Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

I haven't read Doyle's pamphlet, but there's a brief discussion of it by Tav Nyong’o here: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/civility-disobedience/

Ostensibly, the new civility codes have little to do directly with sex. But the neoliberal rhetoric of the campus as a space under threat is deeply intertwined with in the continued infantilization of the democratic sphere, and is thus deeply connected to moral and sex panics. Jennifer Doyle demonstrates this point in a powerful recent pamphlet, Campus Security. Doyle recounts how one police justification for the notorious pepper spray incident at the University of California was the need to protect students, gendered as feminized victims, from the masculinized and racialized threat of occupiers who weren’t currently enrolled students. The justification of the use of real force against students in order to protect them from hypothetical aggressions is the kind of security state doublespeak we routinely confront these days. At the University of Illinois, for example, it apparently fell to administrators, trustees and donors to protect students from the political viewpoints of prospective professors, when and where those views could be adjudged (unilaterally, without any grievance process) to create even a potential situation of harm, discomfort, or threat.

oh, that's good, thanks ows

I was looking at that book today. In the preface she writes about receiving threats from a student and the university calling in security experts who wanted to turn her apartment building into a fortress. She filed several Title IX complaints, against the student and the college iirc. Also some chilling stuff about how difficult it is to convince a jury that someone is guilty of rape even the rape is caught on film.

http://www.vintag.es/2015/10/hiring-women-check-out-this-1943-guide.html
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DiUGHjUIzeo/Vivlhkop9pI/AAAAAAAB5Ig/7xyz4loC5ks/s640/1943+Guide+to+Hiring+Women.jpg

I don't know what the best thread is for this topic but as someone who has always found TERFs philosophically more coherent in terms of how they understand gender + sex (though not necessarily on board with their political ramifications) I find this gender-critical trans women phenomenon fascinating:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/12/gender_critical_trans_women_the_apostates_of_the_trans_rights_movement.html

I won't comment beyond the link bc it's not my place but here's a pull quote:

To the mainstream trans rights movement, womanhood (or manhood) is a matter of self-perception; to radical feminists, it’s a material condition. Radical feminists believe women are a subordinate social class, oppressed due to their biology, and that there’s nothing innate about femininity. They think you can’t have a woman’s brain in a man’s body because there’s no such thing as a “woman’s brain.” As the British feminist writer Julie Bindel—a bete noire of many trans activists—put it, “Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

At first, Highwater felt incensed by these radical feminists. But she also wanted to understand them, and so she began to engage with them online. She discovered “people who had a pretty good grasp of gender as an artificial social construct—the expectations of what females are supposed to be, the expectations of what males are supposed to be, and how much of that is socialized,” she says. “What I started to find is that the women I was talking to actually made so much more sense than the trans people I was talking to.”

less dramatic, perhaps more accurate paragraph

Boylan insists that the trans rights movement is nowhere near as doctrinaire as gender-critical writers claim it is. “The transgender community, as well as the community of people who define themselves as feminists, is comprised of many, many different voices, and the strength of the movement is in the diversity, and quite frankly the contentiousness and disagreement,” says Boylan, who transitioned 15 years ago. “I don’t see that there’s any sort of single consensus on what it means to be male or female either within the transgender movement or out of it.”

the way i hear that kind of problem put now is that while making a strong sex-gender distinction was strategically incredibly useful for second wave feminism, what trans issues bring into focus is that separating biological sex (as a foreclosed area of inquiry) from social gender (as the thing we talk about politically) is not as simple as it seemed, and the distinction has to be navigated much more carefully than previous generations often did.

(though even this is too simple - while the mainstream understanding of second wave feminism is grounded on that distinction, the way that the likes of kate millett treat it is much more subtle even from the beginning.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgF8waRVAAEQ46u.jpg

Sexism has finally invaded that bastion of equality: sleep.

just when I think this shit can't get any more ridiculous

Hearos

they should have flames on them or at least some sort of ribbed metal surface come on

boys apparently protectionist

I'll bet that blue color doesn't run, either.

holy shit the world is so. fucked. up. this is a catastrophe mother of fuck you bastards, you devious little shits. .. you had to do it... you had to make the pink hearo. you won't stop until you have it all will you hearo. smug pricks.

