Obsession with transwomen fetishises sex difference

[spannablue]

Just read on Twitter:

'The problem with patriarchy is not due to men having penises, it's due to the lie that this random feature of birth confers & signifies rank, power & domination. We must not collude in that by fetishising sex difference & aggrandizing genitals that happen to be on the outside.'

What do you think?

Placemarking to read later.

My immediate thoughts are that patriarchy is based on the fact that men do not give birth, have not historically brought up children, and perceived those who did as their property. It is to do with one sex class having specific reproductive functions and the other not, because it is to do with who has control over that.

That is not random.

Deadringer

Whatever the ops motives for starting this thread I want to thank them because some of the posts are fascinating.

Yes, I was thinking along those lines myself. It's really got me thinking and analyzing.

They surely can't be stupid enough to assume that if she is happy to have a particular man in her spaces then she should welcome any man there?

When you deconstruct what they are saying, you arrive at the ideology that has been ruling over us for millennia. If a woman does not reject all men, she has not the right to reject any man. (Except if the man who owns her is present, to defend his property, I guess). And this is not a one off.
It is a systematic dismantling of all artificial power structures (like law protecting the weak), so that in the end all that is left is the power of the fist, like in the days of old.

feminist-reprise.org/library/resistance-strategy-and-struggle/some-reflections-on-separatism-and-power/

I guess it must be some bizarre, crazy coincidence that women have been beaten, enslaved, owned, denied an education, raped on an industrial scale globally for thousand of years.

Maybe someone with some fancy shite vocabulary can come along and explain it for us.

I guess it must be some bizarre, crazy coincidence that women have been beaten, enslaved, owned, denied an education, raped on an industrial scale globally for thousand of years. Maybe someone with some fancy shite vocabulary can come along and explain it for us.

Must've been because we women fetishize penis and randomly confer rank, power & domination to it.

Yes - it's clearly all our fault for being penis obsessed and we should have just identified out of our own oppression.

The problem with knife attacks isn't people attacking others with knives. It's due to the lie that this random feature of metal confers & signifies cutting and blood loss. We must not collude in that by fetishising metal shapes & aggrandizing bits that happen to be sharp and pointy.

If we all agree to lie that we can't recognise knives any more, will knife crime stop?

The problem with child abuse is not due to people abusing children. It's due to the lie that these random features of smallness and date of birth indicate vulnerability, innocence and need for protection from abuse. We must not collude in that by fetishising the vulnerability of young humans.

If we all agree to lie that we can't see childhood any more, will child abuse stop?

Well you certainly could disappear up your own behind arguing that if you remove the capacity to describe or talk about something, or to identify a party it is happening to, then you've removed the ability for it to happen. However anyone with a basic normal grasp of reality is going to find that person too tedious to give the time of day to, and suspect them of having way too much time on their hands. They also know damn well it's still happening, just a powerful group for their own reasons have worked to disguise it to prevent people doing inconvenient things. Like campaigning for it to stop.

It's particularly sad when feminists do this, especially those who've, for example, been instrumental in reestablishing London's Reclaim the Night march.
it's a different kind of betrayal.

Also placemarking to read later. My immediate thought is that the statement is incorrect. One of the problems of patriarchy is the penis, because it is the penis that is used to rape, and as an act of violence I defy anyone to come up with another example, short of murder perhaps, that is equal to it. It’s a war crime for a reason. The penis is acts as a marker to easily identify someone belonging to the sex class with power and domination. Is that wrong? Of course it is. I wouldn’t be a feminist otherwise but that doesn’t stop it being true.

It's entirely possible that patriarchy has fetishised the penis.
I don't think that we can be feminists if we don't acknowledge material reality and then the cultural aspects of oppression that are build on the foundations of that material reality. And we have to acknowledge patriarchal tactics which might well include heteronormativity (sorry but as a lesbian feminist I just see that as part of patriarchy - I think it's backwards to argue it causes patriarchy) but which also include using women's reproductive vulnerability to keep us captive.

If we all agree to lie that we can't see childhood any more, will child abuse stop?

Maybe we should stop calling it 'abuse' and name it 'experience' instead? The pomos and the NAMBLA crowd seem to agree that our value judgment is, what traumatizes the child, not the 'experience'.

