On Transgender, Transsexuals, and Entrenching the Binary Gender System
| April 27th, 2006It’s been years - almost two decades - since the last time I wore makeup or a dress. Why? I like dresses.
I recently noticed that - although I’ve never given the matter any conscious thought - that I always tie my hair back in a low ponytail. Even though a high ponytail would often be more comfortable (for instance, in airplanes, cars, and other situations with high-backed chairs). But a high ponytail is seen as “feminine” in our society, and I unconsciously chose to avoid that.
I spend a lot of time thinking about feminism and sexism and the need to fight our society’s coercive gender role structure. Yet when I shop for clothing, I do so in a way that implicitly condones those very roles. I dress like a man. I tie my hair in a culturally masculine style. I’m helping to entrench the system I oppose.
Yawning Lion at Fem-muh-nist writes:
I have heard the argument that transitioning from one sex to the other challenges the idea of gender as binary. I don’t understand how. If one moves from male to female or vice versa, there are still only two genders at work, aren’t there? It may become harder to distinguish who is who, or who was born what, but the binary gender system remains intact, and women remain at the bottom. If this is truly a challenge to the system and to patriarchy, I would like to understand precisely how that happens. What I see is that it further entrenches the system, while at the same time challenging the legitimacy of complaints against the system - after all, could being a woman be so bad if some people choose to become women?
1) Nothing about transitioning necessarily challenges the idea of gender as a binary. Nor does not transitioning challenge the idea of gender as a binary. Challenging gender as a binary is something we do with advocacy, not by being transgendered or not.
2) However, it should be noted that “male to female or vice versa” with “only two genders at work,” while perfectly valid, is not a complete list of how people are transgendered. Some people have explicitly fluid gender identities, or in some other way refuse to identify as simply “male” or simply “female.” Insofar as their “fluid” gender identities are made public, these folks implicitly challenge the idea of gender as a simple binary.
3) Furthermore, as Piny points out in YL’s comments, transitioning from one sex to the other implicitly “challenges the gender divider that this society seems most invested in: sex assigned at birth defines your gender position, full stop.”
4) In a sense, transsexuals who move from one sex to the other “entrench the system” of gender as a binary, because they are willing to dress and be identified in society as one gender and not the other. But that’s true of the vast majority of us, transsexual or not.
All of us make compromises with the patriarchal society around us, whether it’s getting married to someone of the opposite sex, or shaving (for women), or shopping only in the “men’s” section of the clothing store (for men), or wearing a low ponytail (for me). There are a thousand ways to compromise with patriarchy - no, ten thousand - and I doubt anyone fights against them all. And all of these decisions and actions could be said to help entrench the gender-binary system.
We all do what we have to do - to survive, to express ourselves, and to feel comfortable with what we see in the mirror. It’s illogical to single out transsexuals for criticism on this score - and yet, transsexuals are constantly singled out for this criticism. I call that discrimination.
5) Regarding “after all, could being a woman be so bad if some people choose to become women?” You might as well say that being gay isn’t so bad if some are out of the closet, or that transphobia isn’t so bad if some people choose to be openly transgendered, or that racism isn’t so bad if some POC who could “pass” for white choose not to. (Piny made this argument, as well).
Bottom line: Patriarchy is a huge edifice. We should welcome a lot of different approaches to challenging it. And virtually everyone has to compromise with patriarchy sometimes.
Finally, in my opinion, feminism has never been at its best or strongest when saying “keep out” to oppressed minorities.
NOTE: I actively limit who can post comments on my threads on “Alas.” If your comments aren’t getting approved for publication here, please consider posting your comments on the exact same post at Creative Destruction.
April 28th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Some darn good points. When my library first got in some books on transitioning–for MTF’s anyway–I was startled at how they urged the person changing to adopt a very stereotypically feminine look, sound, whatever, instead of, say, just wearing women’s jeans, or coming up with something entirely new. And there was someone a good while before that who wrote a whole book, “Transexual Empire” I think it was, claiming that transfolks were just dupes to be slotted into the other patriarchal role and keep the system going. Transwomen were likened to actors in blackface in those old minstrel shows. When I met someone who wanted to change I figured it must be more complicated than that, but I’ve long wondered why anyone would ever want to become a member of an apparently oppressed group. Some cultural feminists out there claim that MTF’s are trying to get hold of some mysterious divine power inherent in womanhood, the same power that men supposedly invented patriarchy to suppress, out of sheer jealousy, but I am leery of such mysticism. I guess I figured my co-worker had his/her own good reasons, and left it at that.
This comment was written by Angiportus.What really creeped me out is when I started reading how doctors could “assign” a gender to an intersexed person, as if laying down some divine fiat, taking no consideration of the individual’s wishes. I believe there were some Native American groups who let infants choose sides on their own, watching which tool they picked up. There were still only 2 choices, but it seemed slightly more humane. Of course, what adults think they have the divine right to do to the young is worthy of a whole nother rant (and don’t get me started on doctors either.) When I read somewhere that some infants in this country were being mutilated just to make them fit into a gender–and how telling that they were relegated to the subordinate one!–I about lost my lunch.
You’re right, no one can flout every last rule; I guess we should just do what works for us, and support the freedom of others to do the same.
As one who has never felt much identification with any group yet invented, I am watching this one, and appreciate your holding it up to the light.
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April 28th, 2006 at 5:40 am
More than anything, I think transsexuals challenged the idea that science is about “facts.”
Facts and science are as socially constructed and determined as any other field. But we believe “biology” is correct. If a person is “XX” (how does one really know that?) or “XY” it must be true, because biology says it is true.
Transsexuals interrupt this story time and time again. I no longer believe we are “biologically determined” as we are “scientifically determined.”
If anything, trannsexuals underscore the performativity of science.
This comment was written by Jay Sennett.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 5:58 am
04/28On Transgender, Transsexuals, and Entrenching the Binary Gender System
This comment was written by FeministBlogosphere.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:02 am
All of us make compromises with the patriarchal society around us, whether it’s getting married to someone of the opposite sex, or shaving (for women), or shopping only in the “men’s” section of the clothing store (for men), or wearing a low ponytail (for me).
Saying “all of us” presumes that everyone has characteristics or desires that are at odds with what you view as the “patriarchy”.
I had no desire to establish any kind of partnership with someone of the same sex, nor did I wish to live with my wife and have kids without marriage. I have no desire to go into the women’s clothing department for any reason other than to buy a gift for my wife (and what’s up with the crappy way that women’s clothing is made, anyway?). And I only wish I could grow enough of my hair long enough to make a ponytail out of it - I couldn’t even when I was in college (and I tried).
What compromises am I making to what you call a “patriarchy”? Now, I can see where there may be a lot of people that do. If some guy wants to wear women’s clothing, I say go for it, but I know that there are other people who have a problem with it and that a prospective cross-dresser (sorry if I’m not using the correct term, I’m not trying to make a rhetorical point) would perhaps not do so in the face of such opposition. But on what basis do you presume that everyone has to make such a compromise?
