Thanks for the shoutout, pixie!
To give some context, the reporter (Michelle Goldberg) talked to ~a lot~ of people for this piece, at great length. She and I talked for 90 minutes on skype, then again for a few hours (in groups) at Radfems Respond and after New Narratives. She talked to sometranslady for even longer, and she talked with Mindergenfield. She also interviewed other trans women who favor a more traditional version of trans politics, including historian Susan Stryker. On the radfem side, she talked to ~a lot~ of women as well, including three or four radical feminists who are strong allies of gender-critical trans women, none of whom were quoted in the article.
Except for the extremely minor misstep of stating that âcisâ became a thing in the 90âs (I never heard it before 2006), Michelle really did her homework. This is what made it so laughably absurd when Parker Molloy, who has made a career out of stirring up bullshit on twitter and then writing âserious storiesâ about if for the last year, called Michelle âunethicalâ. Iâm not a journalist, but it seems to me that an ethical journalist would interview more people than she could possibly include in the story, in order to make sure she was really understanding the context correctly.
Did I think the article was perfect? No. For one, I wish that she had mentioned New Narratives, or at least made it explicit that sometranslady and I didnât just âhappenâ to show up at Radfems Respond, but were strong supporters of RR and had planned our own event for the next day. I also expected the article to take a somewhat more explicitly pro-radfem stand. But the longer Iâve sat with it, it feels like Michelle did the best she could do within the constraints of the length limit they imposed (my understanding was that the piece was initially planned to be 10,000 words, not 5000), and the reality that mentioning so-called âTERFsâ in the mainstream media without immediately vilifying them is heretical hate speach, according to mainstream trans and liberal feminist activists. I think that closing the piece with Sandy Stoneâs total lack of empathy, victim-blaming, and support of boundary violation, was as close as anyone can get to being explicitly trans-critical within left-wing media these days.
On a personal level, I was hoping this article would also have the side effect of dispelling the rumors of me being a âTERF sockpuppetâ or otherwise not a real person, but I donât think that happened either. Parker dismissed me as using âviolent rhetoricâ (ironically, for linking to the Dhejne study which says that mtfâs have the same rate of violent crime as all males), and Mari Brighe at Autostraddle pretended sometranslady and I werenât even quoted in the article. (She never mentions our inclusion, anyway, though she complains about âhow little space is devoted to trans activistsâ.)
It is really difficult to engage in this debate without âpicking a sideâ and âsticking with itâ, but thatâs exactly what has to happen - and in that sense I think Michelleâs article really excelled. Clearly, she is sympathetic to radical feminists, and to trans women who are aligned with feminists (by which I mean sometranslady and myself), but she has reservations about the reality-denying âbecause I say soâ delusions of mainstream trans activism. As should any rational person! Our feelings cannot possibly change facts and history retroactively! This is kindergarten 101 level of understanding the world! Except in recent years a large number of delusional trans activists have made a career out of promoting their dangerous vision of subjective reality, and mainstream feminists have gone along with it because, as Sara St. Martin Lynne so eloquently said in the New Yorker piece, âWhen you come from a liberation, leftist background, you want to be on the right side of history.â
But the dudes who have been pushing this agenda have gone a little too far, and Main Street isnât going to swallow that when a 40-something year old man with a sexual interest in underage girls indecently exposes his penis in the ladyâs locker room, but it turns out itâs legal because heâs âreally a womanâ (according to him). And one would hope that with vigorous attacks on women currently being perpetrated by the (formerly married, heterosexual, white) men trans women who have taken over the boards of many ostensibly LGBT organizations, women in the larger sense would wake up and smell the bullshit.
Radical feminists have developed the most realistic framework for analyzing the social realities of gender. Specifically: gender is a hierarchy which is constructed on top of the (real, permanent, dimorphic) category of biological sex. This analysis has been extremely helpful to me in understanding my life as a trans woman. However, the radical feminist proposal to end the pain faced by transsexuals falls short for me. Specifically: if gender is abolished, we will all be âfree to be you and meâ. To my understanding, this is the social change that would allow transsexuality to be âmorally mandated out of existenceâ as Janice Raymond said, not because she disliked individual transsexual people, but because transition would no longer be necessary since we could just behave however we want to. Likewise, the more modern radical feminist analysis of mtf transition by Sheila Jeffreys, that mtf transition is always motivated by autogynephilia, also doesnât right true. Ironically, in both cases I think these analyses fail to get to the actual root of many trans peopleâs experience. Specifically: where is the discussion of sex dysphoria, and of trauma?
On the other hand, the so-called âadviceâ of mainstream trans activism, which says âIf you are trans you have no choice except to transition, whether or not it actually makes you feel better, and it doesnât matter whether or not you pass or fit in, because our agenda is to legislate other peopleâs reactions to usâ, is clearly not helpful for anybody with even the most tenuous grasp on reality.
Goldberg didnât set out to write an article about gender-critical analysis of the trans experience, but she did talk to some of the people who are most engaged in trying to move that analysis forward. To me, that is a huge positive. Like Iâve said many times, it took 20+ years for the woman-hating battleship of trans activism to drift so far off course, and weâre not going to right it overnight. But itâs starting to feel like change is in the air.
titsay
dailybridgerton
annaxmalina
yousharknotpass
izzy806
gummygunk
