuggeddaboutit…
and I mean metaphorically, literally, in every way possible. ad infinitum.
Julian: I like very much your phrase “human beings raised to be boys, being boyed forcefully or mildly but systematically, and part of that raising is teaching them they ARE NOT GIRLS, and OUGHT NOT BE girls, or else. (Or else they might suffer some of what girls and women suffer in patriarchy, albeit not systematically.)”
The opression of which you speak includes a significant number of “girly”/”fem” males, as you say it does, and also men marked as such whether or not they are. So, I disagree with you 100% that the suffering isn’t systematic. It is. Look at any imperialistic venture and the men of whatever “other place” being overtly colonized will be repeatedly associated with the feminine in some way or other (lack reason, are weak, practice sodomy, etc.).
And, punishment for bucking the gender system as a child can be in many cases also systematic (church, school, playground, etc.). Just because something isn’t overtly “organized” by any one person, doesn’t mean the pressures aren’t systematized. At least I don’t think so.
21 June 2006, 5:26 pmJason:
What if we discover that chromosomal differences cannot be negated by political awareness? What if the conclusions of a truly non-state science amount to a confirmation that chromosomal variation manifests, phenotypically according to environment, in a bipolar variation between genetic sexes?
I understand that this doesn’t do anything with the political aspects of gender, or race for that matter, but it seems that we are dealing with a general assumption that categories of race and gender are immutable, that oppressed gendered and melanin-content persons have a monopoly on the comprehension of scientific, political or economic investigations and inquiries, and an absolute right to outrage, no matter what.
I admit to my own whiteness, in so much that I have the benefits of an upper middle class childhood home, private schools and access to the echelons of power. That whiteness is entirely political, though. I am sephardic jew (from the mediterranean) and cherokee and do not qualify, politically, as white.
Does that whiteness, as a political category, exclude me, as Yolanda seems to imply, from a genuine comprehension of actual conditions? Have language and intelligence, and the concommitant sympathy and empathy transmitted thereby, become mutally isolable between persons, simply because the overarching structure bears the terrible imprint, still, of Romano-christendom?
21 June 2006, 8:53 pmJason:
Just noted a typo:
:Tht whiteness is entirely political, though. I am sephardic jew (from the mediterranean) and cherokee and do not qualify, politically, as white.”
should read:
That whiteness is entirely political, though. I am sephardic jew (from the mediterranean) and cherokee and do not qualify, politically, as enforced category white.”
It seems we have abandoned the metaphysical dualism of Indo-european foundations, only to take it up again, in our definitions and structural worldviews of race and gender, and that those who have suffered the system have also internalized that dualism to a greater degree, and that this effectively serves to severs them further from the communications of the (exploitive) whole.
21 June 2006, 9:09 pmAudrey:
“In my view the womyns Michigan event glorifies segregation as the political solution to sexist society. That is counter to any sense of how to deal with social inequality by social change for the ‘whole’ system.”
Let us have our one week. One Week! The other 51 weeks a year we are constantly on your stupid runway, never away from the male gaze aimed either at us or the other women around us, never away from that curious habit of naturally moving out of man’s way in public spaces.
I almost got plowed over in the airport recently because a man was walking directly at me, I was walking directly at him, in a huge open space, and I wouldn’t cede ground. I’m not sure why I did it except out of curiosity and experimentation to see if we really would just smack into each other, and I had to fight off the feeling that I was being a complete jerk, even as I knew he had no such thought – for him, giant suit-guy towering over me, it was just the natural state that I would move out of his way. One week free of that isn’t pretending to be segregation as a political solution to inequality. It’s just a break, because moving out of you all’s way day in and day out – literally and figuratively - gets old. It’s like hiring a babysitter once a year to see a movie when you have a small kid – it’s not that you’re trying to live your whole life childless, or even that you want to. Sometimes you just need a damned break.
Maybe a week’s too long. Nobody seems to mind if I have a female friend over at my house for an afternoon. It’s within the socially acceptable limits. Six hours with one friend, that’s okay. Twenty hours, five friends might be pushing it – anything more starts to look like a movement, and then it’s sexist, I guess.
Just an FYI: If I’m involved in whatever length break from you all that I’m taking, I don’t consider it part of that break to have you wandering into my shower. My apologies to anyone who is offended by that. It’s got nothing to do with accusing you of being a potential rapist; you could be the sweetest guy in the world, with the most charming nonvilified penis ever. The best way I can think to explain how much it’s NOT about you is to talk about my doctor. She’s a mouthy tough woman with a sharp of humor, got divorced about the same time that I did, raised her kids on her own. Sometimes I bring small gifts for her kids. Basically I love her to death. But when I think “Hey, it’s my day off, what fun thing can I do to relax today?†the first thing that jumps into my head isn’t “I’d like to go have Dr. Beasley give me a pap smear.â€
The showers absolutely come down to that distinction Stan was talking about, between ideas and materialism. In a pre-op mtf’s head, they’re female. It’s a simple thing to say I should therefore transcend the material and experience them as female – despite their being in a male body. But that’s not how the world works, and they know that probably better than I do. If a mtf trans honestly believed gender happens completely in the mind, nothing material about it at all, they wouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars on operations to correct their physical bodies. Given their own inability to reconcile their current body parts with their identity, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that others would have the same trouble. Demanding that we transcend what they cannot - enough to be comfortable showering with (physical) men as fellow women - is a bit of a stretch, especially as we don’t even have the benefit of being inside their heads. All I’ve got to go on is some uninvited naked dude in my shower telling me “No, really, trust me, I’m a woman.†Words. What kind of reaction am I supposed to have to that?
21 June 2006, 9:16 pmDoyle Saylor:
Audrey writes;
we are constantly on your stupid runway, never away from the male gaze aimed either at us or the other women around us,
Doyle,
When you write the phrase ‘male gaze’ it seems as if you are referring to something like an oppressors looking at something. However, besides the phrase what sort of physical evidence backs this up? To me ‘male gaze’ is really an empty rhetorical terminology that comes out of ‘reification’ of the system as it is. In other words, to you it’s a wooden statue looking at you, rather than for me a dynamic human made society. The statue can’t stop ‘gazing’ because it’s wooden.
If one takes seriously how seeing builds a society of any sort then the phrase about ‘gaze’ is clumsy and bereft of insight. Let me just quickly sketch an alternate view of seeing. Seeing is fundamental to an infant learning to talk. Not in the sense that blind babies can’t learn to talk, but in the sense that sighted people learn as infants to ‘gaze’ at parent’s faces from which the baby learns to follow parental looks and to begin the rudiments of language. Hence oppression that is socially made is about language. Using the word gaze without putting the word into the context of language makes little sense in describing a reactionary oppressor who is patriarchal.
