Feminist views on transgender topics

Feminist views on transgender topics range from critical to accepting. Some feminists such as Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys believe that transgender and transsexual people uphold and reinforce sexist gender roles and the gender binary, while other feminists, such as Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, believe that transgender and transsexual people challenge repressive gender norms and that transgender politics are fully compatible with feminism. Additionally, some transgender and transsexual people, such as Julia Serano and Jacob Anderson-Minshall, identify as transfeminists. Feminists with critical views have been referred to as "TERFs" (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist). They generally object to the acronym and have called it a slur or even hate speech.

The increased number and public profile of individuals transitioning coincided with second-wave feminism, and so most of the first statements and books were written in the 1970s, with reference mainly to people then known as male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals, and now called trans women.

Socialisation differences

Some feminists argue that trans women are not women because they were born biologically male. These feminists hold that trans women have male privilege by virtue of being assigned male at birth and that their insistence on being seen as women and being included in female-only spaces is a form of male entitlement. Radical feminists reject the notion of a female brain. They believe that the differences in behavior between men and women are a result of different socialization, some going as far to call it "ritualized submission". According to this view, gender is not an innate identity, but rather a role that is imposed on people on the basis of their sex, and is viewed as an obstacle to gender abolition.

In 1973, Robin Morgan gave the keynote speech at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, in which she starkly criticized transgender folksinger Beth Elliott.

I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Diverting from feminist issues

In 1977 Gloria Steinem expressed disapproval that the heavily publicized transition of tennis player Renée Richards (a trans woman) had been characterized as "a frightening instance of what feminism could lead to" or as "living proof that feminism isn't necessary". Steinem wrote, "At a minimum, it was a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality."

Robert Jensen has outlined feminist and ecological concerns about transgender ideology, and connected that ideology to a larger cultural fear of the feminist critique of patriarchy.

In 2017, with regard to the question of whether trans women are women, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed the view that "trans women are trans women." She acknowledged transgender women face discrimination on the basis of being transgender and sees this as a serious issue, but also said that "we should not conflate the gender experiences of trans women with that of women born female." After sustaining severe criticism for her views, Adichie opined that the American Left is "creating its own decline" and is "very cannibalistic." She explained that she sees trans women as women despite her views, but stood behind her position.

Sex reassignment surgery

Steineim wrote that, while she supported the right of individuals to identify as they choose, in many cases, transgender people "surgically mutilate their own bodies" in order to conform to a gender role that is inexorably tied to physical body parts. She concludes that "feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and uses of transsexualism." The article concluded with what became one of Steinem's most famous quotes: "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" Although meant in the context of transgender issues, the quote is frequently mistaken as a general statement about feminism. Steinem's statements led to her being characterized as transphobic for some years. In a 2013 interview with The Advocate, she repudiated the interpretation of her text as an altogether condemnation of sex reassignment surgery, stating that her position was informed by accounts of gay men choosing to transition as a way of coping with societal homophobia. She added that she sees transgender people as living "authentic lives" that should be "celebrated."

In 1979, Janice Raymond wrote a book on trans women called The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which looked at the role of transsexuality–particularly psychological and surgical approaches to it—in reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes, the ways in which the "medical-psychiatric complex" is medicalizing "gender identity", and the social and political context that has helped spawn transsexual treatment and surgery as normal and therapeutic medicine. Raymond maintains that transsexualism is based on the "patriarchal myths" of "male mothering", and "making of woman according to man's image". She claims this is done in order "to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics and sexuality," adding: "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive." Several writers have characterized these views as extremely transphobic, and indeed constituting hate speech.

In her 1987 book Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly asserted her negative view of sex change operations, writing, "Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent . . . in . . . phallocratic technology. . . . Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes." "Transsexualism, which Janice Raymond has shown to be essentially a male problem, is an attempt to change males into females, whereas in fact no male can assume female chromosomes and life history/experience." "The surgeons and hormone therapists of the transsexual kingdom . . . can be said to produce feminine persons. They cannot produce women."

In 1999, in the book The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer published a sequel to The Female Eunuch. One chapter was titled "Pantomime Dames", wherein she states her opposition to accepting trans women who were assigned male at birth as women:

Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males.

