Women are being censored because they wish to discuss the politics of gender. I say NO. Who wants to join me?

[Beachcomber]

Ok, I'm guessing that many here have heard about Julie Burchill's explosive article defending her friend Suzanne Moore against trans activists.

I'm also guessing that there are a lot of women who don't know that trans activists have been becoming increasingly influential in many areas that affect Women's Rights since the 1980s and 90s. These areas include feminist websites and blogs (such as the F word), feminist meetings and conferences, women's music festivals, in feminist literature and in academia teaching gender studies (a subject that used to be taught as women's studies) and in post-modernist and queer theory circles.

Transactivists call any resistance to their increasing influence and presence in these areas of female interest "transphobic". Discussion of gender identity as an oppressive social construct and as a threat to feminism and women's rights is also considered transphobic. Consequently, discussion of women as being a political class of people oppressed due to our sex and our reproductive capacity is becoming harder and harder for feminists to have without being accused of transphobia and bigotry. This is very very concerning.

Numerous women have been threatened or silenced by these people (for example they have been no platformed and/or picketed at feminist events or attacked and threatened after writing articles or essays discussing gender identity).

Let me be very clear that this discussion is about transactivists and people who threaten others into silence. It is not about transpeople in general (some of whom have stated that they are afraid to get involved in the controversy).

In my opinion, no matter which side of the gender identity debate one stands on, surely we can all agree that debate should be allowed to take place. One side cannot be allowed to shout down, threaten and silence the other.

The recent events are not just about differing opinions on gender identity though (or I wouldn't be bothering to post this), they are about women's right to talk about and identify sex based oppression and male supremacy, and therefore to fight against sex based oppression and male supremacy. And that is why this is an important if not vital issue for women's rights.

I think women's rights politics are reaching a pivotal moment - a moment in which we must stand up for our right to discuss our status as second class citizens as a result of the biological fact that we are female. If we can't discuss it, we don't have much hope of fighting it.

bugbrennan.com/2013/01/19/for-every-one-of-us-you-silence-100-more-will-rise-to-take-her-place/

To summarise the link - a well known and influential feminist blogger has been censored for discussing the issues outlined above. She is not the first woman to be silenced by these people. I think it is about time we stood up to them.

Thanks for reading.

Hi, kim, she will be in at the deep end with us! I think a transwomen when they pass will without doubt share many experiences with women. I think when they don't pass, they probably suffer in a different way, often worse, often violence.And they are met with discrimination from men and women. We will share many of the same experiences but females still grow up female, they bleed, they give birth, they go through the menopause. I actually have no problems with trans people and would be glad to share space and believe that patriarchy isn't to be found in penises or those who once had them , do have them, want one.......it's institutional under capitalism. If we can all stand to together then we can get somewhere. But I can understand why rape survivors (not all, but some) might feel that they want female only space. I think that should be respected. As a socialist, we have our own meetings but we also campaign alongside anarcho-syndalists, anarcho-communists and other groups on the left. I see this as similar.

kim sorry she won't experience similar oppression. She will experience some female oppression (and possibly some more oppression from people who might find out she is a transwoman) but she won't experience any issues associated with female reproduction or the role of mothers in society or the workplace.

I think a transwomen when they pass will without doubt share many experiences with women. I think when they don't pass, they probably suffer in a different way, often worse, often violence.And they are met with discrimination from men and women.

We will share many of the same experiences but females still grow up female, they bleed, they give birth, they go through the menopause. I ... believe that patriarchy isn't to be found in penises or those who once had them , do have them, want one.......it's institutional under capitalism. If we can all stand to together then we can get somewhere.

Waving pom-poms, Mini.

That's a great link MiniTheMinx. Thanks.

This bit pretty much nails it IMO;

"Transwomen are oppressed on the basis of gender, not sex. Only females are oppressed on the basis of sex. But all gender oppression is still rooted in the hatred of femaleness."

FF, yours is probably a better analogy but it wasn't what I meant. I was comparing murder to DB's point about everything being socially constructed. Perhaps I should use the term 'been killed by someone' rather than 'murdered' to get away from the idea of legal distinctions between being killed in a conflict, being accidently killed by someone or being killed with intent.

