‘[H]e colonializes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it, uses it, depletes it as he wishes, denies it freedom and self-determination so that he can continue to plunder it, moves on at will to conquer other land which appears more verdant and alluring. Radical feminists call this exclusively male behavior ‘phallic imperialism’ and see in it the origins of all other forms of imperialism.’
– Andrea Dworkin.
The essence of imperialism is, above all, to dominate, possess, own, appropriate, and thoroughly expropriate people considered inferior. One of the subjugated peoples within capitalist societies is the class of women. Dominant men, including leftists and liberals, have colluded with capitalism to carry out various forms of the colonisation of women. The most important of these industries are pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy. These are huge money-making industries and are among the most lucrative in the modern global economy. One of their mottos is ‘sex work is work,’ which is nothing more than a succinct statement that the colonisation of women’s bodies is a legitimate capitalistic agenda and endeavour. The leftists, supposedly opposed to capitalism, become spokespeople and ideologues of the sex industry, the most odious and corrupt of all capitalist industries, and promote the colonisation of women all over the world.
But, over the past 20 years or so, another form of the colonisation of women has emerged. This is transgenderism or the trans ideology movement. In the West as well as in Japan and South Korea, those who chant the mantra ‘sex work is work’ are one with those who chant the mantra ‘trans women are women.’ They constitute almost the same political movement, the same ideological current, and the same interest group.
Why did these two fuse together everywhere in the world? Why does this happen both in the West and in the East, where the cultures and histories are entirely different? Is it a just coincidence?
No, this is not an accident. The reason why they fuse together is that they have the same roots, the same dynamics, and the same essence: they are both imperialist men’s rights movements that seek to dominate and colonise women, women’s bodies, and women’s sexuality.
Pornography physically conquers and colonises women’s sexual bodies in the process of its production, and conquers and colonises them virtually in the process of its consumption. In prostitution, the pimps and punters more directly conquer and colonise the female sexual body. But this is still insufficient for the domination and colonisation of women, because women still maintain their status as the Other, even if only as objects. Men’s desire to dominate women has no limits, and some of them cannot tolerate even the existence of women as the Other. This is where transgenderism comes in. It is the most thoroughgoing colonisation of women. It is so in a variety of ways, as below.
1. First of all, transgenderism dominates and colonises the very category of women by changing the definition of women so that men can freely enter into it or gain access to it. For an oppressed group, defining for themselves who they are is the minimum guarantee of their autonomy. Transgenderism deprives women of precisely that. Just as the Western imperialists colonise the people they seek to dominate by defining who they are, and by determining the boundary between them and the rest of the world, the trans ideology movement, also born in the West, makes women something conceptual and ideal by saying that even a man can become a woman because his mind and/or behaviour is feminine, and/or he self-identifies as a woman. Being a woman now ceases to be an objective, material, and political fact, and becomes an idea or feeling that men are free to possess. Women are robbed of their final sovereignty. Self-determination as an oppressed group becomes impeded because the group is determined to not exist (leading to the question “what is a woman?” lacking any coherent answer from many politicians in league with transgender ideology).
Andrea Dworkin once identified the ‘power of naming’ as one of men’s powers. In her most important work, Pornography, she states:
‘Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself.’ (Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, A Plume Book, 1991, p. 17.)
The greatest manifestation of this power today is transgenderism or the trans ideology movement. Even men are now named ‘women’, and even the very definition of women is determined by men.
Dworkin goes on to say that women who object to men’s ‘power of naming’ are persecuted ― ‘Whatever contradicts or subverts male naming is defamed out of existence.’ (ibid., p. 18) ― and this is what is happening today in the case of transgenderism. Women who oppose this male power of naming are called ‘TERFs,’ ‘transphobes,’ and ‘trans haters’ and are subject to contempt, slander, and violent attacks. Within fields of intense labour competition, such as academia, the media, and third sector, anyone speaking out against transgenderism has their job and livelihood threatened.
