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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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Transgender rights in US legislation--not a trans issue at all

After the election loss of Donald Trump, many Republicans introduced bills to attack trans rights, including one which passed into law in Arkansas seeking jail time for doctors who administer medical care to transgender children. Some bills seek to force educators to out gender-nonconforming children to their parents, which could result in children being killed, beaten, abused, removed from school, kicked out of their homes, or otherwise harmed because state legislatures decided they knew better than trans kids what trans kids need. Every feminist, including TERFs, should find it very, very, very alarming that states are able to make medical care a felony in the US. How much would far-right groups such as the ones sponsoring these bills like to interfere with medical care? Could caring for AIDS patients, administering abortions, prescribing birth control pills, administering IUDs, all lead to felony convictions and jail time? What about pregnancy care--could a state legislature refuse to allow the removal of dead fetal tissue from the body of a grieving mother, leading to more women dying from miscarriages that would never have resulted in a living child the way Savita Halappanavar died in Ireland? Or if legislators misunderstand the medical realities of ectopic pregnancies, could women be forced to undergo useless and traumatic surgeries because legislators believe that all ectopic pregnancies can simply be stuffed into the uterus and result in a living baby? Could gay patients be denied any medical care next? What about addiction related care? Could doctors be forced to sterilize disabled people? And most importantly, why in the hell are trans rights groups the only ones talking about this? I mean, I know a lot is going on right now, but this intrusion of partisan politics into medical care sets a horrifying precedent that a lot of people need to be worried about even if they can’t be bothered to care about transgender people.

These bills are often sponsored by conservative groups, rather than by constituents; these attacks are not about constituents, but about a culture war against a vulnerable minority which does not have the numbers to mount a counterattack. Some of these bills attack transgender adults as well--rewriting the age of majority to call transgender people as old as 21 children. Often, it is the image of a transgender man used to uphold these abhorrent laws--or rather, the image of a young girl, her genitals mutilated, her reproductive system ruined by scheming evil parents. The attacks on transgender rights are attacks on women--classic misogyny rearing its head, this time with a coat of woke paint slapped over the top.

All of these bills have something in common--while railing against mythical children who are receiving trans-affirming surgeries (which in the US are typically not offered to anyone under the age of 18), these bills have caveats allowing doctors to perform dangerous and medically unnecessary surgeries on young intersex infants. Many times, when an infant is born with ambiguous genitalia, doctors coerce uninformed and confused parents into agreeing to perform cosmetic surgery on their baby. These surgeries can result in the infant’s death, lifelong scarring or physical damage, a permanently damaged relationship with their parents or doctors, and in cases where the doctors guess wrong about what gender the children grow up to be, infant genital surgeries can make it harder for the child to be comfortable in their own bodies.

Transgender rights are not in opposition to women’s rights or to any other group’s rights. The need for bodily autonomy to be given to all people is illustrated by the struggle for transgender rights. While intersex people may or may not identify as transgender, intersex rights are entangled into transgender rights as much as women’s rights are.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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The War for Biological sex

Both Terfs and many trans activists seem to agree one one thing--biological sex is real. This is untrue. Biological sex is not any more real than birds are. Let me illustrate. Below are two statements, of which one is a fact and the other is not. Option one: Chickens lay eggs. Option two: Chickens are birds. On the surface, both of these “facts” seem true--however, only the first one is. This is not because chickens are mammals, but rather, because “bird” is not a fact at all--it is a category within a classification system that humans made up. This isn’t to say that classifying chickens as “birds” is bad or harmful--in fact, it is useful to a great many people to classify chickens as birds. However, we cannot pretend that classifying chickens as birds in fact makes them birds. In her misinformed Terf manifesto essay, J. K. Rowling mentions that she is afraid that transgender activism, or rather, the recognition of transgender women as legally women, might impact a charity she donates to which researches Multiple Sclerosis, which is more common in women. It is difficult to understand exactly what it is that Rowling fears--after all, even if the most hysterical Terf future were to come true, the name you apply to women will not actually make them less or more susceptible to MS.

