What transpired following this post by mAndrea is the discussion that started this blog, a discussion that I will reproduce here.
I want to create a women-only radical feminist space that allows free expression about all experiences of misogyny, regardless of whether other outside feminist (!) women feel obligated to viciously silence, attack, discredit, and shame her for her trauma and oppression. The transgender issue has created such animosity and stupidity in feminism that I want to offer support for women who need a safe place to vent about all their experiences, including issues of gender, without misogynist appropriators of radical feminism there to hate her and spew their internalized misogyny and male misogyny apology at her.
Because the discussions about transgender always inevitably lead to a special kind of stupid wherein those above non-sequiturs are hurled at radical feminists as a trump card (which usually happens because there really is no rational way to dispute radical feminists’ arguments), I want to get those out of the way so you can’t demonize women who speak up and dare to ask for the opportunity, the personal integrity, to define boundaries over their own bodies.
Anyone who is against women-only spaces, or my use of the term “women-only” rather than “women-born-women (wbw),” “female at birth (fab),” or that “cisgendered” nonsense is not welcome here. I will outright ban any radfem commenters who fucking refer to me as cisgendered.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on with it.
Because I am somewhat lazy, I will not be reformatting my long comments at Feminazi into a more seamless essay here. They are good enough for a copy-paste job anyway.
It was contended that were society less sexist, less sex essentialist, without any rigidly enforced gender roles assigned at birth because of your genitals, the phenomenon of transgenderism as an escape from these personal confines would disappear. I agree wholeheartedly that it’s a large contributor, and that’s the argument most people like Twisty make when she asks for tolerance toward them in women-only space, since they’re suffering from the system too, and just trying to get by via transitioning. But let’s have a closer look at a particular contingency of MtFs that most women are too privileged to have abusively suffered:
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If people were allowed to do whatever they wanted, regardless of gender, transgenderism would disappear, I think.
For the most part; it has multiple causes though, and the fetishists would remain. No one seems to like the term, but some are autogynephiles and/or fetishists of misogynistic gender role constructs that subordinate women, so the nameless fetish is somewhere on the spectrum of S&M degradation, but not exactly. The fixation on all the ways women are degraded in society is the primary fetish component though, which is the same as any misogynist man, only this is one step further.
I agree with the people who have witnessed the phenomenon as being one step farther than the typical voyeuristic sexism by actively engaging in it in women’s spaces, while simultaneously TAKING a woman’s body as his own.
So I basically think it is part of an OCD spectrum disorder sometimes, much like people with amputation obsessions, but then there are a large subset of OCD fetishists, in which case, social changes wouldn’t eliminate those manifestations of this misogynist body fashion game.
I have never in history seen a MtF NOT have misogynist porn and horrible hentai illustrations littering their photo galleries/blog icons, even if they claim to be radical feminists! This is the same old misogynist porn fantasy about women from men, only in different packaging. OCD + male pornsickness = a large segment of MtFs.
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I should add that the numbers of MtFs are much, much higher than FtMs, which lends further support to bonobobabe’s and my observations, i.e., there is more leeway for women to express the full range of human experiences in society without the behaviors being arbitrarily gendered and shamed, and thus there are fewer female children who get fixated on the “wrong body” conclusion early on.
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Oops, my comment got cut off. Bonobobabe rightly pointed out the above observation. As for transsexual etiologies of fetishistic origin: men are much, much more likely to have sexual fetishes in general, many of which are even imprinted in childhood, which ties into why there are a disproportionate number of MtF transsexuals.
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For the most part; it has multiple causes though, and the fetishists would remain. No one seems to like the term, but some are autogynephiles and/or fetishists of misogynistic gender role constructs that subordinate women, so the nameless fetish is somewhere on the spectrum of S&M degradation, but not exactly. The fixation on all the ways women are degraded in society is the primary fetish component though, which is the same as any misogynist man, only this is one step further.
OK, I’m confused. Are you saying that not only does this male have a fetish about degrading women, he wants to be the woman who is being degraded? That’s kinda weird. Then again, most men are weird.
I agree with you that fetishes are way more common in men (I think I read that in a psychology book some years ago). When I used to date men, I was always shocked by the strange requests they would make (like asking me to pee on them and other weird things). What weirded me out more so than the requests, was that the requests were made as if it were a completely normal thing to ask! And women are often still struggling with speaking up and asking for orgasms!
And I’ve never heard of the desire to be a different gender framed as a fetish. I like it. It makes sense in a way.
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I’ll try to explain. I think a good number are transsexual for the reason you described, and progressive social changes would thus eliminate the origins of the “switched identity” fantasy.
