Stoltenberg: Dworkin was a trans ally

[AntsInPenzance]

So after discovering a few days ago, much to my shock, that Catherine Mackinnon was a TWAW proponent, I did a bit more looking around and stumbled across this very thought-provoking article by Dworkin's husband, John Stoltenberg, saying that she was a trans ally and that if she were alive today, she would be railing against GC/trans-critical feminists, even in the light of current TRA issues.

Just for the record, I lean gender critical on the trans issue, so this thread is not meant to be an attack or attempt to discredit commonly held views on this board. It is genuinely a very interesting read.

bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/john-stoltenberg-andrea-dworkin-was-trans-ally

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I think this is quite interesting, and it could well suggest that she might have been taken up into gender ideology

Doesn't read that way to me. It simply reads like old-fashioned second wave feminism.

.... which has somehow led us right into gender ideology.

The question is why? Even if it was only in a passive sense, there is some gap that is being exploited.

It didn’t lead us into trans ideology. I’m not sure where you got that from at all.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

It didn’t lead us into trans ideology. I’m not sure where you got that from at all.

I suggested why that might be in the post you pulled the quote from in the first place.

Ideas aren't discrete - we create an environment with our ideas that allow other, new ones, to take hold.

What was the environment that allowed gender ideology to take hold? Certainly part of it has been about the ability of science and technology to make the biological impacts of being a woman less obvious to us - and so also, the social impacts that come from those.

We also have the sexual revolution and choice feminism which are a kind of radical liberalism - but in this case I'd say that aren't the main mover.

It's not chance that you have a movement that says, gender constructs don't properly attach to sex at all - and if in fact very disinclined to even talk about the potential biological basis of sex based behaviours, or as Paglia pointed out, an environment where women's studies departments didn't even consider including biologists, or talking about endocrinology, and didn't see this as some kind of gap.And then somehow, these same women's studies departments begin to morph into geder studies departments.

You cannot divorce that change from second wave feminism, there was something happening that led people from saying, gender is not properly attached to sex and should be abolished as being an instrument for sexual repression, to saying, gender is a thing that exists and is some separate mechanism from sex - we'll call it "gender identity".

Usually changes like this are not a trick imposed somehow from the outside a take-over. Or at least not wholly. They happen because there is some internal logic that allows it.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I think this is quite interesting, and it could well suggest that she might have been taken up into gender ideology

Doesn't read that way to me. It simply reads like old-fashioned second wave feminism.

I think this is quite interesting, and it could well suggest that she might have been taken up into gender ideology

Really? It suggests the opposite to me.

I think that trying to guess whether or not a dead woman who held impressively woman-centred views would agree or disagree with you, is about as worthwhile as trying to discern whether Joan of Arc would have been a second wave feminist had she been alive at the time.

What is the purpose in asking if dead women would agree with you were they alive? What is the feminist purpose of using the opinion of the dead woman's husband to decide if alive women are allowed to have an opinion on their own rights?

My main concern with those who emphasise 'difference' is that the kinds of differences they highlight don't ring true to me - i.e. we'd 'rather' stay home and be housewives, we are not as ambitious, or we are naturally connected with nature and so on

The fact remains that many women with young children do want to to stay home rather than rush back to work, and this is not all to do with socialisation.

I think we've got to the point where we can acknowledge general trends and differences between the sexes, without having to assert that all must be in alignment with those differences; or in the situation where women have to give up their job upon marriage ( as once the case).

I do not men can be radical feminists, any more than men can be women

I do not believe men can be radical feminists! Good grief my typing is atrocious today

@FloralBunting

I think that trying to guess whether or not a dead woman who held impressively woman-centred views would agree or disagree with you, is about as worthwhile as trying to discern whether Joan of Arc would have been a second wave feminist had she been alive at the time.

What is the purpose in asking if dead women would agree with you were they alive? What is the feminist purpose of using the opinion of the dead woman's husband to decide if alive women are allowed to have an opinion on their own rights?