Audrey writes;
…you could be the sweetest guy in the world, with the most charming nonvilified penis ever.
Doyle,
This is a version of biology is destiny. Human beings make a culture in which rights can be ‘made’. The point being is that the work to build the society is what makes us equal, not the particular shape of penises. Functionally when I look at a clitoris it’s just a small penis. In other words they are the same thing. One can take hormones to alter shapes or whatever, but the social structure is really what we can change in accord with everything else.
Audrey writes;
Nobody seems to mind if I have a female friend over at my house for an afternoon.
Doyle;
You are searching for various forms of ‘segregated’ moments that I can acknowledge and agree to so I can get ‘it’ that the womyns festival is just not so subversive of equality as I make it out to be. In this sense your comments lack insight into what you are talking about. You are saying that ‘knowing’ someone is the issue. Can’t have a penis in the shower. Can’t look at sex organs because … fill in the blank. This is an old idea which is exaggerated by Islamic fundamentalist with the Chador which is a nineteenth century attempt to get women out of the house into a heavily segregated male society of Islamic cultures. Obviously Chadors are about the ‘male gaze’. And just as obviously women are oppressed despite the cloth protection from the male gaze.
Let’s just take the concept of ‘knowing’ someone. Stripping it of male female content for a moment, it means who can you connect with face to face. That’s a work process. I do some work to connect. I can’t know 10,000 people. I can’t do the work to talk to 10,000 people unless I was using media to ‘broadcast’ my side of the ‘conversation’ to connect. In any case broadcast media re-enforce the ‘big man’ leader concept rather than the community equality.
This communication process of connection is where sexism is built. It’s cultural in the sense that people can make ‘chadors’ to shape the connection. But the problem is that women don’t get to connect equally to social power as men. Or that this system is unequal in regard to wealth.
In my view what is brought out by your comment is how you feel about connecting to someone. Feel! You are really talking about a work process that could be altered to end sexism, but your views are pro-segregation as the solution. In what technical sense can equality and segregation be the same thing? Be explicit!
From my side I say it is the connection process mediated by human feelings is the solution to sexism. A society that oppresses homosexual acts, uses racism to divide, keeps women second class rests upon how the connection process is used to build connections. That connection is deeply related to knowing the other person. Knowing means not just looking but language work to build connection.
The challenge a transgender person throws up to ‘biology is destiny’ is that society can change the physical shapes more or less at will. So what is the core of connection? The language structure mediated by the feeling structure.
Audrey writes;
The showers absolutely come down to that distinction Stan was talking about, between ideas and materialism. In a pre-op mtf’s head, they’re female. It’s a simple thing to say I should therefore transcend the material and experience them as female despite their being in a male body. But that’s not how the world works, and they know that probably better than I do.
Doyle;
22 June 2006, 10:38 amIt’s a reification about penises what you are arguing. Reification means taking an idea and asserting it is reality. Materialism is for human beings how work can alter reality by human influence mainly for the purpose of reproducing the means of life. No external outside of reality spirit, mind, blah blah. Ideas that don’t mesh with reality, that is over determining a penis as an idea are not materialism.
Thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Stan:
Thank you Doyle for that pre-freshman tutorial in vulgar marxism… and for giving us a demonstration of exactly the things we have been discussing on this blog for some time…
You need to research “male gaze” before you start popping off about it, because it is brilliantly apparent that you do not understand what it means, and that you haven’t the least intention of adopting, even for the sake of argument, the standpoint of women for even one second.
I am not generally this short with people, but the distinctly MALE hauteur of your post (including your objectivist demand for “physical evidence”) is exactly the kind of thing that consistently drives women away from most of the leftist lists I have been on in the past.
The comparison of Audrey’s position with that of fundamentalists is not only ludicrous, it is insulting. Women not wanting men objectifying them is not synonymous with men treating women like property… and you know it. That can only mean one thing from where I stand. You are trying to put Audrey in her place. The problem is that Audrey IS in her place her at FS, and it is going to stay that way. This comment is putting you on thin ice here. FS will not become a space that intimidates and bullies women.
Period.
If it makes you feel better, there are modified-feminists, ie, marxist-feminists, who have also taken on this term (male gaze) and used it in a more sophisticated, nuanced, and comlex way: Martha Gimenez, Nancy Hartsock, Rosemary Hennessy, et alia. You should read them.
Here is a quick tutorial from the web, just to get started, as applied in advertising with strategic intent… looking at someone in such a way as to objectify them… or barring that, to make them invisible. Women know exactly what this is. So do men who have engaged in any conscious self-critique about it. It’s important:
***
When you look at an object, you are seeing more than just the thing itself: you are seeing the relation between the thing and yourself. Some objects are made to be looked upon. Someone puts paint to canvas, and replicates a sight. An image is formed, and now a spectator can stand facing the painting and look at the objects depicted. Furthermore, a painting can be purchased, and a person can own the image of the object.
The practice and ideology of image-ownership comes from the heyday of oil-painting in Western Europe (shall we say the 17th century), when the male spectator-owner commissioned the painter to do some oil-magic and make the likeness of something. The range of objects painted was rather inclusive, but for our purposes, I’ll hone in on one genre: the female nude.
The image of the female nude has always been inactive, traditionally reclining, or sometimes even shown admiring her own image in a mirror — all this to nurture the spectator-owner’s sense of ego and possession. The painting of female beauty offered up the pleasure of her appearance for the male spectator-owner’s gaze. But the spectator-owner’s gaze sees not merely the object of the gaze, but sees the relationship between the object and the self. He sees her as a creature of his domain, under his gaze of possession — simultaneously admiring and pejorative, but always as an object of his desire in his domain.
The male gaze is so pervasive in advertising that it is assumed or taken-for-granted. Females are shown offering up their femininity FOR THE PLEASURE OF AN ABSENT MALE SPECTATOR. “Men act and women appear” states Berger, before going on to note that in this scenario .
Using the rubric of the male gaze, let us explore a range of poses and how they constitute the power of the look, the gaze.
22 June 2006, 11:26 amNon Serviam:
Stan:
I believe you’re attacking the wrong target. I’m certainly not in the PLP camp that is against caucuses on some misguided iron-clad principle. But neither am I for narrow, ignorant essays that blame an oppressed class for the oppression of another, where it is completely not their doing.
