Catherine McKinnon on Transgender Law and Politics

ArabeIIaScott · Yesterday 20:32

I read the thing about transwomen being attacked by women more often than the reverse and my response was ... less measured.

What do they mean by "attacked," anyway? A nervous glance on a train? Asking them why they're in the Ladies? And are they including transw attacking other transw?

I wonder how many of those tweeting so enthustically about it could actually make head or tail of it. Its such an alice in wonderland case of "words mean exactly what I want them to mean, no more and no less" and chopping and changing from one paragraph to the next. Really made no sense (the bit I struggled through, at any rate)

If you're stupid Jane that makes two of us...

It does seem to be an argument constructed like rickety Heath Robinson bridge constructed from toothpicks and wishful thinking ,to help CmK clamber her way nervously from where she stands with her feet on the ground, up to the cloud cuckoo land otherwise known as The Right Side Of History.

You can just envisage the scene as these elites discuss the meaning of feminism and what it is to be a woman, rearranging rights and duties like pieces on a chess board, and ranking grievances like a game of Top Trumps.

She really was this feminist hero as mentioned in replies?

It's transhumanism innit. Is it the inevitable consequence of life lived online do you think? The online, internal self is more "real" than the nasty, messy, boring, disappointing physical self.

It reminds me again of that series Years and Years. The irony that so many involved in it have completely swallowed the kool aid and see no parallels.

While being mindful of the risk of victim blaming, transwidow stories have opened my eyes to what their spouses consider "abuse" (ie less than 100% compliance). So, yeah.

Also being picked apart on Ovarit: https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/376367/disappointing-catherine-mackinnon-goes-all-out-for-trans-woo

Congratulations to the posters that got to the end of this and have extracted anything from it. I set out reading it online but kept losing my place as I scrolled back to check an inconsistency. So I printed it out and got out my pencil. I had scribbled more in the first five paragraphs than was originally written, had a mass of arrows with question marks and a real sense of "fuck, I can't see any sense in this".

I reprinted it and set off to read it straight through. I failed miserably.

Either I am totally stupid or it is an opaque pile of incoherent but clever words.

I don't think that I am stupid.

I feel like I say this a lot at the moment but it feels like CMK is struggling with the fact that we’re animals

and female animals are generally less physically strong than male animals

and female mammals bear live young and that imposes restrictions on our lives

and that’s not fair

and this isn’t a computer game or a book, it’s real life, and the universe doesn’t give a shit about fairness

but nonetheless we have amazing human minds, and men’s minds and women’s minds are equally amazing regardless of the restrictions our monkey bodies place upon us

that’s just the human condition. Something we’ve all got to learn to live with

You are most welcome. I'm going to dig up the survey, just to make sure that it only asked transgender victims. If it did (as does seem to be the case), then it gives us nothing to base McKinnon's argument on.

In any case, comparing assault risks from various groups can't be done by just counting absolute numbers at the possible perpetrator groups are of widely varying sizes.

If a low-assault-risk group of one type of possible perpetrators is very large and a high-assault-risk group of other possible perpetrators is very small we might well see more examples, in total, from the former, just because of the very large numbers, even if the latter group is far more dangerous in terms of safeguarding etcetera.

My overall impression is that McKinnon is well-read in only one part of the relevant literature and statistics. To give an example of that, she approvingly quotes:

Trans theorists from Jan Morris to Andrea Long Chu have asked, essentially, if I could live the life I wanted, would I have transitioned?[8]

Recently, a man who new Jan Morris recounted an anecdote about visiting the Morris family after Jan had transitioned and having lunch with Morris. After the lunch, the man visiting got up to clear the table, but Jan told him to sit down as clearing the table was women's work. Yet Jan stayed seated, too.

And we all should know, by now, that Long Chu views femaleness as being penetrated, and the essence of femaleness being an expectant asshole and dull eyes or something similar.

So when McKinnon argues that transitioning, for males, means abandoning masculinity I would argue that this might not always be the case, that the bits abandoned might not be what makes masculinity problematic for the female sex, and that reading more widely would be good for her, too.

Because reading her piece was good for me! It gave me some mental exercise and a nice testing of my views.

The string you need to pull to unravel the whole knot McKinnon creates here is this assertion:

Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies.

I don't think that any gender critical feminist writer would ever argue that women are subordinated or oppressed BY our bodies. That is a strawperson!

The oppression and subordination of women is, however, historically based on the average differences between male and female bodies:

First, the fact that female bodies reproduce the next generation (and the fact that most men want sexual access to that specific type of bodies) makes having societal control over women desirable for societies.

Second, the fact that the average male body is stronger than the average female body, a difference which is further magnified when the latter is pregnant or recovering from giving birth, has historically meant that the subordination of women has been feasible just on the basis of brute strength.

(This does NOT have to mean that individual men or even individual communities forced subordination on 'their own' women as a class, because the differences in average strength and the power of physical aggression has also meant women's exclusion from warfare and tribal disagreements, seen as the need to protect women and children, and because pregnancies and the need to care for small children kept most women away from the public spheres where power was bargained, negotiated, and fought over.

How these arrangements have changed over time, with developments in forms of economic and political arrangements (moving from hunter-gatherer communities to small stationery farming communities to city-states to large states etc.) and with changing technologies is also crucial to understand:

Physical strength and the limitations of frequent child birth have diminished in importance, and so the maintenance of the subordination of women has become more dependent on the gender norms, rules, and stereotypes McKinnon both appears to frown upon and also to see as the proper replacement for sex. I see this as reason to question the concept of gender, not to use it to erase the sex-based nature of women's oppression.

I read the whole thing. She has some trouble with statistical data and how to interpret it. For instance, this bit

In fact, it begins to appear, on limited data, that more women assigned female at birth attack trans women than the reverse.[20]

uses data from a survey about transgender people (2005, I think), so the transgender and possibly nonbinary respondents tell about the attacks they experienced and if the attackers included female people (or perhaps female-identifying people), and also they state the cases where the attackers included or consisted of other transgender people.

As far as I can tell, McKinnon uses the larger percentage for the first group over the other group to base that statement. But the data is NOT about natal women being attacked, so we have no way of checking the validity of that argument.

In short, the survey answers imply that a larger percentage of those sexually assaulting transgender people were female or identified as women than were trans-identifying individuals. The survey tells us nothing about the percentage of natal women being assaulted by transgender people. And, of course, the data is from surveys of individuals, not from police records.

Didn't this idiot used to associate with Dworkin? How can someone spout stuff like this that shows she's never understood basic concepts of feminism?