CounterPunch and the War on Transgender People | Jacobin
As I understand the "RadFem" position, it rejects gender (man/woman) as socially constructed and oppressive to those in the Woman role, but embraces sex (male/female) as real and seeks to create safe spaces for Females. Yet such a sex realism simply moves the gender essentialism, whereby gender is an inescapable consequence of "socialization" as informed by anatomy, to a further remove. Essentialism in sheep's clothing. The motivation behind the whole fruitless endeavor seems to be to exclude trans-women from female liberation movements.
RadFems hold that women who are male (by some ostensibly scientific standard, I guess, or by some less-than-scientific claims of "socialization") are members of an oppressive class. Which, on its face, is ridiculous in my view. Trans*-identifying people are one of the most marginalized and vulnerable segments of society, and any movement which considers them to be oppressive is highly suspect to me.
July 12, 2013 at 2:56:44 PM MDT
- permalink
-
-
-
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/07/counterpunch-and-the-war-on-the-transgendered/