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gatheringbones · 3 years

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["Dannia and I did several anti-racism trainings together. Our workshop model began in the morning with written personal reflections, moved on in the afternoon to role-plays of interrupting racism, and was supposed to end with a discussion of anti-racist activism. Our most effective ploy was a role play in which a white daughter or son returned home for Thanksgiving and had to deal with the father's racist comments over turkey— a scenario guaranteed to generate collective meltdown. We found that participants became so absorbed in the interpersonal issues that we never got to the activism. Were we starting at the wrong end of the process?

These politics will be recognizable to many lesbians who lived during these years. We had an ideological unity then that did not survive the 1980s, for better or for worse. Class and race divisions did not dissolve so easily in the solvent of our sisterhood. "Sex radicals" raised questions about the nature of lesbian and female sexuality that many feminists, straight and lesbian, had no tolerance to hear, and the "sex wars" tore through the community. AIDS soon began to impact all of our lives. There were deeper schisms among women, and new alliances with gay men. A younger lesbian generation began to shape a different politics in the space that we had worked to open for them.

(...) Lesbian-Feminism in the 1970s taught that you should not work with straight women because they "gave all their [and therefore your] energy to men." After Feminary imploded, I figured, Shit, nothing could be worse than this. That's when I went to a meeting in Durham of the National Anti-Klan Network to hear from Leah Wise, Lauren Martin, and Reverend Wilson Lee that North Carolina had the worst Klan/Nazi movement in the country and they were looking for local people to organize. It was 1983 and I was ready to take the plunge. In this border crossing between the lesbian and feminist and the anti-racist movement, I began to realize how such movements separate people as much as bring them together. I found a compelling and complicated reality that neither race theory and organizing, nor class theory and organizing, nor feminist theory and organizing is capable of handling.

Lesbian-feminism had given me a clear analysis of how power operates among people and in a culture's institutions. But it gave me few of the specific skills I needed: how to put on a press conference, build up a computer database, interact with community agencies, organize white and Black people in small towns and cities, or monitor and call to accountability the criminal justice system. With Feminary, our battle had been largely interior, a psychic confrontation with the lethal forces of the culture as we had internalized them. It was an intense, revealing, but sometimes insular process. The "politics of identity" could easily slip into a politics of victimhood and guilt, its focus more purity of consciousness than effectiveness of social change. By 1983, I had hit the limits of this internal work. (I was not the only dyke to think that lesbian-feminism was dangerously over-literate and under-strategic.) Guided by the people who eventually incorporated North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, I set to work to learn to organize.

(...) The shit hit the fan about a year after NCARRV had begun our work in Statesville. A woman involved in the national work suddenly brought up gay issues across Flora's kitchen table. Flora and I were friends by that time. I had come out to her the evening she had asked me whether my interest in the Statesville work came because I also had a Black lover. She was on the right track, I had explained, telling her of my different outcast status. "We still love you," she had said, and reached across the table to take my hand.

Okay, I thought when the woman confronted me. You want this discussion, you'll get it.

Soon everybody had fled the room except my opponent, Flora, and me, as I heard how being gay was like being on heroin, and how this particular woman was raising her daughter to be heterosexual, and how she wouldn't want her organization to take a stand on homophobia because it might promote heterosexuality.

"If I ever have a child," I countered, "the main thing I will teach her about relationships is that she deserves love and intimacy and should never let herself be abused. What this is all about— gay rights and these cross burnings to which Flora and Joe have been subjected— is the right of human beings to love."

Flora stayed beside me, nodding agreement.

When I got back Durham, I called Leah Wise to report. Whenever an emergency arise, I could count on her to let me sit down near her desk for five or ten minutes to think it through. It was natural that I take the incident at Flora's back to her. She responded immediately, "This homophobia is like racism; it's got to be opposed." We arranged a further discussion with the woman in question, and Leah came with me for support. On the way back, Leah took the time to share with me all the things she saw me doing right.

I was intensely grateful. "Shit, Leah," I replied, wedged in the seat adjacent to hers on the plane. "I feel like I do not know what I am doing most of the time. All you folks have all this political history, and here I am flying by the seat of my pants."

"Actually, it's better that way," she said. "A lot of times, that other sectarian stuff just gets in the way."

Her ready support in challenging homophobia and her affirmation of my work marked a major turning point for me. If I knew my enemies, I also knew my friends. Perhaps I could stop looking over my shoulder.

Leah affirmed my instincts to build not just coalitions, but movements grounded in relationships. I figured I was doing work on racism and anti-Semitism because it was the right thing to do, and once I laid out the case about homophobia, the people I was working with would do the same for me and mine. I was not disappointed. The result was friendships that come among people who catalyze changes in each other. Our work carried a lot of risk, but the risk gave us occasions to develop substantial trust. I was scared shitless a lot of the time, but I never regretted what I was doing.

After thirty-five years, my life was no longer segregated.

Somewhere in my metamorphosis, I realized that I could not longer settle for "lesbian space" as just one room, or camp, or building, although I was, and am, still grateful for those gathering places. The Reagan era made it clear: there is no separate safety. "Lesbian space" had better be a world where everyone belongs."]

Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor, The New Press, 1994

#mab segrest #lesbian separatism #lesbian feminism #lesbian literature #history stuff #wasteland radio

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crossdreamers · 4 years

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Lesbians support transgender people

Lesbian trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” are claiming that transgender culture is erasing lesbian identities. Given all the noise they make, you may get the impression that most lesbians share their beliefs. This is not true.

In fact, my own experience from Norway tells me that most lesbians embrace the T in LGBTQA, and see that transgender people and lesbians face the same kind of oppression: Attacks from reactionary people who believe the cisgender/heterosexual gender norm should apply to everyone.

The lesbian erasure narrative

Over at Advocate the lesbian writer Sarah Fonseca (photo above) takes a look at Abigail Shrier’s transphobic book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and touches upon the the “lesbians are going extinct” narrative.

She writes:

Naturally, the assertion of Shrier that lesbians, tomboys, and lesbian tomboys are going the way of the dodo bird seeks to create pandemonium among queer girls who identify as such.

And Irreversible Damage dares to inflict this very damage at a critical moment when lesbian social spaces that weren’t already shuttered are suffering due to national lockdown, and our community’s women — sociable, tactful, and independent of others’ transitions — are left to their own devices...

As a lesbian reader of sound gender, I still find it enormously unpleasant to be repeatedly told that I do not exist or that my gender and sexuality will inevitably shift, all because of a societal trend and its societal pressures; it is all too reminiscent of the comments foisted upon many of us by heterosexuals upon coming out.

Fortunately, Shrier lacks two pieces of vital information. First, the lesbian is the mistress of silently and confidently auditing her own gender. She continues to exist because she abides by no one’s stringent rules...

We are hardly obsolete. If anything, we are just getting started. Our first mission? Disavowing Irreversible Damage. Our second? Taking care of our trans siblings. Our third? Reversing the damage that Shrier has done to lesbian reputation. The fourth? I do not know, but I hope it involves dancing and queers of every stripe, imagined and yet to be.

