Since I’ve got so many followers from Australia, here’s Friday’s update in advance for you!
TERF ideology really does sound like anti-suffragism, actually.
41 posts tagged radical feminism
1950s: being homosexual is a mental disorder.
2010s: being transgender is a mental disorder.1950s: women are not really people.
2010s: transwomen are not really women.
1950s men shut down women and in the 2010s women shut down trans people.
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is not real feminism.Feminism is not about replacing your oppression by oppressing others. Feminism is about equality.
Dear trans women who want to fuck lesbians:
The cotton ceiling isn’t real and IDing as female doesn’t make your penis any more palatable to lesbians. You’re not entitled to our bodies, our time, or any of our spaces/ resources. You’re not a lesbian and you’re not being oppressed. You’re just a special kind of disgusting. Guilt tripping women into sex by calling them bigots if they say no is coercion, which is rape. You’re an attempted rapist/ rape apologist at best and an actual rapist at worst. And you’re disgusting.
There is probably nothing so embarrassing as to see queer people invalidating other queer people using the language of our common oppressors.
Sexualizing queer people? Check!
Dehumanizing queer people? Check!
Calling queer people disgusting? Check!
These are exactly the kind of tactics homophobic people have used to invalidate lesbians for more than a century. Amanda here, who calls herself a radical feminist, has clearly internalized that bigotry and is now projecting it onto trans women.
To get us all into a better mood I am including a picture from the TV series Sense8.
Trans woman Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton) to the right, her lesbian lover Amanita (played by Freema Agyeman) to the left. Love has no boundaries!
More about queer liberation and Sense8 here!
More about the bigotry of trans-exclusionary “radical” feminists here!
Reading something written by a TERF and realising that they literally think that.
TERF stands for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.”
The TERFs are neither radical nor real feminists. They use every single theory the Patriarchy has concocted in order to invalidate trans people, and are basically channeling traditional sexist transphobia.
The good news is that they have close to zero support in feminist circles.
I just had to blog this one: “Feminism explained with Pokemon.”
Laverne Cox Gets Naked, Exposes Radical Feminist Exclusionism
I may be prejudiced. I did not expect a white writer in Playboy to be one of the first to defend black trans woman, Laverne Cox, against transphobic radical feminists.
Yet, Noah Berlatsky has written a well argued and compassionate defense of Cox’ decision to pose nude for Allure. He writes:
“Feminist Meghan Murphy reacted to the photo just as Cox suggests that people often react to black and trans women — with disgust, prejudice and horror. […]
Cox, for Murphy, is a cartoon: a plastic-surgery-constructed thing, unreal and, in its parody of beauty, ugly. The loathing and contempt are palpable. With black feminist activist Sojourner Truth, Cox, in her nakedness, asks, “Ain’t I a woman?” And Murphy with cold glee, replies, “No.”
That coldness isn’t new. Ideally, you’d hope, feminism would be about fighting for the rights of all women and trying to free all people from oppressive gender stereotypes. In practice, though, the radical feminist tradition of Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, who Murphy champions, has often built itself on exclusion rather than inclusion. Radical feminism’s radicalism is often defined by smearing other women — trans women, sex workers, women of color — as deluded dupes of men and patriarchy.”
I would like to add that is important to keep in mind that the bigoted TERFs (the trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are not representative of feminism. They are not even representative of radical feminism. Most radical feminist support the rights of trans women, of any age, sexual orientation or color.
There may be a puritan streak in some of modern feminism, though, a sexual repression that makes expressions of sensual femininity or female sexuality “sins” caused by the patriarchy. For many trans women this adds another burden to their already troubled lives. They now find themselves banned from expressing the erotic, sensual and/or feminine sides of themselves.
They do not need more barriers. What we all need is more freedom to express ourselves.
See also my post on Laverne Cox’ support of the transgender umbrella.
Too many transgender kids attempt suicide because of bullying, which is exactly what I consider TERFs [Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists] to do. Denying how a person feels about him or herself tells the person that you have no regard for them as a human being.
Many transgender people describe going through puberty as torture and call their hormones “poison” because of how they feel living with their effects. The humane reaction would be to trust that people can and do know who they are inside without calling them names and denying them the approved medical options.
Debi Jackson, mother of a three year old transsexual daughter, reveals the true face of transphobic radical feminists in this post over at Transadvocate.
Her conclusion is:
“All I need to do each day to know that the TERF ideology is completely misguided is to look at my daughter and see how confident and at peace she is. I pray the TERF hyperbole will be drowned out by understanding voices. Trans women and girls are true women and girls. Feminists should embrace equal rights for all of them.”
By the way, keep in mind that TERFs only represent a small minority of feminists. The current TERF-debate clearly shows that the TERFs are losing what little sympathy they might have had.
The Dispute Between Radical Feminism and Transgender
Michelle Goldberg on the dispute over what it means to be a woman. The transgender-rights movement has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean, and radical feminists now find themselves shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue.
