#abolish femininity

[lesbianerin]

the male body & masculinity are seen as the standard. unshaven, flat chest, no make up, practical & comfortable clothing, taking up space, confidence. all of those are seen as male traits.

that’s why gnc lesbians who are loud, uncomfortable and don’t go out of their way when i man walks towards them, get told they’re men so often. either by men who wanna humiliate them or by trans rights activists who can’t fathom that women aren’t conforming to the pink stereotype.

femininity on the other hand is an invention by men. they made women dependent on them by hoarding resources and started wars over them. they made up the lie that women stem from a man’s rib, that sperm is racing to the egg when in reality the egg selects the sperm, they made women bind their feet and even made up a god to cope with their unimaginable womb envy.

oftentimes women who don’t conform to femininity, have a small chest and butt, get called boyish, androgyn, masculine but you’ve never ever see a fat man with moobs and a big dump get called feminine. never.

that’s why so many women that identify as non binary get their breasts cut off or tape them away daily, take low doses of T to get a deeper voice, starve their curves off and wear baggy clothes but i’ve yet to see a non binary male get a breast augmentation, lip filler, a BBL or wear heels.

femininity is putting lots of shit on, get under the knife, spent thousands on products & procedures, be quiet, small, uncomplicated, medicated, under control & masculinity is existing in your natural state, standing up for yourself and being confident.

[she-wolfblood]

Every time I see the fandom talking about Arya/Lyanna and saying that they are popular characters for having "masculine" qualities and that is why we are misogenous I want to tear my eyes out.

[fitzrove]

The situation I posted about is mostly funny but I do think it makes me feel alienated from some people (largely certain women because it's my main reference group) dkkdld. Like oh you guys truly have never had to contemplate your gender/enforced gender norms/gendered choices and gendered benefits/punishments, you truly think that all of your choices and actions are simply personal and not societally steered and socially rewarded/punished 😅 like y'all are comfortable with your conformity to an extent where you don't even notice how little freedom there is sometimes dkkdksks

[magical-xirl-4]

the way that i truly am just non-binary still... idk, surprises me? like, i forget that i am, so i have to remind myself that while i am trans, i'm not a man. at the same time, i'm not a woman. i'm just floating out as something else. something totally new.

but that's why it's so hard for me to affirm myself. there is no exact language to describe me that truly encapsulates my experiences. there's very little representation about what it means to be non-binary. it's why i think about it so much, it's why i fixate on it.

the world is extremely binary, and it's influence over my thoughts is still very strong, despite my gender identity.

it can be lonely. it can be confusing.

my bodily dysphoria is so strong but my social dysphoria is ten fold. to a vast majority of people they will never see me as non-binary no matter how many times i say it, and that haunts me.

i know not everyone will be able to instantly see me as my true self wherever i go and whoever i talk to, but the two binary genders are something that we are innately trained to recognise.

if a person recognises me as 1 or 2 and never 3 instantly, it feels. wrong.

why can't you see me as that? no matter how hard i try; why?

maybe HRT and top surgery will get me there, maybe, hopefully, one day. i want to be seen as androgynous, ambigious, first and foremost. someone who perfectly toes the line of masculinity and femininity. i feel like i am that as a person already but i just want people to be able to see that as soon as they see me.

but ultimately what i truly want is reformation of society. i want- no, need, trans acceptance, and abolishment of gender roles and heteropatriarchy. it's the only way i'll ever be able to thrive and feel comfortable. it's easy for you to people to see man and woman, but i wish it were different. i wish it were more that that.

i still haven't changed my name legally, or moved away from my family, so i'd say i'm in the worst of it. i'm just barely getting enough air to breathe. when i change my name, when i move out, when i go on HRT and get top surgery i will feel better.

but those systems put in place to hold up cisheteronormativity will still exist. i'm not sure how i will feel once i'm up to that point. i'll definitely have more air to breathe. but i can't even picture it right now. i'm still looking up from the well. why do i still have to endure more darkness once i'm fully free to be me?

i really hope for a day where that well won't exist and we'll be able to be on equal level a plain and open field. where we'll get to sit next to each other in the warm gaze of the sun, feeling loved, safe, protected and cared for. where we don't have to fight to exist and feel like ourselves. no conflict, no fighting, no hardship. just ourselves and the purity of it.

[v333rbatim]

NO! tumblr soft grunge is not coming back for 2024! instead 2024 is for learning to find your personal style and interests outside of niche aesthetic labels and trends! 2024 is for being authentically yourself and not limiting your soul!

