Feminist perspectives on transgendered people

[toboldlygo]

Excuse the random intrusion (haven't posted here before) but I've been watching My Transsexual Summer on C4 and it's raised some questions for me; basically, I was just wondering if there was any sort of feminist consensus on transgendered/transsexual individuals, whether there's any difference in opinions depending on whether they are FtM or MtF, pre or post surgery etc.

Not looking for a bunfight, just curious, if it helps any I am a cisgendered female these days but went through a phase in my late teens of being desperately uncomfortable in my own gender and wanting very much to be male.

Milly: Maybe I just haven't come into contact with enough transactivism to see the scale of these problems.

Would you agree that women generally have more privilege than transgender people in society? If so, would you agree that we have an obligation not to exclude them, rather than the other way round?

I'd agree that there are a few cases where it may be necessary to exclude some transgender people, for example some spaces for rape victims, but in most cases I think that if women feel uncomfortable with transgendered people then it's up to us to get rid of our prejudices rather than up to them to put up with being excluded.

Marmite you can only convert if a religion chooses to welcome you - e.g. I cannot decide to become Jewish, I cannot have the law changed so that I can enter Jewish spaces. I cannot force a particular group to include me, or make them fight my battles.

Laws against racial discrimination would be made a nonsense of, if it was considered that race was purely about how you feel, and I could choose to decide that I was of Nigerian heritage but born in a white body.

Marmite, how much prejudice somebody has come up against isn't a reason to exclude or include somebody in a group, unless the group they are trying to join is the 'most oppressed people in the whole world ever group.'

There will undeniably be gay Muslim disabled men who are more discriminated against than me. It doesn't mean they should be allowed into women's spaces because the discrimination they have experienced is different.

The question of the privilege of transgender people is an academic one. Our own personal experiences are hardly representative, but the transgender people that I have known were certainly privileged and had very sucessfully established themselves as men before transition.

Hmmm, interesting.

With the mixed race thing, I mean that other underpriveleged groups like black people don't have a solid boundary that separates black people from white people - mixed race people may self identify as black or not, or may sometimes have white privelege but sometimes not... If black people still manage to organise act as a group, and we can still have laws about racial discrimination, despite not having a rock solid boundary, then I feel that feminism ought to be able to cope with the a similar problem.

But the similar problem would be us insisting that race is about how you feel and any of us could choose to adopt the characteristics of another race and become part of that race. Black and white minstrels would be an ethnic minority.

Yes, I think black people would object if I decided that I was black and told them that some of them weren't black because black was actually a 'feeling' and had nothing to do with social roles or skin pigmentation.

And I have actually seen that happen. An Irish American guy told a mixed race friend of mine that being Irish was the same as being black, so he was more black than her because she had a white grandparent.

WhollyGhost - I guess I feel that in this very imperfect analogy, transgendered individuals would be like mixed raced people who are seen as white by society but feel their own identity is not white. That would be the logical outcome if we believe there is something innate within transsexuals that makes them feel this way, but that we can't show it scientifically at our level of understanding. (Not that I can know this for sure of course, and I worry I'm straying into judgements about something that's outside of my experience)

People who sincerely feel they are black, but trapped in a white body, could do a reverse Michael Jackson and have their features and skin colour altered. But they would not have grown up as black and would still not have so much in common with cis-black people.

And biological realities mean that they would be less prone to conditions like sickle cell anaemia etc.

No marmite in that analogy, intersex people would be like mixed race people. Transgender would be like Milly's misguided American, or maybe, Michael Jackson.

It isn't the same though is it? If you are mixed race, but pass as white (my niece is in this position), you still experience many of the kinds of prejudice that ethnic minorities face. You still have an ethnic minority parent and could very well have a child who does not pass, even if your partner is white. Your mixed race is still a biological reality.

I am not asking transgender people to prove this innate gender. If they proved they had it, it would make no difference to me because I don't have it so don't have joint membership of a gender group with them. I have no issue with them setting up a gender group for people, whether trans or not, who have this gender feeling. It really is none of my business and I don't require evidence from them.

There was some social experiment in America where white people disguised themselves as black in order to report back on what prejudice was like. Unsurprisingly, actual black people said that the disguised white people really had no idea, because prejudice is not something you can understand if you weren't brought up with it your whole life.

Those are good points MillyR.

On the other hand, as a middle class fairly young woman I haven't experienced massive amounts of sexism personally. I know that I've received a lot of subconcious messages too and so on, but compared to the misogyny many woman experience, I have gotten off pretty lightly. I can imagine that a transgender woman who'd passed as female for ten years and lived in another area with a different proffession could easily have experienced more misogyny than me. So I wonder why i should be accepted into all woman spaces and not her. Or maybe I shouldn't be accepted either :)

Marmite, I think that is coming from your perspective that groups are about shared experiences of discrimination and who has experienced the most direct discrimination.

