It is just part of their specificity
The student newspaper of New York University Shanghai did an interview with Catherine MacKinnon last March (scroll way down).
Have your views ever changed over the years? Have you ever had to uphold a viewpoint that you do not necessarily believe in for the purposes of achieving some form of legal reform?
CM: My views have certainly developed. They develop every day, with everybody I talk to, everything I hear and everything I see. I don’t know of something I thought in the past that I don’t agree with today…
Certain things that I have had an inkling about have grown over time, for example, concerning transgender people. I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman. Many transwomen are more feminist than a lot of born women who don’t much want to be women (for understandable reasons), who don’t really identify with women, some of whom are completely anti-feminist. The fact that they’re biologically female does not improve things.
To me, women is a political group. I never had much occasion to say that, or work with it, until the last few years when there has been a lot of discussion about whether transwomen are women. I discovered I more or less have always had a view on it, developed through transwomen I know, and have met, including prostituted ones, who are some of the strongest feminists in opposition to prostitution I’ve ever encountered. They are a big improvement on the born women who defend pimps and johns, I can tell you that. Many transwomen just go around being women, who knew, and suddenly, we are supposed to care that they are using the women’s bathroom. There they are in the next stall with the door shut, and we’re supposed to feel threatened. I don’t. I don’t care. By now, I aggressively don’t care.
Simone de Beauvoir said one is not born, one becomes a woman. Now we’re supposed to care how, as if being a woman suddenly became a turf to be defended. I have become more impassioned and emphatic as I have become more informed, and with the push-back from colleagues who take a very different view. Unfortunately some people have apparently physically defended their transition, also. This kind of change develops your views is a further in response to a sharpening of developments in the world. But the law Andrea Dworkin and I wrote gives “transsexuals” rights explicitly; that was 1983. We were thinking about it; we just didn’t know as much as it is possible to know now.
H/t Silentbob.
Damn Second Wavers! ;)
Does that ever get to the heart of it!
I am a man because, to the extent our culture/language insists upon using gendered identifiers/referents, my preference is for the masculine name “Kevin”, masculine pronouns, masculine addressing (Mr. or “sir”) and masculine familial roles (brother, uncle, dad). Take a moment to consider how, in the context of this blog’s comment section, that’s all anyone has ever needed to know in assessing my gender. Just as in all other contexts of life (excepting my relationships with my intimate partner and medical care-providers): nobody has needed to know anything about how my genitals appeared at birth; nobody has needed to know anything about my sexual anatomy now; and certainly nobody has needed or asked to see the results of a chromosomal blood test, in order to assess my gender. In this world, in virtually every interaction I have ever had or will ever have, the only meaningful sense that I have a gender, and the only meaningful sense in which it can be said that I am a man, is simply in the sense that I’ve expressed my gender as such.
It’s on those grounds that I state, unwavering and without nuance, that my youngest son is every bit, and in every way, as much a boy as his older brother. What differs between them anatomically should be between them, us (their parents), and their pediatrician…. and of exactly ZERO concern to anybody else.
As such, unless our culture and language changes; unless all identifying names and referents are stripped of all flavors of gender (and more: unless it becomes as unacceptable to inquire about a person’s gender as it might be to inquire about other aspects of their private medical records), I consider it both cruel and demeaning to act as a superior arbiter of what a person’s gender “truly” is, than that which a person asserts it to be. Note how this mentality inescapably follows from proposed definitions of gender such as “being a woman is having a vagina” or “being a man means having XY chromosomes”; and is exactly why I think such definitions are worthless and, worse, harmful.
Resolving an ambiguity in my post (I think it’s clear what I meant, but my inner grammar pedant can’t move past it):
“This mentality” is meant to refer to “acting as a superior arbiter of what a person’s gender truly is”; not the consideration of such as cruel and demeaning.