Abigail Shrier, who is a privileged white, straight and cis woman, is using the lesbian extinction scare to create a split in the queer community, not because she care about lesbians.

Enriched by trans people

In an article in the British Independent, Carrie Lyell puts it this way:

I don’t recall a plethora of columns offering solidarity from heterosexual “feminists” before so many latched on to lesbians as a way to push their agenda on trans issues. There was no faux-concern from our “straight allies” on any of those occasions, no calls to celebrate my swashbuckling swagger. Straight women were often the first to tell me to grow my hair, shave my legs or be more “ladylike”.

Instead I found comfort in the LGBT+ community and learnt resilience from those around me. While the world tried to box me in and crush my queer spirit, I was lifted up by lesbians, gay men, bi people and, yes, trans people.

Lyell (photo from twitter above) is the editor of DIVA, a queer magazine. She writes that she has never met a trans person who has tried to convert her.

“Not for one minute have I felt erased by trans people,” she writes: “If anything, I feel enriched.”

The great majority of lesbians feel this kind of kinship with trans people, and support them.

They used the same tactics against lesbians

In another article Fonseca points out the similarities found in the way the cis/heterosexual majority used to invalidate and attack lesbian women:

Queers and trans people have historically witnessed our bodies be weaponized in pursuit of the same old Cis American Dream by those on both sides of the political divide.

In the sensational Women’s Lib text The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan was quick to distance herself and her movement from lesbians, writing them off as “disruptors” and members of “extreme left groups.” ...

Unsympathetic to lesbian concerns about child custody and sexual liberation, she referred to the burgeoning group of dykes seeking representation in the larger women’s movement “the lavender menace.”

The same tactics were used against gay men and lesbian women as the TERFs are using now: the sexual predator tropé, the mental illness narrative and the “stupid people seduced by extremists” invalidation.

All the leading lesbian magazines support the trans community

Remember that back in 2018 the world’s leading publications for lesbians came together to send a message of support and solidarity to the trans community. They wrote:

DIVA, Curve, Autostraddle, LOTL, Tagg, Lez Spread The Word, DapperQ, GO Magazine and LezWatch.TV believe that trans women are women and that trans people belong in our community. We do not think supporting trans women erases our lesbian identities; rather we are enriched by trans friends and lovers, parents, children, colleagues and siblings.

We strongly condemn writers and editors who seek to foster division and hate within the LGBTQI community with trans misogynistic content, and who believe “lesbian” is an identity for them alone to define. We condemn male-owned media companies who profit from the traffic generated by these controversies.

We also strongly condemn the current narrative peddled by some feminists, painting trans people as bullies and aggressors – one which reinforces transphobia and which must be challenged so that feminism can move forward.

We are really concerned about the message these so-called lesbian publications are sending to trans women and to young lesbians – including trans lesbians – and we want to make in clear this is not in our name.

Photo of Sarah Fonseca from Posture Mag.

See also: “Lesbians Turning On Elliot Page Is Not An Isolated Event, And We Need To Talk About It.”

#lesbian #lgbt #lgbtqa #trans #transgender #nonbinary #enby #lgbtqi #glbt #terf #terfs #gender critical #transphobia

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woman-loving · 4 years

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I don’t identity as a “bi lesbian,” but I feel there is room for a woman to identify as both bisexual and gay/lesbian, and I don’t agree with the arguments I’ve seen against “bi lesbian” identity.

One thing that annoys me about detractors of the identity is the occasional claim that it is basically an internet phenomenon that arose within the last five years or so. Actually, women have been claiming both bisexual and lesbian identities for decades. There have constantly been debates about how bi women fit within lesbianism, lesbian identity, and lesbian community since the gay/lesbian movements have been active. This isn’t something that has ever been universally agreed upon, and there never will be universal agreement on it.

Just for reference and historical interest, I’ve compiled a few selections from articles and books, mostly from the 80s and 90s, that are by or about lesbian-identified (or gay-identified) bisexual woman, or that at least mention them. Inclusion doesn’t indicate my approval of the author’s perspective or argument; this is to provide a bit of history on the discourse.

What is a Lesbian? To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not have to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other.

--Trish Miller, "Bisexuality," Lavender Woman, Vol 2 Issue 5, August 1973.

The definition of lesbian that I suggest, one that conforms to the two methodological considerations above, is the following:

5. Lesbian is a woman who has sexual and erotic-emotional ties primarily with women or who sees herself as centrally involved with a community of self-identified lesbians whose sexual and erotic-emotional ties are primarily with women; and who is herself a self-identifed lesbian.

My definition is a sociopolitical one; that is, it attempts to include in the term lesbian the contemporary sense of lesbianism as connected with a subcultural community, many members of which are opposed to defining themselves as dependent on or subordinate to men. It defines both bisexual and celibate women as lesbians as long as they identify themselves as such and have their primary emotional identification with a community of self-defined lesbians. Furthermore, for reasons I will outline shortly, there was no lesbian community in which to ground a sense of self before the twentieth century, a fact which distinguishes the male homosexual community from the lesbian community. Finally, it is arguable that not until this particular stage in the second wave of the women’s movement and in the lesbian-feminist movement has it been politically feasible to include self-defined lesbian bisexual women into the lesbian community.

Many lesbian feminists may not agree with this inclusion. But it may be argued that to exclude lesbian bisexuals from the community on the grounds that “they give energy to men” is overly defensive at this point. After all, a strong women’s community does not have to operate on a scarcity theory of nurturant energy! On feminist principles the criterion for membership in the community should be a woman’s commitment to giving positive erotic-emotional energy to women. Whether women who give such energy to women can also give energy to individual men (friends, fathers, sons, lovers) is not the community’s concern.

--Ann Ferguson, “Patriarchy, Sexual Identity, and the Sexual Revolution,” Signs, Autumn 1981.

Individuals who came together a month ago to discuss bisexuality and its relationship to radical feminism decided recently to begin a serious, regular study group on human sexuality and its social/political/psychological manifestations in our culture.

There are eight of us in the group. For all, understanding bisexuality, both in our own lives and and in our society, is a primary goal. To this end, we decided on a format of readings and discussion, with a facilitator for each meeting, that would bring us through the range of sexual options available in the United States today, from male-identified heterosexuality to lesbianism, to a final informed examination of bisexuality in the context of all that we had learned. Throughout our exploration, feminism will provide both a point of departure, and a point of return.

We started by trying to define some terms, specifically "feminism," "gay-identified bisexual," and "bisexual". Alot of us were amazed to see how many different interpretations each term, especially "gay-identified," could have. Is someone "gay-identified" because they devote a majority of their time, energy and emotion to the gay community? Or does an individual's radical critique of heterosexuality make them "gay-identified"? And does "gay-identified" also imply "women-identified"? Some people felt that one could be gay-identified, and still not be woman-identified. And exactly how many Meg Christian concerts make you "lesbian-identified"?

