#if we have the nuance to understand that not every transmisogynist is a TERF then we can understand that not everyone who

[anastacialy]

i do not know how to explain to people that "transmisogyny" is the specific transphobia that trans women + transfems face (often but not exclusively at the hands of cis people), and "transandrophobia" is the specific transphobia that trans men + mascs face (often but not exclusively at the hands of cis people), and that they all come together under the umbrella of "transphobia." these are not opposing concepts nor are they mutually exclusive, to believe in one does not mean non-belief in the other. is there a simpler way of phrasing this. can i be clearer.

[fite-club]

genuine q, i don’t really have a stake in internet discourse so idk what’s going on. i saw the term “transandrophobia” for the first time today and saw you commenting so i scrolled through your blog. i saw you replied to an ask with ``their answer to “so which is it, are transmascs oppressed because we’re seen as men or seen as women?” is “whichever works best for my argument in that moment”`` which i’m kind of confused by. cause like i can see it varying on a case by case basis, if someone excludes a trans man from a queer space for passing too well then like i get that i don’t really think that’s oppression but just hurtful to be excluded from gay spaces. and if they’re perceived as a woman by someone else and experience misogyny like that happens too. i’m just confused on what the argument is, i’m not tryna be dismissive just trying to understand what’s like Going On with all the transandrophobia business. is it that people are claiming to be oppressed for being men is that the issue? just want some nuance cause i can’t grasp it from the random threads i keep finding

yeah parsing through “transandrophobia” discourse is hard because there’s not a consistently used definition or reasoning. the issue is, yeah, people claiming that they’re oppressed for being transmasc specifically (not not just for being trans). the fact that transmascs can be treated as men or women depending on the situation is proof in of itself that “transandrophobia” cannot exist, because the transphobia is motivated in different ways. we experience transphobia when we’re treated like women, and we experience misogyny when we’re treated lesser because of that. systems of oppression that target men like “androphobia” or “misandry” do not exist. the only people who actually hold bigoted views against men are radfems and TERFs*, who are not a majority capable of enacting any structural oppression against men. “anti-masculinity” is not a problem. a trans man might be excluded from a queer group for being “too masc”, but so would a transfem who doesn’t pass. every instance of discrimination against transmascs (besides specific details) is something also experienced by transfems or butch/gnc cis women. because the discrimination comes from misogyny and transphobia, not “transandrophobia”.

the reason why this matters at all is because it’s important to address transmisogyny in the trans community and “transandrophobia truthers” deny that transmascs have any kind of privilege over transfems. i speculate that the reason why terms like “transmisandry” or “transandrophobia” exist in the first place is because transmascs didn’t like admitting that they’re TME (transmisogyny exempt). TME and TMA were terms used by the transfem community to denote the differences in transfem and transmasc experiences. because they ARE different— the defining factor being gender. men have privilege over women; trans men are men and trans women are women; trans men have power over trans women. transfems get called baeddels and transandrophobes just for pointing that out, but it’s the truth. it’s gross seeing other trans guys deny that and avoid taking any accountability whatsoever— we aren’t incapable of being transmisogynistic just because we’re also trans.

*if someone seems to seriously believe that most people hate men and think of them all as brutish predators, if someone is trying to explain how everyone else in the world distrusts men both cis and trans, if someone is saying they’re tired of hearing that transmascs don’t face any oppression at all… that someone has too many radfems and terfs in their life/social circles. these are FRINGE, extremist, reactionary beliefs and they DO NOT reflect the community as a whole. if someone feels like these opinions are the norm, it’s because it’s their norm, which they don’t realize is a bubble.

[prolapsarian]

After Hyde Park

The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again - this time at the Anarchist Bookfair - and there seems to be more polemic than ever around the proprosed Gender Recognition Act, I am posting it again here.

-------

This week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I'm also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being used by cynically by certain feminists in these milieux, whose main politics over the last decades has been to whip up hatred against trans* people, to try to gather a crowd behind them. I know that quite a few people who are currently lining up behind the likes of Julia Long (or who at the very least refuse to recognise the deeply divisive positions and gestures that people like her are taking and making) read my wall. My hope is that some of the stuff below will make you see this differently.

