Perhaps the time has come for a new movement in Feminism, a fourth wave. The subtitle of my blog, postmodern second wave feminist thoughts from a post trans perspective reflect the evolving feminist positions I’ve personally experienced along with my own willingness to re-examine trans-narratives and the “transgender” version of womanhood and how that both intersects and opposes the goals of feminism itself. When I use the term “transgender” I decidedly do NOT use it in the new, all inclusive usage but specifically to cover the range of non-classical transsexual gender transgressors. As a theologian I cannot help but refer to historical perspectives of the patriarchy and the subjugation of women, women’s values and women’s sexuality I perceive at the root of mysogyny. I’ll start with women’s sexuality although this used to be a Feminism 101 issue because somewhere along the line this very basic feminist issue was lost in the feminist dialogue yet stands at the root of much of the tension between radical feminists and trans feminists as well as feminists and the patriarchy itself.
My own study of ancient history has led me to the conclusion that the patriarchy exists and persists because of one primary change in human social organization, the switch from matrilinear descent to patrilinear descent in Western civilizations and this balance was tipped by a single, cataclysmic event, the eruption and explosion of Thera, now known as Santorini, that utterly destroyed the Minoan civilization which was the pinnacle of civilization at the time and would have almost certainly become the dominate Western culture. The Minoan civilization was matrilinear, it was replaced with the Hellenistic culture which embraced a patrilinear descent model.
Other than the obvious, the primary difference between a matrilinear society and a patrilinear one is the absolute need to know who the father of a child actually is. This is turn requires that the sexual life of women be “controlled” so as to prevent any possible question of fatherhood which has been the primary battleground of women’s rights ever since to this day. It is this that makes a women’s sexuality a commodity. Think about it. Without an absolute need to know the father of a child, no child can be “illegitimate”, (a totally sick concept) there can be no prostitution, so much for the lie about the “oldest profession”. Without this need there is no question about the “control” of a woman’s own body hence no birth control or abortion issues. All the variety of outrages against women by the patriarchy ranging from the hiding away of wives and covering their bodies and hair by fundamentalist Judaism and Islam makes no sense absence the need to control a woman’s sexuality. There can be no sense of “ownership” of a wife, no rationale behind limitations on a woman’s participation in government or ownership of property. Once a man feels to the need to “defend” his wife from other men to assure his own paternity of his children, he then tries to control her as well. You cannot have prostitution as an institution unless the “supply” of available women’s sexuality is a commodity rendered scarce by other men controlling access to women sexually. The entire patriarchal house of cards rests on this one factor.
Once a woman’s sexuality becomes a commodity, the individual value of that commodity is tied to desirability to men and we get the beauty trap and the perversion of women’s natural inclination towards personal adornment turned against her to sexualize every aspect of womanhood. This dehumanization of the feminine extends to every single aspect of patriarchal societies by their very nature from religion to family to employment and education…..and almost every woman who ever chaffed at this system understands this on a gut level even if she often doesn’t know how to express it. It was for this reason this subjugation of women did not and could not happen all at once and why feminist expression is not a new phenomena but one that dates back to the beginnings of patriarchy. And it is not “natural” at all, it is actually totally contrary to natural human inclinations as demonstrated by the fact that the bulk of human history was not this way, easing of patriarchal control immediately leads to wider expression of what is and isn’t “acceptable” female behaviour and appearance and even an instinctual movement away from patrilinear descent as marked by a woman “taking” a man’s name as her own in marriage.
Ok, some of this is old hat to some feminists, but this basic understanding of the root of patriarchal thinking and power has been largely lost in modern feminist rhetoric. In a patriarchy women’s personal power measured in her ability to exercise control over her own life is closely tied to how well she can “entice” men sexually and that is a factor of age as well as genetics. The first to escape the beauty trap will naturally be those women who are lesbians and indeed among lesbian women you find a healthy return to “natural” femininity, bodies allowed to be valued in the natural range by other women and an inclination to reject artificial, sexualized, expressions of womanhood in dress and adornment seeking a new definition of “attractive” and newer, liberated manners of expression.
In the first part we reviewed the patriarchy’s need to control women and how that reduced women’s value to desirability. The struggle went on for a long time. In Greece and Rome the matrons held on to some personal power over their lives especially in the Goddess traditions but with the rise of Christianity that balance finally shifted. During the Burning Times, as we Pagans call it, wholesale war was waged on the remaining Goddess traditions and independence among women in the fields of healing and midwifery. Literally the only way that was left for a woman to live independently was spinning and weaving which is why, to this day, an unmarried older woman is called a spinster.