More recently, Julie Bindel wrote several articles critical of sex reassignment surgery, transsexualism, and transgender issues. Bindel's first published article on transsexualism appeared in The Guardian, in May 2007; it was the first example of coverage of a narrative of 'transsexual regret' in the UK media. Bindel interviewed 'Claudia', a post-operative transsexual, who regretted her decision to have surgery and felt that the psychiatrist involved did not take sufficient care in reaching a diagnosis. Bindel questioned the medical approach in the article.

Andrea Dworkin, in her 1974 book Woman Hating, stated that "every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions."

Criticism of feminist viewpoints

In 1997 Sheila Jeffreys published a paper that stated that ""transgenderism" is... deeply problematic from a feminist perspective and that transsexualism should be seen as a violation of human rights". In 2012 she wrote in The Guardian that she and others who "criticised transgenderism, from any academic discipline," had been subjected to internet campaigns to ban their speaking because of alleged "transhate, transphobia, hate speech". She writes that the "degree of vituperation and the energy expended by the activists may suggest that they fear the practice of transgenderism could justifiably be subjected to criticism, and might not stand up to rigorous research and debate, if critics were allowed to speak out." Jeffreys is co-author with Lorene Gottschalk of the 2013 book Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism.

Greer was glitter bombed in a protest against these views at a 2012 book signing in Wellington, New Zealand by a group known as the Queer Avengers.

A 2004 piece by Julie Bindel titled "Gender Benders, beware" was printed in The Guardian concerning her anger about a rape crisis centre's dispute with a transsexual rape counselor; the article also expressed her views about transsexuals and transsexualism. Many considered the language used to be offensive and demeaning. The Guardian received more than two hundred letters of complaint from transgender people, doctors, therapists, academics and others. Transgender activist group Press for Change cite this article as an example of 'discriminatory writing' about transsexual people in the press. Complaints focused on the title, "Gender benders, beware", the cartoon accompanying the piece, and the disparaging tone, such as "Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease" and "I don't have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s [jeans] does not make you a man."

As of 2009, Bindel reportedly still maintained that "people should question the basis of the diagnosis of male psychiatrists, 'at a time when gender polarisation and homophobia work hand-in-hand.'" She argued that "Iran carries out the highest number of sex change surgeries in the world" (see Transsexuality in Iran) and that "surgery is an attempt to keep gender stereotypes intact". Bindel responded to the protest in a piece in the Guardian which covered the way the LGBT movement had developed since her early days as a radical lesbian feminist. She suggested that the protest was as much about "Stonewall for refusing to add the T (for transsexual) on to the LGB (for lesbian, gay and bisexual)." and that "the idea that certain distinct behaviours are appropriate for males and females underlies feminist criticism of the phenomenon of 'transgenderism'." Following the Stonewall protest Whittle invited her to debate these issues again with Susan Stryker, an American academic and transsexual activist, in front of an audience at Manchester Metropolitan University on 12 December 2008. The debate was broadcast live on the internet.

When Linda Bellos was invited to speak at Cambridge University in 2017, she told the organizers that she would be "publicly questioning some of the trans politics...which seems to assert the power of those who were previously designated male to tell lesbians, and especially lesbian feminists, what to say and think." She was subsequently disinvited from speaking. Asked by The Times for comment, Bellos reiterated: "I’m not being told by someone who a few months ago was a man what I as a woman can or cannot do." Claire Heuchan, writing for The Guardian, lamented the university's decision to disinvite Bellos, opining: "When feminists who have spent decades challenging sexism, racism, and homophobia are viewed as a risk to the wellbeing of students, something has gone very wrong indeed."

Feminist exclusion of trans women

See also: Radical feminism § Views on transgender topics

Some feminists see trans women as biologically male and seek to exclude them from women-only spaces.

In 1978 trans woman Sandy Stone who worked as a sound engineer for Olivia Records resigned over the controversy of a trans woman working for a lesbian-identified enterprise, precipitating feminist debate over trans women. The debate continued in Raymond's book, which devoted a chapter to criticism of "the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist". Groups like Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) then voted to exclude trans lesbians and include only womyn-born womyn. A formal request to join the organization was made by a trans lesbian in 1978; in response, the organization voted to exclude trans women. During informal discussion, members of L.O.O.T. expressed their outrage that in their view a "sex-change he-creature...dared to identify himself as a woman and a lesbian." In their public response, LOOT wrote, "A woman's voice was almost never heard as a woman's voice – it was always filtered through men's voices. So here a guy comes along saying, "I'm going to be a girl now and speak for girls." And we thought, 'No you're not.' A person cannot just join the oppressed by fiat."

