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.

and "sex" as biological state is as much produced through ideology as "gender"

Sorry, not quite following this, are you saying that this is what Butler argues?

Because I can't see how that stacks up as a position

Fabulous discussions, half of which I can't really follow, if truth be told. But the other half hit home hard. Beach's posts , especially. How I miss both you & dittany on a thread.

It worries me that there are not more places for women to discover feminism that are not trans-tainted.

Sorry, not quite following this, are you saying that this is what Butler argues?

As far as I understand it. But my understanding is somewhat limited (and I don't have my copy of Gender Trouble here to quote from). I read Butler because I have to -- I'd rather read Wollstonecraft actually

But Cordelia Fine, in DElusions of Gender also argues that biological sex differences, and the way we construct biolgical male and biological female as opposites, is not necessarily rationally "scientific"

thanks for the clarification, UpTheChimney, will mull on that, but my instinct is to reject that notion.

At base male and female are reproductive terms, whatever is constructed around that is fluff as far as I can see (thinking about the other thread that had the great discussion about relative physical strength & power of men and women) But possibly too simplistic a take on it

I have DoG near to hand, will check what Fine says about it

If you google Judith Butler and her book, Gender Trouble, you might get a better explanation than mine at second-hand!

"sex" as biological state is as much produced through ideology as "gender" That it's not a dichotomy. So it can be seen as a fluid spectrum.

I'm sorry, but this is daft, and we can see just how daft it is by applying it to other mammals - do cats and dogs exist on a 'fluid spectrum' between male and female? How do we explain the fact that a female dog will reliably become pregnant if exposed to a male dog, if these designations are social constructs?

Butler was the reason I dropped out of my gender studies class in first-year uni many moons ago, and this kind of sophistry is why. What she's doing here is actually conflating sex and gender by using a verbal sleight of hand: if you say gender is socially constructed and ideologically produced, you must agree that sex (which is inextricably related to gender) is, at least in part, likewise constructed. But this actually scrambles the feminist understanding of the relation between gender and sex, by claiming they are parallel, mutually related and enforcing concepts, when in fact sex is the material reality on which gender (the ideological construct) is built.

I agree Donkey I think it is sophistry and very fundamentally wrong. In human beings, the biological state of sex is fixed and dimorphic, not fluid and not on a spectrum. I'll need to reread Cordelia Fine - I didn't get from it that male and female are not opposite sex but that many things that are thought to be biological differences between the two sexes are not really different. I didn't read her as saying that there are not two sexes which are fixed states.

I find the whole thing that binaries are bad and so must not be said to exist a weird trend.

Binaries, spectrums and mosaics exist in nature independently if whether or not it is fashionable to like them.

"but that many things that are thought to be biological differences between the two sexes are not really different"

Yes, I got this too.

IMO, the difference between genderists (trans or otherwise) and feminists, is that genderists see biological sex as something fluid and abstract and gender as concrete and immutable.

Thus, sex can be changed but all we can do with gender is to "queer" it. Or alter our "performance" of it.

Which is why we get the weird reversal (which originates with Butler AFAIK) that radical feminism's analyses of biological sex as concrete material reality and gender as social construct is us being essentialist. Because we insist that sex exists and it matters (or it certainly does if you live in a patriarchy).

This interview gives an insight into Butler, particularly as she manages to be reasonably straight talking in it.

www.transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm

I don't know how Butler is taught nowadays, but I hope she is read in relation to her position/reaction to MacKinnon. She is a strong critic of MacKinnon and basically calls MacKinnon's definition of patriarchy and female oppression (which is the standard radical feminist one) racist and imperialist. It's the intellectual equivalent of "check your privilege"/intersectionality as a way of telling women to STFU about male supremacy.

Personally, I think Butler's ideas on gender as a performance are massively privileged.

Personally, I think Butler's ideas on gender as a performance are massively privileged.

Exactly, Beach. As Martha Nussbaum points out in her definitive takedown of Butler:

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies.

perso.uclouvain.be/mylene.botbol/Recherche/GenreBioethique/Nussbaum_NRO.htm

www.newstatesman.com/society/2014/06/laurie-penny-what-transgender-tipping-point-really-means

Laurie Penny at it again with her nonsense. This annoyed me:

"cissexual" or "cis" simply means "not transsexual", in the way that "heterosexual" means "not homosexual or bisexual".

Argh. "Heterosexual" does not mean "not homosexual or bisexual" it means attracted to the opposite sex. Her problem is that none of these words mean anything given the refusal to recognise biological sex as a material reality. What would be her definition of "homosexual"? "Not heterosexual"? The OED is unsurprisingly lacking definitions which state that "X" is "not Y". "Cis" has no satisfactory meaning, it's a ridiculous made-up term to promote this genderist ideology.

