Meghan Murphy quits rabble

So, who are our mods now?

It's a different issue now, Winston. Previously, a group accused her of racism and transphobia and tried to get her "fired" from rabble (I put that in quotes because she didn't have a paid position here). Now Murphy has removed herself from rabble.

Here's some of that horribly transphobic article to which rabble objects:

By degendering language around our bodies, we erase the fact of the oppression of women on the basis of our physical bodies. It's like this:

Pointing out how offensive it is to call women "menstruators" is not transphobic.

i agree with both you Sineed and Meghan Murphy.

it's bs.

if women who can bear children are othered into nothing different to see here then how in the hell are we going to fight the oppression of ourselves and our bodies for us to provide society with children?

there's no position from which we can address our oppression.

this is just another form of oppression imv.

I think that Catchfire's on hiatus, so it's just MegB, with occasional assists from oldgoat, so far as I know.

No, I got that (which is why I refered to changing the decision on both sides). Somebody unlinked her blog, which precipitated that decision.

We live in a world where there are over 3 billion of us, and in no place do we have total reproductive rights or autonomy over our bodies. In no country is there parity with men in terms of who holds power, or who earns the most, or who has the most. This oppression is based on biology, not identity. The fact that post-modernist queer theory posits that we can identify our way into or out of our physical bodies does not mean such a premise is based on anything other than wishful thinking.

Our physical bodies are our most basic contact point with reality. So the answer to your question is yes, transmen are included.

Meghan explains it best:

It's like this: gender is a hierarchy, with women as the oppressed class. Using gender-neutral language to describe something specific to women's bodies, that is actually responsible for their oppression, is not a neutral act, but serves to ignore the reality of this oppression.

offs

go ahead magoo menstruate and have a baby.

you can do mental gymnastics all you want.

Why couldn't Meghan have left it at saying "cis women are the only people who can give birth"?  That would have been biologically correct and would have made the point she was, I think, trying to make about recognizing historic cis female oppression, without getting into the territory of apppearing to argue that trans women shouldn't "count" as women(and should, instead, be seen as male oppressors who are simply pretending to be women, and whose recognition AS women would undermine feminism at an existential level-an argument which, taken to a logical extreme ends up dovetailing with the right-wing transphobic argument for "bathroom bills"). 

I agree that she was owed a response and an explanation(any writer whose article is first published and then removed from a website is owed an explanation for the removal of the article-that is simply a basic level of respect and courtest to which anyone is entitled), and she should have been offered the chance to defend the article or to revise it to clarify her intent, but the removal isn't entirely unjustified.

Trans women ARE women, and it is both transphobic and sexist to define female identity primarily in terms of reproductive function.  If femaleness is defined solely by giving birth, do we then state that women who are childless by choice, or due to health issues, or who are past childbearing age are NOT women?  Wasn't one of the points of the feminist project to free women from the repressive concept of biology-as-destiny?

 

 

And you can be post menopausal and still need to buy pads. Frankly I found the terminology pretty awkward and stilted too, not only because it reduces people to a function.

But I did recognize it as a poorly-executed attempt at inclusion, not an attack. Which is why I really don't like where Murphy goes with her rhetoric on some of these issues.

And I feel pretty much the same about the pile-on she gets in these threads. Yeah she has strong opinions on it, and yeah I do find some of them objectionable in in a similar way to how I find Mr. Johnson's views objectionable. The difference is I think she has some things to say which are of greater value, and most importantly, her opinion on gender is actually coming from a feminist analysis which makes sense and points out some deep flaws and inequities in our society (even where she goes with it is wrong, in my opinion). It isn't all just based on the right to do whatever you want, and lame arguments about protecting English, and rote memorization.

But both wind up attacking marginalized people, which is a problem.

Having said that, I didn't actually post here to try and hash that out, because we aren't going to do it. My only concern here is that for some reason she has decided to remove her blog. Whether what precipitated that was an inadvertent mistake or by intention, I do think it would be better if both sides changed their minds and that her blog was still present here, because it is an important perspective.

I can appreciate this is a serious matter for both sides of this divide, but is all this bile and vitriol really necessary, especially considering it is not going to change anyone's opinion? We manage to accommodate divisive (and offensive) issues like this in other areas. Why not here, epecially considering we are talking about an important voice within a marginalized group?

(edit)

And Ken, this is the feminist forum, and that is where her analysis comes from. Maybe you should go read what she is talking about before calling her names, and dismissing her as reactionary.

Yeah it is harsh, but sitting in a position of privilege and wondering why that bitterness is there says more about our ignorance than their anger.