We both run in “the same circles”, and while we both support the BRC and other such projects, I would hope that neither of us would hesitate to criticize identity politics — such as those black ministers who have hitched their ride to homophobia, xenophobia, or some such internalized form of hatred.
On the essay: I quoted verbatim from the same essay as you did, and it’s apparent that it makes broad, sweeping — dare I say it, bigoted — dismissal of transfolk and trans theorists *as a whole*. As I said, it brought to mind the RCP’s line on homosexuality, which was often summed up this way: “gays enforce patriarchy”/”lesbians do not struggle with men against patriachy”. As if patriarchy would crumble today if gay men and lesbians suddenly got hitched and engaged in heated ideological struggle with partners in loveless marriage.
That the essay dismisses Feinberg’s work (encapsulating volumes Les has written with a couple cherrypicked quotes) is merely a case of the general residing in the particular.
Now that, let’s move on to the subject matter which you and the essay bring up.
I will never defend assault-on-other-activists as a legitimate form for airing out grievances, no matter how legitimate the grievance. That gets an activist blacklisted as far as I’m concerned.
I will not, however, sit by and just dismiss the grievance - which transwomen have had for some time with the Michigan Womyn’s Festival and which has been brewing for some time (and which a number of good minded young feminists - who don’t use “post” or some such qualifier - have raised repeatedly, and boycotted the event over).
And Stan, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but part of the *legally required* process for sexual reassignment is living for an extended period of time in the sex of transition — before a surgeon is even allowed to go anywhere near the genitalia. It is a classic Catch-22.
It should be pointed out, if one thinks it is a problem for a single, pre-op transwoman to be in a shower full of biological women, think of the routine danger transwomen are put in any number of institutions, where lack of genital reassignment cause them to essentially be thrown to the wolves in the male wing. The NYPD routinely takes pre-op transwomen and throw them into male section of the jail — where they are routinely told by guards to merely “fight or fuck”, and told by wardens that the only corrective is taking solitary confinement.
22 June 2006, 11:39 amR.S. Morris:
Audrey, thank you for your insight on this topic. I’ll also thank Doyle for reminding me of the mindset I’m trying to escape from.
As a white male working hard to support women in their fight against Patriarchy, I am constantly looking for analogues in my own life that help bridge the gender perception gap. I realize I will never be able to see the world from the point of view of a woman, or a black man or woman, or from anything other than my privileged position. Be that as it may, certain experiences seem relevant to increasing my appreciation of what others (Audrey, Yolanda, Julian, De, Elaina, …) here are trying to explain to me. So I dig these personal anecdotes up and throw them out for other guys to relate to.
The closest I have come to understanding the expressed intent of these Womyn getting their “week off” from men in general is the rare times I have been able to participate in an inclusive veterans’ group for any extended time (say, longer than an hour). While this is somewhat (very) apples-to-oranges on most levels, remembering the feeling I had when a non-veteran would sit-in on our conversation, trying hard to interject their civilian view of our military experience into the mix. Recalling the discomfort I felt in those circumstances—and then magnifying that discomfort by some astronomical factor—helps me realize just how important this focused “away from men” time might be for women who live 24/7 in the pressure cooker of sex-expectation and gender descrimination.
Rather than analyzing the concerns that our sisters (and “others”) express here for the purpose of defending our particular slice of the privilege pie, we need to embrace what they tell us and wear it for a while before we attempt any constructive deconstruction. I know I’ve lived a life steeped in traditional masculinity for far too long to be able to tell ANY woman (or Black, or Trans, or whatever) how to fight the war. In this, am only a grunt.
Randy
22 June 2006, 12:56 pmStan:
I would not engage in trans-bashing, and I am not homophobic. Nor am I disrespectful of women who have internalized gender (defined here as a system of male power) in various ways.
The question has to be raised here, what is the system and the thought process that makes anyone seek surgery (which didn’t exist a few years ago) to change their body when it is functional? Are we separating the spirit from the body? When someone says they are trapped in a body, one that is the wrong end of a socially constructed gender binary, how can we evade the fact that this sense that one is trapped is also a cultural product?
It is entirely likely that there ar women in Africa who will tell you that they feel incomplete as women without clitoridectomy and infibulation.
The comparison of the Womyn’s Festival with prison abuse is outrageous.
22 June 2006, 12:57 pmNon Serviam:
To be clear:
1) I accused the author of the linked essay of transphobia (and a recycling of thankfully vanquished RCP analyses of gay men and lesbians). Not you yourself.
2) I do not compare the Womyn’s Festival with prison abuse. I bring up the topic, as a matter of highlighting the problems of iron-clad essentialist definitions of gender. As well as the unique problems presented to still-transitioning MTF and FTM folks.
Now, on to your question: the system and thought process that makes persons modify their bodies — as being trans is NOT simply a matter of “snipping it off” — whether through hormones, surgery, “strapping them down” or “tucking it in” is a matter as old as time itself. Engels may have suffered from certain illusions regarding pre-historic homo sapiens and its predecessors — but overwhelming evidence at least shows that from the first tool-making species of homo, modifications - both cosmetic and medical - were made to the human body.
(An interesting digression: against common belief in inevitable human perfectability and all that jazz, it seems pre-historic homo sapiens had far greater survival rates than during classical antiquity — the biggest culprit being the disposable nature of pre-historic surgical tools versus the metal tools of antiquity through which germs often entered the body).
You bring up the odious spectre of a perfectly good, functional body being modified - the body as temple argument. But are we born so perfect? Or is the case actually that the body is much more fragile, flexible, and malleable than we care to acknowledge?
From birth, we are vaccinated because, it is an established a medical truth, the immune system on its own is insufficient to fight off any number of “natural” viruses and bacteria. Scratch off the idea that we are anywhere near perfectly formed right then and there.
Beyond that, it is perfectly acceptable to get rid of the tonsils and adnoids; to alter the shape of the lens of an eye for better sight; to place braces to make a short leg longer; to ingest hormones for purposes of fighting cancer; to “correct” perfectly natural stunted growth; to tailor our grooming — ad nauseam.
So the body as we are issued it is certainly “functional” — but functions independent of what we want it to do, what our outside world is, and sometimes functions in contradiction to what we elect our best interests to be. And so we exercise, change diet, ingest pharmaceuticals, etc. — not simply as a matter of consumption but also as a matter of refinement of the body, as an expansion of its capabilities.
