Questioning Transphobia

So, I haven’t done one of these for awhile.  Yes, I’m a bit rubbish, I’m aware.

Anyway, onto the next trope.  This might seem to be two tropes, and indeed they can and do work separately, but I’m going to do them together because I think they very often work together (especially in the criminal justice system). This one is trans women specific.

First, there’s the frequently touted idea that trans women are really just men in dresses.  The man in a dress is a pitiful figure, trying and failing miserably to pass as a woman.  The notion occasionally touted by some online feminists that trans women will be immediately and obviously be readable as trans–and hence able to be kept out of womyn’s “safe space”–relies on this idea.  This is often the figure of trans women in popular culture, the laughingstock who can’t gender themselves properly (always played by a cis man, with bonus hilarity points if there’s facial and body hair).

This second half, the stealthy deceiver, is closely allied to my first trope (“Really a [assigned birth sex]“) except that it posits the trans person as actively fraudulent.  The idea is that appearances are deceptive, that we are able to mimic cis femininity so well that  we can trick innocent people (usually men) into believing we are something we are not.  To live your life in your gender, and most particularly, to expect to have sex with someone, is inherently a lie.

This is the trans person as surprise plot twist that fuels movies like The Crying Game, though it’s more pervasive and pernicious than sheer entertainment.  The figure of the stealthy trans woman fuels the notorious “trans panic” defense that seemingly every murderer of a trans woman seeks to defend themselves.  Unsurprisingly, it is nearly always almost an enormous bloody lie, the evidence frequently conclusively points to murderers having known their victims were trans and then cold bloodedly killing them.

What remains profoundly foreign to this trope, of course, is the perspectives of trans women ourselves, that being born forced to attempt to live in a male gender role and sexed body might have been far more a profound lie that living as women.

So, these tropes seem to in one sense be wildly opposed – in one, transness is immediately apparent, in the other, it is a secret.  But in another sense, they work together, because one can easily move from one to the other, because a cis view of trans people tends to scrutinise, looking for signs of inauthenticity, of our “real” genders.  So, trans women are placed in the double bind of coming out – either come out and have your gender disregarded and ridiculed, or remain stealth and risk being exposed as a deceiver.

Both, I should point out, have incredible risks of violence.

What is more incredible is how they can both appear at the same time. Trans women are ridiculed for the obvious and apparent inauthenticity of our genders – massive bloody attention is paid to appearance, to make-up, clothing, shaving, to shoulder size, to Adam’s apples. See, for instance, this article about the murder of Sanesha Stewart:

Stewart, more than 6 feet tall, was known to wear stylish, provocative outfits with towering high heels, neighbors said.

Stewart also apparently had undergone surgery to give him larger breasts and other female characteristics, neighbors said.

“She looked like a girl but when she turned around, you knew it was a man,” a 17-year-old neighbor said. “She had a big jaw and an Adam’s apple.”

And yet the original title of the story, I should point out,  was “Fooled John Stabbed Bronx Tranny” (until GLAAD complained and the title was changed).  The article proceeded typically, without any evidence whatsoever besides the fact that Sanesha Stewart was a trans woman of colour, from the later-proved-to-be-faulty assumption that she was not only a sex worker, but a stealthy deceptive one at that.  The incoherence of this, that she was somehow both immediately and obviously trans, and yet able to fool a man into thinking she was cis, should be immediately obvious to anyone with even a quarter of a functioning brain.  And yet.

Transphobia doesn’t work on the level of literal sense, instead it proceeds along a path mapped out long before, relying more on a cis common sense of how things “should be” (and therefore are) than on any real knowledge of trans lives.  And so, this trope appears again and again and again – in Kellie Telesford’s trial, she was described as possessing a man’s strength (ludicrously unlikely given the time she’d been on hormones), yet simultaneously she was able to deceive the defendent into having sex with her.

The point is then, trans women do not have stable position in cis-sexist discourse, moving instead through incoherently contradictory counter-propositions as needs permit, but all the while denied an authenticity and truthfulness for our identities which cis gender normative people take for granted.

Monica Roberts has an update regarding the trans woman whose body was recovered from the American River in Sacramento.

Per the quoted news story, her death has been upgraded from “no foul play” to “suspicious.”

Because of all those skinny-dipping trans women who haven’t had surgery yet, yes?

You’re probably all a bit bored of hearing about the Wall Street crisis, and the proposed trillion dollar bailout, but as with any major disaster it’s apparent how rubbish the mainstream media is at anything resembling analysis.  Anyway, what I’d like to do is draw out a couple points from the mess, which hopefully might be more intelligent then “let’s have some more regulation innit” or McCain’s “mumblemumblefundamentals.”

Jodi Dean writes:

The more I think about it, the worse I think this trillion dollar bailout is. The government is being held up by the financial sector. They are demanding that the government turn over all the money it gets from taxes–or else.

This is the subjection of the state to the demands of finance capital. It is not the state taking control of banks, markets, finance. That’s why there were no provisions in the initial 2 page plan for oversight or accountability. That’s also why it was written by a former head of Goldman Sachs. That’s what Wall Street is demanding.

This isn’t socialism. It’s the triumph of neoliberal dominance of the state.

What I think this demonstrates is the utter improbability of anything resembling a welfare program in the United States.  Can you imagine a similarly budgeted universal health care bill getting through?

*pause for laughter*

Because some things are necessary–like Wall Street making obscene amounts of money (and trickling it down, no really–and others, like access to health care and education, are not.

Indeed, rather than Wall Street’s defeat–which it may or may not be in a cultural sense (how much faith is the average person going to have in the market?  Politicians will have to make some gesture to this I think)–this, as Dean points out, represents how the State has been held hostage by the stock market speculators.  This is Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine disaster capitalism applied to capital itself.  In this, I think Fredric Jameson was quite right in Seeds of Time to suggest that it’s easier to imagine the apocalyptic end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Long ago, Marx argued that capitalism is inherently unstable, that the revolution would come out of its own contradictions.  The absolute faith in the free market to regulate, against all common sense (apparently massive environmental destruction, and countless lawsuits demonstrating various corporations’ willingness to kill their customers weren’t enough), has reaped what it has sown.

And I think there is an awareness from above that this instability in free-market capitalism is growing without the stabilising influence of the state (as K-Punk pointed out).  But rather than tighten up control on capital, the response of the government here is things like this:

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

While this is all possible because of post-September 11 terror laws, it’s worth pointing out that this is NOT about the external terror threat. “Helping with civil unrest and crowd control” means aiming the army equally at legal, democratic demonstrations (the RNC conventions) and at disasters like Katrina (which was NOT a natural disaster, it was an engineering disaster).

All of this have shows the woeful inadequacy of neoliberalism for fixing problems of its own creation.  Those who will receive the worst of it will, as always, be those who can least afford it–poor people, immigrants, people of colour.  People without money and social capital, “suspect populations” for the army to aimed at (since a racist system constitutes PoC largely as guilty unless proven otherwise)…  And given the hysteria aimed at “illegal immigrants” it’s hard not to imagine an imminent campaign targeting immigrants as the internal antagonism responsible for the current crisis.

