Questioning Transphobia

My community seems to have seen the launch of more than a few surveys recently; I’m happy to see this one especially – a UK Trans Survey on Domestic Violence – given the abject failure of at least two other UK-based, high profile campaigns to include trans people.

I’m looking at you, HM Government (who still haven’t even bothered to reply to my email of two months ago, asking about trans inclusivity in their VAW campaign) and you, Amnesty UK (who made no secret of the fact that we were excluded from their 1:10 campaign).

So without further ado, via my friends at Spectrum London:

Domestic Violence and abuse is in the limelight more than ever before. The levels of abuse to heterosexual women are 1 in 4 – the same figure experienced by LGBT people.

“Domestic violence is still invisible in our communities,” says Rita Hirani, CEO of Broken Rainbow, funded by the Home Office to run the national LGBT domestic violence helpline.

“Limited research in terms of domestic violence and abuse amongst transgendered people suggests the figure may even be higher,” adds Denise Anderson from Spectrum London, a peer support forum for all trans people and those questioning their gender.

In previous research carried out by Brighton’s Spectrum LGBT Forums Count Me In Too project, along with Press For Change’s research in their Endangered Penalties report, it was shown that an alarming figure of 64% of Trans people had experienced Domestic Violence at some time.

“This is a large percentage of transgendered people, one that when presented to various organisations brings looks of surprise and alarm, because many have not encountered transgendered people contacting them for assistance,” says Denise.

With this in mind Spectrum London along with Broken Rainbow feel it is time to revisit this subject, consulting Transgendered people, investigating if these levels are more indicative of a wider audience nationally. The survey hopes to confirm previous research, and raise awareness to agencies and service providers of the issues surrounding domestic violence in the transgendered communities.

“With increased awareness of these issues to support organisations, we hope transgendered people will feel more comfortable to be able to report issues of a domestic violence nature, knowing support is available,” says Denise.

The Online survey can be found here:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1012451

The survey will be open from 1st June 2009 until the 1st September 2009. We will then collate the information and will be presenting the findings from early October.

Editor’s Notes:

Spectrum London is a peer support forum for all trans people and those questioning their gender.

http://www.spectrumlondon.org.uk

Broken Rainbow is a registered charity in the UK, number: 1103624

http://www.broken-rainbow.org.uk

Broken Rainbow run the national LGBT helpline on 0300 999 LGBT (5428) on Monday 2-8pm, Wed 10-1pm, and Thursday 2-8pm.

Research:

Women’s Aid Domestic Violence Statistics:
http://tinyurl.com/WomansAid

Spectrum LGBT Forum Brighton?s Count Me In Too:
http://www.spectrum-lgbt.org/cmiToo/downloads/

Press for Change Report:
http://www.pfc.org.uk/files/EngenderedPenalties.pdf

Let me just repeat that estimate: 64% of trans people have experienced domestic violence at some time.

Got that, my cis friends and allies?

SIXTY-FOUR PERCENT

Two out of every three of us. Frankly, it’s nothing short of a national disgrace that cis society stands idly by while my trans siblings are subject to this degree of violence.

—————

ETA, June 2, 2009: I’ve just heard from Denise at Spectrum London that technical issues have delayed the launch date of the survey to Monday June 8, 2009.

The closing date remains at September 1, 2009, and all trans women in the UK are urged to complete the survey, even if they themselves haven’t been subject to domestic violence.

—————

Cross-posted at Bird of Paradox

This post is directed at Amananta, but what I have to say in it is more universally applicable to anti-trans feminists.

If you were ever really a supporter of trans people, you wouldn’t have found it so easy to back off that support and change your tune. You wouldn’t have quietly withdrawn your public support for your partner after you couldn’t use your appeal to estrogen to justify that your transphobic actions weren’t really transphobic.

But then you come trolling around my blog under a pseudonym to tell us all how trans women are really acting from male privilege, that we were ever “really cis men” before transitioning:

So basically, you aren’t going to answer her question, which is, why do transactivists focus almost soley on trying to force their way into women-born-women-only spaces, and claim born women should have no right to any space of their own, instead of actually combatting real oppression?
Oh wait, that’s right, you’re the oppressed ones, after getting the benefits of maleness you’re whole lives until you transition, and then want all the energy of women to be focused on your needs. Just like when you were men.

I really wish I could say that this was quite a change from your attempts at peacemaking, but truthfully, your “Radical Feminism and the Transgendered” post was pretty offensive:

I’ve seen a lot of transphobia (prejudice, misunderstanding and delberate hurtfulness directed towards transsexuals and transgendered people) flagrantly displayed by some radical feminists. I’ve also seen some distinctly anti-feminist opinions held by transfolk. Both of these attitudes are counterproductive, hurtful, and divisive. Neither of them make much sense. I don’t even think they are topics worthy enough of serious discussion to have people spend the amount of time and energy on them that they do, and maybe the time and energy I am putting into this post is also part of that wasted energy.

In this paragraph, you establish that you consider the rabidly anti-trans actions taken by feminists since the early 1970s to be rhetorically equal to trans people’s reactions to that violence. To being forced out of feminist spaces, to being denigrated as “surgically/chemically altered men,” to being equated with serial killers and rapists, to Janice Raymond’s call to commit cultural genocide upon trans people, to being described as “Frankenstein’s monsters” by Mary Daly. That trans people’s reactions to all of this hate speech, to all of these exclusive actions, are somehow on the same ideological ground as the insistence that trans people should not exist.

You then say that these reactions make no sense, that they’re not worthy of discussion, and that any energy devoted to that discussion is wasted energy. And please forget that trans women have been a part of feminism since the second wave, please pretend that we’ve never contributed. Please pretend that our participation was not forcibly and violently ended whenever possible – no, act like trans people are being divisive for criticizing this history and demanding accountability from feminism. That trans women are the unreasonable ones for wanting full participation in the women’s movement.

Why do I say these topics are a waste of the energy spent on them? I guess I just have to start off playing hardball here. Dear sisters in radical feminism – there is a tiny percentage of the population that feels they were not born into the right body and wishes to change their gender presentation. They are not your enemy; they are not the founders of the patriarchy; they are not the masses of men who are beating and raping women; they are not, as a group, supportive of violence against women or unequal pay or the anti-abortion movement. Dear transpeople – radical feminist groups that do not let MTFs into women only meetings or gatherings are not the defining issue of your oppression. I have yet to see any radical feminist say it is okay for you to be discriminated against in jobs and housing and beaten to death by roving packs of homophobic/transphobic men.

The first two-thirds of your paragraph is okay. But then we get to the second half – at which point you start explaining – as a cissexual woman – what should and should not be important to trans women. You completely dismiss any responsibility that feminism as a movement has helped perpetrate and reinforce the notions that trans women are really cis men and that trans men are really cis women, and how that is the foundation of violence against trans people – trans women especially, trans women of color, especially.