My story on men in women’s clothing; I was working as a network administrator for a now-bankrupt major retailer. Some of the male buyers in the women’s clothing department wore the goods they were buying, at work. One of my staff, who was born and raised in sub-Saharan Africa, told me that he would not go up to that floor to work anymore. He had some cultural objections. I informed him that he’d work wherever the work was, and that if he refused to work in that area he could either quit or get fired. He decided that a regular income was a bigger cultural issue than dealing with cross-dressers, and I didn’t go out of my way to send him into that department.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:08 am
More than anything, I think transsexuals challenged the idea that science is about “facts.”
Science is definitely about facts. But there are those who wish to use science in a non-scientific way.
If a person is “XX” (how does one really know that?) or “XY” it must be true, because biology says it is true.
A human’s genotype can be determined via well-established tests. While there are definitely exceptions, the general case is that all the cells in a given human body have either two X chromosomes or an X and a Y chromosome. Mental and emotional factors can affect how that’s expressed, but if you do a genotype of a group of people, it would be very unusual to find anyone who is not either “XX” or “XY”.
Transsexuals interrupt this story time and time again. I no longer believe we are “biologically determined” as we are “scientifically determined.”
I’m not sure what distinction you are making.
If anything, trannsexuals underscore the performativity of science.
What does “performativity” mean?
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Yes, but this is equally true of a cohort of transsexuals; what does that say about the idea that chromosomes determine sex?
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Ron,
Science is an evolving field, constantly under scrunity. What we are taught in schools, and read in the media, is often several years behind current research.
Further studies of the human genome project suggests that genotypes may be far more complex than originally imagined. Priliminary results suggest a series of complex mechanisms that interact to create many more types that XX or XY.
I suspect one day the science of XX and XY will look like the Ptolemiac universe.
This comment was written by Jay Sennett.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:38 am
Yes, but this is equally true of a cohort of transsexuals; what does that say about the idea that chromosomes determine sex?
There was a whole “sex vs. gender” discussion once that I lost the thread of. With rare exceptions, people are born with either a penis or a vagina. You’re physically either male or female. Now, what you do with these body parts down the line is a different story, and one that can be affected by a few different factors. How you express secondary sexual characteristics is not necessarily tied to biology either.
There are people on this blog that are a lot more knowledgable than I am on the non-biological issues of sex and gender. I’ll defer. I’m simply making the point that biology is a science and that there are certain facts that comprise it. When you start talking about transsexuals, homosexuals, etc., it takes more than biology to explain it. But the fact that biology doesn’t explain everything doesn’t mean that what it does explain isn’t valid. What is invalid is when people try to use a given discipline to try to explain things that has components that fall outside that discipline.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Which is kinda sorta Jay’s entire point.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 8:24 am
isn’t sex determend by chemistry as well as chromosomes? i’m not a doctor or scientist, but in my research pre deciding to transition, i read about various stages of fetal development and the hormonal effects on development. also there were some theories i read about medications that pregnant women took (especially in the 50s & 60s) to fight morning sickness that might’ve contributed to gender dysphoria.
on another point,
i don’t see why tearing down a binary sex status is a necessary part of feminism. i do see that destroying traditional gender stereotypes is a good thing, and a necessary thing to the liberation of women and men. but i don’t think it will ever be successful to make gender fluid, to where there are more than two boxes to check on forms, etc.
now this is entirely thrown out the window when talking about the medically intersexed. it is terrible to assign them physical sexes as infants or young children just so they fit into a box. but don’t most intersexed people eventually feel more comfortable in one sex than the other and choose it later in life? this is usually made harder due to the butchering done to them as infants/children and their parents’ inablilty to accept them as intersexed. but those cases are more like parents who put their kids through painful surgeries to make them taller rather than accept them as dwarfs and seems to have little in common with blurring gender boundries.
but for example, a small personal anectote, amongst goth circles it’s not uncommon for gothboys to wear skirts or dresses, makeup, nail polish, elaborate hair styles, and other “female” accoutrements. these things are considered “female” not by any inherent nature of the item, but by social stereotype. yet while wearing these things the gothboys at no time cease to be boys or desire to be anything but male, perhaps expressing their gentler “feminine” side. although i have seen some really traditional male aggression & acting going on by boys-in-skirts.
likewise, my wife likes to dress up as a boy. she has a great picture we took, where she wore a high-quality fake goatee, a very victorian/goth get-up and looked just a dead-ringer for trent reznor from the “perfect drug” video. and in her real life, she dresses very masculine, she only wears dresses for renfaire (but she has a boy renfaire outfit too) or if she feels like getting all dressed up. walking around in a leather jacket & pants, despite “vast tracts of land” and long hair, she’d often get mistaken for a guy. it was just a little annoying to me but funny in a way, because at the time, she was “passing” better than i was & she absolutey isn’t trans. but i think it’s more a matter of how she carries herself than her clothing. she has a “masculine gait” (i.e. walks with confidence deterimation and no fear) and is often out walking during times of the night when “sensible women” are locked up in their homes.
so i don’t see how genderfking has much to do with transsexualism. genderfking in and of itself is a good thing in that it challenges outside-the-box thinking on societally-imposed gender roles and those genderprison walls should be stormed and torn down.
i remember in my early feminist reading, reading about someone who when it was mentioned to her that she was wearing “men’s” boots, the reply was, ‘i’m a woman, so these are women’s boots.’ there was not an attempt to clame maleness in her person, but to remove the insane social notion that inanimate objects have a gender.
This comment was written by gothgate.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Thank you, Ampersand.
This argument, made by a lot of (though not all) self-identified radical feminists that, somehow, transfolks should represent for everyone how to radically defy gender norms, while thecisgendered walk around representing one side or the other of the gender (and reaping the resulting privilege) is one of the most infuriating to me. Transpeople who represent one pole or the other of a binary gender system are in no way “worse” or “more culpable for the gender binary” than the majority of cisgendered people, including feminists, who live their lives according to these very binaries.
This comment was written by EL.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 8:36 am
FWIW, I’ve always found low-tied ponytails more comfortable on the plane. With the elastic on at the nape of your neck, it won’t be digging into the back of your head every time you lean back. If you have a high-tied ponytail, with the elastic on or near that indent at the top of your skull, it probably will dig. Plus, the tail of hair will tend to scrunch itself flat when you lean back, which looks goofy and elevates the risk of hair getting in your already-dubious-quality airline snack.
Just a tip from your favorite big-haired ultra-femme girly-girl. :p
This comment was written by alsis39.75.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 8:41 am
I work in basic science, the whole search for a “gay gene” or a “fat gene” has always struck me as missing the point: organisms are a result of both the version of each gene they recieve and how it ends up being expressed (or not). So someone could have the version of the gene for leptin that is known to be associated with increased bodyweight, but it does not garantee increased bodyweight, because the complex balance of every single gene, and how they are expressed might even out the “problem” caused by the whacky leptin gene. Which genes you have in your blueprint do not automatically determine every detail, it’s how the blueprint is read and translated into a working organism that does it. Gene expression is affected by so many factors it makes most scientist’s heads spin.