2. Transgenderism reduces ‘womanhood’ to practices of dressing, having long hair, applying makeup, and behaving in ways that are largely considered ‘feminine.’ Then, some men take possession of ‘womanhood’ reduced to such external adornments. Sometimes they even brazenly say that their parodies of femininity are more realistic than the real women they mimic. This is similar to colonialists accepting and promoting exaggerated caricatures of indigenous peoples as more authentic than the real ones.
3. Trans ideology encourages so-called ‘gender reassignment surgery’ for some men to create fake sexual parts of women on their own bodies to more directly possess and colonise womanhood. They can always admire in the mirror the reproduced fake breasts and other women’s parts on their own bodies, and they can touch them whenever they like. These body parts are pornographic ones reproduced on their bodies. It is embodied pornography.
4. Trans ideology makes girls believe they are men if they behave in a ‘non-girly’ way, and it denies their womanhood by giving them puberty blockers, cross hormones, and breast removal. This is another form of the colonisation of women. The British conquered Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and tried to whitewash indigenous or mixed race children by separating them from their communities, giving them white names, instilling in them a white mindset, and teaching them to hate their communities. However, these classical colonialists did not go so far as to whitewash even the bodies of indigenous peoples. What they did, at best, was to control their minds. But the trans-identity movement does more than that. It not only reshapes the minds of colonised girls but also their bodies.
The transition of children makes global pharmaceutical and medical capitalist’s profit through drugs, surgery, and re-surgery for the rest of their lives. The economic basis of 21st-century imperialism is global capitalism, and the same is true of trans ideology. Capitalism as an ever-expanding economic system requires new areas of expansion to sustain itself and feed upon. Alongside the development of the global sex industry, the global development of the trans ideology movement creates a constant and ever-expanding source of profit for global capital.
5. The trans ideology movement physically colonises women’s spaces, by assuming that women-only spaces are transphobic and by allowing men (who self-identify as women) to freely enter them. Whether in toilets, public bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, or shelters, there are no longer women-only spaces in countries where trans ideology has taken hold. These are now spaces to which men have free access. The most important feature of classical colonialism was to occupy the territory inhabited by the indigenous peoples, to abolish their exclusive spaces, and bring them under control. Women now face this same process.
6. Trans ideology allows men who self-identify as women to occupy women’s political positions as ‘female legislators’, to deprive women of honour as ‘women’s successes’, and to break into women’s sports, women’s contests, and all other women’s events to dominate and colonise them. A particularly disastrous result has been produced in relation to women’s sports. Men with physical advantages, who can achieve only mediocre results in the men’s competitions, enter women’s sports by claiming they are women, and steal medals, prizes, and recognition from women.
7. Trans ideology hijacks and colonises even lesbianism. Men who are merely heterosexual, claim to be women who romantically love and exclusively sexually desire women, and therefore pronounce themselves lesbians, taking lesbianism conceptually away from women and attempting to directly physically dominate (and sometimes rape) real lesbian women. Lesbians are the women who have rejected men the most and have tried to escape penile imperialism the most, and so, for the imperialist men, this is precisely why they must be colonised.
Andrea Dworkin states that lesbians are colonised in pornography by being treated as sex objects for the sexual pleasure of men:
‘The male defines and controls the idea of the lesbian in the composition of the photograph. In viewing it, he possesses her. The lesbian is colonised, reduced to a variant of woman-as-sex-object, used to demonstrate and prove that male power pervades and invades even the private sanctuary of women with each other.’ (Ibid., p. 47.)
This colonisation is done solely through the visual, but transgenderism attempts to colonise living flesh-and-blood lesbians in the real world.
