@consolation:
Your comment about me âmanplainingâ is as stupid a putdown as the Rush Limbaughs of the world calling feminists âfeminazisâ, it assumes a lot of things about me you donât know, and it also is a very old tactic used by those who canât come up with an argument, to attack the other personâs character or where they are coming from.
For the record, I was not deriding all feminists and as someone who has a passion for history, I am well aware that feminism was not all of one type. The people I am talking about were those who wanted to tell others how to live, whose idea of a perfect world was one scripted to their ideas of things. I am talking about the identity politics that has turned private decisions like decisions on being a stay at home mom into somehow being someone who is a âtraitorâ to the cause and other extreme thinking. Feminism should be played out among the broader idea of human rights, and one of the things that is supposed to be about is giving people the freedom to be themselves, to live as they choose and not have others telling them how they can live their lives, I donât care whether it is religion, the law, or the judgements of so called leaders of the cause, when they step over that line they are wrong.
What makes identity politics suck is that instead of fighting the real battles, things like the bias women face in the world, the academic bias that is still out there, the glass ceiling that is very real in many businesses and professions, the forces of the religious right that are not just trying to control womenâs sexuality, especially in issues like abortions and even in access to medical care (ie the religious reichâs campaign against planned parenthood),it turns it into a purity battle over who is good enough to call themselves a woman. It isnât about whether a woman should dress in a certain way, or whether she chooses to have kids, or whether she works outside the home or not, it is all about being able to fully be enabled as a human being who happens to be a woman. Women have spent a good part of history being told by religion and by men what their roles are, what they can do, how they can dress, whether they can read sacred books or be priests or even go to temple or church, so how is it feminism for anyone to tell other women that whatever they do isnât really âbeing a womanâ? That is the kind of feminism I was talking about, not the ideals of feminism in its various forms (I also find the whole first wave, second wave, third wave labels to be quite honestly academic naval gazing, they are all feminism, all part of the same arc that is supposed to be about liberating women to be themselves).
This kind of identify politics existed/exists in the LGBT community, there have been all kind of battles over what it means to be a gay or lesbian, there were lesbian bars in the bad old days in NYC that not only would not let a trans person or a gay male go there, they wouldnât let women in, gay or not, that didnât fit their own little niche, and the LGBT 'community" has often been a fractious place, a lot of gay and lesbians looked at trans people as badly as straight people often did. A lot (though not all) of the feminists who despised trans women were of the radical lesbian fringe, but not all of them were, Donna is correct, a lot of the whatever wave feminists, in academia and otherwise, were outright hostile, rather than seeing the struggle for trans folks face and realizing it was about in some ways the same rights women had been fighting for, and choose to see it as âmen behaving badlyâ rather than someone trying to be themselves in an unfriendly world. The good part was a lot of feminists, gay and straight, got it, and there was support from those folks and over time the haters and the sneerers, other than people like Germaine Greer, have come to understand what it is all about.
And while I donât necessarily disagree with you about Caitlyn Jenner, I quite honestly think she is a complete airhead who thrust herself out there when she obviously hadnât figured out what or who she is, but I also find your comments to be indicative of the same kind of attitude I was talking about with the feminists who thought it was their right to define others. So women who get plastic surgery, get breast enhancement, botox, etc, are not really women? So women who want to fight aging, who donât want to go gray, who have an idea of the way they want to look, arenât women? So a woman who has had breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy, and has them rebuilt, is not a woman? To a transgender women, secondary sex characteristics like having breasts or being able to be free of things like a big jaw or the brow ridge is about feeling like they are themselves, much as women who have had a mastectomy may not feel whole unless they can get their breasts rebuilt (even the insurance companies and the law recognize that one, legally insurance companies have to pay for breast reconstruction after mastectomies as far as I know, it isnât just cosmetic).
And I wish you would do some research, the reason that transgender women have things like breast augmentation, take hormones, get hair transplants, electrolysis, etc, is that they are trying to make themselves look like the woman they feel inside (yes, that is a cliche, it is a lot more complex than that)âŠmore importantly, a lot of transgender women, assuming they were of child bearing age, would love to be able to have the ability to have kids, but the reason, as you so snarkily put it, that transgender women are getting breast implants and facial surgery and such is that is all they can do, the medicine doesnât exist to allow them to be mothers. I am sure if that technology existed more than a few would go through that if it existed, it doesnât. Not to mention that with Caitlyn Jenner being 65, it wouldnât make much sense as it might not for people transitioning in later life. By the way, there are a lot of transgender women if you met them would probably be very, very close in your views of things, for all the Caitlyn Jenner hoopla, there are a lot of transgender women who arenât over the top, designer dresses and heels, lot of jeans and sweaters and comfortable shoes, too, lot of them find Caitlyn Jenner as distasteful as you obviously do, take it from me.
@greenwitch :
Transgender males are an interesting case in point to transgender women, and also show some of the contradictions among those women who donât like transgender women. A lot of transgender men often start out in the lesbian community, and one of the weird things is the type lesbians who want nothing to do with transgender women seem to have no problem with transgender men in their spaces and such, their view seems to be that even though the person is on testosterone, is living as a man, in all ways presents male, it is okay for them to be in that space, but a transgender woman who is living as a woman, who is presenting as a woman, is not welcome, it tells you the complexity of gender identity, and also tells you that a lot of people who should know better have very similar attitudes to the religious fundamentalists and such who say there is only male and female and everything is determined by chromosomes and so forth.
--to lesbian singles bars in DC, and how they would âsit there in their pearl necklaces and look uneasy.â