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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

I don't want to be a TERF

243 replies

PullUpTheTERF · 16/11/2017 14:45

Please help.

I've NC'd for this because, well, obviously. I assure you I am a regular poster on many forums on MN, including Feminism.

Bit of back story; I am a loud and proud leftie feminist, massively pro gay rights, I am known in my circle of friends (I've been told) as being a champion for minorities, I've been to 12 gay prides and counting.

Being on this forum (since way back when it was FWR) has exposed me to gender criticism and TERF idealogies.

And I wish it hadn't.

I find myself agreeing with some (please note - not all) posters who have explained the, seemingly many, issues with the trans movement.

I'll nod along to certain comments and then hate myself for doing so.

I feel like I could never say any of this in public.

I really don't want to start a bun fight.

I'd really like to hear from some pro trans people specifically with some counter arguments.

I worry about going against gender stereotypes being labelled and parcelled as Trans.
My DS wanted a pink phone and my DMIL said he might want to transition when he's older. It infuriated me.
The thought of children having medical interventions really concerns me. I worry that someone can just say what they are and then they are that (but this doesn't extend to race, just sex)
I worry about female prisons and women only spaces being encroached. Can't believe I just said the word encroached.

But then I hear 'Being my true self' and 'Cis genders don't understand' and 'trapped in the wrong body's stuff and I feel awful.

I know if some of my friends knew about this they'd probably think I was a bigot.

I don't want to have these opinions anymore.
It puts me in the same camp as Trump FFS.

I hope this post is taken in the light it is intended.

OP posts:

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GuardianLions · 18/11/2017 12:55

It is interesting that one of the MtFs Bailey originally worked with had a bastardised Native American belief about his/her transformation (this quote is from Alice Dregers' essay The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age ) :

To Bailey’s students, Kieltyka also presented a short video compilation she had made. The compilation included “before and after” shots of herself—for example, clips of her former self (Chuck) playing the hammered dulcimer with a local Irish folk group, and of her post-SRS self (Charlotte Anjelica) sitting in a recording studio. In the recording studio segments, Kieltyka is seen surrounded by television monitors and recording equipment. She is wearing a white bikini, drinking a cocktail, and explaining her history (Kieltyka, 1999).

No doubt to the surprise of Bailey’s students that video compilation actually begins with a pornographic segment Kieltyka had made for herself pre-SRS. In it, as Donna Summer sings “Love to Love You Baby” in the background, Chuck appears as a nude woman through use of prosthetics, including false breasts, a glued-on vulva (with his penis glued up inside his body), a female mask, and a platinum blonde wig. The woman whom Chuck appears as masturbates through simulated finger-clitoral stimulation and through the use of a dildo attached to the floor; she straddles the dildo and thrusts up and down so that it looks as if the dildo is going in and out of her vagina. (It was actually going in and out of Chuck’s anus.) Kieltyka overlaid an audio clip from a porn video in this segment to provide the sound of a woman reaching orgasm. Immediately after this segment, the compilation cuts to a post-op scene of Anjelica standing topless in a bikini bottom and moccasins, looking radiant and being dramatically bathed in a rushing waterfall. She brushes back her long dark hair with her hand and motions to two nearby women unknown to her to also take off their tops. They decline (Kieltyka, 1999, 2006e).

Kieltyka explained to me that she used this video in Bailey’s class to show an important part of her profound transformation from man to woman. In producing the video,
I was freeing that woman that was trapped inside my body. Just as Michelangelo would free the image from the block of marble, or Pygmalia, the carving became the woman that he desired. I became the woman I desired, but it wasn’t a sexual desire, because when I knew and stepped out of the trans state, the ritual state, I knew that was me behind the mask. I could not use that video to masturbate to, because I knew it was me. I could not become aroused if I wasn’t wearing a mask. I had to become the other. (Kieltyka, 2006c).
She also said about the video:
It was a kind of a simulation, almost like a pilot learning to fly a commercial airline[r] first goes through a simulator until it becomes almost second[-]nature or instinctive—a simulator that was also a “stimulator”….and the higher the stimulation[,] the greater the positive feedback[….] it was all religious; technical; psychological; artistic; sexual….even pornographic. (Kieltyka, 2006b; ellipses in original unless in brackets)
In other words, Kieltyka believes that the stimulation she felt in producing the video-simulation allowed her to understand she was a woman inside. To Kieltyka’s mind, the video also demonstrates that the prosthetics and women’s lingerie she used to crossdress prior to her SRS are very much like fetishes in Native American cultures; she specifically likens them to the eagle feathers and animal furs used in certain Native American ceremonies. She is thinking of those Native Americans who “had animal fetishes that the individual[,] in their trans state or their ritual state, would don […] and they would become those animals that had special powers within them. The person was transformed into or transubstantiation took place, using the fetish elements, they became those entities” (Kieltyka, 2006c). She explains that this is why, in the post-op waterfall scene that immediately follows the pre-op pornographic scene, she looked somewhat Native American, with long, dark hair and moccasins: “it was symbolic of a baptism, a kind of native American nature child, born again, emerging from the water like a Venus” (Kieltyka, 2006b; see also Kieltyka, 2006e).

Kieltyka has also explained how women’s “foundation garments” (bras, girdles, etc.) were truly foundational to her self, because they helped her understand who she truly is:
I saw [the foundation garments] as the foundation to a woman’s sexuality, and that was where I ultimately saw the vagina and breasts as powerful fetish elements[.…] If I could create or recreate those powerful fetish objects for myself—within myself[—]I would become the woman in appearance, most certainly, but also to correlate with my own identity that was buried and repressed for so many years—inside. It was substantive[.] (Kieltyka, 2006c).
Thus, as she explained to Bailey and his students, Kieltyka saw herself as undergoing not just a sex change, but a profound transformation which achieved an integration of material, emotional, and spiritual realities.