Sunday, September 21, 2008
This Will be Both Anticlimactic And Brief
Apologies, work has been crazy-busy this past week and yesterday was Open House 2008 so I've not had as much blogging opportunity as I might normally have.
Following on from here..., Miss Andrea said:
All oppressed groups have one thing in common: their desire to be treated with all the respect and rights which should be given to all humans.
But the desire to be treated as a gender is not what all other groups demand -- doubly important when considering that gender itself contains unequal power dynamics. By demanding to be treated as category of gender, transsexualism is significantly divergent from the norm, who all seek full humanity.
I'm asking, "if the demand is fundamentally different, then how is it possible that the way society approaches transgenderism should be identifical to how society approaches all those other groups?"
And the only reasonable answer is: it shouldn't.
Btw, I'm not "erasing the transsexual's existence" and have no wish to do so. I understand that the need to switch genitalia and/or gender roles is a NEED of certain individuals. I am merely pointing out that the way transfolk would have society frame the entire issue is not accurate.
I'm asking you to think about how an accurate framing would effect society's approach to transgenderism.
And unsurprisingly I disagree. Transwomen (and with Miss Andrea it is always male-to-female transsexual women, except when it's sometimes some small subsection of that) wanting to be seen as a gender being completely different from all other oppressed groups only works if you consider 'female' as having absolutely nothing to do with the sex of the body, the sex of the mind, the role of the body in society and the rolls of different genders in society. No-one is talking about theoretical shapes that exist only in ideaspace here (though I've sometimes felt I'm a isosceles triangle in a man's body) so trying to pretend as though we are is not useful.
Following on from here..., Miss Andrea said:
All oppressed groups have one thing in common: their desire to be treated with all the respect and rights which should be given to all humans.
But the desire to be treated as a gender is not what all other groups demand -- doubly important when considering that gender itself contains unequal power dynamics. By demanding to be treated as category of gender, transsexualism is significantly divergent from the norm, who all seek full humanity.
I'm asking, "if the demand is fundamentally different, then how is it possible that the way society approaches transgenderism should be identifical to how society approaches all those other groups?"
And the only reasonable answer is: it shouldn't.
Btw, I'm not "erasing the transsexual's existence" and have no wish to do so. I understand that the need to switch genitalia and/or gender roles is a NEED of certain individuals. I am merely pointing out that the way transfolk would have society frame the entire issue is not accurate.
I'm asking you to think about how an accurate framing would effect society's approach to transgenderism.
And unsurprisingly I disagree. Transwomen (and with Miss Andrea it is always male-to-female transsexual women, except when it's sometimes some small subsection of that) wanting to be seen as a gender being completely different from all other oppressed groups only works if you consider 'female' as having absolutely nothing to do with the sex of the body, the sex of the mind, the role of the body in society and the rolls of different genders in society. No-one is talking about theoretical shapes that exist only in ideaspace here (though I've sometimes felt I'm a isosceles triangle in a man's body) so trying to pretend as though we are is not useful.
Labels: feminism, men, transgenderism, women
