It’s misogynistic because it is actively working against women’s rights.
Biological women are trapped by societal
expectations and the gender binary system. Women are told that they must
conform to the stereotypical beauty ideals enforced upon us through the media
and our culture. Biological sex is a material reality and gender is a social
construct designed by the patriarchy to be a hierarchal structure in which
masculine qualities are exalted and feminine qualities are punished. In the
mainstream liberal feminism we see today, women are being reduced to
performative femininity and this term of “gender identity” is inherently
harmful to the women’s rights movement. It is hard to assert our identity as a
woman when people do not define a woman as an adult human female, but rather
someone who is presenting as feminine; how can we say we are challenging
stereotypes when we are allowing others at the same time to dictate what is and
what is not a woman based on these very same stereotypes we seek to destroy?
What do you call gender-nonconforming women and butch lesbians? Gender identity
politics reinforces the patriarchal idea that gender is innate, not socially
constructed, and when we do not accept the process of “gender acquisition” by
not practicing the performative and appropriate aspects of gender, we are met
with unpleasant consequences (Shaw & Lee, p. 119). Boys who are growing up
more effeminate or are interested in activities that are coded for girls, they
are ridiculed and called sissies by their peers or even their families; tomboys
are being told they won’t be good mothers or wives and they are also being
labeled as a lesbian in a demeaning way because they do not fit into the neat
box of femininity. When the women who were tomboys growing up come out as
actual lesbians, the social ostracization could be worse especially if they
still do not conform to the strict gender roles expected of them.
Gender is ranked, and according to Judith
Lorber (1994), it was created as a structure and a stratification system to
oppress women, and the differences between males and females were coded based
on what men deemed as masculine and feminine qualities. Lorber acknowledges
that gender ranks men above women, and everything that a man does will always
be valued more over than what a woman does. Other cultures recognize more than
two genders (Shaw & Lee, p. 120), but that does not necessarily mean that
they are more progressive since each gender identity comes with its own
limitations and privileges because it still exists within the hierarchal
structure of gender and those identities will always be ranked lower than men
but higher than women. Rather than creating several different narrow boxes that
define gender, would it not make more sense to scrap the entire gender binary
system instead? Liberal feminism seeks to uphold these stereotypes whereas
radical feminism works towards a world where once you are born, you are
assigned a sex and that is it; you may choose any mode of behavior, dress,
mannerisms and any role in your community that would like. Women need to
celebrate themselves and each other for exactly as they are without trying to
police one another for not conforming to gender roles and expectations. We
cannot allow our biological realities and oppressions to be erased by gender
identity politics, because there are so many women out there in third-world
countries who do no have the option to “identify” out of being a woman;
therefore, they are subjected to sex-based oppressions such as honor killings,
female genital mutilations, and female-selective abortions. Women need to recognize
that change starts within ourselves first, and how we relate to one another. If
we keep pushing the same ideals and stereotypes that were created and defined
by men, then we will not see any progress in the female liberation from
sex-based oppression.
Feminism is the female liberation from the
patriarchy through a social and political movement. The goals of feminism
include eliminating the poverty of women, providing access to education and
reproductive rights, addressing all forms of violence against women, and
promoting women’s participation in the public sphere and their autonomy (Shaw
& Lee, p. 15). There are different forms of feminist thought that provide
distinct explanations for creating social change and understanding the social
organization of gender; the two main separations of feminist thought are
radical and liberal feminism that embody the same overarching goal of equality
for women but differ in how they want to achieve that change. Radical feminism
wants to abolish the current system and start anew while liberal feminists
believe in working within the system because it is still salvageable (p. 15).
Radical feminists believe that liberal feminists are more
conservative in their ideas towards reformation because preserving the system
that was created out of the patriarchy is not enough to resolve the social and
political oppression of women (p. 15). The patriarchy influences everything
from our social institutions (the media and the government) as well as how we
perceive ourselves as women in society, how we relate to one another, and how
men as a social class treat women (p. 15). The biggest issues that libfems and
radfems disagree on are gender identity politics and gender as a social system.
Gender identity politics (specifically transgender activism) has undermined the
entire women’s movement as well as divided the LGB community and is actively destroying
the progress that both women and LGB rights activists have worked hard to
defend against misogyny and homophobia. To start, I mentioned above that the
definition of woman has been twisted into this very narrow and strict concept
based in the performance of femininity. A woman should be defined as an adult
human female in the same way that a doe is an adult female deer with the
opportunity to express herself in whatever way she wishes, whether it is gender
conforming or not. It is perfectly okay for transwomen to create their own
space within the LGB community (they have their own oppressions and socialization issues), but it is not okay to invade female-only spaces
that were created to discuss issues in a safe space unique to biological women pertaining to female
socialization and reproductive rights, as well as to escape male violence.
