MNHQ transphobia guidelines part 2

[QueenStromba]

First thread here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2120841-MNHQ-are-going-to-decide-what-constitutes-transphobia-on-MN-What-advice-guidelines-would-you-give-them?

Sitestuff thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/2117350-MNHQ-now-email-posters-with-how-to-get-around-the-talk-guidelines?

The thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2107862-Following-on-from-the-TERF-thread?

I am wondering a few things;

'feeling like a women' surely is, in reality 'not feeling like a man' that being not feeling comfortable with the male roles and social construction.

So why do these men who do not feel that they fit in with, or want to accept that social construction, have their own movement that creates a more diverse and accepting image of what a 'man' is?

Because that is what women have done, I can well imagine the brave women of the generation above me and perhaps even the generation above that, saying 'I do not feel like a woman' that being that they do not feel connected to the sociological reality of what a woman is.

So they changed it, they worked fucking hard and battled and argued and so on in order to change the ontological reality of what a woman is. As such, my generation are afforded a much more diverse spectrum of what we 'can' be as woman and what thoughts and behaviours are considered acceptable for a female to do. I understand there is still a long way to go but that is the reality.

So now there is a (much needed) shift in male consciousness where by there are certain men who are saying 'we don't feel like men' why then, has the shift became 'therefore we feel like women' because I cannot understand how anyone can specify they 'feel like a woman' unless they actually are a woman.

I realise there is body dysmorphia and I appreciate that is a separate (and to my mind mental) condition.

I am just wondering why the focus has changed from 'I do not feel like a woman therefore I will change the status quo' to 'I do not feel like a man therefore I will become a woman'

If it is a given (and surely it must be) that we are men and women purely because of our biological codes, then how can we change from one thing to another? How is that possible?

It is a shame that the transactivists are spending so much time trying to rescind womans rights in order to be considered as one, rather than trying to improve mens rights in order to be accepted as one.

poststructuralism as a larger form of thought was/is very much bound up with feminism.

It made feminism academic.

And that is the very antithesis of feminism. Feminism is not an interesting academia subject on which to muse and philosophize.

Thanks for the Marxist Feminist link almondcakes. I'll take a look later. Must get some work done on boring translation.

I agree with beach about feminism being a 'lesbian' movement. It reminds me of something Sheila Jeffries said which I thought was really interesting. She said that when she first got into feminism in the 70s, it was a very inclusive, welcoming context for women to be lesbians.

I think the response she got illustrates how very different radical feminists are from the popular perception of them, because lots of women, including lesbians, were really quite bothered by her saying that and wanted to say that anyone who was going to be a lesbian would just do it, no matter where they were, and you wouldn't get more women coming out as lesbian just because they were in a context where it was validated.

I get the implicit point that it's quite dangerous politically to suggest that sexual orientation is a matter of choice. But I agree with her. I think, at the moment, we have a situation where being a lesbian who is attracted to women's bodies and not penises must be phenomenally difficult. And really there is very little acknowledgement of that. There really isn't. I think part of it is this nasty social stereotype that lesbians are somehow able to take care of themselves and slighly masculine, to be honest (just based on throwaway comments I've seen).

When we talk about the stats for violence against transwomen (which are horrific, as male violence is), we always seem to be comparing it to violence against cis(=straight) women.

I know gender and sexuality are separate, but obviously gender comes into sexual orientation. I can't see anything in this movement of feminism that uses terms like 'cis' (and 'queer' to mean, so far as I can see, more or less anything from 'lesbian' to 'I want to feel cool and edgy') that acknowledges this.

Using terms like 'ciswoman' for someone who has grown up lesbian strikes me as incredibly dodgy. There's someone I'm getting to know at the moment who was put in an institution in her teens because her parents believed being gay was being mentally ill, FFS. There are women who are deported back to countries where they are under threat of death. There are women who are never going to come out, who are essentially going to spend their lives being raped by men, because they don't possibly dare to talk about it.

I'm cross-posting massively, but I also disagree that it's postmodernism that made feminism academic. There was plenty of academic feminist publishing going on before that, right?

I know we're have part of this debate before, buffy, and I am aware I am struggling with something you know a huge amount about so I'm coming at it from a disadvantage.

(Don't know why I felt the need to say 'essentially' being raped, like a giant rape apologist, there. Oh wait, I do: it's because all of this stuff is constantly described in terms that imply it's slightly less real, this oppression of women stuff, especially when it's happening in other cultures where women have it shit anyway. ).

I like the football, buffy, and I'll pretend I understanding it.

Or and as well: only analytic philosophers really feel threatened by Derrida (because most people don't understand him so don't feel any threat); whereas they do understand what Dworkin means, and they do feel threatened?

Precisely. Dworkin was a big threat because anyone can understand her and her clarity is brilliant. And that was how she intended it to be - she wanted to speak to women. All women. Her books are just one lightbulb moment after another. She gives and she doesn't want you to have to do the hard work. She does the hard work for you and then encapsulates really tricky concepts in simple, clear, direct, forthright language. Every word counts and is meaningful in a way that is simple to grasp. Her writing is generous.

buffy, if you refer to stuff as silly you risk coming across as falesly modest.

But, I need you and beach on a thread about truth and feminism sometime.

Buffy, I agree there has to politics and context in the sciences (beyond things like a scientist blocking other people's results to protect their own wrong ones for career reasons) because a lot of science can't be done under very strict positivism because of the time scales involved for observation. A lot of knowledge about how the material world functions involve listening to competing truth claims from say, a farmer with forty years experience on her own farm, a local doctor, somebody with passed down community knowledge on flooding, somebody who wants to make a profit and so on about the same issue. And who gets listened to about the 'facts' of an area of land is to do with power. But those 'facts' can't be based in something that has no connection to material reality without having serious consequences.