I think this can be extrapolated to the sex chromosomes. Being XX or XY means that statistically speaking you are likely to look and feel like a female or a male respectively, but it doesn’t account for the wide variety of expression of sex charecteristics (both primary and secondary).
Anecdote: I have more of an “hourglass” exaggerated female shape than my “boyish” body-typed sister. Does that make me more female? Nope. For some reason her body type is coming from our mother’s X, and mine is coming from our father’s X chromosome. We each got the same sex chromosomes, but our body types, secondary sex charecteristics, and I’m sure our sexual and gender-identity profiles are quite different.
This comment was written by Rosemary Grace.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 9:04 am
The question of automaticaly conforming is very interesting. My husband also has long hair, and wears it in a low pony tail. He had it in a french braid for our wedding, but that took a little bit of convincing, he was worried it would be too radical for his family. Once he saw how it looked with the splendiferous kilt outfit he’d chosen to wear, he went for the braid. If he worked in a more liberal atmosphere he’d happily wear it braided more often, but his coworkers are highly conservative.
Here’s the kicker, and the reason I’m not publishing my name with this one: he usually wears a bra and women’s panties to work. He finds them comfortable, and was doing it for years before he met me. On the surface he dresses very plainly and in a very stereotypically masculine style, but his collection of cute frilly undies is more extensive than mine. He has no interest in “cross dressing” with outerwear, he identifies as a het male. A het male who prefers women’s undergarments, it’s definitely not a sexual thing for him (I asked), it’s a clothing preference. Just like me wearing pants and non-femmey shoes.
Sometimes I think it would be cool if he were “out” about this preference, to stand as an example of someone who does not fit standard categories and is still a functional member of society. However, he doesn’t want to be a transvestite activist, he really sees it as a non-issue. It’s just what he does. I wish it were this simple for everybody to dress and act how they feel most comfortable with themselves.
This comment was written by Nameless to protect the secretive.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Alsis, I agree that a low ponytail is more comfortable in any situation where you may have to lean on it. Unfortunately, when I try it, my hair finds ways of getting out of it and into my food, cup, mouth and anywhere else it’s not wanted. I have vicious attack hair.
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April 28th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Adding to Rosemary Grace’s and point, and hoping not to harp on something irrelevant: Perhaps we can agree that even good old fashioned science can see that there’s much more to biological sex than chromosomes. You have sex chromosomes, which, in my understanding, can align XXX, XXY, XX, XY, XYY (?) and probably many more combinations. You also have sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen (again, probably more) that are present in various levels across the sexes. Then, you have sex organs, which vary tremendously from person to person. There are interesting cases of people being born as a female and developing the sex organs of a male upon puberty, to give a women’s studies 101 example.
And yet, none of this complexity enters into mainstream conversation about sex difference. And it doesn’t begin to touch the immense diversity of gender expression — across cultures, across ages, across sex, across gender identity, across pregnancies, across sexual desire, across almost anything actually.
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April 28th, 2006 at 10:54 am
RonF:
Yeah, it’s true the exceptions are rare… but I think they’re even biologically more varied than what you’re implying here (which I read as an allowance for intersexed individuals). There are people with XY chromosomes who develop entirely as female without having intersexed characteristics, and I believe who often aren’t diagnosed until problems with menstruation and infertility arise. There are people who appear biologically male who end up having a uterus. Those are the two that come to mind, but I’m sure there are more. (This doesn’t contradict your points.)
Also, I guess the argument that ‘we all have little capitulations to the patriarchy’ is sort of framed as one to be read by those who are struggling against the patriarchy in some way. I don’t get the impression that describes you (though I could be wrong, of course, and if I am, I apologize). But if you aren’t struggling against the patriarchy, then it strikes me that you’re upholding the patriarchy in ways other than those that are listed here… so I still might argue that you’re complicit in supporting the patriarchy in the same way that I am when I, for instance, wear make-up despite my firm conviction that it’s silly. If I’ve misread you or what you’re saying or said something too personal, I apologize.
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April 28th, 2006 at 11:14 am
To further the conversation about biology, the binary nature of human sexuality is a function of the way we reproduce. Human reproduction requires that primary sex characteristics come one each from male and female. That aside, just like everything else about sex in our culture (and most cultures) has evolved out of the protection of human reproduction and thus is built to reinforce the two and only two genders.
That said most of my friends are gay/lesbian/bi with a mix of drag queens, drag kings and transexuals of various degrees of transition. It seems to me that most transgendered people, whichever way they transition, have a number of highly complex emotional and psychological issues with their identity, most especially because they are renouncing one of the primary definitions of personal identity. In one sense they are reinforcing gender stereotypes while rejecting them by rejecting the very thing that gender stereotypes are based on, biology. The reinforcement usually comes with taking hormones, which alter a person’s behavior as well as their secondary sex characteristics.
I don’t think that we are going to be able to alter the binary nature of human reproduction(not yet anyway), but we don’t have to reinforce all of the crap that we have tied to gender like behavior, psychology, fashion sense. I think its wrong to point fingers at each other, saying “your reinforcing gender stereotypes”. Rather I think we need to reinforce instead acceptance of all people’s style, regardless of whether is conforms to gender stereotype of rejects it.
Incidentally, if a person is male and rejects male gender stereotype, aren’t they by definition embracing the opposite(female) stereotype?
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April 28th, 2006 at 11:59 am
bradana:
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement and applaud those who share their own personal experiences which help expand our understanding of what is acceptable. I enjoyed Nameless’ sharing of her husband’s preference for women’s undergarments. I have to admit, twenty years ago my initial response would have been to laugh. I look forward to the day when you people openly discuss these things without fear of judgment.
bradana, your following sentence puzzled me:
I wonder if you really meant this or were just providing a nice fat juiceball down the middle of the plate for someone to jack out of the park?
I look at the boys and young men growing up today and am happy that they are now able to challenge traditional male stereotypes without fear of judgment. Heck, it’s the best way to get more attention. Soon, it’ll be tough for any young guy who adopts tradional male stereotypes for fashion and behavior to be perceived as “normal”.
And I’m all for it. Back when I went through high school and college twenty years ago, I was jealous that women had successfully fought for their rights to do whatever they wanted, wear whatever they wanted, and say whatever they wanted. I look forward to the day when men can follow in the footsteps of feminists to push the barriers of gender based social norms.
This comment was written by azbballfan.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
I was watching the Elizabeth I series on HBO (my English history is weak, so who knows how accurate the show is) and loving all the clothes. And thinking what a shame it is that men don’t have the general OK in our society to be “frilly.” I mean, you look at all those embroidered tunics and leggings and hats and amazing shoes and wish you’d been born in another era.
