Reading: Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 14-15, Afterword to Dennis Rodman version. related tags: #HNvPtS
The development of the trans movement has raised a vital question that’s being discussed in women’s communities all over the country. The discussion revolves around one pivotal question: How is woman to be defined? The answer we give may determine the course of women’s liberation for decades to come.
The question can’t be considered without understanding that women face such constant dangers and harassment, day-in and day-out, that the attempt to define woman is generated by the need for safe space and clear-cut allies. That’s a completely valid need. But how can we create safe space for women?
I think that if we define “woman” as a fixed entity, we will draw borders that would need to be policed. No matter what definition is used, many women who should be inside will be excluded.
It's like reading the words of a soothsayer, even though it was obvious what would happen if we hardened the definition of 'woman' (and also the definition of 'man'). And it's precisely what's happening now.
After years of television and Hollywood movies and schooling full of prejudice, all of us have absorbed a biological definition of what is “normal” and what is not. But in a society rife with internal struggle, even a hard science like biology can be misused in an attempt to justify inequality and oppression. While we were dissecting frogs, biological determinism crept into our classrooms.
Very much this, especially on schools.
Our histories as trans people and women are inextricably entwined. In the past, wherever women and trans people were honored, you can find cooperative, communal production. And societies that degrade women and trans people are already cleaved into classes, because those patriarchal divisions mandate a rigid categorization of sex and gender.
I want... evidence that this is true because it sounds like the faux nostalgia. But this is another kind of thing that Feinberg just drops as if it's 100% true and accurate, as if we couldn't and wouldn't see women creating heinous societies.
The women’s liberation movement that shaped my consciousness exposed the institutionalized oppression of women. The movement revealed that inequality begins at a very early age. But simply looking at the differences between what boys and girls are taught only reveals a broad analysis of sexual oppression. Just as girls experience different messages based on whether they are feminine, masculine, or androgynous, boys do too. It’s absurd to think that messages of woman-hating and male privilege will produce the same consciousness in a male youth who grows up believing he will be part of the “good-ole boys club” and one who grows up fearing humiliation and violence at the hands of men. If the consciousness of male-to-female transsexuals was shaped early on by “male privilege,” then why would they give it up?
Again, it's like reading a soothsayer, but you know it isn't because transphobes were 100% a thing back then just as they are now.
If the segregation of bathrooms is really about more than just genitals, then maybe the signs ought to read “Men” and “Sexually and Gender Oppressed,” because we all need a safe place to go to the bathroom. Or even better, let’s fight for clean individual bathrooms with signs on the doors that read “Restroom.”
God, I hate how long this debate has been a fucking thing.
It’s not your lipstick that’s oppressing me, or your tie, or whether you change your sex, or how you express yourself. An economic system oppresses us in this society, and keeps us fighting each other, instead of looking at the real source of this subjugation.
Except, and this needs to be recognised, we could change the economic system and still maintain these bigotries. This needs to be addressed.
High schools, colleges, and universities need to include trans individuals and struggles in their curricula. In addition, the very concept that our current narrow sex and gender system is eternal needs to be challenged by exploring the diversity that has existed throughout human history. We need a fresh reexamination of history, anthropology, and medical science in order to weed out any concepts that sex and gender variation are “abnormal.”
Every fucking time. You want to talk about institutions, but you don't want to waste a second thinking about WHAT SCHOOLS ARE AND WHO THEY SERVE? Especially when you're out here talking about fucking capitalism being the problem? For fuck's sake.
From the Dennis Rodman version:
Some sports writers immediately accused Rodman of a publicity stunt, comparable to the public cross-dressing of bigot Howard Stern at his book signings. Stern may or may not be a cross-dresser in private. But his public stance—like the burlesque drag acts by upper-class white men in the elite Bohemian Grove Club—is mocking and cruel. Dennis Rodman, already a target of racism, ire, and innuendo, had nothing to gain by coming out as a cross-dresser. He's open about the fact that his gender expression dates back to childhood. He wrote in his bestseller *Bad as I Wanna Be*: “As a kid I would sometimes dress as a girl. You play house, you play doctor—everybody does that, but some people like it more than others. I used to go through the whole routine—dress up, wear makeup, act like a girl.”
I think I was too young, but I do vaguely remember this. Interesting to see it put in. Shame that Dennis Rodman has such terrible politics and behaviours today, like supporting Trump in 2016 and Kanye in 2020... and befriending a dictator. Just ugh.