No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I am so very sick of feminists insisting that every other woman do womaning the same way they do.
Do you really not understand that your experience, as a woman who’s been seen as a woman her entire life, is radically different from the experience of a woman who is finally, after decades of suppression, expressing her femaleness in way that she chooses?
Do you also not understand that trans women are in a nasty double bind? If they present in a traditionally feminine manner, they get told that they’re a caricature of femaleness, or that their gender presentation isn’t sufficiently feminist. If they don’t present in a traditionally feminine manner, their trans identity is called into question.
And to Goodman in particular: why on earth does it matter what “most women” are thinking about at age 65? isn’t the point here that every women gets to decide for herself what it means to be a woman, and how she wants to experience and express that? Caitlyn Jenner is not telling you how to be a 65 year old woman. Why are you telling her — and by extension, any other trans women who might be reading this — the right way to be a woman?
I did not become a feminist to listen to women policing other women’s bodies. Whatever happened to “Our bodies, our right to decide”?
As a trans woman, I want to stand up and cheer for what you just said.
Thank you.
I prefer to see this as a positive. If there was any doubt that feminism can and will include trans women, now that doubt is erased. There is no more certain inclusion in the “woman” club than being found lacking by other women and criticized for it.
As Jon Stewart said: Welcome to womanhood, Caitlyn. Now stop thinking of yourself as completely human and realize that you’ll never be good enough.
Yay!
Shit.
They understand that, I think. It appears to be the very reason they’re having trouble with Caitlyn Jenner’s femaleness. The experience of it is different from a second wave feminists’ experience, therefore it isn’t covered by their feminism. Burkett says:
Yeah, that’s an experience unlike what Burkett has experienced. But so what? Lots of women, cis or trans, haven’t had Burkett’s experiences. Are those women disqualified by second wave feminism too? It sure sounds like it.
Anne Lamott (author who is popular among progressive Christians) said some exclusionary transphobic comments about Caitlyn Jenner earlier this week.
Here is what she said on Twitter:
One of the few good things here is Lamott’s apology isn’t the all-too-common “no apology” that we often hear. Here is her response on Twitter:
Sadly, the transphobia isn’t limited to just second-wave feminists. It’s also found in other progressive voices like Anne Lamott.
Yet you’re saying this on the blog of a woman who calls herself a feminist.
Oh wait holy crap I totally read that wrong 🙂 My bad. Remind me not to do 4 things at once.
“Do you really not understand that your experience, as a woman who’s been seen as a woman her entire life, is radically different from the experience of a woman who is finally, after decades of suppression, expressing her femaleness in way that she chooses?”
But, as I commented over at B&W, I don’t WANT to be “seen as a woman my entire life!” That’s exactly why I am a feminist. I play the role of “woman” not because I am expressing some inner truth but because I have been trained to do so and because I get rewarded for it (sometimes quite subtly). I just don’t think being born with a vagina and behaving in particular ways our society expects of people with vaginas means that I am privileged. I don’t think I do it because I have some “inner femaleness” that I am lucky to be able to express. I do it because I have been trained to do so and because I get rewarded. And maybe that makes me a shitty hypocritical bad faith kind of feminist . . . or maybe that makes me a victim of the patriarchy.
I get that people who are born with penises who behave in a way that society expects of people with vaginas DON’T get the rewards I do, and get penalties instead. That is obviously bad and wrong: no one should get penalised for playing the role they want to play (so long as they are not harming anyone else of course). But I don’t think the rewards I get for conforming to gender norms are PRIVILEGES. They are the carrot that keep me on a vicious treadmill.
I’m surprised to learn that the argument is about what Caitlyn Jenner does with her body at all. Usually in feminism, it’s what the magazine does with its cover that’s under scrutiny. And it’s done it again, as it no doubt does every month.
Emily Vicendese @7
This is a little ambiguous, especially in this thread.
Do you mean you would prefer for people to not think you are a woman when they see you? Or do you just mean you don’t like all the cr*p that other people dump on you when they gender you female?
That “carrot” is what privilege is.
