Any appetite for further discussion on 'trans-feminism'?

[CrewElla]

I made the mistake this morning of reading the comments on an article on the Guardian website re Kellie Maloney being 'outed' in the tabloids which led to me googling trans-feminism and coming across this article from the New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2

I haven't considered myself radical in the past and, at times, even (naively) said I had no need of feminism. Reading the New Yorker article I felt they so missed the point and tried to marginalise a view (woman have a need for spaces free from penises, whether the penis belongs to a man or a transwoman) that I don't think is that radical.

Am I being naive? Does anyone have the time/interest to read the article and share their views on it?

I also think that vocal transactivists are making two statements which, taken together, are very very worrying.

First there is the demand that women not discuss abortion, contraception, childbirth etc as part of feminism in the presence of transwomen because transwomen do not experience those things and it is therefore exclusionary.

And then there is the demand that transwomen have full access to all women's spaces ("It’s your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you.")

You may not discuss XY&Z in our presence. And we will go wherever we please.

So things which ARE women's issues and DO need to be part of feminism are written out of feminism. It's a problem.

There's also the policing of language - you can talk about abortion, childbirth, menstruation etc if you talk about womb-havers or 'vessels' or 'pregnant people'.
So it's a bit like when people who misunderstand what humanism is tell us that feminists should be humanists.
It's depoliticising what it is to be a woman in this society. It's backlash.

thank you to everyone for really interesting, well thought out and heartfelt posts.

andiewithanie - this is fascinating " i even got irrate because women weren't quietening down because now i was seen as female."

How did that work in your head? Was it a consciously "manly" response - "why are they not deferring to me, THE MAN" - or as I am guessing more likely - just a general "ugh, these people are so noisy and rude and aren't giving me the attention I deserve and usually get"?

When I was on maternity leave I used to see this in my friends' husbands a lot (I am sure they still do it but I don't hang around with the the same group of women in the same way). We had a routine that involved a big group of women, babies, and toddlers at someone's house once a week and usually the men were at work. It was a lovely time to get together in a crowd and mainline coffee and cake and basically just say "OMG, I know, I know". Breasts out all over the place, great piles of toys for the toddlers, babies miraculously calm for the first time all week because they were boggle-eyed absorbing all the action.

Anyway every now and then someone's husband would be home for some reason, or would come home, and would appear at the door of the room we were in sort of ...loiter there, usually with a patronising smirk, or would say something incredibly "humorous" and patronishing, probably addressing us as "ladies", and wait for everyone to give him some attention and offer him something. The women always did. Sometimes the men would not to do this but come in quite crossly, give a sort of muted glower to the room and withdraw, which was a signal to his wife to leave the group, find out what he wanted, and get it for him. She always did.

It was clear to me that the general disrespect that men have for women was heightened by the fact that we were in a social group in a domestic setting, which men associate with leisure. I have never worked harder than when I have had babies under about 9 months, and my DP (I only cite him, because I know him) has never worked that hard, for a sustained period, in his life. And yes, those women were my friends but they were also colleagues. We swapped ideas, we coached each other, we were experts. We deserved more respect than that. Those men should have come in and waited on us with cappuccinos and patisserie in gratitude for us nurturing the next generation and they should have sat at our feet and listened quietly, like meek students, so that when they got the odd day with a child they didn't have to freak out and put the TV on for 8 hours and serve takeaway pizza. (only half joking)

Super - yes, the policing of language really upsets me in a very visceral way and I can't really put my finger on why. I mean women aren't listened to anyway, but actually taking away our words takes the project of silencing women to a whole new level. I wish I knew enough about history to know if this is a thing that the oppressing class does routinely: forces the oppressed class to talk about themselves using language given to them by the oppressors.

Julia Penelope and Dale Spender wrote about men dominating language. It's in Genesis in the bible too - men having the power to name. It's pretty key to being able to name our realities as women and work out what our needs are.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Speaking-Freely-Unlearning-Fathers-Tongues/dp/0807762458]]

www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/spender.htm

'Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. In its structure and in its use we bring our world into realisation, and if it is inherently inaccurate, then we are misled. If the rules which underlie our language system, our symbolic order, are invalid, then we are daily deceived.

Yet the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding. Once made, however, these rules have a habit of becoming self-validating and self-perpetuating, regardless of any misapprehensions on which they may have initially been based.'