I should note, sexual reassignment is qualitatively different from a clitoridectomy or infibulation. The social functions are different — sexual reassignment is an individual acting in self-determination over their own body; the clitoridectomy or infibulation is an act of others, intent on creating a mark of kinship or social unit akin to that of a brand upon a steer. The autonomous act for versus the heteronomous.
But beyond this, even, to get down to the nitty gritty: the clitoridectomy is a totally invasive act. Beyond cosmetic, we are talking about the severing of nerve-endings; the cutting of blood vessels. It means, among other things, a permanent loss of sensation and high risk of infection.
In contrast, sexual reassignment surgery is just that - surgical - and in both situations, great pains are taken in the preservation of blood vessels and nerve endings (which are re-routed, rather than “cut off”).
22 June 2006, 3:39 pmYolanda Carrington:
Julian,
You asked “Why do you want to be a woman?” and “Why do the women here want to be women?” as rhetorical questions to the idea that trans folks should be questioned about their political choices when bio-gendered folks aren’t. But here’s the thing: Biological women are judged, questioned, harangued, and second-guessed by the system for their actions and choices all the time. Nobody gives women a free ride, and I get extremely angry when anyone (including you, bruh) so much as hints as such. Simply put Julian, your wording of these two sentences infuriated me.
In fact Julian, what most frustrates me are your occassional tendencies toward liberalism, especially on the questions of gender-race variance and personal identity. Yes, you are hard and radical as hell on hetero white guys (which is too damn easy), and your very clear that women and people of color are oppressed globally, but then you’ll talk about “complex identities” like biraciality, intersex, and transgender, and about how you’re oppressed as a gay Jewish male (I’d say “man” myself). Now I’ll go out on a limb and assume that most people who read Feral Scholar know that human beings are complex, and understand that no human being is only one thing, AND KNOW that humans can be both horribly oppressed and sickenedly privleged (US-born White women and Black men being PERFECT examples of such). But does that mean that a person gets to weasle out of a major identifying status, ESPECIALLY one that confers extreme privilege and power AND/OR atrocious persecution?
When US-born people of color try this shit, we get called “oreos,” “twinkies,” “coconuts,” and the like by our peoples. And to be perfectly honest, we should. Our people don’t let us run from who we are. No, being Black, Asian, and Brown ain’t natural, and yes—many of us are MULTIETHNIC, MULTINATIONAL, AND MULTIRACIAL—but who and what we are is still very REAL, very static, and VERY political. More importantly, we are OPPRESSED, by a dominant group with a lot of bloody power over our lives. The “choices” that we as individual people of color make impact every goddamn one of us, sometimes for mulitple generations. So really, there ain’t no “individual choices” for us, but collective actions. That’s the way it works.
By the way, about your dissenting post on Stan’s “Difference,” let me respond to it right now. Stan was fucking right. He ain’t perfect, but he was right that damn time. Let me tell you something. My twenty-eight-year-old, irregularly menstruating, medium-breasted, broad-shouldered, hairy-ass, deep-voiced, FEMALE body is real, and has a direct impact on how people in the world see me/experience me as a WOMAN. This is the same experience for 99.9% of the women, girls, men, and boys in the world. The fact that intersex and transgendered people do exist DOES NOT negate this fact one iota. You can’t jump over this shit, Julian. Don’t even try.
Before I forget, to answer Jason’s challenge about whiteness and material conditions: Yes and no. You can know the all the conditions, and (possibly) understand their impact, but you can NEVER know firsthand what it is to be race and gender oppressed unless you’ve lived it. I’m serious Jason. You can’t read about this shit and get it. You’ve got to touch it and taste it.
Yolanda
22 June 2006, 3:45 pmDeAnander:
Doyle: cash a reality cheque. as of 1995, the global average representation of women in parliaments was about 11 percent. the global representation of women as senators was 9 percent. 90 percent of the Fortune 500 have no female corporate officers, period. the US has the 2nd highest rate of reported rape (men raping women and girls) worldwide. need I go on?
when women (born women) hold more than half of the seats in governmental agencies, parliaments and senates; when women (born) hold more than half the controlling interest in international and national commerce; hold more than half the command rank in world militaries; own or manage more than half the world’s real estate and farms; get at least half the food when the table is laid; are guaranteed the same wage for the same work, worldwide; are equally represented in education from K12 through grad school; represent *only* half of all prostitutes and “sex workers” [if indeed prostitution as we know it could survive in the alternate universe I describe]; and are not at physical risk of rape, molestation, battery, torture, intimidation, casual insult, prurient invasiveness from biological males every day of our lives…
… then I will happily join you in worrying about and criticising those arrogant segregationist born-women trampling on the rights of born-male wannabe women at a tiny little SubCulture Faire in Michigan. then such women might be acting from a position of privilege — or at least a position of equality.
until then, if you don’t understand why suddenly seeing a biologically male body in a women’s shower would trouble the average woman — let alone a doctrinaire les/radfem/sep — all I can say is you need to call a friend or buy a clue. this is the real world, not some imaginary abstract construct where theoretical human beings engage in theoretical communications. in the real world penises are routinely used to rape women — this is how patriarchy communicates male power; the language of masculinity — real communication, practised daily — reinforces this with nonstop phatic utterance reinforcing the penis=weapon meme and the fuckee=loser meme and the victory=rape meme.
so if naked women see penises and naked men as scary, those women are merely exercising commonsense and self-defence skills in the world men have constructed — the same commonsense and self-defence skills that they will be vilified for failing to exercise, if they are raped in a situation where they stupidly extended “too much” trust to a man or exposed their bodies to a man or men. [tell me, how is anyone to know whether the “transwoman” in the shower is a sincere pre-op trans, or a guy intent on winning a $2500 bet with his college roommates that he can infiltrate the “dyke camp”? what credentials would he have to carry to protect women from this scenario?]
trying to smear women who exercise common sense and reasonable responses to the invasion of private female space by biological males with the taint of Talibanism sounds to me like more of the same-ol’ Librul-Boy BS that we’ve been hearing for the last 50 years, any time a woman criticises male sexual privilege or defies the male ‘right’ to invade any female space at any time on any pretext. ironically it seems to me a “real” (born and raised) woman with full female socialisation would be far more likely to respect the wishes and feelings of others, and not barge into a social space where she was unsure of her welcome. that’s a masculine behavioural signature, to barge into other people’s space and then insist that any lack of welcome indicates something wrong with them.