The exact link between biological sex and MS is unknown, and correlational evidence about MS risk is complicated by the fact that everyone who is alive does not experience the same access to care. For example, it has long been thought that African-Americans were less likely to get MS than were White Americans--however, some recent data disputes this, claiming that African-Americans are actually at increased risk, and previous studies that showed decreased risk actually neglected to take into account that African Americans on average were less likely to see a neurologist who specialized in MS. Furthermore, there are real medical consequences for conflating “womanhood” with the mythological biological sex with being assigned female at birth. There is a large amount of variation among people who are legally identified as women, and forcing everyone to retain the legal sex they were assigned at birth would not change that. Some people who are listed as biologically female in medical records are actually intersex, and up to 12% of those assigned female at birth have a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which can include higher than typical levels of testosterone in the body, as well as other symptoms, which can be serious. (PCOS is in recent years becoming identified as an intersex variation, but for a long time people thought it was caused by being fat and thus, even though PCOS can cause facial hair growth which can make women targets of harassment, people with PCOS were blamed for their own condition and it was not recognized as being an intersex variation. In general, traditional intersex variations account for 1.7% of the population, but if PCOS is counted as an intersex variation that number jumps to between 4.7 and 7.7% of the population)

Thus, by insisting that biological sex is real, diverse and already marginalized bodies, such as trans bodies, intersex bodies, and overwhelmingly, women’s bodies (both cis and trans), are ignored in favor of a letter. Chickens lay eggs, bodies are real--but biological sex, like the category of “bird”, is nothing more than a category that we humans made up. It may be a useful category to some, but we cannot talk about trans issues without acknowledging the fact that biological sex is entirely made up, and many, many people do not fit within the concept of the sex binary.

Transphobes would use my bird metaphor to justify arguing that transgender women are not real women or are not biologically female; however, my counterpoint to them is that no one is a man or a woman, those are categories that humans made up and that are based in social constructions and not biological realities, and that a person’s right to place themselves within (or outside) of those categories should not change based on their identity as a transgender person. I’m sure there’s at least one Terf out there who administers a chromosome test to everyone she intends to sleep with--and I’m sure that, has she had more than a few sexual partners, she’s surprised some of them. Most of us don’t know our chromosomes, because biological sex is not based on chromosomes (although there are more than two combinations of chromosomes humans can have)--biological sex is based on a lot of things, hormones, genitals, secondary sex characteristics, height, menstruation or lack thereof, etc, and a transgender man may have high testosterone, a penis, no breasts, and be tall, while a transgender woman may have high estrogen, breasts, a vagina, menstrual cramps and other period symptoms without bleeding, and be short. A cisgender man might be assigned male at birth but have breasts and be able to lactate. The biological sex one was assigned at birth cannot and should not be used to dictate healthcare--rather, doctors should pay attention to their patients’ bodies, not the label they were given based on what their genital situation looked like when they were born.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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Terfs: Second Wave without the feminism

Some Terfs are genuine second-wave feminists, or at least are based in the theory of second-wave feminism. However, Terfs abandon feminism in the name of focusing nearly exclusively on transgender people, and specifically on fearing or hating transgender people. That is unusual given that feminism is generally about women’s rights. Terfs re-imagine feminism to be an exclusionary movement rather than an inclusive one; they take “radical actions” like disrupting pride parades and attacking queer people while police protect them .

The acronym TERF was originally coined by a cisgender activist who meant it as a neutral descriptor to avoid radical feminists who were trans-inclusive from being lumped in with those who were trans-exclusionists, however, since its inception the term has broadened and is now used as a catch-all term for transphobes who are transphobic in the name of feminism, whether they are or aren’t radical feminists.

One person to whom the label “Terf” is applied is the famous author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling. Back in 2020 Rowling put out a twitter essay in which she outlines a manifesto explaining why she believes that...well...it’s hard to say exactly what she believes, because her beliefs are explained mostly in terms of how she feels rather than in concrete examples. She seems to believe in a few key Terf points though--first, that young women cannot be trusted to know their own minds and, especially if they are autistic, should be denied medical care contrary to the guidelines put forth by most medical institutions. Like Abigail Shrier, another Terf, Rowling espouses classically sexist views about young women--that they are too gullible for their own good and must be denied bodily autonomy for their own protection. It should go without saying that the “women” Rowling is talking about are in fact not women, but trans men, but as Rowling sees trans men as women, her views about them are also her views about women.

