Radical feminism and the transgender woman

Radical feminism is a form of feminism that’s, to put it politely, black and white in its view of the battle of the sexes, black and white enough to be able to use that outdated term with a straight face here. Radical feminism attempts to reject all gender roles and anything that smacks of sexual essentialism — men drive like this, but women drive like that — and argues that all such roles are socially defined, part of an overarching male dominated value system that defines women as inferior and which glorifies those characteristics that are stereotypically male and pillorises those that are stereotypically female. The breakdown of these structures and existentialist gender roles is what radical feminism attempts to do.

And if anything breaks down existentialist gender roles, it should be transgender people, shouldn’t it? What after all shows the idiocity of gender existentialism more than somebody who by their very existence shows that physical sexual characteristics does not a man or woman make, that you can be born and raised a man yet know yourself to be a woman or vice versa, let alone those who know themselves to be neither, or both, or something else entirely?

Yet radical feminism has huge problems with this. On the one hand, it insists that transgendered people are victims of exactly the patriarchial society they’re fighting against, confused by the gender essentialist social roles that insist that if you like pink dresses and My Little Pony you’re a girl, to the point that you’d use dangerous hormonal therapies and even surgery to change your physical gender, yet on the other hand it also insists that there’s no such thing as transgender women, just men masquarading as women (and vice versa). Both views are insulting and repulsive to say the least. Either you’re a duped and confused victim of social brainwashing, or you’re a hideous freak trying to fool real women you’re one of them.

This poisonous attitude is even on display in the writings of more moderate radical feminists, of those who have found that it is no longer possible to ignore or laugh off the “problem” of transgender. Which brings me to what inspired this post, radical feminist Nine Deuce’s sincere attempt to find some way in which transgender can be reconciled with radical feminism. She does this by stating her own position on the issue and seems to believe this should offer some way in which radical feminists can positively engage with transgender “activists”. Yet the bigotry is still palpable:

That there are people who feel so uncomfortable with the difference between their sexed bodies and their socialized conception of themselves that they would choose to risk deformity, death, and disability is to be deplored. Women have been conditioned to harm their own bodies in service of a social gender role grounded in misogyny and male supremacy. Radical feminism seeks an end to this practice. Women seeking surgery in order that their bodies will appear like male bodies, or men who undergo surgery in order that their bodies will present as female bodies, face huge psychological and physical risks and social ostracization. Adamantine gender roles are the source of the demand for these medical procedures and the dangers that attend them. Radical feminism also seeks an end to this practice.

That’s the idea of transgender women –transgender men not being of much interest to radical feminism, other options rejected entirely — as brainless victims having to be saved from themselves.

When trans activists bully radical feminists and attempt to force their way into women-only spaces, women should be angry and should speak up — and should express anger when they do speak up — but should do so responsibly and intelligently, so that the radical feminist perspective won’t be written off.

That’s the idea of transgender women as intruders, as charlatans pretending to be female in order to infiltrate “women-only spaces”. There’s a bit of projecting going on here as well, in an earlier comment Nine Deuce made:

Men absolutely loathe and fear trans people. Transmen are seen as intruders, but transwomen are seen as traitors. Men cannot understand why someone born male would choose to take on what they see as a subordinate position in society. It threatens their sense of order in a fundamental way.

Note that this is men, not some men or many men, but men. In Nine Deuce’s worldview, we all hate and loathe transgender men and women.

Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that this whole exercise is more about a way to improve radical feminism’s image as an ideology that is bigoted towards transgender people, without actually wanting to lose this bigotry, viz:

What cannot be allowed is for the public face of radical feminist theory to appear reactionary, and right now it does.

I think radical feminism has lost that battle. It was a product of second wave feminism, a separatist ideology that has long outlived any merit it once had. For younger women, who grew up in a world in which the ideals second wave feminists fought for have been largely realised and for whom gender and sexual identity has always been a much more fluid thing than radical feminism thought possible, it’s just not an attractive ideology anymore. It battles the wrong things and seems to have no answers to real problems facing women today, welded as it is to a view of gender that’s just as existentialist as the patriarchial system it tries to overthrow.