Billy Bragg's 'sexuality' - is 'trans' a sexuality?

@abitofadvice1234

Thank you for rethinking your comments.

I'm sorry, because this is not going to be easy for you to read, but I hope you will consider it with the same openmindedness that you hoped your comments were read in.

When you claim womanhood for yourself as a male-bodied person, you by necessity impose a version of womanhood on all woman which excludes any experience that emanates from being female.

And yet, those experiences still exist and they still happen to us because of our bodies.

Those of us who have female bodies experience a specific type of threat because of the meanings and entitlements society, and especially males within society, construct around our bodies. We become unpeople: blank slates for male people to realise their own stories upon. And so our experience of assault at the hands of males is inextricably tied into those wider cultural relationships between male and female.

So when, whether intentionally or not, you take the female body out of womanhood, you take away our ability to make sense of what happens to us as female-bodied people under patriarchy.

So while it is wonderful and valuable that through your experiences you have come to be a supporter and aid to women, and I am very happy for you that those particular women do accept you as a woman, it's not ok for you to take that relationship you have with your friends and use it to dismiss female people's experiences and needs wholesale.

I suspect the T is included because transexual males either are homosexual (attracted to men) or are claiming to be homosexual (attracted to women) or bisexual (both).

Warwick Uni included U in their LGBTQUA+ with U standing for Undefined. For people whose sexuality or identity weren't labelled. So that's a hell of a big umbrella for the whole human race now.

LGBTQUA+ for people who either use or don't use labels for their sexual or gender identity. So inclusive that literally nobody is left out. Of course it is hard to be a group promoting the needs of, well, everybody, so I expect it will be grand platitudes about human rights whilst doing bugger all for the actual needs of LGB people.

abitofadvice I'm sorry that you experienced male sexual violence and assault. Unfortunately although it is the law that rape counseling services can offer single sex provision, unfortunately in practice many of these organisations have been ideologically captured by the Sex doesn't Matter brigade and think the only way they can support TW is by repeating TWAW and making previously female single sex groups mix sexed. Whereas really a trans centered group of peers who understand that aspect of what trans sexual assault survivors are going through seems more supportive logically.

You understand that sex does matter or transition wouldn't have been important to you.

Feminists are interested in breaking down the gendered boxes, not re-sorting people into which box they fit best in, because actually most people are gender non-conforming.

However, I and other women like me also deserve that empathy too

We can have empathy for people like you, however, that should not come at the expense of 50% of the population who are having their legal protections as females removed to accommodate a subset of the male sex class.

The T was added for financial reasons and so TRA's could piggyback their nonsense, homophobic ideology onto a movement already accepted by society.

@Blibbyblobby I’m sorry to get pithy. That woman is probably struggling quite a bit and it was uncalled for me to be rude about it. She’s probably having an incredibly hard time getting through the process and any roadblock in the process to accessing resources for trauma recovery can be heartbreaking. I should have had more empathy in the moment. She deserves it.

However, I and other women like me also deserve that empathy too, and in the original responses to the post detailing how I was forced to the margins, and then abused, and raped multiple times there, I saw little to none.

I know that my existence as a woman, and my relation to other woman as such has been a positive. I have been a first point of contact for a number of my friends who are SA victims, and my openness about my SA experiences have made that so. If I had not transitioned, or been allowed to transition, I would not have been able to help them get the resources they need.

My original purpose here was to explain why the T was in LGBT, and I was able to explain well. I’ve gone a bit beyond that, so I think I’m done with posting.

I hope i’ve given some food for thought about the experiences of trans women.

Thanks

If it's reasonable to expect all the members of the 50% of the human race with stress reactions to mixed sex spaces to just get over themselves because you manage your haircut response even though it's tricky for you...

then you can go teach TW to just get over themselves and their fears of assault and dysphoria and distress and use male spaces. Or would you think that was a level of insensitivity and naivety to the reality of the issues that is quite offensive really? Because that's how I perceive what you are saying, and I don't think you'd dream of saying it to male people and thinking that was ok.

[quote abitofadvice1234]@ArabellaScott

I’m guessing because that woman is incredibly triggered by people who are born male and visibly so?

Well my heart goes out to her, i’ve been in similar situations. There’s a particular color/haircut that’s popular with a lot of other queer people that makes me incredibly triggered. It’s awful. I go into flight or fight. But I can’t really ask people with that hair not to get support for their own trauma
can I?[/quote]
JFC. I actually quite liked your posts up til now.

Please, please consider just how privileged and tone deaf your comment is. I am very sorry that this happened to you, but your terrible experience with one individual person giving you fear of a particular hair colour is not the same thing as living with a constant background of grinding indignities and occasionally a forefront terrifying assault, reinforced again and again by cultural sexism, that female people face from a procession of different males over their lives.

