Check out Margaret Corvid’s fascinating piece in the New Statesman on male sexuality and the appeal of misogynistic movements to sexually frustrated men. As a professional dominatrix who’s also a feminist, she’s acutely aware of the ways conventional masculinity restricts and impoverishes male sexuality.
When I became a professional dominatrix after years in the kink scene, I expected my kinky work to involve lots of spanking, whipping and bondage. And, to my delight, it has. But in the majority of my sessions, I am creating a space for men to explore areas of their sexual lives that society feels are unmanly; they come to me to be penetrated, to be used, to serve, to submit, to worship, to be taken. A client might have any or all of a bewildering array of fetishes, but they mostly come to me to experience something well outside the very narrow confines of what society says that it means to be a man.
Unfortunately, as she notes, Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists offer nothing to men who feel confined by these narrow notions of manhood; indeed, their definitions of manhood are both retrograde and restrictive.
One of the greatest tragedies of the men’s rights movement is that, in the end, its lessons serve only to drive men further away from what they yearn for. Pick up artist techniques and aggrieved entitlement are unlikely to help men achieve the goal of intimacy, but feminist values can teach them the skills to communicate with respect.
You’ll notice a few quotes in there from me, from an email interview she did with me as well as from my post Is the Men’s Rights Movement driven by the rage of the rejected? (I also discussed the issue in this post on the weird sexual undercurrents in A Voice for Men’s Facebook “memes.”)
Where on here have you read anyone blathering anything remotely like that? People cite some of that stuff sometimes as examples of other people’s nastiness or nonsense but no one here gets a free pass on spouting anything like that themselves. Even if it’s by accident. Certainly not on telling trans women that they’re not women or insisting on using the wrong pronouns. I can’t remember anyone saying anything like that at all. Apart from trolls randomly misgendering anyone and everyone at will, of course.
… But no one’s said anything about second assholes or rotten meat or what have we. And I don’t see anyone flaunt themselves as a brutally honest awesome truth telller just being honest.
Come in, share your opinion, be welcome, but maybe don’t do the exact arguing against wild extremes you don’t want other people to do? That seems a little off.
@Fibinachi, mildlymaleficent,
As Friday Jones and Donna L. have just explained, the issue to which they were referring was the Gender Minefield blog, which didn’t deny that trans women were women but did insist that they were still male rather than female.
(1) Re Jeffries and Raymond: that was a rhetorical question of the “what’s next” variety, given that someone here has already linked to a hate site, as Friday Jones characterized it..
(2) People here have absolutely suggested that trans women are “male,” and linked to sites claiming that that’s the case.
I’m trying not to get too specific about who said what, because I don’t want to be personally insulting. That isn’t the point.
Like Katz said, if a bunch of trans women are commenting here to say that we’re doing something wrong…we might want to consider that we’re doing something wrong.
“Where on here have you read anyone blathering anything remotely like that?”
@mildlymagnificent A mod here linked (without irony) to a site that does that:
http://secretlyradical.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/females-matter-therefore-femaleness.html
And here is where that blogger compares social transitioning to Blackface:
http://secretlyradical.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/purple-people.html
How was I supposed to view this as anything other than as an endorsement of one of the most pernicious forms of transphobia?
In addition, people here have absolutely claimed that TERF is a slur — an argument which deserves about as much credit as claiming that calling someone an MRA is a slur, or calling someone a racist is a slur. And if someone’s a trans-exclusionary feminist who doesn’t identify as a radical feminist, it might not be accurate to call them a TERF — they can be TEFs, for all I care — but it doesn’t make it a slur either.
As for “gender critical,” that’s just another word for the same thing, because it’s a term used only to attack so-called “transgenderism.” (As if being trans were a religion or ideology like Lutheranism or Marxism-Leninism and subject to “criticism” in the same way.) See the analysis at transadvocate.com I linked to above.
Both sides of this debate are in the wrong in some respects. The notion either side doesn’t have dirt under their fingernails is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Yes, the argument transwomen are men and should be referred to with female pronouns but otherwise treated as men seems prevalent here. I don’t agree with that, especially when we’re talking about women who transitioned as children, never went through male puberty and were socialised as female. There is no way of knowing these women have male chromosomes (that will be my next point) unless you’re a busybody, sticking your head in their underwear or medical records so arguments for “Women might feel threatened by transwoman who have male strength and size/Schrödinger’s rapist so they should be barred from female spaces” doesn’t fly when applied to these individuals. The threat transwomen pose to cis women does get emphasised here and it does all appear to wrap back around to the presupposition transwomen are men.