The response of Wall Street to its own incipient demise–to demand unimaginable amounts of money–amounts to more of the same.  The mentality that creates disasters then reaps the rewards of the aftermath cannot be trusted to fix itself, let alone to take care of the average American, and nothing short of a massive change of political co-ordinates (such as the sort that can imagine universal health care, that will put human rights ahead of corporate interests) can make a bail-out anything more than a short term fix for an ailing economy feeding off its own death.

via Debunking White:

Sunday, September 28th, 2008
9:57 pm More DOMESTIC TERRORISM. how is this NOT huge national news?????
Has this been on a news blackout? How is it that no-one has heard of this until now??

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.

to repeat: Muslim Children Gassed at Dayton Mosque After “Obsession” DVD Hits Ohio

Please, please, go to this link and read the whole thing. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/28/203016/697/536/613742

It was reported in the Dayton Daily News, but not commented on in major media since. The DVDs —28 million of them— were inserted in newspapers in many swing states by a pro-McCain group. And so here we are. A country where hatred is distributed with the Sunday paper. Where children are maliciously attacked because of their religion and no one blinks. Thankfully, no-one died. This time.

I urge you to call or write any major media outlet you know of and disseminate this story. Also, I’m sure the people in Dayton Islamic Society and their members would appreciate a kind word.
26 Josie Street, Dayton, OH 45403 Tel: (937) 228-1503
Here is the email:
isgd@hotmail.com

Here also is the email for the people that put this sick piece of trash into circulation.
info@clarionfund.org

crossposted everywhere

I talk a lot about how feminism fails trans women here, but trans women aren’t the first, or only, group of women that North American feminism has failed. Renee at Womanist Musings writes about how white feminism ignores racism, or even claims that women of color addressing racism is akin to siding with men against women. Or more generally, how second wave feminism fails to address intersectionality when race is involved.

I often engage in conversations with white women in which I accuse them of not owning their race privilege.  Quite often the response is, why are you blaming us, and not white males.  I believe that this is an important issue to discuss because despite the sisterhood claims of feminism, there actually exists a lot of animosity between WOC and white women.

White women and black men, both focus on the marginalizatio0n that they face from over privileged white men.  Though WOC will acknowledge that there is definitely an issue with how the  white male body is encoded with power; they are not our sole oppressors. Unlike white women, white men do not have a history offering friendship that ends in betrayal.  The relationship between white men and WOC is quite clear…adversarial.  Telling us to focus on white men instead of deconstructing their own unearned privileges is an attempt to deflect responsibility.

Feminism has a history of betraying WOC.  As it has been noted on this blog and many others, when it came to activism, white women of middle/upper class standing have repeatedly made the movement about their needs and their desires, while at the same time trying to assert a common sisterhood with WOC.  When there is filing, coffee making and general menial tasks to be done, then and only then, do WOC matter in any significant way. As we look at who are considered the heroes of second wave feminism the disparity between white women and WOC speaks volumes.  Despite the consciousness raising and the ideology of the personal is political, the personal is only validated when it is the experience of white women. White bodies, and white experiences have been utilized to  create the monolithic woman.

The rest of the post here.

As a white woman, words like this make me bitter and angry – not at women like Renee who are speaking the truth, but at the white women who have come before and betrayed women of color. As a trans woman, I certainly sympathize with the experience of repeated betrayals from white cis feminism, as well as dealing with feminists who insist upon attacking me while refusing to deconstruct – or even acknowledge – their own privilege.

And feminists – feminism, as a movement – need to acknowledge these betrayals, need to be held accountable for them. White feminists, as a group need to acknowledge our white privilege and check it, not use it against women of color. WoC live with the intersection of racism and sexism and have no choice but to experience both. Demanding that they privilege one over the other (sex over race, race over sex) is demanding that they pretend that some of their oppression doesn’t exist – and never mind the impossibility of separating the two. White society is not sexist against Black women, Latina women, or Asian women in the same way as it is against white women. This also plays out for Black and Latina trans women, who- for example – are described by J Michael Bailey as “especially suited to prostitution.”

Also, check the comments at Renee’s for a privileged white feminist trying to reenact exactly what Renee’s post is about.

Edit: Also read this followup post.

From the Denver Post:

By Monte Whaley
The Denver Post

Article Last Updated: 09/27/2008 10:51:34 PM MDT

BRIGHTON — Angie Zapata’s life was becoming more complicated and dangerous by the day.

As she neared her 19th birthday, she needed to shave daily to keep up appearances. Her Adam’s apple was growing larger, an emerging tip-off that Angie was not exactly whom she claimed to be.

She was living in Greeley away from her protective older sister, Monica, and other family members for the first time. The striking, 6-foot-tall Latina began running with a bad crowd that sold drugs.

Angie was restless. She needed money for cosmetology school and for counseling to prepare her for hormone treatments so her breasts would develop.

“Every day, I was afraid for my sister,” said Monica Zapata. “The world, the way it is, most people wouldn’t accept who she was.”

Born J***** Zapata, Angie wanted to live and love as a transgender female.

Her quest for a normal life on her terms ended in July, when she was beaten to death in her one-bedroom, $300-a-month apartment.

Her alleged assailant, 31-year-old Allen Andrade of Thornton, met Angie on a dating website. He grew suspicious while looking at photographs of Angie in her apartment, according to Greeley police. He confronted her about her sexual status; she allegedly said: “I’m all woman.” Then he grabbed her crotch and felt a penis, police said.

Enraged, he first hit Angie with his fists. Then he used a fire extinguisher, hitting her up to five times, prosecutors said.

He covered her body with a blanket and left the apartment, taking a credit card belonging to Monica Zapata as well as Monica’s 2003 PT Cruiser.

Andrade faces first-degree murder and felony hate-crime charges, among others. In recorded conversations made public at Andrade’s preliminary hearing this month, he described the killing in stark terms. He said he “snapped” when he learned of Angie’s biological status and told his girlfriend, “What’s done is done.”

Andrade also told police “gay things need to die” and that he “killed it.”

There were plenty of men who found Angie attractive. Her skin was flawless and her hair, dark and flowing.

“Even without makeup, she looked like a girl, a gorgeous girl,” said another sister, Stephanie Zapata.

Angie spent hours primping, even before she reported to work as a shift manager at a local fast-food restaurant.

When she went out, she wore low-cut dresses with high skirts and size-10 pumps. “She was conceited about her looks; she always wanted to look good,” Stephanie said.

Her heart could be broken easily. She recently met a man she liked, but he wouldn’t commit because of her transgender status.

“She said she only wanted him to take her out and show her off, but he said if people found out about them, they would hurt them,” Monica said. “She said to me, ‘I’m never going to be happy.’ ”

Angie clung to her family, especially her nieces and nephews. She had a great fondness for 2-year-old Diego, her godson.

“She would buy them name-brand clothing and definitely Nike shoes. Even if she had a few dollars left, she would spend it on them,” said her friend and transgender mentor, Kitty DeLeon.

At age 5 or 6, Angie showed signs that she was uncomfortable in her masculine skin. She draped towels over her head to look more like a girl, and she quickly dropped out of sports such as soccer and baseball in favor of fixing her sisters’ hair and dabbling in makeup.

“When (our mom) cut her hair, she cried and cried because she wanted it to grow long,” Monica said.

Angie said she was molested as a child by an older relative, added Monica, and she used that to justify her feelings.

“She said that if she could attract men like that, maybe she was meant to be a woman,” Monica said.

To please her mother, Angie dressed as a boy. Once at her elementary school, she would change into girls clothing and wear makeup.

She was taunted for her looks, and it led to altercations.

“She fought two boys once and beat them up and said, ‘See, that’s what it feels like to be beaten up by a fag,’ ” Monica said.

