The thing is…
Why is the BBC determined to share exponential insults to women?
More than the sum of the parts
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3 responses to “More than the sum of the parts”
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Hmm. I would look very much like Raewen Connell if I decided to pretend to be woman. That won’t happen.
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I often wonder why so many women, and particularly women who identify as feminists, support gender ideology. I think a big part of it is that they won’t acknowledge the reality of autogynephilia. It’s not that they can’t see that transwomen are male. It’s that they want to imagine that these men have a deep spiritual solidarity with womanhood and the burdens of the body that come with it. In many feminist writings about trans, it’s clear that they see a resonance there: a transwoman’s (supposed) sense of being trapped inside a male body is akin to a woman’s sense of being constrained by how her body is perceived and objectified as she moves through the world. I’m sure I’ve read feminist arguments that that the feeling of body incongruity professed by these men is the the thing that qualifies them as honorary women. Body-as-burden-to-be-overcome is the badge of womanhood for transwomen in the eyes of many feminists.
But autogynephilia flips that tidy little narrative right around: if transwomanhood is driven primarily by men’s sexual attraction to female bodies rather than their spiritual solidarity with female people, then they’re actively contributing to the burden of the male gaze: their claim to femaleness rests on their sexual desire to have a female body, therefore the definition of femaleness is reduced to a body that sexually arouses a man. Body-as-sexual-object completely smashes the feminist pro-trans narrative. And it is, in fact, the truth. AGP is real, and it’s the underlying condition that most transwomen have. It’s a truth that many feminists can’t face.
I can kind of understand why, at least to a degree. I can imagine it’s heartbreaking to realize that the thing men most want when they want to be women is their bodies.
And of course some transwomen act polite and nice and aren’t being overtly lecherous towards women all the time. They don’t seem at first glance to be directly motivated by sexual desire every second they inhabit their “female” personas — and they aren’t. Men’s attraction to women often turns into love for them, and that often in turn leads to respect for women and a desire for them to be happy. Just this afternoon I read a piece in The Atlantic about just that:
Two years ago, the social scientist Alice Evans published a Substack post titled, succinctly, “Romantic Love Is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality.” Her thesis was straightforward: Cultures throughout history that have valued love tend to also care about women, for the fairly simple reason that loving people is usually associated with an investment in their happiness. In patriarchal settings where marriages strengthen familial ties and male power networks, love is discouraged, and many women are oppressed. But when cultures uphold love and intimacy, the status of women rises in tandem. Romantic ideals, Evans noted, are “a latent asset for gender equality” simply because they bolster the number of “loving men who want women to thrive and be happy.”
I’m sure that some men with AGP really do feel a deep solidarity with women. Prince (the musician, the Purple One) wrote hundreds of songs with lyrics that mixed lust for women with deep love and admiration and adoration of them. Famously, he was an avid supporter of women in music, writing songs for female artists, sometimes gifting the songs to them. The Bangles, Sinead O’Connor, Apollonia, Vanity, Sheila E, Sheena Easton… the list goes on. And I would argue that Prince was unambiguously autogynephilic. He wore women’s clothes, he sang about sexual confusion (“Am I straight or gay?”), he wrote entire songs in which he fantasized about being a woman (“If I Was Your Girlfriend”), and for a while, he even had a “female” alter ego named Camille. He recorded an entire album “as” Camille, and he intended to release it with no acknowledgement of himself as the artist. (The release was scrapped at the last minute by the record label, but many of the songs ended up on other records, still credited to “Camille”, including “If I Was Your Girlfriend”.)
A lot of feminists, even gender-critical ones, can’t abide the idea that Prince likely had autogynephilia, even though he was pretty much a textbook case. I think it’s because there’s a sense that AGP is all-sexual-objectification-all-the-time, and therefore can’t coexist with respect for women within the same male person. To me, that’s kind of the flipside corollary of the pro-trans feminist argument that if a transwoman isn’t all-lechery-all-the-time he can’t possibly be an autogynephile and therefore he must have a deeper spiritual connection to womanhood.
But the key thing about Prince is that he never claimed to actually be a woman and he never tried to intrude on women’s spaces. His alter-ego came rather close, but I think he saw it as channeling his autogynephilic impulses into artistic expression rather than an assertion of actual womanhood.
It’s possible for a man to have AGP and still respect women, but it’s NOT possible for a man to act on it by claiming to be a woman and intruding on women’s spaces and still be truly respectful of women.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what their motives are. Men are male and women are female, full stop. But the motives do matter in the sense that it’s men’s motives that prop up the narrative that justifies the pretence that crossdressing men are either actual or “honorary” women.
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(But also, I cut this for space because I already ran long, but in hindsight it should have been included: Prince’s obsessive adoration of women was not ideal. Yes, he centred women in his art and in his life, but you could sense in his artistic output and in his behaviour that he had a desire for control over how women were presented. All that gifting of songs to women and producing their music… there was also a lot of conflict there, especially when those women asserted themselves outside his creative control. That element of need-to-control-a-woman is of course another hallmark of AGP: the desire to be female is a desire to be in control of a female body.)
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