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writcraft · 4 years

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you said to message you about the jrk thing. she said sex is real and that's pretty much it. she said biological women should be able to address issues that affect only them and that the type of seemingly progressive language of "people who menstruate" is only used on women's issues. never seen "prostate havers" or "dick owners" from men's cancer groups. + every social/cultural group gets their own "space" other than of course biological women. why should gender supersede sex in these spaces?

Thanks for the message Anon. I’m going to break down my reply to this using your message. She said sex is real and that’s pretty much it. She’s said quite a bit more than that and at some length, but on that point specifically there’s a rigidity to the ‘sex is real’ argument that I don’t consider to be particularly helpful. As science has developed we are beginning to understand sex isn’t as binary as we once thought. 2% of the population are born intersex, hormone levels vary, chromosomes are not binary. We can argue back and forth on the science as it’s a conversation that remains unsettled, but I do not take an absolutist approach to sex. I believe I can be persuaded by more inclusive scientific studies around sex, use language that doesn’t exclude marginalised groups and still fight for women’s rights without erasure of the specific, gender-driven violence and inequalities women experience.

She said biological women should be able to address issues that affect only them. I remain baffled as to why we would be unprepared to adopt our language to talk about a biological matter in a way that includes all those that experience it. There are publications that explore the risk of prostate cancer in transgender women so it’s incorrect to say you never see that addressed, but I would advocate for making language around specific biological issues more inclusive across the board. To take the menstruation example, I have zero issue including transgender men and my non-binary siblings in conversations around menstruation and referring to them under the umbrella of “woman” is invalidating, exclusionary and it denies them that place in the conversation. To me, using inclusive language is simply a respectful way of enabling transgender men and non-binary people who face the same issues around things like tampon taxes to be part of the conversation. What does a woman whose gender corresponds with her sex lose from that inclusion? Aren’t we ultimately stronger together than apart?

Every social/cultural group gets their own “space” other than biological women. Why should gender supersede sex in these places? I guess I would flip this around and say what is it about the current system that suggests that kind of space is necessary? I find the debate around access to single-sex spaces very confused because in the UK transgender people can use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender and transgender women can access women-only spaces such as crisis centers. Removing access to these essential services based on the mythical ‘trans villain’ the ‘man in a dress’ masquerading as transgender to cause harm to women is preposterous, dangerous and reinforces the kind of thinking that places transgender people at particular harm. If that was a legitimate concern we would already have seen evidence of the right to access single sex spaces being abused, yet we haven’t. Why? Because the brutal reality is men do not have to go to those lengths to commit violence against women. Is the suggestion honestly that we roll back existing rights, taking a legislative step backwards, in a way that would enable the turning away of transgender women who have experienced violence and are seeking refuge because we are scared of a monster that doesn’t actually exist? I really struggle to understand what excluding transgender women from vital women-only services actually accomplishes. I don’t believe it would make cisgender women any safer from male-perpetrated violence but it would make the position of transgender women even more unsafe.

The patriarchy oppresses women and gender based violence does not discriminate, treating femininity with suspicion and posing a threat to transgender women and femmes together with cisgender women. The suspicion of the feminine operates at all kinds of levels, including the way it manifests in violence against effeminate gay men. Together with misogyny, transgender women also experience queerphobia and if it’s a woman of colour, systemic racism too. Recognising and wanting to support women who experience those intersectional struggles seems to me to be at the very heart of the feminist movement. As Audre Lorde said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” I really struggle to understand what the feminist movement gains from gatekeeping who benefits from it and fail to see anything progressive in enforcing rigid male/female binaries which are rooted in colonialism that were specifically designed to oppress women, permit gender violence and create deep inequalities.

#Anonymous #asks #transphobia #anti-jkr

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queernuck · 6 years

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Preference: A Postface

After seeing myself mentioned in regard to a genuinely reprehensible course of action, a way of looking at the self and at the relationship of trans women to other women that was being pushed by violent misogynists on reddit and being reappropriated in earnest by certain radical feminists, I feel it necessary to discuss in affirmation, not only for myself but for others, for other trans women, the way in which our experience stands as a sort of becoming-woman, is included in part of how trans women are not mirroring structures of womanhood but in fact, are part of the structuring of “womanhood” as a state within certain relations of producing-production.

