I subscribe to the New York Times digitally (mainly because it can be useful as a North American cultural studies student) and recently subscribed to their “what we’re reading” newsletter, a selection of articles from other publications NYT editors like every week. When I opened Tuesday’s newsletter, I was briefly exited. A recommended article from the New Yorker, called “What is a woman?” I’m really interested in gender identity, gender construction, etc. My high hopes waned a bit when I saw the article is by Michelle Goldberg, who hasn’t really represented nuance, intersectional feminism, or just openness to positions that aren’t her own in recent time. Reading the article, I felt uncomfortable and at odds with her portrayal of the radical feminist v. trans women debate. I couldn’t really put it into words at the time, so I didn’t write about it.
Yesterday, Bitch Magazine posted online a comment on the Goldberg piece that puts into words a lot of my thoughts, and then some more. Here’s one of several important passages:
Reading this passage, one might think TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] and trans people have a philosophical or semantic debate. Trans people’s identities, for which they and their allies are waging a worldwide human rights campaign to define as legally legitimate—backed by decades of medical and psychological data—and TERFs’ hateful academic theories carry equal weight and import. If those two sides were balanced in the piece, readers might walk away with a shoulder shrug, “Who knows whether trans identity is legitimate or not?” The title of the piece certainly encourages this confusion, making it a question as to whether transgender women should be seen as women.
But the piece isn’t even balanced. In a response to Goldberg’s piece published on Autostraddle, Mari Brighe noted that Goldberg cited 14 radical feminists, quoting nine and including two quotes from books. In contrast, she quoted only four trans women, including no quotes from books; two of her trans sources actually support radical feminist viewpoints. Likewise, Goldberg quotes TERFs misgendering trans women repeatedly, never mentioning that trans women find such language dehumanizing and hurtful. “Sadly, what she presents is a disturbingly one-sided view of the situation that relies on heavily anecdotal evidence, uncited claims and debunked theories, and ignores the extended campaign of harassment and attack that the trans community has endured at the hands of radical feminists,” writes Brighe.
In Goldberg’s narrative, it’s TERFs who come off as oppressed. Their ideas lack the “power and cachet” of the trans movement, and they’ve found themselves now “shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue.” To understand how unjust this characterization of things is, one has to understand all the issues relating to trans people and TERFs that Goldberg doesn’t mention.
TERF framing of trans rights activists as bullies is bad. Bullying, rape and death threats against feminist women are really, really wrong, something I see as so problematic that I’m writing my master’s thesis on it. However, Goldberg, TERF, and to a degree also Caroline Criado-Perez describe both camps in too homogenous, undifferentiated terms. Extreme bullies in both camps exist, sadly. People in both camps are affected by structural and individual sexism and/or transphobia and/or racsim and/or homophobia. But one thing Goldberg and TERFs claim is, in my opinion, simply wrong: Transgender people, as a group and mostly as individuals, do not have hegemonic power over ciswomen. It could be argued argued that ciswomen who consistently get their one-sided opinions published in magazines/papers/cultural institutions like The New Yorker or The Atlantic have (comparatively!) more power than most trans people…
The Bitch article by Leela Ginelle does a good job of explaining all these issues, so read it in full.
One last thing: I strongly believe that both cis and trans women are women. Women can have a multitude of experiences and individual “forms” and bodily issues. Within this group different forms of relative degrees of privilege exist, not just on a cis-trans scale but also on a class scale, race scale, educational scale, etc.
