Cisgender Lesbians & Trans Women

[kellyandthecat]

www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/02/16/cisgender_lesbians_and_trans_women_how_to_mend_the_rift.html

I am a straight 'cisgender' woman but a friend of mine in America posted this article and I thought it was really interesting to think about 'other' kinds of women. I cant say I know very much about it or feminism with a capital F since I left university but this article definitely makes what it calls TERFS - 'trans-exclusionary radical feminists' look quite bad so I was wondering if anyone on MN had read it and had any thoughts. No one in my house ever wants to have a chat about this stuff

I find this extremely interesting. I'm a straight, white, paid up member of The Patriarchy - but this is the only forum of the several I frequent where opinions seem to largely coincide with my own, and people seem to me to be talking sense.

The problem with the whole "cis" thing is that it reifies something that has only actually been arrived at by elimination, and then proceeds on the assumption that that thing is actually "A Thing" that exists inside the consciousness of most people.

I never decided that I was "cisgender". I never decided that I have a "male gender identity". Neither, as far as I can tell, did most of the men I know. What actually happened was that I was born with a penis, and then OTHER people made that decision FOR me. I'm only "cisgender" by virtue of the fact that I'm not "transgender" - ie, the discomfort and falsehood I feel between the limitations of socially-determined male gender and who I "really am" (which everybody feels to some degree) have not become so extreme that I want to wear and dress or have SRS. It's got nothing to do with anything I ever declared or decided about my own identity.

And yet because we are (rightly) trying to work out what the fuck is going on to make people feel like they are transgender, we have retroatively invented this concept of "normal" gender identity to contrast it with, and assumed that everybody has it. And now apparently, lesbians who don't want to be imposed upon by people who are biologically male - whatever you want to call them - have to check their privilege because of it.

It's bonkers.

I can't find anything concrete, BreakingDad, but have found a couple of sites where people are saying that they reckon about 50% of transwomen are lesbians.

First site

Second site

BreakingDad77, Iran has one of the highest rates of gender reassignment surgery in the world. It also bans homosexual acts.

I agree that the concept of men are this, women are this, ergo if I don't do xyz stereotypically male/female thing then I must be the wrong sex, is very, very conservative.

It's the ultimate expression of the "real man". A real man likes football, has a beard and a six pack (or a beer gut), loves the laydees. Ergo, a man who does none of these things is a woman. It's something that little boys learn very early on and must be very painful for those who struggle to conform.

Good post, Wackadoodle

Great post pastthemission.

On the point about Iran and conservative policies, we see these attitudes in a lot of stories about "courageous" parents of trans kids. The dads in particular couldn't understand why their sons didn't like to play football, wanted to wear pink etc. but were "so relieved" when they discovered that actually they have a girl and that explains everything. The "God made a mistake" narrative is quite strong in conservative US circles. Apparently some senior Mormons are saying they might consider trans to be acceptable. I bet they wouldn't consider "lesbian" transwomen to be acceptable though. The whole thing reeks of homophobia and the "lesbian" transwomen are appropriating the homophobia suffered by GNC and gay boys to their own ends.

On the point about the surgery, I think a lot of men and women think "well if a man is so unhappy he's prepared to cut his penis off, let's do what we can to accommodate that". Particularly for most men, nothing would seem worse than losing their penis. The idea of transwomen with no intention of having genital surgery and who want to have sex with women is largely lost for most people. They think the transwomen who want into shelters and changing rooms want to have sex with men, so there's no risk for women.

For a transwoman who wants to have sex with women, it's perfectly understandable that they would not want to have genital surgery. That, IMV, is a big part of this shift towards saying womanhood can be individually declared. So even if a someone is married to a woman and working as a man in his professional life and only assumes the identity of "woman" on certain occasions, that person can be considered a woman and a prominent activist / advisor on LGBT issues. Or a person can present fully as a man but demand and receive the craven apologies of a potential MP for saying gender identity is an issue for women to resolve.