8. Trans ideology arbitrarily draws a ‘cis-trans’ distinction among ‘women,’ and names ordinary women ‘cis women.’ Giving women the degrading name of ‘cis women’ is the same colonialist act as when Western colonists or imperialists called the local population ‘savages,’ ‘Indians,’ ‘Gooks’, ‘Chinks,’ or ‘Japs.’ In the case of the prewar Japanese imperialists who colonised the Korean peninsula, locals were forced to adopt Japanese names.
9. More thoroughly still, women labelled ‘cis’ are described as more privileged than ‘trans women.’ Although women are the largest and oldest minority in human history and have been consistently oppressed, discriminated against, exploited, raped, objectified, and killed since the beginning of male dominance (patriarchy), the group is now deprived of even this minority status. And a man who has enjoyed male privilege all his life, but one day declares he feels he is a woman, is considered more oppressed than any ‘cis woman.’ Thus, women are deprived of the right to speak out about the injustice of their imposed status. This is dehumanization at its most thorough. Women are robbed of any recognition of their subjectivity as women.
10. Finally, the trans ideology movement hijacks and colonises feminism itself. ‘Intersectionality’, which the Left is so fond of advocating, is today a pretext for taking feminism away from women and using it as a tool to dominate them. In the beginning, ‘intersectionality theory’ was supposed to emphasise the presence of women among racial and ethnic minorities who were always subsumed into and represented by the men of their racial group, but now it has become a means to dismantle the class status of women and to appropriate feminism. Throughout world history, an ideology designed to liberate some groups has often become a tool to subjugate it.
Thus, transgenderism or the trans ideology movement is a male imperialist ideology and a movement that seeks to deprive women of everything they have, and to colonise women in all aspects. And the United States, the world’s largest imperialist state, is trying to spread this ideology throughout the world through pressure, financial incentives, and threats by its government agencies and embassies. The United Nations, an international organisation of mostly Western imperialism, also disseminates trans ideology throughout the world and imposes it on all countries. This is a classic imperialist approach.
Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon once stated:
‘Anything women have claimed as their own――motherhood, athletics, traditional men’s jobs, lesbianism, feminism―is made specifically sexy, dangerous, provocative, punished, made men’s in pornography.’ (Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 138-139.)
This statement is certainly correct. And it would be even more correct if the last word ‘pornography’ is replaced by ‘transgenderism’. Transgenderism, even more than pornography (and prostitution), is the ultimate means of the appropriation and colonisation of women (what is truly tragic is that she does not understand this at all; on the contrary, she has completely capitulated to it and is now attacking other radical feminists). The men have finally discovered it. They will never let it go. So, we must destroy it from the inside and the outside.
- Seiya Morita is a Japanese gender critical Marxist writer. Seiya’s response article to Catharine MacKinnon’s recent paper on transgenderism will be published here next month.
‘Why did these two fuse together everywhere in the world? Why does this happen both in the West and in the East, where the cultures and histories are entirely different? Is it a just coincidence?
No, this is not an accident. The reason why they fuse together is that they have the same roots, the same dynamics, and the same essence: they are both imperialist men’s rights movements that seek to dominate and colonise women, women’s bodies, and women’s sexuality.’
Yes this is why western and non western women hating men are working together because finally they are achieving their male goal which is total male oppression, control and domination of all women and girls!
Immediately after my piece ‘The Trans Ideology Movement, Global Capitalism, and the Colonisation of Women’ was published on ‘On the Woman Question,’ it received enthusiastic support from many people, but also several questions. The most typical of these asked, if transgenderism was a movement to colonize women, why are so many women and feminists promoting it? I already pointed out in section “10” that transgenderism is usurping feminism, and that such a situation is not historically new. Here, I will go further into answer.
1. The dominance of male power
Every historically long-lasting power system has already colonized and dominated the psyches and minds of the people it is supposed to dominate. Without it, long-term domination would be impossible. For example, many workers willingly support neoliberalism and, in the case of workers in Japan, even accept long working hours that result in death (karoshi). The same can be said about male power. Male power has at least as much power over women as the power of capital over the working class. If the workers’ parties and labor aristocrats who purport to represent the interests of the working class have repeatedly betrayed workers to serve capital, and still do, why can’t male power make many women and mainstream feminists do the same? After all, all women are socialized under this male power to actively accept the desires and demands of men in general, and leftist women are politicized to accept the desires and demands of minority men (some are now called “trans women”).