Other Terfs are unsettlingly comfortable with discussing bodies they believe belong to young girls through the lens of being brood-mares, whose only goal in life must be childbirth. This is the experience of trans people assigned female at birth--our own voices silenced while people wax poetic about the babies many of us, like cisgender women who do not want biological children, are terrified of being forced to have; denied agency, accused of being victims of brainwashing, told to be grateful for this treatment.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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The Third Wave’s Connected to the Second Wave

Third wave feminism arose out of Second Wave feminism.

One of the biggest critiques of Second Wave feminism was the way that a concept of “sisterhood” was used in an attempt to unify all women, while ignoring or downplaying the very different realities different women face. White women and Black women, Citizen and Non-citizen, cisgender and transgender, abled and disabled, thin and fat, all of these groups and more have similarities as well as differences of experience.

Post-structuralists and post-modernists brought to the third wave a deconstruction of oppositional thinking at all. Intersectional theory combined with post-structuralist and post-modernist theory to create a feminism that focuses on the existence of multiple realities within broader categories, without either elevating those categories to the level of identity politics or creating a discourse in which the real systemic hierarchies which impact the daily lives of human beings are defined out of existence.

This is the balancing act of much of third wave feminism--avoiding essentialism without also erasing the very categories that essentialism itself erases.

In third wave feminism, knowledge is socially constructed and each voice has a unique and limited perspective, and so the goal of feminism should be to uplift multiple voices.

Transgender people exist within third wave feminism not only as themselves, as transgender people, but also within other groups--people of color, colonized people, etc, and thus have access to third wave feminism from multiple approaches. It should be noted that transgender people are not central to either second wave or third wave feminism--transgender rights discourses exist in both third wave and second wave feminism, but ultimately both of these waves are concerned with other things as well. This isn’t to say that transgender people are unimportant--only that feminism is not only about transgender people.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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James Barry and Trans history

James Barry was not a woman, although he’s remembered as a woman in history. The evidence that Barry was female at all is very, very sketchy, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Dr. James Barry was the first man to perform a C-section during the colonial period where both mother and baby survived. Dr. Barry MAY also have been assigned female at birth, although he described himself as a man for most of his adult life, and got into fist fights and duels with people who insulted his meager height.

James Barry was, by all accounts, an asshole to everyone but his patients, although he described himself as a “gentleman” even in private writings, and to people who knew he had been assigned female at birth. He was loud, brash, unafraid of reprimanding people in front of others (rumored to be the cause of his falling out with Florence Nightingale), and his habit of demanding marginalized people, such as the poor, the leprous, the disabled, and Black people, had the same high standard of care afforded to white wealthy patients earned him many enemies, including powerful ones. Barry also had a penchant for dueling, including at least once with a pistol. Throughout all of this, the only accusations he faced were a claim at one point in his schooling that he was too young to continue as he could not grow a beard, although eventually it was conceded that Barry’s age did not matter as much as his ability to defend his thesis.

Barry had a scandalous relationship with the Governor of Cape Town, Lord Charles Somerset. Somerset was called “Dr. Barry’s wife” during the ensuing drama. If Barry had truly been, as he is often assumed to be, a perisex (non intersex) biological female, one would assume Somerset might have tried to save face by exposing this fact; for some reason, he never did, despite the fact that Barry lived with Somerset for some time, was very close to him, and traveled with him often. To have been this close to another man without being found out is a bit unbelievable in an age before gender reassignment surgeries were common. It is possible that the rumors of the relationship were overblown, and/or that Somerset never saw Barry without his clothes, but again, given the amount of time they spent together it seems a stretch to believe that Barry was secretly hiding a female body without ever being found out.

Dr. Barry did, however, ask to be buried in his bedclothes without being examined when he died. This has been taken by many historians to mean that he knew he would be described as a woman after death. That is exactly what happened--here is a letter, from wikipedia, that Barry’s physician wrote upon being questioned about Barry’s sex: “Sir, I had been intimately acquainted with the doctor for good many years, both in London and the West Indies and I never had any suspicion that Dr Barry was a woman. I attended him during his last illness, (previously for bronchitis, and the affection for diarrhoea). On one occasion after Dr Barry’s death at the office of Sir Charles McGregor, there was the woman who performed the last offices for Dr Barry was waiting to speak to me. She wished to obtain some prerequisites [sic in source, but has to be a slip for perquisites, "perks"] of his employment, which the Lady who kept the lodging house in which Dr Barry died had refused to give her. Amongst other things she said that Dr Barry was a female and that I was a pretty doctor not to know this and she would not like to be attended by me. I informed her that it was none of my business whether Dr Barry was a male or a female, and that I thought that she might be neither, viz. an imperfectly developed man. She then said that she had examined the body, and was a perfect female and farther that there were marks of him having had a child when very young. I then enquired how have you formed that conclusion. The woman, pointing to the lower part of her stomach, said ‘from marks here. I am a maried [sic] woman and the mother of nine children and I ought to know.’ The woman seems to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret and wished to be paid for keeping it. I informed her that all Dr Barry’s relatives were dead, and that it was no secret of mine, and that my own impression was that Dr Barry was a Hermaphrodite. But whether Dr Barry was a male, female, or hermaphrodite I do not know, nor had I any purpose in making the discovery as I could positively swear to the identity of the body as being that of a person whom I had been acquainted with as Inspector-General of Hospitals for a period of years. Yours faithfully, D.R. McKinnon “

