112 posts tagged feminism
It Wasn’t About Bathrooms, and It’s Not About Women’s Sports
Mark Joseph Stern has written an interesting article on Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization that has written most of the transphobic laws in the US right now.
This organization has spent years which has spent years fighting against reproductive women’s rights and LGBTQ equality:
Over the last 28 years, the ADF has defended laws prohibiting same-sex intimacy; opposed marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for same-sex couples; attacked LGBTQ non-discrimination laws, as well as bans on conversion therapy for minors; argued in favor of laws that require transgender people to undergo sterilization before legally changing their gender; challenged access to contraception; and supported the criminalization of abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Its work stretches beyond the United States; ADF has, for instance, championed Belize’s archaic anti-sodomy law, which allows for the persecution and imprisonment of gay people.
The ADF’s overarching position on gay people is that they should either be converted to heterosexuality or fired from their jobs and imprisoned because of their sexual orientation. This stance has earned the group a controversial designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So ADF is basically trying to use the government to force the American people to live up to its 19th century ideas of proper gender roles and sexuality. The goal is to force LGBTQA kids back into the closet and entice the the rest of the population to police the same kids out of existence.
First they tried to get the local governments to implement bathroom bills, stigmatizing trans kids. That did not work. Now they are trying two different tactics: Using sports to discriminate trans kids and using the health system to erase their existence.
Note that none of this is based on popular demand. They know that they are losing “the culture war”, as they call it. The younger generations support trans people. This is why they are now declaring war on compassion and decency, appealing to prejudices instead of facts.
There is simply no evidence that transgender women are dominating student sports and denying cisgender women the benefits that come with athletic excellence, like scholarships, as Stern points out.
And given the transphobia found in our societies the idea that kids chose to be trans because it is fashionable makes no sense. Moreover, no one is allowed to transition on a whim. Not socially and definitely not medically. The problems are all made up.
It is blatantly clear that they now are using fear of harassment to stop LGBTQA youth from acknowledging their true selves:
North Carolina’s Youth Health Protection Act takes the principles embodied in previous ADF-approved anti-trans laws a few steps further. Under the bill, it’s not just minors who cannot access gender-affirming care, but also adults aged 18-20. Schools are not only required to discriminate against transgender students, but also to out them to their parents. Schools must also inform parents if their children are gay, bisexual, and nonbinary students, since these identities also qualify as “gender nonconformity.”
Did anyone really think this was going to stop with bathrooms? Stern asks. I would add: Do you really think they are going to stop with transgender kids? Of course not: They will go after the rest of the LGBTQA spectrum next, while at the same time intensifying their attacks against women.
Soccer tournament bans 8-year-old girl’s entire team because she “looks like a boy”
They tell us that banning trans kids from sport is because of “fairness”. This episode demonstrates that it is more about policing the appearance of girls and women. It is about controlling all women: trans and cis.
The organizers of a Nebraska soccer tournament disqualified an Omaha team this weekend after insisting one of the girls on the squad was actually a boy, her family said.
Mili Hernandez, 8, is talented enough to play for the Azzuri Cachorros’s 11-year-old squad and had helped lead the club to the finals at the Springfield Soccer Club tournament on Sunday. Shortly before kickoff, though, Mili was told that she and her team had been disqualified because she looks like a boy.
“Just because I look like a boy doesn’t mean I am a boy,” Mili told local television station WOWT 6. “They don’t have a reason to kick the whole club out.”
Mary Abigail Wambach steps in
Indeed they had not. And Mili is not transgender, mind you. She was banned because she does not live up to the gender stereotypes of the organizers.
Mary Abigail Wambach, an American retired soccer player, coach, and two-time Olympic gold medalist, told Mili over at Instagram:
Dear Mili Hernandez, you are amazing in every way. Thank you for teaching us how to be brave and shining a light on something so hurtful. If you don’t know, she is my new hero…. Let’s meet soon sister.
The fight for trans women’s rights is a feminist struggle
This is a good illustration of why the transgender struggle is a feminist struggle. Transphobia grows out of a culture that wants to control both women and men.
Women are to live up to the stereotypes, so that there can be no doubt about the hierarchy of power and influence.
