“Men also experience misogyny”
An open letter from “feminists” in support of “birth certificate reform” in Victoria (the one in Australia):
We the undersigned stand in support of the Victorian Government’s proposal to amend the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1996, to allow transgender and gender non-conforming people to change the sex recorded on their birth certificates without being forced to undergo medical or surgical intervention.
In other words to amend the law so that people can insert lies into their birth certificates. I can remember when birth certificates were nothing but cold, dull, bureaucratic statement of a few facts about a person. That’s all they were: just facts: not poetic invocations of personality or inner essence.
This amendment will provide transgender and gender non-conforming people in our community with access to legal affirmation of their identities without being required to undergo coercive sterilisation as a requirement to legally change their sex and gender identity documents.
But that’s the thing, birth certificates aren’t about “affirmation of identities”; they’re about documenting a minimum of cold hard facts.
As feminists we have long fought for people to be freed from the violence that the strict policing of gender and sex promotes, and any law that fundamentally equates one’s body parts with one’s identity and possibilities in life only furthers that violence.
Oh no no no no no. That’s not feminism. That’s not what feminism has been fighting. Feminism isn’t about “the strict policing of gender and sex”; it’s about a system of male domination that casts women as the inferior and subordinate sex. Feminists have never thought that the way to end the system of male domination that casts women as the inferior, subordinate sex was to “identify as” men (while leaving other women behind to go right on being cast as inferior and subordinate). We’ve always thought that the way to end the system of male domination that casts women as the inferior, subordinate sex was to end that system. Policing gender and sex has nothing to do with it; getting rid of male domination has everything to do with it.
We recognise that it is not just cisgender women who face gendered violence and discrimination, but that the transgender and gender diverse community face disproportionate discrimination across all facets of their lives including healthcare, employment, housing, and other aspects of daily life. Trans femmes and trans women and girls in particular also experience misogyny and any attempts to claim otherwise are simply excluding one part of our feminist community.
Men don’t experience misogyny. Men can experience bullying for not being masculine enough, but that isn’t itself misogyny. Feminists are allowed to keep feminism for women and girls and we are under no obligation to “include” the part of our feminist community that is male.
Maybe Dawkins should come out as “Rachel”.
I was getting ready to type something about how men experience (in some sense) misogyny indirectly, but you beat me to it, you wascally wabbit.
…change sex…
Good grief.
I hate everything.
I’ll need my birth certificate changed to read SEX: MALE (DLS / DCC / PSR / WCP / LTV).
I’m a gender nonconfirming male (I don’t like sports, don’t care about cars, have poor spatial reasoning, work in children’s publishing, and I’m a long-term vegan). My birth certificate should reflect this.
Ben, to be fair, it sounds like you’re less classically masculine than some of these TRA’s wearing a dress and makeup. I do wonder what the hell people think sometimes. I know I’m a man, but I couldn’t tell anyone what that feels like compared to being a woman or Iknklast’s otter. I have only the most fleeting interest in sports, care little about cars or motorcycles (sure I own one of each, but I couldn’t tell you much about them except I like them). Admittedly my spatial reasoning is good, but then I like and actually care about interior design (to my wife’s annoyance). Oh, I like meat. Maybe that’s what makes me a man?
This amendment will provide males to push their way into female spaces and gain benefits reserved for females by just saying so, without having to actually look like a female or be a female, and therefore be allowed to maintain male privilege while removing all protection for females.
There. That’s what it really says.
I grew up playing cricket, tennis, soccer, and table tennis; I also read books daily, did well at school, and was in a brass band. OMG what am I??
Women are finally not even allowed to have womanhood to themselves.
The emperor has no clothes. It’s a testament to how self-evident the reality is that this ideology requires all these contortions of definition (feminism is about strict policing of gender? by what consensus? if we look at the corpus this would so obviously not be the case) and such an explosion of new jargon.
“Trans femmes and trans women and girls in particular also experience misogyny and any attempts to claim otherwise are simply excluding one part of our feminist community.”
Oh that ‘simply’. You see it and its ilk everywhere. Here’s a simply. In many parts of the world at different times, if you were born female you ‘simply’ wouldn’t even have made it to infancy because your welcome to the world would have been getting drowned, suffocated or thrown out with the rubbish. Tell us again about how biology is irrelevant.
No, that’s definitely not feminism.
“Fighting any laws that fundamentally equates one’s body parts with one’s identity.”
What the ever loving hell?
It’s just not, people just string words together on some sort of post modernist piano wire and expect everyone around them to nod sagely and agree.
I hate people.
I hate to be the person who brings adoption into everything, but my birth certificate says I’m the true and legal offspring of a sterile man and a woman who was never pregnant. By law, I’m not allowed to see the one that aligns with reality.
Why are adoptees’ birth certificates “amended” and the true ones filed away? To cover tracks and screw over the powerless/women. The fake birth certificate was popularized if not invented by Georgia Tann, who’s notorious for stealing children from the poor to sell to the rich–and for the number of kids who died in her care. Most US states continue the practice because it’s what the powerful parties in adoption (adoption agencies, adoptive parents) prefer: a clean slate, even though that’s obviously bullshit.
And why are trans people’s birth certificates amended? Apparently it’s to cover tracks and screw over women. Obviously you can’t change your sex anymore than you can change your ancestry. You can’t even change your gender–biology aside, no legal change from “female” to “male” will ever get a woman the privilege being born male would have, and the reverse will never cause a man to lose the privilege being born male got him. In other words, whenever reality is successfully bent or avoided, it’s done by the powerful to favor the powerful. A clean slate, even though it’s obviously bullshit.
I’ve had people assure me that legal documents are not meant to reflect reality. But besides other people’s birth certificates (never their own!), they can’t name any legal documents that do or should work that way.
If this is OT, I apologize. I think there’s a connection here, but I don’t know whether I’ve made it or not.
Laurel, that’s just it. Screw over women every time. Surrogate mothers spend nine months carrying a child for someone else, and in many cases, even their activities during pregnancy are subject to demands by the purchasing parent (which is unreasonable even if the father-to-be actually donates the sperm).
The other problem with that is medical. Doctors need to know your real reality history, not your adoptive parents history, since they passed no DNA to you. In the same way, there are different diseases that afflict the sexes in differing numbers, and there is no amount of self identification that will alter that. If the doctor is not allowed to treat you as a man when you have the biology of a man, you could die (same for women). Transmen going to OB/GYN clinics makes sense; transwomen doing the same does not. How long before a transwoman demands a prostate exam at the office of an OB/GYN, and is told they cannot have one, and sues? I’m guessing not long. I put my money on Yaniv, especially if he can find a female immigrant OB/GYN.
I’ve been trying to piece together what the purpose of altered birth certificates really is, and your post #10 nailed it, Laurel. Thanks for that.
The germ of an idea I’ve been mulling over is: what benefit do trans people accrue by changing birth certificate sex that wouldn’t be present if birth certificate sex were eliminated?
Nullius i V @ 2 – yes I did, and it was very much deliberate. I pounced on my own self before anyone else could.
It’s tricky. It IS a kind of indirect misogyny that men and boys are bullied for being in any way “girly”…and yet it’s not literal misogyny itself.
It’s hard to tackle this—I believe homophobia is just a subset of misogyny, and that if we understood that, it might be productive. But that doesn’t mean that men experience “misogyny” the way these guys are using it.
Hell, what’s the point? If these activists were willing to accept the reality of sexism, misogyny, and how it orders our conceptual lives we wouldn’t be fighting this fight at all, would we?