Review of the Bindel/Stryker Debate

[Natasha]

Review of the Bindel/Stryker Debate

http://auntysarah.livejournal.com/174349.html
12/7/2008

Friday's debate between feminist academic, Susan Stryker and Guardian journalist, Julie Bindel, hosted by Stephen Whittle of Press for Change was a more or less predictable affair, and I think nobody came out of it well.

Susan Stryker opened and started to take apart various things Bindel has said in a rational and scientific way. She demonstrated several areas where Bindel was factually incorrect (such as her position that medical transsexualism was a model "invented" by heretonormative psychiatrists in the 1950s, when the work was actually pioneered 20 years earlier by a German Jewish sex researcher and gay-rights campaigner and suggested that in holding trans people responsible for the attitudes of medical gatekeepers, Bindel was engaging in victim-blaming. She spoke about how Bindel's argument is not reasoned; rather it comes from a position of ideology and projection of her own feelings about sex-reassignment onto other people. Bindel, she said, fails to realise that other people may have different feelings and motivations to herself.