I’m sorry if the debate we had contributed to your feeling grotty. FWIW, you didn’t upset me – you educated me. Sure you were a bit harsh, but maybe I needed that!

Love and sisterhood. xx

Everyone needs a breather every once in a while. Know that we’ll be glad to hear from you when you work out your headspace and get some good “me” time in. :D

julian

xx M.

Hugs,

Em

Yes, I’d like to feel less adversarial about it and yes, I hope she can persuade me that it is possible to build more bridges between cis women feminists and trans women. But I think the problem is that she’s writing about the cis women’s feminist movement of which she’s a part. So the tendency – which we’ve already seen in her LJ and elsewhere – is to centre the cis perspective, thereby silencing trans voices, whether she intends to or not. I wish Ms Bindel had had the discussion with a trans woman directly. I think Aunty Sarah would have made a good interviewer. Having previously been a direct target of Ms Bindel’s transphobic bigotry, it would have been interesting to see how she (Ms Bindel) justified her comments when faced with one of her targets instead of someone who seems worryingly close to being an(other) apologist for her.

That being said, I’m very interested to see what steerpikelet will come up with. I hope it’s nothing less than amazing.

…

Regarding the the space between ‘trans’ and ‘other word’ as far as I’m concerned, in this context its use is adjectival. Just as I don’t say lesbianwoman or Klinefeltersyndromewoman or whitewoman or Jewishwoman, neither do I say transwoman.

I’m all for taking a tough line in defense of the community, but let’s not bite people’s heads off. Half the community hasn’t made up its mind about the space between ‘trans’ and ‘other word’ yet, so let’s not make it more important than it is.

I’ve set out my thoughts on this in some depth in previous posts (most recently: Cis Feminism in London 09, Reclaim The Night (For Cis Women Only) and the London Cis Feminist Network, and Feminism in London workshop: follow-up, to name but a few) but to recap:

The problem arises because the term is grounded in the use of the long-established trope which states that transsexual women are “not really women” – hence my assertion that the phrase women only is trans exclusionary. The definition is essentialist in meaning as it infers that one can only be “born a woman” (and never “become a woman”, to paraphrase de Beauvoir), and in so doing it denies not only the existence and agency of transsexual women and transsexual men, but also the potential for change itself. Thus women comes to mean cis women, just as surely as women only means cis women only. The biological determinism underpinning this rationale ensures that these definitions become permanent, unquestionable, immutable dogma.

My assertion is supported by various examples, both real world and theoretical. Real world examples include the discrimination faced by Sandy Stone by Olivia Records in the 1970s, Nancy Burkholder by Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Kimberly Nixon by Vancouver Rape Relief in the 1990s and, more recently, Lu’s Pharmacy.

And from the groves of academe, the names Janice Raymond, Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys will surely be enough of a reminder that cis women feminists have long had issues integrating transsexual women into their ideology, although if you require a more recent example, then you could take a look at Julie Bindel’s article in Standpoint magazine last week.

Just Jennifer, you may find it hilarious, but the fact that the organisers of the recent Cis Feminism in London 09 event issued a public clarification following requests from other cis women, suggests to me that even members of the London Feminist Network – who organised that event (as well as Reclaim The Night) – accept that there are valid concerns that need to be addressed.

Leigh: You ask why there is even a distinction and, truth to tell, I wonder this myself; quite often actually. It’s not a distinction that I have made, nor is it one I am particularly happy with – most of the people I come into contact with every day accept me as the woman I am; it seems to be only certain cis women radical feminists that have a problem with a transsexual woman like me. I have transitioned legally, socially, medically and surgically but apparently even this isn’t good enough. If you weren’t assigned female at birth, it seems that you can never be a woman. And no, I can’t work out how cis women radical feminists square that with their other conviction that gender is entirely social constructed. Apparently the concept of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” only applies to cis women – and cis women radical feminists go to great lengths to police what they see as the boundaries of their territory.

…*Helen shrugs, wearily*…

Go figure – because I’m damned if I can make any sense of it other than it being the product of transphobic views propagated by cis women radical feminists. And until such time as that is resolved, there will always be “women and trans women” – or, as I prefer to say, as a small way of pointing out the Othering and the power imbalance, “women and cis women”. I would happily accept “self-identified women” as a halfway-house label until such time as cis women radical feminists are willing to accept transsexual women like me as the women we are; however, I believe that could be a long time coming.