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From this post and discussion about top 100 "butches" (scare quotes mine), my daily dose of grrr:
It starts well, the discussion of appropriation, speaking for and erasing trans identities, but it didn't take long for the calls for trans inclusion into feminism, and this time, it was overt as opposed to implicit; the voices needed are transwomen and transmen. That shiny little ray of essentialist exclusion aside, it does raise several important quetions:
Is feminism itself dependent on the binary assumption that 'not men=women'? That's not as self evident or clear to me as perhaps it is to others. Think of this an alternative; is feminism concerned with people who are not men and how they're treated in a world structurally constructed to subordinate and demean them? See the difference?
As it plays out in relation to trans (and the discussion linked above is an excellent example), the case is often made that transmen are and should be included under the feminist banner (and I agree). But, if one assumes that feminism is the movement for women in relation to men, I can't see any way that the inclusion of transmen is respectful. If feminism is for and about women, and transmen are included, isn't that inclusion necessarily privileging the meaning assigned to their presumed bodies at birth, not their identities? Much has been said about the experience of growing up (presumptively) female in a world of structural sexual inequity, but again, that's denying the explicit voices of some transmen who say, "we were never women, even if the world viewed us that way". (And yet, curiously (or not), many of the same spaces that include transmen, even the most traditionally masculine, actively exclude transwomen, even the most traditionally feminine. People suck.)
I'm trying, really trying, to see this as a glass half full situation. That the inclusion of self-defined men (the trans matters less than the self definition, to me) as a legitimate concern of feminism, from the inside, suggests that maybe a larger definition is at least occasionally in play, that is to say, the concern of feminism is/may be inclusive rather than exclusively binary. The tiny, halting baby steps of (some) trans inclusion in some spaces suggests this might be so. But good god damn, seeing all trans people assumptively included in transmen and transwomen sort of belies that, or at the very least draws attention to the underlying assumptions that it really is always all about men and women, and fuck anybody else (if it's even possible they exist).
Well, fuck a bunch of that.
It starts well, the discussion of appropriation, speaking for and erasing trans identities, but it didn't take long for the calls for trans inclusion into feminism, and this time, it was overt as opposed to implicit; the voices needed are transwomen and transmen. That shiny little ray of essentialist exclusion aside, it does raise several important quetions:
Is feminism itself dependent on the binary assumption that 'not men=women'? That's not as self evident or clear to me as perhaps it is to others. Think of this an alternative; is feminism concerned with people who are not men and how they're treated in a world structurally constructed to subordinate and demean them? See the difference?
As it plays out in relation to trans (and the discussion linked above is an excellent example), the case is often made that transmen are and should be included under the feminist banner (and I agree). But, if one assumes that feminism is the movement for women in relation to men, I can't see any way that the inclusion of transmen is respectful. If feminism is for and about women, and transmen are included, isn't that inclusion necessarily privileging the meaning assigned to their presumed bodies at birth, not their identities? Much has been said about the experience of growing up (presumptively) female in a world of structural sexual inequity, but again, that's denying the explicit voices of some transmen who say, "we were never women, even if the world viewed us that way". (And yet, curiously (or not), many of the same spaces that include transmen, even the most traditionally masculine, actively exclude transwomen, even the most traditionally feminine. People suck.)
I'm trying, really trying, to see this as a glass half full situation. That the inclusion of self-defined men (the trans matters less than the self definition, to me) as a legitimate concern of feminism, from the inside, suggests that maybe a larger definition is at least occasionally in play, that is to say, the concern of feminism is/may be inclusive rather than exclusively binary. The tiny, halting baby steps of (some) trans inclusion in some spaces suggests this might be so. But good god damn, seeing all trans people assumptively included in transmen and transwomen sort of belies that, or at the very least draws attention to the underlying assumptions that it really is always all about men and women, and fuck anybody else (if it's even possible they exist).
Well, fuck a bunch of that.
