“They assign our bodies”: Why do transgender people all attack
This month, Playboy became the first girl french transgender model Ines Rau. “This is the right decision. We live at a time when the perception of gender norms is changing,” said Cooper Hefner, son and heir to the late founder of the magazine. But not everyone liked the decision of the magazine’s management. For example, Jenna Jameson, now a fashion model and businesswoman, and in the past the unwritten “porno queen”, spoke out sharply against Twitter. Jameson considers himself a feminist, but thinks that X and Y chromosomes define gender. In the same series of tweets, Jameson stressed that she does not consider herself a transfomer and generally supports all LGBT people.
Jameson is not the only public figure who believes that transgender people do not have the right to fully position themselves as women. The most active discussion on this topic was raised, of course, after Caitlin Jenner had come out and corrective operations. Glamor magazine then recognized her as the "woman of the year", and the director and actress Rose McGowan responded that Jenner "does not understand what it means to be a woman." The mainstream media accused McGowan of transphobia, but the feminist community was actively discussing not just a reward, but also whether Jenner, who lived most of his life in a male body and has “financial and gender privileges”, can call himself a woman in principle.
Transgender people are one of the most oppressed groups of the population, and it’s impossible to argue with that. They are hated by conservative politicians, religious orthodox and just people whose views are far from liberal. Transgender people are discriminated at workplaces, forbidden to serve in the army and are not allowed to engage in professional sports. But, in addition to these obvious things, transgender people are hated by some feminists and even by the LGBT community. At best, they are excluded from the agenda, they are recommended to solve their problems on their own. At worst, they are considered potential rapists or traitors.
"Transsexual Empire"
Transphobia occurred during the second wave of feminism. "Transsexuals rape women's bodies, turning them only into an artifact. They appropriate our bodies to themselves," wrote an American, Janice Raymond, in the famous book, Transsexual Empire. In her opinion, transgender people want to live in accordance with old-fashioned ideas about men and women, instead of abandoning gender in principle, and wish to appropriate the sacred ability of women to bear children. She also wrote a report to one of the state medical research centers, protesting the rights of transgender people to specific medical care. The US Department of Health subsequently used its arguments to reject initiatives that extend transgender rights. "Doctors and hormones can produce feminine creatures, but they cannot produce women," activist and colleague Raymond Mary Daly wrote in her book Gynecology / Ecology.
Raymond was not the first transfobka in history, but it was her book that formed the whole trend - the so-called gender-critical feminism, or trans-exclusive radical feminism, abbreviated TERF. His supporters believe that transgender women pose a threat to the community for various reasons. According to the writer Emma Allen, radical feminists think that gender discrimination can disappear only due to the complete rejection of female and male identity, and transgender people for obvious reasons destroy this myth.
Transgender people pose another threat to women for a quite prosaic reason - we are talking about their admission to women's spaces. The current system of separation of toilets, prisons and changing rooms is still a problem for transgender people - only a few countries have adapted these spaces for all people. In turn, trans-exclusive feminists fear for their security after such reforms. "Men rape women in the toilets constantly. Such laws will allow anyone to enter the women's space," said activist Katie Brennan. By the way, it is precisely for this reason that TERF is most disliked by lesbian transgender women. According to Raymond, it is they who can take dominant positions in the women's movement or enter into relations with cis-gender lesbian women, misleading them.
Some trans-exclusive feminists believe that transgender motivation is clear and dangerous. For example, gender researcher Sheila Jeffries in her book "Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism" relies on a highly controversial theory that transmen men just want to raise their status in the sexist hierarchy system. Transgender women, in turn, are initially heterosexual or bisexual men who experience arousal, imagining themselves in the female body and, accordingly, want to have them fully.
However, if the position of Jeffreys for a long time does not hold water, then the question of whether a transgender person can call himself a "woman" without having experienced a specific experience is still being discussed. It is also about the fact that a person who did not possess a vagina from birth cannot feel menstruation, pregnancy, clitoral orgasms, miscarriages, abortions, premenstrual syndrome and much more. This vulgar appeal to biology does not agree with the notion that gender is a social construct, which is essential for the feminist picture of the world. However, there is another experience, said gender researcher Elinor Burkett: “Transgender women never suffered because men did not speak with them at business negotiations, but with their breasts. They never came across the fact that their male colleagues were paid times more. " That is, transgender people cannot declare their affiliation to women, as they have not encountered sexual harassment, sexism, slopping, and the entire package of problems involving gender discrimination.
