Some thoughts on feminism and transsexuality

I just found this post written by Amananta of Screaming Into The Void called "Radical Feminism and the Transgendered, or, how to write a post that will infuriate everyone". I was going to comment on it, but it's over a year old and Amananta seems to have closed comments on her blog, so, as i've been meaning to get my thoughts into a coherent form on a lot of this stuff for a while, i'm responding to it in this blog instead...

Amananta is a radical feminist whose partner is (or was at the time of writing) a transwoman, which is in itself pretty fucking sound, given the transphobia found in far too much radical feminism... and she says exactly the same thing about transphobic people-who-call-themselves-feminists in reference to her partner that i do in reference to my transwoman best friend, which is instant respect from me :)

However, there's some stuff in her post that i think needs a response/clarification...

Amananta writes:

But in other ways, many transgendered people fall prey to patriarchal ideas and attitudes, just as many non-transgendered people do. FTMs in particular seem so anxious to identify themselves as men that they sometimes throw out sexist stereotypes or behave in a very anti-feminist way, perhaps in order to prove they are “one of the boys”. I have seen the very good point made that of course FTMs have “gender dysphoria” - and so do almost all other women, because our culture, as a whole, hates and reviles women and femininity. What woman doesn’t hate being female for at least part of her life? Where is the line between really feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men in our society?

First sentence - very true, indeed arguably inevitably so. Second sentence - not true of any of the FTMs i've encountered, although admittedly i've only really encountered FTMs in fairly "liberated" (or at least allegedly so) online communities, where gender stuff tends to get pretty radically deconstructed (even if "mainstream" assumptions about disability don't... but that's another topic, one i don't really have the strength to write about, and indeed am actively avoiding by writing about this, right now). Rest of the paragraph - also a lot of truth there.

However - what it neglects is embodiment. Transsexuals don't just have a problem with the gender roles society forces them from childhood to live in (I have, and always have had, a pretty fucking profound problem with the male gender role that i'm "supposed", because of my embodiment, to live in - but i'm not a transsexual) - they have a problem with the actual body they are living in. They actually have something analogous to the chemical-imbalance type of clinical depression [which, i hope i don't need to say but probably do, is emphatically not a model that can be extended to cover all depression, but which genuinely does occur in a small percentage of cases - i'm going to return to this in another post], but the chemical imbalance is directly caused by having the "wrong" sex hormones, produced by the "wrong" set of genitals - and i have seen that depression, which in my friend's case was lifelong and suicidal, "cured" almost instantly (and permanently, with no negative side effects), along with several physical problems, simply by taking "replacement" hormones.

I do not think these things [dichotomous gender role stuff] alone are at the root of transgenderism. But I think in some cases, these cultural attitudes have pushed people into surgery and other medical treatments because behaviors outside of the strictly gender normative are seen as, literally “sick”.

True, definitely - my trans friend believes very strongly that there are some people who transition for reasons other than actual hormonal/physiological gender dysphoria, and who probably "shouldn't" have transitioned physically. As a libertarian, however, i believe that those people, even if not "truly" transsexual, have the inalienable right to do to their own bodies whatever they like. However, in a society where there were no differentiated gender roles (which is (one aspect of) my ideal society), those people probably wouldn't feel the need to transition physically, whereas those who are "truly" transsexual, because of physical or hormonal factors, still would...

Since MTFs do not want to be male, they would like to imagine they can just toss male prvilege away along with their unwanted boy’s clothing.

The way i see this, they didn't really have it to start with. If you're traumatised to the point of near-constant suicidal feelings (and i'm not saying every MTF transsexual feels/felt this - but those who i know did) just by being something, then i can't really see how you can meaningfully derive "privilege" from it. There are some sort-of-advantages that i can see MTFs deriving from it (or rather from not having been subjected to some of the really nasty aspects of the brainwashing involved in being raised as a girl in Western culture), but i don't know if "privilege" is the right word for them, especially considering all the "anti-privileges" that they are weighed up against...

Furthermore, if you are a transgendered woman, no matter how badly you may want it, unless you were incredibly lucky you were not raised as a girl in this society. There are some experiences you will never have, and there are some things that will never quite match up between your experiences and those of girls who were raised as girls. I understand well this is a sore point for many transwomen, who feel they have missed out greatly on something very special, and maybe they have - but the fact remains that they did not have these experiences and many of the bonds between women who are born women are based on the assumption of shared experiences.

This is kind of the same point - as an example of the sort-of-advantages, the transwomen i know are very nearly the only women i know who don't have and have never had any kind of eating disorders, and who feel able to eat what (and as much as) they like without feeling guilt or worrying about "being fat". But my obvious response to this paragraph is - while i know where transwomen are coming from when they say they wish they were raised as girls, through the parallels i see with my own experience, as an undiagnosed autistic child, of being raised as if i was a kind of person i wasn't, without any kind of recognition or acceptance for the kind of person i actually was - well, IMO no one should be "raised as a girl", or for that matter "raised as a boy". Individual children should be raised as individual children, and gender should be utterly fucking immaterial in that...

(i'm tempted to misquote Bob Marley misquoting Haile Selassie here - until the shape of a child's genitals is no more significant than the colour of its eyes, there is war...)

I think some radical feminists need to quit the obnoxious practice of deliberately being hurtful by refusing to call transwomen “she” in order to prove their point, and try to respect the ways on which transwomen were born men but have voluntarily given up a lot of male privilege in choosing to take the path they have taken.

(If i ever met Janice Raymond, i would take great pleasure in referring to her with male pronouns, and calling "him" Raymond as if it were "his" first name... ;) )

For the reasons outlined above, i don't think "voluntarily given up... male privilege" is an accurate description. You might as well say that, by getting an Asperger's diagnosis at the age of 22, I "voluntarily gave up neurotypical privilege". Impairment (and IMO gender dysphoria is an impairment, or at least an aspect of embodiment and therefore in the same sort of class of entities as an impairment) isn't something chosen...

(of course this kind of relates back to the issues about chosen vs non-chosen aspects of self in my previous post about sexual orientation - within my moral framework, it really doesn't matter whether it's chosen or not... but in this "privilege" context, it seems to matter, if not to me then at least to a lot of people...)

I think some fabulous conversations about gender and society could take place between radical feminists and transwomen... Please - a little respect, a little listening. I don’t think this train is completely derailed as of yet. Divisiness hurts both of these movements, whereas together we can make a powerful indictment of the strict gender roles imposed on us by society.

Absolutely agreed on this one...

I'm going to invite Amananta (if i can find a way to message her) to respond to this response to her... i think there are a lot of parallels here with a lot of other issues, including (the one that instantly comes to mind) the social model of disability and its (alleged) disregarding of impairment, and the feminist response to that by such feminist disability theorists as Jenny Morris and Micheline Mason... but once again, one post has led me to about a dozen others that need to split off from it...