Feminist Friday–Trans(j)ac(k)tivism

So it’s been a few weeks since I’ve officially participated in Feminist Friday, partly because it was on vacation and I was doing those other feminism things (insert plug for new blog, More Women in Skepticism, here, and find a link to it on the sidebar) that didn’t quite seem right for Going Rogue, but it’s back, and I’m back, and it’s an open topic, and last week (Friday night, actually, when I was up late and Interneting, which never leads anywhere good, except this time) and I had a full-on Learning Experience. I stumbled onto a whole new aspect of feminism that I didn’t know existed, and probably never ever would have thought about if left to my own devices, that’s how far out of my world view it was, although I’m still going to say it’s a subject that is relevant to most women’s lives.

Have I kept you in suspense long enough? The story of how I learned about “transjacktivists” as a group, who they are, and how they are perceived by some radical feminists follows after the jump. Also after the jump is my long and tedious explanation of what I think the issues are that cause conflict between transgendered activists and radical feminists. Hint: “Transjacktivist” is not a compliment.

This is a link to the Feminist Friday hosting blog. Click it.

Again with the what seems like needless plugging, but I was messing with my new blog (see the sidebar!) and saw I’d picked up a subscriber. I followed the subscriber’s link to a different blog, and stumbled on the word “transjacktivist” there. Brand-new word, yadda yadda, see above. I haven’t really talked to anyone in the radical feminist sphere about it, and I know Google and blogs are only reliable to a point, but this is what I think I’ve pieced together.

The Gender Binary Construct

Humans are sexual creatures. There are males and there are females, and this is a thing that is so common in the animal kingdom that it barely warrants noticing, except to establish that there are two sexes. Male sex and female sex. Both sexes share genetic material; one sex–the female sex–has to actually grow offspring in her body. Pregnancy is not easy, and it can be dangerous, and it compromises a female’s ability to fully exploit her biological resources to maximize her growth and safety. It’s just one of those things. It isn’t fair, but it is life. These are sex differences.

On top of sex, however, humans have constructed (that is, invented) the concept of gender. I hesitate to give a definition of gender because I don’t really know what the scholarly definition entails, but best I can tell it’s a way of categorizing people by behavior. Societies choose how many types of genders they want (not consciously, but you know what I mean), and they assign certain behaviors to those genders. Because gender is kind of a behavior identity, you can’t tell by looking at people what gender they identify with. You can only start to guess at it when they act. The culture decides what behaviors go with which gender, and people who identify a preference for those behaviors end up getting assigned to those gender categories. Gender is not innate. Also, there is no biological reason to limit the number of genders to two, even though many cultures have done so (the gender binary). No biological reason at all! That many cultures on Earth have decided to model gender categories after sex categories–male sex, female sex, masculine gender, feminine gender–does not make it an issue of biology. That gender roles seem to roughly correspond to sex categories makes it confusing to talk about in English (because gender and sex categories share vocabulary) (and maybe other languages, but I don’t know any other languages well enough to surmise) but that is a limitation of language. Language isn’t biology, either.

Gender Performance and Transgendered People

Because gender is a set of behaviors, gender can be said to be a performance. Children are trained from birth about which behaviors are appropriate for which genders, and adults tend to try to track children into gender groups based on which sex they are born. Children’s behavior is reinforced according to the gender group they’ve been tracked into, and they reflect their acceptance of the gender roles by performing the behaviors that are expected of them. Sometimes. Not all people go along with this, and history and personal anecdotes are filled with examples of individuals who have refused to be trapped within the confines of arbitrary gender boundaries, and perform behaviors that they like regardless of what gender group people looking at them think they should be in.

I am about to get into the parts of my thinking that are new, and I’m not sure I have all aspects of the issue straight in my head yet. I really hope I can avoid mistakes. I am sorry if I say something hurtful and wrong.

The strategies people employ as they defy gender constraints are numerous. Some people are primarily dissatisfied with the gender categories that have been constructed, and decide to perform only behaviors that they want to perform regardless of masculinity or femininity (the binary genders) and regardless of their biological sex, and deal with the criticism that accompanies not “taking sides” and forming a personal identity outside of gender identity. I only know the word Androgynous for this situation; I don’t know if there is a political identity word for this group of people or not. Transgendered people find themselves at odds not with social constructions of gender so much as the alliance of sex and gender. The gender performance does not cause them grief; the behaviors and required actions associated with either maleness or femaleness are not contrary to their gender identity. They receive social criticism because the gender they identify with is the “wrong” gender for their sex. For example, if a person with female sex organs wears high heels, it’s acceptable because facial makeup is a behavior performed by the female gender, and people with female sex organs are expected to be feminine and people with male sex organs are not. If a person with male sex organs wears high heels, that person is not conforming to the “rules” of masculinity.

How This Relates to Feminism

There are many facets of feminism, including the fight to not be confined to artificial rules about gender. It has been a long fight, and it has not been that long since perfectly ordinary things (now) like “going to college” were included in the list of behaviors for the female gender. Every time a person undermines the alignment of sexual organs and gender expectations–either by refusing to stick to the behaviors of masculinity or femininity or by refusing to let your sexual organs determine your gender performance–it makes it easier for women (and men) to be accepted for doing the things they like rather than the things that are expected of them. Divorcing gender from sex liberates people. On the other hand…

There are real inequalities between the sexes. I will cite from the page at the blog No Anodyne that clarified the issue for me: “Feminism, sex, and gender“

Pregnancy for women is a completely life-changing event. The decision about getting pregnant (or when the decision is taken away through rape or accident), carrying a child, giving birth to a child, and raising a child falls on a girl or woman far harder because of her direct biological connection to the impregnation, the pregnancy, and the child. Women know all of this, they tell their daughters and young girls about it, and all live their lives with the constant awareness of it. Many societies seem to have tried very hard to downplay the nature of this and again, we have to ask, to whose benefit is it if society pretends that women do not have this unique and significant vulnerability? Conversely, who benefits if that vulnerability is highlighted?