Of course, the women then were stuck with dresses - albeit gorgeous - and the Church had nasty things to say about cross-dressers. But it just goes to show how incredibly malleable fashion has been. Male Scots and Greeks in kilts (I guess the Greeks don’t call them that); Toureg men covering their faces while the women go unveiled; Chinese women wearing pants at a time when men wore “dresses.” In Bali, where I spend as much time as possible, although pants are common on both, men and women wear sarongs, the only difference between them being the patterns, and no way can Westerners without a textile degree tell the difference between what’s proper for a male and a female.
There were times and places - among the California Chumash, for instance - when men and women wore the same thing: loinclothes and no shirts. But, around the modern world, we seem foolishly locked into a cultural construct that probably won’t bite the dust until I’m long dead. How much of this is “patriarchy” and how much of it something far deeper I’m way unqualified to discuss.
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April 28th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Alas
This comment was written by Women’s Space/The Margins.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
This is one of the *key* issues on which the current radical feminist movement in the United States has gone sorely wrong — in fact, in the opposite direction of what radical feminism espoused 30 years ago. Radicals generally took the approach of looking either androgynous or butch — passing for a man was admired and frankly still is in many lesbian feminist circles, and the teen-boy-looking lesbian feminist is rampant. The point was not to *look* like a woman, as in women as a gender, to confuse the easy gender designations to emphasize the similaries of the biological man and woman when not all shaved and dolled up, if you will.
But then along came not just drag queens but, with medical advances, transsexuality and transitioning, and now we have “radicals” absolutely insisting on being a “woman-born woman” — in other words, radical feminism has been flipped on its head. Biology is the be-all and end-all. More stridently so, arguably, than ever before. Intolerance reigns supreme. We have radical feminist “leaders” preaching outright hate and calling transgendered people actual “monsters.” And this is radical?! How, exactly? How short, too, our memories of our own political movement.
In my book, it makes perfect sense that so many male-to-female transsexuals become feminists — they’ve experienced what it is to move like a man (gender) in this world and now they’ve experienced what it is to move as a woman (gender) in this world!
But my all-time favorite observation on subversiveness comes from fem Joan Nestle, who told off our backs that to her of course the butch lesbian in the 1950s and 1960s was radical and outrageous and obviously targeted for violence and hate — but actually the more subversive has to be considered the femme. She *looked* like your compliant girly girl but here she was completely flipping the girly-girl world on its head in the way she lived.
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April 28th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
…While I think that high femme carries enormous potential for irony, I think that any attempt to rate one presentation over another in terms of revolutionary potential will inevitably fail. I think Joan Nestle was writing from an entirely justified defensive stance, and I respect that, but I disagree.
I also don’t think it’s fair or accurate to tar radical feminists as bigots; there’s no clear bright political line between transphobia and acceptance, really. That gets muddy whenever you’re talking about a group of people who are cisgendered or cissexual attempting to make space. Transpeople have made some arguments for self-determination that are markedly similar to radical feminist critiques of patriarchy, and some radical feminists are not transphobic. Progressives and liberals are also sometimes guilty of using transpeople to support their own ideas about what’s real and what shouldn’t be.
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April 28th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Laylalola, did you read some Califia, get high, watch The L Word marathon, and then come to your distorted conclusion of what radical lesbian feminism today is? Seriously, get a clue.
If radical lesbian feminists “pass for men,” it’s not because they’re trying to. True, most radical feminists aren’t dipping their faces in make-up and botox and I suppose since THAT’S what defines being a woman nowadays, you assume not doing so must mean wanting to pass as a man.
And the radical feminist opposition to trans politics has nothing to do with biology. Not even close. But I suppose to someone who sees gender as “moving as a man in this world” or “moving as a woman in this world,” it is that simple. So hell ya, let’s all get out our checkbooks, slap down $30,000 for SRS, start popping hormones, and fuck the Patriarchy over big-time.
This comment was written by Puffin.[Personal insults with no other content deleted by Amp. Puffin, please try to respect the moderation goals when you post here. Thanks. –Amp]
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April 28th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Puffin,
I enjoyed reading your post (aside from the personal attacks) - and the exuberance oozing about your views.
As someone who doesn’t understand the radical feminist opposition to trans politics, would you enlighten me?
This comment was written by azbballfan.Report this comment to the moderators
April 28th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
And the radical feminist opposition to trans politics has nothing to do with biology. Not even close. But I suppose to someone who sees gender as “moving as a man in this world” or “moving as a woman in this world,” it is that simple. So hell ya, let’s all get out our checkbooks, slap down $30,000 for SRS, start popping hormones, and fuck the Patriarchy over big-time.
Oh, pleeeeease expand. With a definition of “trans politics” and transsexual experience as sophisticated as all that, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the radical feminist opposition to it.
And not to be pushy or anything, but would it kill you to not add few more drops of medical misinformation to the already overflowing slop bucket? No fourteen-year-old trapped in Oberlin needs to read this and get the wrong idea about what transition entails.
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April 28th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
No fourteen-year-old trapped in Oberlin…
Is Oberlin really a hard place for trans people? It seemed like one of the most socially tolerant places I’ve ever lived (if you didn’t have the bad taste to be a Burkean).
On the other hand, there are a lot of gay people in Oberlin (the College, anyway) and from what it seems like you’ve said, there is some mutual group antagonism operative there?
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April 28th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
[…] So Amp posted (thanks for the response and kind words, Amp) about the non-conversation that took place over on feh-muh-nist’s blog after she posted about “trans politics,” which is a term similar in origin and effect to “homosexual agenda,” “contraceptive mentality,” or “gender feminism.” The phrase is an imposition by outsiders. It is based on a conception of the loosely-aligned community it purports to describe that is so at odds with reality that it cannot be used to say anything accurate. Period. […]
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April 28th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I have a wonderful friend who is trans & she’s been good enough to talk to me in my position of ignorance & help me understand some of her experience.
As a feminist, one of the things I find most interesting about her experience & theory is the idea that all people have a kind of ’switch’ in the back of their brain which is aligned to either male or female. For most of us, that ’switch’ is aligned with our physical sex. For some of us, it isn’t. And that produces feelings of gender dysphoria (if I can use the term just to mean dysphoria about gender and try to slip some of the DSM baggage…)
This idea is both compelling and, for me, a little frightening. Because while it’s potentially really interesting that there could be some kind of biological switch that creates gender identification … it would also disappoint me a little, because it’s binary nature would to some extent preclude an ability to stake out radical territory that breaks the binary.
For the record, my friend is emphatic that when she talks about this ’switch’ it doesn’t have anything to do with gender roles — just gender identification. So, in this model, whether one identifies as male or female would be biological, but how one comprehends and expresses masculinity and femininity would be cultural. (This is part of where I have trouble applying the model to my experience - I have difficulty separating the concept of a ‘female gender’ from its performative aspects.)
