(NB: The link above goes to my comment on the article, which I will reproduce after the excerpt from the article.)
Twitter has been flooded with controversy for the last week about theRadFem2012 conference, currently booked into the Conway Hall, which announced its membership as restricted to “women born women and living as women” (it originally said “biological women”, but that got changed after much mockery). This disturbed the trans community, which it is meant to exclude, but also those feminists who regard trans-exclusion as something other than radical.
To be clear, I know no trans women, still less trans men, who want to spend time in a space organized by people who slander us. However, one of the main speakers at the conference is Sheila Jeffreys, who has aforthcoming book critiquing trans medical care. In much of her earlier writing (see, for example, page 71 of this journal), she calls for “transsexualism” to be declared a human rights violation and then surgery banned by international law, so it’s fairly clear that we have an interest in the debate. What Jeffreys proposes has, of course, other implications for all women – the Vatican would love to make similar declarations about reproductive freedom.
There is also, more importantly, the question of whether what Jeffreys and her supporters say about trans people constitutes hate speech. As of two days ago, the Conway Hall expressed their concerns about the legality of trans exclusion, and about hate speech, to the conference organisers.
One of the problems with the Internet is that it is possible for people to lock themselves further and further into a restricted mind set where they hear no other voices. On the other hand, it makes it possible for those with a strong stomach to overturn every stone and find out just what people are saying and thinking. It’s clear that Jeffreys and her supporters are very hurt and disappointed that so many younger women don’t agree with her – Jeffreys blames the corrupting influence of post-modernism and queer theory; “trans-critical” lawyer Cath Brennan - whouses Twitter to deride trans people’s experiences and mock non-trans feminists who are their allies - is also a RadFem2012 attendee.
My response to the article (some of this is a concatenation of things I have posted recently):
One of the common misconceptions about so-called “radical feminism” is that it has anything at all to do with “radicalism” as that term in commonly recognised in the general parlance. In fact, so-called “radical feminism” has absolutely nothing “radical” in it at all, and it never did. The central thesis of this branch of feminism is that it considers the oppression of women based on oppositional sexism is the most pervasive and dehumanising form of oppression that exists in our society.
Trans activist Emi Koyama summed this up very nicely in her 2000 essay, “Whose Feminism is it, Anyway?” with this quote:
“Radical feminism, in its simplest form, believes that women’s oppression is the most pervasive, extreme, and fundamental of all social inequalities, regardless of race, class, nationality, and other factors. It is only under this assumption that the privilege transsexual women are perceived to have (i.e. male privilege) can be viewed as far more dangerous to others that any other privileges (i.e. being white, middle class, etc.).”
It should be no surprise to anyone reading this statement to discover that the vast majority of self-identifying radical feminists are cisgender/cissexual (a benign term that generally indicates a “non-trans” status which they evidently despise), white, and affluent, often professional women of one sort or another, as with the list of their iconic leaders and prominent activists such as Cathy Brennan and her compatriot Elizabeth Hungerford, two cis white Usamerican attorneys who presumed last year to address the United Nations, calling for the denial of the human rights of transsexual and/or transgender women around the globe.
Their arrogance in having done so is astonishing, but thankfully, the United Nations is staffed with far more intelligent people than radical feminists would prefer, and their proposal was promptly binned. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover the blatant hypocrisy that these two get up to when they describe themselves as supporters of trans rights.
The cult of radical feminism is, in fact, just that…a cult. It is entirely religious in nature and surrounds a cult of personality, which are common features of cults. Since at least the days of that old battleaxe, Mary Daly, there has been a thread of feminine mysticism that runs through radical feminist thinking. Trans women cannot, by their rules, ever be women, because we fundamentally lack the ability to experience the mystical feminine that is the result of being “born woman” (never mind the fact that *no one* in the history of humanity has ever been born a woman). One cannot win an argument that is based upon the postulated existence of an ineffable.
“Radical feminism”, is not “radical”, nor is it “feminism”, as it clearly espouses as a fundamental tenet hatred of at least some women.The idea that trans women have a “fundamentally different experience” than cis women is itself a logical fallacy. Yes, we have a different experience. No one seriously disputes this idea. It is not, however,fundamentally different. It is just different in some ways, for some more, for some less. Trans women, like cis women, do not develop in a vacuum. We live in the same world, and our experiences are only slightly different. Only those who focus upon genitalia believe that our socialization is “fundamentally different”, or that we are the unmitigated, not to mention uncritical, recipients of “male” socialization and “male” privilege.
You can tell a girl a thousand times she is a boy, to the point where she may even begin to believe it herself, but she is not, by definition, a boy. Her childhood will be a girlhood, and it will be just as “significant” to cultural and societal constructions of girlhood and womanhood as any other girl’s. The only way this statement can be refuted is by limiting one’s conception of “female” to that of genital status. What trans women wish you to understand is that the concepts of “girlhood” and “womanhood” go far beyond what you may have been conditioned to accept by patriarchy.
And that right there is the central failing of radical feminism: that it, by refusing to undo the conditioning of patriarchy about what constitutes “female”, serves patriarchy better than patriarchy could have ever wished in its wildest dreams. I wonder if it surprises anyone that so many of the central figures that make up this cult of personality have their origins in Roman Catholicism, including Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, and Catherine Brennan. What could possibly be more iconically patriarchal than the Roman Catholic Church?
![tal9000:
widdershinsgirl:
The file name here is “murderthug.png.” Because that is what the alias “Rose Verbena” represents - murderous thuggery.
[IMAGE: Two posts from an Internet message board. The first, from a user with the alias “Rose Verbena,” reads “Well then when McDonald gets beaten to death in prison, we can re-visit your vicious “Darwin Award” statement, m’kay? Because one of the BEST ways to ensure that you don’t get killed in prison is to…wait for it…stay out of prison. That is: don’t stab someone in the heart because you didn’t like their words.”The second, from a user with the alias “Kittyburger,” reads “Once again you are conveniently eliding (not “overlooking,” this is a deliberate elision done with the specific, malicious intent of painting CeCe as the aggressor) both the previous violence (previous as in “within the same half-hour”) and the fact that Schmitz was in hot pursuit BECAUSE OF the fact that neither CeCe NOR anyone in her group had previously presented the slightest threat to him.
You are being willfully deceitful. Stop.”]
Reblogging this because it needs to be spread far and wide that roseverbena has publicly wished death on CeCe McDonald.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4uy4r9cU21qcwidbo1_500.png)
