Roz Kaveney: Sometimes I strike my face with my palm…
Written by Roz Kaveney
I had hoped, I had really hoped, that we were past all this…And yet, I know we are not.
Julie Bindel is still out there, and Sheila Jeffreys, and Germaine Greer. And it does not matter how many transwoman and transmen are killed or beaten by straight guys, somehow we still remain weapons of the patriarchy in the minds of women who should have better battles to fight than turf wars on ‘The F Word’.
The excellent Questioning Transphobia” has been monitoring the current explosion of anti-trans hatred, and of feminist blogs that are prepared to defend trans rights and see them as inseparable from all other rights in general, and women’s rights in particular. QT is doing a good job and I am not proposing to do more than acknowledge that, and point you in the direction of her ongoing work on these issues.
What I am going to do is say something about how dispiriting all of this is, simply because it wastes so much of everyone’s time. I am going to go further, and talk, just a bit, about how much of my own precious personal time has been wasted by all of this down the years.
A quick summary – back when I first thought about transitioning, (at the cusp between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods say the Plain People of Hackney), I discussed it with my lesbian feminist friends because it was the early Seventies, and we all tended to submit personal decisions to the collective’s discussion because we were not individualists and thought that other people’s input was useful. And my friends sent me to talk to A Senior Lesbian Feminist, who explained to me that I suffered from False Consciousness and needed to get over it. (I was being told something similar by a psychiatric social worker, who reckoned that transpeople are incapable of ever enjoying sex even a tiniest little bit before the sacred rite of transition, and that my preparedness to say, well, sometimes I got sexual pleasure, meant that I was just not trans enough.)
So, I wasted several years in my mid-20s, made various lovers entirely miserable by being caught up in catastrophic gloom and the selfishness that derives from that, and in the end transitioned anyway, five years older than would otherwise have been the case. A key factor in this was that one of my friends died, and on her deathbed gave me a serious talking to about not frakking around any longer, and not listening to anyone except my own heart, not even her…
(Ironically, the Senior Lesbian Feminist cropped up in my life many years later as a colleague in Feminists Against Censorship, for which goddess bless her! At one of those Islington dinner-parties which characterise a certain sort of politicking, someone asked if we had ever encountered at Oxford. She was staggeringly quick to say, no, no, we never had. Which was fine with me, but amused me not a little…)
She meant well, but that is not an excuse, actually.
When I did transition, I walked into the middle of the Janice Raymond wars, because I started writing for Gay News, and got asked to review The Transexual Empire about which I was fairly rude. Somehow, I didn’t get all that much flak for that, partly because most of the ire of the transphobes was being directed at a moderately stealth transwoman lesbian friend. Also, in those days, I still slept with boysm and wore tons of slap and was less of an issue accordingly…
On the other hand, I did lose two close women friends when I transitioned, both of them heterosexual feminists who decided that they ‘could not support my decision’. I didn’t want them to support my decision; I wanted them to be my friends. I am generally a very forgiving person, but I don’t think I will ever forgive either of them – they were people I valued and needed, and they chose to absent themselves when I needed them.
A cynic might say that both of them have prospered in a middle-class careerist way and I might have been an embarrassment at smart cocktail parties. The fact is that other friends, with reprehensible politics in some cases, were loyal because they believe in loyalty – whereas those two women were not loyal and justified it in terms of their feminism.
Most of my feminist friends were loyal, and most more or less came round to seeing me as the same idiotic, loving, occasionally supportive, often amusing, sometimes insightful person I always had been, only happier and saner.
Generally, feminists have been part of my support mechanism and my community – I ended up being the reader at Virago for several years (and, when I left, it was over a political disagreement but with no particular hard feelings on either side). I’ve written for Feminist Review and for various collections of feminist and quasi-feminist criticism.
Every so often though, my friends and supporters have been screamed at for using me; there are people out there who would like to deny me access to some of the work on which I depend for my living.
Every so often, there are moments of unpleasantness – Germaine Greer had a tantrum when a mutual friend tried to introduce us and Julie Burchill clearly wasn’t happy either. No loss, of course, but it was their disrespect for the choices of their women friends who actually knew and valued me that I want to point to.