We didn't reach any conclusions, but had fun realizing that being bisexuals, we are dealing with a whole realm of experiences that can be classified in any number of different ways; and that the variety of possible bisexual lifestyles is as varied as the women who are in the Network.

--Barb H, “Study Group,” BBWN, Vol. 2 No. 4, July-Aug 1984

I recognize that homophobia is at the root of biphobia. I came to lesbianism long before my sexuality was clear to me. I lived an open lesbian lifestyle for four years. I cannot deny the importance of this experience, nor do I want to. For me lesbian identity is more than, and/or in addition to sexuality; it is a political awareness which bisexuality doesn't altar or detract from. 10 years ago when I left my husband and full-time role of motherhood, it didn't make me less conscious of what being a mother means. In fact, it gave me a deeper understanding. I am still a mother. That experience cannot be taken away from me. In much the same way, my lesbian awareness isn't lost now that I claim my bisexuality. When I realized my woman-loving-woman feelings, and came out as a lesbian, I had no heterosexual privilege; yet there were important males in my life, including a son. I am bisexual because it's real for me, not in order to acquire or flaunt the privilege that is inherent in being with men. My political consciousness is lesbian but my lifestyle is bisexual. If I keep myself quiet for another's sense of pride and liberation, it is at the cost of my own which isn't healthy--emotionally, politically or medically. Not only is it unhealthy, it's ineffective.

Since I have come out I have triggered many lesbians to blurt in whispered confidence--"I have a man in the closet. You're brave to be so open. What am I going to do?" These are not easy times. AIDS has given biphobia free reign in the lesbian community (and admittedly with much less destructive effect than how AIDS is fueling homophobia in society at large), it is all right to trash bisexuals, not to trust us for fear of AIDS. Bisexuals are untouchable to some lesbians.

We have to deal with oppression in a constructive way or we will be factionalized forever. Time is running out. We have to see the whole and the part we play in it. Forming family communities with people who share your sexual identity is important, but trashing is nonproductive. The sexual choices we make are equally valid for our individual experiences. AIDS is not a gay disease; it is a human tragedy, a plague that doesn't recognize boundaries. I urge bisexuals to take a political stand, and to become a visible, viable energy force. It is important and timely to open this dialogue in each of our communities. Nobody belongs in the closet. The only way to get a sense of "our" community is for us to begin to speak out and identify ourselves. When we verify the connections and the networks of our oppression, we build a unity that avoids the, "I'm more oppressed than you" syndrome

--Lani Kaahumanu, “Bisexuality & Discrimination,” BBWN Vol. 3, No. 6, Dec 1985-Jan 1986; Reprinted from the 1985 Gay Pride March magazine, San Francisco

What makes the Third Annual Northeast Conference on Bisexuality what it is? The breakfasts and dinners--the entertainment--the excitement of meeting others who feel like family. My first event of the conference was stumbling onto a cocktail party just around the corner from the Registration Desk, which turned out to be part of the Woman's History Week! A bit embarrassing after greeting many people with wine glasses in hand, asking them how they heard about the bisexuality conference!

I'll skip now to describe my experiences at the lesbian-identified affinity group and the two workshops I attended. Why do women who identify as lesbians go to a bisexuality conference? There were about 10 of us in the room, each with a different answer. Most of our relationships at the present time were with women; after that the similarity ended. One woman had affairs with men when not seriously involved with women. Another, in a non-monogamous long-term lesbian relationship, had recently begun a sexual involvement with a man. one woman, now involved with a bisexual woman, was here to discuss her feelings about the situation. Some of us had led exclusively lesbian lives for a number of years and were wondering if we'd closed off important parts of ourselves. Whether or not we would act on our sexual attractions for men, acknowledging them were important to us.

Our personal herstories contributed to our diverse opinions. For some, coming out was relaxed and easy and relationships with women refreshingly egalitarian. Others found sexual awakening and coming out difficult, and lesbian relationships fraught with many of the same difficulties as straight ones. We also discussed reasons lesbians don't accept bisexual women, such as fear that she'd leave for a man or desire to preserved woman-only space. We questioned the reality of "heterosexual privilege," wondering whether any women could really have it. We discussed the sorrows in our lives, such as family histories of alcoholism, incest or physical abuse, and the joys of our relationships, our work and our lives.

--Stacie, “Lesbian-identified Affinity Group Workshops: Lesbian Sexuality & Politics of Sexuality,” BBWN, Vol. 4, No. 2, April-May 1986

[Robyn Ochs]: What is your current sexual identity?

[Betty Aubut]: I call myself a "bisexual lesbian." I will always politically identify as bisexual, which to me means opposing restrictive categories. Some days I feel real separatist, and other days I feel that I want to be involved with men. Being bisexual to me means that I see men and women whom I'm attracted to. A man would have to be very special for me to want to get involved with him but I will fight for bisexual rights whether or not I'm sleeping with men. I see the bisexual community and movement as a very important bridge between gays, lesbian and straights. As long as gays and lesbians are considered completely 'other' from the mainstream, we'll never have any power. I consider myself gay. I think bisexuals are gay and gay liberation is our liberation. I don't consider myself 100% straight and 100% gay; I am 100% gay. That doesn't mean I won't sleep with a man every now and then--some lesbians do that. I never used to identify as lesbian out of respect for women who made the lifelong choice never to sleep with men, but then I realized that was a lot of bullshit. Calling yourself lesbian does not necessarily mean you have made that lifelong decision. Now I mostly identify as a lesbian--so I call myself a bisexual lesbian. I don't sleep with men right now, but I have male friends whom I spend time with and cuddle with. I've even become socially involved with some of the men from the men's network. I'm proud of where I am now because it's been so hard for me. People who have known me for a long time can't believe the change.

--Robyn Ochs, “Bi of the Month: Betty Aubut,” Bi Women Vol. 5, No. 2, April-May, 1987

Sharon Sumpter is a bisexual lesbian activist and psychotherapist who works with women survivors of abuse, institutionalization and sexual oppression. Her book-in-progress, In Pieces, is dedicated to opening the closet doors for former "mental patients." "I went into my work to undo the criminal things that were done to me and that I saw done to other women." She thanks Deena Metzger and Asherah for this, her first published work.

--Contributors' Notes, Sinister Wisdom, Issue 36, Winter 1988/89

Representatives of lesbian-feminist separatism may feel singled out as special targets of our anger and distress. To the extent that this is true, the seeds of anger lie in lesbian separatism as a politic: In this reading of feminism, specific sex acts take on politicized meaning. These are said to have consequences for the consciousness of the person performing them. Lesbian feminism is arguably the most proscriptive gay or lesbian politic, generating in its adherents the greatest tendency to judge others' (especially sexual) behavior. Gay men, for example, seem more likely to cite personal antipathy or simple stereotypes about bisexuals as a source of their chagrin. A great many bisexual women, particularly those who are feminist and lesbian-identified, have felt both personally and politically rejected and judged by the separatist sisters. Even those with no such experience may feel wary having heard of other bisexual women's stories. No one like to feel attacked, even politically.

