One troublesome fact that feminism has always had to deal with is that not all women are feminists. Some women are apolitical, some women don’t really know from feminism, some women are explicitly anti-feminist, some women are minimalist feminists (votes, good; equal pay, good; tweaking the culture, bad), some women are officially submissive, usually on religious grounds.
So feminism has to accommodate that fact. (The same of course applies, mutatis mutandis, to other movements.) Feminism wants to end the subordination of all women, but that doesn’t mean feminism considers all women feminists for the sake of being inclusive. Feminism can’t help being aware that some women are not feminists.
Here’s a shocker: the same thing applies to trans women. Not all trans women are feminists; some are very hostile to feminism.
So feminism has to accommodate that fact. Feminism wants to end the subordination of all women including trans women, but that doesn’t mean feminism considers all trans women feminists for the sake of being inclusive. Feminism can’t help being aware that some trans women are not feminists.
This is not transphobic or transantagonistic. It’s just reality. Not all trans women are feminists. I’m a feminist. I have a very fundamental political disagreement with trans women who aren’t feminists, just as I do with cis women who aren’t feminists. That’s entirely compatible with wanting trans women (and trans men) to be safe, to live as they want to live, to be able to use whatever restrooms they need to use, to choose their own names.
Supporting people’s rights is not the same thing as agreeing with their politics on every point.
It’s not transphobic to disagree with a particular trans woman’s take on feminism. If you ask me, it would be the transphobia of lowered expectations to do anything else.
All that seems obvious enough, but it apparently isn’t.
Comments
31 responses to “Solidarity and disagreement”
Without disagreeing with your comments, which are true enough, I followed the link to the Facebook post and find some examples of execrable bigotry ready to hand. Cheryl Lynne furnishes several examples:
“I don’t care if that ‘woman’ is wearing lipstick, a wig and a dress, ‘he’ doesn’t know what women feel like…”
“Don’t fool yourself Kate, men pretending to be women, is not going to help our cause…”
“They are GNC men, the idea that people can be born in a body they are foreign to, and need to have surgery and hormones to make them real, is the height of craziness… I will not support men calling themselves women. ‘Men in dresses’ saying that they are women does not make it so… they are not my friends unless they understand and state that they are not women…”
“It only behooves men to change this if they are not happy with it. Instead what do they do? They jump boxes, claiming to be entitled to the other box. Like the traitors of old, who ran away from the battlefield, they won’t get shot because they are claiming to be women…”
“trans gender is more of a fetish, like Kroc, the bodybuilder now saying he is a woman… Trans sexual is more of a mental health issue, people suffering from some sort of dysphoria, just like women who are as thin as a skeleton, look in a mirror and see fat. Both mean that they are not women.”
I don’t claim to know what gender “is,” and I reject gender essentialism, which means I really have no clear understanding what it means to be transgender in the first place–but I know blatant bigotry when I see it, and this is pretty vile stuff. This vandalized cartoon is another good illustration.
On this issue, I do often feel stuck between 2 groups of people that I don’t agree with. I don’t think that we can’t discuss gender identity but I don’t think that we should disparage or deny the lived experiences of those who identify as trans.
How many of the Republicans running for president now have claimed they talk with god, and that god told them to run for office? When do we start feeling bad about disparaging or denying their lived experiences?
It is possible to participate in discussions without endorsing deplorable viewpoints held by some of the other participants. This is how it is possible for The Daily Show and various news programmes with discussion panels to have their chats and interviews: if you only talk to people whose views you appreciate, you’ll only hear the echo chamber. I agree with what Ophelia wrote, and i agree that A Masked Avenger’s quotes show some very obvious bigotry. But isn’t it important to have people such as Jerry Fallwell and Anne Coulter be allowed to make their odious statements so that intelligent critics will have a chance to challenge them? How will A Masked Avenger point out the bigotry if they don’t go to where the conversation is?
I don’t join Facebook. I can’t see what’s written there, except as it has been excerpted here. But all i can say is: Opehlia, and any other person, gets to talk to whomever they wish… without automatically being in alignment and agreement with that speaker! If i want to challenge the Westboro Baptist Church or the Moral Majority, how can i do so if i haven’t actually seen their texts or heard their hatespeech?
Being part of a discussion doesn’t make you an automatic fanatical supporter of the participants! Why is this so hard for people to understand, particularly when these people are expressing their misunderstanding in fora such as blog comments?! Wouldn’t the very nature of their participation in criticizing (or haranguing) Ophelia on her blog here be somewhat in the same category as Ophelia going to a Facebook group and giving her criticisms there? Or is that level of self-awareness just non-existent in the people who are making ridiculous claims that a Feminist discussion on Butterflies and Wheels is somehow an aggression against Trans people?
Obvious double standard.
When there is some evidence to support the statement “I talk to God.”
False equivalencies are false.
I know there is plenty of crap in that group. I didn’t say otherwise. I don’t know why yet another bill of indictment was considered necessary.
Maybe I need to bold the part that says That’s entirely compatible with wanting trans women (and trans men) to be safe, to live as they want to live, to be able to use whatever restrooms they need to use, to choose their own names.
I despair sometimes. Bloody hell.
@ #6 probably because you didn’t bow down and say enough apologies, Shibboleths, oaths of fealty, and forever swear to transcend your Sins, and answer all “Yes or No” questions according to orthodox expectations. Or something similarly religiously ridiculous.
I very much agree that it’s a good and useful thing to do. But that particular group is no good place to do it, given its founder’s agenda. *
* To be clear: Anybody who thinks you deserved to be excoriated for not knowing the backstory there, or who assumed that your occasional comments there meant you were/are secretly a TERF, is a fuzzy-minded jackass.