[quote abitofadvice1234]@ArabellaScott

I’m guessing because that woman is incredibly triggered by people who are born male and visibly so?

Well my heart goes out to her, i’ve been in similar situations. There’s a particular color/haircut that’s popular with a lot of other queer people that makes me incredibly triggered. It’s awful. I go into flight or fight. But I can’t really ask people with that hair not to get support for their own trauma
can I?[/quote]
...... I'm sorry, did you just dismiss the specific sex based issues for many females because of your panic response to a haircut?

Are you serious?

No. You cannot expect the rest of the world to manage your triggers for you. You can however tolerate other people having their needs met alongside yours and realise there are sex based issues for females that do not vanish when male people find them a bit inconvenient.

You also cannot expect female people to continue patiently listening to your views when you are head patting them in this patronising way.

Though online I’ve seen what you mean in this complaint, in my every day life, and queer/lesbian spaces I’ve seen little to no issue at all, and cis and trans women have shared spaces just fine,

That's lovely for you.

My experience is different. I'm the one experiencing homophobia and who would be made unwelcome in these wonderful spaces you speak of because I need a female only accessible lesbian environment. You wont have met me or any other lesbian or woman who cannot use mixed sex spaces for very obvious reasons - they won't be in your lovely mixed sex spaces.

But we're the ones who have to run the underground meeting places to be allowed a space of our own, and the ones the wrapped barbed wire baseball bats are for, and the ones tossed out of pride for being homosexual. So I'm so pleased for your lovely experience but hello - sharing mine over here. And there's not many rainbows and butterflies where I'm standing. Women like me exist too.

@ArabellaScott

I’m guessing because that woman is incredibly triggered by people who are born male and visibly so?

Well my heart goes out to her, i’ve been in similar situations. There’s a particular color/haircut that’s popular with a lot of other queer people that makes me incredibly triggered. It’s awful. I go into flight or fight. But I can’t really ask people with that hair not to get support for their own trauma
can I?

with no cost to cis women in the slightest, and at times even some benefit

Says you. Many, many women have been affected by being forced to 'include' males in their single sex spaces, but you don't give a shit about those women. Why can't trans have their own shelters etc separate if needed and stop stamping all over female boundaries.

Also, stop with the cis, most of us on here don't pray at the alter of gender ideology, which is inherently harmful to females and only benefits males.
We are women. Simple as. No need for any prefix.
Transwomen are transwomen because they are male. Separate and distinct sex class. You wanting to opt out of your sex class does not entitle you to insert yourself into ours.

@Artichokeleaves

Though online I’ve seen what you mean in this complaint, in my every day life, and queer/lesbian spaces I’ve seen little
to no issue at all, and cis and trans women have shared spaces just fine, and the inclusion of trans women has allowed them to escape from abuse and greatly improve their lives, with no cost to cis women in the slightest, and at times even some benefit.

The sexual harassment at high school wasn’t just that. Being closeted as trans threw me into shame spirals and pushed me to the margins. Especially as a young person I was incredibly Vulnerable because

And people took advantage of that vulnerability. I bounced between abusive relationship to abusive relationship. My first boyfriend tried to assault me. I was constantly sexually harassed. I was raped 3 times. I still feel the hands and hear the words.

This isn’t particularly shocking and happens to lots of women, but I went through this without support from other women. I was so ashamed of my gender issues and my transness that I just pushed everything down and away. The shame was all encompassing.

And, admittedly, I had quite a bad time of it, but not the worst. My other trans friend got pulled into sex work at a young age. The moment she sleeps she just starts thrashing.

I was a stranger to my family. I was full of shame. I’d go through flashbacks of abuse. I found my body truly disgusting (dysphoria).

But, I got trauma therapy and transitioned. I stopped hiding myself. I was open, and my family accepted me, and the people around me accepted me.

Now my friends have a better friend. My girlfriend has a girlfriend that she loves. I hang out with other gay women and there’s no issue. My existence is positive for myself and for other people.

I see the rhetoric you are talking about sometimes in trans spaces “genital preferences are transphobic,” etc.... But within trans spaces it usually get’s shouted down. I hear it from overzealous allies more than anything else.

But, what I do see is my partner getting told her identity as a lesbian is invalid because she’s attracted to me. That any man that would be attracted to me is gay, and faces that derision.

So, while I do understand the aversion to the rhetoric of an extreme minority of the community, I don’t think the negatives of including trans women outweigh the positives at all.

I simply cannot see any logical reason why these two entirely different concepts are conflated into somehow being the same group of people, and neither do I see why it has become an article of faith that one must believe they are in order to support trans and other gender non-conforming people’s right to be accepted.

It's notable that the core demand of "trans rights" is the elimination/suppression of someone else's axis of oppression. Much intersectionality.

It's an insistence that Sex Doesn't Matter.