That may be the predominant, acceptable belief here. It’s a pretty divisive one though and I think people would like to know whether this site is down with that sentiment or not.
Another thing the commentariat here is doing wrong: silencing people who wish to discuss biological sex from a scientific perspective because it might make someone uncomfortable. It’s also super divisive to tell people who are scientists and biologists and geneticists that, no, no, no, you’re wrong about chromosomes and biological sex and you’re certainly not allowed to talk about that because someone here might respond badly. Fuck it. It is not an attack on trans people to refer to their biological sex as something different than their identity. It just is and it’s good and OK and fine. It’s absurd that there have been times on this blog I’ve felt unable to discuss my field of study accurately because someone might start screaming “YOU’RE TRIGGERING ME” when I refer to lab mice who are XY as male.
So there’s another thing that would be cool if we could get a final answer to: am I going to catch shit if I refer to chromosomes as male and female because it might hurt someone’s feels?
Lastly, why the hell is it so easy for a few people who comment on this blog to silence discussion that doesn’t suit them by threatening to respond emotionally? Historically the commentariat has coddled members who held discussions hostage with threats of being triggered or leaving. Empathy is a two-way street and we’re all responsible for self-care. As much as we need to try to understand how words and ideas impact others and modify our behaviour when appropriate, it’s also our responsibility to avoid discussions, which are important to some, but we know will be triggering to us and sometimes walk away instead of insisting everyone stop expressing an idea we dislike. When all we see happening here is catering to the demands of people constantly using their emotional state to control discussion some of us feel VERY disrespected because we have feelings and needs and ideas too. No one person’s feelings are more important than anyone else’s and when we only cater to the feelings of the person threatening to leave or crying about being triggered, which may be entirely unreasonable on their part, we’re not being very courteous to the people trying to have a discussion. It may well be the case that those people are the ones who deserve to be defended and the person crying that they’re being triggered should excuse themself.
There’s also some really snotty attitudes and constant assumptions of bad faith and premature hostility on this board that don’t at all help.
I appreciate everything the commentariat has done for me. I do. The culture of this place has been bipolar in the last several months though, swinging from “You’re not allowed to discuss or say anything that might be irksome to someone who happens to be trans” (and a couple of those individuals taking full advantage of their new-found ability to control the commentariat) to “Trans women are as threatening to cis women as cis men are to cis women and should be treated as men”. What is this shit?
And, David, I really respect that you don’t get yourself involved in these shit shows and don’t become entrenched in them or moderate heavy-handedly.
I’m going to work on a fucking research proposal.
Ah, so it’s okay to mention wild hypotheticals when you do it, but when other people claim that, say, TERF is sometimes not so much a descriptor as it is a statement used solely to shut up people with a different opinion that’s suddenly the majority group trying to drown out the voices of the subjugated minority?
No, you didn’t write that, but someone else did on Feministe, so it’s totes okay for me to reference it as if that’s the opinion you actually hold because your words are tangentially related.
Come on, that’s fucking ridicolous.
And you absolutely fucking have to point out where people say the things you claim they’re saying. Thank you friday jones. Being all coy with “But I don’t want to mention no names” just means you tar people with a large brush and make either learning from your words (as I assume the intention is?) or responding to them nearly impossible. You’ve already decided to drop by and participate based on the words of someone else, so why not go the extra length and actually make your participation reasonable and useful?
And if TERF isn’t a slur then obviously merely linking to people who hold that view cannot be personally insulting, because TERF isn’t a slur, it’s a descriptor. Right? Unless it is a dire, offensive personal label used to shut people up (which is, again, the only thing I recall anyone here fucking claiming, but I can’t back that up because you’ve refused to link to where people say the things you state they say, aaargh).
Hostile attribution error, people. Maybe thinking everyone is out to get you is just a fucking artefact of human neurology that you don’t need to be perpetuating in a thread that’s already pretty full of people misunderstanding, mis-communicating or getting all up in arms with each other?