Lol

https://i.imgur.com/EuLQGdO.png

'special needs'

designed for women's tiny ears

Delicate fluttering hair cells

Did anyone else see She's Beautiful When She's Angry? A bit too Second Wave Feminism 101 for my liking, but the interviews with numerous key figures of the era (Rita Mae Brown, Kate Millett, Susan Griffin etc, including Ellen Willis in what I'm assuming was footage taped not too long before her death) make it worth a look.

New interview with Judith Butler, addressing (though not limited to) the mainstreaming of Gender Trouble.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4PGL5yW8AAQ2pY.jpg

more power to em

Oh cool, I'm an Alpha Woman now!!!

thank the lord

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/16/why-this-pastor-believes-american-girls-boy-doll-is-a-trick-of-the-enemy/

The Rev. Keith Ogden, who is a pastor at Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville, N.C., said he heard about the boy doll earlier this week on a segment of “Good Morning America.” He then sent a message to his parishioners titled “KILLING THE MINDS OF MALE BABIES.” “This is nothing more than a trick of the enemy to (emasculate little boys) and confuse their role to become men,” he wrote in a statement, which he later sent to The Washington Post. “There are those in this world who want to alter God’s creation of the male and female. The devil wants to kill, steal and destroy the minds of our children and grandchildren by perverting, distorting and twisting to TRUTH of WHO GOD created them to be.”

bit melodramatic imho

"the enemy" is pastorspeak for Satan

So he... wants male dolls to have penises?

no, he wants them to have guns (though I guess a doll with a camouflaged penis that fired nerf darts would meet his standards for acceptable masculine playtime)

A new addition to the feminist canon launches on 10 March:

Join Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel launch their new book, WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.

Imagine a sisterhood spanning all creeds and cultures – an unspoken agreement that women will support and encourage one another. So begins WE, an inspiring, empowering and provocative manifesto for change.

Change which provides a crucial and timely antidote to the have-it-all Superwoman culture, and instead focuses on what will make each woman happier and more free. Change which we can all effect, one woman at a time.

https://d2csxpduxe849s.cloudfront.net/media/9116038B-1451-4FB6-90B39305790096A6/02ED6F11-F2A3-42A0-9ED6939AB4335450/Hero1600x630-83a46e98-0a1e-4fa5-b4b6-1e3e5f899936.jpg

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/03/05/im-never-reenlisting-marine-corps-rocked-by-nude-photo-scandal/?utm_term=.fb674e79ebee

The War Horse’s report focuses on one Facebook group with more than 30,000 members called Marines United. In January, a link to a shared hard drive containing photos of numerous female Marines in various states of undress was posted to the group, according to the War Horse’s report. The hard drive contained images, as well as the names and units of the women pictured. Many of the photos were accompanied by derogatory and harassing comments.

This is a truly excellent reason to start a rock band. https://t.co/bYoFldhcAZ pic.twitter.com/x0YmPPURrp

— Sassa (@astridoverthere) October 19, 2017

So I've been more involved with left activism/organizing of late which means I've been more exposed to more flavors of The Left than I was previously. This has been mostly rewarding and rad but I have encountered a strain of what I'd consider to be on the extreme end of radical idpol, where a couple of trans comrades have outright stated that 1. sexual preference for certain/specific types of genitals are inherently transphobic and 2. because cisgender folks uphold cisnormativity, their cisness / "being" cis is itself a form of oppression against trans folks. I struggle with these ideas and I don't think it's *just* cause I'm a cishet dude (albeit one who's not uh "active" in any meaningful sense and not planning to be again anytime soon), but I also really don't think it's appropriate to ask them about it directly for a whole lot of reasons. So I'm throwing it out to Feminist Theory ILX: are these super common notions of late? How do we feel about them? Am I hopelessly square for bristling at them?