Angie’s death was part of a rash of at least 13 violent hate crimes committed across the country in June and July.

All were aimed at gays, lesbians and transgender individuals, said Avy Skolnik, coordinator of national and statewide programs for the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.

The incidents — including Angie’s death — fall on the heels of the Feb. 12 shooting of 15-year-old Lawrence “Larry” Fobes King at a junior high school in Oxnard, Calif. King allegedly was targeted because he began showing up to school wearing women’s accessories and clothing, high heels and makeup.

King allegedly was shot twice in the head by a fellow student, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney.

“When someone finds out that someone else is transgender, that does not justify an assault, certainly not murder,” Skolnik said.

But Andrade’s defense attorney sees it in a slightly different way. Annette Kundelius argued in her client’s preliminary hearing that Angie deceived Andrade into thinking she was biologically a female.

When he discovered the truth, he reacted violently but without premeditation, said Kundelius, who asked the presiding judge to lower the charge to second-degree murder.

“At best, this is a case about passion,” Kundelius said. “When she smiled at him, that was a highly provoking act.”

Kundelius employed a classic defense-attorney tactic known as “trans-shock,” Skolnik said. “It’s simply used by lawyers to play off the bias of jurors.”

Prosecutor Robb Miller said Andrade could have reacted like most people in the same situation — admit an embarrassing mistake and move on. “He could have lived with it,” Miller said, “but something inside him wouldn’t let him.”

Weld County District Judge Marcelo Kopcow agreed, refusing to lower the first-degree murder charge and erase the felony bias charge. The evidence, Kopcow said, clearly showed Andrade’s rage toward Angie as well as gays.

It was at age 15 that Angie officially came out as a transgender female. About then, she also met DeLeon, a transgender female who also grew up in Fort Lupton.

DeLeon, now in her 30s, sensed an inner strength in Angie that needed to be nurtured. “I wanted her to live a normal life and not a sheltered life,” DeLeon said. “I told her, ‘You know, Angie, there will always be people who will tell you you are evil and wrong. But we can’t let people tell us who we are.’ ”

Later, as Angie’s social life flourished, friends said a cellphone seemed glued to her ear.

She would talk to boys but never go out with them until they had been vetted by her sisters. She also disclosed her status to every suitor, family said. Some of her prospective dates went away angry, but others were happy to stay around, Monica said.

“She didn’t have to lie about who she was,” Monica said. “Plenty of guys liked her.”

But school became tougher for her with conflicts and fights. “She always had to protect herself at school, and it became too much of a hassle for her,” Monica said. “I think that became her excuse to quit.”

She dropped out of Fort Lupton High School in about her junior year and went to work full time, babysitting Monica’s children for $600 a month.

“She started hanging out with some bad people, people who weren’t good for her,” said Monica.

What’s left of Angie’s life — her dresses and shoes and other mementos — is displayed in a basement room at Monica’s home in Brighton.

“She loved people, and she loved going out and looking good,” Monica said. “That was important to her.”

This: “She also disclosed her status to every suitor.” To those of you who insisted upon blaming her because you believed Andrade’s story: Fuck. You.

This is mostly a sympathetic piece, but I’m going to be mean: What’s with the emphasis on her clothes and makeup? Oh, right, I totally forgot the rules for portraying trans women as hyperfeminine and hypersexualized in the media.

Also, that bit above about her trachea:

As she neared her 19th birthday, she needed to shave daily to keep up appearances. Her Adam’s apple was growing larger, an emerging tip-off that Angie was not exactly whom she claimed to be.

Angie was exactly who she claimed to be: A woman. According to the above, she disclosed to anyone who might have been a romantic interest. But this sentence betrays something else: The cissexist attitude that trans people aren’t really who we say we are, that we’re deceivers, wolves in women’s skin. This is a backhanded justification of Andrade’s defense: That Angie’s smile was provocation to kill her.

Also:

Born J***** Zapata, Angie wanted to live and love as a transgender female.

I can’t speak for Angie, and we can’t ask her, but I’d say that if her experiences were anything like mine, she wanted to live as a woman, and “transgender” only in the process for getting there.

It’s also downright insensitive and callous to print her birth name. She wanted to be known as Angie, which is why she changed her name. As with the adam’s apple comment, this only serves to undermine that her womanhood, by asserting that her pre-transition history somehow means she was really a boy.

Also:

Angie said she was molested as a child by an older relative, added Monica, and she used that to justify her feelings.

This is completely irrelevant. There’s no evidence that being trans has anything to do with being molested as a child. Gender identity is not fluid in that way. There is mounting evidence of the possibility of a biological cause for transsexualism. It is irresponsible to link child molestation to being transgender, and plays up the idea that trans people are somehow victims of our condition. It also has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of your story.

I’m so tired of the press – is it that hard to treat dead trans women with respect? I know you made a good effort, but you focused on her sex life, on how long it took her to apply her makeup, and the hemlines of her skirts and dresses. What does this have to do with remembering her? If you wrote about any other murdered woman, would you fetishistically and sensationalistically focus on what she liked to wear in her day-to-day life? Insinuate that she was really a man?

Via Angry White Kid:

Justice for our sister Marcella Sali Grace!

Version en espanol sigue despues del link.

9/27 UPDATE: Friends, there have been many developments in the past two days. More information will become available soon, but it can be confirmed that through the hard work of activists in San Jose del Pacifico, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, Sally’s killer, Omar Yoguez Singu, has been identified and arrested in Mexico City, and transferred to Oaxaca. People here are confident that what happened to Sally was not “political” in the sense that it did not happen as a result of her political activities. Of course violence against women is very much a tragic political aspect of life under patriarchy.  And regardless of the reason, it does not make her murder any less appalling or the loss any less severe. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section. I will post more when it is available. Sally Grace, presente! Ahora, y siempre!

Please read and sign the below call to action. The Spanish version follows my translation. This event is beyond tragic.

Oaxaca de Juarez, Oaxaca.
Thursday, September 25

Justice for our sister Marcella Sali Grace!

Brother and sisters,

Our hearts are full of sadness and rage because our sister Sali was brutally raped and murdered 20 minutes from San Jose del Pacifico and up to this moment the Oaxacan Attorney General’s Office, as is its custom, is not doing anything regarding the fact that there exist witnesses who have information to identify those responsible.

Marcella Sali Grace was born in the United States, with a big heart in solidarity with just causes. She had many friends because she was always inclined to help, using her artistic talents to paint a banner or a wall or doing Arabic dance to raise funds for the struggle, or putting on punk shows, or giving self-defense courses for women because she knew very well how the men accosted them. This was one of her struggles, that women were free and respected. Sali was so involved in the struggle that she was an international accompanier of brothers and sisters who felt harassed by the bad government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

Unfortunately, on September 24, a woman’s body was found with the physical characteristics of Sali, in a deserted cabin twenty minutes from the village of San Jose del Pacifico and at the moment when a village member went to feed some dogs around that area, he was struck by a fetid odor coming from this cabin and notified the municipal authorities of the village, who proceeded to remove the body which was already in a state of decay, and after these events, they did not give any more information to the people in the village.

Yesterday, companera Julieta Cruz (who knew Sali was headed for San Jose del Pacifico) was informed that a young, foreign woman was at in the Miahuatlan amphitheatre, where she went, and where she recognized the body of Sali because of the tattoos she had, as her face was unrecognizable. Julieta thinks it is because of burns, but it doesn’t explain why the rest of her body has less visible damage. When we asked for the case number we were denied as well from seeing the results of the autopsy, as they argued with us that because we weren’t relatives they couldn’t give us any information.