Finally, seriously, Donna L – you, specifically, and this is a personal statement about you – Ally already decided that instead of making things about trans issues, things were supposed to be about her and her personal situation by way of trans issues, going so far as to crosspost on a blog where you participate and rather wildly twisting the claims and statements of people here. Thanks. Deciding to drop by, based on that, and comment and blowing things so far up that you’ve literally claimed this website is now a cesspool of people who, might, at some point, start thinking trans people are just some sort of broken sick robots is so fucking wrong that I don’t really have the capacity to express just how utterly confused it makes me.
I mean, what’s next? Are you going to start advocating for the mass expansion of lunar infrastructure? I just don’t know! I’m speaking in hyperbolic examples to infuriate the crowd and maybe you are going to invest in bitcoin and buy a tropical island at some point. WHO CAN SAY?
…. how is that helpful to anyone, or anything? My god. Jesus.
No one here – except maybe HumorlessRadicalFeminazi who went right out and stated so – actually hold the views you’re so willing to ascribe them to holding. That’s not good debate form. That’s slamming people over the head and screaming they’re evil, the exact same thing people got annoyed with AllyS for doing in the first place.
If you’re all so fucking interested in debating the actual issues of trans lives, maybe make your issues about the issues they relate to? It’s not hard. It can’t be hard.
That’s a good point: let’s either bring forth the examples or agree this discussion can go nowhere because being vague about it does come across more snide than thoughtful.
Yes, TERF is a label that is sometimes used pejoratively to silence and there have been times those of us who would like to discuss “controversial” (in bizarroland) matters like biological sex (which apparently doesn’t exist because some people don’t want it to and threaten to cry if we discuss it) or the role of socialisation in trans people who transition as adults get shit like that thrown at us. YOU JUST HATE TRANS INDIVIDUALS. Poppycock. Enough already. Stop using that ugly label inaccurately.
But in the context of discussing not mice but trans women (considering that neither most trans people nor most cis people have had their karotypes determined, or have any real idea what their chromosomal configuration is, as you said yourself), there is no reason to insist that “trans women are male” other than to be rude and insult them. Chromosomes are not the sum total of everything. You don’t think that’s how people’s sex is assigned at birth, do you? In fact, at least traditionally, their sex is generally assigned, in “ambiguous” cases, by whether the clitoris is too large or the penis too small, by entirely arbitrary measurement standards.
We aren’t in a laboratory. Sex means different things in different contexts. Legally, my sex is female. Socially, I am considered female. Hormonally, by bodily configuration, etc. — female. Read what I wrote. It’s aggressive and antagonistic for people to make an issue of it in that way, and insist that trans women are male, whatever they may believe is the truth.
And I don’t see anyone engaging in emotional blackmail here.
I’m not fucking defending calling trans women men. Christ on a cracker. I’m defending allowing people to discuss matters of biological sex as being male or female without being labelled a fucking TERF, not with reference to specific individuals.
Biological sex doesn’t mean different things in different contexts. It means biological sex. It means chromosomes. There is no such thing as hormonal sex, only hormone level associations. Social sex doesn’t exist. We call that gender. The sex associated with one’s biological configuration can differ from their chromosomal configuration so that too is sometimes different from biological sex though it usually reflects biological sex so, yes, people usually have a pretty darn good clue what of what their karyotype probably looks like. Socially, it does not matter.
People aren’t lab mice but we’re all animals and we have biological sex in common with them.
Oh, and seeing as I don’t like engaging in the behaviour I am chastising others for. Anyone interested can find the link to Feministe here, viz a viz misrepresentations and some snark about “a certain moderator” and other (fun) random hypothethicals.
here.
It’s so much fun when people come by and say:
or
when what they really mean is:
or
It’s so nice to know that people’s invitations to honest debate in good faith are actually attempts at getting others to make statements that they can run back with and point and decry as wrong or TERF-y or “misrepresentations” or what have you. That sure is great debating technique, real honest there.
Ah, but what’s NEXT? Maybe Donna L will roll out a massive programme to help at risk school kids manage their lives better? Who can say? Anything that can happen in slippery slope arguments!
This may be stirring a hornet’s nest here, and I apologize profusely if it is an will shut up completely but…
Why are we discussing biology here? I’m very confused, this threa is a mess and things just seem to be spiraling out of control here with everyone getting pissed off and, well, what are the issues here? This is what I’ve come up with:
1. The use of the term TERF: It seems like, to my reading, that what’s being objected to is that to identify it as simply a silencing technique is inaccurate; and while there have been cases where the term has been misapplied that does not mean that the term is a slur. That, indeed, there are trans-exclusionary radical feminists that are, for lack of better word, complete assholes to trans women.
