That one quote from T/R/F is a real head scratcher... "Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon". If I understand it right, isn't that totally contradictory...? How is it bioessentialist to say gender is social? I really wonder what the hell she means by this.
I think she means that radical feminism theorized gender as a social phenomenon in resistance to bioessentialism, which is actually true (although nuanced).
Radical feminists did challenge the idea that gender objective and innate, arguing that much of, if not all, gender in society was socially constructed for the sake of oppressing women. Many radical feminists wanted a society where gender was completely abolished (although only after women as a class could unite and defeat patriarchy). Andrea Dworkin, a very popular theorist amongst radical feminists and anti-sex-work advocate, wrote in favor of sex reassignment surgery (and actually said it should be community funded).
However, many radical feminists (such as Janice Raymond) came to view trans women and men as supporting gender-the-social-construct. Trans women and trans men were seen as adhering to the idea that stereotypes around gender were real and innate. Radical feminists fixate on biological sex as an extension of seeing gender as socially constructed; the argument is that "womanhood" is a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress females, who are bonded together by their shared biological and social reality as a sex and oppressed group. Trans women seemed, to them, to promote the idea that the identity of women was reducible down to dresses and makeup and breasts (thus threatening a sex-based class uprising), and trans men seemed to promote to women that they could escape the burden of female oppression by rejecting the sisterhood believed to be necessary to defeat patriarchy, and attempting to join it.
Even Andrea Dworkin's trans-supportive statements reflect a belief that the categories of "female" and "male" are still real, and also that under an ideal, androgynous society, transsexuals will not be affirmed in their gender identities but rather transsexuality will stop meaningfully existing:
The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete. [...]
I have made this distinction . . . in order to enable me to say something very simple: that while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. [...]
There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency . . . as a transsexual. There are three crucial points here. One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised. Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.
Ultimately, radical feminism shifted increasingly towards bioessentialism often as a result of frustration and exhaustion with the fight against patriarchy, and constantly raising awareness of the violence done by males to females. Many radical feminists were socialists and involved in other radical movements, and were dealing with misogyny in those spaces, leading to a general sense that women had to place their own oppression above all others in order to ever achieve justice. Their major contribution to feminism, "the personal is political," also meant seeing society in general as having a "male culture" where women were constantly suppressed, and that women needed to develop their own culture as a class - and their own spaces, free of men.
And when that is your focus, no matter how much theory you write or read about gender being a construct and males and females being equal and the abolition of gender... you need to be able to divide males from females. When you are still forming a sociocultural identity around sexual characteristics and what you feel symbolically represents those characteristics, you are just doing gender again. And I hope its easy to see how, especially amongst white middle class cis women, especially with a focus on porn and sexual violence and the Penis Of It All, how this critique of gender as a social construct failed to escape bioessentialism.
I honestly don't really quibble with her claim that transfeminism owes a lot of theoretical groundwork to radical feminism. Radical feminism did genuinely contribute a lot to feminism overall, bad and good, and no one should ignore that. But I think transfeminism, properly done, is radical in and of itself, having moved on from the place we were in the 70s. Me personally, my goal for a post-patriarchal world is not necessarily that gender will be abolished, but that social constructs in general will not be reified (treated and believed to be objectively real) like they are now. I hope that, with the material and ideological structures that keep us oppressed removed and new ones focused on justice implemented, we can have our little human games with symbols and feelings and enjoy them without believing they control our lives and are weaponized against each other out of greed.
And, ultimately, if anyone can make trans radical feminism work in a way that meaningfully fixes its problems especially with gender polarity, I do not think it is Talia "calls other trans women straggots" Bhatt. In my opinion, the kind of "trans radical feminism" we need is one which places intersex and nonbinary people at the heart, not in terms of "being the most oppressed" but rather because the next thing feminism needs to fundamentally reckon with on the gender level is letting go on the "gender polarity" and the need to base feminism around a woman- or female-identity and intrinsic nature, which can also then open feminism up far more to cis men and lead the way for a multi-gender resistance to kyriarchy.
I highly recommend Ellen Willis' essay "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicals" (accessible on JSTOR). She herself was a radical feminist at one point and goes over the history of the ideology in detail, and how it ended up driving away so many feminists who otherwise identified strongly with the "radical" part.
I also recommend Sophie Lewis' Enemy Feminisms which is a great book that explores anti-liberatory feminism and includes a chapter on radical feminists. Its also a lot more transfeminist (and Lewis is genuinely inclusive of trans men and critical of misandristic tendencies).