YY about the policing of language. It seems to be a very male thing to do. Women naming problems seems to cause all kinds of dramas to men who are quite happy to see those problems continue nameless and unsolved. The same is happening with the Rotherham abuse case, lots of links being found with religious affiliations, family's country of origin, but nothing being said about the one thing that links all of them. That they are men.

The reaction to the word mansplaining is quite telling, I think.
And, again, the helpful advice to change feminism to humanism/equalism/femanism etc.

I love The Wickedary by Jane Caputi and Mary Daly for reimagining words.

Recently, there has been a huge increase in feminists willing to name male violence against women and girls for what it is, with concomitant backlash.

Super - I can completely see that, and all I can say in defence of the menz is that we truly honestly have no idea that's what we're doing. We're socialised from birth into both performing that role and policing it.

How did it work for me personally? I didn't realise at first it was because of my male socialisation, and when I did it felt horrible, the idea that I'd been responsible for having that impact on women was just ugh.

I have very mixed ioinions about the whole experience now. On one hand I found it truly enlightening, as when I was privvy to women behaving as freely as they could I began to see them - perhaps for the first time - as fully human: warm; funny; caring; aggressive; strong; opinionated. And on the other I have to come to terms with the fact it's something I possibly may never see again. Simple awareness of how I interact with women may not be enough to counter the instinctive responses, and as I begin to be seen more and more as male I'm going to have to actively resist gender socialisation.

Do I get tea and sympathy to go with cookies now? ;)

I'm lurking and absorbing on this thread, so apologies for this rather drive-by post, but vezzie your most recent post reminded me of that scornful phrase "mother's meeting", used to describe a group of people (usually women) who are seen to be chatting or gossiping about something pointless or trivial and generally getting in the way

"Mothers' meeting" sorry

I've heard 'blether' and 'fishwives' too.
The word gossip itself - it used to be a woman who was with you while you gave birth.

Yes exactly. Women socialising or pleasing themselves is what happens between demands for their attention from men/children. If it is seen to get in the way of that it is unacceptable

And I didn't know that about the word gossip, how interesting

This is an introspective post so probably won't interest anyone else ... I loved Vezzie's depiction of her friends' group, doing that quintessentially female thing of being women together with their babies. Partly because, never having had a live baby, I've only been an accessory to motherhood, and mostly because of her point about the change inflicted by any man's presence. Thinking very carefully about this, I suspect it's a big part of the reason for my social disconnects with women: I didn't instantly defer to men. In fact I've always been the one who tells the intruding blokes at our table to piss off if they can't respect our conversation. (Perhaps surprisingly, the other women fall around with gratitude.)

My dad made it clear I should have been a boy - it wouldn't really have made any difference, but that's another part of the story - and, while he demanded total obedience, he also expected a spirited response. What he wanted was complete access: physical power over me, and entry into my thoughts & feelings about it. It's hard to respect someone who keeps putting you down & beating you up, and I didn't. I feared him instead. The only negotiating tool available to me, then, was choice over which reactions to show him. I allowed him modulated access.

I'm not ready to transpose this into thoughts on how this bestowed on me the ability to treat men as no more socially important than women, or indeed the inability to display appropriate deference (I've always overdone or underdone it.) Neither am I sure of what I'm thinking about how this adds to the discussion in hand, but it's got something to do with this: "What he wanted was complete access: physical power over me, and entry into my thoughts & feelings about it."

A gossip was a midwife? Gosh, that is interesting!

andie "i even got irrate because women weren't quietening down because now i was seen as female."

This simple expression of male entitlement is really depressing to read. Thank you for sharing.

The language thing is fascinating. One of the most disturbing things for me about the whole trans debate is that the assumption that women who were born women have to find another name for themselves. To paraphrase Lees- If we don't like cis, then we have to find another name. We are no longer allowed to be "women" Over, as they say, my cold, dead body.

Just posting very quickly. Someone said earlier that transwomen seem to be substituting appearance for experience and I think that's very accurate. The "womanhood" described and enacted by a lot of transwomen is "off" because they've never actaully witnessed women being women - a bit like those medieval drawings of lions and tigers which were done by people who had never seen a lion or a tiger, but had heard detailed descriptions of them.

Thankyou Garlic, that was interesting.

