Following on from the TERF thread...

[CailinDana]

Trying to get my head straight on this. Surely the whole malarkey around transwomen wanting to be recognised as women even though they have penises will eventually actually help to break down the idea of gender?

What I mean is, if a person with a penis can be labelled a woman simply because they want to be labelled in that way, surely gender becomes meaningless as it tells you nothing meaningful about a person except perhaps the clothes they like to wear?

This is a half-formed thought, feel free to develop/challenge.

I think there is a lot of value in feminist post-structuralist epistemology. Which I define as sociologists / anthropologists do, namely as treating all truth claims to equal scrutiny, not privileging one method (positivism) above the rest.

Buffy, I don't know much about post-structural feminism, but my Honours thesis dealt in part with the post-structuralist and postmodernist critique of positivism in the social sciences, and I came down on the anti-relativist side. While there is certainly merit in questioning the positivist method, especially WRT to the way Western anthropologists have positioned themselves as objective observers of other cultures, I maintained (and still maintain) that we can nevertheless make judgements on the relative merits of conflicting truth claims.

Basically, I took a dim view of postmodernism then, and I take an even dimmer view of it now. Back then, my objection to it was based on finding the pure relativist stance essentially pointless, but since reading this brilliant radical feminist essay on the political function of postmodernism, I now see it also as a reactionary and sinister phenomenon, which pretends to champion marginalised voices, but in fact undermines the ability of oppressed groups to name the truth of what is happening to them (because there is no truth, right?)

What I find most interesting about postmodernism is not what postmodernists say about it, but how it functions in the real world (and I'm assuming there is one) in terms of social change. The effects of the intimidating and obfuscating writing style, of inhibiting generalizations and so the formation of commonalities between people, of ruling out binary thinking and so eviscerating impassioned convictions, and of overemphasizing individual rather than collective action is to create a multilayered system of disconnection, silencing, and disempowerment.

What is also interesting is the timing of the advent of postmodernist theory. As Somer Brodribb and Barbara Christian point out in Radically Speaking, postmodernism came into vogue in academia just when the voices of women and people of color began to assert a significant presence there. It seems that when groups other than those in power attempt to say things, suddenly truth dissolves into meaninglessness. This is a little too coincidental for my taste.

I suggest that postmodernism is nothing more than the new relativism and that relativistic theories emerge as a new line of defense when power structures are becoming threatened. It is a very insidious and crafty defense because it mouths the words of liberation while simultaneously transforming them into meaninglessness. The real agenda is masked in clever obfuscation--to preserve the status quo by rendering dissent meaningless and ineffective, unable to gather any social or political power. Notwithstanding postmodernism's purported intention to deconstruct social norms and by so doing, make way for changes, its actual effect is to atomize peoples' experiences, obliterate the potential for solidarity, silence articulate and forthright speech, and render passionate convictions meaningless. It leaves us unable to condemn anything as wrong or oppressive with clarity, certainty, or conviction.

offourbacks.net/index.php/featured-articles-1/85-let-them-eat-text-the-real-politics-of-postmodernism

There's a massive difference between not wanting to be the sex of your body and wanting to be the opposite sex.

I didn't want to be a woman. Or rather, I had a complex relationship with my mum as a child and couldn't relate me becoming a woman with the role model she provided. Puberty was very difficult for me, particularly periods. That didn't mean I was a man, though.

Great stuff, thanks Donkey , especially the last paragraph.

I don't particularly want to be a woman either. I don't fit at all with the idea of "woman" - I have no interest in how I look, in fashion, in make up, I have hairy everything, I work in a scientific field etc etc. Apart from the fact that my body functions in a female way I'm not really a "woman" and actually I find it weird to be called a woman or to be expected to read things like "woman's weekly" or enjoy "woman's tv" like Loose Women. It doesn't chime with me at all. But I'm not a man, and have no desire to be.

I may be going off at a tangent here. We all presumably agree that sexual orientation, and the ability to determine that for yourself is very important. For women, I think that pregnancy and the ability to determine whether or not you want to be pregnant, by whom, how many times and when is just as important as sexual orientation.

And that is why it is important that we recognise the reality of biological sex, isn't it? Because while that reality exists (and it can only be approached through a constructed power structure), the kind of body you are born into determines whether or not pregnancy is going to be the major experience by which you will or will not reproduce yourself if you are female. And in any kind of socially constructed world, that is a whole different kind of experience involving different decisions than those made by people who reproduce themselves through impregnating others.

I can't imagine how it would be helpful to people to obscure that fact in any kind of world.

