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.

You don't have to ditch it! I am no authority on such things! I am sure there will be contexts where you know exactly what you mean by it and the person who you are talking to knows exactly what you mean by it and it will be very sensible to use it.

Female is a straight forward biological term with a specific meaning en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female

The same goes for sex en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex

Woman generally means adult human female en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman

If society mistakes a transwoman for someone who "can be impregnated", does that make her a female then? And if not, why not?

No, it makes the transwoman a person who looks female. Looking female is not the same as being female.

And I absolutely do not fetshise vaginas . I don't think genitalia have magic powers - I'm just aware of their role in the human reproductive system.

marfisa do you think that a transwoman who looks like a man and has a penis is male?

Please stop agreeing with me, Freya. It's making me nervous.

Beachcomber, we're not going to agree on this, as our views of gender are just too different, but there is a substantial branch of gender theory (Judith Butler et al) that sees sex as a construct as well as gender.

Flora, no, not if she calls herself a trans woman.

I don't believe myself that either gender or sex can be determined on the basis of how a person looks. I was just questioning Beachcomber's definition of female.

If sex is a construct then sex is essentially meaningless and therefore women don't exist as a meaningful class. That just about sums up my objection to this theory. However I don't accept that a philosopher can negate biology, history or culture with a theory of the construction of language.

I do rather think that only people with wombs and ovaries should have anything to say (or expect to be listened to) when it comes to discussion of reproductive right. I would be less inclined to give airtime or talk time to a woman (born and raised as female) who had undergone a hysterectomy at a young age and was strongly anti-abortion. It would be a case of 'your body is not at stake here so sod off.' People who are not women-capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth are entitled to have opinions on reproductive rights, but those opinions should not be given much weight.
But then I don't think anyone's opinion on abortion is worth anything apart from a woman who is pregnant and doesn't want to be.

No, women can still exist as a meaningful collective, politically and culturally. But that collective would not be based simply on biology.

And to view sex as a construct isn't to negate biology, history and culture. History and culture as a whole (not just language) help to construct sex. From the moment a baby comes into the world (maybe even while s/he is still in the womb), and people say, "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!", cultural norms come into play. Human sex can never be understood on its own; it's always viewed through the lens of gender and culture.

That doesn't mean we should try to do away with the categories of male/female altogether. I don't think that's possible. But we have to be aware that from the very beginning, the sexual identities of male and female are produced by culture as much as biology.

SGB, I think I agree with you. I like the mantra, "You're against abortion? Good, then don't have one."

I can't believe I'm still awake. I'm going to bed now. Honest.

Ok we're not going to agree on sex as a construct and your position on the collective is doublespeak - "yes you can still be a collective of women as long as you allow men who say they're women to join".

I didn't plan to come back to the discussion, but wanted to say thanks to Dreaming Bohemian for the very clear explanation of constructivism and anti-constructivism. I'm know zilch about philosophy and am not an academic, but your post of Wed 23-Jan-13 20:50:33 (and marfisa's expansion on it, and some of the discussion) explains exactly why I could never see any logic in the position of trans* exclusive feminists.

And Goth Anne, I suspect you might right that the starting point for trans* exclusive feminists is the belief that trans women can never be women, no matter what. Then "evidence" to support this belief is retro-fitted, a bit like Christians drawing on pseudo science in an effort to make their belief in creationism seem logical.

That's all I wanted to say. Thanks.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that there can be only one kind of women's collective, with one immutable set of members. The context would matter.

I did lose respect for Germaine Greer years ago when she (an academic at Newnham College, Cambridge, a women's college) protested vociferously at
the election of a trans woman to the college teaching staff. She ended up resigning in protest. That for her was a hugely important battle to fight: keeping one woman who wasn't woman enough (by Greer's definition) out of a women's college. To me, that was a huge waste of energy on Greer's part (not to mention a demonstration of small-mindedness). But I suppose that controversial public figures like Greer become famous by adopting extreme positions, not by acknowledging that questions of sex and gender are complicated.

Kritiq, I really liked your early posts. And everything on the thread came to pass just as you predicted.

Oh the irony! Using a philosopher to justify ignoring biology to suit a political belief. More doublespeak.

I don't think the Greer thing was a waste of energy. The trans woman in question was a woman who worked in Physics. When I was at school, no girls did Physics GCSEs at my school and only two did Chemistry GCSE in my year (one of whom was me and only because my parents insisted). There are women still alive who were turned down for jobs in Physics departments purely because they were female (no women's toilets was one excuse, which trans people can certainly identify with). The trans woman in question had transitioned late and so developed her career in physics while living as a man. Appointing her instead of appointing somebody who battled through the education system and the university system as a woman scientist defeats a lot of the reasons for appointing somebody for being a woman scientist, which is to encourage girls and young women to believe they can succeed in Physics because another girl set out to do that and succeeded, and is now there to guide them based on personal experiences of how it can be done. The Transgender woman in question doesn't set that example; they were a scientist who became a woman, not a girl who became a scientist.

"I do rather think that only people with wombs and ovaries should have anything to say (or expect to be listened to) when it comes to discussion of reproductive right. I would be less inclined to give airtime or talk time to a woman (born and raised as female) who had undergone a hysterectomy at a young age and was strongly anti-abortion. It would be a case of 'your body is not at stake here so sod off.' People who are not women-capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth are entitled to have opinions on reproductive rights, but those opinions should not be given much weight.
But then I don't think anyone's opinion on abortion is worth anything apart from a woman who is pregnant and doesn't want to be."