Male assigned people who identify as women are also seen as a threat to the whole system. If someone assigned male would like to like to live as a woman, that must mean that being a man is not as great as it is hyped up to be.
Trans women therefore threaten the very idea of male supremacy, while Mili threatens the clear divide between men and women simply by not looking the way a girl is supposed to.
This is also why masculine cis women are now harassed in women’s rest rooms. They do not follow “the rules”.
Well, if the rules are this destructive, we should not follow them.
5 Things to Know to Make Your Feminism Trans-Inclusive
HRC presents some things you should know to make your feminism trans-inclusive:
1. Trans women are women.
2. Transphobia is offensive and harmful.
“At the end of the day, anti-feminist ideology wants to police women’s bodies, and that includes trans women’s bodies.”
3. To be trans-inclusive is to be intersectional.
“It’s important to point out the ways in which transphobic ideas are rooted in racism. If one does not fit the mold of “traditional femininity” (i.e. white, thin, etc.), one is other-ized and their womanhood is questioned. More often than not, the gender of women of color is delegitimized.”
4. Trans women are feminist leaders.
5. Centering the most marginalized is key.
“In their seminal work on Black lesbian feminism, the Combahee River Collective stated, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
Their analysis teaches us that centering the most marginalized voices is a necessary part of any liberatory work.
Trans women, particularly Black and Indigenous trans women, are directly targeted by multiple systems of oppression that compound to create a culture of violence.”
CUT partnered with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization to interview transgender women and non-binary people of color about some of the most pressing issues facing the community.
Watch the video below!
Photo of transgender woman: FG Trade
The attacks on transgender female athletes is just another way of controlling women’s bodies and lives
Policing trans kids is about reinforcing the same rigid gender norms that are used to trap cis women all the time, Amanda Marcotte writes over at Slate. This is all about how women should look and act — and what their bodies should be used for, based on their gender.
The push to discriminate against trans students ends up reducing the entirety of women’s sports to not just athletes’ bodies, but their genitalia, reinforcing notions that women’s reproductive systems should define their entire existence. The primary victims of this shiny new GOP wedge issue are trans kids, but make no mistake, the rhetoric being employed hurts all sorts of kids, cis or trans.
The attacks on trans girls for supposedly not being “feminine” enough to play girls’ sports also affect cis girls whose bodies or behavior don’t conform to what sexists believe proper little ladies should look or act like…
Many of the anti-trans bills in states open the door to gender-testing that affects all kids, trans or cis. Put bluntly, in places like Idaho, the anti-trans laws give permission to schools to force kids to submit to an investigation of their genitals, a process that will be no less traumatic for cis girls who “pass” the inspection.
The tactic is well know from history, Marcotte points out.
Women were stopped from voting in order to protect their “fragile” and “caring” nature. Anti-feminists in the 1970s attacked the Equal Rights Amendment by falsely insinuating the housewives would be abandoned by their husbands. I would point out that lesbians were banned from teaching, as they might “corrupt young girls”.
And instead of attacking the men that abuse women, the traditionalists blame the female victims for inviting the violence through the way they dress and behave.
All of which leads to the idea that women need men to protect them from other men (and from women who do not follow the gender norms), putting men in control of women’s bodies and lives.
«In an effort to advocate for, as she puts it, “unapologetically expansive” feminism, trans rights activist Raquel Willis and GLAAD invited cis and trans feminist leaders to sign an open letter, published on Transgender Day of Visibility, declaring their solidarity with the trans women and girls who will be affected, on sports fields and in doctors’ offices, by the new legislation and who are vulnerable to anti-trans violence.
«Gloria Steinem, Regina King, Selena Gomez, Gabrielle Union, Laverne Cox, Lena Waithe, Ilana Glazer and America Ferrera are among more than 465 celebrities and activists who have signed so far.»
No, trans people are not causing lesbians to go extinct
Lynne Stahl is the humanities librarian at West Virginia University and a cisgender lesbian. Her research and teaching span popular culture, gender theory, and critical information studies.
She recently published an interesting article debunking the transphobic “lesbians are going extinct” myth over at The Washington Post.