1. There has been a small but vocal scene of feminists around London - people like Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Chester, Julia Long - whose politics over the last couple of decades has centred on making the argument that trans* women aren't women. A good proportion of these people's opinions go further though: they claim that gender reassignment surgery is nothing other than self-mutilation; that trans people demanding protection from oppression are "male rights activists" (that is, aligned with certain far-right movements); and that the main aim of trans* people's lives is to undermine the gains of the women's movement. But what has been peculiar to this politics - and I only know about London here, but I hear the same from other places - is that its mode of expression has been to attack trans* people themselves. Far from making theoretical interventions or arguments, far from entering into conversations, this group of feminists have gone about instituting their politics by publicly outing, doxxing, and monstering trans people. They do this in a context (and take full advantage of this context) in which transphobia predominates in the mainstream press and many other institutions of civil society. In more immediate social interactions their politics consistently and deliberately misgender all trans people they come into contact with. Ultimately their politics amounts to the idea that trans*-women, in their very being, undermine feminist movements, and they wish to undermine them in every way possible, playing opportunistically on wider social transphobias.

2. It is significant that this pattern has been known to feminism in the context of debates over sex work. On that question certain feminists have attacked women sex workers (most prominently on Reclaim the Night marches.) They do this instead of negotiating the dialectical tensions of labour, commodity, libido, possession, and exchange under patriarchal capitalism. Instead the sex worker herself becomes the scapegoat and centre of gravity of the entire system. If only she can be done away with (and with no particular care for how she came to be selling sex), the whole system will apparently simplify itself. The whole thing is slightly bizarre - akin to blaming proletarians in a munitions factory for a society founded on perpetual war, rather than blaming the society based on perpetual war for the fact that certain proletarians find themselves having to produce munitions. This isn't to say there aren't important and nuanced debates to be had about sex work, safety of workers, the consequence of sex being sold on the most anarchic open market for all women, and so on. Although there is an irony that feminists whose political movement arose from hatred of the "it can wait until after the revolution" now take precisely the same attitude to sex workers merely defending their physical safety. This is all slightly by the by. But the same brutality of attitude, which leads to certain feminists putting the blame of sexual exploitation at the feet of sex workers, which leads them to attack their very existence as scapegoat, has been transferred wholesale to how some feminists are treating trans* people. This has now been going on for very many years.

3. In the discussions that have surrounded the Gender Recognition Act, those women who have for many years been aggressively transphobic have been trying to reposition themselves to win support from other women and feminists who might not really agree with the extremity and violence of their positions. They have started to talk about defending civil society institutions, and about having debates. To many trans* people in London it is clear that these aims are not true. Indeed last week's shitshow of a "debate" mainly involved slinging insults and platforming people whose only point ever is to say that trans* women are men (indeed people who have somehow made careers out of this!) There are questions about civil society, and about womanhood, raised by the act. The trouble is that these particular feminists are not interested in them beyond a very specific, outmoded and divisive line.

4. There are genuinely some people who (mainly on the internet) take an "against nature" position in the trans* community, and who respond to anyone questioning trans* discourse - or even the primacy of discourse in trans* scenes - as an existential threat that can only be met with violence. There are certain individuals who send death threats, punch people, shout "kill all TERFs" etc. Apart from these people are the enormous majority of trans* people who are consistently in conversations, discussions, social movements, reflections with all sorts of people (and alone) about questions of sex, gender, sexuality, nature, history. The transmisogynist and transphobic feminists consistently attempt to play up the extent of this violent, silencing culture, because they know that ultimately plays out in their favour. This behaviour is analogous to Zionists who play up the anti-Semitism of small elements of the Arab population to justify the violence meted out by Israel against all Palestinians. They know that it is ultimately beneficial to their position to claim that they are being silenced and attacked, that all discussion is made impossible. Often their aim has been to provoke this situation (for example by holding meetings where the only speakers are those who routinely claim that all trans* women are men.) The events this week in London, when divisions were cynically sown in this way - people like Julia Long know that their position is ultimately stronger, that their hatred of trans* people and violence against them appears more legitimate and more reasonable when people are most divided. It is for this reason that these people have for so long practiced such a highly antagonistic politics. But none of this really helps women, trans* or otherwise. At the same time it is really a terrible shame for most trans* people that the time they need to defend themselves has collided with what can only be described as a crisis in the politics of oppression, where (turbo-charged by the internet) significant numbers of people advocate nihilist violence against their oppressors to shore up the community of the oppressed. But this trend seems thankfully to be waning. It is a strange irony too that an all-out-war has broken out only where these internet cultures have come into contact with those feminists who first tried to drag the movement into communitarianism.

