Sometimes the Transgender Movement needs to stop and get its ideology and rhetoric straight. The movement has long taken the position that gender is between the ears and as long as people are viewing our genitals then what we have there is irrelevant.
This is a major aspect of the fight for rights to use the appropriate bathroom.
I posit there is such a thing as a socially assumed pussy, That is this: If someone appears to be a woman, I assume they have a pussy.
From there follows the not so long logic leap that if a person is assumed to have a pussy then the same issues that apply to those who physically have a pussy tend to apply to those socially assumed to have a pussy.
At this point we are at war. Some of the fine points of academic studies and coffee house discussions are going to be lost in the heat of battle.
Instead of arguing over the feminist symbols chosen, perhaps trans-women wishing to be part of the Women’s Movement should embrace those symbols as including them too.
Way back in the 1970s I was one of the few WBT women in the Second Wave Feminist/Lesbian Feminist movements. Sometimes it took a thick skin, but as a woman I faced all the same issues as AFAB women. Further just by being there and standing along side other women I broke the stereotype many had regarding us.
From The Forward: http://forward.com/sisterhood/361631/what-the-pussy-hat-debates-reveal-about-the-desperate-need-for-inclusive-ci/?attribution=home-top-story-8-headline
When I first noticed concerned social media postings asking whether the pussy hats worn at the Women’s Marches (and, I can now report, by a not insignificant number of pro-immigration protestors this past weekend) had been transphobic, my thoughts quickly turned from the question at hand to, well, where anyone was getting that idea that pussy hats had Sparked Outrage in this way. All I could find were some right-wing articles mocking a handful of posts (and one Mic Identities story) to that effect. Articles, in other words, concerned not with protecting feminism from potentially detrimental infighting but with denigrating feminism and trans sensitivities.
My hunch, then, was that the ‘trans-exclusionary pussy hat’ was a non-issue. I assumed it was, like so many progressive micro-scandals, fodder for conservatives drawn to stories of liberals devouring their own. (If you think ‘Gender Studies’ is inherently hilarious, what fun you’ll have with the concept of there being people criticizing pussy hats from the left.)
Alas, my hunch was wrong. There is in fact an intra-feminist discussion about pussy hats. Are they too gender-essentialist? Too joyful, too representative of a protest taken lightly by women who will probably be just fine under Trump (except can this really be said of anyone)? The current conversation doesn’t amount to the left descending into self-destruction, but that could, yes, go in any number of ways, some more productive than others.
I keep thinking about a line from Josephine Livingstone’s article in the New Republic: “An uncomfortable part of the truth is that bourgeois women thought that the hats were cute, and so the hats conferred a kind of talismanic sense of community on their wearers.”
I don’t think we have to find that prospect “uncomfortable.” It’s worth pointing out, as Livingstone does, that “pussy” messaging excludes women who don’t have that anatomy. But… what does “bourgeois” mean in this context? Were the pussy-hat-wearing women rich? Not necessarily – knitted hats are not luxury items. Or were the women just… a bit square? Genuinely oppressed, if not the very most oppressed, but too out of the loop to know pussy hats might be problematic?
Or had they thought through the relative benefits of utmost inclusivity and a stark visual message of feminist solidarity and consciously selected the latter option?
And is it really so terrible if protestors enjoyed wearing pink hats? If the thrill mixed subversive politics and the feminized and therefore denigrated joy of accessorizing? I think of Katha Pollitt’s – and my own! – initial, partly aesthetic, aversion. Mine I got over not when seeing the aerial shots, or even when showing up (gray-hatted as usual) to the NYC March, but en route, on the subway. A woman standing next to me hat a pink hat and pins. At first I thought maybe this was going to be a pink hat and anti-xenophobia safety pin combo, but no: She was pinning a teeth and fangs patch to her hat, vagina dentata-style. The pussy grabs back, indeed.
This is what we need to ask: Is the intra-feminist, intra-left conflict over pussy hats primarily a disagreement between “TERFS” (that is, trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and trans activists, or is it a generational or maybe even aesthetic conflict among mainly cis women, where ‘optimal enlightenment on trans issues’ serves as a proxy?
While there’s of course no official stance from All The Trans Women on pussy hats, it’s worth reading Katelyn Burns on her ambivalence, as a trans woman and feminist protestor, to the hats. While she confirms that the hats did in fact put her off, Burns’s conclusion is by no means a denunciation of the Women’s March. The last sentence of her piece: “I hope we can march again soon.”
Continue reading at: http://forward.com/sisterhood/361631/what-the-pussy-hat-debates-reveal-about-the-desperate-need-for-inclusive-ci/?attribution=home-top-story-8-headline
Women Born Transsexual 