She dismisses the idea that we have fixed categories of being that perfectly fit a group of people whose needs and interests compete in a zero-sum exchange with those of other groups.
Moreover, as she points out, recent data do not imply that the lesbian identity is under threat:
Perhaps the most immediate source of today’s transphobic anxiety is a recent Gallup poll, which revealed that more Americans than ever identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
While this increase would seem to provide grounds for celebration among LGBTQ advocates, some high-profile cisgender gay men and women don’t see it that way. On Twitter, for instance, journalist Glenn Greenwald attributed the rise in trans-identified individuals to a purported decrease in lesbian identification.
The poll actually indicates a significantly higher percentage of Gen-Z lesbians (1.4 percent) than millennials (0.8 percent) or Gen-Xers (0.7 percent).
Stahl sees clear similarities between this fear-mongering and similar tactics used by racists and homophobes:
As a lesbian researcher of tomboyism trained in queer theory, I find claims like these at once absurd and frightening. Extinction anxieties have long fueled nationalist, fascist and white-supremacist movements and often beget eugenicist agendas. Indeed, tomboyism as we know it arose in concert with eugenics.
Fears about potential White extinction in the United States proliferated in the second half of the 19th century amid emancipation and waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Eastern Asia, as scholar Michelle Abate observes. Child-rearing manuals began advocating for exercise and comfortable clothing, instead of the restrictive and harmful corsets then common, as means of making White girls fit to produce healthy White offspring. The degree to which some girls embraced these empowering options, however, prompted a backlash associating tomboyism and homosexuality.
She also find historical echoes in white, cis and straight feminists excluding black activists and lesbians from their communities and activism.
“And while the Gallup data gives no indication that cisgender lesbians are trading in ‘butch’ for transmasculinity, what if some were?” Stahl adds. “Misogyny and homophobia still exist, and both still harm all women and lesbians. Advocacy for everyone who identifies within these groups is essential, including trans individuals who identify as lesbian or bisexual.”
Original article over at The Washington Post: “The latest form of transphobia: Saying lesbians are going extinct”
Photo from the TV-series Sense8.
Trans rights are the canary in the coal mine for women’s rights
She has always understood, she writes, that the main goal of feminism is “ to dismantle patriarchy and the systems that allow patriarchy to flourish.” In other words: The goal is to change the system of institutions and narratives that leads to the oppression and marginalization of women.
She writes:
One of the few bright spots of 2020 was discovering the loud-brained Egyptian-born feminist writer (and excellent Tweeter) Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy compares patriarchy to an octopus; its limbs include sexism, racism, capitalism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, ableism, and depending on where you are, those tentacles keep the head surviving.
The canary in the coal mine
Edwards points out that there are no countries in the world where LGBTQ+ folk are oppressed where women also have equality: “LGBT+ rights are the canary in the coal mine for women’s rights.”
The gender critical movement
“The ‘Gender Critical’ movement is now a hodgepodge of ideologies, soundbites, and myths,” Edwards writes, “that is about as far removed from feminism, radical or otherwise, as you could imagine.”
Indeed, this alliance now encompasses trans-exclusionary radical feminists, gay and lesbian separatists, right wing extremists and religious fanatics.
The gender critical movement lacks an understanding of what the patriarchy and male supremacy is about, Edward argues. She points out that this system also harness women to its cause: Women can easily uphold the patriarchy, just as much as men can be oppressed by it.
Since the gender critical activists do not understand the intersectionality of oppression – the way different mechanism for social exclusion reinforce each other. They do not grasp that people assigned male can also be disciplined and oppressed by this system.
Her example is a classic patriarchal “core family”, where the oldest child is a straight cis man, the second a straight cis woman, the third a gay man and the fourth a transgender woman.
Who will feel the misogyny of the patriarchy the most? Most likely “Robyn”, the transgender woman:
Any relationships or family Robyn has will be met with intrusive questioning, ridicule, suspicion, and disregard. Her parenting will be called into question, the way she dresses will be scrutinised, she will often be accused of being a ‘pervert’ or sex offender for no reason, when in fact she, herself will be subject to sexual harassment frequently. She will frequently be bullied and misgendered, despite doing nothing wrong except moving through the world as a trans woman.