Transwomen have never, and will never,
understand what it’s like to be socialized as a female (expected to
conform to femininity or bend over backwards to please men) or our
reproductive issues. It’s not meant to be exclusionary, it’s how life,
and biology, is. They tell
us our talk of reproductive rights and issues are too exclusionary, and
demand that their oppressions are worse. They use their identity to
gain access to our spaces, and then they abuse that access by assaulting
and harassing other women.
They cry that TERFS are killing transwomen each day with our
ideologies………IDEOLOGIES when in fact, its really males killing
transwomen, not TERFS.
This also plays a role in how the LGB community has evolved over time, and
lesbian radical feminists are calling for the action of “dropping the T” (and
also “fuck your alphabet soup” in
reference to the QIA+) in the LGBT
community; they believe that the common denominator in the LGB community is the
same-sex attraction and that they are supportive of only the homosexual
transsexuals who experience attraction to members of the same biological sex. Radfems
acknowledge that transgender people transition for a variety of reasons
including mental illness and sexual dysphoria, but it is unfortunate that
medical transition and surgery are being offered as the first line of treatment
rather than addressing these issues from a psychological perspective and
focusing on the underlying causes of unhappiness and discomfort. In the last
decade or so, many heterosexuals (typically white males) have invaded the LGB
community with their several different gender identities and cried that their
oppressions are worse than those who experience actual homophobia within the
public sphere. Transwomen demand to redefine lesbian sexuality by insisting
that lesbians must cater to their gender identity and sleep with them despite
lesbians experiencing same-sex attraction, and transwomen also call anyone who
disagrees with them a “TERF” or
transphobic., and advocating for violence against us.The whole common denominator of the LGBT
community has been the same-sex attraction and that’s it, but now it has
been infiltrated by straight people with made up identities (its called
having a personality) who try to insert themselves into our community,
claim they are more oppressed and then demonize us for having same-sex
attraction, calling us “genital fetishists”. It’s the same sort of
conversion therapy and rape tactics that have been used on us for
decades, saying if we just “tried penis/vagina once” and only accepting
us when we say we have prior traumas, it’s homophobic and the new
progressive language. It’s telling young gender nonconforming (and most
likely gay) children that they have to transition in order to be
socially accepted when they are perfect the way they are. Don’t even get me started on transactivists erasing lesbian and gay history by claiming Stonewall and our community was started by “trans women of color” when Stonewall was actually started by a lesbian of color, Storme Delarverie.
I have many
trans friends, people who identify as nb, and I respect and use their
pronouns, support their transitions, but I do not support the straight
males who try to pretend they know what it’s like to be a woman. Transwomen believe that they can put on makeup and a dress, and that because
they call themselves a woman (or declare that womanhood is a feeling), that
they are a woman; again, this is reducing women to performative femininity,
upholding these stereotypes rather than challenging them, and also dismissing
sex-based oppression. Cisgender privilege is defined as “those whose gender
identity, role, or expression is considered to match their assigned gender by
societal standards” by Evin Taylor (2010). Libfems believe that women and girls
do not experience dysphoria with their bodies and therefore they have privilege
over transwomen. This is a ridiculous concept in radical feminism because it
denies the lived experiences of biological women and how we are forced to
prescribe to femininity and this created social role of being a woman. Women
who do not conform to beauty ideals and societal standards are rejected and
treated just as harshly by the rest of society; women who do not wear makeup or
present femininely in the workplace are considered unprofessional, women in
developing countries are exiled to menstruation huts, and young girls are
subjected to female-selective abortions, genital mutilations and child brides
simply because they are biologically female. Transgender women experience different
oppressions and discomfort with their bodies as a marginalized class, but as
biological males they are not treated worse than females who are not
transgender.
In
short, transactivism and gender identity politics are detrimental to the
women’s rights movement. The postmodernist deconstruction of the word woman
removes power from biological women in their ability to define themselves and
their social, political, and economic oppressions. Radical feminism has never
left, nor has it evolved into the mainstream liberal feminism today which is a
common misconception. It would be in our society’s best interest to critically
analyze the gender binary system in the same way radical feminists do in order
to bring power back to biological women and address sex-based oppressions
created out of the patriarchy.
Radical feminism helped me take back my
identity as a woman, and as a lesbian, and it’s not as demonized as
tumblr makes it out to be. I’m not transphobic, I’m not a bigot, I just
want to exist as a woman the best I can in this woman-hating culture.
Sure, there are a few bad radfem apples but there are horrible people
within every group, so don’t let a few define an entire movement.
Radical feminists are here for females only.
Celtyradfem 