Due to her solidarity work with the popular struggle of the people of Oaxaca, in other struggles in the world and against the racism on Mexico’s border with the U.S., on different occasions and to different people, Sali mentioned that recently in Oaxaca she had suffered political persecution and surveillance. This makes us think that her cowardly murder is related to the widespread repression against the social movement and directed particularly at international observers. Because of this, we don’t dismiss that the intellectual authors are the same who ordered the repression against the people of Oaxaca in their struggle for justice and freedom.

In the face of these bloody events, and for the brutal cruelty used against companera Sali, we don’t disregard that this could be a clear message directed at all the people of Oaxaca, as well as the companeros in solidarity from different parts of the world; we say this based on the recent national and international news which says that “APPO members were the ones who killed U.S. journalist Bradley Roland Will” and as there is no justice in Oaxaca, we worry that the distortion of information could interfere in procuring true justice for our companera and the clear bureaucratic slowness with which the involved authorities are already treating this investigation.

In the face of these lamentable events, WE DEMAND:

The immediate speeding up of the investigations.

The immediate clarification of the facts.

Punishment for the intellectual and material murderers.

Justice for our sister Marcella Sali Grace!

Enough is enough with of the murders, violence and hatred against women who fight for justice!

We ask you to sign on (at the email indicated) to this demand for justice and to become a part of the urgent activities to demand the clarification of these cowardly acts.

rebeldiasentrelazadas@yahoo.com
Information: (01 951) 5178190 CIPO

Since I just posted my own response to Amananta’s post, I am also re-posting (with Rebecca’s permission) Rebecca’s fisking of the same post. Comments are closed on this post, please take discussion here.

While browsing a few blogs to put off writing my essay, I stumbled across an old post from Amaranta, professing to be about finding a middle ground between cultural feminists and transwomen. The entire post, however, drips with cissexual privilege and ignorance about transpeople, our lives and our experiences. It proves that even dating a tranperson doesn’t ensure that you have the vaguest clue about trans issues. Considering that it’s still getting linked and the author made later posts along similar lines, I felt this deserved to be called out in detail as an example of the sort of crap that we seem to sometimes get from people who think they’re allies. It also fits into the theme of the last couple of weeks, with the first trans-related blogwar of ‘08.

I have seen the very good point made that of course FTMs have “gender dysphoria” – and so do almost all other women, because our culture, as a whole, hates and reviles women and femininity. What woman doesn’t hate being female for at least part of her life? Where is the line between really feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men in our society?

I wish I had the privileges accorded to men in our society. Discomfort with living as a woman in a patriarchal society is perfectly obvious, but it takes a cissexual person to be able to conflate the degrees to which that discomfort is felt to that extent. There’s this fantasy that certain cissexual people seem to hold that transmen are all about “gee, I’d dig some of that male privilege”. It’s the difference between City Hill and Mount Kosciusko, and it takes a lot of of privilege to be able to not have to see that gap.

I have seen many MTFs get extremely excited about getting to be “real women” who can – go SHOPPING! and wear frilly things! And heels! Until I sometimes wonder if to them, being feminine is nothing more than a fashion statement. I have known FTMs who explain that they knew they were really boys because they wanted short hair as children, hated Barbie dolls, and were very athletic.

Of course these attitudes are superficially anti-feminist, but how about taking the time to think about why people might hold those attitudes? In the first case, those transwomen have been either unable to or severely judged for doing things that would be considered completely unremarkable for cissexual men or women of their age for decades, and now they’re able to. In the second case, trying to explain being trans to people who are utterly obtuse is a bitch, the sort of example given above is a really easy (if superficial) way to sort of get across things to a lot of people in this society. No one’s pretending it’s the most accurate one. Many transpeople have written about what transpeoples experience of their bodies is like in much greater depth: Lisa Harney in particular has written about this at length. But hey, ignorant assumptions are more fun, yeah?

I do think it is a real problem that the only way little boys are allowed to express the softer and gentler sides of themselves is if they are seen as “not real men”. And it is definitely a problem that little girls are supposed to be shy and retiring and obsessed with their looks or “something is wrong with them.” I do not think these things alone are at the root of transgenderism. But I think in some cases, these cultural attitudes have pushed people into surgery and other medical treatments because behaviors outside of the strictly gender normative are seen as, literally “sick”. I have had some transpeople become very upset with me for daring to say these things, and while it is not my desire to hurt them by reiterating this, I have to call it as I see it.

Most transpeople I’ve ever known would wholeheartedly agree that these gendered expectations are horrendous. However, beyond that, this is pushing another myth about transpeople which is just crap. Being gender variant may be hard in this society, but it’s nothing like the sort of garbage one takes for being trans. Whereas many progressives today are pretty down with most forms of gender variance, transpeople still have to deal with deep-seated ignorance from all sides – this post being one such example. I was with a friend on the weekend whose partner is a transman, and she recounted him being asked about “butch flight” stuff and responding along the lines of “you think I’d go through all of this because you think being butch is so hard? are you high?” I think that was an apt response.

Many MTFs I know minimize the effect male privilege has on their behavior. I suppose it is like the proverbial fish who asks “what is water?” – being the benficiary of male privilege during one’s formative years, even if one begins to question one’s identity as a man, confers benefits upon one that are invisible to the recipient (although obvious to women, who do not receive these benefits.) Since MTFs do not want to be male, they would like to imagine they can just toss male prvilege away along with their unwanted boy’s clothing.

I think it’s interesting that this one gets raised so often by transphobic feminists when they can rarely actually name these benefits that apply to young transwomen. Just because it may be a privilege that generally gets applied to young men doesn’t mean that it’s something we receive. To use one example, it’s often said that transwomen gained benefits in school because they got more attention for being seen as boys. However, this really isn’t a lot of use when you’re getting bullied so badly that you can’t study, or ultimately – as happened in mine and many others lives – attend school at all. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, per se, but it’s a hell of a lot more complicated (at least in regard to young transwomen) than a lot of cissexual folk make out.

The human mind does not work in this way, however. It is ironic that those resorting to violent, invasive tactics in order to enter the Michigan Women’s Music Festivial, for example, with the excuse that they are NOT men and should be accepted as women, are resorting to an ingrained male privilege which tells them they have a right to go anywhere they want to go.

Really? It’s funny that I haven’t actually seen this been argued. As a white woman, I have no right to be in WoC space. As a generally able-bodied woman, I have no right to be in disabled space. As a woman, however, I do have the right to be in women’s space, and I’m going to cry foul when I’m discriminated against on that account. And while I could distinctly care less about Michfest, these things have consequences – and this sort of ideology has driven the exclusion of transwomen from rape crisis centres and domestic violence and homeless shelters, things which I actually do care about.

Also ironic in their insistence that they are no different from women born women is their seeming inability to understand, or their willingness to brush aside as insignificant, women’s very real fears of rape, from which follows the concept of a safe space for women being male-free. Thus the “cutting edge” protest method some have developed, that of passing succesfully as female until they get to the shower area and then showing everyone they have penises in a sort of “Neener, neener, I have a penis and you didn’t guess but I’m showing it to you now so you’re a hypocrite ha-ha-ha you’re wrong about transwomen!” sort of gesture really only proves the point that they DON’T belong in a women’s only safe place, as they have no clue how frightening it is for a vulnerable naked women to suddenly be confronted by an angry naked man.