----Carol A. Queen, "Strangers at Home: Bisexuals in the queer movement," Out/Look, Vol. 4, Issue 4 (16), Spring 1992

Closer to Home successfully deals with these and other problems of self-identification. As most of the writers are "lesbian-identified bisexuals" (one of several labels used for the sake of convenience), the definition of lesbianism is also reevaluated. Is a lesbian a woman who relates emotionally and erotically with women or a woman who does not relate emotionally and erotically with men? Must a woman fit both criteria to be considered a lesbian?

The "Principles and Practice" section expands these main course theories of identity with side dishes of memories and personal feelings--feelings of not being queer enough; of breaking all the rules, even the gay rules; of being dissatisfied with the waste of energy from political infighting. It's odd for lesbian-identified bi's to find themselves viewed as politically incorrect. It's maddening to have one's past feminist work invalidated by the inclusion of a man (or men) in one's life. It's frustrating to find oneself faced with a choice of being honest or potentially losing support of women's groups. It's confusing to work for the freedom to come out of one closet only to be asked to stay in another. As Rebecca Shuster write:

"If we choose a lesbian identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package that includes marginality; invisibility; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. If we choose a bisexual identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package deal that include a feeling of not belonging or having a home; defensiveness; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. Precisely because bisexuality represents freedom of choice, society ensures that the identity comes with its own package of mistreatment and constraints."

----Beth Herrick, "Bisexual Women Pushing the Limits," Sojourner, Vol. 18, Issue 10, June 1993

The first step is to move toward building alliances within our bisexual communities. Many communities are united by a commonality of the oppression. This is not so in our community, partly because of the different ways people identify as bisexual: gay-identified, queer-identified, lesbian-identified, or heterosexual-identified. Some people are bisexual in an affectional manner only; some are bisexual both affectionally and sexually; and some are bisexual only sexually. Since there are so many ways to express our bisexuality, the first step toward alliance-building is to work internally to accept all members of our own community. It is imperative that we build alliances across our own differences; otherwise, alliance-building will fail. Acceptance of the diversity of bisexual labels within our community will allow us to pursue alliance-building with decisive strength in the heterosexual community and what many of us consider our own lesbian/gay community.[3]

--Brenda Blasingame, "Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence, in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions, 1995

Personally, I am unable to separate out the various ways that I am oppressed (as a woman, as an African American, as a bisexual lesbian, as an impoverished single mother) and say that one oppression is worse than the other, or that I desire one form of liberation more than another. I do not want to experience threats to my life, my child custody, or my job security because of racism or homophobia. I don't want to be oppressed for any reason!!!

--Dajenya, "Which Part of Me Deserves to Be Free?," in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, & Visions, ed. Naomi Tucker, 1995

A good deal of criticism has been written about heterosexuals who are surprised when they find out the true sexual orientation of someone who they didn't think "looked gay." These criticism assert what is of course true--that there is no such thing as a gay or lesbian "look," since of course, everyone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, looks that way.

Unfortunately, many of my experiences as a lesbian-identified bisexual woman have said to me that having an appearance or demeanor that diverges from the expected means I will not be accepted as truly belonging in the lesbian community. Despite my attendance at gay pride parade, dollars spent at gay resorts and in support of gay causes, and numerous attempts to participate in gay and/or lesbian groups and volunteer events, I have often felt unaccepted by this community.

--Amy Wyeth, "Don't Assume Anything," Bi Women Vol. 13, No. 4, Aug/Sept 1995

Joan Tollifson relays her struggle to make sense of her life and her spiritual awakening in Bare-Bones Meditation. Born with only one hand, she grew up feeling different, found identity and purpose as a bisexual lesbian and a disability rights activist, but struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. She first embraced Zen Buddhism then a very bare-bones form of spirituality that has no form. This exuberant and amazing testament is for the many people who don't fit into the conventional molds of existing religious traditions.

--"And on Publisher's Row," complied by Jenn Tust, Feminist Bookstore News, Vol. 19, Issue 4, Nov-Dec 1996

#bisexuality #bi lesbian

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a-room-of-my-own · 4 years

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Hi! Did you see the NewStasteman interview with Judith Butler? The way she framed the whole debate about gender is so depressing, I cannot believe it... And that's without going into the Rowling debate, the more I read about it on Twitter and tumblr and the most depressed I get. How can womanhood be reduced to a feeling anyone can claim?

https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

I had not seen it so thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it. She’s really manipulative and that’s pretty scary honestly. I picked up a few examples to show you

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…) I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…)I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

It’s “our” responsibility to act on something she cannot prove? It’s quite easy to observe that trans-activists are an active minority within the feminist movement. On the other hand, it’s much harder to prove than most people support modern trans-activism in all its implications. She doesn’t give any source, proof or figures to support her claim but ask people to fight for it, nevertheless. That’s faith, not fact.

If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” [the problem of men claiming to be trans to access women’s space] we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life.

Then again, no proof, when many gender critical bloggers have lists of dozens of examples of men using self-ID to access bathrooms, women’s shelters, women’s prisons, some of them sex offenders.

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality.

That’s a lot of words to call women who are afraid of men “hysterical”. #sorority

Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

Word salad that could be translated like this: our priority shouldn’t be protecting women from men, it should be accommodating men, because #notallmen are predators, so it would be very unfair to them, uwu. Men’s concerns should always be considered while women who are afraid are irrational.

I am not aware that terf is used as a slur.

I’m 99% sure that’s a lie, but okay.

I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary?

Women who want to have spaces without men should be called exclusionary, because we define women based on their relationship with men and how they include them. Suuuuure.

If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples.

We’re not the ones telling you can cure a psychological problem with cross-sex hormones and amputations, but we are the one pathologizing trans and GNC people. That’s hi-la-rious.

My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

Meaningless word salad > "women should let men redefine the word woman as they please"

Let us be clear that the debate here [between people who support JKR and others] is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today.

TLDR: Real feminist can only be trans-supporters.

Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.

That’s gender for you Judith, not biological sex. Social identities vary, biological sex is a constant. Saying that isn't essentialism.

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women...

“Women who are afraid of men are irrational” third instalment.

Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.

Men are whoever they say they are, women are whoever men say they are.

One does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle.

Many feminists consider that men can only be feminist allies, so the debate is clearly not settled.

When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?

Does “woman” need to have a *gasp* definition? Judith is saying it doesn’t. You’ll notice that she doesn’t say that anything about “man” not having a stable definition. She believes it’s possible to fight against misogyny while having no stable definition for what a woman is. Laughable.

I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are.

Word salad > “we don’t get to choose our gender but we get to choose it I am very smart"

Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.