[trebledeath]

Getting high and arguing gender politics online

[alinedreams]

It's about high time the metal community stops accepting nazis and begins to accept Babymetal and the Kawaii Metal genre as a whole instead

[this-is-exorsexism]

"instead of having men's and women's sections for clothes, we should have masculine and feminine sections! thus, everyone would be included."

this is exorsexism.

"everyone is included in masc or fem" is the same rubbish as "everyone is included in male or female".

sure, those names would include more people than men's and women's sections do, but they sure as hell aren't including everyone!

you can't say "clothes don't have gender" and still gender certain clothes as inherently masc or fem.

you can't replace "male/man/boy" and "female/woman/girl" with "masculine" and "feminine" and act like you somehow abolished the gender binary.

you're just moving the goalposts.

the only way me and many others are "included" in masc or fem is by people misgendering us.

in these people's ideal future, we'd still have no place, we're still too deviant, we'd still have to misgender ourselves when doing basic stuff like shopping.

[kkoffin]

trans men are men <3

He/him and testosterone won’t save you from misogyny. It doesn’t save anyone from genital mutilation or sex slavery. Child brides or rape. It won’t save you from men’s gaze and comments. It wouldn’t have saved comfort women or witches.

These are issues primarily women face, and women should bind together to fight against them. Have solidarity. A woman can be anything. If you want to play soccer, or have short hair, or even have a flat chest so men won’t look at you the way they do - you can do all of that as a woman.

I identified as a man because I hated being a woman. I hated the way we were treated. In all the media I consumed, women were jokes, sex objects, love interests, and background placeholders. Women were attractive and complacent. I wanted to be funny, respected. I didn’t want to wear makeup and be pink, and be “THE WOMAN!!!”. I wanted to be liked for what I was. It’s not that I wanted to be a man - It’s that I wanted to be a human.

I hated my body, I had eating disorders, and I hurt myself. My femaleness had only led to unnecessary suffering. None of this is inherent to my soul, it was inherent to society.

You are not the problem. Your body is not the problem. Your sex is not the problem. You do not need to change them. The problem is patriarchy. Women need to acknowledge such, bond together, and fight against it. Running away will not change anything.

Be respected as a woman. Be gender non-conforming. Be bold, have interests. Refuse to be treated the way they treat women.

There is nothing wrong with being a woman, in nature. Why do you not want to be a woman, in nature? because the way men treat women? because you feel forced to act feminine? because you want to be more than your sex? none of these have anything to do with your nature as woman or man, and everything to do with society, which we must work to change. Running won’t free you. You’ll run your whole life. Fighting will free if not you, than your daughters.

Gender is not real, sex is. Gender can be abolished. It does not matter. There are no gendered or sexed souls or brains.

[tiredyke]

ngl it irks me that people have removed butch and femme from their cultural significance and redefined them so much that they’re now synonymizing butch with “man-like” or masculine and femme with “woman-like”/feminine. like just completely abolishing the depth and significance of these identities to be two opposite ends of a cis-heteronormative spectrum (essentially reinventing m/f) as opposed to two complex and separate queer identities. so then you get people saying things like “futch” instead of genderfluid or genderqueer or nonbinary or bigender, all of which are real and valid things to be. butch and femme are not ends on a sliding scale, butch does not simply mean “masculine” and femme does not simply mean “feminine.” there’s other resources on this and other people who can explain it better than me but basically please don’t dilute the meaning of these cultural identities by putting them on a spectrum they don’t belong on.

edit: blocking people who leave annoying or dumb replies 💋❤️

[genderqueerdykes]

in response to the idea that all nonbinary people are afab i just wanted to clarify that amab and intersex nonbinary people are still nonbinary, still trans, and still queer, regardless of how they act, present, dress, or whether or not they choose to take hormones or not, and should still gain easy access to nonbinary, trans and queer spaces without question.

amab nonbinary, gnc, genderqueer, genderfluid and other gender variant people do not have to be passing as cis women or hyperfemme in order to be given a seat in their own community, amab nonbinary people do not owe you femininity or gender neutrality.

not a single agab "owns" the nonbinary experience and intersex and amab nonbinary people deserve community, and the right to talk about our unique queer experiences. abolish the idea that intersex and amab queer people are "invading" spaces that we rightfully belong to.