women-only space is just another form of affirmative action or reparation — the temporary mitigation of a prevailing atmosphere hostile and dangerous to women; how am I to distinguish, morally, your selfrighteous condemnation of women’s attempts to defend that space, from the rhetoric of angry whiteboys who insist that Affirmative Action is just “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism” and that it’s “unfair” for women or minorities to get any preferential treatment in hiring? perhaps affirmative action and reparations are, generically, an ethically questionable tactic. but in am imperfect world, bandaids can make a difference.
it should be possible to discuss the ethics of separatism — be it gender, ethnic, religious, etc — and power, without taking the stance of the empowered male who condemns separatism as an infringement of his privilege to be everywhere and own all spaces. I have my own issues with separatism and I think it could be a productive discussion. but pretending that women are in some way ideologically, morally, or intellectually deficient because they are angry at having a women’s shower facility invaded by biological men, is not productive discussion.
specifically I suggest that In this sense your comments lack insight into what you are talking about. is a very counterproductive — and insulting — thing for a man to say to a woman talking about sexism, much as it would be for a whitefella to say to a black south african talking about apartheid. the person who lacks insight — and imho lacks also a fundamental respect for women — seems to be you. if you want feminists to engage with your ideas seriously, start by not talking down to women as if you were a Distinguished Senior Professor and they were regrettably dull students. women know more about the material conditions of women’s lives than you ever will — and far more about the ‘male gaze’ (which most any woman, even an “I’m not a feminist but” sister, knows all too well from early adolescence on).
I don’t often respond with such acerbity or intemperance, but I agree with Stan: this kind of pompous condescending bollocks — and I use the gendered pejorative advisedly — is what alienates women from the left and from male-dominated orgs and efforts generally. and — cue irony sound effects — it makes women long for women-only space where we will not be dismissed, ignored, or patronisingly instructed in the “real” meanings of our experience and our feelings. one of the impulses behind the founding of the “women’s culture” separatist and Politicalesbian movement of the 70’s was the despair of left activist women over the arrogance, sexism, and condescension of lefty men. many of the founders of the subculture which spun off Women’s Music and the Women’s Festivals, were alienated Left women.
22 June 2006, 4:47 pmAgnes:
Reading the base article made my skin crawl.
I am a survivor of what used to be called ‘transsexualism’, having undergone reassignment in 1970 at age 30. I am definitely not ‘transgendered’ (whatever that is), though there are people who want to force me to accept that label. I experience my gender as unchanged, apart from maturation, since childhood. Androgenous then, I am no less so now.
I also have a respectable CV as a fang-and-claw feminist and am a committed vernacular socialist (I mention that merely in passing).
In my experience, people who claim the identity ‘feminist’ range from egalitarians to embarrassing bigots. That’s also true of those women who identify as ’separatist’. The women who started the MWMF identify as feminist lesbian separatists, and in my opinion are willfully ignorant bigots. For that reason, I have never even considered attending their event. It would be like attending something put on by the KKK or Stormfront.
But if I did attend some women-only event where nudity was okay, it certainly would totally creep me out to see a penis! I wouldn’t be able to accept such a person as being female-identified, let alone female. That might be the defining difference between ‘transgendered’ people and people like me–I positively *hated* having to take off my clothes in front of anyone else under any circumstances, and would have paid money to have avoided it. (Actually, I don’t like letting anyone see me nude even now, even for medical care. Some injuries never heal.)
I call the MWMF founders willfully ignorant bigots because it doesn’t take much research to determine that the essentialism that underpins their antipathy toward presumptive non-XX people is medievalist nonsense.
Right up until about 50 years ago, women could live out their lives unaware that they were chromosomally XY (’male’). Now that condition has a name: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. It’s often not very distinguishable clinically from Rokitansky’s Syndrome, which afflicts XX (’female’) people. It’s also not rare.
And there are guys who turn out to be chromosomally ‘female’. They get the SRY (male-determining) gene by accident along with the X chromosome from their father. How many? Nobody knows, because unless they get a karyotype done, nobody can tell. They’re just guys.
But based on the essentialist mythology that the sex chromosomes are the only important determiners of personality and identity, the XY woman with AIS would be excluded, but the XX man with SRY would be admitted. I think it should be clear why that’s anti-scientific bigotry.
Stan asks: “The question has to be raised here, what is the system and the thought process that makes anyone seek surgery (which didn’t exist a few years ago) to change their body when it is functional? Are we separating the spirit from the body? When someone says they are trapped in a body, one that is the wrong end of a socially constructed gender binary, how can we evade the fact that this sense that one is trapped is also a cultural product?”
This is a common question, based on deep misunderstanding. Or at least it\’s misunderstanding in the context of my experience and that of people like me. It might be a valid question when referring to people who identify as ‘transgendered’.
I was about 10 years old when I finally worked out that boys *LIKED* their geordies and were *PROUD* of them. I can’t possibly convey what an alienating revelation that was. But it explained a lot that I’d become increasingly worried about: regardless of outward appearance, and regardless of my preference for reading and exploring rather than dolls and other ‘girly’ pursuits, I was obviously not a boy in myself. If one had to feel happy about having a geordie and goolies to be a proper boy, then I was NOT a boy. Whatever had happened to me (and being an avid reader of traditional folktales I had my suspicions!), I was obviously a girl, just not on the outside.
All else followed from that.
22 June 2006, 6:01 pmJen:
I can’t help but feel this article is dismissive of trans issues. I have multiple MTF and FTM friends and know people on both sides of the issue when it comes down to Michigan Women Festival, but I will willingly say I am no expert on either. In light of that, this article rubs me thr wrong way, I do however feel it important for trans folks to investigate feminism and the patriarchy, but to hold them to a level that they MUST understand it seems a bit over fetched (holding them to a higher standard) Kind of like saying gay folks shouldn’t want to get married and buy into the whole institution. As a lesbian I want the rights that institution holds, I could care less about the institution as a whole. I think it may be easier to say “why would you want that” when you can get it, or to be so fed up with our current state of affairs to dismiss it if you are in fact gay. But in the meantime I want protection dammit. I think its similar for transfolks, feeling like they fit in thier skin is issue number one. Its not just a choice or a thought one comes up with one night. Sometimes people just want to feel normal for a little while because they haven’t thier whole lives. Sure you can ask “what is normal” and say “its a constructed normal” but until you are in that place yourself its easy to say they are being selfish.(and many do not feel “normal” after surgery, they have to construct thier own normal in the end) Attacking them isn’t going to make transfolks want to look into these issues. I have been reading bell hooks today and I kinda feel this fits into some of her writing on racism and sexism, how black women felt more alligned with black men than they did with feminist white women.