If I am in a room with 20 women from, for example, Syria and Iraq (this happens more than you might think) and I ask what their views are on barriers for women (which is my job) the main two answers are 1)access to education (cultural based on possession of a penis or otherwise) and 2)early marriage and motherhood and how that links in with 1). (based on reproductive vulnerability) as well as 3) sexual violence (inflicted with penii)

AFAB - still can't get my head around this.
We aren't ASSIGNED a gender, our sex characteristics are observed. No one looked at my newborn, observed a penis and said "I assign this to be a girl-willy' or "we're down on our boy quotas so I assign this one to the boy group"
It's absolute nonsense.
So much poststructuralism ignores what Marilyn French called the "shit and the string beans"- the tedious material reality of what we're dealing with.

Maybe we should stop calling it 'abuse' and name it 'experience' instead?

Thank you. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that a neutral word like experience is needed to describe what happened to a person who has had a crime perpetrated on them.

I was just about getting YetAnotherSpartacus' point about some victims not wanting to use that term outside of its legal sense but on balance "experience" and "experiencer" seems to me far more harmful in their potential to downgrade and minimise the harm caused.

"Victim" is the neutral word acknowledged harm was caused.

It's funny how the OP is versed in pretentious word salad of a post structuralist nature, but completely unable to grasp that a woman's private toilet in her house which she may share with male friends and family members who she loves and who respect her is not actually open to any and all random men.

They surely can't be stupid enough to assume that if she is happy to have a particular man in her spaces then she should welcome any man there?

Oh I think they can be.

AFAB - still can't get my head around this

It drives me insane - because it's such a basic twisting of reality. Really we are just FAB - female at birth - or MAB.

Or FABASA - female at birth and still am. It could be sung to the Pixies' Debaser. I may need a lay down......

They think it's a gotcha

Transwomen's obsession with and fetishisation of bizarre notions of 'feminine' are the central issue. Nothing to do with women being oppressed by penis-holders, though the possession of penises is a common feature.

In my simplistic head women’s problems are down to the fact that men are generally bigger and stronger, and like getting their own way, and women are at a disadvantage because they can be impregnated, give birth, and mother children. Everything else is needless obfustication, especially words like fetishising and aggrandising.

I am not stupid but not having been to uni I find that the language used leaves me a bit behind sometimes

A lot of people will have read the post and felt inadequate because they couldn't quite follow. And as women we're so good at assuming we're not quite up to scratch.

That's probably why post-modernism has got so far. Bamboozle people with big words and a lot of nonsense and suddenly people fear risking embarrassing themselves by saying 'excuse me, I don't think the emperor has any clothes on.'

It's pretty underhand when you think about it.

This whole debate boils down to 'sex matters.' Sex will always matter. Women don't need re-educating or to be more clever in any way. Everyone who feels that way gets to stick their hands up and voice those feelings and be listened to.

I get pissed off because actually there are academic traditions (such as materialism) which do align with radical feminist ideas and which do allow us to make sense of our realities as women.
The fact that you can go to university for 3 or 4 years and come out understanding these things less than you did before is deliberate. And I know hegemony is one of those pain in the arse words but this is exactly the kind of thing Gramsci was talking about when he developed his ideas about the control of ideas maintaining control of whole huge groups of people.

The fact that those of us without gender studies degrees are locked out of the debate means it is, indeed, an echo chamber. With people like Catherine Hakim talking about women in prostitution using their 'erotic capital'.

Bamboozle people with big words

The smartest people I know (and I know some smart people) are of the opinion that almost any concept can be explained to almost anyone* who is interested and that being able to explain a concept in clear terms, using age and audience appropriate language/materials is a vital skill.

Those who obfuscate? They either don’t have it or they won’t do it. A whole field that relies on obfuscation ? Fishy

there’s a book called ‘baby loves quarks. It’s pretty good.

The fact that those of us without gender studies degrees are locked out of the debate means it is, indeed, an echo chamber.

Frankly, I lost respect once they became conceited enought to brutalize biochemistry, genetics and evolution without any understanding of the matter and totally unimpressed by my (or anyone else's) PhD in Biochemistry. At that point I realized that the pomos are just a bunch of pompous prats who think they can get away with their second class sophistry by the tactic of verbose bullshitting.