That is Not Even Wrong

My usual reaction when I read the more outrageous transphobic assertions is “that’s not right - it is not even wrong,” a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Wolfgang Pauli when he had to grade a poor science paper.

In that spirit, I want to address the essay, “Men in Ewes’ Clothing: The Stealth Politics of the Transgender Movement.” This essay is available on the Questioning Transgender website as well as the Vancouver Rape Relief website. I won’t be quoting the entire article, but I will reference it from beginning to end.

Stealth Politics actually elaborates on the vague and threatening language used in the introduction with slightly less vague and more threatening language. For example:

it is really an insidious form of paralyzing liberalism which translates into ultraconservatism in action.

there is such dogma surrounding it, and there is such a taboo on challenging it, that I am unwilling to fudge even a little on how dangerous it is to feminism and women.

In the first quote, Karla Mantilla (someone associated with Off Our Backs) uses words intended to invoke fear and hatred: “insidious,” “paralyzing,” and “ultraconservatism.” She’s equating “transgender politics” with the likes of Pat Robertson or Strom Thurmond. This is echoed more recently when Catherine Crouch tries to imply a similar connection in Gendercator with the line about the “fundies and trannies” teaming up to force every gender nonconformist to transition into conformity. She goes on to imply that it is too difficult to challenge transgender politics, implying that putting up a website filled with hate speech about a persecuted minority is somehow a heroic resistance against the transgender-conformist tide. Of course, we get the reiteration about how dangerous transgender people politics are to women and feminism.However, we won’t see what the actual danger is by the end of this article.

She sets out to establish a separation between mtf trans women and ftm trans men. This is important, because the dogma here is that “trans women are trying to infiltrate and destroy women’s culture and spaces” while trans men are “dupes to the patriarchy.” She’s not willing to go so far as to demonize those born female-bodied, even as they betray sisterhood by shooting up with testosterone and becoming men.

Okay, immediately after the introductory section, we get right into the probable libel:

Look at what happened at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival last year (2001). Apparently, pre-op mtfs entered the festival and disrobed by the showers where women were also naked preparing to shower.

First, this happened in 1999. Second, it was a single trans man named Tony Baretto-Neto. He may or may not have showered in the more private/heated showers for women with disabilities, but I can’t confirm either way. He wasn’t trying to shock anyone. The event is briefly mentioned here, although I came across the story on the MWMF forum. So, already, we have scaremongering about penis-flashing trans women trying to scare women in the showers, and it never happened. Did Ms. Mantilla bother to confirm this story, or did she simply accept it as true because of her disposition to view trans people as dangerous? Since this never happened, the rest of the paragraph is almost meaningless.

One of the most important things women get from going to Michigan is the feeling of complete safety from men and patriarchal rape culture. Now that safety has been eroded.

By “almost meaningless,” I mean she desperately wants her readers to believe that trans women only a short step from raping cis women at the festival. This is not an uncommon assertion from transphobes. Lucky Nkl (often of Heart/womensspace’s blog) asserted a similar idea during an infamous thread on I Blame the Patriarchy in December 2006.

Her next paragraph immediately leaps to the question of whether trans women deserve access to the festival. She’s profiling us. She has an anecdote of an incident that allegedly involved a handful of trans women, and extending that to mean that all trans women want to run around flashing their penises at cis women. Considering that the initial event never happened, and considering that Ms. Mantilla was almost certainly present at MWMF in 2001, or at least knew women who were, I think she may be prevaricating. In other words, I don’t believe she’s just passing along an urban (rural?) legend, she’s actually creating and reinforcing one solely to demonize trans women and maintain our exclusion from the festival. She’s willing to call us all patriarchal rapists* in order to reinforce the idea that we’re a danger “to feminism and women,” so I expect she’s willing to say just about anything. In other words, anything else she says really shouldn’t carry any credibility.