Transphobia is not just about being horrible to transfolk; it is about being horrible to people who are not horrible to transfolk.
When I stopped sleeping with boys, and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that there were women who wanted to sleep with me – I am the world’s least competent sexual predator in the sense that people really have to beat me about the head with the cluestick before I notice that they are attracted – that lack of respect became an issue in my life and that of women who loved me.
People who slept with me were threatened with ostracism by their friends, or grotesquely patronized for not being ‘proper’ lesbians even if people were still speaking to them. It was the 80s and this stuff happened.
The saddest story in some ways is the story of my friendship with Sandy Horne. Sandy was an older woman, a battered veteran of psychiatric abuse and coming out and jail and the peace movement. We knew each other – and became friends for a while across the battle lines of the Sex Wars – because we ended up sharing a table in a crowded Chinese restaurant and swapping dim sum.
She was going through a messy breakup and confided in me a lot, and asked my advice, and seemed to find that advice useful. Unfortunately, the other people from whom she was getting advice were people in the most heavy duty of Radical Feminist circles, and Sandy was called to order by eg Sheila Jeffries. No matter how friendly and helpful I seemed to be – I had the brand of Cain.
Sandy rang me up in tears and said that she was going to have to end our friendship; I missed her, because she was someone whom I genuinely deeply liked, but I got that she could not risk the friendships of her heart. I just hate that people made her choose.
She died a couple of years later.
The pattern I am trying to show here is that anti-trans prejudice is a set of views that give the people who hold them a cast-iron excuse for being mean, mean to other women. In the nightmarish world we inhabit, it is not transwomen or transmen who are burning the forests, setting off bombs, raping and murdering; on the contrary, we are almost always victims rather than perpetrators because we have no power.
Yet slagging us off and slagging off our allies is a way of taking a ‘radical’ position that does not cost much – except time. How about if all the energy and anger that has been expended over maintaining women-only spaces had gone into making them genuinely inclusive and safe.
Back in 1978, I was raped. I dealt with it. I had to deal with it because there was no chance in the world that either the police or the very early stages of victim support networks would have helped me deal with it.
The guy who raped me was a serial rapist of transwomen, a transphobe who thought it funny to use a knife on us. I take it very personally when someone like Janice Raymond accuses me of being, as a transdyke, someone who rapes the community of women by my very existence. I get quite vexed when I am told by her contemporary followers that I transitioned in order to be abused by men as some sort of weird male ritual.
We should not be having to waste our time on all of this crap any more. There are misogynist homophobe racist transphobes in high places who want to KILL US ALL. Not just lesbians, not just transfolk, not just members of ethnic minorities – all of us in the progressive community.
I just think we should remember that. And transphobic feminists should remember that their feminism is the most important thing about them, and stop making feminism all about being mean to people.
It is not hard – just don’t be mean to people.
When someone finds themselves tempted to say something like this:
This has now been enshrined in UK law, where anyone with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (no sex reassignment surgery is required) can legally demand entrance to, for example, women’s domestic violence services. The consequences of this could quite literally be the death of those women from religious and cultural backgrounds where it would be inappropriate for them to share living space with a non related biological male. just don’t say it, because it is stupid and mean.(I don’t have a link, but it is quoted here.
(Unpack that a little – transwomen who might need to escape from domestic violence should not do so because there might be women in the shelter who are liable to be subjected to honour killing because of the presence of a transwoman in the shelter rather than because of eg leaving an abusive husband in the first place. And any resulting honour killing is the fault of the transwoman!?! And then there is the feline use of racist assumptions here – women victims of abuse are all in danger of being killed for leaving their abuser, irrespective of their religious or cultural backgrounds.)
Being mean is always a temptation – heaven knows I have a sharp tongue on me – but it is a temptation that we should try to avoid. We should especially avoid creating a politics out of it, and ‘feminist’ transphobia is just such a politics.
