All this crap about the London Dyke March is just a big political reversal. They are trying to paint feminists and lesbians as essentialists because we identify patriarchy as a sex based hierarchy; as sex based oppression. And that it is the females of the population who are oppressed by the males of the population.
We are apparently, according to trans activist logic, patriarchal essentialists who uphold sexist stereotypes because we point out that sex matters when you live in a goddamn patriarchy. (And we are no better than porn hounds! Trust an autogynephile to work porn into the conversation...)
They are too stupid to understand the basic tenets and observations of feminism. They are too steeped in male privilege (and obliviousness of that privilege) to have even the most basic clue what the sex class 'woman' is and why it is important to human females.
Buffy, I disagree with what you say in your above post.
1. It feel natural to be accepting of trans because a lack of acceptance for any deviation from right wing values gender and social conformity (e.g. homosexuality) is something that, by and large, we fight against. And I do not feel convinced by arguments against the notion that in mainstream society trans people are not oppressed. I think they are and it would be better if feminists and trans could be allies.
Firstly I think it is important to separate out "trans" into what it actually means (something that has been disappeared by that little asterix). "Trans" has become so vast it now means very many things - from the old fashioned homosexual transsexual who goes for GRS, doesn't actually think they are a woman and who lives peacefully alongside women, to your modern male bodied person with penis and testes intact who reckons his 'inner gender identity' trumps the lived reality of over 50% of the population and who has sexually predatory intent to lesbians and other women, and who thinks his narcissistic desire for validation and 'passing' is more important that global oppression of girls and women.
I feel sympathy towards the former but not for the latter. Within the whole "trans*" spectrum in between I find it hard to see how trans and feminists are natural allies when our politics, ideology, worldview, values, priorities and class analysis are so different. The trans movement is an overwhelming male centric movement. Feminism is all about resisting male centric perspective.
Most of the time people forget about the females who come under the (male centric, male dominated) "trans*" umbrella. IMO most of the time when a woman transitions she rejects feminism and accepts gender. I feel deep sympathy for transmen but I think it is difficult for people with fundamentally different politics to be political allies.
In general, for both male and female transgender people, transgenderism is founded on deeply conservative ideas about gender and homosexuality. On deeply conservative ideas that feminists reject wholly.
I also disagree that transpeople are oppressed. IMO they are discriminated against but they are not oppressed. They have coopted the language of social justice movements and of the oppressed (whence such concepts as cisprivilege, transmisogyny, cissexism etc ). Transactivists (and liberal feminists) tell us all the time that transpeople are oppressed but how exactly does social or structural or institutionalized oppression of transgender people manifest? Most certainly, if one were to argue that transpeople are oppressed, one would struggle to find solid arguments that they are oppressed by women. Feminist analysis is not that transactivsts want women to stop oppressing them (despite this being their message), what transactivists want is for women to capitulate to them on everything they want and for women to give up hard won and incomplete rights in order for transwomen to occupy female space because they have decided that they like it even better than the male privileged space that society has afforded them as their birth right.
In feminism, oppression has an element of control and exploitation, and of one group gaining substantial benefit and advantages from the social domination of another group. For example in female oppression by males, males get domestic and sexual services as a benefit of oppressing women. Power structures and cultural rituals and practices are constructed in order to control and exploit us. Men also get to own most of the world's property and money whilst making women do most of the world's work. Women service men. Men control and dominate women and enjoy the fruits of female labor, domestic service, sexual service and reproductive capacities whilst withholding freedom from women. Male dominated society socializes women to believe this is the natural order. THAT is oppression.
This, certainly in radical feminism, is the difference between discrimination and oppression. Discrimination is treating people unfairly/differently due to a socially constructed categorization. Oppression is much larger, is much more institutionalized and structural and is exploitative. That is not to say that discrimination is not a serious and harmful practice - it can lead to terrible violence and make people's lives extremely difficult due to lack of employment opportunities and so on.
Oppression is primarily about resources, be that resource; the labour of black people, the land of indigenous people or the domestic and reproductive labour of women.
And this for me is where the relativist language of post-modernism has played an obfuscating role WRT sex politics - it has shaped thinking about oppression as being something that happens on an individual level and which can be bucked on an individual level. Whether this is the intention of post modernist thinking or not is immaterial, as the writer in the article I quoted upthread what matters to feminists WRT to post-modernism is how it functions in the real world not what it abstractly is in the academy.