Does feeling like a woman make you one?

• Posted by Pauline Smith June 11, 2015 #transvestite crossdress t-girl transgender transsexual transexual t-gurl gurl drag transvestism transsexualism "female impersonator" "female illusion" "male to female" "female impersonation" tranny trannie trans queen "drag queen" ladyboy "third sex" glbt  1,285 views
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  Does feeling like a woman make you one? It’s OK to ask

   

  This article, by Hadley Freeman, appeared in today's Guardian (11 June 2015). I read it and some of the comments late this morning. There were about 400 comments back then and now there are almost 1300. 400 is very high for any Guardian blog and 1300 is amazing. I have given the links to the article so you can read the whole piece, comments as well.

  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/11/caitlyn-jenner-transgender-feminism-woman

   

  Please take some time from your own free time to read the article below, but also to have a look at some of the comments. There are no clear answers but quite a wide divergence of views, and also some comments about trans men.

   

  I remember having a discussion with Beckie Fox earlier this year about how society is changing and the words we use to describe ourselves are also changing. Trans is now an umbrella term, and many trans women are now coming out in their 20s and 30s rather than as a mid life crisis. Words like transvestite or tranny seem almost old hat. Given my advancing years (let's just say I wont see 60 again) it's good to see how we are more accepted than we were. Being a special girl will always mean carrying a load in many ways, and I still see myself as an in betweenie part man part woman.

   

  I think if I was 25 now I would make different choices than the ones I made in the 1970s - which was a very different world.

   

  As ever your comments of whatever flavour will be appreciated. I for one am glad that the Guardian champions our community without being prurient or headline seeking like the Daily Fail. It's interesting that the Azerbijhan government has banned the Guardian from covering the Baku games this summer.

   

  hugs

   

  Pauline xxxx

   

   

  Now that Caitlyn Jenner has brought transgender issues into the mainstream, let’s allow an open debate amid the rush to embrace them

   

  

   

  Feminism will probably survive Vanity Fair dressing up Caitlyn Jenner in a tight dress.’ Photograph: Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

   

  There is a strange irony to the current spotlight on transgender issues. On the one hand, it has made more people aware that gender is not as binary as many once believed. Yet discussions about transgenderism themselves are often conducted in harsh black and white. It has taken, of all unlikely folk, a member of the Kardashian clan to dropkick transgenderism into the mainstream. But amid all the carefully worded expressions of support for Caitlyn Jenner – previously known as Bruce – from President Obama to the Kardashians themselves, there is also dissent.

   

  Last weekend the New York Times published a piece by Elinor Burkett about herqualms over elements of transgenderism. Her main contention was with Jenner’s belief – and by extension, all transgender women’s belief – that she feels more female than male. “People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long … They haven’t travelled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails,” she wrote. Burkett’s piece split liberal opinion, with some expressing relief that someone had vocalised their own feelings on the matter, and others disgust that the New York Times had, as one prominent news website put it, “bungled transgender rights”. By and large the divide followed age lines, with those over 40 taking Burkett’s side and younger bloggers raging against her.

   

  Burkett did bungle her argument. She compares a trans woman to a white man “using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expecting to be embraced by the black community”. But comparing gender to race is a trope as tired as it is irrelevant. Her claim that “the insult and outright fear that trans men and women live with is all too familiar to [women]” is simply laughable. Second-wave feminists, of which Burkett is one, remember clearly the fights they led to liberate women from horrible constraints, and they did this so successfully that few women born after 1980 can imagine living under such constraints today. But at no point did western women endure the kind of marginalisation and risk of violence and suicide still suffered by so many trans people today.

   

  If, as Burkett contends, a trans woman who has lived for most of their life as a man cannot understand what it feels like to be a woman, then a woman certainly has no idea what it feels like to be trans woman. And if a trans woman should not define what it means to be a woman, neither, really, should anyone as that path is paved with generalisations. Burkett’s list of sample experiences that make a woman (“the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway&rdquois as reductive as the signifiers of femininity (cleavage and nail polish) Jenner references, which cause Burkett such rage. In any event, surely Jenner’s belief that she needs such accoutrements in order to look acceptably feminine could just as easily be cited as a near universal experience for women. As for the contention that trans women “undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us”, well, considering all that feminism has accomplished, I reckon it will probably survive Vanity Fair dressing up Caitlyn Jenner in a tight dress.

   

  But Burkett’s piece and the furore around it exemplify the problems in discussing trans issues. Among Burkett’s ultimately alienating rage and unhelpful analogies, she raises reasonable arguments, which is why her article struck a chord for so many. The mainstreaming of transgenderism is a new world, and that means questions will be asked, and that’s a good thing. It means people want to understand. What does Caitlyn Jenner, who became famous as an Olympic decathlete – competing in an event from which womenare still excluded – mean when she says she always felt more like a woman?

   

  And speaking of sport, how to carve out a space for transgender athletes such as Fallon Fox, a trans woman who is a mixed martial arts athlete and fights against women – some of whom have complained that Fallon, having been born a man, has an inherent physical advantage? These are reasonable questions, but they are, in certain quarters, shouted down by accusations that the questioner is transphobic or a “terf” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), which is why Burkett’s article felt to some like the release of a pressure valve, for all its faults.

   

  Some feminists, including Burkett, say that the rush to embrace transgenderism after so many years of exclusion has slammed down any room for debate. Arguments from the more extremist fringes have not helped, such as when the activist Martha Plimpton was widely criticised last year for using the word “vagina” about a benefit for Texas abortion funding. To reference female genitalia, Plimpton was told, is “exclusionary” because trans women are born without one. But these extremist wings, while loud, are no more representative of the wider trans movement than the radical feminist events that explicitly exclude trans women are reflective of feminism. Just as the experience of the hugely privileged and near universally praised Caitlyn Jenner, for that matter, is hardly representative of that of the average trans person.

   

  Among all the talk of Jenner’s bravery, questions should still be asked. Because perhaps the biggest irony to debates about the trans movement is that, while they get bogged down too often in one-upmanship, academic posturing and hysteria, the growing acceptance of trans people themselves shows a realisation of an underlying truth: we are all just humans.

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