And I know I keep harping on and you've said you'll go away and think about it. But my issue isn't that post modernism is wrong in its point about power and truth claims. My issue is that it attempts to decouple social constructions from their relationship to material reality, which isn't deconstructing a process of mystification as a process of power, but reinforcing it.

And I think that is what queer theory is. It talks and talks about the mystification in question here - gender, but in doing so it reinforces that mystification by making it even more incomprehensible and harder for people to dismantle.

And on some level people know that thousands of words on (for example!) the impact of gender in Buffy the Vampire Slayer on trans people isn't just about the mystification, because if challenged on the navel gazing of it, the response they will be pushed into will be... But trans people live in poverty! And become physically ill! And are injured by violence! This stuff really matters! All of which is true, but it is also all about material reality, because on some level everyone accepts that is what we most care about, that is where the real injustice is played out. and so words like poverty, injury, violence, illness, and woman can't mean anything at all, they must describe something that pertains to the materially real, even thought they can only be described through a socially constructed understanding, just like everything else.

And that is the very antithesis of feminism. Feminism is not an interesting academia subject on which to muse and philosophize.

Why not?

It's been a part of philosophy for centuries. As a modern Western movement it is based on the development of ideas rooted deep in Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Enlightenment. First-wave feminism was based in political and moral philosophy. Academic feminism has supported and developed feminism as much as activism has (just take a look at these two threads for examples - ideas that are otherwise confined to gender studies students being debated and developed on mumsnet). Academia is often one of the few spaces where nuanced points of political critique are given space for protection and conservation. The public sphere won't do it (under pressures of profit and the appeal to the masses - try finding nuanced feminist critique in the Guardian these days where limp rubbish about "how to have a feminist wedding" claims it's all AOK as long as hubby to be gets involved in buying the wedding favours).

Political movements need both activism and critique (in the Kantian sense). The one flounders without the other.

'My own view is that the various flavours of critical epistemology have merged and split and the boundaries between them are now incredibly blurred.'

This is something I would like to know about and understand, and at the moment, I don't.

Would it be awful to start another thread? It is a selfish request to an extent - I just find this really interesting and I'd like to be able to be sceptical and ignorant without derailing this thread too much.

I'm not saying that feminism doesn't need to be able to be explained. I'm not saying that it doesn't need theories and books, it totally does.

Feminism is not an interesting academia subject on which to muse and philosophize.

I agree with this, but I also think that this is where academia is going wrong, when it becomes about musing and philosophizing and forgets real life. There are plenty of academic feminists who do not do this, so it clearly isn't inherent to academic patterns of thought. Sheila Jeffries and Julia Long are academics (though, academic publishing as mentioned upthread is painful). Gail Dines is an academic. Liz Kelly is.

To my mind, the problem starts when 'women's studies' becomes 'gender studies'. And then you do get people who really just want to muse and philosophize. And I have really some incredibly offensive shite from such people, who have forgotten they are writing and talking about someone else's reality.

(I'm going to go make another cup of strong coffee now, but on the subject of language, I will say, I can't begin to feel confident spelling epistemology without looking it up, so I am likely to keep on talking about truth and knowledge. I do think the language is an issue.)

Roughly it is this bit Or is it with the way these ideas have been used to adapt the ways women are oppressed rather than to dismantle them?.
Although I think the language is part and parcel of that.

I really have to go and do some work. Don't want the thread to become too much about this because it is such a big and difficult subject in itself and we have enough going on already here with discussing sex and gender.

I shall now go and do boring translation and stop posting about dratted post-modernism/structuralism.

Just want to say thanks to all of you - this is such an interesting discussion. I wish I were able to contribute properly but my feminist theory is very out of date and rusty from lack of use. But it's fascinating to read the conversation :)

And QueenMab - your big room/small room analogy really made me laugh.

But my issue isn't that post modernism is wrong in its point about power and truth claims. My issue is that it attempts to decouple social constructions from their relationship to material reality, which isn't deconstructing a process of mystification as a process of power, but reinforcing it.

I would argue that postmodernism doesn't itself do that, but it claims that late capitalism has done that to us (it points to an effect which has already happened, and has already been enacted upon us by a specific mode of late capitalism which can be called "postmodernity/ living in postmodernism". It shows us that the deed has been done, that it our social constructions have already been decoupled from material reality.

In that respect it's a bit unfair to blame this on, say, Lyotard or Baudrillard or Deleuze: fair enough to say that their prose style is wanky and obscurantist, but they are essentially saying that the material bases of capitalism have managed to wreak such havoc on our essential life that the ideology of capital has simply disappeared into everything and can't be seized or disentangled from our being any more ("all that us solid melts into air"). But it isn't postmodernist theory (which is more like a fancy form of cultural materialism meets media studies) that has done this, to be fair, and our estrangement from material life isn't the fault of a few pretentious thinkers in French universities. They point the finger at the structural workings of real power-capitalism, which are the enemies of feminism just as much. It's bery much looking the wrong way to blame postmodernist theory for the dismantling of social reality!

Yep, I take that, buffy.

I do think it is still something feminists knew before post-modernism, though I get that people are always going to claim prehistories for anything 'big' that happens.

It's just, the reason for saying feminists knew it, is because IME a lot of these debates take as their starting point 'oh well, you feminists are all very hard-of-thinking and assume language has no power and everything is determined by material reality, but I am subtle and postmodern and can tell you it's not'.

*sorry for typos - on phone!