I’m not brushing aside anyone’s fear of rape, as I have this same fear. What transwomen have been suggesting is that, considering there are somewhere close to oh, about zero incidents of transwomen actually raping other women (Julia Serano had some stats on this in Whipping Girl), this fear might be better directed at actual men instead of fearing other women for no good reason.

It’s spectacular that she uses the widely debunked myth about transwomen running around Michfest with their schlongs out to justify this: perhaps, y’know, if you’re going to argue this stuff, it might be worth actually finding out that the person concerned was a transman, one perfectly entitled to be there according to the festival’s “WBW” policy. It’s about here that the ignorance gets breathtaking: I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be pretty fucking terrified to be confronted by an angry naked man too. But no, we’re Other, we must think well…they’re not sure, but it must be bad.

Transwomen – if you are serious about transitioning and serious about feeling like a woman, you have to stop insisting that female fear of men is sexist or unreasonable. Every time you do this it just proves the point of why women do need some women born women only space – so they don’t have to deal with you, as a newcomer to living as a woman, to tell us how we are doing it all wrong.

I don’t think you’d see many transwomen arguing that female fear of men is sexist or unreasonable. It’s something I share. What I and others are confronting is the idea that classing women as men and then trying to use this as an excuse for trans exclusion is at all justified. It’s also wrongheaded in other ways – as the Michfest example above with transmen. Somehow, I think it likely that the average person who is afraid of men would be rather less afraid of running into me in a women’s space than, say, Jamison Green.

You can be as unhappy about that as you like – trust me, I am unhappy about it too – but until the epidemic of male violence against women ends, this is how it is going to be. You cannot blame feminists for this – they did not invent an irrational prejudice against men as violent rapists – the high number of men who are violent rapists is what is responsible for this very realistic fear.

This is entirely true, but transwomen are not the rapists. Men are. The ability of a few hateful people to paste over that gap is what you’re being called on. Mere fear of the Other – whether that be black women, disabled women, lesbian women, or in this case, trans women – is not a justification for discrimination.

But there is a lack of examination of the fact that women have never been allowed to define womanhood for themselves. It has always been about how well they fit into the tiny box allotted to them in patriarchal society. Men have defined various things in the past as unfeminine, including athleticism, wearing pants, even obtaining an education. Americans in general do not accept these things as “mannish” or “unwomanly” today. But there are other patriarchal standards and stereotypes of woman which feminists and women in general struggle with. To demand full acceptance into a group which has little power to define its own boundaries is invasive and insensitive.

She’s conflating two different things here: the expectations placed upon women in this society, and the actual membership of Class Woman. Yes, men have defined many things in the past as unfeminine and inflicted a bucketload of patriarchal standards on women, and a hell of a lot of transwomen, myself included, believe in fighting that just as much as Amaranta. However – Class Woman? The notion that men have imposed criteria for the membership of Class Woman on women is nonsense, and indeed, where this has come up – women from less privileged groups being declared to be UnWoman – just as is the case here, women have been just as complicit as men. Privileged women have always had the ability to try and boot less privileged women out of Class Woman, and it’s hardly unsurprising to see it happened again.

Furthermore, if you are a transgendered woman, no matter how badly you may want it, unless you were incredibly lucky you were not raised as a girl in this society. There are some experiences you will never have, and there are some things that will never quite match up between your experiences and those of girls who were raised as girls. I understand well this is a sore point for many transwomen, who feel they have missed out greatly on something very special, and maybe they have – but the fact remains that they did not have these experiences and many of the bonds between women who are born women are based on the assumption of shared experiences.

Again, we see the assumption that cissexual people are a homogenous group, and transwomen are The Other. Amaranta has had experiences as a woman that I’ve never had. The things is that I’ve had experiences as a woman that she’s never had, too. The same could, I’m sure, be said for practically every other woman in the world. There are few experiences that all of us will have, and very few that will “match up” between women everywhere. Many of the bonds between women – not just cissexual women – are based on the assumption of shared experiences. I’ve been in some pretty powerful consciousness-raising groups precisely because we do have shared experiences – and many of them, too.

So what is the answer? Well, it is becoming more common for many women’s groups to accept transwomen, and I think this is a good thing. At the same time I have no problem for women who wish to maintain a women born women only space, and my corrolary suggestion is that if transwomen feel very slighted by this, they are equally welcome to form transwomen only groups to discuss experiences they have which women who have always been accepted as women would not ever have experienced.

The concept of safe spaces has never meant a place where the privileged can exclude the oppressed. We don’t have “white people spaces”. We don’t have (deliberately) “able-bodied spaces”. We don’t have “straight spaces”. This is precisely what transpeople are objecting to: you’re asking us to swallow our oppressors using the idea of “safe space” to further oppress us. I will always consider minority groups to have the right to form safe spaces – and to scream blue bloody murder when they’re expelled from privileged spaces.

The MWMF does not control or influence this patriarchal world that discriminates against transpeople in housing, religion, and in which they are at a high risk of violence, and protesting it gains you nothing of benefit, it merely fuels the flames between the feminist and transgendered movement and reveals the transwomen who take part in it as being exactly what they protest they are not.

Except that it does. Michfest and its organisers are the locus over the movement in North America to kick transwomen out of women’s spaces, and have been responsible for fuelling transphobia for years. Though Michfest is about the last place on earth I’d want to be, its policies have ramifications in homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centres and other services that transwomen rely on as women. It is perhaps the most significant example in the US, at least, of an ideology that lies right at the heart of the oppression of my community, and by god, I will stand up and oppose that.

Please – a little respect, a little listening. I don’t think this train is completely derailed as of yet. Divisiness hurts both of these movements, whereas together we can make a powerful indictment of the strict gender roles imposed on us by society.

Oh, fuck off. Agreeing to respect my basic humanity isn’t a fun compromise, and forgive me for regarding anyone with as much transphobia as Amaranta – let alone those she’s trying to defend – with a great deal of cynicism. I’ll have your “fabulous conversations about gender and society” when you stop treating me and my ilk as a gigantic dancing Other on wheels.

This post is directed at Amananta, but what I have to say in it is more universally applicable to anti-trans feminists.

If you were ever really a supporter of trans people, you wouldn’t have found it so easy to back off that support and change your tune. You wouldn’t have quietly withdrawn your public support for your partner after you couldn’t use your appeal to estrogen to justify that your transphobic actions weren’t really transphobic.

But then you come trolling around my blog under a pseudonym to tell us all how trans women are really acting from male privilege, that we were ever “really cis men” before transitioning:

So basically, you aren’t going to answer her question, which is, why do transactivists focus almost soley on trying to force their way into women-born-women-only spaces, and claim born women should have no right to any space of their own, instead of actually combatting real oppression?
Oh wait, that’s right, you’re the oppressed ones, after getting the benefits of maleness you’re whole lives until you transition, and then want all the energy of women to be focused on your needs. Just like when you were men.

I really wish I could say that this was quite a change from your attempts at peacemaking, but truthfully, your “Radical Feminism and the Transgendered” post was pretty offensive:

I’ve seen a lot of transphobia (prejudice, misunderstanding and delberate hurtfulness directed towards transsexuals and transgendered people) flagrantly displayed by some radical feminists. I’ve also seen some distinctly anti-feminist opinions held by transfolk. Both of these attitudes are counterproductive, hurtful, and divisive. Neither of them make much sense. I don’t even think they are topics worthy enough of serious discussion to have people spend the amount of time and energy on them that they do, and maybe the time and energy I am putting into this post is also part of that wasted energy.