[trans-axolotl]

"Recounting this brief historical account alongside Semenya's sex-testing controversy draws attention to the way that the spectre of supposed degenerate genital and sexual ambiguity was, and remains to be, imagined and constructed by colonial and imperial forces across gender, racial, national, and geographical lines. The spectre of intersex has been and continues to be used as a colonial and imperial tool with which to classify racialized women and nations as suspicious, threatening Others in order to justify various forms of violence. Addressing the history of the construction of genital "ambiguity" underscores the fact that race and nation play a significant role in determining which body-minds are labelled sexually "ambiguous" or disorder, where the spectre supposedly haunts, and how citizenship statuses and nations are admonished (Magubane 2014). This history reveals how various forms of oppression literally and symbolically converge on and shape certain people's body-minds and nations. It contextualizes the violence enacted on Semenya--and other Black women athletes--and demonstrates the institutionalized violence that these athletes endured, and continue to endure.

...By exploiting and imposing Western notions of sex, gender, femininity, masculinity, pathology, and DSD, sport sex testing is used as a tool with which to limit, control, and impose sexual citizenship, intersex citizenship, or, if intersex is understood to be a disability, disability citizenship. Analyzing how the phantom is currently imagined to reside in women athletes of colour in colonized nations of the Global South also reveals that sex testing is used as a racist, colonial, imperial tool. And, it must be noted, this violent tool has always been used on already marginalized people: intersex, trans, racialized, queer, and colonized individuals and women. The fact that sex testing needs to be abolished is clear. Doing so would constitute a necessary decolonizing and anti-discriminatory undertaking. I endorse immediately scrapping all sex-testing policies and creating new policies that reject future sex-testing proposals and protect athletes from intersecting forms of discrimination."

-Cripping Intersex, pg 172-174, Celeste Orr

[thee-radio-host-is-a-kookaburra]

y’all are all “abolish gender stereotypes! do whatever you want!” but the second a guy wants to present femininely it’s either “he’s appropriating trans experiences!!” or “he’s an egg!!”

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

„why are radical feminists always talking about male violence? women can be violent too“

listen. violence will always exist because it is not (just) a gendered issue. even in a non-patriarchal society, there will be violence, because its sadly human nature to some degree. we as a society should strive to reduce violence. for that, we need to figure out why people become violent and how to prevent it, and how to protect potential victims, and how to intervene and stop violence that is already taking place.

in a patriarchal society, male violence is incentivised, fostered, legitimised, and even protected. female violence is not.

violence is essential for most conceptions of masculinity; the ability and will to enact violence to restore your or your familys honour, for example. that is not expected of women. the military is a male institution, meant to defend and protect; reflecting mens supposed role in the patriarchy to defend and protect (with violence if needed). women are the creators of life, meant to be nurturing, passive. being aggressive is unfeminine - its masculine. men who are not aggressive/violent enough are actually chastised by other men and sometimes even women (for example being called pussy, gay, which is demeaning in a patriarchal context). a man hitting his woman is considered right and normal still in a lot of milieus and cultures, and has been for the longest time. a man enacting violence is living up to his manliness, other men respect him for it most of the time, especially if its against women or even other men. gang violence is another good example of this: men not bound to law will resort to violence.

the patriarchy needs male violence: the constant threat of male violence keeps women in our meant role as submissive and small, and other men in a constant need to prove themselves, keeping the cycle of violence going. so women need men to protect us, from other men. and we accept and excuse mistreatment and disrespect by men.

and then there is sexual violence which men are already more predisposed to enact because they have a penis, and a penis can reach orgasm by penetration whether that be forceful or not. and then the patriarchy enforces this through phallocentrism, through a culture of treating the penis as a weapon, as superior, as a tool that can dirty and undignify others. as a means of enacting violence. this is not the case for vaginas, they are reduced to just „holes“. penetration and how its treated is a key element of the patriarchy. homophobia stems from this too: penetrating someone is treated as an act of domination, and its supposed to be men dominating women this way, which means men being penetrated are „lesser“ men or even considered feminine.

this is why we need separatist options. single sex spaces, especially when girls and women are in an intimate or vulnerable position there. to protect. this is why we talk about male violence, to uncover the roots, how it is ignored, downplayed, and even encouraged and justified, which leads to violence. female violence is sometimes not taken seriously because it is not meant to exist, it is against feminine gender roles and how women are supposed to act in the patriarchy. which means if gender was abolished - which radical feminists are striving for - this issue would be solved with it.

[integra1127grimmreaper]

The Path of Gods: A Daughter's Sacrifice - Part I

Marcus Acacius Masterlist

Series Masterlist

Warning:

Summary: Eldest child and only daughter to the late emperor, half-sister to the present reigning emperors and the first female general in Roman history. Said to have been blessed by the goddess Minerva (Athena) with the wisdom of strategic warfare and brute strength never having been witnessed to be held by a mortal female in all existence. Infamously known as the Severan Harpy, adored by many, yet feared by all. You sacrifice all; body, mind, soul, and lastly, love... all in the name of loyalty to family. This your story, the prelude to your greatest battle yet to come.

