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

WONDERFUL!!!! You SO win the thread!

True, Dworkin was writing before the current TRA issues, but given that both MacKinnon and Stoltenberg currently hold a TWAW stance, it's not that big a leap to suppose Dworkin would as well.

Thats a false equivalence. Let her speak for herself and don't put words into her mouth.

Andrea Dworkin had some sympathy for men who were dysphoric, that does not mean she would support the erasure of sex based rights we see being pushed today.

Maybe she would have. Maybe she'd have become a Hare Krishna. Who knows?

But what does her theory of sex say?

Andrea Dworkin did not view surgery as a right for transgender people; she viewed it as an essential to survival for transexual people.

''every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of
its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.''
Woman Hating Andrea Dworkin (1974)

“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 its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself.”

The surgery thing is interesting, I wonder how she would apply the same thought to other sorts of cosmetic procedure.

I would say, though, that if you are looking to draw out the implications of her though on trangender issues, you don't want to look at just what she said about them explicitly. You'd need to look also about what she said about women, and see if, when you get down to brass tacks, it would also apply to people who "identify" as women.

Fundamentally, in an ideal world, what does she think a woman is? Is it a particular sort of body, or is it a particular set of cultural tropes? And how are they connected?

I don't think she's really very systematic writer or thinker, which makes it a difficult task to pull out the strands of her ideas and see where they all meet up.

She talks consistently of men and women; of the rights they have, they roles they play, the values they hold, and the harm done as a result.
Its only today that we wonder what people used to mean by those terms.

She did not see surgery for transsexual people as a cosmetic procedure. She saw it as essential, and assumed they would want full genital reassignment.
Thats not unusual for the time, and many people still think 'trans' and 'surgery' have the same meaning today.

'Transgender' is a new category, it did not exist at the time she was writing. ''Transsexual with no expectation of surgery'' would have been the category of cross dressing. Cross dressing comes under the Stoneall trans umbrella but I'm not sure if the current moderation rules allow me to say that without being deleted so I've put it in a separate comment.

I would say, though, that if you are looking to draw out the implications of her though on trangender issues, you don't want to look at just what she said about them explicitly. You'd need to look also about what she said about women, and see if, when you get down to brass tacks, it would also apply to people who "identify" as women.

About 10 years ago, I read two of her books, 'Intercourse' and 'Right-Wing Women'. Intercourse has a sort of mesmerising, hallucinatory quality, so I might not be recalling the book accurately, but I do remember being puzzled at how little attention it paid to pregnancy. Much of the book, IIRC, is straight-up literary analysis of the sexual politics of male writers like Tolstoy, Flaubert and Norman Mailer.

It's mostly concerned with the psychological effects of being penetrated, and the social effects of being a person who is defined as penetrable, with virtually no attention paid to the physiological effects of (vaginal) intercourse, which of course means pregnancy and birth (which for most of history carried a high risk of death) and child-rearing. It seems fairly obvious to me that those effects have had a far greater impact on women's freedom and equality than the act of penetration itself, but Dworkin seemed curiously unconcerned with them.

If Dworkin were alive today, it wouldn't surprise me if she (like MacKinnon) took the position that the two basic categories of human beings are 'penetrating' and 'penetrable', with the corresponding assumption that feminine-presenting men belong in the 'penetrable' category, and are therefore basically akin to women.

When I'm dead can nobody ask any man what I might have thought about future feminism please?

@TinselAngel

When I'm dead can nobody ask any man what I might have thought about future feminism please?

Exactly this. The day I listen to what a man says a woman would have believed is the day I'm no longer a feminist.

What, she never surprised him, made him think differently, opened his mind? Because if she did, he has no business pretending he owns her thoughts, and knows what she would have thought.

I am very angry. There's something about the arrogant ownership of her legacy that really pisses me off.

Stoltenberg has been lying about Andrea Dworken for years. The women who knew her are still alive to dispute him.
So, two things.
Andrea Dworkin could recognize a male dominance display at a thousand yards.
The basis for any discussion we had back in the day was that transsexuals were mentally ill. All considerations of accommodations flowed from that.