Anyway, I can’t guarantee that I’ve understood or am accurately representing my friend’s position. And I understand that there are many people here who are much more educated on experience and theory than I.
I’m mostly posting this as information for azballfan and anyone else who may not be up to date on some of the spaces where feminist and transgender theory can potentially get fuzzy - from the perspective of someone who wholeheartedly supports transsexual rights, but who is still trying to work out some consistent gender theories in the back of her head.
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April 29th, 2006 at 4:03 am
the last time I wore makeup or a dress. Why? I like dresses. I recently noticed that - although I’ve never given the matter any conscious thought - that I always tie my hair back in a low ponytail. Even though a high ponytail would often be […]Continue reading at Alas, a blog … posted 1:47 am at Alas, a blog
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April 29th, 2006 at 5:01 am
“Contraceptive mentality”? Teehee, I didn’t know contraceptives even had minds…
This comment was written by Angiportus.By the way, just how do you pronounce “cis-”? I’m glad someone is providing words where they are needed, but spelling and saying them can be tricky.
Mandolin–the switch analogy is an interesting one, and I think what happens is a few people have it welded in the “other” position from what their body looks like, a few have it in neutral and can move it either way, and some just don’t have it, and might even be missing the wiring. That’s just my guess.
Politics makes my head spin, and not in a good way. Whatever happened to all hanging together or else getting hanged separately? This particular
issue, about transfolk and feminism, has gotten too tangled for me to make sense of any more. While growing up I ran afoul of people who wanted to do this and that to my body for their own purposes–I’ll spare you the details–but were aghast if I wanted to do anything to it for my own. So I now won’t presume for anyone else about theirs. Surgery queases me out bigtime, but so does the idea of forcing someone to spend their life in a body that does not look, feel, perform or smell like what they really feel themselves to be. It’s a personal decision that can be hard enough to make without having to worry about whether one is being a traitor to people trying to get justice in other areas. Still it’s a good thing to come up with some consistent theories…I just don’t think anyone has managed that yet.
It may have been Olaf Stapledon who envisioned a far future society with 96 sexes. With my luck I’d be the 97th, but anyway. Someone once said to me, “You are who you think you are.” I’ll go with that. Even if in my own case I can’t even put it into words.
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April 29th, 2006 at 5:54 am
isn’t that just part of the whole “gay agenda” i keep hearing so much about?
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April 29th, 2006 at 5:56 am
a few have it in neutral and can move it either way,
What an extraordinarily elegant solution, Angi! You’ve just made room for the switch theory and binary breakdown. Why didn’t I think of this? (Answer: I got too caught in my own binary of either/or thinking.)
I get kind of bogged down in wondering about the biological/sociological theory of this stuff both because 1) I’m trained in the social sciences and 2) I write science fiction, so I’m always happy to find new ways and things to think/extrapolate about.
But politically & pratcically, for my actions in the world, I don’t feel like these theoretical issues should affect me much one way or the other — as a liberal, a radical, a feminist, or whatever other identity I’m sporting at the moment. Whatever social, biological, or other mechanisms may affect transsexuality, it is clearly something people experience deeply & sincerely. And they should have the right to act in whatever way they find appropriate as adults with agency and an understanding of their own lives, with community support, help when and if they want it, and whatever medical treatments they choose.
They shouldn’t have to be subjected to allegations of selfishness or monstrosity, from either side of the political continuum.
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April 29th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Oberlin, Kansas, Robert. Different place in every conceivable way.
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April 29th, 2006 at 10:26 am
Wow, this discussion is way cool! I’m a female-to-male (ftm) transsexual and while I agree with most points here and disagree with a few, I am mostly blown away by the level of sophistication. If this dialogue is any indication, we as a society ARE advancing in regard to gender!
To add my own points: many ftms chose not to undergo genital surgery for a variety of reasons, among them disappointing results, huge risk of serious complications, and cost. Some, including me, eschew surgery because our gender-identities are more complicated than man or woman. While we are most comfortable moving in the world as men, we choose to expand the categories to include men without penises. A subversive idea, I venture you’ll agree, and hardly one supportive of the binary gender system as it stands.
For that matter, I am a man who is a mother. Being pregnant, giving birth and raising my daughter were among the most amazing and rewarding experiences of my life and not accomplishments I’m eager to turn my back on. True, I was in denial at the time of my pregnancy and through my daughter’s teens, but I have now mothered her for more than half her life as an ftm. It may be a stretch for many people, but for her and me no contradiction exists, although society’s prejudice and lack of imagination often put us in awkward positions.
For the record, too, I am a staunch and vocal feminist. I did not transition because I “disliked” being a woman or believe men are superior. On the contrary, I think I’m biased toward women, believing them to be generally more evolved. I did not seek to make more money nor gain male privilege, most of the time I don’t know how to respond when they’re offered. Nor am I homophobic: I identify as queer, have bedded more genders than most ☺ and have the dubious distinction of having been queer bashed as both a dyke and a gay man.
I rarely forget my differentness. I am always aware that something as ordinary as a roadside accident, an arrest during a non-violent protest, or a personal search at an international border could out me, and in some cases put me in danger of physical assault. As far as we have come, as evidenced by this discussion, most people are still threatened by transsexuals and sadly, for many that provokes violence.
As Angiportus rightly pointed out, the charge that transfolk reinforce the binary gender system was leveled with vehemence in the book, Transsexual Empire. I’ve always found the subject emotionally fraught and difficult to counter. Thank you, Ampersand, and the rest of you here, for so articulately addressing it.
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April 29th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Unless it is pronounced differently in this context, “cis” is pronounced just as “sis” is. Hah, I knew organic chemistry would come in handy sometime!
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April 29th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I’m intrerested in the comments about physical sex. True, reproduction is bianary, at least if you ignore cloning, but are genitals really a simple matter of two?
Is reproductive function the essense of penises and vaginas? I’m not sure. Huge nubmers of us are not “functional” in that respect–either by choice, or becuase of age (young or old), illness, accident, etc. Are impotent men or men with vasectomies not men?
If function isn’t the essense, is form? That argument seem sless convincing and puts an entirely different spin on the intersex topic.
I’m not arguing that there isnt some link between body, reproduction, physical sex, and gender, but just unclear about the links. They may not be as obvious as they first seem, I guess.
These are questions I haven’t answered for myself, but I wonder if more thoughtful folks have their own suggestions.
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April 29th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I know that I can’t speak for all transsexuals, but I’m often disturbed by how many people tend to attribute behavioral changes in transsexuals to the effects of taking hormones.
Just for the record, hormones did little to change my behavior (I’m an M to F transsexual). There are only two changes in my persona that I can even begin to attribute to hormonal changes: I can cry more easily and I have a milder libido. That’s about it. The impact of these changes upon my life are far smaller than changes in behavior that have resulted from conscious acts of will, or as a result of simply living in the identity of a woman for eleven years.