Merely a magistrate under the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius and already having been married for three years; Lucius Septimius Severus and his wife yearned with their whole being for a child and prayed for anyone of the gods to grant their hearts desire at any cost. Through divine power, their prayers had been answered by the Goddess of wisdom, warfare, and handicraft, the goddess Minerva, yet it would come at costly leniency toward the child's heartfelt desires. That night they were both visited by the goddess within the dream-realm.

"I beseech any of the gods to answer my prayers and bless me with a child!" the woman tearfully pleads out into the open abyss surrounding her.

"Wipe away your tears child, your prayers have been answered..." a firm feminine voice utters out from above her.

Tearful gaze raising upward, the woman gasps out in realization that she was now in the presence of the goddess Minerva, "my Goddess!", her head dips back down in respect.

"Lift your head up, child", the goddess commands.

"You honor me, my Goddess" the woman raises her head.

"You have suffered greatly in your quest for a child..." the goddess stares at her sympathetically.

"My Goddess, I-"

"Hush now, child" the goddess cuts her off. "It is done. You shall have the child which you yearn for."

"Praise be to you, my Goddess!" the woman cries out in joy, dropping back down to bow.

"It will come at a price though" the goddess utters then.

"Anything!" the woman eagerly agrees, "anything you ask for, my goddess!"

"This child shall not be like any other mortal" the goddess explains, "the child shall be gifted in many ways, therefore its potential shall not be hindered, no matter the circumstance."

"As you command, my goddess" the woman bows in agreement.

"What is this place?!" Septimius scans the open abyss in confusion.

"Cease your hysteria, mortal!" the goddess Minerva appears in front of him.

"My Goddess!" Septimius abruptly drops to his knees.

"Arise so I may directly address you, mortal", the goddess commands and he does as told. "I have granted the prayers of yours. There shall be a child born unto you and your wife."

"I thank you, my Goddess!" Septimius drops into a bow again.

"You may not be so grateful, as it will come at a price", the goddess remarks.

"Speak it and it shall be done, my Goddess..." Septimius instantly agrees as she continues explaining.

"The child shall be extraordinary, far more than any mortal ever, a master strategist and exceptional warrior."

"That is more than I could ever ask for, thank you Goddess..." Septimius ecstatically responds.

"You shall swear an oath; that the child's potential shall be fulfilled, that nothing nor no one shall hinder it."

"As you command, my Goddess", Septimius submits, "I swear upon my life."

"Your life is meaningless to me" the goddess remarks. "Should you break your oath; your entire bloodline shall be abolished though."

"I swear to uphold the oath, regardless of all circumstances" Septimius responds.

"Excellent" the goddess nods, a glint of satisfaction passing her eyes. "Now return to the waking-realm. Your child awaits you..."

"She should be preparing for marriage, not warfare", your mother mutters in disapproval.

"You know as well as I, that is not a matter of importance" your father responds as he proudly observed your training in the courtyard.

Your mother scoffs in response, "how is she to find a husband if she is marred with battle scars?!"

Turning around, your father shoots her a warning glare. "We made an oath. Should we not uphold it; then our entire bloodline shall be eradicated!"

Your mother opens her mouth to speak but it cuts her short. "Enough! Valeria shall do as she pleases. We are merely here to nurture and guide her through the path that she chooses."

"As you wish" your mother mutters under her breath, tilting her chin upward in dissatisfaction. "I, however, refuse to stand here and witness my only daughter becoming scarred and disfigured!"

"You underestimate my girl, woman!" your father scoff's. "She has already outwitted and conquered all her mentors and yet there is still room for improvement."

"What do mean?"

"The emperor has heard of our daughter's abilities and has sent for a military commander to assess her."

Your mother's eyes widen in shocked, "who?"

"The newly appointed, General Acacius."

"Him?!" your mother screech's, "he is a harsh man and even more merciless warrior."

"Which makes him perfect!" your father excitedly exclaims. "Acacius is also the only one closer in age to her."

"I would hardly call a man in his thirties being close in age to a sixteen-year-old girl!"

"He will have more patience with her than the elder generals" your father attempts to sooth her fears. "They might even fall in love... you do wish for her to find a husband after all."

"The situation suddenly no longer seems as horrible..." you mother remarks, deep in thought.

"Precisely!" your father grins in response, "he would be a great advantage to our family."

"Acacius might be the only man capable of taming our Valeria..." your mother agrees.

"Yes, that may all be well and good, but we cannot force it" your father reminds her, "it must be Valeria's own decision."

