[controversial] on transmisogyny and male privilege

[aaskew]

(apologies in advance because this possibly comes across as a 'what about the menz? :(' post. I've tried my best not to make it so, but this is a topic I'd like to discuss further

Comments

[dogboi]

I'm not aware of any formal response -- like a book or well-circulated essay or blog. But i've gotten glimpses of responses. My impression is they aren't so much mad as they just think we're childish in taking certain feminist ideas too literally or carrying to such extremes they become absurd.

For instance, biological determinism: I've heard two kinds of responses...

(1) It is not sexist to recognize sexism exists. Differences in sex/gender behavior is a natural result of a society that values folks with one body type (sex) more than others. "male energy" or other attributes they ascribe to men/women aren't so-ascribed because of innate biological differences of intelligence, strength, or emotional awareness, but because a sexist society creates these differences by treating folks differently.

(2) Many anti-trans feminists seem fairly blunt that they think of gender wholly as the experience of having a certain body type. So if the very definition of man or woman is someone with (more or less) typical male or female physiology, respectively, it follows by definition that someone born with, say, typical female physiology could never be a man.

So really we would have to have a much deeper conversation to really flesh out why these notions run counter to feminist thought and action. And sadly the time and space to have these deeper conversations so rarely happen :-(

Like taking #1, further discussion often reveals a really big over-simplification of how people are socialized and how culture (including sexist ideas) is passed on. That anti-trans feminists often reveal a very limited understanding of cultural diversity doesn't help matters.
(in that it's often middle class, white, western women assuming their experiences are the norm of "women's experiences," with minimal awareness that their experiences are pretty unusual in the grand scheme of human experience!)

Or to #2, further discussion could highlight how this definition is flawed, but we'd need the time to present evidence from sociology, biology, anthropology, psychology, etc. that gender-as-distinct-from-sex is a very real aspect of human existence. (And sadly, the talking points trans people commonly use to dismiss the biological definition of gender are often really lacking!)

With the frictions that often arise been trans feminists and anti-trans feminists these conversations just don't seem to happen much :-P