It is a waste of time, which has cost me years of my life. Years, I tell’ee.
added later
I should add, in respect of the domestic violence shelter business, note also the assumption that transwomen do not come from minority religious/ethnic communities which put them at risk of death from family. I have had two flatmates whom that fitted. And yet I missed the point until I was cooking, and came to adjust…
Edit to add from comments:
Sorry, perhaps I needed to make this point even more clearly.
One of the standard complaints of feminism, quite rightly, is that men demand access to women’s time. They demand that women clean up after them, bring them cups of coffee, do the xeroxing and so on. In more patriarchal societies, women are supposed to take responsibility for men’s uncontrollable sexuality through various sorts of ‘modesty’; in less patriarchal, but still sexist ones, women are supposed to decorate themselves for men, rather than for themselves. Straight men have privilege and one of the ways that they exercise it is by making uncompensated demands on women’s time.
(One of the mistakes of a particular kind of feminism was to assume that pleasing men and placating sexism was the only reason why a woman might wear cosmetics – certainly, though, I have known women who were perfectly prepared to wear slap to go out clubbing but who objected to being expected to wear it at work.)
My point is that the demand that transpeople constantly justify ourselves, constantly live with other people’s issues, is a similar exercise of privilege, in this case cis-gendered privilege, They are claiming the right to make us spend time we often don’t have on going over and over the same arguments time after time.
And time spent on this, is wasted.
What I am going to do is say something about how dispiriting all of this is, simply because it wastes so much of everyone’s time.
Maybe I didn’t read your post properly, but I still don’t understand why this is all supposed to be a waste of everyone’s time?
z
August 18, 2008 at 2:00 am
I believe that Roz’ point is that trans women and any number of feminists should not be fighting over whether trans women should be treated like human beings, and the waste of time is that it’s happening at all.
Lisa Harney
August 18, 2008 at 2:02 am
I think she is referring to the whole “justify yourself to me! I don’t believe you! Here is my theory on why you exist! why are you attacking me? Obviously, you are an anti-feminist” script as well as all the “theories” that say we don’t really exist or are liars or whatnot.
They don’t do anything good and just waste our time and are used to hurt us.
drakyn
August 18, 2008 at 2:04 am
Drakyn: perhaps — it is a good point. But trans… erm… newbies (for want of a better word!) may still engage them. We are too kind for our own good, perhaps :)
Lisa: Perhaps refusing to engage the outright bigots is a good use of time. But what do we do with the ones in between, the ones who don’t wish that we all evaporate into thin air but need some education?
z
August 18, 2008 at 2:12 am
Engage them as far as your comfort and willingness allows. Same as with the outright bigots, really.
And to clarify my clarification above, I believe Roz is saying there shouldn’t be a fight, but making it stop isn’t really an option as long as so many feminists insist that trans women are not and cannot ever be women, or must be excluded from shelters, and so on.
Lisa Harney
August 18, 2008 at 2:19 am
Sorry, perhaps I needed to make this point even more clearly.
One of the standard complaints of feminism, quite rightly, is that men demand access to women’s time. They demand that women clean up after them, bring them cups of coffee, do the xeroxing and so on. In more patriarchal societies, women are supposed to take responsibility for men’s uncontrollable sexuality through various sorts of ‘modesty’; in less patriarchal, but still sexist ones, women are supposed to decorate themselves for men, rather than for themselves. Straight men have privilege and one of the ways that they exercise it is by making uncompensated demands on women’s time.
(One of the mistakes of a particular kind of feminism was to assume that pleasing men and placating sexism was the only reason why a woman might wear cosmetics – certainly, though, I have known women who were perfectly prepared to wear slap to go out clubbing but who objected to being expected to wear it at work.)
My point is that the demand that transpeople constantly justify ourselves, constantly live with other people’s issues, is a similar exercise of privilege, in this case cis-gendered privilege, They are claiming the right to make us spend time we often don’t have on going over and over the same arguments time after time.
And time spent on this, is wasted.
Roz Kaveney
August 18, 2008 at 2:27 am
I’m just going to delete my own comments so I’ll look smarter now.
Lisa Harney
August 18, 2008 at 2:29 am
Thanks for clarifying, Roz; that makes a lot of sense what you say.
z
August 18, 2008 at 3:45 am
Roz,
Thank you for this post.