I think your last post nails it there Flora. Many people simply don't understand what's involved and what's at risk, and they don't care enough to inform themselves. On that other "oh how terrible anti-transgender thread" thread, both the thread starter and one of the most vocal contributors both seem a bit clueless as to why anyone would have an issue with the transactivists' position, basically.

This is getting more interesting and more of a head-fuck all the time. Thanks Flora for clarifying.

Does anyone have any insight into why men who wish to remain physically male and carry on having sex with women actually want to present as women some of the time? And why they want transactivism to become such a huge part of their lives? And how on earth a person would square, say, remaining professionally male but in their "other" life being transactivist? And the number of men who do this? I'm thinking as a journalist, which I used to be, but I'm not brain-picking for that purpose; I genuinely don't understand how it all works in the minds of the people concerned, still less for society and women as a whole.

Isn't it in part cherry-picking the best of gender roles (as they see it: the performance of the feminine role can look fairly reductive and fetishistic to me ) while avoiding the discrimination being a full-time woman tends to involve?

If someone wants to have the genuine and authentic experience of being treated like a woman, they can sit down, shut up and make the tea.

Hermione that is so true!

I'm beginning to wonder if this all stems from this pronouns stuff. People identify internally as man/women, then a desire to have that internal reality matched by external circumstances (ie called he/she by everyone). Now comes this newfound sense ownership of the term woman.

I'm beginning to think well meaning as it undoubtedly is, calling transpersons man/woman has enabled a further degradation of what it means to be a woman. A conversation I cannot help but notice is not happening over the term man.

Looks like common garden sexism to me. Men carry on regardless, women have to accommodate and compromise.

YES! While Social Justice Wiki (a very dubious website) has a definition of 'woman' as "an extremely broad umbrella term for a gender, role and identity"...
sjwiki.org/wiki/Woman#.VOiQs0sjjwI

There is no definition of 'man'...
sjwiki.org/index.php?search=man#.VOiQZEsjjwI

Yes, but that's a general thing that's long since been pointed out--that everything is assumed to be male, and if it's not, it's an exception that has to be noted. So for instance you could hear about a study on "The position of women in society" and not be surprised, but it would be bewildering to hear about "The position of men in society". Society is men, unless you make it clear that it's not.

So anyone who claims to be a man, however dubious it might logically be, isn't making any waves, because we haven't got any particular expectations about what a man should be, in fact we use "man" to mean "human". But if someone claims to be a woman, they have to meet a set of expectations. Maybe broad or narrow, but still it's not something anyone can just decide to do.

Good point I had not considered that that. Although my wider point is that I'm seeing stuff about female penises and accommodations that must be made by lesbians and women in general, but precious little of that if any is directed at men.

Yes, I would LOVE to see these transactivists being equally vocal towards and critical of straight men who aren't attracted to their male bodies and female penises. Except they won't, because they'd be beaten up, whereas feminists and lesbians are fair game because, as a general rule, we don't make death and rape threats (or actually kill and rape).

Well that brings us neatly around to the link in the original post. One of the first things brought up in that article is the rate of violence experienced by the trans community. Now if someone will suffer a straight man's opinion (as from a completely selfish standpoint I don't have a horse in this race one way or the other), but that violence suffered by both transsexuals and women more often than not comes from the same place: men.

That is the first and most crucial point of convergence of both groups at least as far as my uneducated eye can discern. It is also not unheard of for victims of abuse to disassociate themselves as an unconscious reflex from what they were when the abuse took place, a woman can pile on weight in a reflexive attempt to remove themselves from the crosshairs of future abuse, and yes this can go to the extreme of disassociating from gender as well.

I cannot hope but wonder if at least for some and at least in part some of this drive for access to women's spaces, and being part of the conversation around rape and abusers is being driven by an unconscious fear response and a desire to be safe. It would explain why it's such an important part of the dialoge.

And of course dovetails right back to the problem of male violence.

Oh and one would assume a woman transitioning to a man has no need to fight for access to rape support services, and women's spaces in quite the same way, because of their initial biology.