Many women have internalized misogyny and homophobia, which in turn had a huge impact on their sense of self and self-esteem, but that doesn’t mean they’re not women Judith. And I don’t think any woman who was forcefully married, who had her vulva mutilated for religious reasons, had to wear a veil since she was a toddler, or was sold as a child into prostitution ever “felt at home” with having been born a girl, you absolute unit.

Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.

That was going so well until the last sentence

I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum.

JB, darling, just read your own word salad and get some self-awareness.

The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.

Tell that to your supporters Miss I Wasn't Aware TERF Were A Slur.

I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person.

Kindergarten argument, but sure. Also, yet again, no proof.

I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US.

“Threats against JKR are bad BUT have you seen what’s happening in Brazil?”. I’m sorry what? Also, could trans-activist please stop instrumentalizing Brazilian stats, since they reflect the situation of prostituted homosexual transsexuals ?

So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.

NO ONE, literally NO ONE said that threats against trans people were acceptable. In fact, most, if not pretty much all threats, especially physical threats, don’t come from radical feminists, but from men. Basically, what she’s saying is “who cares about threats against JKR, trans people (men) matter more”.

If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

♫ Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya ♪

It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

All radical feminists are right wingers, sure.

Anyway, it's terrible that this kind of article is taken seriously when it could be summed up as "women are irrational and hysterical, men can be women and redefine the word woman if they so wish"...

#Gender critical #Judith Butler #And that's sooo pompous #Way to hide the emptiness of your reasoning ma'am

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comrade-meow · 4 years

Link

The “world historical defeat” of the female sex continues apace.

Women in their tens of thousands are trafficked into sexual slavery every year. Increasing numbers of poor, black and brown women are virtually imprisoned on commercial surrogacy farms, producing babies for the benefit of rich couples. Brutalisation of women in the porn industry is feeding through into its viewers’ sex lives, with grim consequences, while teenage girls face an epidemic of sexual harassment at school and on the streets.

The frequency of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage has shot up during the Covid-19 crisis. Domestic violence has likewise rocketed. In the UK, prosecutions are so limited that rape is virtually decriminalised. Abortion rights are under attack, from the USA to Poland. And international ‘men’s rights’ networks like ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ attract millions of viewers to videos that dehumanise and pathologise women to an extreme extent.

This is a resurgent global system of exploitation and oppression targeted on women, a reaction against the many gains of feminism. The increasingly commercial nature of many of these deeply exploitative and oppressive practices - the porn industry, for one, makes billions every year, some of it from content involving rape, child abuse, non-consensual filming and the like - drives home the desperate need for a socialist analysis that exposes the roots of these ancient but enduring patriarchal oppressions. And we need an understanding and a language that enables that analysis.

But at the same time as this shocking acceleration of anti-woman attitudes, practices and policies, the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are being rapidly taken apart in response to a worldwide ‘trans rights’ movement. In a rush to embrace the new world of multiple genders, organisations and corporations as diverse as Amnesty International, Tampax, the stillbirth charity, Sands, the Harvard Medical School and many others are in a sudden rush to delete the words ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ from their vocabulary and replace them with a new, ‘inclusive’ language of ‘menstruators’, ‘gestational carriers’, ‘birthing people’, ‘cervix-havers’ and ‘people with uteruses’.

At the same time, the word ‘sex’ has progressively been replaced by the word ‘gender’, which is used to refer not only to reproductive class, but also to aspects of human life as disparate as individual psychology, personality, mannerisms, clothing choices and sexual roles. And the words ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are being repurposed to refer not to the sexes themselves, but to aspects of psychology, personality or clothing that are traditionally associated with one or the other sex.

Is this new language - and the renaming and breaking up of the category of people formerly known as women - the tool we need for the job of dismantling the worldwide discrimination, exploitation and abuse of women that is so often focussed on the female sexual and reproductive characteristics? I would argue not. These misguided attempts to dismantle the language used to describe women’s bodies and lives does nothing to reveal or dismantle the oppression itself.

This is because the conceptual framework that is driving the change in language - and stretching and distorting the categories of man and woman into meaninglessness - is fundamentally wrong. And badly so.

Sex as fiction

The political driver behind these linguistic changes is the ‘trans rights’ movement, which bases its arguments on the most extreme and illogical aspects of queer theory. Many trans activists insist that to even question the precepts that they advance is actively hateful, even fascistic in nature - witness the social media furore when any celebrity, such as JK Rowling, dares to say that the word ‘woman’ means a female person. But it is neither hateful nor fascistic to question arguments that have neither intellectual nor political integrity.

I will quote from Judith Butler’s book Gender trouble1 - first published in 1990, and often hailed as a foundational text of queer theory - and its 1993 follow-up, Bodies that matter2, to illustrate the thinking behind the current trans activism movement. Queer theory is an unashamedly post-modernist, anti-materialist and psychoanalytic school of philosophical thought that frames sex, sexual behaviour and sexual identity (being gay, bisexual or straight) as social constructs, and takes its arguments so far that it claims that the two sexes (not just gender, but the sexes themselves) are fictional. The phenomenon of intersex is thought to prove that sex is not ‘binary’, with only two possibilities, but exists on a spectrum between male and female (I, among many others, have debunked this notion elsewhere3). But in queer theory, gender is not just “the social significance that sex assumes within a given culture”.4 Queer theory goes much further, purporting that the two sexes themselves are social constructs, like money or marriage. Thus gender replaces sex altogether: “... if gender is the social construction of sex, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy.”5

Therefore, according to queer theory, male and female are not objective realities, but ‘identities’. Everyone is required to fit into one or other of those two ‘identities’ in order to enforce reproduction through “compulsory heterosexuality”:

The category of sex belongs to a system of compulsory heterosexuality that clearly operates through a system of compulsory sexual reproduction … ‘male’ and ‘female’ exist only within the heterosexual matrix … [and protect it] from a radical critique.6

It is therefore through the power of language, and the naming of male and female, that gender oppression is created; and it is by the power of language that it can also be defeated. In order to dismantle the oppression that has resulted from this categorisation, it will be necessary to implement an “insidious and effective strategy … a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves … in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic”.7 This feat is to be achieved specifically by “depriving the … narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman’”.8 The category ‘women’ is particularly promoted as being ripe to be emptied of meaning. It should be

a permanent site of contest … There can be no closure on the category and … for politically significant reasons, there ought never to be. That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its political efficacy.9

It is evident that the programme of queer theory is working, in the sense that it is changing and dismantling the language. But does the whole of gender oppression across history really originate in the simple naming of male and female? Because, if it does not, then this new movement is a dead end that is ultimately doomed to failure as far as challenging the structures that bear down on women’s lives.

While it is true that human thought and culture must have developed in tandem with the particulars of our species’ sexual behaviour, reproductive biology and mating systems - such as menstruation, which, although not unique to humans, is unusual among mammals - it is futile to protest that sex did not exist prior to the emergence of the human race.