2. Blogs and tumblrs that have been linked to or recommended are by people who are transphobic.
Is this correct?
Again, this thread, just, shit.
I agree with marinerachel quite a bit. I don’t think sex itself is a total social construct, it exists in the animal kingdom, but I also think chromosomes should only come up in conversations with people’s medical professionals. How we see and experience human sex is cultural and people who want to endlessly discuss how “male” the think certain women are can pretend they’re being all science-like when they’re often just being assholes.
I didn’t see the Tumblr link until now and it’s a shit show, as is any copy pasta list of the supposed crimes of some minority that’s used to paint the entire group as bad.
That said, I’m all for criticism but I’m taking aback by the cesspool stuff. I can be wrong, I can be idiotic and I can be insensitive, but I don’t have some grand secret anti-trans agenda.
I’ve read through this thread, and I’ve read through the emails I’ve gotten as well, and here are my thoughts, at least what I’m thinking right now:
This is a site about misogyny – in particular the “new misogyny” online. Generally speaking, we – myself and the community of commenters here, excluding trolls – have been able to put aside other differences of opinion (including some that are quite significant) because we share a common belief that the new misogynists are terrible.
But obviously the issues that divide us come up in the discussion here. In some cases, we’ve more or less collectively decided to table certain discussions because they seem unproductive and sometimes a bit destructive – like, for example, some of the debates here between religious folk and atheists.
Other issues, well, are still pretty contentious – sex work and pornography, for example. But I don’t think – and I don’t think that most people here think – that these issues should be off limits. (I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.)
Generally speaking, I would like to avoid imposing ideological litmus tests for commenters. I would like rad fems and not-rad fems, atheists and religious folk, etc etc to be able to coexist at least mostly peacefully on this blog.
But trans issues are different, and I think we do need a litmus test here.
That is, transphobia is unacceptable. TERFs are not welcome here. (And though that term is sometimes misused, I don’t consider it a slur any more than “homophobe” is.)
And so I will be asking HumorlessRadFem, who does consider herself a TERF, to move on.
And I will do the same for anyone who is, say, defending Cathy Brennan or Janice Raymond or others like them.
I would like this blog to be a welcoming place for trans folk and to the degree that it is not I’m open to suggestions (public or private) on how best to fix that.
At the same time, I hope that TERF will not be used as an epithet to shut down discussion. So far, I don’t think it has been.
Indeed, what is striking about this discussion, as I think kirbywarp said, is how much of it is about people not in the room. Unless I’m missing something, no one here is making a “cotton ceiling” argument, for example. Nor, unless I’ve missed something, is anyone here saying that the vaginas of trans women smell like rotten meat.
I’m hoping that we can sort of de-escalate the discussion, dealing with what people are actually saying here rather than with what other people have said in other spaces.
This discussion isn’t over, but I hope it can become less nasty.
And if any of you think there are other problems with how we here handle differences of opinion that need fixing, please let me know. It might be best to do this via email until things have cooled off a bit, at which point I will open a new thread for that discussion.
A couple of other things:
I won’t be opening up another thread along the lines of what Ally suggested; I don’t think that would be productive.
Since kittehserf has taken a side in the controversy here, I think it’s best to have her off of mod duties, at least until we have some of these issues resolved.
I realize that there’s no way of addressing the issues here that will please everyone. I know that some folks are talking about leaving; I hope they will reconsider. But I recognize that not all of them will. (If you’re considering leaving, feel free to email me with any thoughts you don’t want to share publicly.)
And just a disclaimer: All of what I’m saying applies to those who are or who want to be part of the community here. It doesn’t apply to trolls, MRAs and all of them. I let them post bigoted garbage because some of you like knocking them about a bit. And I will happily ban them if they overstay their welcome. Even if they’re just being annoying or boring. I’ve been meaning to rewrite the comments policy for some time, as it doesn’t fully reflect how weary I am of trollery.
You want me to name names? You. Cassandrakitty. From her comments today, Marinerachel. Most of all — because of her status as a moderator — kittehserf. Who never once expressed this kind of opinion during all the years when she was at Feministe,. Only here, where she apparently found some like-minded individuals, and/or changed her opinions.. And now links to hate sites. I read that thread that began on August 21 about “War Machine,” and several other threads (including this one), and those threads are the source of my characterizations. Not anything Ally may have said on the current open thread at Feministe.
