![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clovehitchedFeeling so very disappointed right now.
Until feminism as a movement stops being mainly an exercise in navel-gazing for middle-class, educated, white cissexual women, until those professing to be feminists stop holding up bigots like Raymond, Greer and Bindel as icons because they're getting damp over some paragraph they once wrote, until the movement at large takes itself seriously enough to apply its supposed principles to cover all women, and all cases where the powerful oppress the powerless, regardless of sex, gender, race, education, class, income, etc., until someone can make a post about trans people having sex on a supposed feminist discussion board without commenters claiming that a trans person (and you know they mean trans woman) having sex without disclosing their medical history is non-consensual sex (i.e. rape) which should be prosecuted, and having half the people in the discussion sharing a similar sentiment...
...until then, I'm going to proclaim loudly and clearly, "I'm not with them."
By the way, did you know that teh tranz is just like an STD? You can probably even catch it from a snog!
(Also, I think that interpreting "the emotional strain caused by the non disclosure is actionable, and so should it be when one hides the fact of them being trans" as "it's OK to kill trans women after fucking them" is probably not that much of a stretch, as you know, that does actually happen quite a lot).
Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/214250.html - you can comment here or there.
Until feminism as a movement stops being mainly an exercise in navel-gazing for middle-class, educated, white cissexual women, until those professing to be feminists stop holding up bigots like Raymond, Greer and Bindel as icons because they're getting damp over some paragraph they once wrote, until the movement at large takes itself seriously enough to apply its supposed principles to cover all women, and all cases where the powerful oppress the powerless, regardless of sex, gender, race, education, class, income, etc., until someone can make a post about trans people having sex on a supposed feminist discussion board without commenters claiming that a trans person (and you know they mean trans woman) having sex without disclosing their medical history is non-consensual sex (i.e. rape) which should be prosecuted, and having half the people in the discussion sharing a similar sentiment...
...until then, I'm going to proclaim loudly and clearly, "I'm not with them."
By the way, did you know that teh tranz is just like an STD? You can probably even catch it from a snog!
(Also, I think that interpreting "the emotional strain caused by the non disclosure is actionable, and so should it be when one hides the fact of them being trans" as "it's OK to kill trans women after fucking them" is probably not that much of a stretch, as you know, that does actually happen quite a lot).
Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/214250.html - you can comment here or there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-06 01:21 pm (UTC)By the way, did you know that teh tranz is just like an STD? You can probably even catch it from a snog!
I will go out this very afternoon, find women who would make very pretty gay boys and snog them a lot. Spread the love!
As for feminism - after getting into a few scraps with the deeply self-hating transmale gender studies graduates who inhabit the murky depths of some of LJ's FTM communities, I'm really starting to develop a deep skepticism for its value, not just for trans people but for reality in general. It really seems to have a deep vein of misandry and to be, as you say, largely an exercise in academic self-congratulation. With all the privileged outlook access to academia implies. Obfuscating your bigotry in politically correct jargon doesn't make it not bigoted.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-13 11:36 pm (UTC)Quite so.
And the academic self-congratulation school of "feminism", I've seen it not just in trans men, but in trans women too (or should that be "tryns wymyn"?)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-14 10:56 am (UTC)Oh, that's far too possible, isn't it...
I don't think turning into a smug idiot is exclusive to any one social group, though I'd say it's likely to be far easier if you're privileged in other ways too. My beef with feminism as it stands is more personal - FTMs in particular can really be bitten by the misandry concealed in it, since unsurprisingly a lot of us have poor relationships with our inner man before we realise we're trans. Getting exposed to a message like that when you're already struggling with internalised transphobia is not a positive thing - it's a shame there's a degree of truth to the cliche that all pre-transition FTMs are either housewives or gender studies students.
I'd be interested to know how you think feminism goes wrong for trans women, though? (Apart from the whole ugly exclusion thing - I'm talking more about how the ideas can turn sour?)
no subject
Date: 2009-11-14 12:30 pm (UTC)I think you can see analogues to your cliché about trans men, namely that many post transition MTFs seem to end up becoming either housewives or gender studies students (at least in spirit). At one end you have the HBS lot, who seem to mix internalised transphobia with internalised misogyny, and are kind like the trans Stepford Wives. At the other end, ironically, I think you see the same mistakes the radfems make - promotion of ideology over and above their own humanity and the needs of individuals, and a worldview that, while perhaps a little more nuanced than that of the radfems in that it pays lipservice to intersectionality, still suffers from the idea that it's the only valid and reasonable view. Sadly, all too often that view seems to be the one from the top of an academic ivory tower.