In this paragraph, you establish that you consider the rabidly anti-trans actions taken by feminists since the early 1970s to be rhetorically equal to trans people’s reactions to that violence. To being forced out of feminist spaces, to being denigrated as “surgically/chemically altered men,” to being equated with serial killers and rapists, to Janice Raymond’s call to commit cultural genocide upon trans people, to being described as “Frankenstein’s monsters” by Mary Daly. That trans people’s reactions to all of this hate speech, to all of these exclusive actions, are somehow on the same ideological ground as the insistence that trans people should not exist.

You then say that these reactions make no sense, that they’re not worthy of discussion, and that any energy devoted to that discussion is wasted energy. And please forget that trans women have been a part of feminism since the second wave, please pretend that we’ve never contributed. Please pretend that our participation was not forcibly and violently ended whenever possible – no, act like trans people are being divisive for criticizing this history and demanding accountability from feminism. That trans women are the unreasonable ones for wanting full participation in the women’s movement.

Why do I say these topics are a waste of the energy spent on them? I guess I just have to start off playing hardball here. Dear sisters in radical feminism – there is a tiny percentage of the population that feels they were not born into the right body and wishes to change their gender presentation. They are not your enemy; they are not the founders of the patriarchy; they are not the masses of men who are beating and raping women; they are not, as a group, supportive of violence against women or unequal pay or the anti-abortion movement. Dear transpeople – radical feminist groups that do not let MTFs into women only meetings or gatherings are not the defining issue of your oppression. I have yet to see any radical feminist say it is okay for you to be discriminated against in jobs and housing and beaten to death by roving packs of homophobic/transphobic men.

The first two-thirds of your paragraph is okay. But then we get to the second half – at which point you start explaining – as a cissexual woman – what should and should not be important to trans women. You completely dismiss any responsibility that feminism as a movement has helped perpetrate and reinforce the notions that trans women are really cis men and that trans men are really cis women, and how that is the foundation of violence against trans people – trans women especially, trans women of color, especially.

You also completely elide the fact that “women-only space” that excludes trans women count domestic violence and rape shelters among their number, and that these are a refuge from male violence. While cis feminists themselves may not directly engage in violence (please ignore the fact that cissexual feminists sent death threats to Olivia Records when they were demanding Sandy Stone leave), the fact that these spaces are set up to actively exclude trans women means that we’re that much more vulnerable to violence from men – in other words, your “women-only spaces” that exclude trans women are reinforcing that violence.

Also, by setting up women-only spaces to exclude trans women, you are declaring who is a woman and who is not a woman, and every space that’s set up to exclude trans women reinforces the core trans misogynistic notion that “trans women are not real women.”

Finally, it is not your place as a member of the oppressor class (cissexual people) to tell the oppressed class (trans people) what our priorities are supposed to be. If you were really a supporter of trans people as you claim at the time you wrote this, you wouldn’t be lecturing trans women on what causes we’re supposed to care about.

I’m skipping the next few paragraphs, as I believe they are genuinely supportive of your wife in specific and trans people in general. And, really, you should’ve stopped there, because:

But in other ways, many transgendered people fall prey to patriarchal ideas and attitudes, just as many non-transgendered people do. FTMs in particular seem so anxious to identify themselves as men that they sometimes throw out sexist stereotypes or behave in a very anti-feminist way, perhaps in order to prove they are “one of the boys”. I have seen the very good point made that of course FTMs have “gender dysphoria” – and so do almost all other women, because our culture, as a whole, hates and reviles women and femininity. What woman doesn’t hate being female for at least part of her life? Where is the line between really feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men in our society?

First of all, no, cissexual women do not have “gender dysphoria” and it’s both trivializing and tokenizing toward trans people to claim that discomfort with being a woman in a patriarchal society is the same thing as living with being trans – that is, with the fact that you know your physical sex isn’t right.

The line between feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men is a strong, bright line for trans people. Trans men aren’t doing it for the privilege, they do it because they know they’re male down to their bones, and their bodies clash with that expectation so thoroughly that the best answer is to transition. I, as a woman, wish every day that I had the privileges accorded to men, but living as a man was not something I could do and maintain a healthy life.

And yes, some trans men are sexist, and they should be called out on their sexism because sexism is wrong, and their being trans men shouldn’t reflect onto that at all.

I have seen many MTFs get extremely excited about getting to be “real women” who can – go SHOPPING! and wear frilly things! And heels! Until I sometimes wonder if to them, being feminine is nothing more than a fashion statement. I have known FTMs who explain that they knew they were really boys because they wanted short hair as children, hated Barbie dolls, and were very athletic. These kind of statements reveal that they don’t think girls or women who behave in this way are “real women”, and you can’t really get much more anti-feminist than that.

Oh, man, I thought that the previous paragraph was offensively tokenizing, but this, oh my god. These statements don’t reveal anything of the sort. You’re cherry-picking a few statements and behavior, taking them completely out of context, and then using them as evidence that trans women apparently view being women as some kind of shallow, superficial, artificial exercise – and I think that has more to do with how society views femininity than how trans women view womanhood.

It’s like this: Pre-transition life is like a prison. You’re expected to live according to your sex assigned at birth, even though every part of you knows this is wrong. Transitioning means so many things on so many levels, and that includes being able to do things appropriate to your proper sex without being labeled as a freak (although the labeling still happens). Trans women who are excited about shopping for clothes and shoes aren’t excited because this is the breadth and depth of the experience of “womanhood” to trans women, but because it is one of many things that we can finally do as women.

But to know that, you’d have to listen to trans people, rather than impose your own assumptions on us.

I do think it is a real problem that the only way little boys are allowed to express the softer and gentler sides of themselves is if they are seen as “not real men”. And it is definitely a problem that little girls are supposed to be shy and retiring and obsessed with their looks or “something is wrong with them.” I do not think these things alone are at the root of transgenderism. But I think in some cases, these cultural attitudes have pushed people into surgery and other medical treatments because behaviors outside of the strictly gender normative are seen as, literally “sick”. I have had some transpeople become very upset with me for daring to say these things, and while it is not my desire to hurt them by reiterating this, I have to call it as I see it.

And this goes back to the incorrect idea that trans people transition because we think that some things are only for men to do and some things are only for women, “thus, if I want to wear dresses, I have to be a woman.” While I appreciate your concern that people are pushed into surgery, I find it a grotesquely inaccurate distortion of the truth: That the WPATH (formerly HBIGDA) Standards of Care are intended to convince trans people that we don’t want to transition. How ignorant do you have to be to insist that people are being pushed into transitioning by cultural attitudes? Have you taken a look around lately? Society hates trans people.

You do hurt people by saying this, because you are saying something that is demonstrably false. You’re making unfounded assumptions based in your own cissexual privilege, and then asserting them as if they’re true, without (as privilege allows) even backing these statements up. You may call it as you see it, but you’re seeing things that aren’t there.