 

 

Ken, there's layers and layers to this, beyond the biological. I think the first point Megan is trying to make is that the oppression of women does have its basis in biology. But there's more to it. While accepting trans women as women, we also have to acknowledge some differences in experience. Trans women have largely grown up boys to men. Their socialization has been different. They cannot speak to experiencing expectations and limits imposed on females from the cradle. So they're stepping into something at a later date and demanding that the conversation and the focus be modified in all cases to reflect them. Gee, does this sound familiar to anyone?

There's also the issue of essentialism. The idea that one has a "female brain" goes largely against the best science we have on sex differences, or the argument that one has always been female inside a biologically male body reinforces the idea that women are fundamentally and essentially different than men. Basically, essentialism asserts that there are Seperate but equal spheres for men and women - that men don't nurture because they are men and women just aren't good at math, when the reality is that there is so much individual variation and overlap as to make statistical difference negligible and potentially at least partly based in socialization. That complicates the goal of equality. This is feminism 101.

That's not to say that trans people should not be included in feminism. Of course they should. It's a big tent, after all. But it's complicated and there needs to be dialogue. There are entrenched parties on both sides, and they both have valid points to make. It's going to take some time to shake out.

 

I'm working on my application.

Right. So we do have a very small number of exceptions in the trans man group. Most trans men don't seem to want to get pregnant, however. So while exceptions can be acknowledged, this is a somewhat different case.

I suppose the question there is: Is a trans man facing the same discriminations as cis women in regard to reproduction? Does it impact, for example, income and job prospects? Does the trans man, after giving birth, find himself the default primary caregiver? What issues overlap and what issues don't?

I don't really have the answers to those questions, but I would argue the overall issues for feminists around reproduction don't chnage as the vast majority affected by those issues are cis women.

PS: I don't really like the "cis" thing. I use it for expendience, but it has always felt like a label I had no say in adopting.

Agreed that trans women weren't raised as women and didn't face the same oppression from birth(although I'd guess that they did face their own oppression in terms of having to spend years and years hiding their truth and living in public denial of that truth, as has been the case in a different way with lesbians, bisexuals of both traditional genders, and gay men, some of whom lived lives of race and class privilege even while hiding in plain sight).  I doubt that trans women are disputing this point(though I can't claim to speak for them).  And dialog is essential.  But it's hard to see how dialog can be achieved with the elements of cis feminism who simply don't accept the validity of trans women as a group and, especially, those who still see trans women as possessing "male privilege".  It's hard to imagine what privilege trans women could posssibly have over cis women, or of how their existence in some way threatens the anti-oppression struggle of cis women.  It doesn't sound as if Meghan accepts that gender dysphoria is a real state of benig, or that she sees it as something a person can get over.  And from my perspective as a cis man, it's hard for me to imagine a less-privileged person than, say, a trans woman of color.

Frankly, this reads to me(and I recognize my status as an outsider to this debate) as one oppressed group refusing to recognise the oppression of another opprressed group.  But I need to learn more about this and I'm sorry if anything I posted was unconscious cis-mansplaining.

It's not about oppression, though. It's about socialization and how that socialization teaches one how to engage with the world. Trans women who grow up regarded as male are taught different ways to approach things. They are taught a level of entitlement that most girl children are not. And there are times where that way of engaging exacerbates the argument between how much we shift our language or positions on issues that primarily relate to cis women. And there is dispute about this - it's often called "violence" to point out that, hey, you and I grew up in different circumstances and while some of your circumstances were painful to you, there are some things you're not reflecting on. It's another sort of intersectionality, along with race and class, but referencing it is considered "erasure".

I don't think it's true that feminists don't accept the validity of trans women. What some feminists are saying is that there are aspects of the experience of having always been female that is not the same as the trans experience of being treated as male and then later treated as female. That privilege may not be in effect currently, but it shapes and informs the experience of the individual differently. Not better, not worse, but different - and sometimes that will affect how feminist concerns are framed.

I don't know what Meghan thinks of gender dysphoria. It's not something that I as a feminist would argue against, but I also can't speak to that. If someone wants to live life as a woman, have at it and welcome to the struggle. It's not up to me to tell that person they can't. On the other hand, I wouldn't take kindly to that person telling me that my life experience as a female is invalidated because it isn't inclusive of her experience as transgender any more than I would expect a feminist of colour to include my experience as a white woman in how she approaches feminism.

Not at all. The oppression is recognized. It's just not necessarily being granted primacy in all discussions.