On a side note, I had a discussion with a black female teacher in high school (I am a white female) about how she would always be black and everyone would know it and treat her like she was but if i didn’t want people to know I was gay by looking at me I could dress different. I see what she means (to the best of my ability) but if I did work to fit myself into that “straight” look I would not feel right, on the inside. While the outside world may treat me without discrimination I would not be living whole. While our situations were different mine was certainly an issue.
So back to my point, I feel this article uses broad strokes like a paint roller to paint something that looks more like tree roots, many different opinions, aspects and people involved.
Gay agenda? Like we could all agree on one thing!
22 June 2006, 6:04 pmDoyle Saylor:
Stan writes;
Thank you Doyle for that pre-freshman tutorial in vulgar marxism
Doyle;
I see you are being rubbed the wrong way. For example;
Stan;
This comment is putting you on thin ice here. FS will not become a space that intimidates and bullies women.
Doyle;
I’m not sure you understand me either. We seem to be talking past one another. Which I find odd, but in any case, my views on these issues have been around for a long time. For example;
Stan writes;
You need to research “male gaze†before you start popping off about it, because it is brilliantly apparent that you do not understand what it means, and that you haven’t the least intention of adopting, even for the sake of argument, the standpoint of women for even one second.
Doyle;
The first time I saw the ‘male gaze’ was in a book on anti-ocular art by Martin Jay called Down Cast Eyes. That would be about 1993 or so. I’m not an academic I just read a lot. What I thought then and I think now is the phrase says virtually nothing about ‘looking’. It’s feable analysis of oppression.
Usually people mean by Vulgar Marxism a rote rigid uneducated interpretation of Marxism. I think you are wrong about my views. But the only way that resolves itself is if you change your mind knowing me in the long run.
The holes in most Post Modernist thinking as Jay epitomizes is the inability to come to clarity about conflicting currents (a dialectical view of conflict in which one takes from both sides of conflict to find strength). The everything is ok relativism lead Jay to write a book critical of Marxist Wholism because that synthesis was no longer possible in post modern times.
Since I don’t find this avenue politically useful to the whole question of womens liberation I advocate what I think a more consistent left view of what to do. I.e. the work that underlies sexist social relations. The Gaze is not a work concept. It’s a bare political assertion one can’t translate into action. It does not describe seeing in any sort of detail. It’s anti-ocular in the Jay sense of the phrase in that one is trying describe how Anglo-European concepts of vision are related to dominance.
In a technical sense alternative perspectives on the social structure of sexism seem to me much more fruitful in examining the nexus of language and emotion structure. To be frank, ‘the gaze’ tells the average person nothing about what male patriarchy does.
However;
Stan writes;
but the distinctly MALE hauteur of your post (including your objectivist demand for “physical evidenceâ€) is exactly the kind of thing that consistently drives women away from most of the leftist lists I have been on in the past.
Doyle;
I’m not interested in driving women from this site or any other. Like you I am committed more or less to the same sorts of changes in social structure that would end patriarchy.
The fractious nature of blogs lists and other such things is the lack of common shared work. Since you and I don’t work in the same task, as cooperative workers you seem to offer no alternative to resolution other than you interpret me as anti-this or that.
In other words you don’t get it I’m an ally and friend and you assert I’m so and so, but you don’t have any way to verify that.
So I ask you to come down from your judgement and think about what I’m saying with less leap to judgement and more interest in what I am saying.
I’m anti bullying, anti sexism, but I’m not a particular supporter of various gambits that arose in the U.S. with neo-liberalism. One - the segregationism that flowed out of the seventies turn to the right. Two the weakness and academic jargon of Post Modernism. Three endless chauvinism and inability to find solidarity and unity in the U.S. left.
Finally the main issue that faces the left in the U.S. is to directly realistically attack and destroy patriarchy. Toward that end my view is that the key issue is emotion structure in the work process of social connection. In that sense your reference to bullying resonates with me since it is the emotion structure of bullying that re-inforces sexist society.
22 June 2006, 6:19 pmthanks,
Doyle
Agnes:
Doyle, the phrase ‘male gaze’ might not convey any meaning to you, but I think that’s probably because you don’t understand the language. The phrase is in ‘feminese’, as it were.
Women -feminists, anyway- know exactly what it means. It’s shorthand for unconsidered objectification.
Any man can stare at us and undress us with his eyes as of right. It’s the ‘as of right’ part that’s most significant here. It’s an expression of power.
The male gaze says that we should be pleased, even flattered to be stared at and evaluated sexually, that there’s something wrong with us if we want to be let alone, if we’re not interested in being attractive to men, or even just not interested in being evaluated by that one man at that point in time.
To the male gaze, we have no rights worth respecting. And that is a fact that’s beyond infuriating.
22 June 2006, 7:00 pmJulian Real:
Lapetrov said: So, I disagree with you 100% that the suffering isn’t systematic. It is.
To Lapetrov: I completely agree. That was really sloppy on my part. What I meant, I guess, was that males are not systematically subjected to what girls and women are systemically subjugated by and subjected to, in the precise ways girls and women are subjugated. But YES, and thank you for the clarification: what happens to males in patriarchy is systematic! (I agree!)
Audrey said: Maybe a week’s too long. Nobody seems to mind if I have a female friend over at my house for an afternoon. It’s within the socially acceptable limits. Six hours with one friend, that’s okay. Twenty hours, five friends might be pushing it – anything more starts to look like a movement, and then it’s sexist, I guess.
To Audrey: I’ve always found discussions about the MWMF to be a litmus test of misogyny or male privilege. It is in Scapegoat, I believe, that Andrea Dworkin makes mention of the idea of a Women’s Nation. Most of the white women know have said “I’d move there in a second!” (Not primarily lesbian white women, either!) I don’t think most men get what a psychic/spiritual/political burden it is, in so many ways, to be around men almost all of the time. Why there isn’t MORE woman-only space is the question! Not why is there only one week of it.
and this: Just an FYI: If I’m involved in whatever length break from you all that I’m taking, I don’t consider it part of that break to have you wandering into my shower. My apologies to anyone who is offended by that.
To Audrey: I’m not at all offended, and I am angered that male-raised people can be so callous to the needs of women for safe “unmanned space”.
Doyle said: To me ‘male gaze’ is really an empty rhetorical terminology that comes out of ‘reification’ of the system as it is.