You also completely elide the fact that “women-only space” that excludes trans women count domestic violence and rape shelters among their number, and that these are a refuge from male violence. While cis feminists themselves may not directly engage in violence (please ignore the fact that cissexual feminists sent death threats to Olivia Records when they were demanding Sandy Stone leave), the fact that these spaces are set up to actively exclude trans women means that we’re that much more vulnerable to violence from men – in other words, your “women-only spaces” that exclude trans women are reinforcing that violence.

Also, by setting up women-only spaces to exclude trans women, you are declaring who is a woman and who is not a woman, and every space that’s set up to exclude trans women reinforces the core trans misogynistic notion that “trans women are not real women.”

Finally, it is not your place as a member of the oppressor class (cissexual people) to tell the oppressed class (trans people) what our priorities are supposed to be. If you were really a supporter of trans people as you claim at the time you wrote this, you wouldn’t be lecturing trans women on what causes we’re supposed to care about.

I’m skipping the next few paragraphs, as I believe they are genuinely supportive of your wife in specific and trans people in general. And, really, you should’ve stopped there, because:

But in other ways, many transgendered people fall prey to patriarchal ideas and attitudes, just as many non-transgendered people do. FTMs in particular seem so anxious to identify themselves as men that they sometimes throw out sexist stereotypes or behave in a very anti-feminist way, perhaps in order to prove they are “one of the boys”. I have seen the very good point made that of course FTMs have “gender dysphoria” – and so do almost all other women, because our culture, as a whole, hates and reviles women and femininity. What woman doesn’t hate being female for at least part of her life? Where is the line between really feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men in our society?

First of all, no, cissexual women do not have “gender dysphoria” and it’s both trivializing and tokenizing toward trans people to claim that discomfort with being a woman in a patriarchal society is the same thing as living with being trans – that is, with the fact that you know your physical sex isn’t right.

The line between feeling you should have been born a man and wishing you had the privileges accorded to men is a strong, bright line for trans people. Trans men aren’t doing it for the privilege, they do it because they know they’re male down to their bones, and their bodies clash with that expectation so thoroughly that the best answer is to transition. I, as a woman, wish every day that I had the privileges accorded to men, but living as a man was not something I could do and maintain a healthy life.

And yes, some trans men are sexist, and they should be called out on their sexism because sexism is wrong, and their being trans men shouldn’t reflect onto that at all.

I have seen many MTFs get extremely excited about getting to be “real women” who can – go SHOPPING! and wear frilly things! And heels! Until I sometimes wonder if to them, being feminine is nothing more than a fashion statement. I have known FTMs who explain that they knew they were really boys because they wanted short hair as children, hated Barbie dolls, and were very athletic. These kind of statements reveal that they don’t think girls or women who behave in this way are “real women”, and you can’t really get much more anti-feminist than that.

Oh, man, I thought that the previous paragraph was offensively tokenizing, but this, oh my god. These statements don’t reveal anything of the sort. You’re cherry-picking a few statements and behavior, taking them completely out of context, and then using them as evidence that trans women apparently view being women as some kind of shallow, superficial, artificial exercise – and I think that has more to do with how society views femininity than how trans women view womanhood.

It’s like this: Pre-transition life is like a prison. You’re expected to live according to your sex assigned at birth, even though every part of you knows this is wrong. Transitioning means so many things on so many levels, and that includes being able to do things appropriate to your proper sex without being labeled as a freak (although the labeling still happens). Trans women who are excited about shopping for clothes and shoes aren’t excited because this is the breadth and depth of the experience of “womanhood” to trans women, but because it is one of many things that we can finally do as women.

But to know that, you’d have to listen to trans people, rather than impose your own assumptions on us.

I do think it is a real problem that the only way little boys are allowed to express the softer and gentler sides of themselves is if they are seen as “not real men”. And it is definitely a problem that little girls are supposed to be shy and retiring and obsessed with their looks or “something is wrong with them.” I do not think these things alone are at the root of transgenderism. But I think in some cases, these cultural attitudes have pushed people into surgery and other medical treatments because behaviors outside of the strictly gender normative are seen as, literally “sick”. I have had some transpeople become very upset with me for daring to say these things, and while it is not my desire to hurt them by reiterating this, I have to call it as I see it.

And this goes back to the incorrect idea that trans people transition because we think that some things are only for men to do and some things are only for women, “thus, if I want to wear dresses, I have to be a woman.” While I appreciate your concern that people are pushed into surgery, I find it a grotesquely inaccurate distortion of the truth: That the WPATH (formerly HBIGDA) Standards of Care are intended to convince trans people that we don’t want to transition. How ignorant do you have to be to insist that people are being pushed into transitioning by cultural attitudes? Have you taken a look around lately? Society hates trans people.

You do hurt people by saying this, because you are saying something that is demonstrably false. You’re making unfounded assumptions based in your own cissexual privilege, and then asserting them as if they’re true, without (as privilege allows) even backing these statements up. You may call it as you see it, but you’re seeing things that aren’t there.

But the fact remains that it *is* easier to get along in life if one appears to be what others expect. In this regard, FTMs have a bit of an easier life, as the taking of testosterone makes them indistinguishable from men born men in a fairly brief amount of time, at least in public settings, or while clothed. Their masculine behavior will then pass unnoticed by society unless they wish to make an issue of having been born female. MTFs face a different set of variables, however. Depending on several appearance factors, some MTFs can be taken as a woman by most people without comment, but some will never succesfully “pass” as female, but will be seen as “a man in a dress.” While feminism has made some avenues open to women which were never open before, such as the freedom to wear either pants or a skirt/dress, men as a group have clung to the idea of dresses as women’s clothing and go out of their way to torment any fellow male who dares break the masculine code of dress and behavior. When an MTF, or for that matter, any crossdressing man, hippie boy, or goth boy, goes out wearing a skirt, s/he is exposed to, at best, whispered mockery and ridicule. At worst, men will beat him/her to death for breaking the male code of behavior. Male privilege comes with a high price, and those who visibly reject this code, even with something as petty as changing one’s clothes, sometimes pay that price with their lives.

This paragraph is problematic for a couple of reasons:

• You assume that trans men have an easy time passing. While it is true that testosterone over time does masculinize trans men rather effectively, a large number of trans men do not in fact pass perfectly well.
• You talk about “passing as female” when trans women are female. I think what you mean is “passing as cissexual.” Because trans women who fail to pass as cissexual are incorrectly gendered as men – that is to say, it’s the people who insist they’re men, not the trans woman’s fault for not looking female enough.

This is mostly plain old cissexism at work here, which is ignorant, but forgivable.

Which brings me to male privilege.

This isn’t.