You are right, of course

Andrea Dworkin died in 2005, before transgenderism became a major issue. People didn't use the term 'gender' in the way it's used now -- I'd never heard of anyone having a gender, rather than a sex.

She was angry about the system that oppresses women as a sex, and about the violence inflicted on women's bodies because they are women's. Like most feminists, she said that women's role was a social construct, not that being a woman was.

Nothing I've read by Andrea Dworkin gave me the idea that she would have supported self-ID, or transwomen's rights to enter women's single-sex spaces, or anyone's right to prescribe drugs or surgery to non-conforming children.

As has been said earlier in the thread there is no way to know as Dworkin had died before we had the changes in the Stonewall transgender umbrella. The transexual Dworkin would be speaking of is the same transexual who is ostracised by transgenderism now. I wonder given her writings in 'Pornography: Men Possessing Women' how she would have felt about the very sexualised approach taken now. I also wonder about how she would have felt about the changing of language - but the truth is I can't know for sure and yes, he knew her better but people change and men have been known to abuse women's words. Again, no idea if that is the case or if she might have been a supporter of the whole new trans ideology of anyone who says they are ...

Still we can only look at her words of the past and apply them ourselves.

“Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself. [...] The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

I just assumed, from the views posted on this board that GC/trans critical was a standard belief for '2nd wave/radfems'

It wasn't much discussed in the 70s, as far as I ever heard. I can only speak for myself, and I found transsexualism a bit disturbing, as I had experienced male violence and I deeply valued women-only spaces. But "live and let live" seemed a pretty standard view among the feminists I knew. It just wasn't much of an issue.

Transsexuals, as they were called then, tended to have had full surgery, and there weren't many. Probably the most annoying aspect was that those who got into the news all bought into the whole "feminine mystique" crap and did their best to reinforce the sex-role stereotypes that feminists were trying to break down.

But it didn't really seem like a problem, and the idea that men could just say they're women and the state would say "Oh, OK" would have been dismissed as a dystopian joke.

Mainly, we wouldn't have defined ourselves as anti-trans or gender-critical because those weren't central issues at the time.

@FloralBunting

I think that trying to guess whether or not a dead woman who held impressively woman-centred views would agree or disagree with you, is about as worthwhile as trying to discern whether Joan of Arc would have been a second wave feminist had she been alive at the time.

What is the purpose in asking if dead women would agree with you were they alive? What is the feminist purpose of using the opinion of the dead woman's husband to decide if alive women are allowed to have an opinion on their own rights?

I don't think a question like this is really about Dworkin, as a person. It's about the nature and implications of her thought, because she was a public thinker. And if people are still seeing her ideas as live ideas, and as part of the discourse around women and sex, and being influenced by them, it's worth trying to parse their implications around current questions about sex.

Did anybody else read that link to a facebook post that SunsetBeetch posted? Here it is again.

I don't trust John Stoltenberg on this topic. He is pushing his own views by invoking his (more successful) partner's reputation.

It's a big leap for me. Get back to me when you're revived her zombie corpse and can ask. I think this is just dishonest revisionist history.

In The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer discusses transexual April Ashley (I think it was) in terms of Ashley being a victim of the patriarchy. Greer refers to Ashley as a "sister". I think she was saying that men who challenge the demands of gender stereotypes, and women, do share some common ground in terms of their disadvantaged position in a patriarchal system.

Greer's views on transgenderism are well known, and in The Whole Woman she examines the issue in much more depth and takes a critical approach.

I don't think Greer's position had necessarily shifted. In the early 1970s she had identified common ground with transexuals. By the turn of the century transgenderism was becoming a colonial enterprise, and now as we are all painfully aware there are vocal proponents of transgenderism that claim actual womanhood, which is what Greer objects to.

We can't know of course , but I suspect Dworkin would have followed a similar trajectory to Greer. If "trans ally" means someone who understands the damaging effects of patriarchy on transexuals and who believes that transexuals should be protected from discrimination and harassment, then I'm a trans ally and it's easy to imagine Dworkin would be too.