Socialization? Again, what’s the point of bringing it up except as another reason to separate trans women from other women, and engage in the catch-22 reasoning that judges all behavior in a trans women by an entirely different standard (either pushy! aggressive! male! or “aping femininity”) from the way other women are judged.. First of all, I obviously got where I am now by a different path from most other women. But I’m here now, and have been since I transitioned ten years ago. I completely reject the notion that (a) a child who’s trans — especially, but not necessarily, if they’re aware of it from an early age — reacts to and/or is able to (or wants to) take advantage of socialization the same way as a child who’s cis, so that transition for trans women is literally “man to woman”; and (b) socialization is immutable, and living in the world post-transition has no effect on it.
And just to make clear, I don’t think anybody should feel guilty about not being attracted to anyone else, whether because they have a penis or belong to a particular race or for any other reason, which seemed to be the primary subject of discussion in that August thread. Regardless of whether those reasons are because of socialization or innate orientation or any other reason. But for actual TERFs, the whole penis thing is largely a red herring, because it’s more a “do you have or have you ever had” question. They say equally despicable things about trans women who’ve had genital surgery. All that innate, ineradicable maleness, you know. So: rejecting someone because they have a penis and you don’t find penises attractive? AOK. BUT: let’s say a cis lesbian meets another woman, finds her attractive, has sex with her, enjoys it, and so on. (And somehow doesn’t manage to detect her history by the scarlet T we all bear on our foreheads, or her special smell.) But then finds out later that she had a trans history, and reacts like that cartoon character (either Family Guy or South Park, I don’t remember) who’s shown vomiting profusely after finding out he’d been to bed with a trans woman. Exactly that kind of thing has happened to people, and nobody can tell me that it isn’t due to transphobia, in the same way that reacting that way to finding out after the fact that someone is black or Jewish could only be due to racism or anti-Semitism.
sorry, I posted that before seeing David’s comment.
I’d rather bath in glass that rehash this argument but this is a total misrepresentation of that debate. My issue was with people policing women’s, especially young women’s, sexuality and the anti-lesbian rhetoric being slung around tumblr (often from cis teens btw). Ally recognized this happened and made a point of rejecting it, just as I recognized there are garbage arguments against trans women identifying as lesbians and said that was horseshit. There are some real assholes on every side and every version of this debate. If you’re intellectually honest you’d admit that.
I shouldn’t have come out swinging like that and apologize. It’s may be sore subject but I’m an adult so that’s no excuse.
I apologize. (Forgot to include that key element.)
Backing up Fibi and MarineRachel. I honestly don’t know what the solution is to some of these issues. I’ve definitely dealt with people worthy of the term “TERF” and they’re as awful as everyone says. I do not like how often it’s misapplied, though!
And this all started because of one toxic person who used her status to make herself the centre of attention on everything. Ally came here, played on people’s sympathy to make everything about her, was asked to stop, did so for a while, then took over the personal threads, slowly made every thread about her again, started pushing the idea that bio sex doesn’t exist, started heavily policing language to the point that the term “scrotosphere” was transmisogynistic, oh, and defended the notion of the cotton ceiling.
In response to pushback, she actually said at one point that her status as a trans butch lesbian teenage woman of colour meant she should get special consideration on all issues even if she was wrong. That kind of shit should not be tolerated by anyone.
I firmly believe that this type of behaviour would have been the case whether or not she was trans. And because trans people are people, there are assholes amongst them just like in every other group. But so many spaces sweep it under the rug as if it never happens! That’s naturally going to piss off some people, but anyone who brings it up just gets called a TERF, even if they’re trans themselves!
Yes, sometimes the language of people’s frustration towards this does lean close to “TERF” ideology, and no that’s not okay, but fuck you’re not helping by continuing to accuse people of ridiculous things and pretending a toxic person is totally innocent just because of her status. And her rallying people at Feministe before coming here as though she truly wanted to discuss things? Totally disingenuous. Yet a bunch of people welcomed her anyway. She’ll still misrepresent it as whatever gives her the highest victim status, though.
What the hell has happened to this place?
According to David and non-trolls they do.
I didn’t refresh before posting that and didn’t see your comment, David, so I apologize. I’ve said my piece for this thread.
Thanks, David! I really appreciate your ongoing efforts to try to make this space as friendly as possible.