The categories are equal in their relational existence
Lori Watson, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of San Diego, asks: What is a “woman” anyway?
Radical feminism has theorized “woman.” One of its more salient contributions for this context is showing that what it means to be a woman is not an absolute; it’s relative.
The category “woman” and the category “man,” the groups “women” and “men,” are relational. One does not socially exist without the other. For all the vexing about nature, social categorization is what is being dealt with here. Men without women don’t exist as socially defined. Women without men don’t exist as such either. The categories are equal in their relational existence. Unfortunately, such equality doesn’t extend to their social substance, although we are working on it.
The categories are relational.
No doubt women who have been socialized to femininity since birth on the basis of their sex organs do have a relationship to womanness that is in some important sense particular. But so, too, do white women, Black women, Latina women, Asian women, lesbian women, poor and working class women, differently abled women, even if it is not based exclusively on their sex organs. In other words, even if one commonality among all these groups is socialization to and subjection to femininity on the basis of sex organs at birth, that does not exhaust their relation to the category woman. Femininity varies along other hierarchies. Sojourner Truth reminds of this in her “Ain’t I a woman?”[5]
Moreover, gender nonconforming persons, whether trans identified or not, are typically confronted with the hierarchy of gender in often violent and torturous ways. Socialization to masculinity is itself about socially demonstrating one’s ability to dominate. Fail at it, and what are you? A pussy. A fag. In short, a girl, a woman, someone who allows “them”selves to be penetrated, dominated.
And you get called that. You can see and hear men doing that without even going outside; you can just watch all those macho reality shows on the Discover channel.
Now return to our observation that gender is a relational category. Where do trans women stand in relation to men? (For that is the question, not how do trans woman stand solely in relation to women, as is often treated as the only question.) The radical feminist analysis revealed that femininity under conditions of male domination entails widespread forms of discrimination including sexual access for men to women on men’s terms, often with impunity, including often with force. How do trans women stand in relation to these forms of male power? Trans women are often socially marginalized, locked out of employment opportunities for gendered reasons, excluded from housing opportunities, lack basic protections for physical safety and bodily integrity, aggressed against for their perceived gender transgression, raped in order to be taught the meaning of womanhood and for who knows what other “reasons,” forced to sell their bodies for sex for sustenance, and murdered for asserting their right to exist. That starts to sound a lot like being a woman in this world to me.
In other words it’s being someone’s “bitch.”
Did we just get to “trans women are women” via radical feminism, or am I delirious?
Yup.
No, we got to “trans women suffer many of the same injustices as women”. Not the same thing.
Not sure I agree with the argument that the categories are relational per se. That’s like saying that you can’t enjoy pleasure without experiencing pain.
I mean, it’s almost definitional. Categories are distinct entities that don’t require another for their existence. If someone decides there’s a category of blurfarb, it exists of its own creation, and not in opposition to the category non-blurfarb.
I don’t disagree that certain individuals are marginalized and that the likelihood of being marginalized increases based upon which category one belongs to (whether chosen or assigned by virtue of genetics–such as being born black). But it strikes me as an awfully broad brush being applied here.
I’ll leave the rest of it for another time (when I have more time and figure out how to construct sentences without parentheses). But a flawed premise doesn’t necessarily argue for the conclusion reached.
‘Differently abled?’ Anyone who can use a term like that with a straight face has lost all respect.
I have one eye, that’s LESS than two, not ‘different from’ (she would probably write ‘than’) 3 years ago I lost 75% of that eye. That is not ‘different’ its less.
Differently abled. :D.
I’m not differently abled. I’m disabled.
The pain I experience every day is not a difference in comfort, it’s pain.
The things I can no longer do are not things I now do differently… they’re things I can’t do.
I don’t have a “different hearing ability,” I’m fucking deaf. Well, “hearing impaired,” if you like, considering that for the time being I still have about 50% of the frequencies worth of hearing in my one “good” ear.
I remember some controversy over a cartoonist being accused of drawing cartoons insensitive to the disabled. They did TV interview – lo and behold, he was in a wheelchair.
They asked him if he considered himself disabled. He said “I prefer the term ‘maimed’.”
I’ve met a lot of disabled people, and not one who was offended by the term disabled.
Most stress it, probably in part because of the current environment where people’s disabilities are questioned and they are accused of being lazy, not wanting to work, get called “con-men,” are described as being “on welfare” if they receive Social Security Disability, etc.
The more harmful attacks on the disabled these days are not people calling them disabled or “cripples” or whatever… the serious worries of the disabled are of people calling them cheats, thieves, fakers, and of being thrown off of whatever meager income and medical benefits they receive.
The defensive reaction is to practically shout “I’m DISABLED!” In fact, because of people with non-apparent disabilities having to be accused by strangers of parking in the wrong spot, or defrauding the government, etc., there is a push for awareness of invisible disabilities. People are being forced to claim the word disabled and defend it and wear it as a badge to defend themselves from everyone from politicians out to defund, to passersby who take a glance, decide they don’t look disabled, and scream at them for using the restricted parking, etc.
Human beings are socialised from birth with the definitional behaviours of the two major categories of people. Long before a child is aware that the categories are based on the bits they pee with, they are aware that they are expected to conform broadly to one of two suites of behaviours. And we look at those suites, and gender ourselves according to the one which best describes ourselves. All of this happens pretty much subliminally. We don’t make a conscious choice as such, but most of us do ‘choose’ because ‘not choosing’ is so rarely an option.