Feminists of the second wave actively fought for the exclusion of transgender people from female spaces for ideological and, it would seem, practical reasons. Today, only 33% of transgender people have undergone surgery, and their opponents tritely referred to possible violence from “biological men”. They were not accepted into lesbian organizations and were not allowed into feminist events. The most vivid illustration can be considered, perhaps, the women's music festival, which takes place every August in Michigan. Since its foundation, since 1976, only "real women" have been accepted there. This rule has been tried several times to protest, but the founder of the festival, Lisa Vogel, has stood her ground for many years. She responded quite radically to one of the petitions in 2013: “The festival, which takes place just one fine week, was created for women who were born to be women who grew up as women and who consider themselves women. I believe women who were born as such live a special experience, and he bases their unique gender identity. "
Transphobia is absurdly supported by men. For example, the leader of Deep Green Resistance, Derrek Jensen, in 2012 declared his eco-organization to be trans-exclusive: "Why is it normal to be a transgender, while not being declared black as a black?" The co-founder of the organization, Lear Kate, explains this decision by the fact that the trans community is supposedly very misunderstood. "Transgender women do not understand that they have special masculine power. They do not recognize that they somehow have to do with violence against women. In my opinion, transgenderism has become possible due to pornography and the destruction of borders about acceptable."
In an absurd way, the transphobia of activists enables the conservatives to use "feminist" rhetoric, pursuing absolutely patriarchal goals. For example, the traditionalist organization Ruth Institute bases its argument against transgender people on the work of Sheila Jeffries. “I didn’t expect to ever agree with a radical lesbian feminist. However, I also think that Bruce Jenner was never a little girl. It doesn’t matter what his fantasies are. I was such a girl. She was Jeffries too. But Jenner is not, ”says Jennifer Robak Morse.
Not women, but transgender women.
Unlike the traditions of the 70s and 80s, third-wave feminism seeks to include as many excluded groups as possible, including transgender people. The principle of intersectionalism helps the movement to expand the number of supporters and keep pace with social changes. It would seem that now a consensus has already been reached, but transphobic statements now and then come to light in the public space, and gender researchers of the old school continue to talk about "real women."
For example, in 2015, Australian professor Jermain Greer, speaking at Cardiff University, said that getting rid of penis and putting on a dress is not enough to become a woman: "If I ask the doctor to increase my ears and cause stains on my body, can I become damn cocker spaniel? " Greer is very famous in the world of gender studies, and her book "Female Eunuch" is considered a classic work on female sexuality. But transphobic statements badly damaged her reputation, and local students signed a petition demanding to forbid her to speak at the university. For the same reason, the feminist and LGBT rights defender Linda Bellos was removed from speaking in Cambridge: local activists were afraid of possible transphobic statements. "A soft policy on transgender people can allow men to dictate to lesbians, and especially to lesbian feminists, what to say and how to think," Bellos said.
From time to time, the rights of transgender people are also questioned by modern feminists. For example, the famous Nigerian writer and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi told Channel 4 news in an interview that men who have long enjoyed their privileges and then decided to change their gender cannot be called women in the full sense of the word. "Transgender is transgender," says Adichi. Later on Facebook, she explained her position: calling transgender women equal to women from birth - "a good initiative, but I am not satisfied with such a strategy. Diversity should not mean a strict separation into" men and women. "
However, among transgender people there are people who consider the current view on gender identification issues to be quite controversial. For example, transgender Helen Heywater believes that the notion that men truly become women after remedial procedures is a lie, which only helps psychologically to get used to the gender identity disorder. "I lived for forty years as a man. So why should I consider myself no less a woman than those who were born as such? I am an adult man who suffered from a gender identity disorder and decided to change." Highwater discussed this issue with radical feminists and found support, but, of course, her position contradicts the notion that today, gender depends not on genitals, but on attitudes.
In Western society, it is believed that transphobia among feminists is a relic, and trans-exclusive representatives of the movement are sympathetically called activists of the old school. However, in online communities, the hatred of transgender people continues to exist, and the Russian one is no exception. A new wave of transphobia rose after the attack on a 60-year-old trans-exclusive feminist in Hyde Park. The trans-activists hit her while the woman waited for the start of the event called “What is gender?”. She did not receive serious injuries, but the incident spawned new discussions about the inclusion of transgender people in the feminist community.
Suicides and pregnancy
The appeal of transgender opponents to a unique traumatic female experience clearly does not take into account the difficulties faced by people with a gender identity disorder. Take at least the statistics of suicides in the United States. According to these data, 41% of transgender people attempted suicide, 53% of homophobic crimes were committed against transgender women, and about half of American transgender people experienced sexual violence or harassment. In addition, there are still homosexuals who call for the removal of the letter T from the movement for the rights of sexual minorities. They also believe that transgender people reinforce stereotypes about male and female identity, instead of fighting against outdated binary oppositions.
Gender mobility still raises many questions. Can we call a heterosexual man a transfob who does not want to have sex with a transgender who has not performed an operation to correct the genitals? Should we abandon the gender line in the passport, leave it alone or introduce new definitions? Is it ethical to use the word "woman" when referring to pregnancy and abortion if the patient considers herself a man? One thing is clear: we seem to have no right to determine who among us can be considered a "real woman" and who is not.
Photo:Caitlyn Jenner, Models, MAC, Ivy Park, Wikimedia Commons