But the fact remains that it *is* easier to get along in life if one appears to be what others expect. In this regard, FTMs have a bit of an easier life, as the taking of testosterone makes them indistinguishable from men born men in a fairly brief amount of time, at least in public settings, or while clothed. Their masculine behavior will then pass unnoticed by society unless they wish to make an issue of having been born female. MTFs face a different set of variables, however. Depending on several appearance factors, some MTFs can be taken as a woman by most people without comment, but some will never succesfully “pass” as female, but will be seen as “a man in a dress.” While feminism has made some avenues open to women which were never open before, such as the freedom to wear either pants or a skirt/dress, men as a group have clung to the idea of dresses as women’s clothing and go out of their way to torment any fellow male who dares break the masculine code of dress and behavior. When an MTF, or for that matter, any crossdressing man, hippie boy, or goth boy, goes out wearing a skirt, s/he is exposed to, at best, whispered mockery and ridicule. At worst, men will beat him/her to death for breaking the male code of behavior. Male privilege comes with a high price, and those who visibly reject this code, even with something as petty as changing one’s clothes, sometimes pay that price with their lives.

This paragraph is problematic for a couple of reasons:

• You assume that trans men have an easy time passing. While it is true that testosterone over time does masculinize trans men rather effectively, a large number of trans men do not in fact pass perfectly well.
• You talk about “passing as female” when trans women are female. I think what you mean is “passing as cissexual.” Because trans women who fail to pass as cissexual are incorrectly gendered as men – that is to say, it’s the people who insist they’re men, not the trans woman’s fault for not looking female enough.

This is mostly plain old cissexism at work here, which is ignorant, but forgivable.

Which brings me to male privilege.

This isn’t.

Many MTFs I know minimize the effect male privilege has on their behavior. I suppose it is like the proverbial fish who asks “what is water?” – being the benficiary of male privilege during one’s formative years, even if one begins to question one’s identity as a man, confers benefits upon one that are invisible to the recipient (although obvious to women, who do not receive these benefits.) Since MTFs do not want to be male, they would like to imagine they can just toss male prvilege away along with their unwanted boy’s clothing. The human mind does not work in this way, however.

Because growing up as a trans girl is exactly the same thing as growing up as a cis boy, right? Because when you know you’re a girl, even though the world insists you’re a boy, you’re totally socializing in exactly the same way as the cis boys are. You can’t possibly be picking up gendered messages intended for girls and absorbing them. And of course this in no way affects how trans girls interact with male privilege, right?

It’s cissexist supremacy that claims that trans people’s lives are identical to cis people’s lives pre-transition, that our state of mind and how it affects us in no way affects how we interact with the world or how the world interacts with us. So, before you start lecturing on how the human mind works, you could at least try to understand how trans women’s minds work throughout our lives.

Discussion by cissexual women of trans women’s “male privilege” is a silencing tactic, used to tell us that behavior that would be completely acceptable from a cis woman is unacceptable and essentially male from a trans woman. By explaining to trans women what our lives are really like, and how we really experienced male privilege, you’re doing the same thing that men do to women:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.

You’re exercising your cissexual privilege to shut trans women up. I’m not arguing that trans women have never received any male privilege, here. What I am arguing is that your assumptions about what that means are wrong, that you’re using this assumption of male privilege as a way to explain that trans women are essentially not really women, and carry an indelible mark of Cain that can and should be used against us when we start saying or doing inconvenient things – like, for example, protesting discrimination and segregation directed against trans women.

It is ironic that those resorting to violent, invasive tactics in order to enter the Michigan Women’s Music Festivial, for example, with the excuse that they are NOT men and should be accepted as women, are resorting to an ingrained male privilege which tells them they have a right to go anywhere they want to go. Also ironic in their insistence that they are no different from women born women is their seeming inability to understand, or their willingness to brush aside as insignificant, women’s very real fears of rape, from which follows the concept of a safe space for women being male-free. Thus the “cutting edge” protest method some have developed, that of passing succesfully as female until they get to the shower area and then showing everyone they have penises in a sort of “Neener, neener, I have a penis and you didn’t guess but I’m showing it to you now so you’re a hypocrite ha-ha-ha you’re wrong about transwomen!” sort of gesture really only proves the point that they DON’T belong in a women’s only safe place, as they have no clue how frightening it is for a vulnerable naked women to suddenly be confronted by an angry naked man.

The story about trans women exposing penises in the showers has been debunked many times:

Tony entered the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1999 and took a shower inside, inadverdantly exposing his transplanted forearm, which was made to appear like a penis. This is considered to be the origin of the myth that “men walked around the festival exposing themselves (which has no concrete eyewitness reports besides Tony’s story itself).

In other words, the tactics you’re saying trans women used in the Festival never happened. But, there’s so much more buried here:

• You’re saying that trans women represent a threat of rape by being present at MichFest. How is it not trans misogynistic to insist that trans women are potential rapists?
• You’re saying that trans women should be ashamed of our anatomy, even though the only control we can exert over it is via hormones and surgery, since we can’t will our penises away. You’re saying that it must be hidden at all times. The truth is that a trans woman who reveals her penis is not putting cis women at risk for seeing it, but herself at risk because people who see her as “not a real woman” may commit violence upon her.
• You’re coopting survivor voices to justify continued exclusion and ejection of trans women from women-only spaces.
• Aside from the debunked rumor about trans women flashing penises in the shower, what “violent, invasive” tactics have been deployed to protest MichFest?
• Earlier in this post, you asserted that trans women are at great danger from male violence. Now you justify excluding trans women from MichFest because the women there need to be free from male violence. How can you not see that trans women may need this space as much as cis women?
• You’re assuming that the default is that trans women shouldn’t be allowed in. MWMF is for all women, which means that trans women are automatically included. It was an act of violence to expel Nancy Burkholder, and maintaining the policy in the years since has been continued justification of that violence against a woman.
• Penis or no, trans women are not “men” ever. Saying so is the core of transphobia – that trans people’s genders are not valid.

Transwomen – if you are serious about transitioning and serious about feeling like a woman, you have to stop insisting that female fear of men is sexist or unreasonable. Every time you do this it just proves the point of why women do need some women born women only space – so they don’t have to deal with you, as a newcomer to living as a woman, to tell us how we are doing it all wrong. Every time you think or say something along these lines, you are acting on male privilege, whether you like that idea or not. Question – if you are transgendered and pre-op or non-op, would you feel safe in a prison with men? Of course you wouldn’t – and for the exact same reason, in general women are not going to feel safe if you invade a space where they are naked and vulnerable. You can be as unhappy about that as you like – trust me, I am unhappy about it too – but until the epidemic of male violence against women ends, this is how it is going to be. You cannot blame feminists for this – they did not invent an irrational prejudice against men as violent rapists – the high number of men who are violent rapists is what is responsible for this very realistic fear.

Now this is where Amananta’s putting trans women in our place – we’re “newcomers to living as women” and thus need to understand that our presence, as a minority of women around women is exactly like putting a trans woman in a prison full of cis men (and yay, comparing trans women to violent criminals who are cis men – you go, Amananta!). She throws in the “shut up” bit by invoking male privilege yet again.