2. The elitization of some women and feminists
The women who have embraced transgenderism most enthusiastically are those in the intellectual and cultural elite: university academicians, lawyers, politicians, writers, etc. They live in a very different economic and political world than ordinary women who are directly affected by transgenderism. Elite women think they share more in common with men belonging to the same economic and political class than with lower-class women belonging to the same sex. They assure the stability of their position by making the women of the lower classes into human servants of male power.
3. Mainstream feminism and the cultural Left have become utopian
Engels once argued that socialism gradually developed from utopia into science. But, since the 1980s, the opposite process has occurred. Ignoring women’s bodies as a living, tangible reality and women’s material conditions of existence, mainstream feminism and the cultural left have indulged in ideological vacuousness. Their favorite idea of social constructionism, originally intended to demystify the naturalized social and expose its inherently social and class character, has now become a means of denying the natural foundation on which the social is based, thus, theoretically obliterating the material reality of women’s bodies. Their favorite idea of postmodernism denied the progressiveness and scientific nature of modernism with its various limitations. (And so throw the baby out with the bathwater.). At the same time, strange as it may seem, they accept one of the greatest limitations of modernism, mind-body dualism, and take it to extremes: the complete separation of a ‘sex of mind’ from a sex of body, and recognition of the former as determining sex itself.
4. Neoliberalism as a Zeitgeist absolutizes individual identities
After 1980, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet block in the 1990s, neoliberalism became the global Zeitgeist, in which society is reduced to a mere aggregation of atomized individuals. Individual identities are now exalted as absolute. In the pre-neoliberal era, the objective social attributes that defined individuals–workers, peasants, capitalists, and petty-bourgeois intellectuals–were emphasized and constituted the modern society and its class struggles. Today, however, the subjective identity of each individual is considered absolute, and even if it does not correspond to the objective attributes, it must be respected, or else the very existence of the individual is denied.
The combination of at least these four interrelated dimensions has resulted in a situation in which many women and all mainstream feminists actively support transgenderism, which, as my piece argued, essentially colonizes women.
Hello. I have followed the online discussions and fights between people who are advocating for trans people’s rights and feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women. I have only followed them off and on. And I have not read very much of the feminist literature by feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women. The recent debates about Catharine MacKinnon’s new pro-trans article have gotten me interested in the topic again.
I do not know if authors of pieces typically engage with comments on here, but I thought I would give it a shot. Clearly I’m in the pro-trans, trans-women-are-women camp, but I am genuinely interested in understanding “gender critical” and other feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women. So I hope you will engage.
Could you explain why you date the emergence of “transgenderism or the trans ideology movement” to ‘the past 20 years or so”? I would date it earlier than that.
Feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women seem very insistent that other feminists are not actually feminist–and you characterize advocates for trans rights as members of the “mens rights movement.” I assume that associating feminists with whom you don’t agree with this movement is designed to stigmatize them by linking them to an odious backlash movement that they in fact vehemently oppose. At least in a US context, the “men’s rights movement” refers to a group of anti-feminist, misogynist people. I know you think that trans-allied feminists are not actually feminists and that they’re advancing a misogynist agenda. I disagree and think this is a very unfair and cheap rhetorical move that seems pretty widespread among feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women. You genuinely think Catharine MacKinnon is a friend of the men’s rights movement?
