Feminist perspectives on transgendered people

My example was just that, LRD - the point is not about doctors in particular, but about the need for a term which differentiates women-born-female from women-not-born-female, without using very loaded terms like 'real', 'normal', etc.

Manatee - fascinating to hear about your friends and their various approaches/experiences.

proles - what I'm finding complicated isn't the feminist side of the argument, it's the other side. Which I can't get my mind around. I would like to understand it, I just can't follow what people are trying to get across.

manatee - I'm sorry, I am being really inarticulate but I still do not understand how it does not reinforce the concept of gender to form some identity that refers to biological sex or the trappings thereof, as if it were constructed.

It really isn't complicated. Gender is a binary and a binary is a hierarchy. The solution isn't to multiply gender but to get rid of it.

mooncup - I am still not really sure I understand enough of the whole situation to comment helpfully (I know that's not a great response).

I think at the moment, what occurs to me is, in what situation would a doctor have a responsibility to treat a MtoF transsexual like a woman born a woman - opposed to treating that person as a human being, male or female? The situations I can imagine where it matters your GP pays attention to your sex are ones that surely wouldn't apply to a transexual?

I could be misunderstanding here.

But for example, if your GP said 'oh, I can't treat your depression, you're depressed because you're a transsexual', I'd not say that GP was failing to treat someone as a woman - I'd say he was being a knob.

Me too Manatee.

Tis tres complicated.

What about the spectrum thing?

LRD I think 'problematise' is probably a better word than 'challenge'. I see what you're saying, but while you've got a point it only really holds if all trans people behave in the same way, which isn't my experience. Of course plenty of people transition and then just vanish into the general population; you could argue that these are indeed reinforcing the gender binary. But then there are others that don't.

I know male-bodied people who live as women, with female names, but don't want to have the operation. I know a woman who went through all the legal, hormonal and surgical steps to transition and become a man, and who still passes as such, but who stopped taking T and carried a baby when his/her female partner became infertile after cancer treatment.

One of the most important relationships of my life was with a woman who went halfway through gender reassignment surgery, lived as a man for 4 years and then had a dreadful reaction to hormone treatment and resumed life as a butch lesbian. I got used to thinking of her first as 'her', then as 'him' then as 'her' again.

I know people who identify as male but remain female-bodied because they don't agree with the idea of gender reassignment surgery, people who are 'he' within groups of sympathetic close friends but legally and professionally 'she', and plenty of people about whom it'd be anyone's guess if you saw them on the street whether they were male or female - and who would say, if you asked them, 'None of the above, thanks'.

These friends have definitely left me with a more nuanced and non-binary understanding of what gender is and the different axes on which it's constituted. That, in turn, has definitely influenced the way I think about gender politics in the broader sense.

Proles - I don't know about this, there is an argument to have women only things where trans aren't allowed? Surgery/non-surgery/all?

I realised I have obviously missed a big issue here..

But what term would you prefer trans people to use, LRD? You can see the need for one, yes? And it does work both ways - one can say cis man and trans man too.

In that case I think there are two problems - that definition is using gender, which is a concept I'd reject as a feminist, and I cannot get over feeling that it is really hurtful to invent a term that makes women even more 'other' than they already are in patriarchial society.

I can see why it could have happened and why, if you are being treated very badly, you may feel any solution is acceptable. But even though I sympathize with that, I don't like the terminology or what it indicates.

"I sometimes wonder if the condemnation of transgendered people by some feminists is linked to a fear of losing that gender dichotomy (i.e. male = oppressing class, female = oppressed class,) that supports their analysis of gender-based injustice. Dunno."

I must take issue with this, Kri. I don't see feminists condemning trans people. I see feminists condemning a trans politics that has the capacity to undermine, divide and destroy women's struggle for liberation from male oppression (and is already doing so: consider the difficulty feminists have in even speaking of women-only organising without accusations of 'transphobia'). And unsurprisingly patriarchal institutions - medicine, the law - are more than happy to legitimise this trans politics. Feminism offers an analysis of SEX-based oppression. Gender is not the basis; gender is the hierarchy that feminists want to banish. That's why the concept of an innate gender identity is nonsensical from a feminist POV.

Here we go:

Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook defined "cisgender" as a label for "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity", complementing "transgender".[2] A similar adjective is "gender-normative"; Eli R. Green wrote, "The term 'cisgendered' is used [instead of the more popular 'gender normative'] to refer to people who do not identify with a gender diverse experience, without enforcing existence of a 'normative' gender expression."[3] There are many derivatives of the term in use including cis male, cis female, and cissexual.