First wave feminism was the Suffragette movement in the mid 19′th century through the early 20′th. Concurrent with this was a re-awakening of the ancient Goddess traditions first as archaeological curiosities noted mainly by semi obscure scholars. During this time period women finally broke into the technology field primarily in telegraphy as operators. The Maetreum of Cybele is currently putting together a living history exhibition of this breakthrough at their Women’s Spirituality Centre in upstate New York.
Transsexual women, who had always been an important part of the ancient Goddess traditions mostly disappeared from view with the subjugation of those traditions. In the late 1950′s Second Wave feminism was born as a result of the vast social experiment to return women to the home from the factories following WW II. At this same time, the first noted transsexual woman of modern times, Christine Jorgensen, also came into view. Christine was stuck within the same framework as other women of her time and dealt with it with grace and dignity but left only with “entertainment” as a venue to support herself.
At first the Second Wave was a housewife movement, suffering from the same racial problems as both the first and second parts of the Suffragette movement. Lesbian women were also pretty much excluded but that did not last long. The radicalization of the movement led to a virtual takeover of the movement by Radical Lesbian Separatists which to this day leaves a taint on the very word “feminist” for many straight women. Led by Mary Daly and her more rabid student, Janice Raymond, the war on the patriarchy was expanded to include women of transsexual history who were part and parcel of the movement. It was, for all practical purposes, a witch hunt and conducted in that fashion. Just as housewives who started the American Second Wave felt estranged, so did women of transsexual history who followed them.
Slowly modern feminism started to recover from this with the idea that feminism is, indeed, a big tent capable of many divergent points of view with one single goal….women’s rights, women’s actual equality. Once again, some women of transsexual history rejoined the movement and quietly did their part. But then we had two transsexual women with wide audiences declare they were not men, but not really women either (both had prior to this maintained woman identities). Both of them tapped into a following of Judith Butler’s gender deconstruction to it’s illogical extremes with books that became the staples of women’s study programs across the country and both learned quickly they could make a nice living as “professional trannys”. Rikki Wilkins and Kate Bornstein did more to undermine the womanhood of classic transsexuals than Raymond had accomplished in a decade and did it almost overnight.
In his column Dan Savage asks: Do “post-op” trans people have an obligation to tell their lovers “that they were once the other sex”? and answers “yes”. Trans identified people all over the internut agreed. I do not and find this to be the perfect vehicle to resume the essence of trans-feminism vs. feminism. Implicate in the question is that a woman such as myself is less than “real”, a position I find I take total exception to. I’m just as “real” as the next woman, thank you very much. Further, in my own case, I was surgically assigned male at birth, not declared. In my own head I always saw myself as female, so much so I had to often remind myself the world was seeing a male so as not to get into trouble like automatically turning towards the ladies room. I would then ask, what possible obligation to I have to tell anyone that I used to be something I never felt I was?
That a gay man would see fit to ask and answer this on behalf of a woman with a medical history is insulting enough to begin with. That others who would declare themselves my sisters would agree with him frankly disgusts me. My past and my body are mine. Mine to share or not as I see fit. I am just as “real” as the next woman and utterly reject this idea that being born different and having corrected that I am now some modern Hester Prynne to be forced to wear a scarlet letter of shame.
And I find it is this that separates me from what now passes for trans-feminism. These modern “trans-feminists” are very quick to accuse post corrected women as full of self-loathing and shame but, this voluntary wearing the the scarlet “T” reveals to me quite the opposite. By rambling on about all the “cis” oppression they experience, they set themselves apart from women (or men) and I never identified as anything other than just plain woman myself. A feminist woman, part of the vast sisterhood of women everywhere with shared experiences with other women that come from negotiating a patriarchal world and all that entails.
I used to believe that my unique life experiences gave me much to bring to the feminist table and to a degree I still believe that. But I find I have absolutely nothing in common with those who now call themselves trans-feminists. Like all things that seem to require the prefix “trans” these days, it now reads to me as an admission of “less than” and I don’t feel I am less than. Trans-feminism has become something divorced from almost all branches of feminism outside the Judith Butler gender deconstructionist viewpoint and most modern feminist thinkers, even Mary Daly herself, came to reject that in favour of celebration of the unique strengths of womanhood.
No one has the right to tell me to wear a scarlet “T”.