clovehitched | LJ Drama - Let She That Fights Against Monsters Beware, Lest She Herself A Monster Becomes

Ironically, some of the most horrible vitriol and hatred directed at trans women comes from the women's community. People like Janice Raymond, author of the shameful "The Transsexual Empire", Germiane Greer before she became less vocal in favour of her own career as a media person, and that one who writes in the Guardian sometimes, you know, the trans people should be forbidden from having surgery because it's inconvenient for my politics one, started out with the best of intentions. They saw the way society treated women like second class citizens, and they wanted to do something about it.

And they saw they had an enemy - the patriarchy, and they divided the world into "us and them", and then it started to go a bit wrong. They assumed that "us" were always the victims, and "them" were always the perpetrator, and anything done in the name of "us" was automatically right, because it was "fighting oppression", and if someone else got hurt, well then they're automatically one of "them", and they probably had it coming.

And so when trans women are systematically excluded from women's resources and spaces, whether that be something as symbolic as being denied access to a music festival where you commune with the Moon Goddess for a week by eating tofu, Having a pharmacy refuse to serve you, or something as serious as being denied rape counselling or being put in a male prison, transphobic radical feminist turn a blind eye, or even cheer on the abuse of other women in the name of "ending women's oppression". We're not even casualties of war to them, we are the oppressor.

Julia Serano, a trans women, has written a book which has become very influential in transfeminist circles, Whipping Girl, which is broadly a collection of essays highlighting some of the problems trans women face, often perpetuated by the women's movement, or the queer community. She popularised and gave us lots of useful terminology - cissexual, someone who is not transsexual; cissexism, the belief that the identified genders of trans people are somehow fake or less authentic than the genders of cissexual people; trans misogyny - hatred or transphobia directed specifically at trans women.

It's the last one I want to talk about. One of the issues Julia Serano highlights is the way many queer spaces and people value or fetishise gender transgression by female-assigned-at-birth people while simultaneously directing hatred or disgust towards gender transgression by male-assigned-at-birth people. The fetishisation of trans masculinity within the lesbian community, while that same community frequently campaigns to shut trans women lesbians out, is but one example. If one hangs around queer spaces enough, this fetishisation of trans men can often seem ubiquitous, and there are those who encourage it, whether trans men themselves, or masculine-leaning lesbians wanting to demonstrate how subversive and edgy they are by adopting a transgender identity, as if it were a new haircut.

This is appropriative and really messed up, and it creates a lot of anger amongst trans women, who often struggle to have our voices heard in this atmosphere, or who are dismissed as "men in dresses". While it is subversive and radical for female-assigned-at-birth people to adopt the trappings of masculinity, it is seen as shameful and appropriative and oppressive for male-assined-at-birth people to go in the other direction.

Of course, these people don't really respect trans men, or take their gender identities seriously. Having a trans man as a boyfriend while proudly proclaiming your lesbian identity is a la mode presently, even if you do then refer to them as "she" and "her" behind his back, and will dump him the moment he starts to get body hair, or talks about getting any kind o gender affirming surgery. There are limits! One can't be too edgy and subversive, otherwise it looks like heterosexuality, and gosh darn it, that's not edgy or subversive at all!

Serano has done a great job in giving form to this issue, so that we can talk about it in terms of the way it ungenders both trans men and trans women, perpetuates trans misogyny and the exclusion of trans women from queer and women's spaces, and so on.

But I can't help thinking that, like the Raymonds, the Greers and the Bindels, some of us have lost the plot.

A few weeks ago,in

transgender, a community which I moderate, during a debate over who was allowed to reclaim the word, "tranny" witout being oppressive, a really nasty undercurrent seemed to surface. That there was a debate at all was cast as trans misogyny. Trans men who tried to argue their case, or trans women who supported them were frequently shouted down and told to stop being oppressive. The thread grew to 800 comments, and showed no sign of slowing. Meanwhile parts of it degenerated into outright personal attacks between small groups of people. Before we, the moderators, shut it down, some of the arguments had descended into racial abuse. It got extremely ugly.

One poster in particular started referring to trans men as "runts with c*nts*, and talked about how sick they were of listening to "dickless men", which ultimately earned them a ban. At the time I figured it was such a clearcut case of inexcusable transphobia that even those who had been sympathetic to the "Even discussing whether trans men are allowed to say 'tranny' is trans misogynistic" angle would not make excuses for it. It seems I was wrong.

I was recently dismayed to see some women defending the abuse of trans men with phrases such as "runts with c*unts" and "dickless men" on the grounds that it is, and I quote, "funny and witty", and that it's, "an emotionally evocative phrase meant to illustrate the damage of living in a body that is a constant, inescapable cultural punch line".

It gets worse; the reasoning seems to go that picking a trans women up for saying this is evidence of trans misogyny - apparently it would be just fine for someone to talk about "chicks with dicks" in

transgender, and it would receive no comment from the moderation team, on account of how invested in trans misogyny and sticking up for "them" (trans men, in their newly cast role as part of "them") we all are.

To anyone who genuinely thinks that, and from the LJ drama surrounding this, I can see there are those who do, I can only suggest you try putting it to the test - the community would likely be better off without you. I'd also like to say this - I think you've taken trans misogyny and turned it into a dogma, and in doing so you're attacking your own community. When trans men I know come to me, as a community moderator, in tears because they feel at the mercy of their GP, or gender clinc, and no-longer even feel they can turn to their community because it's cast them as the oppressor, then it seems clear that some in our community are doing to them what the transphobic radfems did to us. People doing this, becoming the trans community's own Julie Bindels are part of the problem. When you start talking about whether it's OK to use transphobia against trans men as a satirical way of highlighting transphobia against trans women then I think you've lost the plot.

A friend of mine (white, straight, cismale), once referred to much of the identity politics on LJ as "bullshyt". At the time I thought, "what a terribly privileged thing to say". Now I see my own "side" using a position that should be used to highlight and combat oppression to victimise other people with impunity, because they are so used to being the victims, and I see he had a point. Yes, trans women are oppressed. Yes, some queer spaces privilege trans men over us, but this is wrong, and I want no part of it.

I'm screening comments here, for obvious reasons.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/205192.html - you can comment here or there.