White-centrism, Profeminism, and Transgender Politics

image, of a white hand holding the world, is from here

[T]hose of us who are transsexual feminists, and especially those of us who transition as adults (I was age 22), are likewise in certain ways “younger sisters or nieces” of women who have lived their whole lives as female. The “cis/trans” binary idea is very harmful because it seeks to reverse this natural order of respect and status where newcomers honor our more experienced elder sisters. And this kind of AFAB-phobia can, in effect, recreate aspects of the patriarchy. For a women to have many years of experience in a given position, and then be asked to train a new man who gets the promotion she deserves, is a pattern women who are AFAB may feel is at least approximated when a new transsexual woman in a group who has only recently transitioned becomes an instant “expert” on the feminist movement. 

                               – Margo Schulter

What follows is an exchange between white transsexual Lesbian and feminist, Margo Schulter, and my white self. I’ll put my text in italics. It picks up from a longer exchange in the comments section of this post, “Is John Wrong? On Andrea Dworkin, Sex Difference, and Gender Dominance”.

Margo begins her responses to comments in the prior post with this quote:

“Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression.” –Audre Lorde

In continuing this dialogue, I would like warmly to accept your invitation to focus more on Women on Color, intersectionality, the ethics and methodology of a woman such as Patricia Hill Collins or bell hooks, and also the need to avoid misleading racial analogies applied in either direction to the Turf Wars. There are some very powerful Indigenous and other non-European models that can be applied to the relationship between women who have lived their whole lives as females (including some intersex women), and women who for some part of their lives have experienced both a measure of male privilege and trans oppression. I’m not saying that there’s any exact precedent on this that I know, although I have heard some stories about one Indigenous Nation which, if true, would much fit my sense of sisterhood and justice.

As a first step, I think that we need to follow Audre Lorde’s advice on not scoring “oppression points,” as you call them, in any direction. Let’s not verticalize the Turf Wars, which involve horizontal hostility between sisters, into a conflict where one side has the equivalent of white privilege, and the other is in the position of Women of Color. Such an analogy, whether it’s the “cis/trans” binary and “cis privilege” misconception all too popular in the trans community, or the “any transsexual woman should be suspected of expressing male privilege the rest of her life” misconception that has harmed feminism for over four decades, divides sisters and interferes with recognition of mutual vulnerability and the need for mutual aid.

So, to follow Audre Lorde, within the Lesbian community I am a transsexual, and within the trans community I am a radical Lesbian feminist. Any attack against transsexuals is a Lesbian feminist issue, because I and many other transsexuals are part of the Lesbian feminist community. Any attack on Lesbian feminists is a transsexual issue, because many Lesbian feminists are transsexual.

Let’s now focus a bit on race; then on special vulnerabilities of women who are AFAB or trans; and then on feminist process and some uplifting models from Women of Color.

Hi Margo,

Thank you for your openness to engaging on these issues, Margo. I’ll respond comment by comment, rather than posting all your comments together, to keep my responses in closer proximity to what I’m responding to.

I can’t take credit for “oppression points”; it is not a term I use to point out problems with ranking oppression. But I know what you’re referring to in this context.

For me, a more useful way to understand ourselves intersectionally is in terms of our structural locations and our political positions, which necessarily includes what forms of institutional power we have access to and which privileges we benefit from and enjoy. See for example, this post, which informs how I understand various methods for addressing sexual slavery, trafficking, brothel-keeping, what you term sexage work, and pimping and procuring: The Life without Privilege: the Inhumane Consequences of Pro-Prostitution Politics, part 1.

When in my early twenties, a feminist (wo)mentor, a white feminist and Lesbian, pointed out that in something I wrote, I made references to two groups: “people” and also to “Black people”. Her point, brought to my attention in a way that was very impactful without being shaming, was that identifying people in this way simultaneously falsely universalises and problematically invisibilises whiteness. I have thought about that a great deal since then. The problem my mentor named has not been sufficiently mitigated in white writing since. Let us consider the following book titles: Sexual Politics (Kate Millett) and Black Sexual Politics (Patricia Hill Collins); Feminist Thought (Rosemary Putnam Tong) and Black Feminist Thought (Collins).