That's the sole point of contention here. It's not "inclusion" versus "exclusion." It's Sex Matters versus Sex Doesn't Matter.

And it's a bit rich for male people to be telling female people that Sex Doesn't Matter.

The slightest glimpse at the way people behave towards other people in this debate shows that it very much does. Indeed, it's thrown it into sharp relief.

No other civil rights movement has ever demanded the unrecognition of another group.

[quote abitofadvice1234]@CheeseMmmm

I'm somewhat of a radical feminist, and I have read/use radical feminist frameworks that places homophobia as an issue inside larger structures of patriarchy.

I'm just trans inclusionary.[/quote]
Trans people, homosexual people and female people do indeed have many things in common due to patriarchy’s construction of them as “other”, “transgressive”, “less” etc. In effect, the culture itself creates common ground.

However, that doesn’t mean those groups have anything intrinsic in common outside the commonalities imposed upon them by the dominant culture.

I am trans-inclusionary in the sense that I entirely support, indeed welcome, gender non-conformity including people’s right to inhabit social gender constructs previously mapped onto the opposite sex.

I do not, however, believe that in some way makes a person equivalent to and interchangeable with the opposite sex, nor do I believe it precludes the right and indeed deep need of female people, historically and even now marginalised and oppressed in their billions, to organise, politicise, associate and have a collective voice that is based on their sex and therefore does not include male people regardless of those males’ gender identity. Because sex is not gender, and therefore asserting ones sex cannot possibly negate anybody’s gender unless there is a politically motivated desire to confuse and conflate the two.

To claim that a trans women IS a woman is to claim that no meaningful difference exists between her internal sense of her own identity, and a lifetime of being subject to the external gender reactions, pressures and constraints of others that female-bodied people experience because of their female body.

I simply cannot see any logical reason why these two entirely different concepts are conflated into somehow being the same group of people, and neither do I see why it has become an article of faith that one must believe they are in order to support trans and other gender non-conforming people’s right to be accepted.

The trouble is that the quiet bit of trans inclusionary is often, in the bitter experience of people with female biology, woman exclusionary and lesbian exclusionary and highly homophobic.

That's the problem we'd quite like to straighten out really.

@CheeseMmmm

I'm somewhat of a radical feminist, and I have read/use radical feminist frameworks that places homophobia as an issue inside larger structures of patriarchy.

I'm just trans inclusionary.

I'm not sure about the exact makeup of the participants of the stonewall Riots but if I remember my history correctly it was actually a mixed crowd between gay men, lesbians, and "trans people" then conceptualized sometimes as transexuals or just plain crossdressers. Basically, the Stonewall Inn (located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan NYC), was generally a bar for those who did not fit the social roles of society. The cops tried to break it up, everyone fought back, and as the story goes the LGBT movement (with everyone participating) was formed. This also coincided with a general American bent towards liberation and activism sparked by the civil rights movement. So, at the same Time you had the Occupation of Alcatraz by AIM (the American Indian Movement), and a lot of activism around women's rights all coalescing around the same time.

The T in LGBT has always been there, but what the T stands for and how that section of the community has always been somewhat shifting, and only recently has been codified, specifically, as "Transgender," but they've always been members of the community, and self identified as women, but were not seen so by larger society, and had little means to organize with each other to create their own groups.

This can be seen in the documentary film Paris is Burning. It follows the drag/Ball culture of New York City in the 1990s. Notably, though not much distinction is made between Drag Queens and Trans Women, both exist as separate entities both participating, with Venus Xtravaganza being the main trans woman followed (she would, by the end of the documentary, be found murdered under the bed of a motel).

Trans Women were also a large part of the AIDS movement/crisis in the 80s. Many trans women were particularly vulnerable as quite a few resorted to prostitution as no one else would hire them, and therefore were (like gay men) vulnerable to AIDS and died in very very very high numbers.

So, basically, in the American movements Trans people have always played a part in these social movements.

As I understand it, in the UK there was less specific community based organization around LGBT issues, and the acronym is somewhat of an import from the United States. Much of the focus was on Buggery laws for gay men (though I don't know much about how it effected Lesbians in the UK). But, broadly, the UK didn't go through those same social reforms and wasn't subject to the same movements as the United States, so the culture around LGBT is different, but also influenced by, American LGBT movements, causing a bit of a disconnect.

I think there is a movement to have it regarded as a sexual orientation. Even within the wider gender critical movement, particularly the men.

I thought cross dressing used to be classed as a paraphilia, not an indicator of orientation?

I thought that whilst drag queens where prominently gay men, cross dressers weren't? Isn't that were AGP comes in?

Reason T was included is that gay men have long history of cross dressing eg drag. Part of history etc and if man caught cross dressing was evidence of gay and therefore dangerous arrested etc.