It is fascinating to watch the latest intersection of the Gay Conserva-Queer controlled GLBt movement, radical feminism’s brand of feminism and the vocal “everyone cis-gendered hates us” TG crowd.
While everyone seems to be lining up to defend the ramparts of their individual ideological castles from each other it might be helpful to take a deeper look into those ideologies and the hardline positions and where they surprisingly overlap.
First the current situation. It seems that a Julie Bindle, a self proclaimed radical feminist, has been nominated for an award by the British Stonewall group while having made a number of comments about the womanhood of women of transsexual history based on opposition to gender reassignment surgery and a strict deconstructionist viewpoint regarding gender. Her stated position goes something like this, SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) is forced on gender transgressing males who are in open denial of actually being gay men. That if transsexuals want to aid the feminist movement, they should remain physically male and openly screw with gender stereotypes. This is a classic Janice Raymond position. Remember Raymond? She’s the boogywoman of all trans people. It also agrees with the basics of Bailey’s “all transsexuals are either actually gay men in denial or autogynophiliacs (a weird sort of way of saying a transsexual woman’s satisfaction with changes to her body made surgically is a pathology. Bailey came to the attention of the trans world when he was also up for an award for his work by a GLBt literary group.
What fascinates me is the surprise that Conserva-Queer led groups would ignore transsexual realities and support two individuals who essentially take the same position that these conservative gay men have maintained all along, trans-women are gay men in denial. Let’s forget the lesbian identified post op women, they don’t count. Surprising is the TG reaction to this when they themselves actually hold very similar opinions to the Rad-Fems regarding the desirability of deconstruction of gender roles and the artificial nature of women of transsexuality’s post operative womanhood. Yet again it is the women of transsexual history whose bodies and identities are the battleground for oppositional groups who both deny us except when it’s convenient.
During the intersection between Bailey and Bindle the TG rights movement has been busily promoting the arbitrary need for SRS, openly attacking the womanhood of the HBS movement women, (a reclaiming of the classic transsexual identity from those who have tried to erase it from view) and pushing a hardcore deconstruction of all gender roles agenda that brooks no opposition in a middleground. Suddenly they are circling the wagons to “defend” the womanhood of those of us they were attacking and mocking openly not so long ago. Why? because they are still aware, as I’ve pointed out for years, that classic transsexuality and the growing body of evidence that it is a neurologically based form of intersexuality is the only way they can defuse charges that non-classical transsexuals in the gender community are fetishists and their claims of being penised women border on the ludicrous.
Consider: Both the Rad-Fem branch of feminism and the TG movement embrace gender deconstruction and gender-queer expression by transpeople as necessary towards that end. It is the rock on which both movements are built. Both are highly invested in lesbian identity as opposed to heterosexual ones and they differ only in that one group, with pretty good arguments, denies the womanhood of the other. When they come into direct opposition, the TG side is forced to embrace classic transsexuality and the neurological realities of intersexed gender identity formation, something that they openly oppose without that confrontation by a Julie Bindle or a Ray Blanchard or a Bailey. TG apologists like Lisa Harney try to deny this “peacetime” opposition by making excuses and nitpicking perceived “insults” for the oft expressed insults of surgically corrected women’s bodies with terms such as “artifically construction vaginas”, “mutilated crotches”, and “after-market inverted penises” and ignoring the frequent charges by non-classically transexed transgenders that somehow women of post-operative history are trying to recruit them with cheering squads of hoards of post operative women cheerleading the removal of all trans penises. (it’s pretty much MtF specific)
During the intersections between outside assaults on transsexual women’s womanhood the TG crowd openly misrepresents the dysphoric imperative that leads to the need of surgical correction to cast that correction as the hard and fast “line” of the HBS movement when in fact it is no such thing. It’s the neurological realities of a female central nervous system vs. a male one that separates the classic transsexuals from the TGs and need to correct one’s body is just an outward expression of that reality. A post surgical crossdresser still acts and thinks like a male so very few thoughtful HBS women hold the position that SRS makes one a woman. It is this neurological difference that both the TGs and the Rad-Fems deny.
So, exactly how much does all this impact the life of a woman such as myself? In actuality, not very much. Rad-Fems don’t own feminism, they are just a single branch of a vibrant and growing movement and actually are becoming the minority position within feminism which is moving towards a reclaiming of the value of feminine strengths and values and away from becoming penisless men to gain economic parity. The TGs influence on the lives of most women of transsexual history is limited only to forced association with ideas most of us hold as downright insane. Our day to day lives remain mostly unaffected absent some clash with the legal system over IDs or marriage legitimacy by one of us. I never had any desire to attend the Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival preferring indoor plumbing and sleeping in a bed over the conditions there and my day to day life just isn’t adversely affected by some random Rad-Fems denial of who I am. I just avoid such folks only to find a number of them thus are willing to make an exception regarding my own womanhood ironically enough.
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