#the leslie mentioned here is indeed leslie feinberg

[that-butch-archivist]

"Q: Finally, putting this all together, what does femme mean to you? MBP: Femme means to me that I have a feminine gender expression as a site of resistance of old values. Those values say that I am not a fighter, I am not smart, I am not tough, or that I can't be sexual and be a mother too. There are a lot of these should-nots attached to the old way of being femme that I have cast aside. In making my life a site of resistance, I walk through life my own way and create a kind of power and defiance that says "You can't touch me unless I say yes." To me, femme means being powerful in myself, in my own body, with all her feminine ways. It means saying to myself I don't have to take care of other people or give myself up for somebody else. Femme means that I am conscious about what people are saying and doing around me, toward me, as a woman, and that I always maintain my dignity and power. [...] I do not think that femme means making your butch take the trash out for you. I do not think that femme means loving to shop. If loving to shop for clothes was femme, Leslie would be a femme. I don't think femme is having long fingernails. I don't think femme is not understanding how to deal with money. Those are old degrading stereotypes that establish femme on a foundation that is degrading to women. And I do not agree with that at all. For me, femme is a place of resistance to that degradation, a place to divest femininity of limiting stereotypes, and a place to assert the power and dignity of femaleness."

An excerpt from "Pronouns, Politics, and Femme Practice: An Interview with Minnie Bruce Pratt," as recorded in Fem(me): Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls. Questions developed by Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker, the interview conducted by Tania Hammidi. (Emphasis in bold is my own.)

[bidaubadeadieu]

The idea that only men can afford to philosophize is completely ahistorical and undersells the accomplishments of women, something I would think would affront self-proclaimed radical feminists. Modern gender theory, including concepts like social construction of gender and performativity, rests of the back of Judith Butler. Many other (female) pioneers like Simone de Beauvoir, Leslie Feinberg, and Gayle Rubin have contributed to contemporary understandings of gender. I do not intend to "claim" these thinkers for contemporary trans-inclusive feminist movements, and indeed many of them have disagreements with each other, but there are evidently many, many great female philosophers of gender (notwithstanding that some, like Judith Butler, have fraught relationships with being assigned female at birth and now identify as nonbinary and may use other pronouns or names instead of or in addition to the ones they were given, see Jack Halperstam).

More importantly though, I'd like to challenge this strange notion that you cannot both think complexly about gender and also take action against real, lived suffering at the same time. Trans writers like Susan Stryker and Kate Bornstein have done incredible things for both their respective academic fields and also for drawing attention to past and present civil rights activism, spurring real change. Consider also Viviane Namaste, a cis woman as far as I know, who wrote her book Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People in 2000, touching on many of the topics that one of the posters above mentioned, including gendered violence, medical malpractice, and injustice in the legal system, all written in a trans-inclusive manner. An expansive definition of womanhood does not deny that women are here, now, hurting, and unpacking our cultural assumptions around gender does not prevent anyone from taking serious action against ongoing violence and oppression against women; rather, I think it helps!

The commenters above are offering a completely revisionist history. Transgender movements are not at all opposed with feminism; they share many of the same foundations, perspectives, and champions.

Radfems are so boring they use questions like "can people be exclusively attracted to the same sex" as gotchas instead of springboards for deeper questions like "what is sex, really, and how can you be attracted to it?" or "what is attraction? where does it come from?" Like if you're gonna ask stupid questions at least have some fun with it.

This is actually an EXTREMELY good point like transphobes in general tend to ask really interesting questions but do so exclusively as stupid gotcha setups like "what is a woman?", for example, could be a legitimate question that can be explored from a variety of cultural and sociological angles but no, the only reason anyone asks that question is to be like "haha stupid liberals don't know what a woman is 😏"

[mesoamericaaboriginalworld-blog]