Many MTFs I know minimize the effect male privilege has on their behavior. I suppose it is like the proverbial fish who asks “what is water?” – being the benficiary of male privilege during one’s formative years, even if one begins to question one’s identity as a man, confers benefits upon one that are invisible to the recipient (although obvious to women, who do not receive these benefits.) Since MTFs do not want to be male, they would like to imagine they can just toss male prvilege away along with their unwanted boy’s clothing. The human mind does not work in this way, however.

Because growing up as a trans girl is exactly the same thing as growing up as a cis boy, right? Because when you know you’re a girl, even though the world insists you’re a boy, you’re totally socializing in exactly the same way as the cis boys are. You can’t possibly be picking up gendered messages intended for girls and absorbing them. And of course this in no way affects how trans girls interact with male privilege, right?

It’s cissexist supremacy that claims that trans people’s lives are identical to cis people’s lives pre-transition, that our state of mind and how it affects us in no way affects how we interact with the world or how the world interacts with us. So, before you start lecturing on how the human mind works, you could at least try to understand how trans women’s minds work throughout our lives.

Discussion by cissexual women of trans women’s “male privilege” is a silencing tactic, used to tell us that behavior that would be completely acceptable from a cis woman is unacceptable and essentially male from a trans woman. By explaining to trans women what our lives are really like, and how we really experienced male privilege, you’re doing the same thing that men do to women:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

This syndrome is something nearly every woman faces every day, within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to believe Mr. Very Important and his overweening confidence over my more shaky certainty.

You’re exercising your cissexual privilege to shut trans women up. I’m not arguing that trans women have never received any male privilege, here. What I am arguing is that your assumptions about what that means are wrong, that you’re using this assumption of male privilege as a way to explain that trans women are essentially not really women, and carry an indelible mark of Cain that can and should be used against us when we start saying or doing inconvenient things – like, for example, protesting discrimination and segregation directed against trans women.

It is ironic that those resorting to violent, invasive tactics in order to enter the Michigan Women’s Music Festivial, for example, with the excuse that they are NOT men and should be accepted as women, are resorting to an ingrained male privilege which tells them they have a right to go anywhere they want to go. Also ironic in their insistence that they are no different from women born women is their seeming inability to understand, or their willingness to brush aside as insignificant, women’s very real fears of rape, from which follows the concept of a safe space for women being male-free. Thus the “cutting edge” protest method some have developed, that of passing succesfully as female until they get to the shower area and then showing everyone they have penises in a sort of “Neener, neener, I have a penis and you didn’t guess but I’m showing it to you now so you’re a hypocrite ha-ha-ha you’re wrong about transwomen!” sort of gesture really only proves the point that they DON’T belong in a women’s only safe place, as they have no clue how frightening it is for a vulnerable naked women to suddenly be confronted by an angry naked man.

The story about trans women exposing penises in the showers has been debunked many times:

Tony entered the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1999 and took a shower inside, inadverdantly exposing his transplanted forearm, which was made to appear like a penis. This is considered to be the origin of the myth that “men walked around the festival exposing themselves (which has no concrete eyewitness reports besides Tony’s story itself).

In other words, the tactics you’re saying trans women used in the Festival never happened. But, there’s so much more buried here:

• You’re saying that trans women represent a threat of rape by being present at MichFest. How is it not trans misogynistic to insist that trans women are potential rapists?
• You’re saying that trans women should be ashamed of our anatomy, even though the only control we can exert over it is via hormones and surgery, since we can’t will our penises away. You’re saying that it must be hidden at all times. The truth is that a trans woman who reveals her penis is not putting cis women at risk for seeing it, but herself at risk because people who see her as “not a real woman” may commit violence upon her.
• You’re coopting survivor voices to justify continued exclusion and ejection of trans women from women-only spaces.
• Aside from the debunked rumor about trans women flashing penises in the shower, what “violent, invasive” tactics have been deployed to protest MichFest?
• Earlier in this post, you asserted that trans women are at great danger from male violence. Now you justify excluding trans women from MichFest because the women there need to be free from male violence. How can you not see that trans women may need this space as much as cis women?
• You’re assuming that the default is that trans women shouldn’t be allowed in. MWMF is for all women, which means that trans women are automatically included. It was an act of violence to expel Nancy Burkholder, and maintaining the policy in the years since has been continued justification of that violence against a woman.
• Penis or no, trans women are not “men” ever. Saying so is the core of transphobia – that trans people’s genders are not valid.

Transwomen – if you are serious about transitioning and serious about feeling like a woman, you have to stop insisting that female fear of men is sexist or unreasonable. Every time you do this it just proves the point of why women do need some women born women only space – so they don’t have to deal with you, as a newcomer to living as a woman, to tell us how we are doing it all wrong. Every time you think or say something along these lines, you are acting on male privilege, whether you like that idea or not. Question – if you are transgendered and pre-op or non-op, would you feel safe in a prison with men? Of course you wouldn’t – and for the exact same reason, in general women are not going to feel safe if you invade a space where they are naked and vulnerable. You can be as unhappy about that as you like – trust me, I am unhappy about it too – but until the epidemic of male violence against women ends, this is how it is going to be. You cannot blame feminists for this – they did not invent an irrational prejudice against men as violent rapists – the high number of men who are violent rapists is what is responsible for this very realistic fear.

Now this is where Amananta’s putting trans women in our place – we’re “newcomers to living as women” and thus need to understand that our presence, as a minority of women around women is exactly like putting a trans woman in a prison full of cis men (and yay, comparing trans women to violent criminals who are cis men – you go, Amananta!). She throws in the “shut up” bit by invoking male privilege yet again.

And here, she flips things – at the beginning of her post, she tells trans women that cis women are not responsible for the violence inflicted by cis men on trans women, to show that cis feminists are not enemies to trans women. Here, she basically says that trans women are responsible for the violence inflcited on cis women by cis men, and that to keep cis women safe from male violence at MichFest, trans women must be excluded. She says that “until the epidemic of male violence against women ends, this is how it is going to be.” What that means is that trans women are scapegoats for cis feminists – that cis feminists attack trans women as substitutes for cis men. Trans women are safer targets to attack than cis men, being as we’re oppressed in relation to cis women. Heart even says this on her own blog:

When a radical feminist female uses insulting words in the direction
of transwomen, she understand this to be no different from using
insulting words in the direction of males. It might be rude, crude,
and socially unacceptable, it might be insulting, but it isn’t hate
speech. It’s not discriminatory. Because given power differentials as
they exist between males and females, females aren’t situated socially
so as to be able to discriminate against males, or to be bigoted
towards males or to be phobic against males. To the contrary, our
experience as females is that males *are* to be feared because they
hurt females and to say so, and behave accordingly, is not “phobic,”
it is based on female reality.

Also the way Amananta excuses prejudice against trans women by talking about how a prejudice against men as violent rapists is rational, due to the number of men who violently rape.

Hey, Amananta, can you point to the apparently extensive pattern of trans women who rape cis women?