One can ask how a fundamental reversal, binary series of recognitions of different sorts, that may present themselves in Derridean terms, recognition as woman versus as man, can fundamentally be the same kind of violent act. However, this requires an essentialism of the body, of the sexed body as productive force, as a singularity of marking, that accepts the structure of gendered exchange in-itself, the sort of turn that many radical feminists themselves make: recognition of a woman as such is different from what is constituted by the supposed recognition of maleness in a trans woman, is a sort of act that implies the masculine as a sort of marker of unilateral privilege rather than one found in assemblage with other structures. The recognition of subjectivity for gay men is a possible means of describing this: the feminine man, the campy image of a certain sort of gay man, a more effeminate and flamboyant idea of a gay man’s subjectivity, is rightfully understood as commanding a certain homophobic response specifically because this subjectivity is coupled with an assumed response, a structured understanding. However, the opposition, the top to the bottom, the “masc” subjectivity, is additionally alienated and moreover is understood in light of a sort of ideal being subverted, a kind of supposition of masculine gay men as entryism or part of a gay domino theory, an insidious trick intended to lure in straight men by implying that gay subjectivity is not defined by a unilateral expression of the gendered body. The commonality of this sort of identity (often described as “butch”) with that of butch women is important and notable, and moreover is marked by the assumption of an absent satisfaction, a kind of desire for the fulfilment of sexual meeting and shared subjectivity with a man that is imagined as “fixing” a butch woman. The violent, sexualized means through which butch women are imagined, the idea of the “tomboy” as a phase or as part of a show put on for masculine desire, as an expression of certain acceptable desires that border on the homoerotic, the expression of a shared libidinal pooling in male spaces and the matching of that to the figuration of a certain sort of woman, is all part of the sexualization of the butch woman, the gendering-act that occurs in order to bring her into accordance with heterosexuality.

The recognition of a trans woman as a man is thus of a similar sort to the recognition of woman as woman, is coupled with the recognition of transness, is a measure of disparity such that one finds the trans woman as a subject of violence, her recognition as trans is not one of privileging except in the most vulgar of analyses, ones that would ultimately turn themselves toward the same violent concept of womanhood. The notion that a man would pretend to be a trans woman in order to rape a woman, to effectively create a situation in which the expectation of sex is placed upon a woman (a situation that indeed represents rape) is ignoring that men have no problem with openly and vocally justifying rape even when it is named as such. Rape is horrifying, except insofar as it is delineated as something other than rape, is considered as justified or excusable, is known under another name. This leads to the series of acts that soften, ignore, excuse rape, the notion that only certain actions, certain overt and delineated and intentional acts are ones of rape. It requires a sort of reversal of certain arguments around rape: the idea that statutory rape, as a specific violence that is found around intentionally cultivated disparities in rape, is insufficient to qualify as rape because the same disparity of age can be found in legal relationships, rather than questioning if the legal relationships at hand too represent rape and the same sort of violence, if a process of grooming is only notable if it is sexualized immediately rather than after a certain constructed passage into adulthood. So, a man pretending to be a trans woman in order to pressure a woman into sex would absolutely be a rapist, as would using the structure of trans womanhood as a means of making one a possible subject of lesbian desire. The aforementioned possibility of rape as realized specifically in disparity, in measures of violent tension, is necessary as a descriptive elaboration upon the rape being forwarded as an acceptable act, being justified, by men of a certain ideological position. However, noting that it is as men, as positioned as-such in a specific already disparate relationship that this position is itself realized is necessary to understand the vast difference between these men and trans women. Rather than acknowledging the complicated subjectivities of trans women, a totalization of trans subjectivity as that of a man accepting the violence he will commit in linking together certain flows of libidinal violence, reactionary notions around trans women cultivate the same sort of ideological positioning as a word like "trap" does, in at once acknowledging violence in an act and ignoring the prevalence with which it is directed against trans women. The act of doubt, the way in which a positioning of the phallus at a measure of remove from trans women that can only be realized in violent response. That there are multiple ways of discussing trans women as subjects, as poised to manipulate and deceive, is unsurprising and moreover is in part resultant from a sort of fascist convergence on trans women as ideological structures. Furthermore, that trans women are focused upon by a certain phallic ideology that positions them as objects of progressive libidinal desire is worth noting if only to speak against a different position regarding trans women. The notion of “genital preference” and the socially constructed sphere of attraction, its contingency and the widely malleable character it takes on, is something that has been noted in order to point out the way that trans women are so often only understood as fetish, as aberration, as part of dehumanizing us. To simplify what trans women seek to sexual satisfaction, to a specifically male concept of libidinal expression, is to simplify the very structures at hand, the incredibly high stakes for trans women involved in any discussion of our womanhood.