And you also seem to think Dworkin is wrong about her own views on trans people but right about everything else. Why wouldn’t she apply this analysis herself? (I’m not a Dworkin expert but I found this pretty compelling: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally/). I really don’t understand how you square your view of what she should have said with the fact that she said what she did say. I’m interested to hear what you have to say about MacKinnon’s article as well. But why not accept that she was never a feminist who excluded trans women from the category women? Why is she not the authority on what she thinks now and what she thought then? To me it seems insulting and patronizing to tell her that she’s “capitulated” and “does not understand.” Why not just say “oh, she disagrees with me” and then disagree with her? It makes me think that you understand any pro-trans position as a form of false consciousness, no matter who espouses it. Do you think anyone who believes that trans women are women is a dupe and a dumb-dumb? Anyone who thinks advocating for trans rights is totally compatible with feminism?
A related but probably more important point: You write, “a man who has enjoyed male privilege all his life, but one day declares he feels he is a woman, is considered more oppressed than any ‘cis woman.’” I haven’t heard any trans people’s stories that involve an overnight realization. I am not saying that they don’t exist, but I would wager a lot of money that stories that involve a longtime feeling of discomfort with one’s own body and a longtime discomfort with being understood as the gender that one is assigned are far more common. Or are you trying to imply that the man in your example is just pretending to be a woman so he can do something nefarious? In any case, this sentence strikes me as symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that you–and this seems to be the default position among who feminists who want to exclude trans women from the category of women and who write online–don’t believe what trans people say about themselves. It seems to me that it is a very widespread practice to simply state as fact that trans people and “TRAs” have the motivations that you say they do, which are generally pretty evil sounding. Do you get annoyed when people attribute motivations to you that you don’t have? Why not believe what they say? I’m not saying you have to agree with it or that you can’t criticize it. But to just substitute your own belief about their motives does not seem in keeping with feminist ethics or polite behavior.
You write: “Whether in toilets, public bathrooms, changing rooms, prisons, or shelters, there are no longer women-only spaces in countries where trans ideology has taken hold.” This strikes me as overblown and untrue. There are lots of non-gender-neutral bathrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, and (non-trans) women’s spaces in the US (where I am from). In the US, I think it would be pretty clearly unconstitutional to legislate non-trans women’s spaces out of existence.
You write: “The British conquered Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and tried to whitewash indigenous or mixed race children by separating them from their communities, giving them white names, instilling in them a white mindset, and teaching them to hate their communities. However, these classical colonialists did not go so far as to whitewash even the bodies of indigenous peoples. What they did, at best, was to control their minds. But the trans-identity movement does more than that. It not only reshapes the minds of colonised girls but also their bodies.”
British, European, and American colonizers also spent a lot of time, effort, and violence trying eradicate what they deemed nonnormative gendered and sexual practices in order to impose a binary notion of gender and sex. And to say that “what [classical colonialists] did, at best, was to control [indigenous people’s] minds” seems to me to minimize actual colonialism’s evils in the pursuit of trying to make “trans ideology” seem somehow worse. Killing people is a bodily act, as is forced labor, imprisonment, apartheid, rape, and slavery. Even what you describe with child separation I would say is embodied, as are the many, many other ways that colonists attempted to control and reshape reproduction and family formation. Why didn’t you discuss these? Why do you think the residential schools analogy was the most appropriate? Or am I misunderstanding what the analogy is supposed to be doing?
“The transition of children makes global pharmaceutical and medical capitalist’s profit through drugs, surgery, and re-surgery for the rest of their lives. The economic basis of 21st-century imperialism is global capitalism, and the same is true of trans ideology. Capitalism as an ever-expanding economic system requires new areas of expansion to sustain itself and feed upon. Alongside the development of the global sex industry, the global development of the trans ideology movement creates a constant and ever-expanding source of profit for global capital.” This point seems pretty weak to me too. I mean, yes, big pharma is bad and the medical profession is indeed a source of a lot of misogyny and attempts to control women’s bodies, and it has a history of neglecting conditions that are understood as “women’s” problems. But you could make the critique of capitalism using any new medication or any mental health condition that is conceptualized in a new way. Depression for instance involves new drugs that people are on for the rest of their lives. Depression did not always exist as a diagnosis. It was developed in the West and “exported” globally. It thus “creates a constant and ever-expanding source of profit for global capital.” I don’t see “trans ideology” as unique in this regard. You could substitute autism, ADHD, etc.