Finally I want to tackle what I think is the most hidden issue in all of this but perhaps the root of it all – the question of “who defines womanhood”? I have seen the very good point raised that women ave never been allowed to define what makes a woman. Men have defined womanhood for us for centuries. When I see transgendered women questioning the refusal of some to refer to them as women, there is again an unexamined male privilege in their questioning at the same time as that there are some very good points. The unexamined privilege comes from them setting up patriarchal societal objections to accepting transpersons as they wish to be accepted and smashing those admittedly unfounded ideas, thus concluding that radical feminists are wrong to ever exclude them from anything at all.

This is a vacuous question – the answer is “no one defines womanhood.” There is no single, universal, experience of womanhood. The idea that trans women are demanding to define womanhood for all women is as ridiculous as the assertion that cis women get to decide whether trans women are really women. It doesn’t work that way. You and every other radical feminist in the world can line up and tell me I’m a man, but that doesn’t erase the sexual harassment I’ve experienced, the misogyny, the violence I’ve risked and experienced. It doesn’t erase the boss who offered to give me rides home in exchange for blow jobs, and it doesn’t erase the fear of rape and violence I felt when a man followed me across three bus transfers and right off the bus at the same stop. Do those experiences define womanhood? I don’t think they do – they don’t define the men and women I’ve dated, who have all accepted my womanhood, they don’t cover the fact that 99% of the people around me do use feminine pronouns. They certainly don’t cover my own self-perception, which has been unassailable for my entire life.

You’re trying to encapsulate “womanhood” into this commodity that can be defined or withdrawn by individual people, and it’s not. No one can define what it’s like to be a man or a woman for another person. Not Heart or Lucky and their appropriative lists of oppressions, no one.

The real unexamined privilege in your question is cissexual privilege: The idea that cis people have the authority and right to gender trans people incorrectly based on standards that don’t apply to cis people.

To demand full acceptance into a group which has little power to define its own boundaries is invasive and insensitive. Furthermore, if you are a transgendered woman, no matter how badly you may want it, unless you were incredibly lucky you were not raised as a girl in this society. There are some experiences you will never have, and there are some things that will never quite match up between your experiences and those of girls who were raised as girls. I understand well this is a sore point for many transwomen, who feel they have missed out greatly on something very special, and maybe they have – but the fact remains that they did not have these experiences and many of the bonds between women who are born women are based on the assumption of shared experiences.

Trans women are women, just as cis women are. It’s not a matter of demanding acceptance. Acceptance should be a given. It’s demanding that you stop excluding and ejecting us for arbitrary and unfalsifiable reasons.

For example, you raise the point that trans women aren’t raised as girls, and you tell us that this is why we should be excluded from women-only spaces and not complain about it. I want to ask you: Do you not see how abusive, how violent, how alienating it would be for a girl to be raised as a boy no matter how much she protests? And would this woman be welcomed into women-only spaces, knowing she had endured such an abusive upbringing?

That’s what trans women grow up with – it’s abusive, violent, and alienating. And now, this abuse, violence, and alienation that was forced upon us as we grew up is used as a reason to justify further abuse, violence, and alienation from a movement that is allegedly for all women, but is really only for some women. Not only do you deny that trans women are women, but you hold the violence inflicted upon us against our will as something we must be held responsible for.

And when confronted with the extensive and fundamental transphobia of your statements, do you – as a self-proclaimed ally to trans people say “Oh, hell, I screwed up?” No, you blame trans people for getting rightfully angry with you:

The content of this post removed because I have been silenced by transgender activists who ignore everything else I write in order to take what I have written here, twist it out of context and proportion, and make me out to be some horrible transphobe who dehumanizes all transpersons everywhere and abuses my supposed privilege over transpersons.  In fact, the only links my blog gets anymore is from angry transactivists vilifying me.  Everything I write about women’s rights?  Completely ignored.  The irony seems to escape you all.

Yes, you were silenced. You were unable to voice your opinions without being criticized, and that is exactly the same thing as being censored out of having a voice, which is why you took your blog down, never to post to it again, right? How trans people actually set up a rule on the entire internet that “Amananta is not allowed to speak on trans topics,” and it is now a physical law of nature.

Spare me your bullshit about being silenced. No one silenced you – you even dropped a trolling comment in my blog, as linked above. This “I was silenced!” rhetoric is just more privileged whining about how people won’t let you say bigoted things in peace.

I also like the false opposition set up throughout the original post, where trans activists were set up as being solely interested in trans rights and needs, while feminists were set up as being properly concerned about women’s rights. This is simply not true. A large number of trans women and men identify as feminists and are in fact actively focused on feminist issues. A large number of feminists understand that women’s issues apply to both cis and trans women. There is no divide. Both trans people and women experience gender-based oppression, and if feminism is really about ending gender-based oppression, then feminists would see that it’s just as important to fight transphobia as it is to fight misogyny

Of course, most transphobic and anti-pornography radical feminists seem to understand intersectionality about as well as they understand trans people – which is not very much at all. So, getting the above across seems about as easy and likely as communicating that racism, immigration, disability rights, poverty, and more are themselves feminist issues because women experience all of those things.

Note: Some of the concepts described in this post were inspired by Cedar’s Beyond Inclusion zine.

Justice Walks has decided that she’s going to set the agenda for trans activism:

I was informed recently that the Masons do “panty checks” to be sure that prospective members actually occupy male bodies before they are invited into the fold.

Where, oh, where are all of the trans-advocates picketing, suing, and protesting this blatant “phobia” against transmen?  Why is it that male members of Elks clubs and Freemason clubs all over the country aren’t being decried as “transphobic” when they take steps to ensure that their membership is comprised only of people in male bodies, regardless of what they may believe themselves to be in their heads?

Because, of course, Justice Walks gets to tell trans people what we’re supposed to prioritize. What causes we’re supposed to champion. Isn’t that how it works? Privileged people tell the oppressed what they’re supposed to do?

Oh, wait, that’s oppression. Justice Walks isn’t just setting an agenda for trans people, she’s making an excuse to say more bigoted things to and about trans people, and give us marching orders:

The next time some pro-genital-mutilation trans-advocate comes at me whining about that rape crisis center in Vancouver or the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, I’m going to demand proof that they are just as vehemently opposed to the “discriminatory” practices of the Masons, the Elks, and other such fraternities – collegiate, social, or professional – that require prospective members to disrobe or otherwise offer proof of their biological sex.

I can almost hear the crickets and see the tumbleweed now.

I like this idea that Justice Walks thinks her opinions about trans people are actually informed and not, say, ignorant. Surely she understands that body shaming comments like “pro-genital-mutilation” are downright oppressive. That she’s willing to claim that trans people’s genitals are not just invalid, but completely ruined. Just how much stigma can you load down on one group of people, anyway?

