I actually think – and this is too Big a thought to cover as it deserves, so apologies for that – but I think this is a big part of why some schools of feminist thought don’t really have room in them to accommodate trans experience. People think it’s because radical feminism is essentialist, but it’s the opposite of that.
Radical feminism has one lens through which to view gender, and that is class struggle – specifically, the idea that the world sorts you, against your will, into either the oppressed class or the oppressor class, and that’s that on that. It doesn’t matter if you want to be there or not – radical feminism assumes, in fact, that no thinking woman wants to be sorted into Oppressed Class – but who fucking cares, that is the system of patriarchy, which over the course of one’s life creates victims and perpetrators out of people, based on the class they’re born into. You don’t have to like it, want it, relate to it, approve of it, or find it natural to you, but it IS the condition under which you will be required to spend your life.
And there’s much to be said for an analysis of gender as class. But then…trans people turn out to exist, which is pretty disruptive to that analysis. Under a lens of Gender As Class Hierarchy, what can you make of trans men, except that we are so uncomfortable under oppression that we’d prefer the privileges of oppressors, so we’re pretty bad people? And what can you make of trans women, who completely destabilize the narrative that it’s worse to be a woman, that the way we socially construct womanhood is through control and oppression? Here are these people who say they experience womanhood as liberatory, as freedom from manhood on such a profound level that they’ll risk their lives to have it, and radical feminism truly doesn’t have a mechanism to reckon with that. Who would choose oppression? Something must be very deeply wrong with them – they’re liars, they’re deranged, they’re foolish, they’re not real women because real women know that gender as it currently exists is a game of winners and losers that women are losing. Trans women can’t be accepted in solidarity, because they don’t accept the premise that womanhood means being sorted against your will into a class that experiences uniquely intolerable suffering that has to be struggled against.
And I think what’s got them scared and angry now is what OP is saying – when cis women know real trans people, and discover that we fundamentally don’t interact with gender or experience it in that way (most trans men very much are feminists and transition for reasons other than raw Will to Power! most trans women are not too broken or ignorant to understand misogyny!), that this ideology of socialization in the context of class struggle can’t by itself account for our lived experiences – suddenly a lot of assumptions and premises are up on the block to be questioned. And if this ideology doesn’t account for us, who else doesn’t it account for?
(Black feminists, of course, have criticized the premises of radical feminism for decades but, y'know. Racial segregation means that white cis feminists are unlikely to be in intimate relationship with actual Black feminists – but more and more, people they thought they knew well in their own lives are turning out to be trans feminists. So that’s in the living room, in a sense, and impossible to ignore. So inherently more threatening. Also racism.)
(Also Abigail’s video about art in times of crisis is, in itself, a work of art, so watch that.)
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