“They can always admire in the mirror the reproduced fake breasts and other women’s parts on their own bodies, and they can touch them whenever they like.” This just seems like taking something normal and trying to make it sound creepy. Why wouldn’t they admire themselves in the mirror? Lots of people do it, especially when they’ve changed something about their appearance that makes them feel better about themselves. Lots of people–Id venture to say everybody–touch their own bodies, including their genitals and breasts. You seem to be implying that they have a fetishist relationship to their own body but you don’t present any evidence of that and don’t say it outright. Apologies if that’s not what you’re intending, but if it’s not could you please explain what you do intend?
I guess I’ll stop there.
just drawing your attention to this reply on Stoltenberg
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-does-john-stoltenberg-call-andrea.html
and derrick jensen response
https://derrickjensen.org/2015/02/response-to-john-stoltenberg-andrea-dworkin-transphobia/
The idea that Andrea Dworkin was a trans activist is just not credible (irrespective of what Jon Stoltenberg says). I mean here’s her written endorsement on the cover on the cover of The Transsexual Empire: https://imgur.com/5EgJ0eu .
The first sentence in Catharine Mackinnon’s piece:
“For the first time in over thirty years, it makes sense to me to reconsider what feminism means.” https://signsjournal.org/exploring-transgender-law-and-politics
As Seiya Morita says, she has rejected us – not the other way around.
I recommend you check out this rebuttal of MacKinnon: [Against “squint a bit” feminism: Catharine Mackinnon can’t avoid the obvious by Victoria Smith](https://thecritic.co.uk/against-squint-a-bit-feminism/)
Ok! That book endorsement is actual evidence! Thanks. I am more than willing to entertain that dworkin would have wanted to exclude trans women from the category woman, as I hope was clear from the outset. But I never said she was a “trans activist”, did I? Maybe you’re using that term differently than I would, but I find it confusing.
I did see the Smith thing and am afraid I don’t find it convincing at all, sorry. She either misinterprets the “imperatives and limitations’ line or pretends not to understand it for a joke. (Or something else–you tell me.) And then I don’t understand how revisiting the history of feminist thinking, which mackinnon obviously knows about, rebuts MacKinnon at all. It isn’t “as though all this thinking never happened.” MacKinnon is arguing the thinking happened and was good, but that contemporary radical feminists, in their zeal to exclude trans women from the category women, are wrong and doing harmful things. Which is why I also don’t understand why “she rejected us not us her” is supposed to be an argument for your or Morita’s position. Nobody’s ever broken with a movement they find is going in a wrong direction before? As I said, i can understand your being hurt/angry about it but that’s as far as it takes me.
Thanks for your detailed rebuttal. It would require a longer post than the original one to answer all of your objections, so I’ll just make three points.
1. I used to believe “trans women are women,” but changed my mind after seeing the countless sexist, violent, and misogynistic words and actions of trans rights activists in Japan and around the world. Whatever Dworkin’s original thoughts were, she would have stood with us if she had seen the litany of misogynistic violence by TRAs today.
2. Catharine MacKinnon writes in her latest article that “I also don’t use the term TERF, not because those who are labeled with it are not trans- exclusive; they are. But because I see nothing radical in their feminism.” She said this to her (ex-)comrades who have fought alongside her for decades against sexual violence, prostitution, and pornography. We did not reject her. She did us.
3. We have long been called “fascists,” “Nazis,” “racists,” and “supporters of genocide” endless times by trans activists. You would do well to say something about this first, before worrying about our correct comprehension of history. It is trans activists who throw these concepts around without regard for their substance or historical reality.