I don’t think that any fraternity that excludes trans men is cool for doing so, or that such behavior should be encouraged. My position has always been that trans men should be unreservedly accepted as men and trans women should be unreservedly accepted as women, and that is in all areas. And if trans men are fighting for access, I will gladly assist them in their efforts to gain access.

However, I find it deeply insulting and misogynist that Justice Walks thinks that membership in a fraternity – a social club – is somehow equivalent to women being excluded and ejected from domestic violence and rape shelters. Women go to DV and rape shelters because they’ve survived violence or rape, not because they want to socialize and network. Women go to these places for safety from those who harmed them, as well as recovery from that harm. Excluding a woman from such a space puts her at potentially deadly risk. How is this the same as being excluded from a social club?

I’m also puzzled at the idea that activism against the segregation of trans women at MichFest (which is allegedly open to all women but is really open to some women, who are apparently more equal than others) as well as work to make more DV and rape shelters accessible to trans women should be subordinated to trans men’s needs. Seriously, is Justice Walks really asking “What about the menz?”

Cis privilege does not grant you the right to to tell trans people what our priorities should be and demand that we take up the causes you believe we should take up, just for you to consider our positions to be consistent and valid. Whether or not trans people engage in protests and activism to open Freemasonry to trans men (can anyone confirm this rumor?) has absolutely no bearing on whether trans people have the right to engage in protests and activism against segregation elsewhere. Cis privilege may make you think you have that right, but that’s the nature of privilege – it actually makes you believe you’re better than people who aren’t like you for purely arbitrary reasons.

It’s up to trans people to decide where to devote our energies – whether it’s to employment and housing non-discrimination, improved access to health care, increased education for the general public, keeping hate groups from taking our civil rights away, or protesting to gain access to areas that exclude us for arbitrary and prejudiced reasons. It’s our movement, and I think we’re grown-up enough to know what we’re doing with it, whether the needs addressed are specific to trans men or trans women, or the needs are applicable to all trans people. We definitely don’t need any cissexist radical feminists who don’t even understand who we are let alone why we do what we do to set us straight.

From Uppity Brown Woman:

**Please distribute widely**

FORUM: Supporting Non-Status Women Fleeing Violence

Thursday October 2, 2008
9:30am Registration
10:00am Forum

Location: Ryerson University
Student Centre
55 Gould St
Rm SCC115

** March and Rally to follow at 12:00pm **

* Learn about how recent changes to immigration law impact diverse women, including women without status

* Hear about attacks on safe spaces and community responses to support non-status women fleeing violence

* Q&A with immigration lawyer, front line workers and service providers

To register please contact Sonia at sonia@workersactioncentre.org or (416) 531-0778, ext. 221 by September 25, 2008

****************************************************************************
MARCH and RALLY at the Immigration Refugee Board

Thursday October 2, 2008
Meet 12:00pm at the corner of Yonge St. and Gould St.

Let Them Stay!

* Support domestic violence survivor Isabel Garcia and her children to stay in Canada

* Call for protection of women fleeing violence through the refugee determination process

Isabel Garcia, single mother and survivor of domestic violence, and her children are just one of many families whose lives have been put at risk as a result of negative decisions at the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Isabel came to Canada with her children 3 years ago seeking protection from her violent ex-husband in Mexico. Ignoring overwhelming evidence pointing to a lack of state protection for women surviving domestic violence in Mexico, the Immigration and Refugee Board heartlessly denied Isabel’s claim for asylum.

By issuing an abrupt and last minute deportation notice, Immigration Enforcement ensured that Isabel and her lawyer did not have time for a fair review at the Federal Court for a stay on her removal. Isabel made the difficult decision to go into hiding rather than face further violence in Mexico.

Canada’s failing Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is allowing huge numbers of women fleeing violence to fall through the cracks. The Federal Court of Canada has begun to question decisions of the Refugee Board and has recently overturned several decisions where women faced gender violence.

These women have been unable to access shelters, crisis centers, professional support, guidance or counseling because of Immigration Enforcement’s targeting of these spaces.

Stand up against immigration decisions and policies that put women and children, like Isabel and her family, at risk of violence. Join us as we call on the government to:

* Let Them Stay! – Allow this family to stay in Canada while their Humanitarian Application is considered, and to grant their Humanitarian Application

* Ensure protection for women fleeing violence through the refugee determination process

For more information, visit http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/24

***ENDORSED BY***
Carranza Barristers and Solicitors
Centre for Feminist Research
Community Development Council Durham
Community Social Planning Council
Interim Place
Mennonite New Life Centre
METRAC
MUJER
Nellie’s
No One Is Illegal – Toronto
North York Women’s Shelter
Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses
OPSEU
Parkdale Community Legal Services
Ryerson Students Union
Ryerson Women’s Centre
Ryerson Working Students Centre
Sistering
Step It Up Campaign
the Stop Community Food Centre
Toronto Rape Crisis Centre
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
Workers Action Centre

Facebook event

This post describes my personal experience with domestic violence, and may be triggering for those who have experienced it.

When I wrote the post about the exclusion of trans women from woman-only spaces, I linked to three separate blogs where someone took pains to explain how the presence of penises is triggering to survivors, and thus survivors must be protected while in woman-only space from coming near a penis.

This argument has several problems with it. The first is the paternalistic notion that survivors need to be protected from anything that can trigger them. The second is the rather hypocritical notion that the only thing that can trigger a survivor in a woman-only space is a penis. Or rather, that other triggers don’t need to be filtered out.

Some history: I’m a survivor of domestic violence. I was in a relationship from 1989 until 1994 in which I was emotionally abused, and battered a few times, isolated from friends and family, and even prevented from finding work. One of my few social outlets was the computer – I frequented computer BBSes from 1989 until 1992, and switched the internet in 1992. Most socializing that did occur tended to happen around my abuser, which made it difficult to say or do anything.

In 1989, I had been in the process of transitioning for two years. I had changed my name the previous year, I had been on estrogen since September of 1987, and I experienced the male gaze rather frequently. I met a woman who was much older than I am. A woman who, I later realized, exploited my age and my increasing sense of myself as a young woman. She was married, but her husband had joined the army and was at basic training, and their relationship was open – polyamorous. To have someone appear to give me unreserved, unconditional attention as a woman was . . . well, not new to me by that point, given the men that had also pursued me, but with two exceptions, I’ve never really been strongly interested in men. While I hadn’t firmly defined myself as a lesbian until several years later, even then attention from a woman was a much stronger pull to me than attention from a man.

So, she exploited my sense of myself as an attractive woman, and I was attractive. Men were constantly flirting with me. One man moved nearly 200 miles to maintain a relationship with me, and another man tracked me down to my place of work and followed me around. The former was sweet, but the latter was really really disturbing and creepy. I’m not saying this to establish my credibility as a woman, attractive or otherwise, but to establish context for the next part. This woman, whom I’ll call Mary, was careful to tell me how beautiful I was to her. She was occasionally subtle and often not so subtle about using my trans status to tell me how no one could really love or accept me like her. This wasn’t a message that I took to instantly – I mean, I had the boyfriend from 200 miles away at the same time. But it was an invasive, insidious message, one that played on my insecurities.