To what extent is Millett’s book “White Sexual Politics”, and Tong’s book “White Feminist Thought”? The question is easy to answer: both books only deal with or strongly center white writers, theorists, and worldviews. Except one chapter in Feminist Thought titled “Women of Color Feminisms”.

This is a critique, Margo. You wrote:

“So, to follow Audre Lorde, within the Lesbian community I am a transsexual, and within the trans community I am a radical Lesbian feminist. Any attack against transsexuals is a Lesbian feminist issue, because I and many other transsexuals are part of the Lesbian feminist community. Any attack on Lesbian feminists is a transsexual issue, because many Lesbian feminists are transsexual.”

I understand and respect the point with two caveats. 

1. I’m arguing that to follow Audre Lorde you and I must not invisibilise our race when we write about ourselves. So, within white Lesbian community, you are a race-privileged transsexual, and within the white trans community, you are a race-privileged radical Lesbian feminist. I have thought many times about whether I should retitle my blog, “A Radical White Profeminist”.

2. I want to be clear about what constitutes “an attack”, because we know, online, it is used to describe both shaming and derisive verbal assaults, doxxing, criminal threatening, and “reasoned critique”. I don’t welcome the first things on that list, but militantly want to protect spaces that welcome reasoned critique, even if it ‘threatens’ core viewpoints by those in the conversation. I mention this because in most white trans-friendly spaces, what is not considered friendly or welcome is digging deeply into some issues, such as the presence (or not) of male privilege and male supremacist power. As a radical, I reject making some subjects verboten, automatically. I agree that there are more and less appropriate spaces for some conversations, and I hope to respect those, if the boundaries are set by those I structurally oppress. I hope not to respect them if set by those who structurally oppress me, or women of any color.

Margo continues:
At this point, I’d like to get into race, and explain why I often call myself a Second Wave Feminist, even while recognizing that the term does have a certain white bias. The fact that I recognize Frances M. Beale, who wrote in the late 1960′s on the “double jeopardy” of being Black and female, the peerless Flo Kennedy whom you recently honored here and I once got to hear speak in San Francisco in the mid-1970′s, Pauli Murray of the Harlem Renaissance tradition, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective as all at the center of the Second Wave doesn’t mean that it’s not a white-oriented way of viewing hirstory.

The question arises: “If the First Wave ended with the gaining of the vote in the U.S.A. in 1920, what about Bessie Smith or Eleanor Roosevelt or Frances Perkins or Rosa Parks or Ella Baker? What about the Black Lesbian culture that thrived through `race records’ and the like long before Olivia? Is it really fair to see the whole era of 1920-1963, if we take Betty Friedan’s _The Feminine Mystique_ as the start of the Second Wave, as a vast wasteland or blank slate of patriarchy unresisted? Even from a Euro-American view, Ruth Herschberger published the radical feminist _Adam’s Rib_ in 1948, and Simone de Beauvoir _The Second Sex_ in 1949.”

The reason I identity as Second Wave, as parochial as it is, is to affirm that there were and are radical Lesbian feminists of this era, transsexual and also AFAB, who believe in equal sisterhood, and reject both transphobia and also what I might call AFAB-phobia (with the term “cisphobia” in air quotes tempting, because AFAB-phobia is based on the misconception of “cis privilege”). Make no mistake: either AFAB-phobia or transphobia is destructive, unsisterly, and antifeminist. So is for someone inside or outside the women’s community to propose that this or that sister be “decentered” because of her birth assignment.

Many trans people, AFAB as well as AMAB, assume that the 1970′s, at least among white feminists, were an era of universal transphobia. I’m delighted when I can change some minds. And the erasure of transsexual Lesbian feminists from some Lesbian feminist accounts of those years by women who rightly resist AFAB-phobia but not the other side of the equation, is something I want to do my part to correct in fighting AFAB-phobia.

But let’s get into Women of Color and better ethics and models for feminism.