And once again, by the time I comment my comment is superfluous. Didn’t mean to pile on, sorry.
Well anyway I disagree. There are good discussions there. I don’t see why I should miss out on them because of someone else’s agenda. I might occasionally find a good article in National Review, for instance; that doesn’t mean I’m endorsing its politics. Reading is not allegiance.
Hmm, maybe I accidentally created a misunderstanding by my phrasing. I meant the discussion is not transphobic, not that the group isn’t. I think the group is mixed, but I don’t have a strong position on that.
Ophelia @6,
This is the group that you participte(d) in, right? So you are saying that it’s ok for you to participate in a group in which there is “plenty of crap” like the blatantly offensive stuff sampled by A Masked Avenger above, and you apparently don’t feel that makes you a bad person.
But on another thread you and other commenters just got through explaining how anyone who participates in the slimepit is basically complicit in the worst that goes on there. Sure seems more than a tad hypocritical.
Here’s what you wrote in that other thread:
And what MrFancyPants wrote in reply to your quote above:
So… Do you and MrFancyPants really believe this stuff or not?
If someone hangs or participates in a group or forum, does that mean that it’s safe to conclude that they don’t really find the contents of that group over the line? Is it safe to conclude that that person is complicit in everything, or just the worst, of what goes on there?
If you both really do believe this, then what does that say about your participation in this group Ophelia? Surely you would have to agree that we ought to conclude that you don’t really consider the stuff A Masked Avenger sampled (and whatever else is posted there) to be over the line and we can conclude that you are complicit in what else goes on in that group.
Or, on the other hand, if you don’t believe that your participation makes you complicit and you don’t believe that it’s an indication that you don’t find the content to be over the line – well then we can all conclude that you unfairly maligned the slimepit participants with faulty reasoning that you reject when applied to you.
In either case it seems like quite the double standard you have going on. As in blatant and deserving of an an explicit acknowledgement and explanation.
On this thread, you were talking about how people who participate at the pit while they know the crap others there say and do are complicit, and that it’s callous to ignore or abide the bad things because they don’t affect you personally. I think that’s right, and from what I’ve learned about the FB group (I’m not on FB) it seems the same considerations might be applicable.
Oh for fuck’s sake. I haven’t seen anything in that group that remotely resembles the slime pit. No photoshops, no obsessive personal attacks and monitoring, no jeering and sneering, none of that. There are some intelligent conversations. (And there is heavy moderation – abusive stuff is not allowed and doesn’t go unnoticed.)
I don’t read every thread. I’ve read there only occasionally. I have however read enough to know it’s nothing like the slime pit.
Special pleading, also wholly unconvincing.
Since you haven’t seen the group, SC…why would you say that? Do you seriously think it’s like the slime pit and I’m down with that?
That stuff is far worse than the juvenille and crude content posted at the slimepit. It’s plainly transphobic and offensive, no gray area whatsoever.
Here is the pinned post at the top of the group’s page, laying out the rules. They’re enforced.
This is such obvious McCarthyism, it makes me sick.
People are trying SO HARD to divide things into “enemies” versus “allies” and as soon as you’re seen “associating with known enemies/ pinkos/ fags/ TERFs/ squirrels” then, ergo, you must be a horrible pinko fag TERF squirrel.
I’ve never looked at the links to the Slime Pits. I won’t join Fecebook. But i don’t have to see them in order to recognize the McCarthyism here. “Are you now– or have you ever been– a member of the Communist Party? Or *any* party?” Straight out of Joe’s playbook.
It’s “offensive” but the slime pit garbage isn’t? In what universe?
I wasn’t judging Ophelia’s participation–just noting for the record that the place has its share of hateful ass clowns. I still visit some forums from my libertarian/fundie days, even though I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the contingent of racist, sexist, misogynistic asshats there. What keeps me coming back is partly the few more enlightened souls, and partly the hope that because I can still speak the language, there’s a chance of having a positive impact.
A Nonperishable Softie @ 14, 17, 19 –
How does all that comport with what you said on August 9th?
It doesn’t. It flatly contradicts it.
You’re trolling.
Goodbye.
So, good news, Kevin @ 21, it was just one troll.
Well, and SC, which frankly baffles me.
@ #23 A Nonperishable Softie:
So, if i join Fecebook, and i join that group which has discussions wherein the moderators didn’t censor the transphobic bigotry, am i automatically transphobic? Am i automatically a bigot? Am i guilty of helping to harm Trans People because i join that group? Because it seems to me that’s what you’re claiming. And i say: “McCarthyism Bullshit!”
I can read whatever i want and even talk to whomever i want WITHOUT automatically being their supporter. What the fuck is so difficult to understand about this? Seriously? It’s like you believe in Cooties, and i’m going to catch the Cooties if i go talk to those Awful People With Cooties.
Ooops. I was slow at the keyboard. Thanks.
No problem.
Softie tried to make an impassioned defense of the merits of the slime pit. Uh huh.
Why wouldn’t this apply to the quotes posted at #1? It doesn’t have to be in every comment or every conversation. There seems to be an overall welcoming of a specific form of bigotry. If I found a forum that had some good discussions, but then came to notice several comments and conversations that were misogynistic, racist, or homophobic (“plenty of crap”), I wouldn’t want to continue to be part of it, and would feel complicit if I did.
Well bully for you. You’re pure and I’m filth. We already know that. Thank you for your contribution.
Dammit, what a derail. I’m going to start this thread over. I wanted to discuss the subject of the post, not the god damn Facebook group.