I was also not comfortable with sex at the time, as I hadn’t had surgery yet, and was still trying to save for it. I was not comfortable with my anatomy at all, and sex involving it would be dissociative and triggering. The thought of sex was dissociative and triggering. But she kept pushing me, and we did some foreplayish stuff, but she wanted me to pleasure her, while I basically wasn’t comfortable receiving at all. She played the “If you really loved me, you’d do whatever I want despite your comfort zone” but somehow the idea that if she really loved me, she’d respect my boundaries never came up.

After her husband got out of basic training, we were basically attached at the hip. Her husband was assigned to the Presidio in Monterey, CA for intelligence training (including some language learning). And she asked me to move down to Monterey with them, and offered to help pay for my surgery. What I didn’t think of was that in Monterey, my family and friends would be over 1,000 miles away. I ended up leaving the boyfriend, but our relationship was rocky anyway. I also left my support network behind – my roommate, who graciously provided space rent free during the early part of my transition during which getting a job was very difficult, my mother, and my grandmother. It wasn’t much of a support network, but on the recommendation of my psychiatrist, I had cut off all contact with my high school friends. Yay standards of care.

Once I arrived in Monterey, the really abusive stuff started. At one point, Mary’s husband – Rich – was pretending to be a woman on the local BBS scene – something which made me deeply uncomfortable, but I didn’t say anything about it to any of the local sysops. However, Rich got clumsy once, logged in as his female persona, logged in as himself, and then as his female persona again, and the sysop of one of the local WWIV BBSes watched this happen, and posted about it. I noticed the thread, didn’t say anything because, what the hell? It was his game, I wasn’t part of it, or so I thought. The next day, after I returned from work, Mary mentions that the sysop had posted that Rich was also this woman he was posing as, and told me that if I did not back Rich up and tell people he wasn’t this imaginary person, she was going to out me on the local BBSes. So… I backed him up, because I was stealth and being outed was a fairly horrible thought.

And games like that were being played constantly. She used the same threat to get me to ban two people from my own BBS for basically no reason, and sabotaging their trust for me.

However, the fact that I was socializing over the computer itself became a point of contention – she wanted me to stop. She got angry with me when she caught me using the modem (after I shut down my BBS), so if I wanted to call BBSes (and later, the internet) I had to do it when everyone was asleep. But she’d do phone checks and flip her lid if she heard a modem tone. Once she actually removed my modem from my computer and hid it. It got worse once I got onto the internet – at this point, I was talking to people from all over the world, making long-standing friendships, and generally finding some escape from her stifling abuse.

I left for two months to visit my family. Within a month, I was planning to stay, start college, help raise my nieces and newborn nephew, and escape. At the end of the second month, Mary called to ask when I was coming back down, and I felt this sense of doom and powerlessness, I felt like I had to go back – and besides, she was being nice and apologizing for the horrible things she’d done and promised to be better and I fell for it. And of course, things were back to normal. It was after returning in fact that I discovered she was screening calls from potential employers. I had been searching for a job for months before I’d left and continued to search after I returned. I managed to answer the phone once while she was gone, and it was someone who wanted to interview me, who wanted to know why I hadn’t shown up. Of course, I’d never received the message. I don’t know how many messages I didn’t receive, I just know that until 1990, I had constant employment. After 1990, I was never able to find a job.

Anyway, back to the Internet – it was a friend on the internet who suggested I call a DV shelter in 1992 when I described what was going on, and her reaction to what I was telling her was pretty strong – much stronger than I expected, and I was explaining why I was downright miserable. On some level, I just assumed I deserved to be treated this way. I called the nearest DV, began asking about what I could do, was asked if I were trans, and was bluntly refused.

Two years later – two more years that I didn’t have to go through – Rich and Mary decided to move to Ohio. The plan was that I’d move too, but the plan was also to drive across country. As it turned out, my grandmother’s house was on the way, so I said I’d like to stop and visit my family for a month or so, since I’d be moving thousands of miles away. They dropped me off, I took the things I absolutely wanted to keep and left the things I could live without, and never saw them face-to-face ever again.

My grandmother sucked at lying, though. Mary started calling the house, almost daily – usually while I was out, thankfully. But one time she called right as I was going out the door, and my grandmother turns around and asks loudly “Are you here? It’s Mary.” (Trigger, here, btw, I had a panic attack right then and there) and I told her “No!” and she sputtered that I had just left and hung up. I didn’t feel safe anymore – Mary could call at any time and my grandmother was not going to protect me from any calls that came while I was home. She was not going to change her phone number, and I couldn’t move out until I got a job. So I had to take responsibility for that myself, for the fact that any incoming phone call could be Mary.

Mary tracked down my e-mail address in 1995. She apologized for everything she had ever done, promised to help me find a job and pay for my surgery (that she had spent years preventing me from earning money to pay for), and I ignored her. She sent me another e-mail in 1996, and I ignored that as well. I haven’t heard from her since, and with luck I never will again.

But things still trigger me to varying degrees. The flashback to the wedding in Kill Bill, part 2? When the Bride steps outside and finds Bill waiting for her – that moment was a trigger for me. I was right back to the time that Mary called me while I was at my mother’s and wanted me to come back. I was right back to the time she called my grandmother’s, and my grandmother made it clear I was there and not willing to talk. That’s a hard scene for me to watch, but I know why it’s a hard scene, and when my friends watched the film, I watched it with them knowing about that moment and taking care to leave when it came up so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

On another occasion, someone who I saw as a friend did something that – well, it put me right back into Mary’s house. It wasn’t him being mean or even trying to be mean. What he did was downright innocent, and had no business being anything I’d need to guard against, but it triggered me so badly I was unable to sleep that night with help from Benadryl, and caused anxiety problems that forced me to drop some freelance work I was doing at the time.

I appreciate it when my friends realize that something is triggering and help me deal with it or get away from it, I don’t require it. I don’t know everything that can trigger me, and I certainly can’t expect anyone around me to protect me from all possible triggers.

So I get back to the women who are explaining to me why the possibility that a trans woman might trigger a cis woman in a shelter or at MichFest means that trans women must at all times be kept from cis women, at least in safe spaces. Of course, this isn’t about safety, because just being triggering is not enough for something to be dangerous, but it is presented as being a safety issue.

Now, let’s go back to my friend who accidentally triggered me in a way that neither of us could possibly have predicted. What he did that triggered me isn’t really important. What if my friends told him that he couldn’t be around me because I found him triggering? Why would I need other people to make this choice for me?