5. One frequent line of argument that is common is the "gender" is all post-modern nonsense. But to think that the transformations in social relations that have taken place in the last 30 years can be done away with through the power of a demystifying gaze, which does away with the ideology of discourses only to rediscover nature, is to miss the point. We are without a doubt living through a sexual revolution - one as great as those that preceded it, that of the 20 years following the French Revolution, that of Weimar Germany (and Austria) in the wake of psychoanalysis, and that of the 1970s. And indeed it is the revolution of gender itself. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy. When I try to think about the early decades of psychoanalysis it is impossible to think about the great advances it offered people in thinking about their sexuality, about understanding the sexual lives of children, without at the same time thinking of its victims: of Dora, of the children subject to the prevalent paedophilia of Western Culture over whom psychoanalysis had thrown the darkest cloak (until Ferenczi's late interventions). But to take up the position that just refuted it as pseudoscience - the position of someone like Karl Kraus - is to sort of miss the point. The great historical movement of psychoanalysis (which remains unfinished) was already transforming people's lives, people's self-understandings and self-misunderstandings, people's relations and relationships. So too is the case with something like Butler's view of gender, which has now entered the everyday. And whether you agree with it or not is no longer the issue, because questions of humanity are not staked either for or against it but within it and through it. When I was teaching classes of 18 year old humanities students a lot of them had read Butler while at school. Most of those who hadn't were at least aware of the discourse, and were familiar with replicated or bowdlerised forms of it online. It was just part of their sexual growing up. And sometimes I think of the old arguments against the psychoanalytic revolution: that it left the continent of Europe deep in anxiety, packed full of people narcissistically introspecting, discovering uneasily, and obsessing over, their own neuroses. And perhaps if psychoanalysis left in its wake a generation of neurotics, then theories of gender leave a generation of gender disphorics. But it is unclear to me that they are any less well as a result. All of this isn't to say that something like a fiendish Krausian rejection isn't interesting, but it is nonetheless brutal, polarising, as Benjamin would say: destructive. But the Karl Krauses of today's sexual revolution have none of his style; they are experts in the brutishness of brutality alone. They refuse even to accept the divisive effects of their own polemical skepticism, and refuse to notice the bodies trodden underfoot.

6. Perhaps one of the arguments used by transphobic feminists that I find myself most sympathetic to is the idea that we need to return to a conversation of nature. The claim stands against the idea that questions of gender and sexual identity are entirely matters of society and consciousness, in a world that has apparently (at least in these spheres) overcome the forces of natural necessity, the expressions of nature, and natural divisions. But where I absolutely disagree is with the sort of nature that is invoked by these people: it is nature viewed with the taxonomic gaze of Linnaeus. The point of this thinking is to show, just as Linnaeus tried to do with animal species, that sexual divisions are eternal and unchangeable, and thus can be given names. It is to invoke precisely those figures like Goethe's "eternal feminine" that feminism initially set out to undermine. Absolutely no regard is given to questions of sexual development, transformations in sexuality in childhood, puberty, maturity or old age. No discussion of how socialisation and historical catastrophe might affect this. Instead all of this is ignored in favour of the sovereignty of the persistence of the genital, in its purely fleshly form. After the arguments I had this week I went back and read Firestone's Dialectic of Sex and Mitchell's Feminism and Psychoanalysis - two of the brightest stars in the constellations of the second wave. What I love about these books is their views of nature (and in Firestone's case, where she is most indebted to late Engels, quite polemically) as something utterly dynamic, as a world of constant change, modification, and dialectical force, utterly unrecognisable to Linnaean fixation. This thinking shows up the will to fixate nature - the brutal domination of nature - as that which bourgeois thinking has mistaken for the mastery of nature by an enlightened nature that would lead it to reconciliation. This fixated and fixating view of sexual difference ultimately disregards all questions of sexual development (and decline), and in questions of consciousness it willingly swaps out the sensitivity and nuances of developmental psychology for the stark fruitlessness of evolutionary biology.

7. Amongst responses to the Gender Recognition Act are a set of arguments that have been virally circulating on the internet about how it is set to roll back the victories of the second wave. Most of these arguments are patent nonsense, relying on convincing readers (with no evidence) that legal gender reassignment isn't already possible (the Act would just streamline these processes, and would not require the sign-off of doctors.) But more than this, these arguments often rely on a total revisionism about the gains of the feminist movement. Reading them one might quickly believe that women in the 1970s spent their time arguing for single sex toilets and women's prisons. Meanwhile these arguments have a habit of eliding the work done by many trans* people continuing the best of the struggles of the second wave, in organisations like Sisters Uncut, fighting for better domestic violence services. Similarly on questions of sexual violence these viral internet ventures seem to take a step back. Far from the perspective of the second wave that so often saw press sensationalism around street rapists and unknown attackers as often used as a mask for not dealing with the prevalence of sexual violence in the home and amongst known men, the sensationalist figures have been reinvented as the spectre of a sexually violent man who becomes trans* only to gain access to women. This is not to say that street rapists and the like are not real consequences of patriarchal society that need a feminist response. But it is to say that the rolling back of the perspective that finally after decades won out against the marital exemption for rape into a sort of tabloid sensationalism is a step backwards. And more than this, it is terrifying that this sort of sensationalism is used to justify punishing all trans* people, not least when there is absolutely no evidence that this behaviour is any more prominent in the trans* community.

