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?

At risk of being accused of more academic "derailments", I just do not get why it is being assumed here that the problem is poststructuralism, postmodernism, postwhateverism and so on. These are actually very subtle and often highly feminised and feminist-influenced movements compared to pretty much any other area of philosophy - Kristeva, Cixous, Butler, Irigaray, anyone? And thinkers like Foucault are very precisely concerned with exactly how the language certain groups of people use becomes felt in the world as real material power over bodies, particularly vulnerable bodies. Postructuralism is actually one of the most feminist-centred forms if modern thought. It's an odd straw man (ha!) to choose, really - there are tons of other, very very male dominated and either implicitly or explicitly antifemale and antifeminist forms of thought that are currently far more dominant and powerful than French postructuralism (which is now rather out of fashion and quite attenuated) - starting with the often insidiously nasty pseudo-discipline of evolutionary psychology, and including all sorts of reactionary movements in academia, politics and medicine. So why choose postructuralism to get worked up about?

Some people and groups will be more able to (re)construct what we take as reality and exercise power than others and the beneficiaries of that need to try to develop some awareness of that and think a bit beyond themselves. All this individualistic 'choice' bullshit likes to conveniently gloss over that.

And that's not even to get in to how ideas of 'choice' and 'freedom' function as mechanisms of social control insofar as they shift responsibility to individuals and translate all sorts of bigger issues into individual failings to exercise 'choice' and 'freedom' responsibly.

Yes to this.

It appears that in both cases there is a problem in that small segments of society don't seem to accept that you don't actually get to choose how other people perceive anything, including you combined with an utterly soliphistic refusal to consider or care about anyone else. The latter part is really problematic, especially when there are people out there desperate to paint severely disabled people are their 'privileged oppressors'.

The issues are the same as with the transactivism we've been discussing; it's just they're so much more glaring when the campaign is directed at (dis)ability rather than sex/gender.

I disagree georgettemagritte. If we are going to head back into this subject and I think we are actually talking about it without calling it that then can we please all keep it simple and not reference obscure stuff without properly and simply explaining what it is. Also I think it is helpful to stick to post-structuralism/modernism in the context of feminism and women's rights and not veer off into architecture, etc because our brains will melt.

DonkeySkin linked to this the other day and it pretty well says what I think of Judith Butler's work for example.

The Professor of Parody

It's really dismissive of women's lived experiences too because it seems to me that if we accept that a) women are discriminated against but also b) that we can be whoever we choose to be; then it's a bit thick and stupid to choose to be someone whose discriminated against. I mean, if you had a complete choice of identity, why wouldn't you pick to be on the side of power?

I think that too OddFodd Doesn't it all lead to a rather fatalistic aspect that you are identifying with the subordinated status - your essential element is subordinate - and therefore all is right with the world? Except that dominant women might identify as men and therefore (in their ideal world) be treated as a man and subordinate men can identify into the lovely submissive role and have lots of fun with make up and not bothering their heads with important stuff. Like that silly video of the boy who gendershifts ie when he's ditzy he's a girl.

Urgh.

On the topic of transabled, this person is both transgendered and transabled, although the DM (apols) did not report the transgendered aspect

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2366260/Body-Integrity-Identity-Disorder-Chloe-Jennings-White-58-disown-legs.html

Georgette: that's why I called it 'post-whateverism'. Because, I suspect, the problem is that all these problematic developments come out of a pick and mix to suit yourself thing based on someone else having read some lecture notes in a social science UG class a couple of years ago and posted about it on tumblr, rather than any coherent philosophical position. This kind of super-individualistic identity politics doesn't actually want to be stuck with being in any way consistent.

I totally agree with you that Foucault's work is all about the consequences of power/knowledge games on people's everyday experiences and their embodied realities. I was actually thinking about Nikolas Rose's (really excellent) Foucauldian inspired work in writing about consequences or the refusal to acknowledge these.

Thank you for that, Flora.
So it appears that in Iran membership of the group known as men is policed by harassment of homosexual men and by insistence that men experiencing body dysphoria must become biologically women.

What I think your post highlights is the fact that the definition of 'man' apparently must not be challenged, and not just in the secular west. Maybe it also illustrates the notion that any person not fitting into the really quite narrow definition of what constitutes a man is not accepted in the club, and that men have a right to exclude - and place on an inferior footing - those deemed unacceptable.

The feminist contention is that the problem is heterosexual men's insistence on actively policing membership of their club and protecting the privileges associated with membership. By insisting on being called women when there is no biological basis to that claim, transactivists are bolstering up the men's club, which is a hostile (womenphobic) act.