This is also a tactic fundamentalist Christians use when talking about homosexuality - to immediately and dramatically associate homosexuality with paedophilia and bestiality to undermine the chance for any honest discussion.

The next part is “identity as stealth politics.” Ms. Mantilla immediately makes her opinion of trans women clear:

First, one of the ways transgender mtf activists have managed to confuse lesbians who know that there is something wrong with letting men, however altered, into Michigan is through framing their position as one of identity. The argument is that they are, in some fundamental way, really a woman inside a male body. That is their identity. It is taken as a given that one must not question another person’s assertion of his or her own identity.

Mind you, in all the conversations on the MichFest forums, the arguments that have raged from IBTP to Alas to Womensspace to Fetch me my Axe to Woman of Color Blog, all the way back to the Ms. Magazine forums before they were shut down in 2004, in which trans women have tried to engage women who deny our identity and persist in imposing the male gender on us, we don’t assert. We explain. We go to great lengths to try to communicate what it is like to be a trans person, what it means to grow up with the persistent and inescapable sense that your body should not be the sex it is. We tolerate far more questioning than any reasonable person would ever allow and answer as carefully as we can because, frankly, these conversations are minefields. We’re told straight up that you can’t trust a trans person’s narrative of his or her own life - that we’re basically just telling self-serving lies, or apparently we’re not as self-aware as other human beings. We weather numerous assertions about the quality of our character, or the supposed true reasons we choose to transition. We read post after post about how transitioning is a political act, and not a personal act, and how being a trans person means not having a valid gender. And we rarely, if ever, argue that we’re a woman inside of a male body, or a woman trapped inside a man’s body (or vice versa for trans men). Those are really crude explanations for what it’s like to be a trans person, and rather crudely implies that we’re somehow prisoners inside our own bodies, which is nonsense.

The reason Ms. Mantilla frames this argument this way is pretty simple - despite her generous statement that:

Clearly, transpeople (like all people) deserve basic human rights, such as access to jobs, health insurance, respectful treatment, and freedom from living in fear of hate crimes and violence.

She immediately goes on to deny that we’re anything but men, and deny that we deserve to have our identities respected. She implies that we’re lying about our lives and our reasons for transition.

Her next paragraphs establish that radical feminists believe that gender is a matter of socialization and that many transgender people explain ourselves in essentialist terms. Now, I’ve been in these arguments, and they’re not so clearcut.

Radical feminists do throw out essentialist arguments in order to deny the validity of trans people’s gender. I’ve had a woman tell me that my lived reality and experiences as a trans woman is so deeply offensive to some radical feminists as to actually be offensive and triggering, that by saying “I’m a trans woman,” I’m imposing the entire patriarchal system of gender on women. That’s another fundamentalist christian rhetorical trick - “your existence as a homosexuality is offensive in the eyes of God” - but it’s probably unfair of me to hold that particular discussion against the author of this essay, except so far as her essay enables such bigotry.

Anyway, Ms. Mantilla goes on to say that if she must be burdened with the need to respect a trans woman’s identity as much as her own identity is respected, then it’s impossible to criticize or analyze trans woman identities, and that it sidesteps the political implications of our identities. She goes on to conclude that identity politics is a stealth maneuver that demands that others not challenge those politics.

Now, the first problem here is that she wants us to believe that she’s informed enough about trans woman identities to be able to question or analyze them. Of course, given that she’s willing to assert that there’s a real danger of trans women running around raping cis women, I think we can safely say that her understanding of trans women is perhaps a bit less than perfect. She’s also assuming that trans women don’t actually spend much of our lives examining and analyzing our own ideas, perhaps implying that we decided to transition one day just because it seemed like a neat idea.

I want to describe another group who uses a form of stealth politics to shut down discussion of a certain topic, and to insist that it doesn’t need to be analyzed or criticized. This would in fact be radical feminist transphobia. As anyone who has tried to point their transphobia out to them knows, they immediately accuse us of trying to silence them, make magnanimous declarations about how they support our need for civil rights and respect our identities, or assert very loudly that they can’t possibly be transphobic and trying to oppress trans women because “You’re men, and women have no power to oppress you.”