Attempting to explain the bulk of gendered behavior in terms of biological influences seems to be widely in vogue these days. Having lived on both sides of the gender divide, I couldn’t disagree more with this idea.
As much as I dislike the anti-trans bigotry expressed by some radical feminists, I find their tendency to use sociological analysis rather than biological determinism to be quite refreshing.
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April 30th, 2006 at 7:54 am
The Trans Political Agenda…
Those pesky, luddite feminists hurl the words "trans politics" like certain so-called christians scream about the "gay agenda."Rather than cower, I say, Yes, I have an agenda.Below please find a list of what I believe constitut…
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April 30th, 2006 at 8:21 am
I’ve been waiting for Puffin’s response to this because it does seem particularly relevant to this thread. I have seen it written by one radical feminist that she and her political allies (and I quote) ‘reject in whole the theory that underpins the idea and practice of trans, both transexuality and transgender. We find any form of trans or genderqueer to be little more than more gender enforcement, more purveying of gender stereotypes, and more confining and disrespectful of women *as women* rather than less of any of these things.’ This was written as part of an explanation for why transexual and transgender individuals were not welcomed into a particular self-described *women’s* space.
I’d like to ask Puffin, or someone who agrees with most or all that’s stated in this view, to explain why they agree with it.
Thanks for your whole comment, brynn, and this paragraph in particular - every word - really stood out to me. I can now imagine the two of you, and all kinds of possibilties and paths for human lives and relationships.
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April 30th, 2006 at 10:07 am
I don’t know if it is radical feminism or queer feminism but I believe that what troubles some feminists is the focus on sex and gender.
If you belive that gender is learned and want to work for a world where sex doesn’t matter more than any other personal characteristic it is troubling to deal whith people who claim that there is some innate psychological difference between men and women and find this difference to be so important that they decide to remake their entire lives as well as their bodies because of it.
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April 30th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
For those of you not bored to tears with my posts on transgenderism or the never-ending debate about the gender dichotomoy and how trans-people either challenge it or reinforce it, you should check outthis post
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April 30th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
“Innate psychological difference between men and women” contains a lot of terms that are problematic in their reductive connotations, but I see what you’re saying.
This is an understandable reason, but it’s a crappy excuse.
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April 30th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
I understand this. I agree with it to a certain extent, though I think the solution is to alter one’s personal gender theory to accomodate both the experience of gender as a socially learned construct and the experience of people who need to transition. What I don’t understand is the above statement can possibly turn into this:
How does “I am wary of the ramifications of making gender, at least to some extent, biological” turn into “I blame transsexual people for a system that oppresses both of us”?
I suspect there are a few leaps of logic that have to exist there first. And I suspect one of them is refusing to give transsexual people the respect of assuming their experiences are genuine, and instead assuming they are “choosing” transsexual feelings in the same way that Christians assume homosexuals “choose” homosexual feelings. And I don’t like that at all.
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April 30th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
I am talking of course about The Second Sex and how Second Wave radical feminists spelled out in books galore how the assumption of biological determinism had led to the oppression of women: Why educate women at universities, for example, when their purpose in life is in a secondary social sphere than men, etc. (It’s so easy to forget these actually were real-life issues for women one generation ago.) Biological determinism: bad thing to radical feminists. There is nothing about sex organs and reproductive capabilities that innately subordinate a woman’s human capacities to men in regard to contributing to the sphere outside of the home. There shouldn’t be a Second Sex, that is, that is subordinated and assumed to be subordinate based on biology alone. And surface indicators of biology — or one’s place in the hierachy of who is dominant and who is subordinate — would be anything or any behavior that appears to be “female” (gender) or “male” (gender). *Gender — what is “female” or “male” — is socially constructed, radical feminists argued.* One way of emphasizing how socially constructed maleness and femaleness is is to be androgynous — literally, as in your physical appearance, or more figuratively, as in your attitudes and personality and aggressiveness and attempts to make whatever mark it is you seek to make in the world beyond that which, according to “biological determinism,” you had no business even going into in the first place (be you a biological man or a biological woman — if a man, your role was to look like a male (gender) and to achieve in the male-sphere (worldy) as opposed to family sphere, to “act” like a male, etc.)
What transgendered people and transsexuality and the like has done is *prove the early radical feminists correct!* Look at how fluid “maleness” and “femaleness” is in this society! They were correct, literally and figuratively, in saying that gender *is socially constructed*. You do not have to be surgically altered to now pass as a “male” when you were born as a biological female or vice versa. But instead of seeing that the advent of transsexuality proves everything they said early on, longtime radical feminists today see transsexuals in particular as a severe threat to them and as oppressors, even though of course anyone with an unclear gender designation — who doesn’t clearly fall into the socially constructed role of “male” or “female” — is to this day treated brutally, murdered for it, hardly dominant but a minute minority, discriminated against, supremely not tolerated, etc. That is, socially constructed indicators of male or female gender to this day are harshly enforced, as we can see when we consider the transsexual phenomenon.
All of which is — or should be — directly relevant to a more informed radical feminist analysis of these social constructions and how to subvert them or overtly change them. Instead, radical feminists like Mary Daly argue that the transsexual *emphasizes* biological determinism by thinking that altering the sex/genitals/and/or reproductive organs is what will make a man a woman or a woman a man. But this argument, while it makes some sort of sense on its face, is actually a cover for her and her followers’ extreme intolerance of transsexuals and for their hypocrisy. The fact is whether a man or woman has surgery, it is indeed possible for a man to “become” a “woman” (gender) and experience what it is to move through this world as a woman (gender), and vice versa. What transsexuals show is that gender indeed is very constructed socially, and in a society where biological determinism is still assumed, who could blame the transsexual for thinking that what makes one a male or female is the biological sex? Like I said, it makes sense that transsexuals who are not political before surgery might *become politicized* after surgery and after moving through this world as the opposite “gender.” Of all people, it seems, they could tell us the differences in how men and women are treated, in what is expected of them, etc.
So now we have this awful emphasis in radical feminism, made legit by the likes of Mary Daly, of extreme intolerance and hatred of transsexuals, who not only prove that early radical feminists were correct about the social construction of gender but who could better inform the movement of current differences in the treatment of genders than those of us who have always lived as one gender. And you have a near-hysterical insistence on “women-born-women” space, politics, etc. Back to biological determinism! Fundamentalist, even. This approach so utterly buys into the biology determines you, who you are, that it makes the radical feminist ostensible argument that transsexuals only emphasize biological determinism transparent as the radical feminist lie for intolerance and hypocrisy it is. I mean we have radical feminists these past 15 years arguing that a the presence of a baby boy’s penis at a women’s music festival is oppressive to them, that’s how completely outrageous and out-of-step this strain of radical feminism has become.