Yes, maths. That sounds like exactly the issue.

And some (not enormously academic) thoughts on academic thought. I think that this kind of transactivism (and all the seriously dubious identity politics that appears to thrive on tumblr) requires a kind of pseudo-intellectual veneer. It needs to appear to be robustly theoretical so as to give power to the discourses and the concepts it creates. But it really doesn't want anyone opening up a discussion about the techniques of power it employs because that might undermine the whole 'you're all oppressing me' narrative they've got going on.

And now all I can think of is that scene from the Life of Brian.

But, Beach, postmodernism explicitly started as a movement in architecture, and that is where it retains its most coherent and specific form. If you want to understand how postmodernism points to particular problems in the literally material world, why not start there where it clearly does have something to say about the material world? Since several posters had claimed postmodernism suggests the material world doesn't exist (which is not in fact true).

I simply don't see why people are intent on blaming some specific theoretical movements, which want to tell us about particular states of being in the world, for the very things they are pointing out to us? Both postmodernism and postructuralism are very clear about the fact that real structural oppression exists, and they are also quite clear on some of the reasons behind why it exists - real structures of social, political, legislative and capitalist power that have become so internalised to our society that we don't see them.

Yet for some reason Butler or Lyotard or Derrida are to blame for pointing this out, not the political, commercial or legal interests that enforce real oppression in the world. Meanwhile far more insidious and nasty forces go about ensuring that oppression continues.

Thinking about architecture.... How our literal material environment shapes who gets to go where and in what kinds of spaces. Loos and changing rooms, for example. Unisex loos. Disabled loos. Who gets to use them. How they are accessed. Why public buildings do or don't have loos. And money. Money gets to go everywhere these days: there are no sacred spaces where profit or the market doesn't reach. If no space is sacred any more, why should women have sacred or separate spaces either? What's the big deal with spaces? Why shouldn't men go everywhere as well? Why should women feel threatened if males intrude on their spaces? After all, those spaces aren't theirs, are they? They belong to private corporations (mostly). Yet the way that the profit motive, the right to have anything you can buy, has co-opted the language of rights goes unexamined, where a few French thinkers who point these things out get the blame!

I remember reading about Chloe Jennings-White (the transabled, transgender person mentioned above) and what I wondered is whether the reality of having a 'sex change' actually forced her to look for further validation and for a further group to 'be' in.

Because I think it is clear that though legally you can 'change sex' physically that is impossible. That must be very hard to take when you have gender dysmorphia and you think that the surgery will give you 'the' result and then it doesn't

I would defend talking about architecture. We literally build ideas into buildings and, in doing so, give them reality and force us to live in and through them.

And that includes ideas about gender that have enormous influence on everyone's lives and which serve to constrain women in all sorts of ways. In particular, domestic architecture says a lot about where we position women in society. For example, kitchens used to be small and not very nice when they were only really used by women. The more (fancy and showy, as opposed to the mundane reality of the kids' tea every night) cookery becomes something men do and really value, the more the kitchen becomes an important room. So kitchens get bigger, and grander and have more 'gadgets' in them.

And that's not because men (stereotypically) like gadgets. It's because technical innovation so often follows the (socially acceptable) interests of men. It mattered less that the cooker looked crap and wasn't all that reliance when it was something purely for women.

Buffy agreed - and there's a worrying trend in more than one area of academic thought to defer to really quite crude and underdeveloped neuroscience or "cognitive science" as if with a blind faith that scientific "fact" will solve all out problems.

I think it was Kim actually who said on one of these threads that really the issue was just like how it had been recognised that homosexuality is something that just is exists in people's brains and they are just born like that. Um, no, large parts of the gay rights movement certainly don't accept that, and there is only dubious pseudoscience at best to support it. The claim that homosexuality is innate serves a particular social and political purpose - for one thing, it is dominant in the US where the constitution affords protection to the inalienable characteristics of the individual, so it has always served a particular strategic and political purpose to make a claim that homosexuality is innate. But there is a long history of lesbian and feminist thought that thinks the opposite.

Now the crude form of thought that "homosexuals are just born like that and so we must accept them" might be great if you are trying to convince a fundamentalist Christian why the Consitution grants Rosie O'Donnell the right not to be attacked in the street. But co-opting that as a model for transgender rights gets into all sorts of problems, because as previous posters have said, it's trying to justify an "inalienable" aspect to the person that doesn't in fact exist, so gender, or "feeling like a woman", has to take the place of biological fact, which tries to treat gender as inalienable when it isn't. It collapses gender back into biology when one of the aims of poststructuralism was to prise them apart.
In this it is supported far more by current medicine, crude neuroscience and the host of "male brain/female brain" theories that have started to occupy everything from autism research to evolutionary psychology to advertising.