I would add that one of the reason the trans women is a threat to male supremacy is that they question its very premise: That being a man is good and that women are inferior.
The biological sex is gender narrative is oppressive
The idea of biological sex equalling gender plays right into the hands of the ones wanting to keep up this oppressive system:
The gender-critical view that female oppression occurs BECAUSE of our female bodies, by males (and those males often reduced to terms like “those with penises”, presumably to ensure some trans women are included in the definition) is simplistic and unhelpful.
There is also Gender-Critical rhetoric stating ‘sex is immutable and unchangeable’ — yet there is the belief that sex and sex alone, rather than gender, is the source of our oppression as women? By this logic, therefore, sexism and patriarchal oppression are seemingly impossible to escape.
Their solution? Segregation. If females are statistically the most likely to be victims of violence, and males the most statistically likely to be perpetrators, then the number one thing to fight for is segregation of the sexes. Lock up the women safely, lest they be hurt.
This shifts the blame onto women for their own oppression. The men don’t have to do anything, except stay away from the locked spaces where women feel safe. This focus on ‘sex-segregated spaces’ also fails to take into account that the majority of women who are abused, are so in domestic spaces by people known to them.
Edwards concludes that womanhood is a constellation of factors; biological, relational, cultural, social, mental, emotional, and in some cases spiritual:
Many experiences overlap, some do not. This is why, in my opinion, intersectional feminism is our best chance at dismantling the patriarchy.
White Tears, White Rage – the Roots of “Gender Critical” & Transphobic Feminism
Here’s an article about modern white feminism that deserves your attention: “White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism,” by Alison Phipps.
I m not sure Phipps’ criticism always hit the right targets. For instance: Her text may sometimes give you the impression that nearly all white feminists are reactionary and violent (although I do no think this is her intention – Phipps is herself white). That is not the case. But her discussion of white privilege anchored in a patriarchal, colonial and racist past makes very much sense to me – unfortunately.
Paragraphs like the following will be recognizable to most transgender and nonbinary people:
Reactionary feminisms, which coalesce around debates about sex workers’ rights and transgender equality, magnify the political whiteness of the mainstream and deliberately withhold womanhood and personhood from marginalised Others.
Trans women are defined as ‘biological men’ while trans-exclusionary feminists are ‘adult human females’. Sex workers’ rights are juxtaposed with ‘women’s safety’, a manoeuvre in which the womanhood of sex workers is implicitly denied.
This reasserts the normative economically productive body and reproductive sex. It conjures up colonial sex difference and bourgeois white womanhood as a symbol of moral order, set against the racialised and enslaved inhabitants of colonised and settled territories and the multi-racial, ‘dangerous, immoral, and libidinal lower classes’ of the metropolis (Tyler, 2008: 22).
In this mentality, neither the ‘unnatural’ or the ‘unrespectable’ woman can ever be a real woman (Phipps, 2020: 151). (…)
Trans-exclusionary (or ‘gender-critical’) feminism similarly relies on accounts of sexual victimisation, set alongside a construction of trans women as predatory and essentially male. This pertains to discussions about trans women’s inclusion in women’s services and other spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms (Serano, 2013: 31).
Trans women are made responsible for acts of violence committed by cis men, through narratives that naturalise the penis as violence and stick this organ to the trans woman via an intrusive and violent obsession with her surgical status (Phipps, 2016: 311).
Simultaneously (like other reactionary politics), trans-exclusionary feminism monsters trans women in general through publicising isolated incidents of violence committed by members of this group. The effect of both tactics is to repackage trans equality as predation: trans women’s demands to be recognised as women are reinterpreted as invasion and sexual threat.
This reactionary feminist politics exemplifies the threatened bourgeois femininity of political whiteness. This is magnified in claims to be silenced and oppressed, which have been made by reactionary feminists (or men speaking on their behalf) in high-profile media outlets (Phipps, 2020: 150).
The narrative – that reactionary feminists are the real victims but their voices are not being heard – achieves several aims. It disseminates reactionary feminist ideas; it deploys Strategic White Womanhood to avoid accountability; it uses the device of white women’s tears to deny humanity to the Other.