What if they didn’t like him much, and they used that as an excuse to keep him from coming around? What if they decided his brown (Cuban) skin was what triggered me (it wasn’t), and thus they decided that I needed to be protected from men with brown skin? What if they made these decisions on my behalf without asking my opinion? What if they started making other decisions on my behalf regarding how my friends interact with me without asking my opinion?

To be fair, I’d be pissed off. I can manage my triggers. I don’t blame my friend for triggering me, I don’t blame the fact that he’s a man, nor do I blame his brown skin. He didn’t spend five years tearing down my self-confidence and self-image just so he could control my life. He just accidentally reminded me of something that happened during those five years. If I or my friends told him that his presence was triggering, at that point, we’re blaming him for what happened to me – holding him responsible. Hell, might as well blame Quentin Tarantino too, for that Kill Bill wedding scene. Hold him responsible.

Or, I can own the fact that my triggers come from my history, that one person abused me often, and her husband who abused me less often (he was responsible for the instances of battering – including one instance in which he charged into my room to scold me with a little physical force mixed in).

What I don’t want is for my friends to rob me of my agency, to frame me as a victim who needs protecting from my own history. To shield me from whatever they think might trigger me.

Other survivors have said similar things. One, who spoke to the Lesbian Sex Mafia about their rule that trans women had to keep their penises covered at all times said:

I know some people say that this policy is to protect survivors from being triggered by the sight of a “bio penis.” The truth is, anything can trigger me. I can walk down the street and get triggered. I can stay at home and get triggered. I can get triggered by something someone says, by how I feel, by what’s going on in my body. There are lots of things at a play party that could trigger me, and they are not trans women’s bodies.

My triggers are just that. Mine. It would not be fair or practical to ask you to try to protect me from my own triggers. They are my responsibility. I was robbed of my choices when I was abused. In owning responsibility for my triggers, I take that back. I own my experience. I get to decide what I do about it. I get to ask for help if I want, or go resolve it myself if I want. Nobody has the right to protect me from my choices.

I know what it’s like to be isolated from the community support I need. I know what it’s like to be shamed about my body. I know what it’s like to not be seen as a whole person, to be reduced to the gender box someone put me in. All of that is what perpetrators did to me. That is what LSM is doing to trans women, and it does not protect me, it hurts me. In fact, it triggers me. Thinking about how people justify this policy as a way to protect me turns my stomach into a twisting ball of knots.

I don’t want your protection. It comes at too high a cost. And I’m not just talking about the cost of trans hatred and fear in my community, which is a high enough cost for me. I’m talking about the cost to my dignity and right to choose for myself. By thinking you need to protect me, you are sending me a message. You are saying that you have no faith in my ability to care for myself. That you see me as helpless and as a victim, forever. That you would rather protect me than listen to what I really need. That you would rather decide to hide “penises” away than to set up policies to effectively deal with harassment and violence in our community. Is that the message you want to send to survivors?

Of course, she’s not speaking specifically for shelters and MichFest (or other woman-only spaces), but what she’s saying here is pretty powerful, and highlights how radfems often position victims in such a way as to rob them of their agency. To use them, in this case, as tokens to justify excluding trans women from these spaces.

I also quoted this comment from Feministing in my linked post above:

People have already explained why the policy at MichFest is transphobic and I agree. I wanted to touch on this:

“In the past, I have volunteered at both a rape crisis center and a domestic violence shelter. I saw rape victims, victims of sexual harassment, and women who’d been beaten and emotionally abused. I remember many of the women saying that a lot of things triggered their memory of the assault–things they associated with their assault(s).”

First, I don’t know your own personal background with rape and abuse, corey. Taking just this statement, it always sounds to me like a “Well, I don’t have experience with this but my friend…” or “but my friends are black/gay/etc argument.” I am a survivor of five years of DV which included numerous atrocities to my person and I sometimes get really tired that OTHER people are speaking for me and about my experiences when they haven’t experienced them themselves. We can learn from each other but it’s different when you’ve actually experience something. There are some great essays out there about “non-survivors privilege.” I think it’s presumptuous to speak for the women at MichFest, and survivors, by using fictional possibilities that further try to justify transphobia.

What all this talk about trans women’s penises triggering women tells me is, aside from the notion that cis women’s comfort trumps trans women’s safety (see shelters), that trans women are being held responsible for possibly triggering survivors. That it is somehow our fault that we might be seen as men (because people can shapeshift their faces, you know) or someone might discover we have or have had a penis. That we bear a mark of Cain that says it’s not safe for women to be around us just because of what those women might see when they look at us.

It also implicitly absolves cis women from potentially triggering women ever. From appearing threatening to other women. These possibilities are simply not mentioned, because to mention them – to mention that cis women can be abusive, can be batterers, that cis women might trigger survivors – calls into question the entire idea that trans women can be excluded on the basis of bearing potential triggers. If anyone or anything can trigger a woman, if anyone – man or woman – can be abusive, how can MichFest truly be a safe space? Should it even be described as a safe space? Especially considering that this isn’t a matter of safety, but positioned as a matter of perceived safety, as if a survivor is somehow incapable of measuring actual threat from someone who triggers her.

But this absolution also applies to DV and rape shelters. I’m not saying that the only potential triggers that anyone’s arguing to protect against are trans women and their genitalia – shelters don’t allow men – but rather that positioning trans women as nuclear explosions of triggerness makes it easier to elide other problematic issues in the shelter – for example, dealing with a battered lesbian’s abusive partner:

One of the big barriers for lesbians seeking services for domestic violence is that is may be hard for police or service agencies to determine which partner is the victim. Sometimes the abusive partner will call the police or seek services at a domestic violence shelter as a way to further control her victim.

I imagine that the staff at many DV shelters do take this problem seriously, and many try to screen for it, but I’m not seeing many arguments that lesbians should be kept out of shelters because the abusers might sneak in to keep their partners from accessing the shelter, or to find their partners in the shelter in the first place. I personally find this problem a lot more worrying than the possibility that someone in the shelter might have a penis that no one’s likely to see, or worrying that a trans woman who’s in the shelter as a rape or domestic violence survivor is likely to bring any kind of violence into the shelter herself, or that cis men will use the fact that trans women can access services by pretending to be a trans woman so he can assault women in the shelter (and I can’t find any information anywhere that this has actually really happened in any shelters that admit trans women).

I’m not finding the explanation that trans women might be triggering to be a convincing argument. This is a double-standard held against trans women, and not one that is universally considered to be the way that shelters should handle trans women. The fact that Vancouver Rape Relief (for example) defends its “no trans women ever” policy while also maintaining links to multiple explicitly transphobic and transmisogynistic articles that were posted during the Kimberly Nixon case, that Vancouver Rape Relief positions as “protecting women-only space” on this page, makes it hard for me to accept that it’s strictly about protecting survivors from potentially triggering situations, but rather about not accepting trans women as valid women in the first place.