Ah, I see moon.

I'm sorry, but I do feel it is really rude to use a term that takes away from another disenfranchised group, though.

The point is LRD that transsexuals do need a term to differentiate trans and non-trans people. E.g. 'That doctor treated me appallingly - I bet he wouldn't have treated a cis woman like that.'

as far as i understand, cis is used for a woman whose gender feelings tally with her born body (appalling English but you get the drift), as opposed to a trans woman

cis is also used for men whose feelings and bodies tally.

Ah, thanks Hully.

So why did the term 'woman' not get used?

I'm not saying I would not have a problem with that - I think I might, I'm afraid. But I don't get why, if you want to have a word for transgender being normal, you wouldn't campaign for MtoF transsexuals to eb called women, instead of introducing a term that qualifies the identity of other women?

I may well be missing a lot here so excuse me if this is not making sense.

On wiki where I just looked, lrd, it said it was introduced so that transgender wasn't the abnorm with male/female being the normative. To give equal value to trans as well as cis. An interesting idea.

Manatee, I don't follow - how do transsexuals challenge the gender binary?

Doesn't it reinforce the gender binary to think of it as something that really exists, that you can transgress?

Does it mean then, does anyone know, that identification is a kind of spectrum? So if you're a certain length along you identify as "female" without wanting surgery, a bit further and hormones will do, the whole hog and you want the surgery?

Oh, I see.

Do you know where it comes from, Moocup? I would like to know.

I do feel hurt by the use of qualifier. I think if someone referred to me as a 'born female' I'd still be confused.

What I don't follow is, if being female is not to do with how you were born, why distinguish between 'cis' and 'trans'? Personally I don't understand how it could be the same thing - ie. 'femaleness' that you'd either be born with or acquire later on. Can anyone shed light from the trans perspective as I just don't understand the argument, whereas the definition of being a woman thunder gave is much easier to accept on first principles.

Ah. Interesting.

I sometimes wonder if the condemnation of transgendered people by some feminists is linked to a fear of losing that gender dichotomy (i.e. male = oppressing class, female = oppressed class,) that supports their analysis of gender-based injustice. Dunno.

I think there's a lot in this. It's a thorny one, because there's a paradox there in some feminist thought: on the one hand, there's a desire to challenge the gender binary, as it's used to prop up oppressive social structures, but on the other hand there's a dependence on the binary as a way to describe what's there to be challenged. There's a sense in which talking about men or women as a class in order to critique the interactions between them actually reifies the differential it's trying to dismantle.

I wonder also whether there's a feeling among some feminists that trans people are in some sense 'letting the side down'. Here are these people whose bodymind challenges the gender binary in all kinds of complicated ways, who feel that body and mind in some way don't align; on the face of it they should be ideal allies in a feminist project to dismantle gender-based oppression. And yet there they go (some of them at least), these fifth columnists of the patriarchy, mutilating their bodies and taking on stereotypical gender attributes in order to conform and reify the gender norm, instead of helping to bring the whole system down!

But what gets left out of that analysis is the fact that living outside the gender binary is to be a permanent pariah. From the stares in the street, the questions of small children 'Mummy, is that a man or a woman?' to the volley of abuse in a public toilet when someone perceives you to be in the wrong one, all the way to the gang that beats you up at a bus stop just for looking 'queer'. All these things are part of daily experience for my genderqueer friends - those who've chosen to stay genderqueer, that is, rather than train themselves to 'pass' as one gender or the other.

And the thing is, while some people are willing to take that on, to see their embodied problematisation of the gender binary as a radical political project, being trans isn't a choice: it's just something you're born with. Many, many trans people don't want to be a living political statement - they just want to fit in, live unremarkable, happy fulfilled lives with loving relationships, work, family, pets etc. Can you blame someone like that for going along with the doctors at Charing Cross who say they should be more 'masculine' or more 'feminine' in order to be able to access treatment that'll help them fit in? It might not be politically ideal but to me it is eminently understandable.

please someone tell me what cis is.

Oh I know...I'll google it

I'm with Hully on the self-identity issue... what I mean re 'cis' not being offensive is that it's not offensive to transsexuals (who understandably object to the use of 'normal woman' or 'real woman' in opposition to 'transsexual woman').

I'm not at all offended by being called a cis woman; it just means 'born female', doesn't it? Which I was.