So to recap: Historians believe that Dr. James Barry was assigned female at birth, although records of his birth do not exist so we cannot be sure that he even WAS assigned female at birth

Despite rumors of being gay at a time that could have gotten him killed, despite his many enemies, Dr. Barry was never accused of secretly being a woman until his death

Dr. Barry identified himself as a man throughout most of his adult life, including to people who would have known that he was assigned female at birth, had that been the case

Dr. Barry asked to be buried in his bedclothes without being examined upon death Barry was short, could not grow facial hair, and displayed some insecurity about this

The woman who identified Barry as a female upon his death asked to be paid money to keep the story secret

The same woman identified Barry as having had a pregnancy, although we can be almost entirely certain that, as Barry was never missing long enough to have gotten pregnant, and pregnancy surely would have outed him as female, Dr. Barry was never pregnant and the woman who identified him as such was mistaking stretch marks or some other scarring, which can have many causes, as being definitely related to pregnancy alone

No one else, including doctors, lovers he may have had sexual relationships with, enemies, patients, ever accused Barry of being a woman, and no one else saw his body after death except for the woman who demanded payment in exchange for not exposing such a “secret”.

And yet Dr. Barry is often included as a part of woman’s history, despite the fact that the historical record alone, poorly sourced biographies notwithstanding, literally gives more evidence to the idea that Dr. Barry was a cisgender man than the idea that he ever identified himself as a woman. His middle name is even disputed--here is a long list of historical examinations into Barry and the many histories of him that are used in his wikipedia article without actually linking to historical documentation https://notesonagentleman.substack.com/ I include his story here as context for the difficulties that arise in examining transgender people in history. When you first look into Dr. Barry’s story, he seems to be the transest trans man to ever trans--but as you dig deeper, evidence that he was even assigned female at birth starts to look more like hearsay. It’s possible that Barry was intersex. But it’s also possible that Barry was a cisgender man who was insecure about his body and was maligned after his death because someone thought they could make a buck, or had never seen a man with stretch marks before, or some other explanation. The majority of historians write about him as a woman, sometimes inventing--with no evidence, the idea that he was forced to pretend to be a man for financial reasons, and was secretly a proud woman despite never once identifying as one, even in his own writings. It’s possible that Dr. Barry was transgender, or that he was intersex, or that he was a cisgender man--however, historians do Dr. Barry a disservice by describing him as a woman, because “woman” is the only identity we can definitively rule out.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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TERFs, the second wave, and regression

TERFs are Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. They are, or present themselves to be, second wave radical feminists standing against the scourge of trans people who want rights.

They believe that more trans rights will lead to less women’s rights.