8. Perhaps what has been most grotesque in the last week is the willingness of people to talk explicitly and aggressively about trans* people's bodies - about bodies they don't know in any sense other than seeing a clothed photograph, and about which they have no real right to speak. This is matched with the cruelty that wants to point to every moment when those bodies might be most uncomfortable, when they might not "pass", when they betray a difficult history or an unfulfilled wish, when they express a neurosis that they try to compensate against or disguise. I have been so upset by how friends' bodies have been spoken about - and all just to try to elicit an angry reaction from them at best and to destroy them at worst.

All of this isn't to say that no conversation should be had. Nor is it to say that that gender is some easy solution (and I challenge you to find a single trans* person who thinks it is.) The point, however, is that at their best theories of gender - in their natural-historical, dialectical elaboration - are capable of saying "well sex isn't that easy or simple either." But the point is really to give some background and hopefully some understanding about what is going on. I know lots of people feel uneasy too and want to have conversations, and that they feel silenced. The best suggestion I have - other than joining in existing discussions, forming reading groups, or getting involved in struggles together - is not to line up behind people like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Miranda Yardley, Jen Izaakson, and the rest. Strangely their politics of hate wants you to be silenced too - they want to leave the field divided so that their hatred can win out (as it did in London this week.) Similarly, quite a few people in the last week have responded to me by simply denying the violence and effects of transphobic feminisms. I would encourage everyone who says this to go and talk to some trans* people about their effects it has on their lives. Why not just ask them about it? And find out how a discussion with them can happen humanely without all of this shit. This is quite the opposite of organising meetings where the one thing the platform speakers have in common are repeated press claims that trans* women are men - never mind acting all naive afterwards when it causes shit to kick off. It will require some savviness to work out who is involved in what position and why - but what is needed now is to be savvy, and to not think that Julia Long presents the only option for "opening debate" while she in fact closes it down. It is also true that the Gender Rights Act has the potential to affect more people than just trans* people. This really ought not be responded to by publishing outright lies, provocations, and viral content, only to conclude "let's have a comradely debate," by which point the "debate" is already utterly uncomradely.

[iamthestrangerinmoscow]

I'm sorry but if you agree with both laci green and the terf she argued with, even though you disagree on other parts of their "debate" you are holding transmisogynist views and need to evaluate yourself. You are a danger to me and others like me as it stands, and I'll be unfollowing. I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, but instead urge you to address the issues you have with trans women because if you agree with them on anything at all, you're consuming bad ideas and opinions that hurt us

“Especially since you identify as trans masculine. You need to set yourself right before you hurt someone. Stop watching laci green for one, or listening to TERF’s, and go look at some videos by trans women. Your ideas are dangerous, you’re treading in dangerous waters. Nothing a TERF says is ever OK, even if you disagree with other things they say because being a TERF changes the content of everything said. Nothing they say is OK and you really need to stop, and don’t claim it’s "science” wtf"

I’m also sorry but if you think that we should shield ourselves from all opinions and exist in a comfy little circle of people who all agree with us, you are wrong. We should listen to other people, even when their views make us uncomfortable, angry and hurt, because an opinion is no good when it’s not challenged.

“Nothing a TERF says is ever okay” well that’s just logically false. The TERF in question, Megan, said a lot of things I agree with. Like “we shouldn’t tell people to kill themselves because we disagree with them” or “rape and sexual assault is never okay”. She said that. I agree with her. I also disagree with her on many, many things.

One bad opinion doesn’t automatically disqualify all your opinions and all the things you say. That’s a logical fallacy. And it doesn’t change content of EVERYTHING they say. If she said “Earth is in a shape of a sphere and revolves around the Sun” that would still be true, regardless of her other views. That’s just how things work.

I asked you what evidence you have for Laci Green being transmisogynistic and you didn’t reply. I am a skeptic. I don’t just believe people on the basis of “I said so”. Unless you provide evidence for that claim, I have every right to not even take it into account.

Debates are important, they help us understand opposing views better, and know our own views better. They help get more people on your side while assessing your own opinions critically. They help show that you don’t believe something just because you believe something, but because there is a valid reason to. If we don’t have conversations with people who disagree with us, we will never get anywhere. We will be stuck in one place.