But there are people with OCD who have, for example, obsessions about wanting to amputate all their limbs and become disabled. It’s more about losing the limbs than existing as a disabled person in an ablist society. Similarly, there are transsexuals who have an OCD-spectrum disorder akin to this fantasy; they seem inordinately focused on “the parts.” Furthermore, there is another subset of the OCD group–sexual fetishists, as most fetishism is a subset of OCD-spectrum disorders. They are also focused on “having the parts” and sexualize getting to play a “sub” in society in general, while simultaneously resenting the loss of male privilege after satisfying their, ironically, male-entitlement fuelled expectation that all sexual fantasies will be sated by bringing them to their final conclusion. That’s why they are drawn to women-only feminist spaces like magnets; it’s not that “transgender people have thought about gender in a more nuanced way than anyone else” and all those apologists’ defenses; it’s more like, they have an active need to be validated as female, which admission into women’s only space does, while simultaneously addressing their genuine anger over having lost male privilege by simply using his overblown male entitlement to reach the natural conclusion of his personal sexual fetish, which all men are trained to expect.
So the sexual fetish component fixates on the way porn and society in general treat women, only he “identifies” as being treated that way just as someone in S&M would, and that sexy subordination becomes inextricably entangled with everything associated with women biologically and socially.
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I want to clarify a mistake I made; there are fetishists of female bodies, and fetishists of female gender roles. Usually a fetishist does both as someone who sees the social/sexual subordination and female body parts/gender presentation as inextricably related. In your utopic scenario without gender expectations or sexual subordination, only the fetishists of female body parts could possibly remain. For example, even if physically disabled people were awarded all the same rights and fair attitudes in society, OCD people who obsess about self-amputation would still remain, though anyone who fetishized being handicapped as a symbol for greater social subordination couldn’t.
Basically, fetishist MtF collude with every other misogynist man and choose to participate in the dynamic in an alternate way. They spin it as a handicap when it’s really a male-entitled sexual fantasy that actively oppresses women just as any other pornsick man does. It’s the rape and total control over a synthetic female body, giving him and any other man he includes full access to treating women the way they both love to fetishize treating women. They then strengthen the conditioned response to female parts with their misogynist sex. That’s why you see so many misogynists patronizing MtF prostitutes, and MtF prostitutes happy to do it. Sexist men look out for each other and will cooperate to control women’s bodies in any novel way they can think of.
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I’m sceptical of your analysis K.A. What I find disturbing is that there is no substantial definition, no substantial marker for this thing called gender EXCEPT your birthcertificate.
But nobody would argue “I feel like a barry inside” though the birthcertificate says harry. Why then do they argue that “I feel like a woman inside” if all it is, is a word on a birthcertificate and a whole lot of socialisation?
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Skeptical…okaaaay…care to elaborate on why? Because I have had plenty of personal experience with transsexuals in my life, which is where I learned about the subset who have a misogynist fetish (my boss was one). And the pornsickness is ubiquitous in their blogs. Anyone who saw the ginmar transsexual battle would have noted that the MtF “radfem” had icons LITTERED with misogynist porn pics and pedophilic, misogynist hentai illustrations as icons. Naturally, all the morons rushed to his (yes, his) defense and he never copped to his misogyny, but did remove them so he couldn’t be found out later. I wish I hadn’t pointed out this universal factoid that could be used as glaring evidence for the obvious, but now they’ve caught on and are removing them.
If you’re not familiar with male fetishism in general, it doesn’t have to make sense to you. There are men who fantasize about being castrated by a dominant woman until they finally have her do it! It doesn’t seem to make sense, but there it is. So there are also men that fetishize having female parts, without it being about any of the gobbledygook sex essentialism they say it is. But, as I said above, it is not the only cause of transsexualism.
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. . . [m Andrea compliments my analysis and wishes for its wider dissemination] . . .
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Thank you very much, mAndrea. After the aforementioned MtF fetishist boss sexually harassed me until I quit, an event from which I still have not financially, professionally, or emotionally recovered, I have thought long and hard about this and I’m not going to be continue to be silenced and verbally abused by other feminists in all the ways they claim to deplore, i.e., not believing a woman’s experiences of misogyny at the hands of men, whether it be a rape or sexual harassment. It only compounded the trauma at the beginning, because the only time I’ve ever disclosed it was online and I’m pretty poverty-stricken and isolated right now as a long-term result of the original experience, but now I seem to be handling it better now by talking about it more clearly.
I don’t know where else I can post this for wider readership, since so many are hostile to undiluted, realistic feminism. Maybe I should get a blog too and throw these thoughts into a formal post though. You’ll be one of the few I’ll definitely link to, though. It’s nice to have a place that takes radical feminism and racism seriously, unlike a particular few who appropriated the radical term as a synonym for merely being anti-porn without any care for why it’s actually called radicalism.
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Whoa, sorry for the typos (though) and massive run-ons! I get a little “passionate” reminiscing about that stressful experience since I’ve still never had a single person validate my reality, even though it’s been 3 YEARS since I had this epiphany about transsexualism, gender constructs, and the necessity of feminism (I was not educated about feminism of any kind back then) as a result of the incidents. Luckily, Dworkin was my first foray into theory and analysis thanks to Nikki Craft’s site, so I knew there was at least some segment of feminism that validated the world view arising from my own epiphanies about porn, sexual subordination, and the mythical gender construction. Thank goodness for the real radical blogs like this one that keep me sane! And I mean that literally!