A lot of the reason I spend time in women only groups is because I have things physically in common with other women that are important to me. As a consequence of indirect discrimination, those things are rarely talked about or discussed because the norm is to look at things from the perspective of people who have male bodies.

So it is about having a space to share our experiences, not a space to talk about how mean men are.

at spaces to talk about how mean men are

Thanks for explaining it to me... I still feel that we should be more inclusive of transsexual women, but I can now understand better why some people don't. I guess it's something that has to be discussed on a case by case basis.

(not to make light of women who've been abused by men, the phrase just sounded funny)

Well I suppose we do sometimes talk about men being mean, but it isn't our sole topic of conversation!

The law says that women have no physical reality, that's the important thing. Our physical existence has been erased and treated as non-existent. No other creature on the planet has had that done to them, only women.

Manatee I asked you earlier if you thought that other sexually dimorphic species also had male and female "gender identities", would it be possible to answer that now?

Judith Butler isn't a feminist, she's a queer theorist.

I'd also be very interested to know if people think that the biological sciences got it wrong, and the fact that they recognise sex right down to the cellular level is actually a mistake?

I don't think biological sciences got it wrong, as such, but i think like with most things in science, the reality is much more complicated and nuanced than that straightforward distinction.

"The law says that women have no physical reality, that's the important thing. Our physical existence has been erased and treated as non-existent. No other creature on the planet has had that done to them, only women." There's a massive difference between saying "It's more complicated than we thought to define what a woman is" and calling into question our entire existance. There are many things in the world that I know exist but that I can't define in a simple way. This doesn't strike me as a dramatic problem.

Marmite I also personally would like to be (and have been) inclusive of transgender women. On an individual level, I would be supportive of any friend or family member who felt the need to undergo surgery to make them feel happier in themselves .

But I respect that not all women share my views on inclusion, and there are valid reasons for that (e.g. making groups accessible to women with PTSD, or to women who will not associate with men for religious or cultural reasons).

Also, I do believe that a sex change is impossible. There are things about ourselves that we cannot really change, however much we'd like to. And I think it is wrong that the law has decided that being a woman is merely about identifying with gender traits.

What is the more complex explanation of women's physical reality then?

And what other things have a physical reality that requires a complex explanation?

I thought that key to the definition of physical reality was that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. I don't think this should be extended to social constructions, but I can't see evidence that this has changed when we are describing material reality.

Re your question earlier, thunderbolts - sorry - I missed it due to skipping in and out during an unspeakably annoying day at work. I couldn't really speculate on the felt experience of other species - I can at least inquire about the experience of my own species, as we share a language (however imperfect) but I don't speak any animal languages so don't really have any way of enquiring what it might be like for, say, a cat or a horse.

I'm still getting this nagging feeling that we're talking at cross purposes about this idea I floated of a 'core gender identity'. I'm definitely NOT talking about some essentialist idea of the attributes that come with a biological gender, but more about the 'tacit knowledge' that people have about themselves. The kind of 'implicit identity' I'm trying to describe is usually unspoken and largely unconscious, and comes about inductively and experientially, through inhabiting the world in a physical body.

Stuff like the shape and extent of our bodies, physical urges like hunger, thirst, tiredness or sexual arousal, subtle hormonal changes throughout the month or year, mood swings, proprioception - all the implicit knowledge we have about ourselves as embodied humans. The idea I wanted to float was that this is part of how we experience ourselves, fundamental to what we can experience (senses, sensitivities, etc), rarely reflected-on, and that at least some of that experience is gendered. This becomes more marked at puberty, with adult male or female hormones, but some part at least becomes marked at a pretty early age with the idea 'male' or 'female'.

And that the idea 'male' or 'female' becomes connected to aspects of embodied experience before we grasp any of the gender role stuff that goes along with 'male' or 'female', eg that one colour is 'for boys' and another 'for girls', and all that bollocks. I'm trying to describe that point where small children become aware that their genitals aren't the same shape as their opposite-sex parent, but don't realise yet that this will increasingly come to mean they have to behave in pre-determined ways that differ for girls and boys, in order to fit in with the expectations of those around them.

Milly - I certainly have an embodied sense of myself as female: I have breasts, I get PMT, I menstruate etc etc. Of course your experience is your own, and I don't dispute it, but I'm puzzled by your statement that you have no core gender identity. I'm thinking maybe we were at cross purposes, as you said in a subsequent post that you choose to spend time in all-woman groups partly because you have 'things physically in common with other women that are important to me'. Surely those 'things physically in common with other women' are approaching what I'm trying to describe here, as an embodied sense of yourself as female?