Trin
August 18, 2008 at 7:25 am
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August 18, 2008 at 9:17 am
Roz,
An excellent blog and excellently argued. We have lots of “wars” in the area of minority regonition as human and whether we are women, transgendered people of no definite binary association of people or color or all of the above finally means nowt except that we like to be mena and like to fight.
I agree that these battles are simply a waste of everyone’s time and energy. If I am a bigot against women of color must I exclude them from my feminism, or can I find ways to incorporate them to make the entire movement stronger.
Bogotry always seems to me to be an energy-sapper that does more to reenforce the status quo than pushing for any type of change at all. We simply become bullies toward those we perceive as even less powerful than we are.
Radha Smith, MSW
August 18, 2008 at 11:10 am
Thank you for this. And it’s infuriating and depressing to be reminded that no, actually, it’s -not- just online, it -is- “the real world,” this sort of quasi-feminist Wendy House-ism has been going on ever since the beginning of…the beginning.
and fuck Sheila Jeffreys and her noisome spawn.
belledame222
August 18, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Heh. I read this for the first time and didn´t get the blockquoting and got to ¨the excellent QT,” and was all, wait, where am I?
What BD said.
And what Roz said–plus, as we see lately, then transpeople and their allies get in trouble for derailing because they have a problem with asides about “men.”
Also, I don´t say this often enough, partly because I´m not blogging right now and therefore not linking to your posts: I really, really appreciate all the heavy lifting you´ve been doing. It´s an enormous amount of work, digging through the articles on QT and all the chapters on The Trans Question from radfem luminary after radfem luminary and fisking every obnoxious transphobic post that comes down the pike. You´ve amassed a really impressive set of essays here. It´s become a detailed, multipurpose “Transphobia 101,” and I´m grateful for it.
piny
August 19, 2008 at 2:14 am
Oh, I did forget to blockquote…
The idea was that it was sort of a guest/crosspost, but yeah. I tried to label the title and put a link at the start of the post so it’d be clear.
And thank you!
Lisa Harney
August 19, 2008 at 2:31 am
This is a fantastic post, Roz, and I cannot thank you enough for sharing your story with us all. I find it just so baffling that people are still saying these things and drawing these bullshit lines in the sand.
QoT
August 19, 2008 at 2:48 am
I was involved with a Women’s Centre some years ago – at the first AGM, which was the first of its meetings that I attended, a large number of women (heterosexual and lesbian) turned up to vote against allowing transgendered people into the Centre. I assumed at the time that these were centre members, and so they were: they joined purely to take that vote and they were never seen again. Later the rules were changed.
It always strikes me as extraordinary that people should make such a fuss over this sort of thing, but perhaps that’s naive. Given Greer’s inane remarks on Sf, a subject about which she knows nothing, it shouldn’t surprise me that she’s as ignorant about other things, too. I think you are right about the mean thing.
Liz Williams
August 20, 2008 at 3:44 am
Sf?
I’ve seen Greer’s inane comments on everything from pink to cleavage to domestic violence in Aboriginal communities in Australia, but I don’t recall Sf?
And that’s purely spiteful – if they had no intention to be make use of the Centre, why make trans inclusion about them?
Lisa Harney
August 20, 2008 at 3:47 am
Fantastic post. Thank you, Roz!
friendlygun
August 20, 2008 at 8:02 am
Thank you again for saying this, something that, sadly, really should not have to be said in the first place.
Colleen
August 20, 2008 at 8:38 am
>I’ve seen Greer’s inane comments on everything from pink to cleavage to domestic violence in Aboriginal communities in Australia, but I don’t recall Sf?
She’s wheeled out onto book programmes here to comment on various SF works and demonstrates a total lack of interest and knowledge. Infuriating. I’m afraid I regard her as an attention-seeker – she’s said some good stuff and written some interesting stuff, but I can’t say I warm to her.
>And that’s purely spiteful – if they had no intention to be make use of the Centre, why make trans inclusion about them?