Another site of conflict between feminists and trans women was the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MichFest). It ejected a transgender woman, Nancy Burkholder, in the early 1990s. Since then, the festival has maintained that it is intended for "womyn-born womyn" only. The activist group Camp Trans formed to protest this policy and to advocate for greater acceptance of trans women within the feminist community. A number of prominent transgender activists and transfeminists were involved in Camp Trans including Riki Wilchins, Jessica Xavier, and Leslie Feinberg. MichFest considered allowing post-operative trans women to attend; however, this was criticized as classist, as many trans women cannot afford sex reassignment surgery. Lisa Vogel, the MichFest organizer, said that protesters from Camp Trans responded to the ejection of Burkholder with vandalism. The festival ended in 2015.

A similarly long-running dispute occurred in Canada, also involving access to women-only space. Kimberly Nixon volunteered for training as a rape crisis counselor at Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter in 1995. When Nixon's trans status was determined, she was expelled. The staff decided that Nixon's status made it impossible for her to understand the experiences of their clients, and required their clients to be genetically female. Nixon disagreed, disclosing her own history of partner abuse and sued on the grounds of discrimination. Nixon's attorneys argued that there was no basis for the dismissal, citing Diana Courvant's experiences as the first publicly trans woman to work in a women-only domestic violence shelter. In 2007 the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear Nixon's appeal, ending the case.

Germaine Greer was appointed as a special lecturer and fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she unsuccessfully opposed the election to a fellowship of her transgender colleague Rachael Padman. Greer argued that Padman had been born male, and therefore should not be admitted to Newnham, a women's college. Greer resigned in 1996 after the case attracted negative publicity. An article concerning the incident was published on 25 June 1997 by Clare Longrigg of The Guardian. Entitled "A Sister with No Fellow Feeling"; it disappeared from websites after print publication, on the instruction of the newspaper's lawyers due to incorrect and potentially libelous information.

The 2018 Pride in London march was disrupted by a small group of lesbians calling themselves Get the L Out. The group carried banners with the phrases 'Lesbian = Female Homosexual', 'Lesbian not Queer', and 'Transactivism Erases Lesbians', while giving out leaflets stating that LGBTQ politics had failed lesbians and was contributing to lesbian erasure and compulsory heterosexuality. A member of the group described their motivation as follows: "We protested the LGBT movement as a whole and Pride specifically because many lesbians feel erased and betrayed by a movement which claimed to represent us. The L in “LGBT” is meaningless when the LGBT organisations claim that a man can identify as ‘lesbian.’" The group was condemned as transphobic or "anti-trans" by several news outlets, and the organizers of Pride in London published a public apology, condemning the group of "a level of bigotry, ignorance and hate that is unacceptable."

The term "TERF"

Trans theorists argue that it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only spaces, women's political movements, or the definition of "woman". Many who do so refer to feminists holding such views as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or "TERFs". Cristan Williams from The Transadvocate has listed criteria pertaining to what she considers "TERF ideology".

The neologism was coined by an inclusive radical feminist online space in 2008 as a way to distinguish between trans-supportive or trans-neutral radical feminists and those who wished to exclude trans women from their feminism. The progenitor of the term, the cisgender feminist Viv Smythe said, “It was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping. We wanted a way to distinguish TERFs from other RadFems with whom we engaged who were trans*-positive/neutral, because we had several years of history of engaging productively/substantively with non-TERF RadFems.”

However, the term was later experienced as a slur by several feminists at whom it was directed. Radical feminist journalist Sarah Ditum, writing for the New Statesman in 2017, noted how "TERF" became a mainstream slur after initially starting out as what was mostly an Internet buzzword. In a piece written for Feminist Current, Sarah Ditum asserts that the term is used to silence feminists through guilt by association. Julie Bindel, writing for The Guardian, opined that her exclusion from university platforms for alleged transphobia, even when it was planned for her to talk on unrelated issues such as male violence, was indicative of an anti-feminist crusade and linked the term "TERF" to this. In February 2017, the opening of the Vancouver Women's Library was met with protests and harassment by a group of people who complained about the library including books which they deemed to contain "TERF" ideology.

