Defining WOMAN.
by Undercover Punk
Posted on Friday, June 17th, 2011 at 5:38 pm
http://radicalhub.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/defining-woman/There is lots of talk about what "woman" means. It's practically a cliche feminist topic! But the debate takes on new meaning in light of transsexuality's destructive "gender" conservatism. Post-modern anti-essentialism seeks to dismiss the experience of womanhood by claiming that anyone can choose to be a woman and, in any case, we are too diverse to be generalized about. This is not true. Women are all subject to the tyranny of compulsory heterosexuality that dictates the sexual-ized behavior of humans according to the mutually exclusive classifications of "man" and "woman." Women have shared life experiences as "girls" and as "women." Radical feminist theory seeks to expose the ways in which trans theory, like patriarchal reality, denies female self-determination and imposes upon women their own false (read: male-serving) definition OF "woman."
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By hijacking the word "woman," trans ideology seeks to erase or invisibilize the presumption of female-ness that constitutes the core criteria informing the word itself. Trans reduce the word WOMAN to a social construct and identity — one that they can appropriate at will, have socially and politically supported merely on their word, and then legitimized legally in a relatively short time (usually just 2 years). For trans, it is not a contradiction for a MAAB to adopt the term "woman" and the often-repeated mantra of the community is "trans women ARE women."
