1) The construct is that everyone who isn’t a Real Man ™ is less-than; therefore everyone who isn’t one has that much in common, and can and should be allies

2) the construct is rigid gender norms as well as body policing, which means that the best way to get away from that construct is not to set up new norms (all the while insisting no that’s not what we’re doing), no new “thou shalt nots,” but rather “do what thou wilt” (as long as you’re not -directly- hurting someone else).

3) as LL referred to, the great ancient goddesses and pagan cultures were -not- all about Big Nurturing Mama, at least as they tend to think of it; there’s Cybele with her transgendered priestesses, there are the goddesses of sex, the temple prositutes; there’s Kali, the original Domme, dancing in ecstasy on the prone body of her mate.

these days, in a perverse way i’m grateful to TF and Heart and so on being -so- incredibly assy, because if they hadn’t been i probably wouldn’t have gone farther afield and thus wouldn’t know nearly as much as i’ve learned in the past year about other, interlocking forms of oppression as well as other frameworks for looking at them (anti-racism, post-colonial theory, some kinds of socialism, among other things). it was good for me to grow. and, i am really really skeptical of the way “Patriarchy” has been reified into something like “the Zionist Occupational Government” or “The Illuminati” or simply, “THEM!”

nonetheless, it’s -something.- it’s just, as you say, not everything. and, there really is no excuse, at the end of the day, for this kind of bigotry. there’s just not. i don’t care what kind of convoluted hooha they dress it up in. as QD once put it,

“if it looks like bullshit, smells like bullshit, then it IS bullshit.”

yup.

i haven’t read anything at IBTP since she finally got a micron of a sliver of a clue and booted the most hateful transphobic fucks (who are currently drooling all over the Margins and getting hugs and kisses from Guess Who). i am finding myself a lot mellower toward her when i, like, don’t read her -at all.- it is rather nice i must say.

I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t make a post to my own blog, but I’m not sure my friends who read it would understand everything that was at stake. If Jack’s willing to play host, I’m willing to support whatever she wants to do with it. I have no particular attachment to the “long-winded essaying at each other” form of discussion.

There’s a lot in your post I really want to respond to, some of it I think makes a huge amount of sense (we absolutely CAN look at oppression of trans people with a lens of analysis of patriarchy as a system) and some of it I find deeply disturbing, at least on the surface (don’t we need to come up with alternatives to privilege as a zero-sum game if we’re going to help various kinds of people survive and fight *together*?)

As you can see I have trouble not responding to everything right here, but I’m also concerned that we’re writing walls of text that are impenetrable to most other readers. Jack wants to make another post that draws out some ideas from this conversation so that more people can participate, so she’s asked me to hold off from continuing this back-and-forth, and let some more voices into the mix. But I wanted to let you know that I very much want to continue the development of these ideas?

1. There seems to be nothing within radical feminist theorising about patriarchy that captures the oppressive conditions experienced by trans people. While this might be cause to throw out theorising and categorising altogether, has any attempt been made to conceptualise the oppression of trans people within an analysis of patriarchy as a system?

There are many aspects of gender transition and gender dysphoria which radical feminists don’t touch. It’s not much of a coincidence that these tend to be the more painful, difficult, and ambiguous parts of trans peoples’ experience. I definitely agree, Holly, that normal models of socialisation don’t necessarily apply to trans people, and radical feminism glosses over this by conceptualising it as “choice”.

What I’ve seen in blog discussions so far has been critical of radical feminist statements about trans people, and reiterated that trans people are oppressed, but the politics of that oppression haven’t really been conceptualised (I admit that I haven’t read everything; my brain might explode if I try). People seem to be going for the easier route of re-stating the facts of trans oppression, but not its conditions (understandable, given the nature of the hate speech on IBTP and elsewhere, but I think we can move past the ugly tone of those comments).

2. There’s a lot of anxiety about the dissolution of the category of “woman” and the entitlements that belonging to that category gives people within feminist circles.

In some ways, this is definitely divide-and-conquer politics. In order to hang onto certain privileges, small though they might be, people are fighting tooth and nail over who gets to access them, and on what basis. (In my experience, people tend to fight harder when the stakes are materially small, but politically high.)

