However, the fact that the arguments eat their own tails is exactly the starting point. “It’s X because it’s Y, and since it’s Y, X must also be true.” It’s just painful and frustrating to sift through it that far.

Best of wishes on the essay. I hope this provides useful inspiration.

So major, major, kudos for wading through that pile of shit, and producing something totally awesome out of it.

Also, good point on dualisms and where they fail. I mean, I fell into it by talking about tops and bottoms, even though I know for a fact that these are not the entirety of BDSM orientations. It’s so easy to just fall into that stuff and assume it’s the way things are.

I really like this paragraph:

And, y’know, I’m sick and tired of ‘woman’ being treated as a catch-all category for ‘other’ by people who claim to be feminists. I mean, I spend a lot of time feeling othered out of womanhood, what does that make me? Monster off the edge of the fucking map. All this goddamn normativity and … what the hell? A trans man is not a stealth woman; a trans woman is not a failed man. People are gods-be PEOPLE, not sneaky or transgressive implementations of category errors. (That was not as coherent as I would like, but…)

Because it drives me up the wall all the time. I’m sick of the objection that the only reason that trans women can be women is because the patriarchy defines “not men” as women. I mean, that just creates this weird dichotomy where, well, as you say.

The other thing about the whole “there’s this binary (and implicitly gendered) thing going on here” is … okay, when I was a babykinkster and trying to find resources to understand whether there were people like me out there, people who might be the complement to the stuff in my head, I kept running into things that … made no sense to me. There isn’t one dualism there — there’s a myriad of complexly nuanced different dualisms, some of which line up pretty closely to each other some of the time. And most of the publically available material doesn’t speak to the stuff in my head. I can stretch a little and go ‘Okay, this implementation doesn’t match, but some of the underlying stuff is familiar’ and work from there, but …

… it’s actually not dissimilar from how I deal with gender stuff. Hmmm. I may take that back to my place and chew on it later.

The presumed passivity of the submissive (or bottom, but I don’t consider myself a bottom per se, so whatever, let’s ignore that tangent into nuance of dualities) is one of those things that drives me bonkers. One might just as well argue that a top could be replaced by one of those flogging or fucking machines and nobody would notice or care (except for, presumably, the suddenly unpartnered tops).

And, y’know, I’m sick and tired of ‘woman’ being treated as a catch-all category for ‘other’ by people who claim to be feminists. I mean, I spend a lot of time feeling othered out of womanhood, what does that make me? Monster off the edge of the fucking map. All this goddamn normativity and … what the hell? A trans man is not a stealth woman; a trans woman is not a failed man. People are gods-be PEOPLE, not sneaky or transgressive implementations of category errors. (That was not as coherent as I would like, but…)

… and wow, is that quoted thing othering the FUCK out of me. I don’t know what being ‘raised as a girl’ means. Putting on a bra led me to the not terribly life-changing realisation that I didn’t want to wear itchy, uncomfortable clothing, not even to make my mother stop being a passive-aggressive psycho, so I stopped doing so, and don’t own any. Where is the interrogation that comes of MY goddamn existence? Nowhere, I’m just la la la can’t hear you invisible. For fuck’s sake.

…

Remember gender and sexuality are a choice, and this is bad, but any woman can choose to become a lesbian! And everyone kinky is doing so in a gendered way, including the people who are gender-variant in some way and the ones who are creeped out by people doing kink in a gendered way! And … oh, for crying out loud.

I need to pad my desk or I’ll dent my skull pounding my head on it, y’know?

The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who had been socialized female - something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, page 241

I was way too tired to look it up last night. :)

That’s so abbreviated it may almost be wrong. ANYway, she’s convinced some cis women via this method, but I was simply ignored when I tried it on the MWMF forum.

Nice. I was considering that as an approach between reading your post and reading the comments; good to know it can work sometimes.

One way that Julia Serano explained this to a woman without pointing out her transmisogyny was to ask a series of questions. It’s not okay to have a trans woman raised as a boy, but is it okay to have:

That’s so abbreviated it may almost be wrong. ANYway, she’s convinced some cis women via this method, but I was simply ignored when I tried it on the MWMF forum.

Interesting.