getting down & structuring some vague thoughts i've been having, would love to hear people's thoughts:
there is an ideal feminist subject (the thin white middle-class pretty gender-conforming-but-not-too-feminine cis perisex woman). this ideal feminist subject is who much of mainstream feminism has been build around protecting, supporting, defending, and theorizing on her experiences. she isn't real; she's an idea, a trope, a story used to ground feminism in a certain story. feminism uses a lot of stories in order to develop and communicate certain ideas & webs of ideas, which allow us to see the world differently, realize the different options we have to react to our experiences in the world, and connect with others to support one another and act collectively.
people who wish to engage in feminism narrate their experiences through feminist stories. this can be very useful, as it allows people to make sense of their experiences in a way that can actually empower them: there is an important difference between telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because i was a dumb slut, and i disappointed everyone" and telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because our sex ed was worthless and i didn't have a good understanding of consent and my boyfriend felt like he owned my body, and my community betrayed me because they held misogynistic beliefs about my body and my role in society."
but there are a lot of people who could seriously benefit from being able to apply those feminist stories to themselves, who cannot, because they struggle to narrate themselves as the feminist subject. this not only limits their ability to make sense of their experiences in an empowering way, but also has real material impacts. the ideal feminist subject is also the ideal feminist victim of domestic abuse, the ideal feminist survivor of date rape, the ideal feminist victim of the gender pay gap, the ideal feminist recipient of feminist support. if you can't fit yourself into these stories defined by the ideal feminist subject, you are far less likely to have your suffering recognized as real or urgent. resources that you may desperately need will not recognize you as a potential client. feminist movements to fight for social change will not consider how society needs to change for you to not suffer needlessly.
so many people re-narrate their experiences in order to present themselves as, in some vital way, close enough to the ideal feminist subject to count. people can take different tactics, but one of the most popular is emphasizing one's womanhood in order to counter-act the distance caused by being fat, non-white, lower-class, not conventionally attractive, gender non-conforming, trans or intersex. the narrative used often goes that feminism is for women, I am a woman, therefore feminism should include me. this isn't always successful, but it is one of the most influential, because feminism is centered around gender, it is most concerned with thinking about gender and people as gendered subjects. with all the words i listed above as describing the ideal feminist subject, the final word is not an adjective but a noun: "woman." the ideal feminist subject has many traits, but she is a woman.
trans women narrate themselves very similarly to other marginalized women, emphasizing that their identity as women is what allows them to step into the role of the feminist subject and use those stories and be integrated into feminism at large. trans women in particular can struggle with this process because "cis" (and "perisex") are fundamentally gendered (and sexed) terms, making them part of the same category as "woman," and so it is extremely hard to separate the ideal feminist subject's womanhood from her cisness and her perisexuality. we can see this in how, traditionally, these terms were not used at all; a woman was presumed to be a cis and perisex woman, so much so that "cis" and "perisex" didn't exist as defined concepts. transphobic feminists zero in on this to argue against trans women's inclusion. but, in popular strains of trans-inclusive feminism, gender identity is re-imagined as the location of womanhood (as opposed to the cis-perisex "female" body), which helps to de-couple cisness and perisexuality from womanhood.
but this is where feminism continually fails transmasculine and nonbinary people, and where transfeminism has continually disappointed. even if cisness and perisexuality are de-coupled from womanhood, they are still working behind the scenes to define it. you don't have to check those specific boxes, but you need to pass the vibe checks.
a trans man is systemically oppressed on the basis of gender, affected by misogyny and transphobia, and in need of the support and resources offered by feminism. but if the ideal feminist subject is, fundamentally, a woman, then he must narrate himself as a woman. and, crucially, even transfeminism rarely meaningfully questions the frameworks of oppositional sexism and exorsexism which define womanhood around being the opposite of, and excluding of, manhood. nonbinary people, even if they aren't men, are similarly excluded. even if someone identifies as a woman in some way, they can only re-narrate their experiences effectively if they downplay the parts of themself that aren't "woman." this also affects many trans women who, for a variety of reasons, are not comfortable or able or willing to re-narrate their experiences on the basis that their womanhood is just like cis women's.
and, even worse: the violence and misogyny experienced by trans men, by nonbinary people, by many other kinds of trans and GNC people, is fundamentally tied to their rejection of cis womanhood. yet they must try to narrate these experiences with misogyny as being fundamentally born from existing as a woman-as-defined-by-cisness. this creates an intolerable paradox which was well-explained by C. Jacob Hale in his 2009 essay "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency":
Those of us who are dislocated from already given gender categories, both normative and nonnormative ones, are dislocated in that we cannot fully inhabit any of them. We place ourselves and are placed by others in the margins of any number of gender categories, never close to the paradigmatic core of any but also never falling fully outside all. [...] I do not fit the paradigms of any already given gender categories. I flit about the margins of each of these categories. Since some of these categories share unions with one another, I flit through overlapping border zones constituted by the margins of several gender categories.
Flitting about the margins is not a refusal to own my location, nor is it valorization of gender play or gender fluidity. Flitting is a type of movement proper to ghosts: creatures abjected from full social existence who, instead, have only partial, limited social existence. For reasons as personal, various, and idiosyncratic as the personal, various, and idiosyncratic connections border zone inhabitants draw between our embodiments, self-identifications, and subjectivities, already given discourses offer us little else than indefinite sequences of indiscriminate erasure. Already given discourses may elide the specificities of those with firm locations within already given categories, but not to the same degree that they elide the specificities of the dislocated. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly for the dislocated have fallen through the cracks in the structure of the gendered world. Having slipped off all the handholds we have ever tried to grasp, we have fallen between the cracks of language and life. Unintelligible to ourselves and to others, we are driven to search for new category terms, since category terms are the signal-flags of social ontology, and we desperately long to reenter the world.
this is the source of trans in-fighting within feminism. some trans men desperately try to use the idea of a "female body" to narrate themselves as a feminist subject and downplay gender identity (which will inevitably be used by cis-feminists to ignore their transmasculinity entirely, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse), while some trans women use woman-identity and downplay the body. nonbinary people, too, engage in this. the core issue here is that all trans people, in order to re-narrate themselves to get closer to the ideal feminist subject, must downplay their transness. transness implies the inter-mixing of different gendered experiencs, different sexed bodies. it implies the blurring and crumbling of a solid, objective, unifying identity as females or as women. so the trans community is pulled in various different directions, tearing us apart as we try to cut off different pieces of ourselves to justify to cis women why we deserve whatever scraps of allyship they are willing to give us.
my solution to this problem is to define a new feminist subject, one based around shared suffering under patriarchy and shared resistance to gender-sex-sexuality oppression. this has already been done and will continue to be done until it sticks on a broad (ha) level; bell hooks' Feminism Is For Everybody comes to mind. just because re-narrating yourself to align with the ideal feminist subject is a popular method does not mean it has been the only one, and many people (particularly Black women) throughout the history of feminism have simply rejected the idea that the ideal feminist subject should be the ideal feminist subject. this is important for not just trans people but also the question of where cis men fit into feminism. feminists have long discussed men of all kinds being engaged in feminism, but if the feminist subject is always defined as a woman, then we will always struggle to conceptualize a multi-gendered approach to the goals of feminism, and feminism will continue to be used to turn gender-oppressed people into ghosts and make us tear each other apart for a seat at a very small table, never built to hold us, much less feed us.
2087
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
areudirty
yousharknotpass