I'm surprised the links posted very early in the thread haven't been of more interest to this discussion. On the FB one, a close friend of Andrea's utterly disagrees with Stoltenberg and says he is betraying her work and legacy for his own profit and that

the only way to validate the truth of Andrea's actual views on the subject, which she explicitly told me, is to publicly share them while I'm still alive. With your persistent denial, you left me no choice but to offer my evidence that you are misrepresenting her views and presenting biased memories to promote your own work and further inflate your own ego.

Thank you SunsetBeetch for those links. I'd read them early after I'd realised what an attack on women's rights was happening, but couldn't remember where.

I do not see how anyone could posit Andrea Dworkin could ever have agreed with transgender ideology as it presents itself today. She was, always, fiercely pro-woman and transgender ideology is not.

It's bizarre to read this today after talking about Andrea last night with a friend who invited her to come speak and who then had the pleasure of spending time with her. Talking about the views she actually expressed when she was alive. How fierce on stage and how warm she was and caring in private. To claim she'd have rejected us, been angry with us for centering the needs of women is just ... bizarre.

From MoaMy's tumblr link (Thank you for finding and sharing this.)

@CharlieParley

From MoaMy's tumblr link (Thank you for finding and sharing this.)

Thank you for posting them here!

I don't know very much about Dworkins, but I know a fair bit about religious apologetics. There's a certain type of religious person who says things like "did you know that even Charles Darwin thought the eye was too complex to have evolved?", or "did you know that Darwin accepted God on his deathbed?" As if that catagorically proves the existence of God and the literal truth of the bible. "But even Andrea Dworkins accepted TWAW at the end" is exactly the same fallacy. Elect one prominent person to represent the belief you wish to disprove, announce that they infact agree with your position, then flounder in confusion when your opponant says that this doesn't actually prove anything. It's a bog standard argument from authority, and example number 96,462 of "TRAs and religious groups use the same arguments". Andrea Dworkins believing that TWAW is no more proof that "gender" exists than Darwin having a religious conversion is prood that God exists. Its honestly the most pathetic kind of straw clutching to argue in this way. Even if every single person in the entire world from now until the end of time believed that TWAW and that God exists it still wouldn't prove either of those things.

I actually find it quite disturbing that people find these kind of arguments compelling. A really large section of the public seem genuinely incapable of understanding basic logic and applying fairly low level critical thought. Just look at how many people need really obvious fallacies like circular reasoning pointing out to them. It's actually quite scary. Maybe we need to start teaching formal logic in schools?

I am certain in my own mind that Andrea Dworkin would have seen the TRA agenda for what it is.

If she wrote on trans, I can only imagine it was about old school transsexualism as a mental problem not transgender a la Stonewall as we are dealing with now.

Exactly ByGrabtharsHammer, so what if a now dead person would have disagreed with a viewpoint that arose after their death. That would not invalidate the material basis on which that viewpoint rests. It's the material basis that needs to be invalidated. In our case that is biology. No mere opinion can bring about a third gamete or a continuum from egg to sperm.

To be clear though, when you actually read up on what Stoltenberg bases his claim on that Dworkin would be a trans ally, that he misrepresents (or misinterprets) her words becomes obvious. He either does not understand the aims behind extreme transgender ideology and legislation, or he does not understand gender critical feminism (or both). Because the flip side of his claim is that Dworkin would reject and speak out against those seeking to defend women's rights and to define the female sex class separately from the male sex class. That is clearly a ridiculous notion.

He presents, for instance an essay she wrote rejecting biological determinism/essentialism, where she argues equally against the notion that women qua females are superior to men or that men qua males are superior to women, as proof that she rejected biology, that is biological difference between males and females, altogether. Only the most distorted lens allows that interpretation.

He started out simply trying to prove that Dworkin was not a transphobe - and no matter what is being said in gender studies departments and libfem circles and by trans rights organisations - nothing she wrote supports that notion. But there is no evidence that a fierce campaigner for women's rights then would have stood against women's rights today.