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April 30th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
To put it more simply: Amp wrote about his conflicted thoughts about wearing a ponytail low, in the more accepted style for a man in our society. That was one example of the extent to which indicators of “maleness” and “femaleness” are still strictly enforced in our society, and by us individually internally. Yes Amp’s example *is* one of conflict and *is* relevant to a radical feminist analysis of how far or not social roles in this society have been broken down. If it struck you as a breezy personal passage about a small thing, well, I’m saying it’s all connected. At this time it happens to be transsexuals in particular who carry the brunt of society’s wrath for *not* fitting into clear-cut “male” (gender) or “female” (gender) roles based on what role their biology predestined them to fill/look like/act like. And whether it’s radical feminists like Mary Daly calling them “Frankenstein’s monsters” or bigots on the streets who reacted violently to *not* being able to clearly delinate who is a biologically born man and who is a biologically born woman, the attitude is the same: They are a threat and they must be punished and/or they must die (and they are murdered in too great of numbers).
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April 30th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
I think we may be looking past an elephant in our living room, pretending that it really isn’t there.
As stated in earlier posts, much of second wave feminism was predicated on the notion that gendered behavior is rooted in social forces and that biological determinism is just another rationalization used to justify the oppression of women. These sociological explanations were used as a justification in pushing for positive change for women.
More recently, perhaps in the last fifteen years or so, biological explanations of gender identity and sexual orientation and have been used as a justification for encouraging tolerance of queer people. Conversely, sociological explanations have been used by conservatives to justify the oppression of those who do not conform to heteronormative expectations.
Now, this approach has served the queer community well. We have gained much tolerance amongst the straight populace by pushing some variant of the idea, “I did not choose to disobey heteronormative expectations. My biology made me do it.”
Why has this tactic worked so well? The first answer that comes to mind is straightforward…it is unjust to hold a person responsible for conditions and traits that are inborn. Biological explanations of gender identity and sexual orientation tie in well with this notion. However, the idea that gendered behavior is innate has been around for a long time…it lies at the very heart of patriarchal oppression. So, if a person accepts that women and men behave differently because of biology, only a short distance need be traveled to accept that queer people behave differently because of biology. This ties in particularly well with the stereotype of lesbians and gays manifesting gender behavior deemed more appropriate for the opposite sex. Transgender people would be viewed as a more extreme manifestation of this type of biological variation.
Simply put, using biological arguments to justify tolerance for queer people unwittingly harnesses biological determinism as a means of dismantling homophobia. Notice that I said unwittingly. I’m not trying to assert that anyone is intentionally doing this. Regardless of original intent, however, that’s how it’s filtering through the matrix of patriarchal belief that riddles society.
I am a transwoman and a lesbian, so I reap benefits from the current approach in gaining greater acceptance for queer people. However, as a woman, I’m not very happy with the fact that patriarchal notions of gender are being reinforced during the process.
I can’t count the number of times that straight, progressive men have pointed to research on “brain sex” as a means of being supportive of my decision to live as a woman. I also can’t count the number of times that these same men have asserted that “male behavior” and “female behavior” are eternally locked in by genes and hormones. They often reference this when I vent about their sexist behavior or the sexist behavior of others. Needless to say, I’m not impressed. I want to smack them over the head with the latest “brain sex” article in whatever magazine they happen to be currently waving around in the air.
This problem is not going to go away by ignoring it. I understand some of the fears vented by the women who have written at questioningtransgender.org. Unfortunately, they have allowed their fear to refashion itself in the form of bigotry against transgender people.
Where do we go from here? How do we deal with these issues? How do we formulate a means of fostering acceptance for queer people without becoming an unwitting tool of sexist oppression?
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April 30th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
It seems to me that a first step lies in making acceptable a more complex matrix of nature versus nurture. I know most people who think about the issue a lot understand that both nature and nurture must play a role, but I think that people at large have a tendency to want the debate to be black and white. If there’s some way of convincing people that, despite their instincts to binary opposition, nature and nurture together play roles in sex & sexuality — then maybe there will be a way to create acceptance for both transsexuality as primarily biological and gender roles as primarily social.
There may also be something to intimating that ‘gender identification’ and ‘gender roles’ are two different beasts, the first biological, the second social.
I don’t guess this is feasible, but I would personally like to see the idea that it’s okay to punish people for things they choose go away. Homophobia shouldn’t be okay whether homosexuality is a choice, a constrained choice, or a biologically determined fact. Human rights shouldn’t be dependent on being able to wave an “I can’t help it!” doctor’s pass.
Among other things, I think the dialogue of choice sets up a false dichotomy. Like the concepts of nature and nurture, I don’t think most things are either a choice or not a choice. Homosexual attraction may not be a choice, but the decision to live with a partner of the same sex is a choice — yet it’s not a “free” choice taken lightly or on whim, it’s a constrained choice that involves seeking joy & fleeing intolerable repression. (Likewise, the feeling that one is transsexual may not be a choice, but the decision to transition rather than living permanently unhappy & closeted is a choice.) Choosing to be closeted or to live as one’s birth gender are also choices — something which I think is often eclipsed by the concept of “lifestyle choice” as it’s presented by the right.
Choices are not always free; they do not always entail choosing between equal options. And even when they do, why should people be punished for choices?
If it wasn’t okay for us to punish homosexuality & transsexuality whether they were choices or a biological inevitabilities, then I think a lot of the biologically deterministic arguments would disappear from lack of necessity.
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May 1st, 2006 at 7:50 am
It seems obvious, doesn’t it? My feeling is that the fact that biological determinism has been (and still is) used most damagingly against women, isn’t a good enough reason for feminists to deny absolutely that nature or biology has any role whatso-ever in determining sex (if not gender) and also sexual orientation (for some or even most individuals, even if not all.)
I agree that ‘we can’t help it’, while useful in helping create a fair and just attitude towards transexuals, gay men and lesbians, shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. And yet, some version of ‘we can’t help it’, is a deep personal truth we hear over and over again from those very people. (I include myself in this re my lesbianism. I experience it as innate.) This is not any kind of political strategy. It’s simply ‘this is how it was and is for me in my life.’ Many, many, homosexuals would never have chosen to be, had they actually had a choice. The only choice those people ever had was whether or not to act on those unbidden, unwelcome and even frightening feelings and attractions in a dangerously homphobic world. I remain utterly unconvinced that any kind of ’social constructionism’, whether even that involved any element of individual choice or not, can explain all transexuality or all homosexuality. Homosexuality is trans-historical, trans-cultural and trans-national (not to mention its presence in the animal world…) and I imagine transexuality is as well, even though actual physical transitioning via surgery and hormones has only been possible in recent times. Sure, so is patriarchy all of the above things, but there is just no way of *knowing* that patriarchy alone constructed everything to do with sex, sexual orientation and gender. It’s theory.