I was responding to DB's post about how gender and sex are both socially constructed, in which she never mentioned trans, and I never mentioned trans in my response. Some trans people think sex and gender are social constructs, some think sex is a biological reality and gender is a social construct and some think both are biological realities, just as non-transgendered people think all of these three things. I am not conflating the idea of 'being killed by someone' is purely a social construct with trans people at all. Trans people as a group are not the ones arguing that everything is a social construct; it was something DB was talking about. The very fact that people are attempting to conflate my critique of an ideology about social construction with being trans merely strengthens my view that a lot of people who are not trans are simply using transgender issues as a way of promoting something they want to promote which is not intrinsically to do with trans experiences at all.

We all participate in gender roles. We all have an identity based on gender, even if our identity is that we don't believe in gender and so might call ourselves 'radical feminist' or for others 'agender.' Everyone acts out a role related to the concept of gender; it is not something trans people do more than anybody else. When I do identify as a woman, I am well aware that most other people take that to mean a whole lot more than just my body, so it is as much something I do and the whole of society does as much as any trans person does.

Pretty much everyone, some, all or most of the time, are in situations where they think that their biological sex is totally irrelevant to their sense of identity in that situation. I went to the opticians today and the fact that I have a female body was totally irrelevant to me. Anybody should be able to go to the opticians and have their biological sex be irrelevant to how they are treated. Online I sometimes RP as a man, and the fact that I have a female body is not relevant; my gender is male in that situation.

But the fact that we all sometimes want to identify in ways that have nothing to do with biological sex, and some of us never or seldom want to identify by biological sex doesn't make the material reality of that go away in every situation. It still needs a name. It is in no way the fault of trans people that society as a whole has, for a very long time, been using terms like man and woman to mean more than just physical bodies; those terms have meant gender and sex together for a long time. If we are moving in a direction (and I think we are; it can't be held back) where words like man and woman are going to solely mean gender and have no relationship to biological sex, then we need new words to mean biological sex.

How do people think? what is thinking in relation to? for me it's a dialectical process between environment, things outside of us, "actors" "agents" apart from us, we react to this and we think. Everything that happens shapes our thinking but in turn we shape everything around us. Which is (marxist) but also very positive because it means that there is no longer a limit to what we can change, human behaviour isn't static, it changes over time in relation to other changes, human nature isn't static and can also change over time. Working from this, I feel very strongly that Rad analysis of patriarchy is static, aHistorical and actually as the liberals (incl gender/queer theory) has moved into the central ground for most people, we either find a way forward or the number of women prepared to identify as feminist will be far smaller that those who identify with their opposite gender!

"Transwomen are oppressed on the basis of gender, not sex. Only females are oppressed on the basis of sex. But all gender oppression is still rooted in the hatred of femaleness."

YY Beach but don't get carried away with the "rooted in the hatred of femaleness." please, we need hope not doom. We can't be stuck in this soup forever with two armies pitted against each other to eternity.

Freya said, "I think different trans people, like different kinds of all people, see gender identity in different ways."

Absolutely. Some trans people understand gender in what I would personally consider a very conventional way (that is, their ideas about what men are like and what women are like are quite traditional). Other trans people are much more interested in questioning the gender binary. Trans women don't share a common view of gender any more than cis women do.

Dreaming, I totally understand where you're coming from - maybe we have read the same gender theory books or something! Some of the arguments people have been making on this thread strike me as deeply contradictory as well. Some people seem to be arguing that what makes someone a woman is having a vagina which fetishises genitalia and is quite an essentialist position while simultaneously saying, "Oh no, I don't want any reductive gender identity imposed on me!" -- which sounds like a constructivist position.

To me, if you see gender identity as a construct something fluid, that varies from woman to woman, and depends upon one's particular experiences and one's particular culture then you are not going to get hung up on vaginas or the lack of them. That's precisely what patriarchy gets hung up on, saying that women's biology dictates who they are and how they behave (or should behave).

I'm not saying that bodies don't matter. Menstruation and hormones and pregnancy and childbirth and menopause are important elements of many women's experience. But not all women experience all of these, and more importantly, no two women experience them in the same way. A famous (ish) book on medieval misogyny argues that misogyny is any sentence constructed in the form, "Women are X". In other words, as soon as you try to generalise about women in any way and imply that all women are the same, you are getting into trouble. You are glossing over the uniqueness and complexity and particular historical position of individual women.