To Doyle: As Stan noted, this is a well-utilized feminist phrase. I come from an art background, among others, educationally, and “the male gaze” was discussed not nearly enough. It impacts on women in so many ways: it is, practically, impossible to escape, and obnoxious as hell. And I say this as a gay man who has endured men’s objectification for years, until removing myself from most public spaces. And I know from women friends, that what I dealt with doesn’t compare at all to what they deal with, because of so many other factors that go into creating unsafety for women that men don’t deal with, generally and publicly.
and this: And just as obviously women are oppressed despite the cloth protection from the male gaze.
To Doyle: The oppressive male gaze does still impact deeply on women who are publicly covered up. It’s perhaps a husband’s gaze, rather than a crowd’s, but the dehumanizing gaze is still there.
and this: This communication process of connection is where sexism is built.
To Doyle: If it were only this simple. Sexism is built with so many methods and means, there surely isn’t just one!
and this: From my side I say it is the connection process mediated by human feelings is the solution to sexism
To Doyle: Have you met Charles Brown? Your solutions are similar enough, and ignore systemic, structural harms that better communication and sharing of feelings alone will not eradicate. Keep in mind, most of the Earth’s population are not being heard at all, and most of what the oppressed have to say is dismissed by the oppressor with comments like “that doesn’t make sense”.
Yolanda said: Nobody gives women a free ride, and I get extremely angry when anyone (including you, bruh) so much as hints as such. Simply put Julian, your wording of these two sentences infuriated me.
To Yolanda: I can understand why, Yolanda. In going over that, I realized how dumb that was to say, and how ridiculous. So thank you for pointing that out. I apologize for being so sloppy and wrong in my statement, and for infuriating you.
and this: In fact Julian, what most frustrates me are your occassional tendencies toward liberalism, especially on the questions of gender-race variance and personal identity.
To Yolanda: We have some real differences of experience and opinion here, and I hope we can mutually respect one another even with those. And I welcome anyone here to point out where I slip into a liberalism that is harmful to your struggles for justice and freedom. And thank you for doing so here, and I hope you have the stamina to continue to do so! But it is my work to try and correct those faulty views/perspectives/statements BEFORE they get to you eyes, and I will work harder to do just that.
and this: But does that mean that a person gets to weasle out of a major identifying status, ESPECIALLY one that confers extreme privilege and power AND/OR atrocious persecution?
To Yolanda: I don’t agree I have done that, since my very earliest posts, in which I incorrectly tried to speak of myself as ungendered, and threw up some other smokescreens about my identity. But those early posts ARE THERE, and DO MATTER. You have educated me about what is messed up about that, and I have taken those corrections to heart, and now call myself an adult whitemale, among other things. You prefer to call me a white man. Please do.
22 June 2006, 7:16 pmSks:
“If we only see the individual ethical dimensions of hese questions, and do not wieghin on the systemic dimension, there is a tendency to slip into what might be called a kind of phenotype authenticity, with its first cousin, tokenism”
And its bad uncle: labelism.
“Thank you Doyle for that pre-freshman tutorial in vulgar marxism”
Oh, people forget: Stan is post-patriarchial, but he still Da Man…
Seriously, tho, thats the most male I have ever read you. Don’t relapse, you know?
De:
“I don’t often respond with such acerbity or intemperance, but I agree with Stan: this kind of pompous condescending bollocks — and I use the gendered pejorative advisedly — is what alienates women from the left and from male-dominated orgs and efforts generally. and — cue irony sound effects — it makes women long for women-only space where we will not be dismissed, ignored, or patronisingly instructed in the “real†meanings of our experience and our feelings.”
This is methinks is the synthesis of it all.
Yet I must ask, why are “separatist” spaces to be dismissed? After all, workers have unions to which only workers belong, progressive ethnic organizations abound, etc. I think, for example, that NOW is weaker, not stronger, for having men inside. (Imagine the NAACP led by whites with a black head!)
Even the most progressive of men, under patriarchy, fall into two categories: those who become hermits in order not to oppress (am thinking Julian Real here), and those who accept that they will be oppressive, come to term with it, seek to mitigate this impulse, and each day more or less succesfully do it - partiarchy is like alcoholism, you are one until you die, its how you handle it what counts…(am thinking Stan).
In either case, not a hell of a lot useful to women.
This is why I brought up the Women’s Caucus in my organization.
One of the most positive aspects it seems to have is that since a lot of the people in the organization, for many reasons, end up together as couples, it eliminates the power dynamics of the relationship from the equation.
Another is that we men are keenly made aware of how oppresive we are as men: some of the leaders and spokespeople that emerge are the ones who are quiet and sheepish in mixed debates. This has a strong political effect.
As to what we have at hand, I have to say I both understand the point, and cant really tell, but ultimatelly, it was up to the women in those showers to decide either way.
What I do think could be brought up is that there is a relatively well documented history of homophobia and hetereosexism in the women’s movement, both towards lesbians and to gay men.
And that this homophobia and hetereosexism was frequently disguised as well-worded, seemingly coherent, critiques of the gender roles of Butch-femme relationships and of misogynistic gayness.
That both exist, and in the case of gay misogynism probably prevalent, cannot be teleologicized, in my opinion, into an overshadowing denial of the existence, and the right to exist, of gays, lesbians, transgendered and bisexual people, or that while such sexual identies exist within patriarchy under specific forms, it doesnt mean that these forms are inherent to the sexual preference. (they sometimes feel motivated by a certain fear of de-gendered androginy, of a post-gendered bisexuality… I digress)
Perhaps this article follows in this same vein, and perhaps it doesn’t.
If it does, it must not be used to diminish the arguement of male oppression of women, if it isn’t, then perhaps some abbyss needs to be mended, thought about and acted upon those who feel like women but posses penises, and those who are born with the “(in)correct” genitalia.
(I found it interesting and contradictory that in the same paragraph where there is a protest against the presence of penises in a female shower, there is a rather correct explanation on how gender is social. Internal coherence always is the weak part of identity politics, it seems.)
I just don’t buy this whole transgenderism as a form of male privilege thing. I havent mayde up my mind, and am listening, but it just feels like old school hetereosexist womanism. It feels like the Revolutionary Communist Party’s line on homosexuality until the late 1990s. Its oppresive.
In particular I find it hard to swallow from women whose experience in male oppression in general pale in comparison to those of women who couldn’t escape, and much less afford to take off “one week in one remote corner of the United States to feel completely safe from male violence”.
The wife of the petty-bourgeosie is not the same as the wife of a worker…
As to Yolanda and transphobia:
This is true:
“And I’ll say it again and again: MAN AND WOMAN AIN’T EQUAL, FOLKS! Women don’t run the gender system! We ain’t the problem dammit!”
