Quote from: AlexD on January 15, 2013, 09:23:09 PM
I was recently unfortunate enough to come across a hateful radical feminist blog whose author considers transmen to be little more than self-loathing lesbians. And while I know that author is just too concerned with her own agenda to spare a sympathetic thought for folks who don't think like she does, I can't help but see the truth in her words. If most of my dysphoria is social, then doesn't that mean I'm just brainwashed by our misogynistic society? I can very easily accept that there's no such thing as "brain sex", or that if there is, mine is female, in which case my desire to transition must be a lazy excuse to escape fighting for women's rights. And I'll be honest: being free of that crap would make me so happy. I'd still back women's rights 100%, of course, but I'd be doing so from a nice comfy place of privilege.
I realize it's not conclusive, but in the time since I myself was fairly attached to some radical feminist ideas (which were at least part of the reason I did not pursue transition during, say, college, when I was looking for ways to be a part of or at least on the fringes of the flannel and Doc Marten's uniform of college lesbian culture)... there has come more and more research to suggest that maybe our condition IS almost entirely one related to brain structures, and therefore as "legitimately" intersex as any condition involving atypical genitalia.
But whatever winds up being the final conclusion on that, it really is much simpler in some ways. No amount of trying to be the best male lesbian I could be, or fighting against gender stereotypes ever erased the feeling that I deeply wanted to have the physical attributes of a woman, or barring that, some kind of degree of acceptance of me, not as a gender outlaw, or a SNAG or an at-home dad, but very, very deeply as a woman.
Seems to me that Les Steinberg and Pat Califia's coming out more or less put the last nail in that kind of wishful thinking.
I can't tell anyone else what will work for them, and I wish Cathy Brennan and others all the peace they can find in themselves. From what I've seen, though, they're not going to find that peace by harassing others and calling it some kind of radical justice. It seems intellectually empty to me at this point, apart from those aspects that do challenge convention and do ask some tough questions. I don't think surgery is a panacea, since it does nothing to address the problem that exists in coercing gender identities. But I think Cathy and others may be confused between genitalia and what is in one's head. The hatefulness at this point is almost indistinguishable from the kind of things that gender and racial bigots are usually ridiculed for. Perhaps the only reason Brennan and others aren't a household word is that the
only people paying them any attention at this point are newbie transgendered people looking for others to attack them?
They seem, for example, to have no influence on the transgender policies developing at some of the leading women's colleges where gender issues have long been a topic of interest and discussion, albeit in a far more considered and considerate manner than is done by the self-haters like Brennan seems to be.