They also silence us by imposing their own invented narratives on us. They tell us what our motives are, why we want to transition, and how we hate women for doing so, and then they analyze and criticize those imposed narratives. They don’t have to engage us, they don’t want to. They want a target, a scapegoat.

I also want to highlight this particular statement:

And if I demand that other people respect my identity as a catholic, then I demand that they accept without protest the politics that I choose along with my catholic identity, even while I pretend my catholicism is not a political choice, only a matter of identity.

I know I keep doing this, but I can’t resist. Fundamentalist christianity asserts that homosexuality is a choice, not identity. Again and again, Ms. Mantella echoes note for note the oppressive statements that fundamentalists impose on gay, lesbian and bisexual people for her arguments against transsexualism.

She closes by questioning whether it’s possible to, by changing one’s appearance, presentation, or body, also change one’s gender. This pretty much nails that she doesn’t get trans women or men - she’s arguing against us changing our gender, and we’ve certainly never argued that we’re trying to change our gender, either. We’re changing our sex, because it doesn’t match what our brain expects it to be. She criticizes trans women for focusing on “passing” rather than overcoming internalized masculinity, which is again, a matter of her imposing a narrative of her choosing on our lives. She believes that the process of changing sex is a superficial thing, focused on how you hold your hands, how you walk, what you dress, and that prior to transition, trans women were men in an uncomplicated fashion. That’s how she speaks of us - she doesn’t acknowledge that we typically are aware of our transness from an early age, nor does she acknowledge that this could possibly affect our socialization growing up. She doesn’t believe that transness is possible because her political theory is more important to her than the lived realities and experiences of trans women and men,

She also says that this focus on the superficial instead of power dynamics, masculinity, and patriarchy shows little understanding of feminism. She’s still practicing telepathy. She seems to believe that a trans woman’s life doesn’t change in any way after she transitions, and that society still somehow magically detects she’s biologically male and extends her male privilege while simultaneously choosing not to beat her to death. She also seems to be implying that womanhood brings an innate understanding of feminism, and that trans women are somehow unable to come by this mystical, essential, understanding. I might be overinterpreting her words, but I don’t believe this is the case.

Now we get to “it’s a woman thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

This is the most offensive, patronizing, and purely racist part of the essay, and reminds me that radical feminism is first and foremost a middle-class white woman’s movement. She introduces this example:

How superficial, individualistic, and simplistic it would be for me, as a white american raised by a white family, to come to feel that I was really a black person inside, to change my skin color and other features to begin passing as black, and to demand to enter people of color space! In that case we could clearly see how outrageous such a demand would be. Being black in the United States (and elsewhere) is so much more than a matter of adopting skin color. It is an insult and the mark of privilege to miss that point so entirely.

First, this is appropriation. Ms. Mantilla uses people of color to make her point - they’re basically political tokens to generate outrage. Second, this silences trans people of color, who might have their own take on this scenario, and certainly understand intersectionalities of oppression very well. Third, she again implies that transitioning from one sex to the other is a superficial thing, which betrays her lack of understanding of trans people yet again. Given that she paints as us rapists (and yes, I will mention that again, I want to make it clear how badly she distorts us to defend her bigotry), this isn’t surprising in the least.
Anyway, Queen Emily of Sexual Ambiguities addresses and refutes this point rather skillfully, saving me the effort (and thus allowing me to put off a more detailed discussion until I have to deal with the “Trans-Race” essay). If you didn’t read this when I linked it in this post please read it now - it’s a really good post.

She then insists that trans women don’t get womanhood, and refers back to the fictional shower raid, which again undermines the point she’s trying to make (by building it on a lie), and again makes it clear she views us all as being a monolithic group of potential rapists.