It seems to me that some radical feminist ideology is so rigid that it simply can’t entertain the possibility that it could be wrong - even where there can be no proof. It’s proponents are prepared to dismiss, sometimes ruthlessly, other peoples - other feminists even - understandings of their own lives and their actual experience, in the name of freedom for all women. I find this very diicult to understand.
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May 1st, 2006 at 8:30 am
All three of the posts above are excellent. :) I just want to add that my earlier posts deal primarily with looking at these issues from what I consider a back-to-original-meaning radical feminist view. There are multiple additional issues/viewpoints to add in too, of course. And I could elaborate on my own views on these matters outside of the radical feminist one — but mostly what steams me is how far off course the current radical feminist “movement” has gone and how hypocritical and how flat-out not even feminist, much less radical, much of the near-hysteria has become. I mean it really borders very much on classic fundamentalist blind hate and intolerance. And it’s shocking to me that this is what has become of the movement.
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May 1st, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Laylalola
One of the biggest early critiques of radical feminists arguments were its implicit acceptance of a biological determinism. I’ll just quote Alison Jaggar’s seminal work, Feminist Politics and Human Nature:
Poststructuralist critiques of radical feminist theory (and other types of feminist theory, as piny rightly points out) have very helpfully argued, as well, why cultural determinist thought or social constructionist thought ends up clinging to a biological determinism that it never fully eradicates. I think it helps explain the lacunae in feminist thought, particularly as we see here in what they have, themselves, described as a radical feminist response to the transfolk and their supposed unified politics.
One pretty excellent critique of radical feminist thought is an article by Linda Alcoff which I just posted about at my blog and I’m blanking out on the title. In it, though, Alcoff gives us a close reading of the radical feminist Alice Echols works, delineating the differences between the rad feminists who tend to biological determinism and the radfems who tend to cultural determinism. She then goes on to show some of the drawbacks. In turn, she does the same with poststructuralists, arguing that neither extreme serves us well. it’s a pretty good article.
She also has a heavy duty article on the topic on her site, alcoff.com
I’ve been having fun wrestling through a lot of this on my blog for the last few months. I’m more interested in the connection between theory and political practice, and I’m also interested in the problem of a femnist thought that, as radfem does, insist on a “gender in the final analysis” framework.
While individuals might not be racist, bigoted, etc., I do think we can look at the way the theories can reinscribe oppression. That way, we are addressing the theory which can then be improved on because of the critique. In this case, I think it’s the ‘gender in the final analysis’ argument that becomes the problem. And that kind of think, while central to radfem though, is also implicit in a lot of mainstream feminist thought.
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May 1st, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Cicely,
The only choice those people ever had was whether or not to act on those unbidden, unwelcome and even frightening feelings and attractions in a dangerously homphobic world.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately; I put something about the political nature of choice on my blog a couple weeks ago.
First of all, I hear you. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought homosexual attraction was a choice; I don’t. I do understand through my own experience that most people have no control over how their sexuality develops and fixates.
But I do think the choice you mention gets too little attention in liberal political dialogue, though conservatives strut around with it all the time. Romantic love and sexual satisfaction are not basic to human survival, though they’re woven pretty firmly into our culture. I think there have been times and places where very few women and a minority men could reasonably expect romantic love — in fact, I think the idea of romantic love (or at least companionate love) as we think about it is a relatively recent construction.
So, if conservatives (or anyone) are out there being the “choice” police saying “you can be homosexual as long as *every action you take as a homosexual is biologically driven and you never make a choice to do it*” — then practicing homosexuals would fail such a ridiculous litmus test.
I apologize if I’m belaboring a relatively small linguistic point, but I think when we discuss homosexuality in these kinds of political contexts, there ends up being a semantic condense between “homosexual attraction” and “homosexual acts.” I think this is what allows a whole lot of wishy-washy conservatives to both believe that people can’t control sexual attraction and that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice.”
As far as I can tell, the only way that people can make an argument that homosexuality (both attraction and acts) is biologically determined is if we take for granted that people must be free to pursue romantic love and sexual attraction. And I’m not sure that this is something conservatives agree with deep down, though I suspect many would agree with it on the surface.
So since we end up back at this point of arguing about whether or not homosexual acts are a “lifestyle choice” anyway, I guess I’d rather just start politically with making choice okay rather than with making homosexuality all right through biological determinism. (Not that homosexual attraction isn’t biologically determined, just that I think it weakens everyone to define “rightness” as “that which is biologically determined.”)
But for all that I’m a bisexual woman and a supporter of gay rights, I’m not living in a partnership with another woman. And that means I have no right to determine how people go about struggling for their rights. I can put my thoughts in public like this, but push comes to shove, I will always respect and support what people who are risking their life and happiness have to say and how they choose to go about it.
Anyway, that’s a fairly large thread drift, but I think it relates to transsexuality. While the feelings of transsexuality may be innate, transitioning is a choice. (Not transitioning is also a choice, of course.) Given that the act of transitioning is a (constrained) choice, transsexuality (both impulse and transition) can only be constructed as biologically determined if everyone will agree that people have an inalienable right to pursue… happiness.
And in practice, I don’t think everyone agrees on that.
All my caveats above about supporting but not dictating apply here also. I’ll take my cup of STFU now.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
May 1st, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Bitch Lab,
What you are saying isn’t quite what i was told when studying literature. There we studied french feminism and anglican feminism. And all the radical feminists I’ve heard of fall into the latter category of anglican feminism. Scandinavian radical feminists also seem to look at anglican feminists for inspiration.
Maybe we should try to decide what differentiates Radical Feminism from feminist that are radical.
I’d also like to thank Laylalola for explaining what I tried to say much better than I was able to.
When it comes to biological determinism that is a debate that has gone on and on here in Scandinavia for the last fifty years at least. The divide is betwen Särartsfeminister (separate feminists sort of), who believe in the idea of biological determinism and holds to the motto of “separate but equal” or sometimes believe that women are inherently better than men, and Likhetsfeminister (equal feminists sort of) who believe that we are inherently the same and that differences between sexes are due to gender or are smaller than differences within the groups or between other population groups.
Lately the equal feminists are the ones given most credibility allthough the separate feminist continue to influence much of the popular culture and is what many ordinary people actually believe in. Equal feminism tend to be more leftwing while separate feminism is more rightwing.
Still there are many issues where the two feminisms agree and I believe both are represented in the feminist party F! that are to enter into our elections this fall.
This comment was written by B.Report this comment to the moderators
May 1st, 2006 at 4:14 pm
“virtue” of apparently being more fluid and unstable … more queer. I’m thinking of the way butch/femme role-playing has been denigrated by some lesbian feminists. I’m thinking of the development in feminism which seems to have abrogated hugeresponsibility for upholding/ deconstructing the gender binary to transsexual and transgender people. The point is not to apportion blame to people for doing sex, sexuality and gender wrong; it is to analyze and be critically aware of our place in the system. But we
This comment was written by Desperate Kingdoms.Report this comment to the moderators