Just as not regularly getting pulled over for “driving while black” is one of the “carrots” of my (USAan) white privilege.
A big part of cis privilege is not having to deal with the cr*p that you’d have to put up with if people (routinely) gendered you as trans, or the even worse cr*p you have to put with if they initially gender you as cis male / cis female and later find out your history.
Teh Patriarchy doesn’t dole out privileges out of the generosity of its heart. It uses them to insure that most people, however badly off, will feel that they are better off keeping things as they are than risking losing what privilege they have.
Note: I am using “gender” as a verb the way Julia Serano does, to mean what sex other people categorize you as when they see you.
Emily, for many trans people, myself included, the need to medically transition has a life of its own, separate from gender roles and gender norms. I’m a trans woman and I transitioned twenty years ago. I am not a pink, frilly, “girly” type of person. I don’t care much for makeup, dresses, heels and most other socially mandated trappings of femininity. Romantically, I far prefer women—although mostly, I prefer living solo because I’m more asexual than anything else. I absolutely despise chivalry and I generally hate the daily crap that women have to put up with living under patriarchy (or more generally, kyriarchy).
I am not the living, breathing expression of stereotypical, patriarchy-inspired femininity… not buy any stretch of the imagination.
Whatever the origins, the internal pull toward female embodiment would still exist for me, even if the behaviors society commonly clusters and segregates under binaristic gender roles would disappear tomorrow. I can still sense that bodily orientation to this day, even though I transitioned socially, hormonally, and surgically decades ago. It’s akin to knowing what direction is “up” even if you are in a darkened room, floating in a bathtub of water. It offers only one piece of information: how my body should be configured. That’s it. My internal sense of “correct bodily configuration” offers no information on gender roles/expectations. As best I can tell, those roles and expectations are mostly derived from the social process that flow out of oppressive, systematic cultural forces which strive to control sexed bodies, rather than flow out of inflexible internal dictates of sexed biology itself.
What I experience is, in many respects, analogous to same sex attraction and patriarchal culture’s oppressive reaction to that particular affinity. For whatever reason, a portion of the populace is attracted to people of the same sex and thwarting that drive causes immense distress to those individuals experiencing that romantic/sexual pull. Those people who primarily experience an attraction to members of the other sex, an attraction sanctioned by patriarchy, are able to experience and express that attraction without the violence, disapproval, and discrimination that same sex attracted people experience. Hence, people who are attracted primarily to a different sex have the privilege of being able to express and live out that affinity without being subject to the violence of a homophobic society.
For whatever reason, a portion of the populace experiences an internal pull toward a bodily configuration at odds with the body they were born with. If that internal pull is thwarted by society, great distress is incurred. Acting upon that internal pull comes with extreme levels of prejudice, discrimination, and violence from society at large. Those who do not experience this internal pull do not experience this particular kind of prejudice and abuse.
In the absence of prejudice, discrimination, and violence exists respective types of privilege for both straight people and cis (non-transgender) people. Patriarchal culture sanctions neither same sex attraction nor shifting to a physical embodiment at odds with the sexed category assigned to an individual at birth. Both of those ways of being violate basic sex & gender normative dictates of patriarchy-regulated relationships and expectations. We are all expected to bond with members of the other sex class and remain firmly affixed to whatever set of roles and body types we were born into, dictated by oppressive social forces and randomly assigned by genetic lottery.
I’ve been a feminist since Reagan was president… since my teen years. I majored in sociology and women’s studies in college. I’m familiar with the warp and weft of feminism. I don’t view my journey as a trans woman as embracing patriarchy. Rather, I view my life journey as a big middle finger to kyriarchy. I am not the person my authoritarian, misogynist father expected me to be, I can tell you that much. I am not the person the conservative, hateful culture of my hometown expected me to become.
The more we break down the cultural and physical boundaries embedded in the sex and gender binary, the more we disrupt and dissolve patriarchal relations. Trans people pierce and disrupt the boundaries of assigned membership present in a two caste system. If you can’t maintain the boundaries present in this system, that system is more likely to become unstable. The more “noise” we can introduce to that system, the more wrenches we can jam into that social machinery, the quicker we’ll bring it to a grinding, metal-rending halt.
