Monopolising struggle

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Bindel seems to be accusing gender reassignment surgery - a core desire of many transexuals - of being a sexist plot to prevent woment from acting like men.

That's not how I understood her point. I thought she was saying that gender reassignment was being pushed for by male psychiatrists to ensure gender conformity of some sort. Male to female, and female to male. Basically, she was suggesting that the problem isn't so much that someone is born the 'wrong' gender, but that our concepts of gender are so fixed and polarised as to make those people feel like they're in the wrong body. That rather than surgically altering them to be more in line with the gender they feel, we should expand or dismiss the gender definitions in a way that includes difference.

I can see the argument. I am not sure I agree with it, but I can see the argument.

[Sundae]

Also that only a certain type of female form is being idealised in some cultures.
I'm not sure Maggie L would agree with me, but she certainly wasn't a woman who wanted to conform.

Women, whether born or "created" are subject to a heck of a lot of pressure to be "real". Funnily enough, that reality doesn't always happen naturally. How many born women feel pressure to have surgery when nature doesn't provide them with what society thinks they should have? Oh and how many men (with no gender issues) are put in the same situation? Very, very few. I know no men who have had surgery, but many women.

There are more "real" actresses in the UK than the US as far as I can tell with my limited television time. And FAR more than on Brazilian TV. Not every woman in every office, street, coffee shop, bar is 5'8"+ and 8 stone. Men on TV are allowed to be chubby. Even Hollywood leads (as long as they are in comedy films.) Women have to have immovable tits and arse, NO bellies and perfect hair. Fair? No. We should be worried about 50% of the globe being set against an almost impossible standard rather than a small amount of trans* people being offended. They're switching one set of prejudices for another. And I feel for them. But lets look at sheer numbers here people.

[DanaC]

An interesting response to this issue, again in the Guardian (my regular read ;p):

I remember, many years ago, reading about women who'd had mastectomies after breast cancer, and had been sent home with little bags of sand that they'd been told to place in their bras. It devastated them that this was considered an adequate substitute for a breast. Happily, things are different now, and every effort is made to incorporate whatever breast reconstruction is possible as an integral part of breast cancer treatment.

However, delighted as I am that this is the way things are now, it wasn't what I chose for myself. I opted out of reconstruction after I'd had breast cancer. I'd had enough of hospitals, clinics and surgery. But it wasn't an easy decision. Perhaps, in the future, I will have it. But it won't be because it will help me feel more like a complete woman again.

Frankly, if my entire body was removed, and only my head remained, somehow attached to machines that kept me alive, I'd still feel entirely female, just as I felt as a child, before my breasts had developed, before I even knew I had a vagina or a womb.

I have a memory of when I was very young. I remember trying to persuade myself that perhaps little girls grew up to become men, and little boys grew up to become women. Even at that age, I knew it was impossible, that of course it didn't work that way.

I know, too, exactly what inspired that strange wish. My father had bought my mother a new iron for her birthday, and my mother had been really upset. She had told my dad how insulted she felt, how awful it was that he imagined that this was some sort of treat for her.

My dad was bamboozled. "But you said you needed a new one." She told him what it was like, being stuck at home, while he went out to work, seeing other people, being in the world. She told him she resented that even though she was at home all week, he still left her at home on a Saturday morning while he went to play golf. I thought that sounded miserable. I didn't want to grow up and get an iron for my birthday, instead of being able to saunter off to the golf course to swing one.

Luckily for me, feminism happened before my young adulthood, and I had many more choices than my mum did.

My childhood yearning to grow up a man was transitory, a response to adult descriptions of a gender role. It had no biological roots. As I say, I know in my head that I'm female. I need no breasts, no vagina, no fallopian tubes to tell me that. If, as an adult, I'd had difficulty becoming pregnant, and doctors had examined me to find my fallopian tubes were poorly developed, or not there at all, I'd be no less a woman. That happens sometimes. Nobody's perfect.

Yet the memory of that moment of misery, that brief encounter with the helplessness of feeling my gender destiny was wrong, yet inescapable, has stayed with me. If my wish for masculinity had not been a thought that faded, but a feeling that grew, well, that would have been terrible. My male mind would have been trapped in my female body, in some sort of hideous locked-in syndrome of gender. How strong would that feeling of incarceration in gender expectation have become as I underwent puberty? It doesn't bear thinking about.