Reactionary feminists seize womanhood – and personhood – while sex workers become uncaring ‘happy hookers’ and trans women become shadowy threats. We see the weeping Madonna versus the unfeeling whore. We see the weeping survivor versus the menacing predator. Neither sex workers or trans women are entitled to complex feelings or to claim victimisation on their own behalf.
Alison Phipps is a Professor of Gender Studies at The University of Sussex in Britain. She has been a scholar-activist in the movement against sexual violence for the past fifteen years. She is the author of the book Me, not you The trouble with mainstream feminism
See also: Genders, Bodies, Poliics, Alison Phipps’ site
Feminist Icon Judith Butler Defends Transgender People in New Interview
Judith Butler is probably the leading feminist philosopher of our times.
Back in September 2020 she defended the rights of transgender women against trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) in an interview with New Statesman,
In this new YouTube interview with Owen Jones she discusses feminism and queer and transgender identities and expressions.
The video is embedded above.
She says this about feminism and the transgender struggle:
“I i don’t know who came first [of the transphobic feminists], Janice Raymond or Sheila Jeffries, but it seems to me that those two writers feminist writers did a lot to establish a transphobic strain of a feminist theory.
But my understanding is that at least in the US that was very marginal. It also tended to make certain kinds of alliances with with right-wing moralists or Christian moralists who thought gender should be a certain way and that it should all remain aligned with the biological sex assigned at birth.
But that, in the US, has never been the dominant strain and, in fact, I think it’s considered embarrassing and and hateful. And I don’t think feminism ever sought to be about about hatred or applauding hatred or circulating hatred, and it’s one of the things that worries me most about the transphobic feminism.
You know when we we talk about trans-inclusive the point is not just to add trans people to the mix. The point is that many trans scholars and trans activists have always been feminists…. I don’t even know who we would be without trans theory within feminism, so you know we might want to turn it around.”
As far as Butler goes, feminist, trans and queer activism are part of the same struggle, enriching each other.
When Jones asks her about the role of biology, she answers:
“Well first of all let’s remember that when sex is assigned it’s it’s assigned by a set of institutions, you know, medical institutions, hospitals, doctors and according to legal codes that decide in advance how sex will be assigned. So even at the moment of establishing the biological sex of an infant there are a number of social and legal forces at work.
That’s not to say that there aren’t biological differences. I actually think biology is exceedingly interesting in the way that it itself admits of complexity both along chromosomal lines and endocrinological lines. So I think it’s important to take into account that those fields actually do expose quite a great deal of complexity.
The question of whether how the sex you’re assigned at birth is the sex you will have to live with your whole life is is one that pertains to political freedoms and legal rights.
And those who say that the assignment of sex should be binding for a life are giving those initial powers absolute power to define who you are regardless of the fact that you may well feel quite strongly – in fact quite desperately – that this assignment is absolutely wrong, and that in order to live and breathe and move and love you actually have to change that category in order for it to fit you and to allow for a social recognition and acknowledgement.
Now, when someone like [English journalist and trans-exclusionary radical feminist] Suzanne Moore says that trans people just think they’re women, because of a feeling they have… I don’t think it’s falsehood to call her transphobic. I think she values transphobia. She wants more of it in the world.
I think that that is a moment where she doesn’t understand what the the existential predicament is for a trans person who is burdened with a name that doesn’t fit, burdened with a sex assignment that doesn’t fit; that if you are forced to live with that assignment you can become suicidal.
If you are forced to live with that assignment you are facing and denying something absolutely fundamental about who you are. It very often stops your ability to eat, to breathe, to move, to live, to love, to inhabit the world and to call upon the world to recognize you as you are – your social and existential reality.
It’s not a mere feeling. It is indispensable for one’s life. It’s not luxury. It is a way of living, a way of loving, a way of flourishing, and it’s a way of affirming oneself in the world.
And to be deprived of those capacities is a travesty. It’s an absolute travesty. So for her to be dismissing people who ‘just have this feeling’ and therefore lay claim to the category of women is ignorant.”
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Photo from PublicSpace.org. She identifies as nonbinary, but accepts the use of female pronouns.
See also: “Renowned Feminist Philosopher Judith Butler Tears Transphobic Feminism Apart”