On the other hand, I can relate to the feeling that transwomen’s needs and concerns are quite different from those of “women-born-women” experiencing patriarchal oppression… In times when I talked about feeling threatened or offended by street harassment, for example, trans friends of mine spoke about their experiences of it in terms of their desire to ‘pass’ being fulfilled. The dissonance was alienating, not least because my friends ignored my feelings.
Now, I don’t want to dismiss that desire — in many situations, ‘passing’ can literally be a matter of life or death — but at the same time, I don’t want experiences which women have every day (such as men asserting public dominance over them in public spaces) to be discounted because we’ve deconceptualised gender oppression in an effort to be less essentialist. To me, that seems like putting out an eye in an effort to see better because cataracts are deteriorating your vision.

It’s definitely a matter of concern that it’s a certain group of women who continually get to define the category of “woman” in feminist circles, and also have control over the privileges accruing to people seen as belonging to that category. But at the same time, that’s not the only thing that’s going on here. At the same time, women do experience splintering categorisation by men, and radical feminism is one attempt to develop an oppositional political consciousness within that category, based on the experience of being so categorised.

I think the anxiety, while it does represent a certain petty vindictiveness, also represents an anxiety that gender oppression will be theorised away as a legitimate political force to organise around.

3. This brings me back to point 1, above. In my (less than expert, much less) opinion, one of the problems is that radical feminist analysis lacks awareness of the specificity of transgender experiences, and sweeps those experiences under a blanket to avoid their political and theoretical implications for the conceptualisation of gender.

At this point it might be worth remembering that fear never helps to actually deal with problems.

Aggressively (and in this case, offensively, hurtfully, and hatefully) reasserting radical feminist concepts of womanhood also depends on a conviction that the only alternative to a narrow political definition of patriarchal genders is a disoriented nihilism which allows oppression to run rampant while removing the power to name or challenge it.

I’m not going to say that’s not a possibility, but many people haven’t even given their politics the chance to find out.

I have to say, as someone trained in political economy, I’m suspicious of aestheticist theories that the primary form of power is the power to define and categorise. Categorisation may be powerful, but that doesn’t mean it’s the source of power, and criticising categories doesn’t address material conditions.
On the other hand, ideological sleights-of-hand happen all the time to the effect that certain material conditions are marginalised in any given political frame. To that extent, I agree that intersections matter, possibly to a greater extent than unilateral analyses of oppression. But at the same time, that doesn’t have to mean that power is theorised away as an effect of categorisation and definition.
In other words, I think it’s possible to deal with the fact of transgender oppression alongside the fact of women’s oppression under patriarchy.

Part of that, I think, is dealing openly with transgender experiences rather than trying to subsume them under one category or another to keep political theses intact. It’s imperious of RadFems to exclude transwomen from political participation on essentialist terms; but I think it’s disingenuous for trans-friendly feminists to insist that trans people are entitled to equal participation in gendered social life on the basis that gender essentialism is a flawed ideology. The former ignores trans oppression, while the latter ignores the patriarchal social structure. We have to call into question the legitimacy of any gains made within an oppressive social structure. Not simply because “we could be next” (we could), but because privilege is a zero-sum game; empowerment at someone else’s cost is merely injustice.

Finally, while all this oppression is real, it doesn’t mean that categories are essentialist. Politics around gender and sexuality seem to have fallen prey to conundrums about essentialism because of a lack of historicity about them. Imagining that gender or sexuality can be universal in form is a highly suspect project, for the reasons you mentioned. But still, it’s problematic when people don’t interrogate the historical and cultural specificity of those forms except towards deconstructive ends. Perhaps because it also calls into question the utopian visions that people conjure up to justify their essentialisms, but constructivism doesn’t have to be nihilistic. It’s just that political change without utopian ideals is much more difficult to measure, and effect, and that’s scary.

I think a good place to start is what we, as people working towards justice and liberation, need, and how to meet those needs.

Ugh. I’ve talked a lot. Sorry. I can listen, too. I’ve been somewhat selective about what I read in this blog shuffle, because of time and energy constraints. I don’t mean to monopolise the floor as if my own views mattered more than others’, even though I learn better by conversing. I don’t mean to come off like a know-it-all either. I just hope I’ve contributed something useful to the very productive discussions happening here and elsewhere. I’d like to reaffirm how much I admire the people who are trying to penetrate these issues with critical insight, empathy, and understanding. You’re inspiring.