And cooks get to use blowtorches to make creme brulee.

Yes completely Calamitously - so much of the discussion on previous threads has focused on women's spaces - changing rooms, loos, the desire to feel safe or to protect space. And those spaces aren't just theoretical spaces, but actual spaces, which are physically within our material environment. I think people are sort of missing the fact that "postmodernist" thinkers are largely critical of postmodernism/postmodernity - they don't think the postmodern world is great; they aren't advocating it; they're pointing out how insidious and oppressive it is and how that oppression has literally become invisible to us. The fact that they can be crappy prose stylists doesn't mean they're to blame for the ways the discourse of identity can be used against the very people it was designed to help (women, the disabled).

That identity-based discourse is at root a male, Enlightenment discourse: it took women centuries to start to get to use it for themselves, and if powerful groups have found ways of co-opting it back, we should be looking at how structures and institutions enable this rather than getting diverted by Judith Butler's prose style.

OK, talk about architecture if you think it will help people understand transgenderism and the predicament of women's rights today. Or if will help us to get a good handle on what post-modernism and post-structuralism have to offer as solutions to the oppression of women for being female.

I don't think all the world's woes are the fault of a few French philosophers and their followers and yes there were useful and interesting and clever ideas there, of course there were.

I think the problem is how those ideas actually function in the real material world. And the real material world is ruthlessly capitalist and oppressive and it will use every tool going to remain that way and divert movements for change and use them for its own end.

Which brings me to Neo-Liberalism. I highly recommend this video where Gail Dines gives a talk on . It is long but really interesting and easy to understand (love Dines for that). OddFodd you might be interested because Thatcher and Regan feature.

Dines talks about what she calls 'The New Hegemony in the Academy' which is 'Post-Modernism meets Neo-Liberalism'.

Also a link to this article from feminist journal "Off Our Backs" Let them eat text: The real politics of postmodernism

Both of the above helped me to understand my own position on some complicated concepts and get them clear in my head in a simple way so they might be helpful to others too.

Ooo I've just done an essay on neo-liberalism (admittedly more about the rise of punitivity across the world) but I would be very interested in the feminist angle, thanks for that beach

You're welcome ICanHearYou, would be interested to hear what you think of what Dines says (it gets quite rousing and fierce at the end with the 'boulders up a hill' lets all push together bit).

I certainly agree with you about neoliberalism, Beach - but neoliberalism is anathema to poststructuralism (by the way, I think a lot of postructuralism offers something towards solutions, or tries to; but postmodernism in the Lyotard/Baudrillard/Jameson form I see more as negative critique).

On architecture, though - when so much of the discussion is taking place around rights to spaces, do you really think architecture isn't relevant? So Jameson, say, points out that postmodern architecture is all about how spaces must be sexy, permeable, flowing, filled with screens and opportunities to buy stuff, rather than being, say, functional, or spiritual, or sacred to specific groups or communities. Doesn't that have some kind of connection to a rights-based discourse that says you have no right to exclude me from your spaces ?

An architect in my family once told me that the reason there are never enough women's loos in new buildings (as opposed to old buildings, where the reasons are different), is that some architects believe that equality legislation means that if they build in more women's loos then they are discriminating against men. I don't know how true that is, but it shows something of how relevant architecture is.

On another thread I read in FWR a student gave the example of how the women's loos at her university had been turned into unisex loos. But unisex loos are sexy and permeable, and the menz can use them too, so why should women need separate loos by virtue of their biology when unisex is so much more now?

I'm not saying that architecture isn't relevant to discussions about space.

I'm saying that if we are going to talk about post-modernism on a thread that started out in 'chat' about transphobia we might alienate people if the discussion becomes too niche or too full of references to things lots of people haven't read or aren't very familiar with or veers off into a complex discussion of post-structuralist architecture.

I would be one of those people and I don't think I'm alone. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be interesting or relevant just that it might not be everybody's cup of tea on a thread such as this one. I'm all ears though, as I said if such a discussion will shed light on transgenderism or how to protect women only space or how to stop non gender compliant children and lesbians being pressured to transition or offer solutions to the predicament of the women's rights movement of today.

by the way, I think a lot of postructuralism offers something towards solutions, or tries to; but postmodernism in the Lyotard/Baudrillard/Jameson form I see more as negative critique

georgettemagritte, can you explain what the above actually means? What concretely does postructuralism offer in terms of solutions to the realities of female oppression which affect women in their actual lived lives?