And I do watch videos by trans women. I also watched videos by Blaire White, who is a trans woman and anti-feminist. I disagreed with her on a lot of stuff but still, there were things we agree with. It’s not all black and white. People are complex, they have nuanced opinions, you can’t just put them in simple “good” and “bad” boxes.

What kind of dangerous ideas do I have? Please feel free to point them out but with facts, not with blind accusations. I’m always here to have conversations, to have my views challenged, etc.

And you can unfollow all you want, no problem. No one should be forced to engage with stuff that makes them uncomfortable. However, once again, I am a skeptic and I choose to critically examine my views and opinions whenever I can. And I am not hurting anyone by being critical, skeptical and reasonable. In fact I think it would help all of us if we tried our best to be those things.

If nothing, not anything, would ever change your mind on whatever topic… well, then what’s the point of that opinion.

[kittyit]

A little earlier I got really upset because I know several of my friends are being witchhunted for being friends with me and got the urge to start apologizing and begging for people to think I’m not evil. I made a post apologizing for how I acted after Max & I posted about being radical feminist. A few of my friends reached out to me to talk about it (thank you so much) and I decided to try to come at this from a way more self-empathetic angle.

I usually kind of brush off what happened after we made our post to be a joke. “Yeah lol all my friends said they wanted me to die and someone tried to convince me they were going to my mom’s house to kill her but she lives on a boat.” Hilarious. It’s hard for me to talk about what happened because of how upsetting and crazymaking it was. Max, who openly expressed on her blog how shitty it was for her, was accused of being an emotionally manipulative abuser and I’m pretty sure the same thing will happen about this post.

On some circles on this site I’m often framed as this incredibly evil woman. It’s not true. I’m not going to beg you not to think that, I’m just going to openly state it as a lie and a male reversal. I definitely “acted crazy” (openly displayed trauma responses) both in public and in private. I messaged people who had posted about me and initiated conflict with them. I misremembered facts, then when confronted with that, immediately apologized, amended my statements, and have stuck to that. There are rumors about Max & I that are ludicrous: she was never really trans/faked her transition and we were just scamming transwomen with ZP the entire time, I believe Joseph Mengele created trans people/all trans people are nazis, that I’m a serial abuser of “underage transmen” or a cult leader. It’s absolutely wild. But these weren’t the things that got me labeled evil & worth of starving to death to the streets, they were just fuel on the fire.

The thing that got me labeled a TERF (worthy of death) was naming male violence. It was discovering politics that allowed me to name the 20+ years of sexual abuse from men and the ~8 total years of sexual abuse & 4 years of steadily escalating emotional/physical/sexual abuse from transwomen as male violence. It was Max & I getting tired of seeing our female friends sexually & emotionally abused by transwomen. It was watching a serial rapist man who had expressed interest in nail polish a few times suddenly vocally identifying as a twoc to deflect being outed as a rapist - and it working. It was watching transwoman figurehead after figurehead being outed as a pedophile, rapist, sexual or emotional abuser & it being excused and deflected because they were transwomen.

Making a carefully worded, diplomatic post about the reality of sex based oppression and male violence still being relevant in the radical queer community resulted in a lot of evil things. It resulted in many, many messages telling me to kill myself, insulting my appearance, insulting my genitals, denying that I was raped/abused, telling me I deserved rape/abuse, rape threats, death threats, & gendered insults. I don’t know how many. I deleted anywhere between 5 - 20, sometimes more if a post was going around, every day for months.There was one specific exchange in which someone did their best to convince me that they had my mom’s address and they were driving to her house to kill her because I was a TERF. I knew they were lying because my mom lives on a boat, and it was pretty stupid of them to continue insisting I was lying after I said that, but what if she didn’t live on a boat? What if I hadn’t known they were just trying to terrorize me and make me think they were going to kill my mom instead of, you know, actually killing my mom? There was one specific pretty pornographic exchange in which someone sent a 5+ part graphic message about how they were going to physically & sexually torture me and then when I was begging for death only kill me after I had said that “trans women are women and beautiful and valid” and meant it.

It resulted in regular accusations that other people anonymously telling me their stories of abuse & rape from transwomen were me making things up for attention & my transmisogynistic agenda. There was relentless public mocking of my trauma, appearance, word choices, brain damage/intelligence level, & boundaries by transwomen, which was really hard for me to handle in a diplomatic and calm way due to the multiple years of intense trauma of being treated that way by a transwoman I was trapped in an abusive relationship with.