Thank you.
Thanks for responding. On the first two points: You are making an educated guess about what Dworkin would believe. Fine. But it’s unfalsifiable. Her partner addresses it in the piece I linked. The critique of trans people as appropriating “woman,” as being “opportunists, infiltrators, and destroyers”, has been available since 1973 in the US. Clearly she didn’t find it compelling. I think there’s ample evidence she wouldn’t be in your camp. We are both guessing. But I would point out that had Catharine MacKinnon died, it would be equally plausible to guess that she’d be in your camp, but she’s not.
I guess I understand why you’d feel betrayed by MacKinnon. But she rejected you because she disagrees and thinks that what you are arguing is wrong and harmful, not because she is ignorant. It’s the attribution of ignorance or capitulation, or associating her with men’s rights activists, that bugs me (not just about her but about a lot of people who disagree with you). I’d just ask you to grant that she might be arguing in good faith, even if she’s being mean to ex-comrades, and then proceed from there.
And then for the third point, I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know what in my comment was “worrying about [your] correct comprehension of history.” When I asked about your periodization? So for whatever it’s worth, I acknowledge that some trans activists have mischaracterized your positions and called you inappropriate names.
It’s telling that you cite a man whose himself is colonising the legacy of Dworkin to secure his own reputation in these fraught times of female erasure.
Here is a couple of more men, who are true feminist and anti-colonizing allies
Dworkin’s work does speak for itself, though apologies i don’t have relevant links
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-does-john-stoltenberg-call-andrea.html
https://derrickjensen.org/2015/02/response-to-john-stoltenberg-andrea-dworkin-transphobia/
I just saw your reply. Thanks. I’m curious what exactly my referencing the Boston Review piece tells you about me. I referenced it because it includes quotations from Dworkin and was by somebody who knew her well. I admit I thought and still think it’s a pretty good argument. I will just reiterate that we are all making educated guesses. You disagree with Stoltenberg and don’t think that that would be Dworkin’s position. Because you disagree, it leads you to say he’s “colonizing” her legacy for his own benefit. The men that you link to agree with you. Therefore they are correct and not colonizing her legacy. Which is fine. That’s how arguments work. (Also I’m a little insulted that you seem to think men will be more convincing to me than other people.)
In the “Radical Profeminist” piece, he writes: “It is clear that Andrea and Catharine [sic], in this radical legal mechanism for ending sex-based discrimination [the anti-porn ordinance], did not equate being a transsexual with being a woman or a man.” Do you think he needs to alter this argument given MacKinnon’s trans-inclusive stance? (An explicit stance that was available to be read, by the way, prior to his writing of this essay.) If not, can you make that argument without attributing false consciousness to her, or saying she’s a men’s rights activist, or saying that she doesn’t actually understand what’s happening?
Thanks for posting. Good article. Be prepared for backlash. There’s always hateful twisted individuals bent on hurting women.
All I could say is that this is a very impressive article. Though I am not that familiar with the theories of radical feminism, I am sure that trans-identified males are not and should never be at the center of any schools of feminism. As a Taiwanese woman, when I figured out how the trans rights movement was carried out in Western countries, I realized that the definition and existence of women would disappear at the end of it.
Being a woman has never been easy (or as easy as trans-identified males think). For example, female puberty comes at a younger age than male one. At the same time, female teenagers have to deal with misogynistic opinions. When they have grown into womanhood, they will face more sex-based discrimination as well as difficulites–and this harsh condition might continue probably throughout their entire lives. However, transgenderism, no matter socially or medically, offers a fake exit for the young women at our time.
I am not saying that no one should be allowed to do whatever they want. What I am saying is that no one should be lied to when making important choices which may influence their whole lives. Further, it is always better to work on achieving equality than just telling someone to opt out her current plight.
It is really good to see that critical theories could be helpful in this condition instead of complicating everything without providing a solution. Please keep bringing us insightful pieces!