But the main reason I posted this is that I realized that as a survivor of domestic violence, that I am tired of radfems using survivors as tokens to justify excluding trans women, or as reason to attack sex workers who don’t present themselves as victims. I’m tired of experiences that I myself have survived being given as reason to keep me out of women-only space. And seeing the women – the other survivors – I quoted above speaking out on this, I realized that there was privilege here too, the privilege to speak for other women solely on the basis of positioning them as eternal victims, thus requiring eternal protection.

So I was reading and having some conversations about exclusion of trans women from women-only spaces, and I ended up doing some research on how inclusive domestic violence and rape shelters really are. I didn’t find the overall numbers that I wanted, and a large number of shelters just don’t say whether they’re inclusive on their webpages, but I found this report written in 2002. It’s a fairly long read, with 196 pages, but I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the topic.

The report itself is titled Re/Defining Gender and Sex: Educating for Trans, Transsexual, and Intersex Access and Inclusion to Sexual Assault Centres and Transition Houses by Caroline White, and includes such information as the fact that 45 of 62 surveyed shelters in the Vancouver BC area in 2000 were trans inclusive with no conditions. Of the remaining 17, several conditionally allowed trans women.

The Feministe link above links to Emi Koyama’s article on the unspoken racism in the trans inclusion debate, which makes the point that the idea that all women share similar experiences being born female and raised as girls erases the different experiences that women of color have while growing up and living in a white supremacist society. For example, how beauty standards are defined in relation to white women and how that impacts women of color. It centers the “common experience” of being born female, raised a girl, and lived her entire life a woman” on the experiences of white, middle-class women.

The report I linked above also discusses the unspoken racism in the trans inclusion debate, with a bit more force:

Page 112-113

“…one of the biggest implications that we have seen… is women’s reluctance to include trans women in [women-only] spaces and racism, and white supremacy; the connection between those things… There was this time when I was at this conferance and… there was a trans woman in the room for awhile and finally she had to leave and somebody said “I just want to say I feel unsafe because there’s a penis in the room, and I just want to know how in a women’s only space, how we’re supposed to talk about that, blah, blah, blah…..” And so it made an opportunity to talk with this woman, which I was able to say just a little in that group, and then also meet with her and talk with her more at length about the problems of locating sexual violence in an organ such as a penis, and talking about white skin as an organ that represents lynching and systematic oppression of people of color and all kinds of violences; I mean if we’re going to be locating violence and oppression in an organ, none of the white women in that space seemed to have any problem with their white skin showing in that space, and the trans person that was there, it was really speculation on this person’s part that there was a penis in the room.

It was just absurd… the way that she was bringing that question to the group and what she was able to bring, the power behind it was that she was a survivor of sexual abuse. And so being able to really look at this piece of – white women in particular’s – just incredible resistance to including trans folks and trans women in women-only spaces I think, really reflects an investment in the binaries between men and women, and that we maintain sexism as the primary oppression that can exist in the world so then white women remain not responsible for their participation in creating, and implementing, and designing, and sustaining, and benefiting from white supremacy and racism, and imperialism.

By centering the question of whether cis women’s safety and comfort is threatened by the presence of trans women (and thus the presumed presence of past or present penises), the questions of racism, classism and ableism are simply elided.

Emi Koyama points this out as well:

Even the argument that “the presence of a penis would trigger the women” is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis. The racist history of lesbian-feminism has taught us that any white woman making these excuses for one oppression have made and will make the same excuse for other oppressions such as racism, classism, and ableism.

But for some reason, when I re-read that yesterday, it didn’t resonate so strongly as it did when I read the longer passage above.

The report continues with some discussion of woman-to-woman abuse:

One of the big problems that I’ve got with trans exclusion is that the kinds of things that you need in order to keep a shelter safe when you let trans people in and the implications that has for the so-called problem of “men masquerading as trans people in order to gain access to shelters and whatever” – not that that has ever happened once and people raise that anyway – that…should be no less terrifying than the idea of a lesbian batterer gaining access to a shelter by masquerading as a survivor, it should be. And, in fact, what it tells us is that we still don’t take seriously the idea that women are powerful! No one has …as a movement, we’ve not internalized that we are powerful; if we believed that we were powerful andthat we learned the lessons that lesbians can batter each other, we would be afraid of the power of a lesbian batterer gaining access to our shelter or our other programs, and we would take serious steps…

Both quotes are taken from interviews with women who worked in shelters at the time.

The comments also address how the question of safety in this context obscures women’s agency and autonomy:

So [safety] can trump anything, and just looked at, what does that mean? What does it mean to say that’s the most important thing? And where has survivor’s safety eclipsed survivor agency, of autonomy? And why have we chosen – Barbara Hart puts out this elegant little model that all our work should be judged against the measurement of “does it promote safety and autonomy for survivors and accountability for perpetrators of domestic violence,” which we find to be a very helpful thing to look at. But one thing we’ve noticed is that in the movement, we’ve really prioritized safety over autonomy; that safety is just it, and actually being agents, being able to think critically about our choices and be responsible for how we’re moving in the world and do that in a way where we’re seen, and we’re actually making choices in our own best interest, and all those things, that that’s really not been prioritized.

Or as Xana at Feministing put it:

People have already explained why the policy at MichFest is transphobic and I agree. I wanted to touch on this:

“In the past, I have volunteered at both a rape crisis center and a domestic violence shelter. I saw rape victims, victims of sexual harassment, and women who’d been beaten and emotionally abused. I remember many of the women saying that a lot of things triggered their memory of the assault–things they associated with their assault(s).”

First, I don’t know your own personal background with rape and abuse, corey. Taking just this statement, it always sounds to me like a “Well, I don’t have experience with this but my friend…” or “but my friends are black/gay/etc argument.” I am a survivor of five years of DV which included numerous atrocities to my person and I sometimes get really tired that OTHER people are speaking for me and about my experiences when they haven’t experienced them themselves. We can learn from each other but it’s different when you’ve actually experience something. There are some great essays out there about “non-survivors privilege.” I think it’s presumptuous to speak for the women at MichFest, and survivors, by using fictional possibilities that further try to justify transphobia.

As Caroline White, the report’s author writes,

Space does not become “safe” simply by virtue of it being “women’s space.” “Trans” 101 education exposes the fiction of women’s space as safe space, as well as the associated costs of maintaining the fiction. In doing so, it challenges women’s organizations to, as Diana expressed, take seriously the power, autonomy, and agency of women, and to take seriously racism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression as violence. Practically, Connie suggests that instead of working for a safe space, maybe feminists should be asking, “‘what can we do to make this space workable for us who are here today,’ or a ’safer space’ or ‘intentional space,’ or make a space ‘thoughtful about oppression and violence.’”

All of these quotes come from chapter 3, the Trans 101 subsection, starting on page 97. I highly recommend reading this chapter if no other part of the report.