Queer theory, however, rejects any understanding of human sex or gender that involves biological sciences. Our evolutionary history simply disappears in a puff of smoke:

... to install the principle of intelligibility in the very development of a body is precisely the strategy of a natural teleology that accounts for female development through the rationale of biology. On this basis, it has been argued that women ought to perform certain social functions and not others; indeed, that women ought to be fully restricted to the reproductive domain.10

For those who believe that reproduction is the only societal contribution appropriate to the class of people that possess wombs, by virtue of the fact that they possess wombs, altering the use of the word ‘woman’ cannot change that. It is the reproductive ability itself, not the words used to describe it, that the argument is based on. Nothing materially changes - moving words around will not change the position of the uterus, or its function. It is as futile as rearranging the labels on the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or like renaming the Titanic itself after it has hit the iceberg - thus, miraculously, the Titanic will not sink after all.

Many of the abuses and exploitations that oppress women target the real sexual and reproductive aspects of women’s bodies - our materiality - so a materialist analysis is essential. Can any such analysis work, when its starting point is that sex is a fiction?

Applying Occam’s Razor - accepting the simplest explanation that can account for all the facts - queer theory’s conceptual framework does not cut the mustard. If sex is a fiction invented to enforce heterosexuality and reproduction, it leaves vast swathes of the picture unexplained. An analysis worth its salt would bring together multiple, seemingly different, inexplicable or unconnected aspects of social and cultural attitudes to sex under one schema. A materialist analysis that takes into account the reality that there are two meaningful reproductive sex classes fares far better, and explains far more of the problematic - and often bizarre - social and cultural practices and attitudes around sex.

Is it not a far better explanation that people became aware of the blindingly obvious early on in human development - that there are very clearly only two reproductive roles, and that the anatomical features associated with each are astonishingly easy to identify at birth in nearly all humans? And that the possession of those distinct anatomies resulted in them being named, in the same way that other significant natural phenomena are named - because, irrespective of any relative value placed upon them, they actually exist?

Leaving aside that blatantly obvious counterargument, there is a further problem with queer theory: homosexuality just does not need to be eradicated in order to ensure reproduction. Why? Because occasional heterosexual intercourse, at the right time, during periods of female fertility, is all that is needed. A woman could sleep with a man just once or twice a month, and have it away with another woman for 20-odd nights a month, with exactly the same reproductive outcome. While it is true that there would be no reproduction if every sexual encounter was homosexual, strict heterosexuality, or anything approaching it, is not required to ensure childbearing. Likewise, a fertile man can sleep with a woman a few times a year and be almost certain to father children. And since one man can impregnate many women, significant numbers of men could be largely or exclusively homosexual without any impact on the number of children born - so why persecute and punish homosexual behaviour so severely?

The ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ argument has no basis, once examined in this light, and thus a central plank of queer theory falls easily.

Queer theory proposes that the so-called ‘complementary’ aspects of masculine and feminine behaviour have been created by culture in order to justify the compulsory pairing of male with female. Genders, including the two sexes themselves, are understood to be performative: brought into being by repeated ‘speech acts’ that, through the appearance of authority and the power of naming, actually create that which they name.

Thus, each individual assumes - or grows into, takes on and expresses - a ‘gender’ that is encouraged, promoted, and enforced by social expectations. I broadly agree that many of the observable average differences in male and female behaviour are largely culturally created, and reinforced by oft-repeated societal expectations. The fact that the expectations have to be so often stated, and sometimes violently reinforced, is testament to the fact that those differences are in no way innate, but are driven by the requirement to conform. But the origin of the expectations of ‘complementary’ male and female behaviour is not, as queer theory suggests, to counteract homosexuality and force the pairing of male with female.

The specifics of masculine and feminine behaviour do not point towards such a conclusion. Why is feminine behaviour submissive, while masculine behaviour is dominant? Why not the other way around? Why must one be dominant and the other submissive at all? Wouldn’t a hand signal do instead? How do the particular, specific manifestations of gender serve the purpose of enforcing heterosexuality and eliminating homosexuality, when many of them, such as FGM, reduce heterosexual behaviour in heterosexual women? True, any enforcement would require bullying of some kind, but why is it that so much of the bullying related to sex focuses on (heterosexual) women, and so relatively little on heterosexual men? Why is virginity in women prized but of little account in men? Why is so much actual heterosexual behaviour, that could lead to reproduction, so viciously punished? Why are women punished, humiliated, shamed far more than men for sexual promiscuity - heterosexual promiscuity? Why is it girls, not boys, who are the primary victims of child marriage practices? Why, in so many cultures, are women traditionally not allowed to own property, and children are considered the property of the father and not the mother? What answer does queer theory have to all this? None. It is not even framed as a question that needs to be answered.

Patriarchy

All of these disparate cultural practices spring sharply into focus when we understand the simple rule formulated by Friedrich Engels, the primary and founding rule of patriarchy, which exists to enforce the rights, not of men in general, but specifically of fathers: when property is private, belonging to male individuals rather than shared communally, women must bear children only to their husbands.

Why? Because the mechanics of reproduction mean that, while a woman can be certain the children she is raising are indeed her own, a man cannot - unless he knows for sure that the children’s mother cannot have slept with any other man. Thus when private property is concerned, men have a strong motivation to ensure that the children to whom they pass on their wealth are their own offspring. Herewith the origins of monogamous marriage. And with it, as an integral part (indeed as a driving force), the origins of women’s oppression - or “the world historical defeat of the female sex”, according to Engels.11

The gender rules developed in order to ensure paternity and inheritance. This simple explanation takes us a long way to understanding the specifics of how gender oppression manifests itself globally, in the enforced submission of women to men, and specifically to their husbands, and in seemingly disparate cultural values and practices that prevent women from having heterosexual sex with multiple male partners, outside of marriage, or punish them if they do.

How do men, individually and collectively, stop - or attempt to stop - their wives from sleeping with other men? Promises are not enough, as we know. How do you stop anyone from doing something they want to, from expressing their own desires? You bully them. You humiliate, threaten, harass, attack and perhaps - occasionally - even murder them. In these multiple ways you seek to enforce compliance, through assuming social dominance and forcing social submissiveness and subordination. Society and culture evolve around these values, and develop in ways that satisfy the needs and desires of the socially dominant group. Meanwhile members of that socially submissive group are discouraged from banding together (they might mount a revolution), and learn to adapt their own behaviour to avoid harm. And, since conflict is costly, disruptive and traumatic, both groups develop strategies to signal their social position, to defuse and avoid conflict and possible injury, with social rules and expectations developing around these behaviours.

The global hallmarks of masculinity and femininity would be recognised in any other primate species as the unmistakable signs of social dominance and social subordination. Socially dominant primates (and other mammals, plus many other vertebrates) make themselves large, take up space, monopolise resources. These are the core components of masculine behaviour. Subordinate animals drop or avert the gaze, make themselves small, move out of the way, and surrender resources. These are typical feminine behaviours. In primates, attending to the needs of the dominant members of the group, by grooming, is also characteristic of social subordinates. In humans, grooming as such has been replaced by a far broader suite of behaviours that involve serving the needs of the dominant class.