"Very well" your mother nods in agreement, "yet, I shall nonetheless pray to the gods for it."

"As you should..." your father matter-of-factly state, turning back toward watching you train.

"So, this the girl I am here for...?" General Acacius stood scrutinizing your fight against your latest mentor.

"That is my daughter, Valeria, yes" your father comments proudly. "She is everything you would desire for a skilled warrior."

"Except for the fact that she is a girl", Acacius remarks.

"Skill is skill, regardless of one's sex" your father scoffs, "she is a formidable force when it comes to fighting."

"I would not boast so loudly if I were you", Acacius warns your father, "the emperor might come with the idea to thrust her into the gladiator fights."

"I have already steered him away from those thoughts" your father assures him. "I thank you for your concerns though."

"Then he has considered it?" Acacius' eyes widen in shock and your father snorts in amusement.

"A young, beautiful woman, with the skill and power she possesses...? Of course, he would. It would be of great entertainment to watch her rip apart the gladiators one after the other."

For a split second, Acacius felt his cock twitch at the vision described to him. Awkwardly clearing his throat, nodding toward the courtyard then. "Let us begin."

"Come now Caius, that cannot be all you have to offer..." you playfully taunt your mentor, who was breathing harshly whilst you had barely broken a sweat.

"That mouth of yours will wind you up in trouble one day, little one" he warns, a smirk spreading across his face when noticing the general and your father approaching from behind you.

You scoff in amusement at his word, "you are only bitter because you could not outbest me!"

Caius' smirk spreads to a full-blown grin as he taps a finger against his temple. "In time, little one..."

You were about to retort, when Caius' suddenly bows and then silently proceeds to walk off.

"Caius where are you going?!", you frown at his retreating form, taking a step forward. "Caius?! Wher-" you were cut off by a harsh tug of your braid. A large hand winds the braid tighter around it, tugging you backward against a hard chest.

"Your number one weakness when in the battlefield...", a harsh male voice snarls into your ear.

Basic instinct instantly kicking; you throw your head backward full force into his face, driving your elbow into his gut thereafter as you rip loose from his grip.

"Valeria!!!", your father bellows out as you whirl around to face them with your sword held up. You silently stared as he rushes toward the whizzing man, doubled over, "General Acacius?!"

The man pushes your father aside as he stood up and silently glared at you. With a mocking arched brow and a head tilt; you reach back for the tail of your braid, pulling it taut as you lift the sword up to cut it off. "Issue solved", you remark, tossing the braid at his feet.

"My apologies, General", your father splutters out, "my daughter has a tendency to act before thinking."

"I thought about my action before executing them", you comment, refusing to back down.

"Valeria!" your father scolds you, turning toward Acacius to apologize yet again but the general pays him no attention. His lips twitching in silent amusement at your antics.

"Feisty... I like it." 

Pt II

[abtrusion]

Theories of the holy shit what did I just see back there on the street?

Because transmisogyny makes them so impossible to ignore, for at least the last 70 years transfeminized people have served as key material of Anglo-American gender/queer/trans theories, as laundered through anthropology, sexology, and uncited personal witnessing. The anaemic denial of this fact through snappy and surface-level distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ and between different transfeminized groups has made it functionally impossible for these theories to seriously account for transf* life, and this failure is highly productive, because it allows for the continued use of both ‘premodern’ ‘third gender’ and ‘postmodern’ transgenderism as lobotomized material for the theories of other people. The last century of gender theoretic development has revolved around slowly refining methods of extracting transfeminized peoples’ insight, forgetting and re-introducing them to their field over and over again to frame them as perpetual novelties, leading to a pernicious form of feminist amnesia that repeats over and over again.

1 . MARGARET MEAD (1949)

The work begins with Margaret Mead, the ‘most famous anthropologist of our century’ (Behar and Gordon 1996), who made her career studying indigenous groups in Samoa and New Guinea, then joined the larger anthropological effort to inform the US Government’s genocidal re-education campaigns against Indigenous American tribes. She later enjoyed a prodigious career as a public intellectual and shifted to more explicitly feminist writing which extensively influenced the movements of the 60s and 70s. Mead argued that essentially all sex-gender roles were culturally determined, and used the specter of the transfeminized homosexual-transvestite both to make that argument and to advocate for gender abolition.