The threat of that state of being is forever in women’s lives and both women and men know that from the time they learn the biological facts of their bodies. A boy is told: you can make a girl or woman be pregnant and the converse isn’t true. It’s a power that we completely take for granted on the surface, but pass on as a deep human superstition and ritual. Even when a female herself is not impregnable, the superstitions and social reactions related to that reality remain attached to any and all females. Rape is based in a social ritual of power-over that wouldn’t exist but for women’s reproductive biology. The current rush by male legislators to deny women the right to abort pregnancies (and even to prevent them from having access to birth control) is directly connected to women’s unique capacity for giving birth.

Regardless of whether you have a gender identity of masculinity or femininity or an amalgamation of the two, if you can become pregnant, you are vulnerable physically and politically. Thomas Beatie (the “pregnant man”) knows that, even if he benefits from his masculinity in other ways. Renee Richards, the tennis player who fought for the right to compete in women’s matches, never had to worry about unplanned pregnancy, or getting an abortion, or having access to female contraception–even though she probably experiences the general sexism that pervades society (even though she got to go through medical school in the 1960s as a man). For many feminists who campaign mostly on behalf of procuring legal and social protections for the impregnatable people, the confusion about the difference between sex and gender and the fight by transgendered people who claim a feminine identity for full status as legal women (by having their birth certificates altered, for example) serves to undermine their efforts. It is these people (the transgendered people) who have been labeled the “transjacktivists.”

Radical Feminist Opposition to Transgendered Activists

I’m not certain if the “jack” comes from the word “hijack” or from “Jack” as a term for Generic Fellow. The term, which is pejorative, does not include all transgendered people. It refers specifically to the transgendered people who were born with male sex organs but live as feminine women, and who are fighting for the legal right to be included in places that people with female sex organs have legally established as “women only.”

The feminist arguments against allowing people born to one sex being bestowed the rights and protections established for people born to the other sex include the following:

1. If “womanhood” is legally recognized as a self-selected identity, the social and political protective mechanisms codify the completely artificial and not related to biology constructions of gender. Gender is established by a community to perpetuate power structures and biases, and giving it legal sanction makes it very hard to overcome the enforcement of gender roles in people’s lives.
2. If legal protections are accorded by gender instead of by sex, the actual people who can actually become pregnant have no recourse for the discrimination that is sourced in this actual biological vulnerability.
3. By granting legal protections to women who are women not because of their sex organs (ie, vulnerability to pregnancy) but because they perform femininity, it legally conflates femaleness with femininity. Women who are vulnerable to pregnancy but who do not want to perform feminine gender behaviors end up being outside automatic protection. They are put in the position of having to perform gender behaviors they do not identify with in order to get their full rights, even though those rights were supposedly established to protect them, too.
4. People born with male sex organs grow up with access to male privilege. They have been exempt for most of their formative years from the discrimination and sexism that affects people born with female sex organs (although they received plenty of discrimination and forms of harassment for other reasons). They do not have to overcome the obstacles that people born with female sex organs have faced their whole lives, and the struggle of feminists for equality of women doesn’t apply to them in the same way. There are plenty of rights transgendered people do need very much to fight for, and these are parallel issues, but they are not the same issues. Rather than seeing transgendered activists as allies, this group of feminists sees them as men co-opting their movement.

These are not objections held by every feminist.  There is no universal source of conflict between people born as women and people who choose femininity. Furthermore, objecting to transgendered activism from a feminist activism standpoint is not the same thing as denying transgendered people civil rights and protections from things like job and housing discrimination, being denied health care and fearing for personal safety. It is a matter that focuses on the legal definition of womanhood being derived from sex organs and/or from gender identity, and the opponents of “transjacktivism” believe that the definition should be derived from sex organs only. What I have been unable to determine is the prevalence of the conflict: if the legal practice of defining womanhood by gender is a series of localized anomalies or a dangerous precedent with noticeable negative effects, if the “transjacktivists” generally act alone or if they are representatives of the transgendered community at large, and where the issue falls on the spectrum of paranoia to danger. There are some things you cannot learn from the Internet, and like I said above, I have no scholar friends or journal subscriptions to advise me, and my ability to read up on it in the college library is very limited.

As far as this group of radical feminists go, I do see their point. If pregnancy were a physical vulnerability but not a legal one (contraception always legal and available, abortion easily accessed, rape culture dismantled), would it matter if womanhood were defined by gender or by sex? Would there need to be legal protections for the impregnatable class beyond the laws that protected all people from having their physical vulnerabilities exploited? Right now in California–not sure about the other states–pregnant women can claim disability compensation; would disability laws work instead of gender and sex laws? People move in and out of disability status all the time; if gender is a performance and legal womanhood is based on gender, what happens if a woman stops performing feminine gender behavior? If that woman once had male sex organs, would that person get to reclaim masculine status? Would masculine people who become pregnant get access to women-only spaces until they gave birth? Would they get to keep that access afterward? These are hard questions that I could keep asking all night. I’ve got a million of them, but no answers at all. I so have no answers, in fact, I wonder if I should have brought it up in the first place.

I dunno. I throw up my hands. There’s a lot to think about, and this is all I’ve come up with in the week that has passed since I stumbled on this intersection of feminism and transgendered activism. I know there is so much more to educate myself on this topic, but I don’t even know where to start.

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