Gendered behaviours and the social values attached to each sex reflect this pattern worldwide. Societies globally and throughout time promote and encourage these masculine and feminine behaviours - better understood as dominant and subordinate behaviours - as appropriate to men and women respectively. Western cultures are no exception.

The enactment of dominance (‘masculinity’) and subordinance (‘femininity’) can be understood as partly learned and partly innate. Innate, in the sense that the expression of these behavioural patterns is an instinctive response to a felt social situation, or social position - anyone will signal submissiveness in the presence of a threatening social dominant who is likely to escalate dangerously if challenged. Thus, nearly everyone signals submissiveness extremely effectively, and unconsciously, as soon as they have a gun pointed at their heads. And it is hard not to display these behaviours, when we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a socially dominant or subordinate individual or group.

So femininity is a stylised display of primate submissiveness - a behavioural strategy that reduces or avoids conflict by reliably signalling submission to social dominants. Members of either sex, when they find themselves towards the bottom of any social hierarchy, deploy different, but similarly ritualised and reliable, submissive gestures. Examples include bowing, curtseying, kneeling or prostration before monarchs; the doffing of caps with downcast eyes and slumping shoulders in the workplace; and the kneeling and bowing (in prayer) that is such a large part of patriarchal organised religions. It is easy to recognise such gestures as signals of submission to social superiors, and they should be opposed as manifestations of social hierarchies that need to be abolished as an implicit part of the project for universal liberation. Neither the bowing and scraping of the dispossessed nor the arrogance and high-handedness of the wealthy should be welcomed or celebrated. It is time to apply the same approach when it comes to gender.

Moving beyond their instinctive component, the specifics of so-called ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ behaviour are learned and then practised until they become habitual; and sometimes deployed consciously and strategically. People do what other people do; children start to mimic others around them, especially those they perceive to be like themselves, at a very young age, perfecting gestures, postures and vocal tones that may be cultural or, within each culture, gendered. Learned and practised from a young age, it is no wonder that these behaviours can feel like a natural part of a person’s core being - especially when they also incorporate an instinctive response that is deployed after rapidly gauging the level of threat posed by others. In addition, both sexes are explicitly taught to behave as expected - and so the dominance of males and the subordination of females is reinforced and perpetuated from one generation to another.

Anything that undermines the position of men as dominant and female as subordinate is a threat to the established order. Thus the second rule of patriarchy: men must not act like women, and women must not act like men.

This explains why homosexuality, cross-dressing and other forms of refusal to conform to gendered expectations are persecuted in many societies. For men to start acting ‘like women’, either sexually or socially – ie, submissively, which has come to include being penetrated sexually - would be to undermine and threaten the superior role of all men. Similarly, for a woman to act ‘like a man’ is a shocking insurrection - she must be kept down, and such behaviour has to be punished and made taboo. Since clothing and other behaviours are cultural markers that help to distinguish between the two sexes, cross-dressing breaks this law very blatantly. And further, to allow cross-dressing potentially allows the mixing of the sexes in ways that could undermine paternity rights.

On this reading, then, the persecution of homosexuality, cross-dressing and all other forms of gender non-conformity originated secondarily from the enforcement not of compulsory heterosexuality, but of compulsory monogamy for women in the interests of ensuring paternity rights. This is an important distinction, for, while it accepts that gendered behaviours and values are cultural, it acknowledges the material existence of the two sexes as a real and significant phenomenon, with powerful influences on societal development.

Combating oppression

Understanding and placing ourselves as animals with real, material, biologically sexed bodies - rather than the smoke-and-mirrors erasure of sex and materiality itself that queer theory promotes - gives us a far more powerful tool to understand and combat the oppression of women, and homosexual and transsexual or transgender people, than queer theory’s baseless speculations ever can.

It explains not only the different social and cultural values and expectations around men and women, but it also explains many of the specifics of what they are and why the expectations are so strongly hierarchical. Women must be submissive to men (‘feminine’) because they must be controlled - from the male perspective, in order to bear children fathered by the man who controls them. From their own point of view, they must allow themselves to be controlled, and teach each other to be controlled, in order to avoid injury or worse. It also explains widespread cultural practices that control the sexual lives and reproduction of women - from FGM to child marriage, to taboos around female virginity and pregnancy outside of marriage. These things happen because sex is observable, and real, and known from birth. At birth, it is in nearly all cases blatantly obvious whether a person can be reasonably expected to be capable of bearing a child, or of inseminating a woman, and it is on this basis that the two sexes exist as classes. To suggest otherwise is to enter the realm of absolute fantasy, or at least of extreme idealism, which indeed queer theory does, since “to ‘concede’ the undeniability of ‘sex’ or its ‘materiality’ is always to concede some version of ‘sex’, some formation of ‘materiality’.”12

The current queer theory-led trans movement seeks to dismantle the second law of patriarchy - men must not act like women, women must not act like men. We do indeed need a movement against sex-based oppression that acknowledges and unites against that law. We need to work towards a world where qualities like strength, assertiveness, caring and gentleness are rewarded, encouraged and promoted in both sexes rather than mocked and punished when they are exhibited by the ‘wrong’ sex; where it is impossible for men to act ‘like women’, or women to act ‘like men’, because gendered expectations attached to each sex no longer exist and anyone can, without censure or even mild surprise, be an engineer or a carer, be logical or emotional or wear a dress or make-up or high heels or a tie or cut their hair short, irrespective of their sex. But to pretend that the sexes themselves do not exist is a nonsense. And it is a dangerous nonsense, when it obscures and denies the existing power relations between men and women.

Female oppression is not an inevitable consequence of the differences between male and female bodies. Yes, the fact that men are bigger and stronger on average can make it easier for them to establish social dominance through direct physical threat; while the risk of being left literally holding the baby and having to provide for it can put women in an economically vulnerable position, where social subordination is a likely outcome. But under different material conditions - and a different value system - there is no reason why we cannot shed these destructive, dysfunctional habits of gender that oppress and limit our humanity.

There is nothing inherent in being a man that makes men oppress women - it is their position in society that allows them to do it, and rewards women who collude with them. Power is the ability to harm without being harmed yourself, and therefore, with sufficient motivation, many people when they have power will use it to cause harm. Currently, men very frequently have that power in relation to women, and so they use it, resulting in very many harms. When, within any given social grouping or class, men occupy a position of power with respect to women, it is not an inevitable effect of human biology: it is a position gifted by property, by wealth, by tradition and by law.

We must seek to rebalance power to prevent harm. That involves, among many other things, abolishing both masculinity and femininity - no progressive cause should support or perpetuate a social system in which dominance is encouraged in one group, while social submissiveness is promoted in others. It is absolutely contrary to all ideas of human dignity and liberation. How could any liberatory movement adopt a position that posits an innate, inescapable hierarchical system at the heart of human nature, with close to 50% of humanity born inescapably into a submissive role?