And it seems to me that the obscuring of the fact mainly applies to obscuring issues around women. The default isn't that most people could get pregnant; the default in our society is that most people won't, because the default human is male. Or when genderqueer people performed womanhood, a lot of them would do so with a strap on baby bump, but they don't seem to.

I have to admit that I see an element of disordered thinking in the transgenderism. There is a type of body dysmorphia in which the sufferer wants to remove a healthy limb, and feels compelled to do so, such that there have been very sad cases of people sitting on railway tracks in order to irrevocably damage a leg so it must be removed (once surgeons have refused to remove it as it is healthy.) I can see that the person genuinely wants to remove the leg, and genuinely believes that their lives will be better after it is removed, but there is no rational explanation for needing to remove the leg beyond recourse to mental illness.

I'm starting to see transgenderism in the same way. There seems to be an attempt to normalise it, but really, wanting to remove parts of your body and obliterate your identity isn't normal.

Also, I don't see a movement among people with other types of dysmorphia to gain recognition as part of another group. For example, I haven't seen those who've removed legs wanting to be part of support groups for people who've lost limbs due to bombings or polio - because their experiences are totally different. I don't understand therefore why transwomen want access to women's space. They are a separate group of people, with different experiences. Those experiences are valid, and they have every right to talk about them, but imposing restrictions on women makes no sense.

" Or when genderqueer people performed womanhood, a lot of them would do so with a strap on baby bump, but they don't seem to"

That's interesting.

Yes to what DonkeySkin says to postmodernism.

It is smoke and mirrors.

It seeks to annihilate class identity, politics and powerful collective activism and replace them with individualized, vague, powerless, obedient, sectionized, non confrontational identity politics.

Post modernism is the antithesis of grass roots movements and activism.

It is an every man for himself schema. It is an intellectual denial of the non privileged and their actual, real, concrete class struggles and subsequent distress.

My Dad really wants to be Scottish. All of his names are Scottish. We have Scottish ancestry (actually, I have more because of my dad AND my mum, going back). He has spent a lot of time in Scotland. He supports Scotland in the rugby.

He was born in Chester and was brought up, and lives, in Yorkshire.

He's not quite as much of a tosser as that makes him sound! And he's still not Scottish. And would be laughed out of town by a Scot if he claimed that he was Scottish. He knows that, so he doesn't. He still loves doing some of the things that make him feel an affinity, though.

That is one of the things I find incomprehensible about the idea of non binary, gender queer, gender fluidity etc. It is about performing gender in a way that is associated not with male or female, but all of humanity in all its forms. But actually, there is nothing about being or appearing socially male that couldn't also be done by a woman who isn't pregnant. So by not having the appearance of pregnancy as a common part of gender queer culture, what is really being said is that there is a new binary, group one -- humanity who perform gender in a fluid way, and group two - those things that get pregnant.

Can I ask a possibly stupid question.

Is there a different definition of transsexual and transgender? Surely wanting to change your sex (body) is difffrent?

I have used language as carefully as I can above. My understanding is that the definition of trans (transgender and transsexual) by those who self-define as trans is much broader than the above.

Yes, BillnTed the definition of a trans is now 'identifies as trans'. Trans activists are very clear that one does not need to have dysphoria with one's sexed body to be trans, and I read that 80-90% of males identifying as trans women do not plan to have surgery (this was based on a survey of trans people in the New York area - can't find the actual source, sorry).

And that definition is being pursued politically too - Denmark just became the first European country to approve legal change of gender without any clinical diagnosis.

www.ilga-europe.org/home/news/for_media/media_releases/denmark_becomes_the_first_european_country_to_allow_legal_change_of_gender_without_clinical_diagnosis#.U5h4qwKPPos.facebook

It's one of the many contradictions at the heart of the current trans political agenda: on the one hand, they push transgenderism as a crippling medical condition that should be treated with extreme interventions like surgical and chemical modification of bodies (including those of children). On the other hand, they say a person's self-stated gender identity should be accepted without question and demands for medical diagnoses or treatments as 'proof' of trans-ness are discriminatory and oppressive.

Norma, I think that is l a key question.

Fair point. Sex is pretty genetic, though, I would've thought.

I don't get postmodernism and I'm not ashamed to say that :-)

kim147 and Norma This is why I asked the question before about when 'trans' as the whole term in itself started to be used and popularised. Yes, it does have the straightforward convenienceof being shorter, but it also has the appeal of avoiding naming 'sex' 'gender' or any of the other concepts being negotiated specifically - people are just 'trans'. Allows for a lot of vagueness (or freedom, depending on your pov)