And here, she flips things – at the beginning of her post, she tells trans women that cis women are not responsible for the violence inflicted by cis men on trans women, to show that cis feminists are not enemies to trans women. Here, she basically says that trans women are responsible for the violence inflcited on cis women by cis men, and that to keep cis women safe from male violence at MichFest, trans women must be excluded. She says that “until the epidemic of male violence against women ends, this is how it is going to be.” What that means is that trans women are scapegoats for cis feminists – that cis feminists attack trans women as substitutes for cis men. Trans women are safer targets to attack than cis men, being as we’re oppressed in relation to cis women. Heart even says this on her own blog:

When a radical feminist female uses insulting words in the direction
of transwomen, she understand this to be no different from using
insulting words in the direction of males. It might be rude, crude,
and socially unacceptable, it might be insulting, but it isn’t hate
speech. It’s not discriminatory. Because given power differentials as
they exist between males and females, females aren’t situated socially
so as to be able to discriminate against males, or to be bigoted
towards males or to be phobic against males. To the contrary, our
experience as females is that males *are* to be feared because they
hurt females and to say so, and behave accordingly, is not “phobic,”
it is based on female reality.

Also the way Amananta excuses prejudice against trans women by talking about how a prejudice against men as violent rapists is rational, due to the number of men who violently rape.

Hey, Amananta, can you point to the apparently extensive pattern of trans women who rape cis women?

Finally I want to tackle what I think is the most hidden issue in all of this but perhaps the root of it all – the question of “who defines womanhood”? I have seen the very good point raised that women ave never been allowed to define what makes a woman. Men have defined womanhood for us for centuries. When I see transgendered women questioning the refusal of some to refer to them as women, there is again an unexamined male privilege in their questioning at the same time as that there are some very good points. The unexamined privilege comes from them setting up patriarchal societal objections to accepting transpersons as they wish to be accepted and smashing those admittedly unfounded ideas, thus concluding that radical feminists are wrong to ever exclude them from anything at all.

This is a vacuous question – the answer is “no one defines womanhood.” There is no single, universal, experience of womanhood. The idea that trans women are demanding to define womanhood for all women is as ridiculous as the assertion that cis women get to decide whether trans women are really women. It doesn’t work that way. You and every other radical feminist in the world can line up and tell me I’m a man, but that doesn’t erase the sexual harassment I’ve experienced, the misogyny, the violence I’ve risked and experienced. It doesn’t erase the boss who offered to give me rides home in exchange for blow jobs, and it doesn’t erase the fear of rape and violence I felt when a man followed me across three bus transfers and right off the bus at the same stop. Do those experiences define womanhood? I don’t think they do – they don’t define the men and women I’ve dated, who have all accepted my womanhood, they don’t cover the fact that 99% of the people around me do use feminine pronouns. They certainly don’t cover my own self-perception, which has been unassailable for my entire life.

You’re trying to encapsulate “womanhood” into this commodity that can be defined or withdrawn by individual people, and it’s not. No one can define what it’s like to be a man or a woman for another person. Not Heart or Lucky and their appropriative lists of oppressions, no one.

The real unexamined privilege in your question is cissexual privilege: The idea that cis people have the authority and right to gender trans people incorrectly based on standards that don’t apply to cis people.

To demand full acceptance into a group which has little power to define its own boundaries is invasive and insensitive. Furthermore, if you are a transgendered woman, no matter how badly you may want it, unless you were incredibly lucky you were not raised as a girl in this society. There are some experiences you will never have, and there are some things that will never quite match up between your experiences and those of girls who were raised as girls. I understand well this is a sore point for many transwomen, who feel they have missed out greatly on something very special, and maybe they have – but the fact remains that they did not have these experiences and many of the bonds between women who are born women are based on the assumption of shared experiences.

Trans women are women, just as cis women are. It’s not a matter of demanding acceptance. Acceptance should be a given. It’s demanding that you stop excluding and ejecting us for arbitrary and unfalsifiable reasons.

For example, you raise the point that trans women aren’t raised as girls, and you tell us that this is why we should be excluded from women-only spaces and not complain about it. I want to ask you: Do you not see how abusive, how violent, how alienating it would be for a girl to be raised as a boy no matter how much she protests? And would this woman be welcomed into women-only spaces, knowing she had endured such an abusive upbringing?

That’s what trans women grow up with – it’s abusive, violent, and alienating. And now, this abuse, violence, and alienation that was forced upon us as we grew up is used as a reason to justify further abuse, violence, and alienation from a movement that is allegedly for all women, but is really only for some women. Not only do you deny that trans women are women, but you hold the violence inflicted upon us against our will as something we must be held responsible for.

And when confronted with the extensive and fundamental transphobia of your statements, do you – as a self-proclaimed ally to trans people say “Oh, hell, I screwed up?” No, you blame trans people for getting rightfully angry with you:

The content of this post removed because I have been silenced by transgender activists who ignore everything else I write in order to take what I have written here, twist it out of context and proportion, and make me out to be some horrible transphobe who dehumanizes all transpersons everywhere and abuses my supposed privilege over transpersons.  In fact, the only links my blog gets anymore is from angry transactivists vilifying me.  Everything I write about women’s rights?  Completely ignored.  The irony seems to escape you all.

Yes, you were silenced. You were unable to voice your opinions without being criticized, and that is exactly the same thing as being censored out of having a voice, which is why you took your blog down, never to post to it again, right? How trans people actually set up a rule on the entire internet that “Amananta is not allowed to speak on trans topics,” and it is now a physical law of nature.

Spare me your bullshit about being silenced. No one silenced you – you even dropped a trolling comment in my blog, as linked above. This “I was silenced!” rhetoric is just more privileged whining about how people won’t let you say bigoted things in peace.

I also like the false opposition set up throughout the original post, where trans activists were set up as being solely interested in trans rights and needs, while feminists were set up as being properly concerned about women’s rights. This is simply not true. A large number of trans women and men identify as feminists and are in fact actively focused on feminist issues. A large number of feminists understand that women’s issues apply to both cis and trans women. There is no divide. Both trans people and women experience gender-based oppression, and if feminism is really about ending gender-based oppression, then feminists would see that it’s just as important to fight transphobia as it is to fight misogyny

Of course, most transphobic and anti-pornography radical feminists seem to understand intersectionality about as well as they understand trans people – which is not very much at all. So, getting the above across seems about as easy and likely as communicating that racism, immigration, disability rights, poverty, and more are themselves feminist issues because women experience all of those things.

Note: Some of the concepts described in this post were inspired by Cedar’s Beyond Inclusion zine.

Monica Roberts posted about it here and here.

E! Online has an interview with Isis:

Sexual Reassignment Surgery, Y/N? Isis says yes, she’d love to have the operations and treatments necessary to become more biologically female, but cold hard cash is currently an obstacle: “There’s still obviously the finances. I’m not working right now, but hopefully I get a lot of gigs from me being on the show. Once I save my money—hopefully within the next two years, that’s my goal—I will have it done as soon as possible, so I can just get it out of the way.”

Psych Out? Isis admits it was hard to totally ignore the issue of her gender during the competition, but she did her best: “I just try not to really think about me being born special or a little different than other girls. I really try not to dwell on it, because the more and more I start to dwell on it, the more and more it starts to consume my shoots, or my personality, or my ability to perform…[but] I guess it was inevitable.”

Behind-the-Scenes Backbiting: Apparently Isis didn’t know Clark was against her until she saw the show. Says Isis, “I guess I never really knew how Clark felt about me. In the house we talked and everything, and I never knew that she felt the way that she felt.”

I think the surgery question was interesting too, because it highlights the fact that it’s difficult for a large number of trans women to afford it. The fact is that it’s difficult to get insurance coverage for trans-related procedures, despite the fact that they’re relatively cheap as compared to routinely covered medical treatment. Despite the fact that surgery is necessary to live a fairly normal life, it’s just not seen as a necessity for trans people.