"how this bestowed on me the ability to treat men as no more socially important than women"

Although I do tend to defer to men socially (usually - although I am often annoyed by how disruptive it is when my friends do it), I am like my mother in that I know I am doing it, and I know that it is a physical manifestation of their superior status which I do not ideologically or theoretically agree with. This is bad, because, like my mother, I am full of unexpressed resentment while not knowing how to actually change anything.

However. One of the formative influences in my feminism is actually a man. A close friend of mine in college, who is not white, very clever and very passionate and very clued up about oppression, read and understood and perfectly articulated some of the classic radical feminist texts. It was liberating to me to see his response to this with clarity and logic; and to see how he articulated his political anger (about his own position as well as the positions of others) - he was getting mixed messages, because socially, angry clever political young man = good, but also angry person of colour = very, very bad. He showed me how you can own your anger, and not be ashamed of it just because you are hearing that people like you must not get angry.

anyway. Years went by (imagine the fluttering of the calendar - something like 20 years) and now we are still friends though don't see each other much. Someone on fb just now asked him to name key books that have stayed with you and he included some of these radical feminist texts. One of his friends said, "I assume you do not endorse these?" He said "I don't know how how clearly I remember them, or how I would feel if I read them now".

I have seen several of his political friends post in a "no-brainer" way, in an anti-TERF way and I think this may be to do with that? THose names are now persona non grata because of this issue? This confuses me and makes me sad. (Of course there is also the very real truth that if you genuinely did read a book for the last time 20 years ago, how do you know if you stand by it today?)

It makes me think

• am I outdated? Do I need more sophisticated political modes of thought and what should I be reading?
• I wonder how much he and I agree on now? As an active political activist, maybe feminism has just fallen off his list
• it is not just men who are his friends who are outspokenly anti-TERF but women too. but - I can't help but notice that passionate sincere lefties are always in terrible shape psychologically. It is a punishing predicament to be in, working towards justice in this world, and there is so much poor mental health amongst these clever people of integrity. (they do not have the various balms that the religious fighter for justice have to protect themselves with) Is this a place where we are parting company - to the extent that we are parting company - because I am quite healthily, though decadently and bourgeois-ly, drawing a personal-health line of "this hurts me and on this I care about me MORE" - which committed lefties do not seem to do very often?

I don't know what I think about all this and honestly in real life I don't have to, because I am just polite to everyone and no one has pushed me beyond my limits. So - maybe I should just be on the side of the oppressed - the trans activists?

There are a few more examples of etymology in this Gary Nunn article about the feminisation of 'madness'.
www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/mar/08/mind-your-language-feminisation-madness

Garlic - That's fascinating stuff. If you ever blog about this I'd love to read it.

I'm not surprised at all surprised your friends response to you telling the men to fuck off. Transition made little or no difference to the amount of privilege I retained in my dealings with men, and I realised pretty quickly that whenever I stood up for myself (in ways women were often unable to), women would be the first to give me support. It was clear there was a great deal of entirely justified resentment toward men.

Language and gender is a fascinating subjects, and the module I did in it during the Access ourse I did last year pretty much wiped out any notions I had of the female gender being something that I could approriate. Do any of you read Trouble & Strife? Debbie Cameron wrote some amazing stuff for them.

drawing a personal-health line of "this hurts me and on this I care about me MORE"

I've long felt, quite despairingly, that this is the case with most big issues of social injustice. I can see that it makes sense, for instance, not to go round wondering which of your local councillors, bankers, friends and bosses are child abusers. It looks clear that the people most likely to be able to bear the thought, and face the problem, will be those who've already been forced to face it: either by being part of the problem or having successfully weathered the trauma of working with it.

Thanks, everyone, for such interesting posts. Looking forward to catching up later :)

"The language thing is fascinating. One of the most disturbing things for me about the whole trans debate is that the assumption that women who were born women have to find another name for themselves. To paraphrase Lees- If we don't like cis, then we have to find another name. We are no longer allowed to be "women" Over, as they say, my cold, dead body."

I find that interesting too. I think I've mentioned this before, but I once had a comment deleted on CIF for saying the reason so many women do not like the term cis is that we've been labelled against our will for centuries, and now we aren't even allowed to be just women.

'Woman' itself means wife of man. It's already sexist and limiting. Add to that 'cis' and half the population really gets told who they are, don't they? The time to invent a new word for women was the 70s when it would have been empowering, not disempowering. If we couldn't call ourselves something else then, why do we have to because we are told to?