When I made mistakes and acted crazy (displayed trauma responses) in ways that affected and upset other people, as soon as I was done acting crazy (having a trauma response), I immediately apologized, took responsibility for my actions, and reiterated that I was working really hard on not doing this anymore. And you know what? It’s working. I’m in recovery. Did any one who sent me any of these messages or said these things about me apologize or try to stop this behavior? No, not that I know of. If you’re going to call someone evil in this situation, why is it me?

I recently read Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Obviously, I was not physically and sexually tortured and then tied to a stake and burned alive (or after strangling, if they were feeling generous), but the parallels are there - the pressure from patriarchal forces to confess, just admit you’re an evil woman, anything to try to make that pressure stop. The intentional destruction of women’s knowledge and women’s communities because of the threat to males. Women’s livelihoods being used as pawns in male games. Women who haven’t been branded witches yet seeing what happens to women who are and understanding that it could happen to them just as easily if they step out of line.

I am not an evil woman. I am not a bad person. I am a flawed, traumatized woman doing my best to help other women with what I have. I am committed to self improvement, self awareness, nuance, and truth. I don’t want to beg for your forgiveness anymore or continue validating the part of me that says I really am evil and I did deserve all of this I’ve said and all of the things in this post I haven’t said. I understand that I will still be condemned, but I just wanted to explain what you are justifying & excusing when you condemn me.

[prolapsarian]

A note on transphobic feminisms

Last week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I'm also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being used by cynically by certain feminists in these milieux, whose main politics over the last decades has been to whip up hatred against trans* people, to try to gather a crowd behind them. I know that quite a few people who are currently lining up behind the likes of Julia Long (or who at the very least refuse to recognise the deeply divisive positions and gestures that people like her are taking and making) read my wall. My hope is that some of the stuff below will make you see this differently.

1. There has been a small but vocal scene of feminists around London - people like Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Chester, Julia Long - whose politics over the last couple of decades has centred on making the argument that trans* women aren't women. A good proportion of these people's opinions go further though: they claim that gender reassignment surgery is nothing other than self-mutilation; that trans people demanding protection from oppression are "male rights activists" (that is, aligned with certain far-right movements); and that the main aim of trans* people's lives is to undermine the gains of the women's movement. But what has been peculiar to this politics - and I only know about London here, but I hear the same from other places - is that its mode of expression has been to attack trans* people themselves. Far from making theoretical interventions or arguments, far from entering into conversations, this group of feminists have gone about instituting their politics by publicly outing, doxxing, and monstering trans people. They do this in a context (and take full advantage of this context) in which transphobia predominates in the mainstream press and many other institutions of civil society. In more immediate social interactions their politics consistently and deliberately misgender all trans people they come into contact with. Ultimately their politics amounts to the idea that trans*-women, in their very being, undermine feminist movements, and they wish to undermine them in every way possible, playing opportunistically on wider social transphobias.

2. It is significant that this pattern has been known to feminism in the context of debates over sex work. On that question certain feminists have attacked women sex workers (most prominently on Reclaim the Night marches.) They do this instead of negotiating the dialectical tensions of labour, commodity, libido, possession, and exchange under patriarchal capitalism. Instead the sex worker herself becomes the scapegoat and centre of gravity of the entire system. If only she can be done away with (and with no particular care for how she came to be selling sex), the whole system will apparently simplify itself. The whole thing is slightly bizarre - akin to blaming proletarians in a munitions factory for a society founded on perpetual war, rather than blaming the society based on perpetual war for the fact that certain proletarians find themselves having to produce munitions. This isn't to say there aren't important and nuanced debates to be had about sex work, safety of workers, the consequence of sex being sold on the most anarchic open market for all women, and so on. Although there is an irony that feminists whose political movement arose from hatred of the "it can wait until after the revolution" now take precisely the same attitude to sex workers merely defending their physical safety. This is all slightly by the by. But the same brutality of attitude, which leads to certain feminists putting the blame of sexual exploitation at the feet of sex workers, which leads them to attack their very existence as scapegoat, has been transferred wholesale to how some feminists are treating trans* people. This has now been going on for very many years.

3. In the discussions that have surrounded the Gender Recognition Act, those women who have for many years been aggressively transphobic have been trying to reposition themselves to win support from other women and feminists who might not really agree with the extremity and violence of their positions. They have started to talk about defending civil society institutions, and about having debates. To many trans* people in London it is clear that these aims are not true. Indeed last week's shitshow of a "debate" mainly involved slinging insults and platforming people whose only point ever is to say that trans* women are men (indeed people who have somehow made careers out of this!) There are questions about civil society, and about womanhood, raised by the act. The trouble is that these particular feminists are not interested in them beyond a very specific, outmoded and divisive line. 