This can be seen most clearly in Mead’s 1949 book Male and Female: a Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Mead chronologically traces individual gender development through an ethnographic-sexological narrative, beginning with ‘first learnings’ that a child receives primarily through observation. Then the family comes in, and the transvestite comes with it, existing as the primary motive (alongside Freudian sexual attachment) which motivates gendered socialization:

Too great softness, too great passivity, in the male and he will not become a man. The American Plains Indians, valuing courage in battle above all other qualities, watched their little boys with desperate intensity, and drove a fair number of them to give up the struggle and assume women’s dress. (Mead 1949)

Mead argues that “fear that boys will be feminine in behavior may drive many boys into taking refuge in explicit femininity,” but makes a distinction between this identification and what she calls ‘full transvestitism,’ the culturally-specific recognition of that status. This differential leads her to conclude that the physical traits seen as markers of ‘gender inversion’ are culturally specific, and that what is understood as physical sex (then existing on a ‘spectrum’ model) is therefore partially socially determined.

For Mead, gender must be abolished precisely because of the fact that she could even make this argument. As she says,

Only a denial of life itself makes it possible to deny the interdependence of the sexes. Once that interdependence is recognized and traced in minute detail to the infant’s first experience of the contrast between the extra roughness of a shaven cheek and a deeper voice and his mother’s softer skin and higher voice, any programme which claims that the wholeness of one sex can be advanced without considering the other is automatically disallowed.

The desperate need to reproduce these distinctions, to make sex clear and visible and obvious, leads Mead to ultimately argue for a gender abolition that rests on complementary sex-roles. The main benefit of this approach for Mead is the complete eradication of sex-gender ‘confusion’ and its incarnation in transfeminized people, so associated precisely because of their intense usefulness as a tool for undermining sex-gender distinctions. So Mead sees the construction of physical and social gender by using transfeminized people as a lens, but because of her own disgust she can only fix gender by unseeing it again, by displacing gender to ‘real’ physical sex and protecting herself by breaking the tool. This, unsurprisingly, leaves her exactly where she started.

2. BETTY FRIEDAN (1963)

The feminist theorists that came after Mead directly confronted this reversion to ‘complementary sex’ logics, most notably in Betty Friedan’s foundational work The Feminine Mystique. Friedan discusses the ‘paradox’ of Mead’s influence, the strange combination of her exposure of ‘the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature’ and her ‘glorification of women in the female role – as defined by their sexual biological function.’ In the middle, Friedan cites a page-long quote describing a point of ambivalent warning in Mead’s writing:

The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature… Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls… Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s” … Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the biological functions of women. (emph added by me)

...Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it…

...We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences? … If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement?

Friedan attributes this ultimate focus on sexual difference to Mead’s Freudianism: she argues that Mead’s need to approach culture and personality through sexual difference, combined with her anthropological understanding that ‘there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation’ (Friedan and Quindlen 1963), combines to cause her to inflate the cultural importance of the reproductive role of women. Friedan intensely rebukes this reification of reproduction as another component of the ‘feminine mystique’ (very close to the modern ‘divine feminine’), advocating for programs which enable women to reject the mystique and housewife status and to seek education and employment, to combat the problem ‘which had no name’ but takes shape through spikes in female ‘sex-hunger’ and ‘overt manifestations’ of passive male homosexuality, both understood as ‘children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers.’ In a paradoxical return to Freudianism, Friedan characterizes husbands unwilling to let their wives work as being seduced ‘by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother’ (the Freudian homosexuality-signifier), associating antifeminism with passive homosexuality with femininity which the aspiring feminist has escaped, learning to compete “not as a woman, but as a human being.”

3. THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRANSFEMINIZED SUBJECTS

As we can see, transfeminized subjects are frequently used as signs of system collapse, hypervisible enough to be easy examples and potent enough to rhetorically corrode existing sex-gender systems in preparation for the author’s own vision. Once a piece is published, these examples are usually then forgotten, assumed as scaffolding for the real theory; but the rhetorical strawmen of these transfeminized subjects still remain, trapped implicitly in the text, and they bleed into one another with every new addition to the corpus, every call to action invoking a new transfeminized archetype.

So far we have seen Mead’s anthropological-orientalist framing of ‘transvestitism’ among the anthropological Other and Friedan’s psychological framing of ‘passive homosexuality’ in the United States. The increasing visibility of adult ‘transsexuality,’ somewhat disjoint from the developmental sexology Gill-Peterson (2017) discusses because of its visibility in high-profile cases like Christine Jorgensen, was likewise framed for theory. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which described methods for observing ‘the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment,’ used an intersex woman named Agnes as an avenue to expose how everyday social facts are constructed. Agnes was an ideal exemplar because her insistence on getting HRT and being seen as a woman was considered psychologically normal: “Such insistence was not accompanied by clinically interesting ego defects. These persons contrast in many interesting ways with transvestites, trans-sexualists, and homosexuals.” Of course, Garfinkel was later notified that Agnes did not have an intersex condition, and he then noted that ‘this news turned the article into a feature of the same circumstances it reported, i.e. into a situated report.’