*michael bolton voice* how can we be lovers if we can’t be cis

2 sounds like a very serious evolution of something that probably started off as a joke

1 i don’t really have any comment on

1. sexual preference for certain/specific types of genitals are inherently transphobic and 2. because cisgender folks uphold cisnormativity, their cisness / "being" cis is itself a form of oppression against trans folks. I struggle with these ideas

what is there to struggle with? they're irrational and wrong

I feel like #1 leaves a lot more questions than it provides answers

"being" cis is itself a form of oppression against trans folks

My basic reaction to this is that, even if there is some grain of truth hiding in there, the obvious solution is to expand what is normal to include being trans, rather than, let's say, trans folks setting up intensive deprogramming sessions to 'fix' cis people, much like those evangelicals use for 'fixing' gays. because the oppression does not really reside in "being cis".

expand what is normal to include being trans

i feel like this is what both ideas are getting at, albeit extremely

everyone join me in flagging that sleepingbag post

yeahhhh that was the type of language I was explicitly trying to avoid

i feel like this is what both ideas are getting at, albeit extremely

yeah this makes a bit of sense to me, like an extreme way of leveling the playing field

It's sad that sleepingbag can't keep a girlfriend for more than a few months.

can we keep to a generally respectful tone in this thread even if some
malcontents feel like disrupting it?

yeahhhh that was the type of language I was explicitly trying to avoid

― Simon H., Thursday, November 23, 2017 2:08 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so you were thinking something similar but you wouldn't just come out and say it? what is wrong with saying that ideas like those are absurd?

Diplomacy.

i'm not at all well informed but i do see people expressing both 1 and 2 with apparent sincerity, which i suppose means that they're not too uncommon (if i could take notice of them).

both seem prima facie coherent as moral/political stances but liable to harbor all manner of confusions/distortions of the relevant moral and political concepts (which if interpreted charitably could mean challenging, radical revisions of them in the direction of justice, the good, etc.).

for instance on 1, a similar view about homophobia would probably be met with skepticism. yet it seems to be a consistent implication of a trans-positive ethic that if one accepts the gender self-identifications of others, for instance not at all denying trans women any status, role, etc. one assigns cis women, then one must accept them in sexual activity as well. even as a cis het man, for instance. if in response to the imputation of transphobia a cis het man who had some inclination to prefer cis women to trans women as sexual partners appealed to his desires as on some level a brute fact, or as something that falls under the exercise of his own autonomy (on a par with the self-identifications of others), the idea that our desires are educable, correctable, and often deeply in need of education and correction, would seem to undermine that appeal. but it seems like it would be a bit of a feat to appeal to autonomy and authenticity or legitimacy of desires on the one side and, out of a moral/political critique (what the use of the term 'transphobia' earmarks), to question or deny them on the other in the name of a more enlightened desire, without putting enormous pressure on all those concepts to change significantly. in effect, it's a critique that sees most contemporary behavior around gender and sex as thoroughly unradicalized, and validates itself by resting on a vision of a thoroughly transformed society.

I'm heading off to a party in a moment, so I can't get deep into discourse, but I would say (speaking as a queer trans woman in a relationship with another trans woman):

Regarding 1), genital preferences are not necessarily transphobic, but the people who feel the need to publicly articulate their sexuality in terms of attraction to specific kinds of genitals are usually also making a whole lot of cissexist assumptions about trans people and their bodies. Patterns of attraction are conditioned by systems of power, but that doesn't mean they can be reshaped at will; at the same time, though, statements about who one can find desirable can often serve as a way of policing the boundaries to a given community (think of what "No fats, no fems, no Asians" implies as part of an online dating profile).

Regarding 2), this seems mostly like a hyperbolic way to express frustration with transphobia, and shouldn't be taken too literally.

Xp

yes, op made it sound like these ideas were axiomatic in this leftist group when it sounds much more likely that these things were said in exasperation or to blow off steam... either way i don't understand the point of struggling with the ideas and/or self-flagellating for not being a proper ally unless you've completely lost the ability to evaluate things for yourself tbh?