She is such an arsehole.

I can't bear to read it until I'm feeling psychologically prepared.

Here's the thing:
'then we have to question every assumption about gender and sex role we've had drummed into us since the moment the doctors handed us to our panting mothers and declared us a boy or a girl', writes Penny.

But that panting mother always was, and always will be, a biological female. Because sex exists.

And as long as biological sex exists, to be told we are bigots for wanting to discuss it is going to be antithetical to the interests of the group of people which is oppressed on that basis, and promotes the interests of the oppressors.

Pretending that society allows us to grab any gender we like and we will all be equal in the face of that reality is a massive, stinking lie.

It really is that simple.

Sarah Ditum's excellent crit of the Penny ramblings

Why on earth would it matter to these arguments whether there are intersex people?

Look. Race is an obvious place where there is much MORE of a spectrum than sex. Does that mean "queering" race by parodying blackness or declaring it as a white person would be okay? Disability's a spectrum, too. Are disability cheats just "queering" an oppressive system?

Everyone's acting like the fact that scientifically we could divide people in these other ways matters. For 99.9999% of human history, the science of reproduction was so poorly understood that women were thought to be only vessels, rather than contributors of reproductive material, in most cultures.

The reason that oppression divides the sexes into a binary is that for the huge, huge majority of human history, you've needed a vagina when you were born to get pregnant, and a penis when you were born to impregnate someone. It frankly didn't matter to the people using this system whether these classifications left some people out in the cold, it wasn't designed to grant wishes.

Since infertility was very poorly understood, the idea of "well, then, women who aren't fertile wouldn't be oppressed" is stupid. The mechanics of infertility are still difficult to understand, and supposedly infertile women conceive with stunning regularity.

Oppressions can only develop in the context of people's actual knowledge. The single biggest clue people had to whether someone was the impregnable or impregnating group of humans was their genitalia. The understanding of human sexual development, biochemistry and anatomy developed in the last 20-30 years bears literally no relevance to the historical oppression of female people, because historical people did not know how to perform DNA tests or check hormone levels. They only knew how to check what was between the legs.

People can talk all they want about the utopian society they'd like, where it's decided differently, and that's fine. But when we're talking about combating the current effects of thousands of years of historical oppression, it seems like an incredibly handwavey, mansplainy thing for people to say "oh, you just don't understand the SCIENCE that makes all your oppression irrelevant."

-- AbortionFairyGodmother (I also run a blog at culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com, which was linked in this thread)

Beachcomber Tue 24-Jun-14 08:30:12
IMO, the difference between genderists (trans or otherwise) and feminists, is that genderists see biological sex as something fluid and abstract and gender as concrete and immutable.

Lightbulb!!

How on earth did that come about? Why not the opposite, which makes so much more sense for anyone whose brains haven't fallen out?

At the risk of coming across as goady (and that's not my intent), I do hope, Kim, (if you are still reading) that you could involve yourself in this part of the discussion, rather than focusing on the changing room stuff on its own.

Sarah Ditum's response was very good. My problem with it however is that she ends by saying Laverne Cox is a beautiful woman. As gender critical feminists (lib or rad), our responses fall down when we agree to the delusion that a man can ever be a woman. I know this is done out of sensitivity and politeness but it is very harmful to a meaningful understanding of the issues. The simple fact of that matter is that a woman is an adult human female and a human male can never be and never become a woman. Men may live as women and women may live as men but when a gender critical feminists calls a man a woman, the genderists pounce on this and, quite rightly, point out the inconsistencies of agreeing transwomen can be women but treating them differently for some purposes and acknowledging actual women as a biological reality on which gender enforces patriarchy.

AbortionFairyGodmother thanks for the link to your blog. Very interesting!

Be careful Flora. I've had a post deleted for telling it like it is. Apparently it makes me transphobic.

I think it would be far simpler if the feminist definition ofgender went back to being called sex role and the definition of gender was used for other things. I would probably still disagree with the definition of gender but on grounds of racism rather than misogyny, which is anissue that would have to be led primarily by people from other cultures.

Have you all seen Glosswitch's brilliant piece, where the analogy she chooses is class?

glosswatch.com/2014/06/24/finding-privilege-class-gender-and-social-justice-tourism/#respond

Glosswitch is brilliant. Her twitter isn't working at the mo else I'd have told her so.

From Sarah Ditum:because there are parents who would rather diagnose transness in their gender-rebel kids than face the stigma of raising a child who fails to fit. I would agree with this. I have seen several interviews of parents of children diagnosed as trans, usually boys who have transitioned to being treated as girls*

This is pretty much what Sheila Jeffreys says. She's the woman who's been extraodinariy villified.

The real sadness of all this is that while women (however you define them) are attacking other women, patriarchy strolls on by, whistling.