In the late 1980s, there was a schism among feminist activists whereby some radical feminists began excluding women whose female identity was anything other than entirely conventional. This exclusion has been controversial and small-minded from the outset. It continues to this day, even though it seems plain that the last thing needed by women who have suffered so much trauma to be accepted for what they are, is this fundamental and fundamentalist rejection. Likewise, it's not surprising that women whose identity is so hard-won are often intensely interested in the subject of gender politics.

Some people do not seem to see that gruelling gender-reassignment is undergone to make the bodies of women less male, or, in the less highly publicised process of female-to-male transition, the bodies of men less female. We are, as I say, who we feel we are in our heads. Trans women, like so many women who have had breast cancer, sometimes need the help of surgeons, because it is helpful for one's social body to support and confirm one's biological identity, not contradict it.

That's why it's so awful to talk of trans women as men who have been castrated. Such people are women who have had the biological misfortune to have been born with bodies that are out of kilter with the much more complex biology of their female minds. That too, is why the trans community prefers people not to talk of being biologically or born female as opposed to trans female. Trans people are biologically or born female, but with detail of the flesh that traduces their ability to be physically and socially accepted for what they are.

The saddest thing is that feminism is all about liberating people from rigid ideas about the immutability of gender, about not stopping people from being able to do things just because they are female. It certainly shouldn't be about telling people that they are not quite female enough to be awarded with a shining medal saying: "Oppressed".

The whole article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-female-enough

[DanaC]

The 80's schism within feminism is interesting. Provides a little background to Burchill and the two friends she spoke of. It explains, I think, why the response amongst the trans community to that article and those feminist writers, was so strong. It's clearly a long-standing division that has spilled out into wider public debate with this recent flurry of hostilities. Somewhat at odds with the picture Burchill presents of her friends as innocent victims of a powerful trans lobby.


[eta] I should add at this point that the history behind all this stuff is entirely new to me. I have an automatic shutdown switch in my brain whenever I encounter 'feminist' writing on the whole. By which I mean writings about feminism and the feminist political scene. With the exception of writers on gender history pre 20th C.

[DanaC]

Ok, I'm not going to quote from this one, because I would end up posting the entire thing :p

As part of the response to the furore over Burchill's article, 'The Panel' in which various people are invited to give an opinion on a current issue, sought the opinions of four trans writers on what feminism means to them. I recommend reading it. Very interesting and certainly gave me food for thought.

[DanaC]

This whole debate, along with a parrallel ongoing debate over the definition of feminism in the wake of a recent Mumsnet poll showing fewer younger women that ever who self-identify as feminists, has got me thinking quite a lot about my own definitions of and responses to 'feminism'.

I may write more about that at some point. *glances at the half smoked Saturday special in the ashtray* but not right now :P

[Happy Monkey]

A blog on the topic.

[Sundae]

Darling, you know Mumsnet is a spit away from the Mail on Sunday, right?
I would not be surprised to find a poll on gay marriage respond at 80% negative, while an attendance at church poll respond at 20%.

[DanaC]

Thanks HM, that was a really good read!

@ Sundae: oh, I know, I know. I don't give the poll itself a lot of credence, but it hit the news and sparked a load of comment and discourse on the role of feminism in today's world, and whether younger women relate.

[xoxoxoBruce]

An interesting column at TIME.

All epithets, even such ugly ones, push back against their own demise, and when it’s clear that they’re doomed, their remaining adherents find coy ways to nod in their direction or come up with slippery substitutes. During the early years of the civil rights movement, when Negro was a perfectly acceptable term but its ugly cousin was already falling out of favor, southern politicians like Alabama Gov. George Wallace grew fond of the pronunciation “nig-ra,” luxuriating in the first syllable and then surrendering only grudgingly to the hedging of the second. Deliberately misusing the noun form of a group’s name as an adjective is another too-cute way of giving offense while pretending to do nothing of the kind.

Jewish food and Jewish doctor mean the same thing as Jew food and Jew doctor, but one version is intended to sting. This is the same schoolyard device many members of the GOP continue to use, with their endless variations on the term “Democrat party” instead of Democratic party, including George W. Bush‘s reference to the “Democrat majority,” and Bob Dole’s deathless “Democrat wars.”

Just why such a construction should be offensive at all is unclear—aside from the fact that it fails to honor the right any group should have to determine what it’s called. Zimmer thinks it may have something to do with the way the terms clang against the ear. “There’s a stress clash,” he says. “If you have two stressed syllables next to each other instead of having a non-stressed one between them it’s just harsher.” The -ish and -ic suffixes in effect serve as shock absorbers.