On September 13, 2017, some members of a transgender activist counterprotest were involved in a physical assault against Maria MacLachlan, a participant in a feminist gathering at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London. Meghan Murphy, founder of Canadian website Feminist Current, opined afterwards that "TERF" is not only a slur but a form of hate speech, pointing at the number of transgender activists and sympathizers who were defending or even celebrating the assault against MacLachlan on the grounds that she was allegedly a "TERF". The defendant, Tara Wolf, admitted posting on Facebook going to Speakers' Corner, "I wanna f*** up some TERFs. They're no better than fash (fascists)." Tara Wolf was found guilty of the assault against MacLachlan.

Claire Heuchan, criticizing the deplatforming of Linda Bellos from Cambridge University on grounds of her perceived transphobia, said that "TERF" is often used alongside violent rhetoric, and used to dehumanize women who are critical of gender. She also added that the term obscures who is responsible for violence against transgender people: "The term “Terf” and the violent rhetoric that often accompanies it only serve to obscure the reality: women and trans people alike are targets of male violence. To make radical feminists the villains is to blame men’s violence on women’s thoughts."

The Morning Star reported that on International Women's Day 2018, an elected union official was bullied off a picketline by a group of protesters, unconnected to the strike, who surrounded her shouting "Terf!" The newspaper describes the term as "commonly used as an insult towards women who question proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act". One of the protesters was identified as Tara Wolf, who was at the time facing court action on grounds of physical assault against Maria MacLachlan.

On May 1, 2018, Meghan Murphy published another opinion piece condemning transgender activists' perceived glorification of violence against women, this time in relation to an art exhibition displayed in the San Francisco Public Library. The exhibition, set up by transgender art collective The Degenderettes, displayed a t-shirt with the words "I punch TERFs" on it, splattered with red dye to imitate blood. It had been worn by singer Mya Byrne during a pride parade in the city. The art exhibition also displayed axes and baseball bats, some covered in barbed wire, painted in the colors of the transgender pride flag. After controversy, the library removed the t-shirt, but not the other items, stating that "The Library has altered the exhibit, removing artwork that could be interpreted to promote violence which is incompatible with our policies."

Feminist support

In Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, published in 1974, radical feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin called for the support of transsexuals, whom she viewed as "in a state of primary emergency" due to "the culture of male–female discreteness". Dworkin asserted that "every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions." However, she also opined that the phenomenon of transsexuality might disappear in a free society, giving way to new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

Dworkin's long-time partner John Stoltenberg published an article entitled Andrea was not transphobic. He was criticized by Derrick Jensen for the implication that the characterization of other feminists as "transphobic" is legitimate. He was further criticized by Dworkin's long-time friend Nikki Craft on the basis that he was revisioning Dworkin's work to further his own political positions.

In a 2014 interview, Judith Butler argued for civil rights for trans people: "[N]othing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world." Moreover, she responded to some of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond's criticisms of trans people, calling their criticisms "prescriptivism" and "tyranny." According to Butler, trans people are not created by medical discourse but rather develop new discourses through self-determination.

Transfeminism

Main article: Transfeminism

Robert Hill defines "Transfeminism" (also written "trans feminism"), as "a category of feminism, most often known for the application of transgender discourses to feminist discourses, and of feminist beliefs to transgender discourse". Hill says that transfeminism also concerns its integration within mainstream feminism. He defines transfeminism in this context as a type of feminism "having specific content that applies to transgender and transsexual people, but the thinking and theory of which is also applicable to all women".

Influential transfeminists include Julia Serano, Diana Courvant, and Emi Koyama. In 2006, the first book on transfeminism, Trans/Forming Feminisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out edited by Krista Scott-Dixon, was published.

See also

• Feminine essence concept of transsexuality
• Feminist movements and ideologies
• Feminist views on pornography
• Feminist sex wars
• Feminist views on sexuality
• Feminist views on prostitution
• Feminist views on BDSM
• Misogyny
• Trans-misogyny
• Transphobia

External links

• Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues
• Help Hindrances and the Indifference of Feminism

Further reading

• Jeffreys, Sheila. Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. London : Routledge, 2013. ISBN 0-415-53940-4
• Califia, Patrick. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism, San Francisco, Calif. : Cleis Press, 1997. ISBN 1-573-44072-8