I promised myself I wouldn't post on this thread any more, because the anti-trans stuff really depresses me, but I keep getting drawn back in...

Being treated as female is not the same as being female.

Feeling female (whatever that actually means) is not the same as being female.

This is why in feminism we often talk about 'being radicalised by motherhood'.

The female is the one with stitches in her vagina, who has the breasts that can feed and the lived experience of childbirth. If things go wrong it is the female who dies attempting to give birth/create life.

Women are oppressed because they carry and birth babies.

And this is true for all females whether they have children or not, society places them in the category "can be impregnated" just as it places all males in the category "can impregnate".

Mini, I took "rooted in the hatred of femaleness" to be a reference to homophobia.

I want to be full of hope. I really do. It is a bit hard though because what is happening at the moment is not insignificant for women.

YY Beach, totally agree. I think there is something in the primordial brain that sets biological female and male brains up as quite different. I know it's not fashionable to think this way but a distinction can be made between conscious brain and primordial brain. It is the conscious brain that deals with social functioning and that can change in negative as well as positive ways, has changed over time.

I have always felt that nurture is natural to females, it is so because otherwise our ancestors would have dropped the hungry crying baby and walked off to find food for themselves instead, we simply wouldn't be here.

Beach, I think the problem is that we don't have a history of treating the term 'woman' as just meaning biological sex. We have a history of the word woman meaning both biological sex and a range of feminine social characteristics.

All the other meanings of woman are not going to disappear; people are still going to use the term 'woman' to mean a person with a whole load of feminine social characteristics.

A compromise would be to let people have the word 'woman' to mean a feminine person, on the understanding that there are to be a wide range of other possible genders besides man and woman, on of which would be the category 'agender.' And to also have the further understanding that people could change categories whenever they felt like it.

We could then have new words to mean biological female, biological male, intersex and so on, and nobody needs to take those on as identities if they don't want, but they are still politically protected categories so that we continue to work for everyone who can get pregnant to be protected from forced impregnation, sexualisation of their physical characteristics, poor treatment in pregnancy and so on.

And to quote this again because it is very incisive and gets to the root of many of the issues we have explored on this thread;

"Transwomen are oppressed on the basis of gender, not sex. Only females are oppressed on the basis of sex. But all gender oppression is still rooted in the hatred of femaleness."

This is why females do not have cisprivilege. In patriarchy, females are not afforded any type of gender privilege.

(Although, as I have already said, females can be rewarded for gender conformity - but that is not privilege, it is just another manifestation of oppression.)

Perhaps I should add, it is the conscious brain that is so important to humans because we are social animals, it isn't innate, can change and actually is the reason we master new skills, shape nature and environment and shape society as we do, it is that, that evolves and can evolve positively.

Night all

Beachcomber, clearly you see "being female" as something quite straightforward. I don't.

You jump from talking about females and their bodies to talking about the "category" that society places women in. You are trying to separate sex and gender, but in fact the two are inextricably intertwined. If society mistakes a transwoman for someone who "can be impregnated", does that make her a female then? And if not, why not?

What does it mean to fetishise genitalia?

Transwomen and "females" are BOTH oppressed on the basis of gender.

Flora: to endow genitalia with a kind of magical symbolic significance that they don't actually deserve. If I google "fetishise", I get the definition, "Have an excessive and irrational commitment to (something)."

You can't fetishise genitalia on living people. It completely contradicts the meaning of the word fetish.

OK, the word fetish can be used metaphorically, and that's how I was using it.

Genitalia are secondary sexual characteristics which, together with chromosomal profiles, indicate male or female sex. Science. Not magic.

But science and chromosomal profiles can be a lot less binary and a lot more complicated than one might think.

That's intersex which is very different from transgender.

I agree with you Marfisa, but the fact that biological sex is a fuzzy and imperfect concept in no way makes acknowledging the material reality of different kinds of bodies and what happens to them literally or metaphorically a fetish.

And I apologise for going on about it. I just think the word has been misused so many time in social justice conversations that it no longer has any real meaning and just confuses people as to what point is being made, which is in no way your fault.

OK, you have convinced me, Freya, I will ditch the word fetish! It's a bit jargony and imprecise anyway. I didn't know that it had a history of being misused.