Having gone to a girls’ school I am under no illusions about the lengths that women will go to put one another down. Depressing….
Liz Williams
August 20, 2008 at 8:48 am
An excellent post. I’m glad I was pointed in this direction. It’s disspiriting in the extreme to realize that this kind of self-imposed intranecine warfare goes on. (Yes, I must have been the only person in the universe not to know that some self-identified feminists thought that way.)
kaffyr
August 20, 2008 at 12:11 pm
We’re writing about this on the CA NOW blog: http://www.canow.org/canoworg/2008/08/transwomen-are.html
Tiggrrl
August 20, 2008 at 4:51 pm
It strikes me that it’s also a waste of time because it’s never bloody over. Every 6-8 months online, transwomen (or women of colour) will stand up to the white, middle class, “women born women” set and say “Hey! You’re excluding us. AGAIN. Didn’t we already have a chat about this?” Then everyone gets their privilege in a knot, the clue-by-fours come out in force, and at the end of the day there’s still a bunch of people that just don’t get it. Aaaaand it happens all over again a few months later. This “crabs in a barrel” crap has got to stop. We’re all women. We should be tearing down the patriarchy, not each other. (That’s an admonition aimed at the cisgendered feminists who cannot/refuse to grok, btw, not to the fabulous folks here.)
I second a sentiment from above – Lisa, you are a wicked-strong-goddess-woman for all your work here.
(And as an aside: as a west-coast Canadian feminist, I apologise for the asshats at the Vancouver Rape Relief Centre. We’re working on it, I promise.)
silver
August 20, 2008 at 11:58 pm
per slap: btw, have you seen this?
http://ohyouprettythings.net/blog/2008/08/20/the-sparkle-pony-post-to-end-all-sparkle-pony-posts/
belledame222
August 21, 2008 at 12:03 am
Liz, true on the cruelty. That just seemed to move beyond even that cruelty.
Silver, I’ll admit here that my only reason for getting into any discussions about or with anti-trans radfems at this point is the fact that new people show up and surf the trans wars, and I’m pretty much commenting for whoever happens upon those arguments, and less so for people who make it clear through their actions that they’re not interested in changing.
Lisa Harney
August 21, 2008 at 12:32 am
Just want to add my voice to the chorus of those saying excellent post.
Cara
August 21, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Oh! I wasn’t trying to say that the conversation *shouldn’t* happen – clearly, it needs to happen as many times as it needs to happen, it needs to happen until people “get it.” And voices like yours, people who deconstruct the BS and point out exactly why it’s BS are important. Because once, I could look at a comment and think, “That’s wrong/problematic, but I can’t find the words to express why I know that’s wrong.” And then someone would swoop in and articulate all the things I felt but didn’t have the words for, and that’s given me the vocabulary to do so myself. And I am certain I am not the only person who feels that way. And the work you do in that vein is hugely important and valuable – to me, specifically, and to others more broadly.
I was just partly feeling for the people who don’t have the strength to do “101″ anymore, and partly lamenting the fact that 101 is still needed, and partly expressing frustration about the fact that if we all just *agreed* that trans/POC/etc rights were HUMAN rights, we could get on with tackling the problems facing folks under patriarchy.
which is to say i’ll just hush now, and cheer while you keep doing what you’re doing, and look for opportunities to do the same myself.
silver
August 22, 2008 at 3:19 am
I was just describing my motivations in response to your comment, not arguing with you.
101 shouldn’t be necessary ever for people to accept that all people are in fact people, and human to boot. I recall – in a conversation about how a child with cerebral palsy was given a DNR order to convenience her school – how it finally came down to, “She’s a human being, she deserves the same rights every other human has access to,” and someone said “You can’t expect people to to just get that.”
Except I do expect that. I do expect people to take the basic, empathic, leap and say “I may not understand everything about you, but I don’t have to” and just stop fighting against basic human decency.
I don’t mean that in the sense that I literally expect to see that every time, but rather that my expectations for people are high, and I realize this means that I find cis people perpetually disappointing.
Cara – yes. I <3 Roz so much.
Lisa Harney
August 22, 2008 at 3:38 am