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    Can feminism avoid being trans exclusionary?

    A few months ago some of us discussed Julia Serano's book Whipping Girl, which argues that a lot of mainstream feminism ironically enforces the Aristotelian view that masculinity is healthy and normal and femininity is artificial and harmful. The chapter on gender in Tristan Garcia's Form and Object makes a similar argument with respect to some academic queer theorists who (according to Garcia) end up excoriating people who don't cowboy up and take responsibility for their own gender.

    If there is a problem here it has to do with a calim that is taken to be almost analytically true in many Women and Gender's Studies classes. It goes like this. The division of sexes is a biological notion, and hence tied up with nomic necessity in some manner, while gender division is merely cultural, and hence highly variable and contingent. But the biology doesn't really support the presupposed views about biological sex (there are more than two genetic sexes, and the leap from genetic to genital sex requires at the very least lots of epigenetic factors we don't understand, and there are more than two genital sexes). And the view of gender as entirely cultural involves systematically ignoring what a lot of transgender people such as Juliana Serano have to say about their experience (and perhaps some of the relevant biology as well).

    A recent post by Andrew Sullivan chronicles how this debate has gone beyond academia and is actually become poisonous in the activist community, pitting trans exclusionary radical feminist ("TERF") activists against transgender activists.


    When Mark Silcox and I were doing research for the feminism chapter on our video games book (especially with respect to claims about three waves of feminism), we were struck over and over again just how difficult the following issue is for feminist theory. There's always a danger in feminist theory of reinstating the very forms of oppression that are being theorized about. And the danger characteristically goes like this. On the one  hand, one can end up unintentionally telling women they need to just be more like men (Serano and Garcia's charges have been made against earlier forms of feminsm as well). On the other hand, there's the danger of valorizing gender differences in a way that is in reality just Aristotle with condescendingly nice sentiments attached (Carol Gilligan and Carol Glover arguably both end up doing this). This issue about TERFs reinforces my belief that credibly negotiating this Scylla and Charibdis is almost an a priori success condition for feminist theory.

    I'm about seven years out of date on this scholarship, and I never was a specialist, so it would be helpful to me (and I'm sure many readers) if anyone has any references to recent work that would negotiate the two dangers, especially with respect to the controversy in the activist community that Sullivan chronicles.

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    7 responses to “Can feminism avoid being trans exclusionary?”

    1. Scu Avatar
      Scu

      While I support most of what is above, this doesn’t seem necessary, or particularly true: “If there is a problem here it has to do with a calim that is taken to be almost analytically true in many Women and Gender’s Studies classes.” It isn’t the 90s anymore, and most of the gender studies professors I am friends with do not make this an analytically true statement in their classes, nor has it been for me when I have taught courses in Women and Gender Studies (nor has it been true in any WGS class I have taken in my career). I think at this point most gender studies professors have read their Anne Fausto-Sterling quite well. So, I am sure there are courses where the divide between biological sex and cultural gender is still treated as true, I think your original statement is a weird way of throwing shade at exactly the people who are doing some of the most interesting work in the problems you are concerned with.

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    2. Anne Jacobson Avatar
      Anne Jacobson

      Cheers for Anne Fausto-Sterling. But I have no idea how international her influence has been.

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    3. Scu Avatar
      Scu

      Anne,
      I would not really know the international influence of Fausto-Sterling, good point. Also, I did not mean her work exclusively, but in general that my experience with women and gender studies professors and classes is that they are a group that is familiar with disagreements over gender being purely cultural, and sex being purely biological. Though, my cross-sample could be wrong. I could be too generous here. But I don’t think so.

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    4. sk Avatar
      sk

      What Scu said. I mean, i’m a brand new professor of women’s studies, but I don’t know any of us who teach gender like it’s (still) 1999. This argument has been happening in feminist circles – activist and academic – since Nancy Burkholder got kicked out of Michfest in 91, and was hashed out in feminist press and in massively interesting – and disturbing – ways in the feminist blogosphere in the early oughts (so, the framing of it having gone beyond academia is false: it didn’t begin there). I teach Anne Fausto-Sterling (i’m in the US, btw), and she is anthologized in several major readers on gender and sexuality. And Serano is hardly the last word on trans (though i teach her too!); some trans folks take issue with the underlying biological essentialism in her claims – for instance, Dean Spade’s work is pretty awesome on this.
      I would say though that you are correct in your second to last graf there, Jon; however, I would extend this condition of success (not a priori, though; that takes feminism too far away from the empirical for my tastes!) to race as well. Which brings this question way back to the 19th century debates about abolition v women’s suffrage, to 1960’s and 70’s black feminist/womanist critiques, up to the recent #solidarityisforwhitewomen. The question of what a woman is, and who counts as a woman, is a very old one indeed. I would just argue that it is primarily feminist philosophers/theorists, and women’s studies professors (sometimes these are the same thing!), who have been on this question from go.

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    5. bzfgt Avatar
      bzfgt

      Actually, I had my first class on feminism in 1999, and already then I was introduced to the notion that sex as biological may be an untenable position. Gender Trouble was a hugely popular book that came out in 1990 that problematized this distinction. “Sex is already gender” is a pretty mainstream idea.

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    6. sk Avatar
      sk

      ha, bzfgt – you’re definitely right; the dangers of making a far-too-veiled prince joke, i guess!

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    7. MJSM Avatar
      MJSM

      I’m going to add my assent to the general chorus that the problem of trans erasure has hardly gone unnoticed in Gender Studies. While I wouldn’t want that to be construed as saying that trans (and racial) erasure aren’t still problems in the field–or fields, since as WGS is almost definitionaly interdisciplinary–there are a number of thinkers for whom these issues are central to their work: the aforementioned, and pretty awesome, Dean Spade, Jay Prosser (especially in the early theoretical chps. of “Second Skins”), Jack Halberstam, Jose Estaban Munoz, and probably many others I don’t know. Of course most of these people work in literature departments, so the backgrounds and techniques of analysis are different, but well worth looking into, I think.
      It may also be worth pointing out that the desire to avoid this sort of erasure may be one of the reasons stand-point epistemology is popular in the field. I don’t think that this is a bad thing, as it tends to prioritize individual narratives over universal truth claims (I’m being very general here, but it’s late), something which is valuable to movements seeking to empower the oppressed.

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