I want to see this system destroyed. Utterly.
I’ll do my part in my own particular way. Other folks are doing theirs. There are multiple paths in which we can chip away at this oppressive social edifice.
Emily Vicendese @ #7: I’m going to start by saying this one time, and one time only: Do not ever — EVER — come into my blog again and refer to trans women as “people who are born with penises” who are “playing a role.” Do not EVER come into my blog again and dismiss the reality of trans people’s lives in any way. If you do, I will block you so fast it will make your head spin.
If you, personally, experience being a woman as playing a role you’ve been trained to play, and behaving in ways that women are expected to behave — that is totally fine. We all get to define and experience our genders (or lack thereof) for ourselves. But not all women experience being a woman the way you do. Read timberwraith @ #10 above. Read the writings of any number of trans women. And it’s not just trans women who experience gender differently than you do. For me, for instance, being a woman means the set of behaviors expected of women, AND it means the decisions I make about which of those behaviors are authentic for me and which ones aren’t (and which inauthentic behaviors I’m willing to go along with even if I don’t like them), AND it means the ways that I work to subvert and destroy those expectations, AND it means a certain relationship with my body. What timberwraith wrote above, about feeling a certain pull towards lliving inside a certain kind of body, resonates strongly with me — except that I’m lucky enough and privileged enough to have been born into the kind of body I feel a pull towards.
I understand that some feminist gender theory defines gender solely as a social construction, a set of roles to be played. But as I wrote the other day: If my feminist gender theory doesn’t include the lived experience of transgender people’s lives, it will be bullshit. Theory is supposed to explain reality: the whole freaking point of gender theory is to explain the reality of gender as it plays out in people’s lives, and if I have to reject the reality of trans people’s lives to hang on to my theory, it’s a crap-ass theory that should die in a fire. And more to the point: It will be bullshit because trans lives matter, and trans people’s lives and experiences are more important than my goddamn theory.
Again: If you personally, for yourself, define gender as a set of roles to be played, that is 100% fine. But if you impose that definition on all women, to the point where you’re being an asshole to trans people, your theory is bullshit.
Trans people exist. Period. No actual person’s life should be sacrificed on the altar of anyone’s dubious beliefs.
And that includes feminists who haven’t thought through the issue, AND ‘trans activists’ who demand that other trans-folk conform to THEIR particular notions.
So Caitlyn Jenner poses on the cover of Vanity Fair. Looking like just about every other cover of Vanity Fair. I get to roll my eyes, or applaud her courage, or both.
Sounds to me like some feminists forgot how to feminist.
I, for one, welcome Caitlyn to the metaphorical “sisterhood”, and love that she’s finally free to be herself in whatever way she wants to be.
Thanks Greta!
@3
That bit that you quoted from Burkett seems like Burkett is literally playing “Oppression Olympics”. (And like there’s one “correct” path of of suffering for being female, erasing various other awful experiences in an unsympathetic way.)
@Emily Vicendese (post 7)
your description of you being a woman sounds a lot like my experience of being a man (back when i was pretending to be one). maybe you would be happier if you stopped being a woman, at least in some aspects of your life?
In the particular case of Caitlyn Jenner, Burkett is right.
Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican. Which means she actively supports making life difficult for trans people who don’t have the massive privilege she has had.
Way more women transition in adulthood than men; with children, the numbers are equal. Why is that? Because children’s economic status doesn’t correlate to their initially assigned gender, while that of adults does, so more trans men can’t afford to transition and are forced to live as their initially assigned gender.
Yes, everyone’s experience is different, that’s a trivial truth. What people should be looking for is qualitative consequences of those obviously different individual experiences. Jenner has no moral right to be a spokesperson for trans people when she works to make it harder for trans people to find a job, access medical care, and go to the bathroom, and no one should be praising her “bravery”. Her lived experience is evidently vastly different, different enough to disqualify her, exactly because she supports discriminatory policies.