Terfs are biological essentialists and believe in the white supremacist concept of the gender binary. They believe that men have XY chromosomes and penises and testicles and high levels of testosterone, and that that is what makes them men. They believe that women have XX chromosomes, uteruses, ovaries, vaginas, breasts, and high estrogen, and that that is what makes them women. Nevermind the existence of intersex people, to terfs intersex people are defective biological males or females. Terfs believe that men are violent and abusive towards women because they are men, that women are victims of male violence because they are women. They believe that the solution to male oppression is to segregate women away from men (often ignoring the fact that in this segregated “utopia”, black women would still have to deal with racism from white women, who decidedly do not oppress black women on the basis of biology), and that by keeping transgender women out of women’s spaces, they can protect women from male violence. Terfs ally themselves with the antifeminist christian far-right; have blamed adolescent girls for being purveyors of quote “hysteria”, also known as the catch-all term doctors used to diagnose women with to avoid addressing the fact that they had been raped by their husbands or fathers, among a host of other causes, and treated by sexually assaulting them. Ironically, there is significant overlap in the attitudes that allowed people with uteri (and trans people with uteri especially would have been “treated” with this sexual violence) to be sexually abused by doctors, and the language Abigail Shrier uses to discuss teenage girls (and when she says teenage girls, she is particularly referring to transgender boys who are seeking medical transition)--when she was invited to Joe Rogan’s podcast, Shrier blamed “teenage girls” for carrying “every...social hysteria”, and implied repeatedly that girls as old as 17 should not be allowed any modicum of control over their bodies. In the episode, she and Joe lament the fact that in Oregon, 15 year old girls are able to access medical services without their parents’ consent. Abigail Shrier would have 15, 16, 17, and probably older girls be forced to carry pregnancies when their antifeminist fathers rape them; would force girls to gain parental permission before accessing birth control; she generally presents the same idea that led to doctors prescribing rape to cure, in some cases, PTSD their patients had from being previously raped--girls cannot know their minds or bodies. Girls are not smart enough to advocate for their medical needs. Girls must defer to male doctors. Girls must defer to male doctors who are prescribing treatments that harm them or that do not help them.

Terfs believe, without evidence, that by allowing transgender women to enter women’s spaces, such as bathrooms or changing rooms, predators will have access to women that they did not have before. Often, their solution to this perceived problem is to invite police to enter bathrooms and remove women they believe are trans. Otherwise, terfs display a remarkable lack of understanding surrounding the ways in which doors work, namely, the fact that anyone can walk into a door regardless of what it says on it, and a legal definition of gender would not necessarily prevent any man from entering a woman’s space--it would only criminalize trans people. Creeping on women remains solidly illegal regardless of the creep’s gender, and if they really cared so much about women, one would think that TERFs would argue for more rights for women, rather than frequently opposing efforts intended to outlaw discrimination based on gender.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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Trans Debates in the Second Wave

Second Wave feminism had a complicated relationship with transgender feminists. By the second wave, transgender people were openly identifying themselves as transgender and as feminists at the same time; some feminist organizations accepted transgender women, while some did not. Some organizations accepted transgender members for a time, and then kicked them out after those members had spent significant time and effort in the organizations; such is the story of Beth Elliot, a transgender woman who edited the newspaper for the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis for some time before being kicked out because members decided she was not a woman. Some second-wave feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, were trans-inclusive. Andrea Dworkin in particular wrote against the concept of biological essentialism. Biological essentialism is not just the idea that gender is synonymous with a binary biological sex--it also claims that certain aspects of a person, such as personality or other traits they may express, are the result of biology and not of socialization or some other factor. Dworkin believed that biological sex was a social myth, like other myths that second wave feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir railed against in her influential second-wave feminist work, The Second Sex, where she describes the way men oppress women by defining them as “other” than men, who are the true humans of the species.

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classprojecttransexperience · 4 years ago

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Placing Transgender Identity in Historical Feminism

Transgender people are nothing new; we have always existed. However, our ability to openly identify as transgender has not been consistent across time and culture, thus, placing transgender identity within first wave feminism is difficult. Modern understandings of transgender identity categorize gender non-conformity (such as crossdressing) as a separate experience from that of transgender identity (where a person identifies as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth), and this also makes it difficult to place transgender people within the context of first-wave feminism.

For example, Anna Howard Shaw was a first wave feminist--president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association for over a decade, Shaw lived with a woman for much of her life and performed traditionally masculine tasks within the relationship, such as mowing the lawn, fixing things around the house, while her partner performed the role of a housewife. Shaw dressed in feminine attire only after intense media scrutiny made her fear that her habit of dressing in masculine clothes and keeping her hair cut short might endanger the suffragette movement by turning public opinion against them. Was Shaw transgender? Or gender non-conforming?

Additionally, as it has always been considered insulting to refer to a woman as “mannish”, historical documents describing suffragettes that way may be intending to insult the suffragettes rather than describing deliberate actions they took to be gender nonconforming.

From our vantage point in history, we are stuck waving our hands and saying “surely some of the suffragettes were trans” without being able to pinpoint which ones. However, just because conceptions of gender have changed over time, does not mean that first wave feminism was devoid of transgender activists.

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