I don't think that the ownership of ovaries and wombs neccessarily leads to an opinion having more weight. There are plenty of women with ovaries and wombs who actively campaign against abortion, harrass women who want to undergo them etc. Their opinion is no more valid than that of someone who doesn't have a womb/ovaries but firmly believes that a woman should have the right to make decisions over their own bodies.

Florafox "but she won't experience any issues associated with female reproduction or the role of mothers in society or the workplace. "

Are you saying that women who are infertile are less women than those who are fertile? Women who aren't mothers don't experience the same issues as those who do, doesn't make them less women, either.

Infertile women and trans women who are living as women, not disclosing their trans status, of child bearing age face exactly the same discrimination as any other childless woman in that age group will, as they don't have it tattooed on the forehead that they're infertile.

Yes, they can't get pregnant and in that way have fewer things to deal with, but at the same time, they can't get pregnant, which is a huge thing to deal with in itself, so I can't see how this should be used as a divider between who's a woman or not.

I don't really engage in much feminist discussion because it always seems to waste a lot of time when women might otherwise be out there persuading men to do more hours of babycare at the weekend or more kitchen cleaning or enhancing their own careers than arguing over these types of things. Hardly any men or women are transgender so although I accept it's very important for those who were born this way and must be difficult for them it is not a major feminist issue.

No, women can still exist as a meaningful collective, politically and culturally. But that collective would not be based simply on biology.

As long as women are an oppressed class, oppressed because of their biology, we need a word to identity ourselves which refers to our biology. Presently women's politics and culture are overwhelmingly influenced by how society treats us because of our biology.

To be exact, because of our reproductive organs - the thing that makes us female.

If you do away with that classification with some post-modernist philosophising, all you do is take power away from women. And that is the last thing women need considering we currently have so little of it.

Women will still be victims of male violence, of sexualised violence, of sexualised cultural practices, of misogyny - we just won't have an identity with which to name our oppression and under which to organise to resist that oppression.

Our entire society is founded on the oppression and exploitation of women. Did you know that women do two thirds of the world's work yet only receive one tenth of the world's income? And that nowhere in the world do women earn equal wages to men? Did you know that male on female violence causes more causalities across the world than wars currently do?

Women have been colonized.

Judith Butler can theorise that that colonization is based on sex as a social construct all she likes, but it won't change the reality of women. It will just serve to fudge it.

I suspect you might right that the starting point for trans* exclusive feminists is the belief that trans women can never be women, no matter what. Then "evidence" to support this belief is retro-fitted, a bit like Christians drawing on pseudo science in an effort to make their belief in creationism seem logical.

You what?

Come again?

What does this actually mean KRITIQ?

Are you saying that sex is a belief system? Does that mean that if I don't believe I can have all the PIV I want and I won't get pregnant? Does that mean if I don't believe I won't ever suffer from a prolapse as a result of childbirth or get cervical cancer or need an abortion? Does that mean that if I am raped and I try really really hard not to be taken in by 'pseudo science' then I won't get pregnant?

And LOL at "evidence".

The mental contortions required to cognate the dissonance of transgender theory are quite something.

So let me get this right.

A female reproductive system is 'pseudo-scientific evidence' that a person is female. Pregnancy is 'pseudo-scientific evidence' that a person is female.

I don't think I'm up to that level of double-think.

One of my gerbils has recently given birth and is feeding babies - I wonder if it is the female one or the male one?

I find this use of Butler et al so common yet quite odd. I am pretty familiar with this literature for a different reason. Indeed people coming from Butler's position do have a radical notion of construction and see everything as constructed. I get how you can say sex is constructed as a category. We could have constructed all sorts of other categories in all sorts of other ways.

But we didn't.

Butler et al didn't stop there and I'm forever baffled where people get the idea that it does stop there. She also recognised power. That's really really important.

However sex is determined does not alter the fact, if you are using feminist analysis, that it was constructed within patriarchy, by patriarchy and is used to further patriarchy. There is a power relationship that upholds it. Butlerites do not just think yay it's all constructed so I'll imagine it out if existence and wave my magic wand so its all gone. Yes they see construction as a start point, but the rest of the analysis includes engagement with the power in how these things are constructed. I am forever baffled why this important second part of the analysis is ignored.

As has been said several times, feminists would love for sex not to be an important category. But it is. Because patriarchy decided it was. It's not inevitable, it doesn't have to be that way and that's what they're trying to change. The theory helps make a sense of how/why it is a category. But it doesn't think it out of existence.

Exactly Alice.

I disagree with Butler on the category of sex as a construction, but even if I did agree with her, it would just be empty rhetoric if you don't talk about power structures.

Are you saying that women who are infertile are less women than those who are fertile? Women who aren't mothers don't experience the same issues as those who do, doesn't make them less women, either.

This often comes up in these sorts of discussions WidowWadman. I commented on this further up the thread when I said this;

Women are oppressed because they carry and birth babies.

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

Sorry, I bet I've missed things (when do you lot sleep?! ) ... but I wanted to pick up on the Greer issue.

I often think GG is odd, or don't quite 'get' her brand of feminism. But I did see her point there, to be honest. It infuriates me that there seemed to be no widespread outrage that there weren't two posts going, that all this debate was over one lousy post.

I don't get Judith Butler either, btw. All hot air.