But in today’s gender debate, the position of queer theory-inspired trans activists is exactly that. For them, to be a ‘woman’ is not to be female, but to be ‘feminine’- in other words, to be a ‘woman’ is to be submissive. It is here that we begin to see the true social regressiveness of this supposedly liberatory movement. For, while it is understood that biology does not determine the gender of trans people, the flipside of that argument is that most people’s gender is indeed innate, as social conservatives have always thought. Why? Because, according to trans activism, most people are ‘cis’ - they ‘identify’ as the gender they were born into. If 1% are trans, then 99% are cis; perhaps being trans is more common, especially if it includes the non-binary category, but still the vast majority of people are cis. So, since most people born with female reproductive systems are ‘cis’ women, they are supposedly innately feminine, which is to say, innately submissive, subordinate, and servile. Meanwhile a similar proportion of people born with male reproductive systems are considered to be ‘cis’ men: innately masculine, and therefore born into a socially dominant role. It is likely that many activists and well-meaning people on the sidelines of this debate have not thought it through far enough to understand that this is the logical and necessary conclusion of their arguments.

While most trans activists avoid definitions like the plague, such a conclusion is borne out by the attempts of some to redefine ��woman’ and ‘female’. Definitions of ‘woman’ include such gems as: “a person who acts in accordance with traditional gender roles assigned to the female sex” and “anyone that culturally identifies and presents as the combination of stereotypes and cultural norms we define as feminine” or “adhering to social norms of femininity, such as being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable and concerned with appearance”. And femaleness is “a universal sex defined by self-negation … I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another … [The] barest essentials [of femaleness are] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”13

This is what we are fighting. It is why we are fighting. We refuse to submit.

#Anglo.txt

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aro-culture-is · 4 years

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Hi, I have a question. I'm Aroallo. Am I a part of lgbt+ community? I received diverse opinion about it from different people and I want to know if there's a definitive ans

Yes! all people who do not identify as cisgender, heterosexual, and heteroromantic all the are part of the queer community.

people who don’t believe that are referred to as “exclusionists”. they have unfortunately fallen for radfem rhetoric. Breaking it down to the basics, this belief comes from radical reactionaries who believe that, on some level, there is a “right” way to be gay, a “right” way to be a women, and generally speaking, a “right” way to behave as either a model minority or as a form of lateral aggression. From the top down, the people who begin this type of thought may be straight people trying to divide and conquer the community, gay individuals who have been taught to believe that they would be accepted if it weren’t for those people (a combination of model minority and lateral aggression), and generally speaking people who identify as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF for short) or otherwise as radical feminists (who often believe that only the LG and maybe the B should be allowed to be terms).

below the readmore is a detailed explanation of where this attitude comes from.

TW: discussion and use of examples of phobia/misia towards BTQAAPN+ groups. mentions of trauma, rape, and pedophilia.

these types of people and this type of argument have been around for a while, and if you listen to queer elders, you’ll find that they often reframe or straight up lie about the history of the queer community in hopes of convincing a few types of people into believing what they believe. The type of people they prey on can be generally considered as the following:

People who are new to feminism

People who are new to the queer community

People who are just learning of identities beyond the LGT

People who are young and impressionable.

People with trauma.

Notice a theme? These categories all represent people who have a reason to listen, whether because they don’t know better, are used to being told what to think, or are afraid of making mistakes and maybe aren’t comfortable questioning what they are told.

Why did I go on this long, seemingly tangential thought? Because they start with things that don’t seem controversial.

“The LGB community is founded on same sex attraction and people who are asexual don’t experience that.” Lie. While I’m speaking from an american perspective, our queer elders tell us that the asexual and aromantic communities often were part of the bisexual community from the beginning.

“The LGBT community is founded on discrimination and they aren’t discriminated against.” The statistics (link to wiki article with the sources provided better than I can) which exist currently do not agree, and on a personal note a significant amount of aspec people including myself have gotten very similar comments to that experienced by other queer people (ie: “I can fix that”).

“Microlabels/MOGAI/etc are bad”. etc etc etc. Target the small underrepresented communities so it’s harder to find them to hear another side. accuse high profile people of pedophilia, rape, or other things shortly after they made a supportive statement for any community they don’t like.Then progress. “bi is panphobic / pan is biphobic / either are transphobic” (divide and conquer. they don’t really care) “Queer is a slur” (like gay hasn’t been?), the insidious and harder to notice transmisogyny framed as complaining about “men”. Cutting the label to LGBT only or even smaller yet - “drop the P. drop the N. drop the T. drop the B” - I’ve seen each, and recall we’ve already framed everything else as bad. Now, for those new to feminism, introduce it only as providing female power, ignore the ways the patriarchy hurts everyone, make it a binary men:women bad:good argument. Tell those with trauma that it is because of these communities, because of men, whatever it takes to convince people in pain to avoid healing for the sake of an ugly movement.

The worst part? It operates like a cult. People are encouraged to “support and protect” these vulnerable groups from communities they may even belong to. The overall figurehead becomes the ideal of pure, innocent women, typically, and of safety.

You are part of the queer community, where we support each other.

#advice #aro #aromantic #actually aro #actually aromantic #terf tw #biphobia tw #panphobia tw #queerphobia tw #aphobia tw #exlcus tw #ask if you'd like more tw #ask #Anonymous #mod kee

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Conversation

Alone Ferber, Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”, New Statesman (September 22, 2020)

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?

Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

Alona Ferber: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.

Judith Butler: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

Alona Ferber: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.

Judith Butler: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.

Alona Ferber: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?

Judith Butler: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?

Judith Butler: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals? . . . I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms. . . . Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.

Alona Ferber: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?

Judith Butler: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.

Alona Ferber: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?

Judith Butler: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.

Alona Ferber: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper's this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you?

Judith Butler: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently . . . On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.

Alona Ferber: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?

Judith Butler: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.

Alona Ferber: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?

Judith Butler: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.

Alona Ferber: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?

Judith Butler: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.

#judith butler #interviews #gender #controversy #transgender #TERFs #trans issues #jk rowling #transphobia #radical feminism #feminism #trans-exclusionary feminism #cancel culture #internet culture #anti-intellectualism #online abuse

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the-goofball · 4 years

Text

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture. In the three decades since Gender Trouble was published, the world has changed beyond recognition. In 2014, TIME declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”. Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement. How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler recently exchanged emails with the New Statesman about this issue. The exchange has been edited. *** Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics? Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence. JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur. JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived. AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments? JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people. AF: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply? JB: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals? I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms. Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. AF: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online? JB: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms. AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling. JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. AF: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper's this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you? JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently. On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud. AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement? JB: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity. AF: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights? JB: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society AF: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate? JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.

22 September 2020

*Judith Butler goes by she or they

#judith butler #feminism #trans #terfs #jk rowling #gender

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