Your kind of discovery of your sense of self

Jul 11th, 2020 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Glamour magazine had a long talk with that most glamour lady of all, Munroe Bergdorf. Glamour asks a profound question:

How have you learnt to become at one with yourself in that sense what have been some turning points in your kind of discovery of your sense of self?

In other words tell us more about your Self, which Bergdorf is only too happy to do.

As a trans person you’re forced to find who you are in a world that really doesn’t have any space for you. You’re forced to exist within the world that constantly wants to tear you down and invalidate your feelings, invalidate your identity, invalidate your contributions, invalidate your possibility of having what we would call a normal life or an authentic life.

Well, no. That turns things inside out. Nobody “forces” trans people to do anything; trans people decide that they are different from everyone else and then complain that nothing fits. It’s a bit like saying you identify as having ten feet and then that it’s unfair for shoe stores to expect you to pay for five pairs of shoes instead of one pair.

It’s not really reasonable to claim to live in a way that’s the opposite of the way the vast majority lives and then accuse that vast majority of blocking your ability to have a normal or authentic life.

Does Bergdorf even want a normal life? A male Bergdorf would not be getting all this attention.

As a person of colour, as black person, as a trans person, as a queer person and as a woman, I’ve been navigating a hostile environment my whole life. I do feel like now that we’re all confronted with our phones, much more than we were we’re not distracted. I think that we’re all starting to see exactly what’s wrong with society.

Bergdorf is doing a lot of double-counting there. A person of color and a black person? That’s two points instead of one? And a trans person and a woman? He gets to count both? A man who says he’s a woman gets two disprivilege points where a man who doesn’t say he’s a woman gets none and a woman gets one? When literally speaking a man who says he’s a woman is in fact a man? Is this all just a big con game to accrue points?

Then he explains how feminism is all wrong because it doesn’t center him.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of really unhelpful feminism out there, such as the feminism that J.K.Rowling follows which is called gender critical feminism which believes that trans women are men and that the only women are women that have a uterus. That is awful because a lot of women can’t have children and does that mean that they’re less women because they’re no longer of use? It also doesn’t centre the needs of black women, of sex workers, of the people that really need feminism the most which is the most oppressed cross sections of society. So, I believe that feminism needs to lift up people that are on the front lines when it comes to sexual violence which are people that engage in sex work whether or not that’s for survival or choice, not just sex slavery of sex trafficking. But also, trans women, disabled women, people that are often overlooked within society or have the least rights need the most access to feminism.

Except that trans women are in fact men, and feminism is for and about women, not men, not even men who claim to “feel like” women, men who say they are women, men who “identify as” women, men who claim to think or even know they are women.

I think journalists should stop asking men for their criticisms of feminism. Men do enough of that without prompting.

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