Around this same era, Martha Shelley of Radicalesbians wrote her “Confessions of a Pseudo-Male Chauvinist,” and I recall that her description of her experience as a Butch Lesbian, and elements of internalized sexism, often fit my experience as a transsexual Femme Lesbian. So feminist process is a tool that keeps balance in a group where some women are by socialization, experience, white privilege, academic advantage, or temperament ”empowered” in ways that might lead to imbalance or unequal participation. And, as Joreen suggests, women with this kind of style (whether we are AFAB or trans) might also form affinity groups where we can learn from each other.

To move beyond aberrations such as the misconceived “cis/trans” binary, and also the idea that when women who are AFAB and trans harmoniously cooperate (as in the Olivia Collectives during the mid-1970′s) the AFAB members of a group are somehow “caring for men” rather than for their transsexual sisters, Indigenous tradition can again help in moving us beyond an “Oppression Olympics” mentality in either direction.

An Indigenous woman in a discussion on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Michfest or MWMF) pointed out that a tradition like those she knew would look at circumstance and need in a situation where newcomers desired to share a group’s territory, for example as refugees from some natural disaster. Here I should emphasize that for me, attending Michfest (2000 miles away) was not Andrea Dworkin’s “primary emergency,” nor even a 100th-rate emergency, so to speak! But this woman explained how the Indigenous approach she knew would look compassionately at the needs and intentions of newcomers.

An important factor favoring the inclusion of transsexual women in the women’s and Lesbian communities in general — as opposed to every women’s or Lesbian group! — is that transsexual women make up less than 1% of women, and also face great oppression from patriarchal society while often sharing many of the same ongoing oppressions as other women, although not the special oppressions of AFAB socialization, and also the reproductive vulnerabilities of most AFAB women through much of their lives. If the number of women who are AFAB or trans were about equal, the political and ethical questions might be a bit different.

To say that transsexual women need feminism, and need to make our contribution to feminism in a way which takes advantage of the special perspectives we can bring but also our relationship of juniority to women who have lived their entire lives as female, does not mean that we or any other women need to be present in all women’s and Lesbian spaces at all times! No woman can rightly make that demand. Rather, we can look to the wisdom of Lisa Vogel, founder of Michfest, in 2006, who reaffirmed Michfest as an AFAB-only space while affirming the value of “spaces that welcome all who define themselves as female.” She declared that “we stand shoulder to shoulder as women,” with women who are AFAB or trans being alike “part of the larger diversity of the womyn’s community.” That is the unity in diversity that can help end the Turf Wars.

Julian, you also raised a very important point that bell hooks addresses in _Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism_ (1981). I agree that it’s an open question just what “primary” means in Andrea Dworkin’s “primary emergency.” Michael Walzer writes of “supreme emergency,” meaning a threat so extreme that it might justify violating the normal laws of war, for example; maybe this is a mark of Eurocentric discourse. And to me, ”emergency” is quite enough, or, as bell hooks puts it elsewhere, “what is important at a given point in time.”

But I agree with you and bell hooks that intersectionality applies in situations of great stress and danger, as she quotes Sojourner Truth, speaking in New York in 1867: “[T]here is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored woman; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.” (_Ain’t I A Woman_, p. 4). Interestingly Truth, an activist for Black Liberation and Women’s Liberation and the abolition of the death penalty, spoke a century before the founding of Radical Women of New York in 1967 which marked a landmark moment in the modern radical feminist movement.

One larger message of Sojourner Truth is that we can and must recognize each other’s emergencies and needs, even while joining in solidarity. Thus if a women, AFAB or transsexual, is expressing patriarchal attitudes or exercising “power over” rather than “power with” in a women’s group, feminist process should call this out. If a nonbinary person like Cerien is having their needs neglected, every radical feminist should consider this ”our” issue and priority also. The current abortion situation in the State of Texas, USA, is likewise a rightful priority for every feminist woman, whether or not she has herself experienced menstruation or pregnancy.

It is possible to appreciate Andrea Dworkin’s powerful insights while also applying the wisdom of Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, and also Audre Lorde: emergencies of different groups or subgroups, like oppressions, do not have any hierarchy. But cooperation, solidarity, and mindfulness of vulnerabilities and immunities can promote the feminist ideal of mutual aid, as opposed to the patriarchal pattern of privilege and servitude.