I would like to draw attention to this quote from this well researched article on the conflict between trans-bashing radical feminists (TERFs) and transgender activists.
‘Yet, at the same time, the trans-rights movement is growing in power and cachet: a recent Time cover featuring the actress Laverne Cox was headlined “THE TRANSGENDER TIPPING POINT.”
The very word “transgender,” which first came into wide use in the nineteen-nineties, encompasses far more people than the term “transsexual” did. It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither. (According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.)
The elasticity of the term “transgender” has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean; at least in progressive circles, what’s determinative isn’t people’s chromosomes or their genitals or the way that they were brought up but how they see themselves.
Having rejected this supposition, radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion.’
How to Effectively Invalidate Marginalized People!
Many people seek comfort in strict stereotypes, and they do their best to police others who do not share their prejudices.
A very efficient way of forcing others to adhere to whatever is considered “self-evident” in a society is to negate or invalidate the lives of those who fall outside these norms.These tactics are used against women, people from other cultures, the disabled, homosexuals and transgender.
The Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen established the concept of Master Suppression Techniques, which were further developed by the feminist and social psychogist Berit Ås.
What they found was that there are a lot of subtle and manipulative techniques and strategies that can be used by those in power to invalidate the identity and views of those marginalized.
Ås pointed out that men often marginalize women by
- Ignoring or silencing them
- Making fun of them
- Keeping them out of the information loop
- Punishing or otherwise belittle the actions of a person, regardless of how they act (double bind)
- Embarrassing them, or by insinuating that they are themselves to blame for their position
- Discussing the appearance of someone in a situation where it is clearly irrelevant
- Threatening with – or using – one’s physical strength
As trans activist Julia Serano has pointed out in her book Excluded, there are many ways of invalidating people, transgender and genderqueer included:
- Claiming that you are mentally ill or incompetent.
- Sexualizing. People of color are for instance often depicted as being exotic, promiscuous or sexually predatory.
- Accusing you of being immoral, like in “homosexuals are out to deceive straight people”.
- Claiming that you are sick or contagious (Like in: “One drop of Jewish blood is enough to make you a dirty Jew!”).
- Arguing that some type of body or behavior is anomalous or even “unnatural”. (Homosexuality is for instance often considered “unnatural”, even if same-sex relationships are common in nature).
- You are accused of being inauthentic or fake (like in “You are not a woman. You are just a male rapist in an ugly dress!”)
- Claiming that you and those who like you are suffering from a fetish (like in: “He does not really love you; he just has a fetish for fat people”.)
It is truly fascinating to see how people who would never consider using these techniques against some marginalized groups have no qualms about using them against others.
In the essential study The History of White People Dr.Nell Irvin Painter describes how Irish immigrants to the US – who were originally labelled racial inferior by American scientists – felt no qualms about using the same invalidation tactics against African-Americans after having gained access to the Anglo-Saxon family.
I suspect many took the anger caused by those harassing them out on those further down on the racial pecking order. Moreover, now that they were on the inside, they felt free to express the darker side of their psyche. In other words: hatred breeds hatred breeds hatred in a never-ending cycle of violence.
These days this kind of negation causes a tremendous amount of suffering among transgender, transsexual and genderqueer people, as it makes it extremely hard for many of them to gain respect for their true identity.
It is time to break that circle of hatred!
Is Gender Really Nothing More Than a Performance?
One of the most efficient ways of invalidating trans people of all shades and colors – transsexuals, crossdressers, crossdreamers and girlfags included – is to argue that gender is nothing but a performance, a game, an artificial play of sorts.
If it is not real, there should be nothing to stop you from playing, right? And if you cannot stop playing, you should at least not pretend that this is as real as the identities of non-transgender people.
Julia Serano has written an extremely important book on the exclusion of marginalized minorities called Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive
. The book should be read by anyone interested in women’s and trans issues in particular and in society’s treatment of minorities in general.
I have taken the liberty of including some of her quotes on gender and performance below:
“If one more person tells me that ‘all gender is performance’, I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that soundbite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty 'I-took-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t’ sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess.” (Excluded p. 105)
“Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same – wore the same T-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had – yet once other people started reading me as female, they started treating me very differently.” (p. 106)
“Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, of subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which developed organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.” (p. 107)
“So to clarify, I am not suggesting that biology is the only, or even primary, factor that shapes gender and sexuality. I am simply saying that biology and biological variation do, on some level, influence our gender and sexuality” (p. 113)
“Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about all the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours.” (p. 108)
Let me add this:
The current attacks on both girlfags and truscum, transsexuals and gender queer here at tumblr has this in common: They all try to reduce trans lives to something unreal, to a performance, to a superficial fetish or to some kind of perversion. I guess they find us very threatening.
The fact is, however, that trans people do not threaten the identity of non-transgender people, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, male or female. At the moment you embrace the diversity of life, you will see that there is room for everyone.