Folks:

I am, myself, a bit conflicted about the relationship between feminisms and
the trans movement. 

This dates back to my early expansion of non-academic feminist awareness,
sparked by discussions of the Michigan Women's Festival which was trying to
juggle the idea that the festival was supposed to be a place where women
felt safe with whether to admit pre-op MTF, post-op FTM, or other variants
of human sexual and gender identity. Women who had, for instance, been
victims of rape or sexual assault by men were experiencing threat (but not
being performatively threatened) from the presence of persons with penises.
Others testified to feeling uncomfortable at best in the presence of person
who had been born and reared male because they exhibited typically masculine
behaviors and that this was off-putting at best and threatening at worst.
This debate was eventually "settled" by explicitly stating that the festival
would be for "women-born", if I recall correctly.  This was controversial
even in feminist circles because it's an essentialist version of what it is
to be women (that you are born).  It has resulted in the placement of
protest camps outside the festival every year staffed by trans persons and
persons allied with the trans movement.  So this was my first exposure to
the possible conflicts between feminisms and the trans movement.  

Carl Elliott's most intriguing book, Better Than Well: American Medicine
Meets the American Dream, also identifies a possible problem for the trans
movement like the one described by Renee, though he does not contrast it
with feminisms.  Elliott's framework in the book is the contrast between the
language of authenticity (that medical technology can help us to be our true
selves) and the tyranny of the majority (that some or many of our desires
and choices are shaped by the mainstream, even and perhaps especially our
desire to and means of rejecting the mainstream).  In analyzing sex change
operations, Elliott persuasively recounts the story of a person who wishes
to undergo a sex change operation (MTF).  He presents it as a tale of
authenticity, persuasively, so persuasively that when I teach this section
of the book even most of my conservative students feel compassion for the
trans person's existential angst.  

Elliott then goes on to say that even the trans person whom he discusses was
reluctant to adopt the authenticity argument because it seemed essentialist
but eventually did so for rhetorical purposes because only then would the
medical establishment perform the procedure and there was some truth in the
authenticity argument.  Ultimately, though, Elliott's analysis is that when
trans folks who choose surgery (or, presumably, full bivalent gender
performance) do so, they are both reacting against the limitations of
society's bivalent gender model and simultaneously reifying it: "I do not
feel like A; society allows A or B; therefore I will choose B." (that is my
paraphrase rather than a direct quote from Elliott)

What do the rest of you think about these two cases (Michigan Women's
Festival and Elliott's analysis)?  I haven't made up my mind, but because of
them I already understand Renee's position even though I do not know whether
I fully concur.  I am convinced that the relationship between feminisms and
the trans movement is fraught, and that goals and means for particular
feminisms can indeed conflict with goals and means for trans folks at a very
basic level and not merely on a pragmatic one.

Best,
  Alison 


-----Original Message-----
From: Feminist ethics and social theory [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Renee
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 1:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: alert regarding DSMV and reparative therapy" to "cure" LGBT

Ann and Loren, et al;

I wanted to address what you have shared and I wanted to respond rather 
specifically why I feel the trans movement as it understands and constructs 
itself is antithetical to feminism. Ann, I may have made blanket statements 
but I haven't seen any exceptions to what I said and therefore I am pretty 
comfortable what I said.

First of all, I don't think feminism is all that diverse. I think there are 
people who call themselves feminists who diverge from it and this divergence

is one on of the major reasons why feminism has come to so politically 
ineffectual. In my own experience, I became a radical because I came to see 
major problems in liberal feminism.

But I wanted to focus on why feminists should take issue with trans ideology

and what the problems are. One of the most serious anti-feminisms in trans 
ideology is the treatment of gender as a noun, as if gender is a natural 
entity and gender is something someone has. I'd submit that gender is a verb

because it's a social and perceptual process. People simply behave. 
Observers gender(verb) the behavior and in doing so behaviors that are 
gendered are compared to prescriptions and norms. These behaviors are held 
in place by the insistence that gender is real and occurs in a nativistic 
fashion. Out of these constructions women are seen as being inferior to men 
because of supposed pre-social determinants of gender (as a noun).

"I have never heard one remark that could be considered anti-feminist. I 
have had numerous heart-felt conversations with trans-women who, while 
celebrating the physical changes of transition are finding just how 
precipitous a plunge they have taken in terms of social privilege. 
Transmen, like myself, have our own experiences of crossing the great gender

divide."

What gender divide? Feminism sees two gendered (verb) classes of people. 
What divide are you referring to? What kind of Being are you proposing that 
this divide has?

"Of course, whether one physically transitions or transgresses gender in 
other ways, one can barely help but consider the very difficult questions of

what gender means in our society, the strengths and weaknesses of 
essentialist views, and how the psychological establishment holds a dominant

position in our quest to be ourselves and to be understood by others as 
such."