Accordingly, it comes as something of a shock to some of us when we are told that we have ‘chosen’ wrongly, and that other people now get to choose for us and put us into the ‘alien’ category. After all, we had worked out that people whose characteristics mostly fall in the range A-M are called ‘boys’, and those whose characteristics mostly fall in the range N-Z are called ‘girls’, so if I have characteristics E-Q I must be a boy, right? I presume that someone who is born with the characteristics K-X feels ‘like a girl’, grows up feeling ‘like a girl’, and is just as devastated by puberty not giving them the hoped-for adult body as I was.
Those women-born-with-female-sex-organs who think that trans women are male invaders and rapists are ignoring the obvious fact that in a lot of places men don’t need to ‘disguise’ themselves in order to get access to as many women as they wish, since their society is set up for them to have free access (since it is the case there that women are still largely viewed as chattel and not full persons) so long as they keep to certain social rules, e.g. make sure that any woman they target is unlikely to be believed (e.g. drugged with alcohol or similar, and/or poor, and/or a sex worker) and doesn’t belong to a socially more powerful man. In all places, they reduce their chances by cross-dressing. As far as wider society is concerned, trans women are women. They are devalued in all the same ways that cis women are devalued, and they also have the additional burdens associated with having been born with the sex organs associated with male, manly, macho men but rejecting the socialisation that usually goes with that.
As for the categories being relational, well, some of the socialisation obviously is; but there would still be women if we simply stopped gestating male offspring. The sexism problem could be solved within a century if humanity restricted itself to daughters. Whether we could prevent the hierarchical problems, though, is another matter entirely.
But I’d still be disabled if all able-bodied people vanished tomorrow. I’m suffering from crippling pain, and there really is no more accurate way to describe it.
Me:
That would be better put as
Are these women also terrified of being the targets of cis-lesbians? Women, cis and trans, go to loos to pee, not to ogle or assault anyone.
P.S. I understand that the largest group of English-speakers on the internet is necessarily from the U.S.A. However, it still irks me when it is assumed by them that all other English-speakers have the same experiences and should have the same taboos. Someone like me, born in the UK in the 1950s, has very different life experiences to someone born in the USA in the 1980s. What might seem like universal truths to them seem mightily specific to other people. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathise. But why are youthful USAians in particular often so keen to proclaim their own ‘lived experience’ as a valid reason to police the behaviour and language of other people, yet accuse those same people of ‘ageism’ when we point out that our ‘lived experience’ gives us a different view?
My own view of language policing is not to use other people, or the descriptive labels of other people, as pejoratives. If I wish to describe myself as a crippled autistic tr*nny granny, surely that is my right? It hurts no-one†, and I’ve found that humour is a good way to get other people to be on my side.
†(Seriously, it hurts no-one, although I refrain from using the word ‘tr*nny’, with or without the splat, on the open internet (such as Fæcesbork) because of the sensibilities of the USAians for whom it is an unforgivable slur. I even debated putting it here, but I reckon that Ophelia of all people would understand, and besides – you can delete this if you find it offensive.)
tiggerthewing #7:
Not quite. Trans women are not at risk of forced pregnancy. I’m your age, from the USA, and spent quite a few years in fear of being forced to choose between unsafe, illegal abortion and unwanted pregnancy. When any woman is forced to bear unwanted pregnancy, I am dehumanized, all women are; I know this deeply, viscerally,furiously. I know it daily because I’m reminded daily.
I know you know this, at some level, just as I know that I haven’t experienced many of the problems that trans women face. I wish reproductive freedom was something we could all take it for granted, then I wouldn’t bother raising the issue. But it isn’t, far from it.
olaru, So infertile women or post-menopausal women aren’t women, because being at risk of forced pregnancy defines a woman?
That one won’t fly- you’re going to have to try a little harder. Or, you could just admit you’re grasping at straws to justify an irrational prejudice against trans people.
?????????
I said, “I know I haven’t experienced many of the problems that trans women face” and you hear “infertile women or post-menopausal women aren’t women?”
Any statement that members of one category of woman are “devalued in all the same ways” as another, is risky. Because we aren’t. Of course there are commonalities – we need to be sensitive to our differences as well.
Oh dear. I just realized that the way I broke up my quotes could be interpreted as saying “Not quite” in response to tiggerthewing’s statement that “trans women are women.” I most certainly did not mean that! I meant that various groups of women are devalued in “not quite” “all the same ways.” Not more, not less, just not the same.
#10 Yawn:
Women=biologically female. Having the capacity and function are two different things dude. Menopausal women are still women dude.
I call ‘transwomen’ male because that’s what they are. When they decide to perform a gender they put themselves at risk FROM MEN because gender is a social order whereby women are oppressed by men. However, women shouldn’t have to forego their safety and spaces to accomodate them. They should have their own bathrooms, their own culture.
Even if we get rid of gender, which is the radical feminist perspective, we still have women being oppressed by SEX. It’s the FIRST and primary oppression.
Mancheeze:
“women” is a gendered word, and since you explicitly don’t distinguish between sex and gender, your hypothetical is incoherent and thus spurious.
(I presume that by “SEX” you refer to coitus in that last and remarkable claim)