4. There are genuinely some people who (mainly on the internet) take an "against nature" position in the trans* community, and who respond to anyone questioning trans* discourse - or even the primacy of discourse in trans* scenes - as an existential threat that can only be met with violence. There are certain individuals who send death threats, punch people, shout "kill all TERFs" etc. Apart from these people are the enormous majority of trans* people who are consistently in conversations, discussions, social movements, reflections with all sorts of people (and alone) about questions of sex, gender, sexuality, nature, history. The transmisogynist and transphobic feminists consistently attempt to play up the extent of this violent, silencing culture, because they know that ultimately plays out in their favour. This behaviour is analogous to Zionists who play up the anti-Semitism of small elements of the Arab population to justify the violence meted out by Israel against all Palestinians. They know that it is ultimately beneficial to their position to claim that they are being silenced and attacked, that all discussion is made impossible. Often their aim has been to provoke this situation (for example by holding meetings where the only speakers are those who routinely claim that all trans* women are men.) The events this week in London, when divisions were cynically sown in this way - people like Julia Long know that their position is ultimately stronger, that their hatred of trans* people and violence against them appears more legitimate and more reasonable when people are most divided. It is for this reason that these people have for so long practiced such a highly antagonistic politics. But none of this really helps women, trans* or otherwise. At the same time it is really a terrible shame for most trans* people that the time they need to defend themselves has collided with what can only be described as a crisis in the politics of oppression, where (turbo-charged by the internet) significant numbers of people advocate nihilist violence against their oppressors to shore up the community of the oppressed. But this trend seems thankfully to be waning. It is a strange irony too that an all-out-war has broken out only where these internet cultures have come into contact with those feminists who first tried to drag the movement into communitarianism. 

5. One frequent line of argument that is common is the "gender" is all post-modern nonsense. But to think that the transformations in social relations that have taken place in the last 30 years can be done away with through the power of a demystifying gaze, which does away with the ideology of discourses only to rediscover nature, is to miss the point. We are without a doubt living through a sexual revolution - one as great as those that preceded it, that of the 20 years following the French Revolution, that of Weimar Germany (and Austria) in the wake of psychoanalysis, and that of the 1970s. And indeed it is the revolution of gender itself. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy. When I try to think about the early decades of psychoanalysis it is impossible to think about the great advances it offered people in thinking about their sexuality, about understanding the sexual lives of children, without at the same time thinking of its victims: of Dora, of the children subject to the prevalent paedophilia of Western Culture over whom psychoanalysis had thrown the darkest cloak (until Ferenczi's late interventions). But to take up the position that just refuted it as pseudoscience - the position of someone like Karl Kraus - is to sort of miss the point. The great historical movement of psychoanalysis (which remains unfinished) was already transforming people's lives, people's self-understandings and self-misunderstandings, people's relations and relationships. So too is the case with something like Butler's view of gender, which has now entered the everyday. And whether you agree with it or not is no longer the issue, because questions of humanity are not staked either for or against it but within it and through it. When I was teaching classes of 18 year old humanities students a lot of them had read Butler while at school. Most of those who hadn't were at least aware of the discourse, and were familiar with replicated or bowdlerised forms of it online. It was just part of their sexual growing up. And sometimes I think of the old arguments against the psychoanalytic revolution: that it left the continent of Europe deep in anxiety, packed full of people narcissistically introspecting, discovering uneasily, and obsessing over, their own neuroses. And perhaps if psychoanalysis left in its wake a generation of neurotics, then theories of gender leave a generation of gender disphorics. But it is unclear to me that they are any less well as a result. All of this isn't to say that something like a fiendish Krausian rejection isn't interesting, but it is nonetheless brutal, polarising, as Benjamin would say: destructive. But the Karl Krauses of today's sexual revolution have none of his style; they are experts in the brutishness of brutality alone. They refuse even to accept the divisive effects of their own polemical skepticism, and refuse to notice the bodies trodden underfoot.