Transgender Liberation

The article of “Transgender Liberation A Movement Whose Time Has Come” written by Leslie Feinberg is a very interesting article that shines light on the historical facts of transgender during ancient times. How it was looked at as a power structure in certain demographic regions of the world, and how the power of the femininity were looked at and glorified as masculinity is viewed in today’s society. We can also see the evolution of the name changing, and meaning during ancient times, and in modern day. In the article Feinberg established the non-gender-specific pronouns like “s/he” and “hir” to show the reader how the word, and meaning grew over the past years into something favorable to society. When you go deep into the historical content, we can see that everything we’ve been told always haven’t been the same. For example, blue for boys and pink for girls. Then you have to ask yourself, who constructed these so called norms without society permission? “All our lives we’ve been taught that sex and gender are synonymous-men are “masculine” and women are “feminine”. Pink for girls and blue for boys. It’s just “natural”, we’ve been told. But at the turn of the century in this country, blue was considered a girl’s color and pink was a boy’s. Simplistic and rigid gender codes are neither eternal nor natural”. We can see that through the course of history that things manifested through a conversion that isn’t part of the norm in today’s society. However, we are going to see more of this with the transgender conversion of transgender always being prevalent in ancient times and now. In today’s society it is condemned and looked down upon. Then it was looked at as superior in certain cultures around the world. “Many people today would be surprised to learn that ancient communal societies held transgendered people in high esteem. It took a bloody campaign by the emerging ruling classes to declare what had been considered natural to be its opposite. That prejudice, foisted on society by its ruling elite, endures today”. Therefore, we can see the enormous effort in change through the course of history, how transgendered people was held on a platform that established them and put them in power. Verses in modern society where they struggle gender-phobia- like racism, sexism, and bigotry against lesbians and gay men. Like I previously, transgendered people have been here for along time, but never been established because they didn’t passed or where shunned from society. “It is true that women’s oppression, especially under capitalism, has created profound social and economic pressures that force women to pass as men for survival”. “Transgendered women and men have always been here. They are oppressed. But they are not merely products of oppression. It is passing that’s historically new. Passing means hiding. Passing means invisibility”. This is the reason why most people are oblivious to the fact that transgenderism been around since ancient times, but unfortunately they been hiding their way of life. During the years, when they started condemning they’re way of life. Let’s take a look how at a point of time, transgendered people was honored with great value. “Transgender is a very ancient form of human expression that pre-dates oppression. It was once regarded with honor. A glance at human history proves that when societies were not ruled by exploiting classes that rely on divide-and-conquer tactics, “cross-gendered” youths, women and men on all continents were respected members of their communities”. Throughout these glorifying times of “transgenderism” we can even see how deities were transgendered, and certain societies worshipped goddesses, not gods. In Europe prior to 4500 B.C. goddess were worshipped throughout Europe and Western Asia. The femininity power structure was very powerful at these points and times in history, which I mention in class how the women power structure was equal or much as powerful than the men. “As Jacquetta Hawkes concluded in her History of Mankind: “There is every reason to suppose that under the conditions of the primary neolithic way of life, mother-night and the clan system were still dominant, ad land would generally have descended through the female line. Indeed, it is tempting to be convinced that the earlier neolithic societies throughout their range in time and space gave women the highest status she has ever known”. We can engage that women even inherited the land, which we can see always been a huge value system in owning wealth and power. Even in ancient Egyptian (Kemet) sculptures beamed by women were sacred symbol of power and wisdom. Later on, we are going to witness how the femininity way of life and power structure were invaded, and opposed by the masculinity structure in taking away that power. “An early prohibition against transgender was codified in the Mosaic Law of the Hebrews, one of the earliest patriarchal societies: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God”(Deuteronomy, 22:5). We can see how things started to overturn throughout the decades in marginalizing the power structure of transgenderism. “Patriarchal gods like the Greek deity Dionysos arose to overpower the pre-class goddesses. Dionysos was one of the Greek gods that replaced goddess worship”. That’s when we get the disenfranchisement of the femininity power structure over the decades of continuum perpetuated draining of the women power in ancient times and the taboo outlook of transgender people. In other words, like they say history always repeat itself, so by that being said things that once was the norm, and not now. Will become the norm again until some other new force come about and subject its way of life.