The reduction of trans women to genitals, the singular intensity of the imagined trans woman’s phallus, similar to the Lacanian-qua-Butlerian idea of the lesbian phallus (conceptual structures that, for some trans lesbians, intermingle) is part of creating an immediate and visceral repulsion that then sets the tone for further realizations of the body and its potentiality, the possibilities of the body: the denial that relations determined by the phallus are realized through violence by men is able to be spoken, to be placed upon the bodies of trans women, and then again realized once the targeting of trans women for violent action is agreed upon and accepted. It is in this singularity, this act of switching, where trans women are excluded from any possible being described by the structure of womanhood, that converging and vital critiques of becoming-woman as a social process are excluded from realization. It is by sexing the body through a collapse of the body to genitals as a singularity of intensity, genitals turned into an ontological determination beyond all others, through a language that assumes trans women as behaving like these men, as rapists, as having a subjectivity that is determined by a desire to rape rather than the violent and lifelong process of victimization that trans women are faced with, that their subjectivities are refused.

Entering into a structuralist critique of this, using the structural boundaries at hand in order to accept and realize that which is necessarily held in a given position and the binary machines that sustain it, leads to the realization that a great deal of the ideology around trans women is in creating a sort of idea of what trans women are, why they accept becoming-women and what becoming-woman must mean for them, starting from a position where womanhood is not only undesirable, but unthinkable so long as one has a certain sort of sexed body. It begins with the means in which transmisogynist and homophobic ideologies converge from early delineations of “proper” childhood conduct, and continues as the undesirability of trans women is used to mark them as undeserving of life itself. Trans women are categorized as outside of the potential expression of desire, and thus any affirmation of them is simply affirmation of the turn toward fetishization necessary to make trans women temporarily acceptable subjects. It is in collapsing trans women to a single means of recognition that the predominant justification process for transmisogynist violence is affirmed, that trans women are denied the most vital forms of recognition and community, that trans women are left to die. That some trans women discuss themselves in a way that includes undesirability as something suffered, something difficult, is not surprising, as it feeds into the realization of just how deeply fetishized trans women are. However, it does not stand as the primary means through which trans women are realized as alienated subjects, subjects made legible through the dual structures of womanhood and transness.

These men do not care about trans women, they do not care about lesbians, they simply care about justifying their rapist ideologies to themselves through fascist turns of ideology. Adopting this, allowing them to determine what sorts of bodies trans women can have, allowing fascist ideology to determine the demarcations of both bodies and possible-bodies, under the guise of protecting women from rapists, is allowing for structures that harm all women to be constructed and redoubled simply because the harm is more apparent to trans women. The structure discussed is not the personal, singular expression of a relationship to the genitals of others, but rather a structural relationship to the phallic relations of an assumed sexed body that is developed as a projection of the ideology constructed within this language. It makes a meaningful and restorative discussion on the ways in which trans women and lesbians and trans lesbians and all other sorts of women are fetishized impossible because it presents itself most immediately as the singular realization of women as merely constituted by their fetishization.

Emphatically, trans women must affirm that, as a way of discussing larger structures of sexual expression and often-traumatic experience, languages of genital preference are at the very least a passable means of describing one’s own desire and that arguing against an individual experience in this is at best useless and at worst indicative of an entitlement that is found in all sorts of disparate sexual relationships, that is realized as a pressure which indeed expresses itself through rape when realized. The individual is unimportant in this discussion. Rather, discussing it to highlight that the development of a singular focus on genitals is part of how trans women and other women converge in experience, are understood in relation to the ideology of the rapist, of women as subjects approachable through rape, to make more clear that trans women must be affirmed as woman in discussing this commonality, is the primary concern. Discussing this in relation to the gendering of violence, the homophobia that informs and characterizes transmisogyny and the converse statement, the assemblages of violence shared in these subjectivities, is instead where one must concentrate one’s efforts.

#rape///#genitals///#transmisogyny///

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