Anyways, now it’s time for yet another transfeminized subject: the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian feminist.’

4. JANICE RAYMOND (1979)

As with her predecessors, Raymond sees analytical power in her particular transfeminized group, arguing that “transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotypes in a role-defined society.” But she also has some concerns for ‘transsexual women,’ initially assumed heterosexual, none of which are particularly novel or interesting. Now that she’s writing in an environment dominated by Friedan’s mandate towards shedding femininity, feminist amnesia makes it novel to regurgitate Margaret Mead’s responses: that “male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex-role molding has wrought on men,” and that “men recognize the power that women have by virtue of female biology and the fact that this power, symbolized in giving birth, is not only procreative but multidimensionally creative” (Raymond 1979).

Her analysis of (new archetype) ‘transsexually-constructed lesbian feminism’ is much more interesting. While Raymond can understand heterosexual transsexual women as ‘reinforcing gender stereotyping’ by pulling primarily from medical archives already hegemonized by gatekeeping and passing requirements, the transsexual women in the lesbian-feminist movement achieved a certain degree of personal contact and visibility that undermined ‘hegemonizing’ logics. So Raymond uses three main arguments: an essentialist appeal to fundamental ‘maleness,’ a red-scare-esque appeal to transsexual lesbian feminists as ‘court eunuchs’ bent on monitoring and controlling feminist spaces, and finally, an argument that transsexual lesbian feminists are fundamentally epistemically corrosive to lesbian feminist spaces:

Whereas the lesbian-feminist crosses the boundary of her patriarchally imposed sex role, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is a boundary violator. This violation is also profoundly mythic, for as Norman O. Brown writes of Dionysus, he as the ‘‘mad god who breaks down boundaries.’’

Contrary to contemporary transmisogynistic discourse which frames trans lesbians as personal threats to women in lesbian-feminist spaces, this violation takes its form not in any particular act but in the act of passing, the deconstructive question this existence seemingly automatically places on lesbian-feminist spaces:

One of the most constraining questions that transsexuals, and, in particular, transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists, pose is the question of self-definition—who is a woman, who is a lesbian-feminist? But, of course, they pose the question on their terms, and we are faced with answering it.

Raymond notes with some frustration that this transsexual question has been discussed ‘out of proportion to their actual numbers,’ using up valuable feminist energy, and frames this as a symptom and crime of transsexual lesbianism itself. The trans question is transsexual women; like the theorists before her, she sees transfeminized people as a gaping hole in the gendered world, but now they’re inside her house, feeding “off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” and inherently stand to break “the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness,” to dissolve lesbian-feminism itself.

I want to stress two main points in all of this. First, Raymond understands studying transsexualism as a crucial tool for answering ‘the question of what gender is’ and ‘how to challenge it.’ Second, Raymond’s anxiety about transsexual lesbian-feminists moves away from specific actions and towards the ‘penetration’ inherent in their existence in these spaces at all, the understanding that transsexual women are inherently corrosive to lesbian-feminist movements. These two points are clearly linked. Raymond understands transsexuality as a form of epistemic gender acid, something that can be useful at arm’s length but is deadly up close. Of course, the transfeminized people she discusses were not necessarily invested in asking the Trans Question themselves; trans women attended lesbian-feminist events like Michfest before and after their trans exclusion policies, and regardless of ‘passing’ many people enjoyed a form of don’t ask don’t tell (Tagonist 1997). But within these spaces, the Trans* Question long predated the actual existence of transfeminized people – so once they arrived, the Question and person were fundamentally linked. Trans theorists have negotiated this association extensively, but that’s not the topic of this essay, so I’ll leave you with some sources (Stryker 1994; Stone 1992) and move to Butler.

5. JUDITH BUTLER (1990)

This work has been done already by Vivian Namaste (2020), who argues that “contemporary discussions of Anglo-American feminist theory, exemplified in Butler’s work, begin with the Transgender Question as a way to narrow our focus to the constitution, reproduction, and resignification of gender.” This singular focus on the ‘Transgender Question’ has made it functionally impossible for Anglo-American feminist theory to consider the outsized role of work, particularly sex work, in motivating the discrimination and violence against transfeminized people of color: “framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as ‘gender violence’ is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal nature-a violence at the level of epistemology itself.”