And yes, all that talk about profoundly different male and female beains is sexist tripe and should be called out as such no matter who it comes from. I’d be more sympathetic to talk about gendered souls, because souls are fictional and everyone knows it’s being said metaphorically. There are queer people out there who seriously police other people’s identities by administering folksy “gender tests” such as comparing finger length and demanding answers to stupid riddles, what with lacking an fMRI machine, with results like “you’re 60% female, 40% male”. Statements about brains are intended to be taken as factual, objective truth, and, as such, they necessarily infringe on other people’s identities. If I say my female soul hungers for nail polish, that’s okay — replace “soul” with “internal perception of gender” or whatever. If I say that, because I’m a woman (cis or trans), I am naturally more sensitive and emotional, it’s a straight-up insult to identities of non-emotional women and emotional men, whether cis or trans.
ethereal @ #17 No. In the particular case of Caitlyn Jenner, Burkett has her head up her ass.
There is a monumental difference between saying:
A) “Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican, and we should criticize her for that, because Republicanism is terrible and nobody should do that”;
B) “Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican, and therefore she should not be a spokesperson for trans people, because the Republican Party is horrible on trans issues”:
C) “Caitlyn Jenner’s personal definition of her own womanhood contradicts my feminist theory about gender, so she is wrong and should stop saying it.”
A) is totally valid. B) may or may not be valid, but it’s not up to cis people to decide it — trans people get to decide who they want to have as their spokespeople. C) is utter horseshit. And very importantly, C) is utter horseshit, regardless of where you come down on A) or B). And Burkett didn’t say anything at all in that piece about A) or B). There was nothing in that piece about Jenner being a Republican. It was C), C), C), all the way.
As for this:
“I’d be more sympathetic to talk about gendered souls, because souls are fictional and everyone knows it’s being said metaphorically.”
What world are you living in where everyone knows that “soul” is being said metaphorically?
dangerousbeans @ #16: Actually — can you please not do that? I understand that it was probably meant kindly, but I’m not okay with anyone in my blog telling other people how to experience their own gender, even if it’s done gently and with kind intentions. Thanks.
I’d like to point out that the mainstream media (television, publishing, news papers, magazines, etc.) doesn’t have a great track record for elevating voices from any marginalized demographic which truly represent the communities under examination. The media is also conflict driven. It tends to elevate stories and voices which hone controversy. Controversy grabs attention. It sells copy. That approach results in actions such as pitting trans-antagonistic feminists against against transgender celebrities. Social hierarchy thrives on pitting marginalized groups against each other. It thrives on pitting women against each other.
So, you have a media which promotes the stories and voices of trans people who are wealthy celebrities over those who live work-a-day lives like the rest of the world. Movie directors, movie stars, children of famous singers, and world-renowned athletes do not represent the reality of most trans people’s lives.
In 2011, The National Center for Transgender Equality and The National Lesbian and Gay Task Force came together and published an extensive study which detailed the impact of violence and discrimination upon trans people. Here are just a few of their findings:
While there are many trans men and women who thrive, media portrayals of trans celebrities hardly represent the social threats which so many of us live under. Caitlyn Jenner does not represent the bulk of trans people and the media is largely incapable and unwilling to represent us in a way which reflects our actual lives. It’s more interested in distracting us with glitz and editorial controversy than actually examining injustice and everyday lives. What’s new? Again, does the media do a good job of representing ANY oppressed group well?
Here’s the thing, if you think it’s OK to use the media’s representations of trans people to draw conclusions about the bulk of our communities, would you do the same for the media’s representation of cis women, LGB people, people of color, immigrants, or atheists? If the answer is “no”, then I fully expect you to extend that consideration toward trans women and men. Otherwise, you are forming stereotypes about us, based upon media images which turn nearly every oppressed group into fodder for supporting social hierarchy. That hurts trans people and it promotes a form of feminism which embraces tropes promulgated by the privileged for the privileged.
Here’s a link to the 2011 study I cite:
http://www.thetaskforce.org/injustice-every-turn-report-national-transgender-discrimination-survey/
Greta @19, Emily Vicendese @7
Sorry about that. delete the comment if you want.