6. Perhaps one of the arguments used by transphobic feminists that I find myself most sympathetic to is the idea that we need to return to a conversation of nature. The claim stands against the idea that questions of gender and sexual identity are entirely matters of society and consciousness, in a world that has apparently (at least in these spheres) overcome the forces of natural necessity, the expressions of nature, and natural divisions. But where I absolutely disagree is with the sort of nature that is invoked by these people: it is nature viewed with the taxonomic gaze of Linnaeus. The point of this thinking is to show, just as Linnaeus tried to do with animal species, that sexual divisions are eternal and unchangeable, and thus can be given names. It is to invoke precisely those figures like Goethe's "eternal feminine" that feminism initially set out to undermine. Absolutely no regard is given to questions of sexual development, transformations in sexuality in childhood, puberty, maturity or old age. No discussion of how socialisation and historical catastrophe might affect this. Instead all of this is ignored in favour of the sovereignty of the persistence of the genital, in its purely fleshly form. After the arguments I had this week I went back and read Firestone's Dialectic of Sex and Mitchell's Feminism and Psychoanalysis - two of the brightest stars in the constellations of the second wave. What I love about these books is their views of nature (and in Firestone's case, where she is most indebted to late Engels, quite polemically) as something utterly dynamic, as a world of constant change, modification, and dialectical force, utterly unrecognisable to Linnaean fixation. This thinking shows up the will to fixate nature - the brutal domination of nature - as that which bourgeois thinking has mistaken for the mastery of nature by an enlightened nature that would lead it to reconciliation. This fixated and fixating view of sexual difference ultimately disregards all questions of sexual development (and decline), and in questions of consciousness it willingly swaps out the sensitivity and nuances of developmental psychology for the stark fruitlessness of evolutionary biology. 

7. Amongst responses to the Gender Recognition Act are a set of arguments that have been virally circulating on the internet about how it is set to roll back the victories of the second wave. Most of these arguments are patent nonsense, relying on convincing readers (with no evidence) that legal gender reassignment isn't already possible (the Act would just streamline these processes, and would not require the sign-off of doctors.) But more than this, these arguments often rely on a total revisionism about the gains of the feminist movement. Reading them one might quickly believe that women in the 1970s spent their time arguing for single sex toilets and women's prisons. Meanwhile these arguments have a habit of eliding the work done by many trans* people continuing the best of the struggles of the second wave, in organisations like Sisters Uncut, fighting for better domestic violence services. Similarly on questions of sexual violence these viral internet ventures seem to take a step back. Far from the perspective of the second wave that so often saw press sensationalism around street rapists and unknown attackers as often used as a mask for not dealing with the prevalence of sexual violence in the home and amongst known men, the sensationalist figures have been reinvented as the spectre of a sexually violent man who becomes trans* only to gain access to women. This is not to say that street rapists and the like are not real consequences of patriarchal society that need a feminist response. But it is to say that the rolling back of the perspective that finally after decades won out against the marital exemption for rape into a sort of tabloid sensationalism is a step backwards. And more than this, it is terrifying that this sort of sensationalism is used to justify punishing all trans* people, not least when there is absolutely no evidence that this behaviour is any more prominent in the trans* community.

8. Perhaps what has been most grotesque in the last week is the willingness of people to talk explicitly and aggressively about trans* people's bodies - about bodies they don't know in any sense other than seeing a clothed photograph, and about which they have no real right to speak. This is matched with the cruelty that wants to point to every moment when those bodies might be most uncomfortable, when they might not "pass", when they betray a difficult history or an unfulfilled wish, when they express a neurosis that they try to compensate against or disguise. I have been so upset by how friends' bodies have been spoken about - and all just to try to elicit an angry reaction from them at best and to destroy them at worst.

All of this isn't to say that no conversation should be had. Nor is it to say that that gender is some easy solution (and I challenge you to find a single trans* person who thinks it is.) The point, however, is that at their best theories of gender - in their natural-historical, dialectical elaboration - are capable of saying "well sex isn't that easy or simple either." But the point is really to give some background and hopefully some understanding about what is going on. I know lots of people feel uneasy too and want to have conversations, and that they feel silenced. The best suggestion I have - other than joining in existing discussions, forming reading groups, or getting involved in struggles together - is not to line up behind people like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Miranda Yardley, Jen Izaakson, and the rest. Strangely their politics of hate wants you to be silenced too - they want to leave the field divided so that their hatred can win out (as it did in London this week.) Similarly, quite a few people in the last week have responded to me by simply denying the violence and effects of transphobic feminisms. I would encourage everyone who says this to go and talk to some trans* people about their effects it has on their lives. Why not just ask them about it? And find out how a discussion with them can happen humanely without all of this shit. This is quite the opposite of organising meetings where the one thing the platform speakers have in common are repeated press claims that trans* women are men - never mind acting all naive afterwards when it causes shit to kick off. It will require some savviness to work out who is involved in what position and why - but what is needed now is to be savvy, and to not think that Julia Long presents the only option for "opening debate" while she in fact closes it down. It is also true that the Gender Rights Act has the potential to affect more people than just trans* people. This really ought not be responded to by publishing outright lies, provocations, and viral content, only to conclude "let's have a comradely debate," by which point the "debate" is already utterly uncomradely.