From a feminist perspective, gender is a system of privations imposed upon 
women (verb statement). It is not mysterious and its meaning is pretty 
clear. It manifests itself in terms of women making seventy cents to the 
male dollar, and eighty three percent of congress being men. It manifests 
itself in terms of the deep hatreds unleashed on Hillary Clinton during this

election. Gender mean no women CEOs in the fortune fifty and two percent of 
the fortune 500 have women CEOs. That's the "great gender divide" as 
feminists understand it. Feminist analysis doesn't mystify gender - the 
trans movement does. What strengths in essentialists views? To borrow one of

the most succinct quotes, "Essentialism and feminism cannot occupy the same 
space."

"I would hope that this would be an opportunity to have these groups work
together as opposed to having some groups (those who identify as B, L or
G) distance themselves from the concerns of transpersons for fear of some
kind of political contamination."

I think defining oneself around a social construct and making that construct

the most salient thing about you actually shows a deep paradigmatic 
misunderstanding of gender as feminist analysis understands it.  For me 
personally, I don't want to work with people who propagate these 
understandings and who have internalized trans-culture. I'm not worried 
about contamination, I worry about what trans ideology does to UNDO feminism

and to situate women. We've see the phrase "gender variant". Such a term 
implies gender norms which is exactly what feminists want to eradicate.

What I see is that trans-ideology is a set of distortions and unsupported 
declarations. It also is an extremely coercive movement. If I do not accept 
husbands and father as women, then I am transphobic. I don't accept husbands

and fathers as women because women aren't husbands or fathers. The 
trans-movement presents a demand, that I pretend that I do see them as 
women. Along with that is a demand that my experience be trumped by someone 
else's voluntary life choices. I am supposed to relate to these people as if

I accept them in a wholly undiscerning manner, as if they are all the same 
and as if they have the same degree of credibility. I do not think they do. 
I think some have quite a bit of credibility and other have very little. 
That's the politically homogenizing function of the trans umbrella.  If I 
voice that, the consequences are dire and punitive. To be honest, after 
looking at this, I've concluded that transphobia is a set of valid feelings 
and people are punished for having those feelings. But saying that takes 
enormous courage. Why should I fear saying, "this is what my experience
is."? 
I am supposed to accept people with penises as women and pretend that they 
do not have penises. If I do not play the game, again the social 
consequences are dire. It's next to impossible for feminists to publish 
critiques of the trans movement. In these manners, feminist women are being 
silenced. It feels like the 1950's and the McCarthy era.

Trans-ideology seems very twisted to me because of the placement of the 
"alter of gender" (noun as used by the movement). It doesn't have to be. 
People don't have to be constructed as natural objects who are pre-socially 
determined by "brain sex". Radical feminism has done a huge amount of work 
to unravel constructions around gender. Trans-world is busy re-tangling 
them. It isn't about contamination, it's very much about a reification of 
deeply rooted constructions providing patriarchy with its most bedrock 
justifications for the systematic oppression of women and treatment of 
gender as a noun and as if gender is some/thing that someone contains or 
conversely is contained in. It's also about a culture that has inherited 
from transvestites and crossdressers.

Often people who are opposed to the trans movement speak for individuals 
constructing strawmen and then arguing against the strawmen. I hope I don't 
do that because I feel that there is enough wrong with the ideology that I 
don't have to.

Ann, you mentioned transfeminism. What I have seen has either been pro-sex 
feminism which supports pornography and the prostitution of women or has a 
centrality in trans-issues. When feminism is seen as human rights movement 
perhaps it fits but when feminism is seen appropriately as a political 
movement addressing the material concerns of women, trans feminism just 
doesn't have much in common with feminism and I would assert is actually 
frequently at odds with it. I have seen a little of Julia Serano's writing 
which is essentialistic and again begins with a declaration, "I am a woman".

There is never a statement of what constitutes this individual with male 
anatomy as a woman. Is she saying, "I am this kind of object"? Then there is

the use of 'trans misogyny". Looking at the roots of misogyny, I understand 
it to apply to people with vaginas. However Serano is treated, I wouldn't 
think the word is applicable and that looks like yet another linguistic 
distortion and begging of the question. I have never seen transfeminism 
address choice or equal pay for women. On the other hand I have often seen 
many of the arguments employed by the men's rights movement against women in

the form of "women do it too."

I think there are places where these people could make contributions. There 
has to be a linkages between identity (not "identify as" but identity), 
epistemology and gendered standpoints.  But in order to look at these 
phenomenon, one would have to read and understand feminism in significant 
depth. I've never really seen that occur in a trans-identified person. One 
would have to see that ALL of our identities are constructed and that most 
people's identities are validated by patriarchy. The trans movement is not 
looking at such issues or asking such questions.

It is for these reason that I'd say that the trans movement is not a friend 
to women.

renee