Men and penises are not the enemy and as long as 'feminist' spaces perpetuate the fear and hatred of an entire group of humans out of context of action no major change will occur in the greater society. ... I'm not saying men should be allowed in nor that male privilage in our society should be ignored or written off. Rather I'm saying a suspicion of an individual without knowledge of that individual's behavior or life experience is prejudice.
I agree that men and penises are not the enemy. And I think we agree that men have real power and penises have a huge symbolic importance and power in all patriarchal societies--a symbolic power that is real, if not entirely tangible, and one which feminist groups did not invent and by which they have been harmed. And we agree that feminists groups are wrong to extend this power to transwomen. We also agree that femnist groups need to have as a goal the dismantling of systems of unearned privilege based on race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.
But, with feminist groups, in particular, there's a danger in expecting them to do the connecting/humanizing work for the rest of the culture that I'm wary of, and think I hear a little of when you say that as long as they make this mistake, the rest of the culture is incapable of changing its ways.
Moreover, the evidence I've seen thus far, with the possible exception of the ejection of the transwoman from the festival (and, again, I have an academic's distrust of the isolated, decontextualized anecdote), suggests to me that the extension of male privilege to mtf's comes more from misplaced fear than from hatred.
I believe that one's response to another's fear--particularly a fear rooted in a likely experience on the part of many of the organizers to past sexual assault by male-born men who used their penises as an assault weapon and their physical strength as an implicit threat--ought to be different from one's response to hatred.
That seems to be where we differ. I'm pretty loathe to use the term "hatred" here, at least given the information I currently possess, which I accept may be limited or incorrect. I think--just off the cuff (so, on reflection, I may revise this slightly)--I limit the use of "hatred" to someone actively seeking or advocating the destruction of another person or group of persons.
We seem to agree that MWMF can say "men are not welcome here" without saying that "we think men should not exist" or, worse, "men need to be destroyed." (But many people would and do conflate all those statements.)
This raises at least two questions in my mind: In saying "transwomen are not welcome here" are the MWMF people actually saying: "we don't think transwomen should exist at all"? If they are they saying "we don't think they do exist as women"--does that come to the same thing? I agree that it's wrong, I agree that it's humiliating, but is it hatred, pure and simple?
Hesitantly, I'll say, I don't think it's the same.
Look, I'll be honest: Maybe it's because I've had to struggle with this more than I would have liked in my own life. Maybe it's that, to my shame, I know it's really hard to get one's brain around transgender experience in reality--even when, in theory, you're quite open to it. Maybe it's that if my own child hadn't come out to me as a ftm I would never have realized the depth of my own resistance and fear, I am finding it hard to simply label this stuff as "hatred."
I do know that I do not "hate" my child. I'm struggling with the transition, yes. I hope this doesn't seem off topic, but: I know that--in my case--my struggle is definitely about fear. Yes, alas alas. STILL, not to let myself off the hook, I also have, as a result, had to work hard to weed out all those annoying residual marks in my brain of a culture that frames trans-people as freaks. I know that that's there in my brain, because I grew up in this culture, but I didn't realize at all how strongly it was still there until my kid told me he was trans. (I've taught Kate Bornstein! I've heard Leslie Feinberg lecture! But, still, there they are.)
I don't think the existence of those problematic thoughts is precisely the same as "hating" transpeople.
This is scary and hard work. I have to be repelled by myself, by these thoughts in my head. I have to feel the anger that I don't want to admit to feeling, the fear that I don't want to admit to having, and work through them. And, on top of this, our culture makes it easy to avoid this work.
My sense is that the MWMF framers are avoiding, actively avoiding, doing this work. That makes them fearful and somewhat lazy and, yes, marks them as privileged in certain ways, because transpeople don't have the luxury of avoiding this work. But I'm not SURE it marks them as hating transpeople.
So, my goal is: I want to encourage people to face this fear and do this work, despite the fact that there are few material rewards for doing it, and often there are considerable penalties--or perceived penalties--attached to it. This is not an easy sell, therefore.
My claim, here, is that labeling it hatred, or (to me) too quickly labeling it hatred, will not facilitate that effort, and may in fact actively work against it. That sometimes we label someone else's actions as hatred as a way of letting ourselves off the hook of having to do the hard work of educating them. And it lets us set ourselves up as superior to them. It can, in short, function as another form of othering. I know this from my own experience; I do not know if it applies to your stance--xk. I just perceive it as a risk implicit the label "hatred."
However, is this standard of mine an appropriate for distinguishing hatred from fear? Am I being too easy on MWMF? These are honest questions.
I agree that safe space is essential for any oppressed group. However if in the pursuit of that safety the group dishes out oppression than that safety is false.
This may be slightly off topic, and I hope you'll read this as a reflection and a critique of my own position, more than of you or yours. It's just that your use of the term reminded me that I used the term "safe" above, and, on reflection, I am discovering that I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with it as a term.
I accept the need for exclusive spaces. But I'm beginning to think it's both incorrect and not helpful to think of them as "safe" because some element(s) of the society have been excluded.
I also suspect that others have written about this, but I haven't seen it. Here are my thoughts: Oppressed groups need exclusive spaces not because they are "safe" but because they remove from the mix persons who benefit from the specific oppression that is affecting those in the exclusive space--whether they "want" to benefit or not, whether they resist the system that rewards them or not. This needs to happen not primarily to make the space safe, but to help the oppressed figure out who they are by eliminating an element of society that tends to set up a specific pattern of reaction, reactivity, and which, when it is present, they cannot help but deal with. E.g., because power relations are asymmetrical, and have been historically so for such a long time and over such broad swaths of human cultures, when men are present, women often find they cannot help but focus on them and their needs at the expense of their own.
Thus the exclusive space is a space for self-discovery, which isn't necessarily safe, and for discovering the differences and even the conflicts within and amongst those in the oppressed group, that otherwise tend to get covered over in the face of a need to fight the "bigger" oppression, represented in the bodies of those who have been excluded.
To state the obvious, the existence of camp trans reveals that setting up an exclusive space is a powerful act, in and of itself, even when the people doing it are relatively disempowered in the broader culture in many ways. I think your points about female rape, in particular, also reveal the problematics of conceiving of an exclusive space as "safe," and why I think I'm leaning toward abandoning the concept. It also reveals that the work of the women's movement is incomplete, which I think is pretty close to what you're especially wanting us to acknowledge, here? |