The rest of the essay dealing with trans women introduces the idea that transgender politics is a libertarian movement:

The transgender movement, by dwelling so much on freedom of choice to identify as whatever gender you want, takes our eyes off the consequences of choices and the way our choices are structured by oppressive forces, in short, it does nothing to eliminate a system based on power and privilege. Such a system values competition over connection, control over cooperation, aggression over compassion, and individualism over interdependence. Freeing people from gender roles means they are free to hold whatever values they choose including the values of power: they can be controlling, disconnected from others, or aggressive if they want to.

Now, I want to emphasize here that when Ms. Mantilla talks about how transgender choices “do nothing to eliminate a system based on power and privilege,” she’s talking about a documented medical condition. The reason that Gender Identity Disorder is in the DSM-IV is because, from Harry Benjamin forward, the medical profession has dealt with us, determined that the only way to resolve the problem of having a brain that expects the body to be a different sex is to make that body as close to the desired sex as possible - hormones, surgery, and (for trans women) electrolysis. Attempts to cure us with electro-shock therapy, administering hormones, aversion therapy, or even just plain denial don’t work. In fact, we have a suicide rate pre-transition that’s five times that of the general population. What Ms. Mantilla is saying here is that her politics are much more important than our lives, and that we should be willing to subordinate our lives and our happiness to validate her politics. I find it ironic that she goes on to say that transpeople transitioning supports a system that values aggression over compassion, when her argument here is so clearly devoid of compassion itself. Who is it that values competition over connection? She’s clearly placing radical feminism in opposition to trans people, and makes no attempt to connect to or understand trans people - choosing instead to dismiss our lives in favor of her fables about us. Who values control over cooperation? She would have us subordinate our needs to satisfy her politics. Aggression over compassion? She attacks us relentlessly, fabricates stories about the horrors we’ve committed in the MWMF showers, implies that we might even be rapists, and insists that it’s selfish for us to live our lives as we must lives our lives. Individualism over interdependence? She clearly doesn’t want trans people and radical feminists to be interdependent in any way, although I’m not sure I could argue that this implies anything about individualism.

She closes by saying that she wants to dismantle patriarchy, which she implies transsexualism prevents.

Finally, for all the lip service paid to challenging gender stereotypes through transgression, there is remarkably little analysis about male power, oppression, and patriarchy in its politics. The transgender movement is really a liberal platform–a movement for inclusion in the existing social structure.

What she seems to be saying here is that a) trans women (because this entire essay is about trans women) pay lip service to challenging gender stereotypes through transgression. This is completely a manufactured position or she’s conflating what other transgender people have said with trans women. She asserts that the transgender movement is a movement for inclusion in the existing social structure.

We have to live in the existing social structure, and the odds of blowing that up are pretty low. The odds of us suffering because we have to live in a social structure that devalues people like us are pretty high. I also don’t see radical feminism criticizing people of color or people with disabilities who are involved in political activism for greater inclusion in the existing social structure. I don’t see them criticizing cis women all that harshly, either for this particular reason. In fact, I only see them criticizing trans people who are actively punished by the existing social structures for transitioning - losing jobs, family, life. She doesn’t want to acknowledge that transitioning for trans people is a matter of survival, not politics.
She finishes the trans woman part of the article with a discussion on why inclusion is bad. Like with most of the other sections, she begins by lobbing a fallacy into the discussion - this time, she starts with another racial argument:

I have always been skeptical of the sudden interest in “equality” evinced by white people who feel that affirmative action is not fair to whites. The argument goes, after all, if we want equality between all kinds of people, shouldn’t we start treating all people equally now? This strikes me as self-interestedly disingenuous. It is like a basketball game in which one team is forced to play with one hand tied behind their back until half time. At half time the score is accordingly drastically uneven. Then, after half time, when the first team finally gets to use both hands, the second team says it is unfair to ask to even the score–after all, shouldn’t the score be tallied purely on merit, shouldn’t they be treated equally? Funny how the second team didn’t feel merit and equality were so important during the first half. Acting as though equality has been already reached and now needs to be extended towards the oppressor group belies how pervasive racism still is and is a way of undermining efforts to challenge racism.

Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, unless she’s equating cis women to the oppressor group and trans women to the oppressed group - but she’s not. She’s again trying to coopt racial issues to defend her transphobia. She goes on to discuss how women’s space is a powerful thing under siege from the right wing and the GLBT movement, and that women don’t even get one whole week without men (which is her code for “trans women”) trying to force their way in and ties it back to attempts by white people to abolish affirmative action. Of course, as I point out in a backwards way above, this argument really only works if she assumes trans women are a privileged class. That we’re the white people demanding an end to affirmative action. The only way she can assert that we are privileged is to completely ignore the oppression we experience, but that’s not an unusual radical feminist stance. This discussion on Fetch me My Axe features a radical feminist saying

You play the victim card every chance you get. Some of you claim you are MORE oppressed than other women.

The very idea that trans people suffer worse oppression than cis women is unthinkable to the radical feminist mindset espoused here. Women are seen as the most oppressed class, which is such a problematic position it is impossible to defend without pretending race, class, disability, sexual orientation, and transitioning do not exist. This is why many say that radical feminism (or feminism in general) is largely a middle-class white woman’s movement. Trans women cannot possibly be more oppressed than cis women, despite the fact that we have to deal with how society treats women, plus how society treats trans people. This goes back to the convenient myth that trans women experience uncomplicated and total male privilege after transitioning, which the above quoted paragraph stealthily tries to assert.

And now it’s time for another dose of fear, uncertainty, and doubt:

As for inclusion and nondiscrimination at Michigan, of all places, that would destroy the very meaning and soul of the festival. The whole point of the festival is to get a chance to experience life without male oppression or the fear of male violence. If the festival operated under the idea of inclusion, why wouldn’t we just invite in those guys who ride cars up and down the road outside the festival trying to get a glimpse of naked women? If we want inclusion, why go all the way up to rural northern Michigan–we can stay at home and simply go to a diverse public gathering of any sort. Inclusion is the very opposite of the whole Michigan experience. Excluding men is the point: it’s what makes it the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and not a shopping mall. If having women’s space just once a year for a week in one place in this country is so threatening that the boys have to find any way they can to destroy it, I say let’s have more of it! Fuck inclusion! We’ll have inclusion when we live in post-patriarchy.

First, inclusion would destroy the meaning and soul of the festival. Allowing trans women into the festival would shatter it to its foundations. The goddess herself would burn the place down with a flurry of lightning bolts and meteors. Never mind that trans women have been attending the festival for years without such terrible consequences. She goes on to reiterate the ludicrous notion that a trans woman in the festival is a potential rapist, regardless of her op status. She follows with a slippery slope argument: If we let the trannies in, why don’t we just go invite a bunch of men in, because of course, there is absolutely no difference between a trans woman and a cis man.

She finishes by continuing to imply that trans women are men, thus absolving her from the cognitive dissonance of trying to defend the idea that a space for women should exclude some women. It’s okay - we’re not really women! Of course, given that she also says we’re rapists, that we don’t examine our own identities, politics, and choices, that we try to silence any discussion when we’re actually trying to explain ourselves, we can safely say that she’s ignorant enough about trans women that she’s not qualified to assess whether we’re even human. In fact, I would say that it’s fairly clear she does not view us as fully human, given the lengths she goes to in order to describe us in dehumanizing and occasionally monstrous terms.

I have a whole other essay on how the MWMF exclusionist policy supports discrimination against trans women in other areas of life as well as permanent woman-only spaces, which I’ll get to someday soon. 

This ended up longer than I expected, so I will address the FTM portion tomorrow.

* Edited for TMI: In the short version, estrogen + penis = difficult to achieve erections. You’re in more danger from a dildo.