Namaste attributes this focus on featureless ‘gender violence’ to a crippling lack of empiricism, a lack of researcher-subject equity, and an exclusion of subject knowledges. She provides an effective power-based solution to this epistemic violence – that feminist theorists should talk with the subjects of their theory and give them some measure of power in the transaction – a sort of endpoint analysis which means she doesn’t need to consider too much of the internals of the system she’s challenging. That’s a good idea for her work, but with the benefit of history we can move differently. The next section synthesizes Butler, Friedan, Mead, and Raymond together to provide a functionalist analysis of the feminist theoretic use of transfeminized people. What are the benefits of using transfeminized people as an epistemic tool in feminist theory? What are the dangers of using this epistemic tool, and how does feminist theory manage those dangers?

6. PATTERNS OF EXTRACTION AND DEFENSE

Looking past Butler and further into the past reveals that transfeminized people have been crucial not just to the feminist theory of the past 20 years, but have served as exemplars as far back as the 1940s. The ‘Trans* Question,’ which frames transfeminized people as the most visible signifier and most horrifying symptom of social gender, has been cyclically used in a form of feminist cultural amnesia:

A transfeminized group serves as a hypervisible example to 'deconstruct' social gender

Transfeminized deconstruction bloats beyond itself, undermining 'sex traits' or 'femaleness' or some other foundational category of feminist analysis.

Reconstruction of gender as 'biological sex,' alliance between feminist theorists and men of all stripes by arguing that post-gender eradication of transfeminized people will (a) allow men to be feminine without becoming women or (b) destroy femininity entirely.

New-generation feminist theorists realize their predecessors have reinvented social gender. Return to (1).

As Margaret Mead’s work shows, the use of transfeminized groups to deconstruct both physical and social gender has been observed regardless of transmedicalization. This helical pattern has a few general properties:

Each cycle introduces a distinct transfeminized group, positioning it against prior groups as uniquely suitable for analysis, but simultaneously blurs the new group into the existing melange.

This "Trans* Queston" is almost entirely devoid of group-specific context and rooted in transmisogyny, which positions them as horrifying and visible symptoms of social gender.

Each "Trans* Question" initially exposes social gender, but constantly threatens to dissolve other categories or even the theorist's own writing as socially constructed, against the theorist's will.

Each new cycle demonstrates near-complete historical amnesia as to the relevance of transfeminized people in the prior theoretical move.

So the “Trans* Question” allows for the basic feminist move, asserting that gender is socially constructed, but if improperly controlled it stands to dissolve virtually any definition feminist theorists try to build. To be clear, I do not believe in the total deconstruction of categories – you need definitions, even ones you acknowledge as imprecise, to say anything at all. But transfeminized people probably have pretty solid ideas about gender, having to, you know, live with it. The alienated ‘Trans Question*’ has none of this insight, appearing instead as a gaping epistemic hole in the world, and so feminist theorists are forced to come up with complicated quarantining measures to keep the Question from spilling over.

What jeopardizes feminist theory’s use of the Question? One answer (among many) comes by looking at Mead, who concluded that physical characteristics seen as ‘sex traits’ were socially constructed by looking at the culture-specific construction of what she called ‘full transvestitism.’ In this case, the Question undermined sex when the social position of transfeminized subjects were seen as simultaneously normative and anti-normative, existing in some normative ‘social’ role while being understood as distinct from non-transfeminized subjects via another ‘natural’ axis. The fact that these splits were made differently across different transfeminized groups undermined the distinction between social and ‘natural/biological’ aspects of gender, and because the alienated Question provides no means of making anything solid out of any of this, Mead retreated to the womb.

So understanding that the Question allows for the deconstruction of gender, and that it overgrows when multiple (studied as) semi-normative transfeminized groups are cross-compared with one another, we can consider aspects of contemporary feministqueertrans theory that enforce the epistemic isolation and normativization/antinormativization of transfeminized groups. The knots this ties in feminist theories seem relevant both to the ‘why does trans theory exist’ question posed by Chu & Drager (2019) and to the challenges and limitations of applying queer/trans theory to groups outside the anglosphere (Chiang 2021, Savci 2021). I’ll discuss that more in another essay.

SOURCES

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1996. Women Writing Culture. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press.

Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.

Friedan, Betty, and Anna Quindlen. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1st edition. Cambridge Oxford Malden,MA: Polity.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2017. “Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender.” Angelaki 22 (2): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.

Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. First Edition. William Morrow.

Namaste, Viviane. 2020. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun, 5th edition. New York, NY London: Routledge.

Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.

Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press Books.

Stone, Sandy. 1992. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2 (29)): 150–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

Tagonist, Anne. 1997. “Sister Subverter Diary August ’97.” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender.