Excluding Trans Women From Women Only Spaces: What This Policy Renders Invisible
So I was reading and having some conversations about exclusion of trans women from women-only spaces, and I ended up doing some research on how inclusive domestic violence and rape shelters really are. I didn’t find the overall numbers that I wanted, and a large number of shelters just don’t say whether they’re inclusive on their webpages, but I found this report written in 2002. It’s a fairly long read, with 196 pages, but I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the topic.
The report itself is titled Re/Defining Gender and Sex: Educating for Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Access and Inclusion to Sexual Assault Centres and Transition Houses by Caroline White, and includes such information as the fact that 45 of 62 surveyed shelters in the Vancouver BC area in 2000 were trans inclusive with no conditions. Of the remaining 17, several conditionally allowed trans women.
The Feministe link above links to Emi Koyama’s article on the unspoken racism in the trans inclusion debate, which makes the point that the idea that all women share similar experiences being born female and raised as girls erases the different experiences that women of color have while growing up and living in a white supremacist society. For example, how beauty standards are defined in relation to white women and how that impacts women of color. It centers the “common experience” of being born female, raised a girl, and lived her entire life a woman” on the experiences of white, middle-class women.
The report I linked above also discusses the unspoken racism in the trans inclusion debate, with a bit more force:
Page 112-113
“…one of the biggest implications that we have seen… is women’s reluctance to include trans women in [women-only] spaces and racism, and white supremacy; the connection between those things… There was this time when I was at this conferance and… there was a trans woman in the room for awhile and finally she had to leave and somebody said “I just want to say I feel unsafe because there’s a penis in the room, and I just want to know how in a women’s only space, how we’re supposed to talk about that, blah, blah, blah…..” And so it made an opportunity to talk with this woman, which I was able to say just a little in that group, and then also meet with her and talk with her more at length about the problems of locating sexual violence in an organ such as a penis, and talking about white skin as an organ that represents lynching and systematic oppression of people of color and all kinds of violences; I mean if we’re going to be locating violence and oppression in an organ, none of the white women in that space seemed to have any problem with their white skin showing in that space, and the trans person that was there, it was really speculation on this person’s part that there was a penis in the room.
It was just absurd… the way that she was bringing that question to the group and what she was able to bring, the power behind it was that she was a survivor of sexual abuse. And so being able to really look at this piece of – white women in particular’s – just incredible resistance to including trans folks and trans women in women-only spaces I think, really reflects an investment in the binaries between men and women, and that we maintain sexism as the primary oppression that can exist in the world so then white women remain not responsible for their participation in creating, and implementing, and designing, and sustaining, and benefiting from white supremacy and racism, and imperialism.
By centering the question of whether cis women’s safety and comfort is threatened by the presence of trans women (and thus the presumed presence of past or present penises), the questions of racism, classism and ableism are simply elided.
Emi Koyama points this out as well:
Even the argument that “the presence of a penis would trigger the women” is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis. The racist history of lesbian-feminism has taught us that any white woman making these excuses for one oppression have made and will make the same excuse for other oppressions such as racism, classism, and ableism.
But for some reason, when I re-read that yesterday, it didn’t resonate so strongly as it did when I read the longer passage above.
The report continues with some discussion of woman-to-woman abuse:
One of the big problems that I’ve got with trans exclusion is that the kinds of things that you need in order to keep a shelter safe when you let trans people in and the implications that has for the so-called problem of “men masquerading as trans people in order to gain access to shelters and whatever” – not that that has ever happened once and people raise that anyway – that…should be no less terrifying than the idea of a lesbian batterer gaining access to a shelter by masquerading as a survivor, it should be. And, in fact, what it tells us is that we still don’t take seriously the idea that women are powerful! No one has …as a movement, we’ve not internalized that we are powerful; if we believed that we were powerful andthat we learned the lessons that lesbians can batter each other, we would be afraid of the power of a lesbian batterer gaining access to our shelter or our other programs, and we would take serious steps…
Both quotes are taken from interviews with women who worked in shelters at the time.
The comments also address how the question of safety in this context obscures women’s agency and autonomy:
So [safety] can trump anything, and just looked at, what does that mean? What does it mean to say that’s the most important thing? And where has survivor’s safety eclipsed survivor agency, of autonomy? And why have we chosen – Barbara Hart puts out this elegant little model that all our work should be judged against the measurement of “does it promote safety and autonomy for survivors and accountability for perpetrators of domestic violence,” which we find to be a very helpful thing to look at. But one thing we’ve noticed is that in the movement, we’ve really prioritized safety over autonomy; that safety is just it, and actually being agents, being able to think critically about our choices and be responsible for how we’re moving in the world and do that in a way where we’re seen, and we’re actually making choices in our own best interest, and all those things, that that’s really not been prioritized.
Or as Xana at Feministing put it:
People have already explained why the policy at MichFest is transphobic and I agree. I wanted to touch on this:
“In the past, I have volunteered at both a rape crisis center and a domestic violence shelter. I saw rape victims, victims of sexual harassment, and women who’d been beaten and emotionally abused. I remember many of the women saying that a lot of things triggered their memory of the assault–things they associated with their assault(s).”
First, I don’t know your own personal background with rape and abuse, corey. Taking just this statement, it always sounds to me like a “Well, I don’t have experience with this but my friend…” or “but my friends are black/gay/etc argument.” I am a survivor of five years of DV which included numerous atrocities to my person and I sometimes get really tired that OTHER people are speaking for me and about my experiences when they haven’t experienced them themselves. We can learn from each other but it’s different when you’ve actually experience something. There are some great essays out there about “non-survivors privilege.” I think it’s presumptuous to speak for the women at MichFest, and survivors, by using fictional possibilities that further try to justify transphobia.
As Caroline White, the report’s author writes,
Space does not become “safe” simply by virtue of it being “women’s space.” “Trans” 101 education exposes the fiction of women’s space as safe space, as well as the associated costs of maintaining the fiction. In doing so, it challenges women’s organizations to, as Diana expressed, take seriously the power, autonomy, and agency of women, and to take seriously racism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression as violence. Practically, Connie suggests that instead of working for a safe space, maybe feminists should be asking, “‘what can we do to make this space workable for us who are here today,’ or a ‘safer space’ or ‘intentional space,’ or make a space ‘thoughtful about oppression and violence.’”
All of these quotes come from chapter 3, the Trans 101 subsection, starting on page 97. I highly recommend reading this chapter if no other part of the report.
Woot! 200-page .pdf report! (I’m not being sarcastic–I love long .pdf reports, especially when Adobe Reader reads them to me while I play computer games :-)).
I dunno…it just seems to me like a lot of invocations of the “women-born-women safe space” aren’t so much about freedom from harm as freedom from challenge.
There’s nothing wrong with creating a space for a specific group of people (people of color, trans* people, disabled people, queer people, disabled people, sex workers, etc.) There’s nothing wrong with making a space for a VERY specific group of people. But even people in very specific groups will be different from each other. And it just seems like the idea of “shared girlhoods” is about trying to keep everybody the same.
If trans* women have experiences that are vastly different from cis women with their “shared girlhoods,” so what? And if “shared girlhoods” growing up under Patriarchy’s thumb is, like, the most important thing ever, then that just sucks. (The only thing that bonds women together is that we’re oppressed by the Patriarchy? Yuck).
Tera
14 Aug 08 at 2:07 pm
Thank you for this, Lisa.
Trin
14 Aug 08 at 4:37 pm
And really, the whole “penis in the room” thing just creeps me out totally. So there was nothing worth noting about this woman besides the fact that she might have brought a penis into the room?
I can’t even articulate why that makes my skin crawl. But it does.
Trin
14 Aug 08 at 4:43 pm
I’ve been participating in the discussion over on Feministing to which Lisa linked. It’s how I found this blog and all its awesomeness (now added to my RSS feeds!). Good post, and I think it does illustrate rather well the hypocrisy involved in these situations.
Allie
14 Aug 08 at 5:43 pm
Tera, to many radical feminists, “woman” is defined as strictly oppression, and I think it’s threatening to find women who not only disagree (as many cis women do while still acknowledging the realities of the violence, sexism, and oppression that women face) but to find women who (to their eyes) chose to be women. Many have said this to me directly, one saying that the very idea that transsexualism could be real might be so triggering as to drive some cis women to suicide.
While I think she was exaggerating greatly, I also found this positioning of trans women as being so triggering just because we don’t find being female inherently oppressive as simply being another way to center trans concerns onto cis people (who we are and the bodies we have to live in are unimportant – all that matters is how we’re perceived by cis women).
And I believe that this positioning females as the most oppressed, as femininity as being nothing but oppression (as gender being oppression) is a simplistic view that not only ignores a large number of people and their relationships to gender and their own bodies (and I am not speaking strictly of trans women here), but also robs cis women of power and agency by positioning them as perpetual victims of the patriarchy.
And that, of course, absolves women of any responsibility for racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, cissexism that they perpetuate, because they don’t really have the power to perpetuate those -isms. They just ignore intersections.
Lisa Harney
14 Aug 08 at 7:04 pm
Trin, yeah completely on the penis thing. “So the most important thing you can think of about this woman is what her genitalia might look like? This is someone who lives in the same world you do, breathes the same air, experiences the same misogyny, and her penis makes her dangerous to you? Oh, and somehow your whiteness is not dangerous to women of color? Your able body is not dangerous to women with disabilities?”
Allie, thanks for coming over. :)
Lisa Harney
14 Aug 08 at 7:06 pm
right on the money. it makes so little sense to predicate help and assistance and entrance to anything based on one’s historical narrative and it’s conformance or not to some upheld golden story that “real” women must have.
z
15 Aug 08 at 1:25 am
I’ve been rereading the report on and off all day, and I have to say it’s an eye-opener. It completely destroys the notion that keeping trans women out of women-only spaces is anything but reinforcing oppression and discrimination.
It also destroys the notion that any single event or shelter or group maintaining exclusivity from trans women is in any way indicative that this is the natural way things should be.
I wish I’d found this forever ago.
Lisa Harney
15 Aug 08 at 1:29 am
Thanks for this post, Lisa. I will read the whole report at some point, but you’ve broken it down nicely.
Debi Crow
15 Aug 08 at 7:23 am
Yeah, ffs: hi, the penis is just an organ. So, what, people who were sexually assaulted -without- a penis (whether by a man or not) don’t count, now? and why are we so hung up on peoples’ supposed genitals that it matters so very much even in situations where -people are going to be fully clothed the whole bloody time?-
it’s bullshit.
and then of course with the nonono! it’s about way MORE than the genitalia! okay, so what -is- it, then? well…the experience of being raised male. okays: and you know how this person was raised, how, exactly? well…shorthand, because we found out ze had or has a penis.
Next.
belledame222
15 Aug 08 at 1:58 pm
The thing I find a bit funny about defining a woman as a lack of funny is… well, isn’t that a bit the definition of patriarchy ? With the idea that everything lies in the phallus, the power, the strength,, all the machist comparisons with swords and all…
Wouldn’t the real feminist approach to say that penis is just a piece of flesh and that it is all the social aspects which give it all it so-called “power” ?
Which can lead to the psychanalytical question : right, pre/non-op mtf have a penis… but do they have a phallus ?
Elly Rouge
15 Aug 08 at 2:19 pm
“as a lack of funny”… you were supposed to read “as a lack of penis”, of course.
Elly Rouge
15 Aug 08 at 2:21 pm
I think the idea that trans women were raised as male, as boys, lived as men, is so simplistic and ignorant as to be laughable.
Elly, yeah – Radical Feminism says that the patriarchy defines men as the norm and women as the other, but then reasserts that patriarchal category by insisting that trans women remain men forever and always. Whatever their excuses, they’re simply reinforcing the gender binary they claim to hate so much.
IMO, the gender binary is pretty convenient for them, as it allows them to position women as powerless and without agency, as described in the article above. Radical feminists are also the only civil rights movement I’ve seen which has proposed that the natural and proper state of being who you are is hating every minute of it, or at least that’s the excuse used when trying to discredit trans women: “We hate being women, why would you want to be one? There must be something wrong with you.”
And also, yes, it’s the social aspects – it’s men, not penises, that cause the violence. Of course, centering the violence in the penis itself also robs men of agency – an excuse that Kyle Payne even tried to use to justify his sexual assault recently.
I would also say that it’s not so cut and dried as “trans women who haven’t had surgery have a penis.” Lots of trans women don’t even view it as a penis, but sometimes as a clitoris, or in other ways.
Lisa Harney
15 Aug 08 at 3:09 pm
“Radical feminists are also the only civil rights movement I’ve seen which has proposed that the natural and proper state of being who you are is hating every minute of it, or at least that’s the excuse used when trying to discredit trans women: “We hate being women, why would you want to be one? There must be something wrong with you.””
Yeah, this… which makes me so utterly puzzled thinking of it as a disability rights advocate. Here my people are hooting and hollering that we’re NOT “suffering” in ways that justify “mercy killings”, that justify assuming we’re better off dead, and here this other glut of people who are SUPPOSED to be my people on another axis fucking bawling about being women. WHUUUUT
Trin
15 Aug 08 at 9:23 pm
I should have said “radfems” just to maintain the distinction between women who are doing feminist work and women who think feminist work is all about trashing.
Lisa Harney
15 Aug 08 at 9:30 pm
Or even women who do feminist work and think that gives them a ticket to trash at will.
Lisa Harney
16 Aug 08 at 12:20 am
[...] I wrote the post about the exclusion of trans women from woman-only spaces, I linked to three separate blogs where someone took pains to explain how the presence of penises [...]
Survivors and Triggering « Questioning Transphobia
16 Aug 08 at 5:01 am
As a Dianic, the exclusion of transwomen within out women only spaces is the one aspect of the tradition that I really struggle with. I have talked to our leader and sisters many time on this topic, and they all know where I stand on it. I have also made it clear when I am ordained, I will work with ANY of my sisters and their children, born women or not. I can’t change ti all with a wave of my wand, but I can make the choice to do something more with my own ministry.
Moondancerdrake
19 Aug 08 at 7:31 am
I’ve never dealt with a Dianic coven, myself. It’s all been variations on English trads – Gardnerian with some differences.
I do think that it’s heavily privileged, to casually pass judgment on people like that, to say “You’re not good enough women, or even women at all, to be acceptable in our trad,” though. I’m not surprised to see religious essentialism, but I also know that most Wiccans I’ve known have been pretty accepting, so it’s hard to reconcile on that front (but after reading lots of trans-exclusive radfem writings, easy to reconcile on that front).
Lisa Harney
19 Aug 08 at 11:25 am
I made it into a Lisa Harney post? I am honored.
I commented on your more recent entry discussing this but I just wanted to chime in with another…”Exactly! You said it!”
I’ll have to read more Emi Koyama…sounds like great writing.
Xana
20 Aug 08 at 7:23 am
Emi was indirectly responsible for my second introduction to feminism, and that time from a trans perspective. She also was one of those who set up The Survivor Project several years ago.
She has some writings on staying in a domestic shelter and how there’s power issues that can be used against the women who are there for protection. Her website’s here.
Lisa Harney
20 Aug 08 at 7:27 am
[...] in Feminism more now that Hypatia has said they don’t want it, because discussions like this one are really hard for me to deal with, but I can’t spend the time to write out that essay all [...]
Trans Woman Inclusion and Safety « Taking Up Too Much Space
24 Aug 08 at 10:48 am
[...] Excluding Trans Women From Women Only Spaces: What This Policy Renders Invisible « Questioning Tran… somebody said “I just want to say I feel unsafe because there’s a penis in the room, and I just want to know how in a women’s only space, how we’re supposed to talk about that, blah, blah, blah…..” And so it made an opportunity to talk with this woman, which I was able to say just a little in that group, and then also meet with her and talk with her more at length about the problems of locating sexual violence in an organ such as a penis, and talking about white skin as an organ that represents lynching and systematic oppression of people of color and all kinds of violences; I mean if we’re going to be locating violence and oppression in an organ, none of the white women in that space seemed to have any problem with their white skin showing in that space, and the trans person that was there, it was really speculation on this person’s part that there was a penis in the room. (tags: race intersectionality feminism transphobia) [...]
links for 2009-04-13 « Embololalia
13 Apr 09 at 11:03 am
[...] follow trans issues, this may not be surprising; trans people are routinely excluded from LGB and feminist spaces and conversation. So the fact that a meeting to discuss ending violence against women and [...]
Honduras: Reconciling a “Culture of Non-Violence” and Transphobia « Gender Across Borders
3 Jun 10 at 3:20 pm
[...] the place. That trans men aren’t really men (and, of course, that I was really a woman), that the comfort of cis people outweighs the SAFETY of trans people, that trans people aren’t even important enough to be considered in a talk during the [...]
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