But by seemingly denying that there is such a thing as a transgendered person (somethign even the Islamic Republic of Iran recognizes, AND PAYS FOR OPERATIONS), you are being transphobic.
You are doing to transpeople what we men do to you. It is indeed as simple as that: trnsgendered people dont choose to be transgendered in the same way women dont choose to be women. (please do not confuse tranvestites, men with the sexual fetish of dressing up in traditional female garb, with transgenderism, which are women born inside of bodies with penises, rarely but sometimes even having an extra X cromosome and even less rarely but also know to happen, being XX cromosome but having a penis)
Which brings me to something that is inescapble: women might not run the show, but they are an essential part of the show.
This can be called the “treason to gender is loyalty to humanity” question.
While men are the oppressors, and the ultimately privileged group under patriarchy, they are to a lesser extent also its victims, and women, in a perverse twist, are generally tasked with reproducing it…
One of my first experiences with gender inequality and my own position of power was when my paternal grandmother asked me, when I was 5 or 6, “how many girlfriends do you have?”. Lets not get into how ludicrous it was to ask a 5 year old if he had a girlfriend, but lets concentrate on the quantity issue: I was being trained as a man, expected to have multiple adulterous relationships based on lying and patrairchial notions of success, not by a man, but by a woman!
Which to round up that point the issue might not be men v women, but gender itself, and the social organization around it.
Althought like with class, we must first embrace that division in order to destroy it, it doesnt emerges, at least from my point of view, that gender, not which gender, is the oppression.
(As I find time to rejoin the convo, I please ask not to do this error again: we might disagree with our intepretations, but as a red diaper granchild of revolutionary women, I have been privileged with a great practical and theoretical education on gender politics, besides of a decent library which contains quite a lot of somewhat obscure-but-seminal 60-70-80s USonian and world radical feminism/womainism. So please do not assume ignorance. Assume in any case that I am mistaken. Please.)
22 June 2006, 10:14 pmYolanda Carrington:
Sks…where did I deny the existence of transgendered people? Please read the goddamn posts I wrote again.
Again…you’re a man that ain’t listening. Fuck.
23 June 2006, 12:01 amDoyle Saylor:
Julien writes;
To Doyle: Have you met Charles Brown?
Doyle;
Yes I met Charles online about 1998. I like Charles. I had a nice exchange last year with Charles on PEN-L about Angela Davis. I admire Angela quite a bit, though I’m more concerned with a femminist re-orientation of Marxism than she is. That’s why I am here, because Stan and others here seem much more deeply committed to Women’s liberation. Most of the left does not try, and to me this is the central core issue that serious change would have to advance.
I was once a member of M/L organization founded by lesbians that used traditional communist organization to advance a solution to a sexist left. While it failed as an organization I got a clear picture that a left ought to always reflect women fully impowered and able to directly address power issues essentially a direct challenge to patriarchy.
SKS writes;
Oh, people forget: Stan is post-patriarchial, but he still Da Man…
Seriously, tho, thats the most male I have ever read you. Don’t relapse, you know?
Doyle;
I take Stan is trying to keep me from taking over conversation and to him I feel arrogant. I think his aim is what any group like this needs a sense of the purpose and to make new voices not step on others but strengthen the groups whole view. I still think when he gets to know me his impression will shift.
Agnes writes;
To the male gaze, we have no rights worth respecting. And that is a fact that’s beyond infuriating.
Doyle;
23 June 2006, 10:08 amMy position is to recognize your feelings and what it would take to address for example ‘infuriating’ as a social realty I’m part of. I get it that people see the metaphor, Male Gaze, as a prime way to describe a patriarchal system. Where I agree is patriarchy is the central problem of social change. So my question then is the tension between us about terminology how do we resolve that emotion issue that reflects a clear anti-patriarchy solution?
thanks,
Doyle
Stan:
Doyle, I ain’t mad atcha. You have seen what I’m talkiing about… and I am already uncomfortable that the danger is emerging that we men are now dominating this conversation.
Can you explain what you are taling about, the “emotion issue”? It’s never been clear to me what you mean.
23 June 2006, 10:30 amAudrey:
Doyle: When you write the phrase ‘male gaze’ it seems as if you are referring to something like an oppressors looking at something. However, besides the phrase what sort of physical evidence backs this up? To me ‘male gaze’ is really an empty rhetorical terminology that comes out of ‘reification’ of the system as it is. In other words, to you it’s a wooden statue looking at you, rather than for me a dynamic human made society. The statue can’t stop ‘gazing’ because it’s wooden.
Target #7: I like the imagery of the gazing wooden statue. Sadly, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, possibly because I’m bereft of insight. This is not “empty rhetorical terminology†to people that live it. I am not referring to wooden statues. I am referring to men continually checking out women’s asses, chests, etc. to assess if they’re good enough to sleep with, and having the expectation that we are always on display for their viewing pleasure, and feeling like it’s their God-given right to give us constant feedback on how we’re doing in the fuckability department, even if there is no possibility that we’d be sleeping together, even if we didn’t ask for their opinions.
And I am referring to the opposite effect also, when women are deemed unfuckable, whether through age, cellulite, body hair, etc. It becomes women’s moral obligation to cover up whatever offending body parts there are so that men don’t have to withstand the horror of looking upon the unfuckable female body, even if it’s 90 degrees out, and men will actively police that for us, and I could go into that at length if you think that’s something vague and rhetorical.
I’m also referring to being deliberately used on the job as a prop for the almighty male gaze when it’s convenient for my bosses – like at my old job being sent to the Pentagon to get shit signed off for my boss, being advised to wear my pin-striped Allie McBeal suit that barely covers my ass when I sit, because the guy that needs to sign off on our program likes how I look in that suit. (20 pounds ago, anyway. *stares ruefully down at gut*). If I had a voice and a guitar, I’d be writing songs about him and me sizing up each others’ war chests.
I’m referring to guys honking at you while you’re driving, pointing at their ring finger urgently, and that ick feeling you get when you realize they’re asking if you’re married. You’re driving home minding your own business, enjoying a temporary respite from being everyone’s potential fuckobject, and then you’re jarred back to reality, where it turns out the whole time you’ve been on display (the runway) for the idiots in the next lane, who suddenly need to know if you’re already sleeping with someone because in the two minutes they’ve been driving next to you, they’ve decided they’re willing to screw you if you’re available. Yippee!
Just once, I’d like the guy in the next lane to lift up a