Interesting essays about gender margins

[liv]

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in sbqr's thinky response.

I don't strongly care about Doyle's beef with Moira Donegan, but everything else he says about comparing the discrimination he experiences as a trans man with how he was treated as a mildly well known feminist presumed-woman is interesting. As is the 'Two Steves' model, that gender is a word for two overlapping things, a deeply felt sense of personal identity and also a social construct used to make people in the 'woman' class lesser. This problem has been an ongoing source of contention among my social group, with people I consider to be coming from well-intentioned places ending up on opposite sides.

sqbr has some great clarifications and expansions on the Doyle piece. I very much appreciated

Being raised as a woman has some huge inherent disadvantages even if you ultimately decide you're not one ... Acknowledging this disadvantage does not mean implying that being raised as a man always has equivalent advantages

And some really good examples of how cis women can be sexist and transphobic even if we're starting with good intentions.

I'm pretty sure I'm not secretly a TERF. I am not and never have been a radical feminist, I do not at all believe that sexism is the root of all oppressions or that men are inherently the Oppressor class, and I basically always prefer liberalism over radicalism (I am shading towards the more radical side on climate catastrophe, but basically I want tolerance and diversity within a functioning society, not revolution or separatism). I believe strongly in intersectionality and for many years I refused to identify as a feminist because I thought feminism required me to hate trans women and hating trans women is just bigotry as far as I'm concerned. But I think I am somewhat guilty of what Doyle calls out in his piece, of being prejudiced against trans men on the grounds that they are, well, men, and therefore assuming that they are advantaged rather than oppressed by the patriarchy.

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

Comments

[rysmiel]

This exchange was a very cheering thing to come across for me right now, thank you both.