Since Dworkin's death we've had the expansion of the trans umbrella and the mad science denial and the demands to access women's spaces and the replacement of sex with gender as the axis of oppression. I wonder what Dworkin would make of this.

By the turn of the century transgenderism was becoming a colonial enterprise,

Well put.

“The fundamental problem with radical feminism’s obsession with biologically defining the category woman is that it unwittingly enables a politics that is profoundly reactionary. In falsely framing the reality of male supremacy as being based in biological “fact” about “real womanhood,” it completely misses the point about how male supremacy actually functions to construct the category “real manhood.” That lethal reality happens transactionally, not anatomically”

Just because a concept (here: biological fact) has been harnessed by your opponent shouldn’t mean you then retreat from using that concept at all. All that does is intellectually disable yourself while handing your opponent control of the language and thought process.

I mean: some bad people use cars to run over other people. Most don’t then say we shouldn’t use cars at all.

The term “essentialist” gets thrown around in academic thought as a criticism and put down. But essentialism means defining something or someone by a single fixed and impermeable quality or nature which determines the trajectory or path they will take through life.

Acknowledging biological differences between men and women doesn’t mean believing those differences have to determine their path through life. Rather radical feminism recognises those biological differences and argues for a world where they shouldn’t have to add up to a particular “gender” conforming role and life path that patriarchy requires.

Acknowledging biological differences between men and women doesn’t mean believing those differences have to determine their path through life. Rather radical feminism recognises those biological differences and argues for a world where they shouldn’t have to add up to a particular “gender” conforming role and life path that patriarchy requires

The debate in the second-wave was over what those differences were and how much they were determined by bodies - and bodies were considered as (to some degree) immutable. Some excellent feminist philosophy of science hit the scene at the same time as pomo thinking - and pomo was far more popular. Janet Sayers was one author. I'm quite distressed that I can't see the book from the other on my shelf or remember the author's name! Of course we now have Cordelia Fine.

Ruth Hubbard.

This is from a pro-trans blog, but as far as I know the basic facts are accurate. This was posted a few years ago, maybe before they decided that the party line should be that Dworkin was a trans ally?

"Andrea Dworkin wasn’t a friend to trans people, especially transsexual women.

The truth is, Dworkin’s views on trans women were later influenced by Janice Raymond. In the publication Chrysalis, Raymond published an article titled “Transsexualism: The Ultimate Homage to Sex Role Power.” In it, Raymond attacked Dworkin for claiming “that until sex roles disappear (and thus also transsexualism), sex-change operations should be provided ‘by the community as one of its functions.’”

While Raymond’s article generated a lot of outrage from many cis lesbian-feminists, Dworkin actually went on to give her assistance to Raymond in the writing of the Transsexual Empire, particularly “Chapter IV: Sappho by Surgery.” It’s in this chapter that Raymond writes, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit as well.”

Dworkin, in fact, gave a glowing endorsement to the The Transsexual Empire when the book was originally published in 1979."

transfeminism.tumblr.com/post/12371381560/andrea-dworkin-wasnt-a-friend-to-trans-people

I'd love to see evidence of that endorsement. I believe it. I'd just like to see it.

I'm quite curious about why there is not more discussion of UK second-wave feminists on MN. There are a few excellent ones!

Thanks @YetAnotherSpartacus, I’ll look those writers up

If you are interested there is another - Helen Longino.

What I remember about these authors was that they challenged the objectivity of scientific inquiry, arguing that much of it was socially located and imbued with patriarchal values. Interestingly, that couple of biologists at Evergreen seem to be taking potshots at just this observation and confusing it with postmodernism. It is, however, very different. There is a difference between critiquing objectivity and saying that everything is subjective.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I'd love to see evidence of that endorsement. I believe it. I'd just like to see it.

I'm quite curious about why there is not more discussion of UK second-wave feminists on MN. There are a few excellent ones!

Finally found the tumblr post I was originally looking for, that had pictures of the endorsement. I can't seem to figure out how to post pics here, but you can see them at the link:

morethancritical.tumblr.com/post/622222495898025984/til-that-andrea-dworkin-not-only-positively