What would a revolutionary gender politics be? I don't have a clear answer, but certainly the area is one where there aren't many clear arguments of much use. The recent debacle involving Stonewall and Julie Bindel does allow us though to think about where to start.
Julie Bindel’s nomination for the Journalist of the Year prize (which she didn’t win) at the Stonewall awards this month ignited a storm of controversy, with many within the broad 'LGBTQ community’ outraged at the organisation’s recognition of a commentator with a long record of writing which they see as ridden with ‘transphobia’. This led to a colourful demonstration outside the event, and a not so colourful counter demonstration by the 'Julie Bindel fan club'.
Bindel, the Guardian’s stable ‘radical feminist’ has come up here before. Her stance on prostitutes organising was used as an example of moralistic thinking precluding effective action in this blog entry. Clearly, as a self-described ‘good liberal’ she is pretty far from any kind of anarchist/libertarian communist position, and so we shouldn’t expect much from what she writes – interesting as it is in showing how much ‘radical’ feminism in actual practice translates into simple radical liberalism, unable to go beyond various forms of civil rights activism. Her writing on transgender issues is pretty sloppy too, and the opposition to her 'transphobia' centers around two main and contradictory arguments she has made over the past few years:
1. Gender reassignment treats gender as an internal biological condition when it is not, and therefore surgically altering the genitals of transsexuals is the mutilation of gays or lesbians who identify with aspects of the ‘wrong’ gender and who are attracted to those of the same birth gender.
2. Transsexual women are not ‘real’ women, should not be treated as such, and should not receive support as such.
The first argument comes up in a number of articles, such as this, in which Bindel writes: ‘Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?’ Claiming that ‘sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation’, she argues that ‘my concerns about the increasing acceptance of "transsexuality” as a diagnosis are based upon my feminist belief that it arises from the strong stereotyping of girls and boys into strict gender roles.’
Though of course containing its own moral assumptions in seeing choosing to alter the genitals as “mutilation”, this argument is reasonably straightforward.
The second argument was used in some of Bindel’s earlier and most controversial articles on transsexuality, in particular an article from 2004 on the case of Kimberly Nixon, a male-to-female transsexual who had a human rights ruling in her favour in Canada overturned – the woman in question had been turned down employment from a rape counselling centre on the grounds that she wasn’t a ‘real’ woman: ‘The arrogance is staggering: having not experienced life as a "woman" until middle age, Nixon assumed "she" would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.’ She then, contradictorily, argues that genders ‘...are not real. We play at them. We develop traditional masculine or feminine traits by being indoctrinated, not because we are biologically programmed to behave in those ways.’
In which case it would be impossible to make claims about who is a ‘real’ woman or not. If it is the experience of ‘being’ a woman, then for Bindel’s argument to work you would have had to have been a ‘woman’ from birth, living some shared experience that possession of a ‘natural’ vagina entitles you to irrespective of real divisions (as if a cleaner and Deborah Mearden share any meaningful commonality despite both having vulvas, much the same as if a Muslim postal worker and a Muslim entrepreneur have any meaningful commonality as part of the ‘Muslim community’); having lived as a ‘male’ (with a real cock), however this played itself out, at whatever point in your life would disqualify you. Moreover this experience of being a ‘real’ woman is only accessible to those born as such, meaning it isn’t acted because in order to work it comes down to 'natural' genital endowment. This contradicts her arguments about not accepting arbitrary, institutionalised binary sexual identities, and clearly just dresses up her own gender essentialism.
She is right about one thing though: feminism’s most vital insight and argument was to decentralise the production of gender from a given biological ‘fact’ to a contingent social relationship. Gender is acted out through norms of behaviour, speech and comportment. Interpretations of this run from the fairly general acceptance that gender and sex are two different things - biological sex being the material facts of the body, gender being the roles and behaviours assigned to binary categories of people - to more radical analyses which criticise the ways in which biological sex is already a gendered category, seeking to understand the way in which sexual organs, hormonal differences, height and the rest to have meaning within a binary gender discourse in the first place.
But either way, gender must be understood as something which is learned and acted, and that a society that we’d want to live in would involve the dismantling of binary gender identities.
It is this argument which seems to be causing so much anger in the transgender community. Ultimately it comes to clash with the underpinnings of much trangender activism. Gender reassignment surgery does reify gender, it seeks to objectify and materialise a social relation. The argument that sex change surgery makes you a man or a woman is clearly reactionary – the belief that surgery makes you more of a woman is reactionary whether it is a transsexual or Katie Price doing it. And here is the controversy. Lefties of many varieties who will criticise cosmetic body modification as the attempt to make bodies fit into binary, ideal gender types when ‘natural’ women have it done will see the same argument applied to the modification of the body by transgender people as ‘transphobia’. It is not a coincidence that gender-reassignment surgery is supported by fatwa and easily available in Iran, whilst having sex with someone with the same genital arrangement is punishable by death, as the setup there reifies heterosexist, binary gender norms.
What matters, then, is the practical implications of the best insights of feminist theory. Clearly, the violence and intimidation transgender people routinely face is unconscionable. But the question again boils down to the contradictions between the politics of affirmation and the politics of negation. This may at first seem strange. As Slavoj Žižek amongst others has argued, the difference between the politics of oppressed and marginalised groups seeking to defend themselves and the politics of class struggle is that class struggle seeks as its end point the abolition of class. “Class pride” is a reactionary concept, and though class relations can and do express themselves through communities and class identities, if class struggle is to be part of a revolutionary project rather than the affirmation of the working class within capitalism then it must abolish capitalism and with it abolish class. Class is furthermore a material position within capitalism – those who have nothing to sell but their labour and who must work for the money necessary to live, those dispossessed of ownership of capital and who must sell their labour time and labour power to those who have or administer it. It is not a sociological category, but a condition and a social relation. The struggles of women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians insofar as they are organised around the marginalised group must struggle for recognition of various kinds. But this, as so often, is an oversimplification. The various marginalised roles are themselves constituted within the process of their marginalisation – and though the material proletarian condition which is the prerequisite for capital accumulation is demonstrable in a different way to the constitution of various marginalised identities, we can still see the issue in terms of affirmation or negation: in the case of gender, either liberal feminism’s affirmation of women as bourgeois subjects with equal legal standing, or the radical project of the negation of gender binaries and with it gender identity.
So what would this look like in practice? I don’t pretend to have the answers. In the case of negating the proletarian condition, the answer is relatively straightforward: the direct communisation of the means of production, the abolition of wage labour and the replacement of the state by the construction of real human community through linked councils. Gender cannot be negated in the same way, though the same processes of seizure and transformation growing out of class antagonism. Its fairly easy to imagine that a society where the production of the entire social environment is no longer alienated would allow for a new kind of society and more radical possibilities, but its not enough to talk abstractly of revolution as being the cure-all we must invest our faith in.
But we do know where it can’t start – certainly not from the reification of binary gender identities. The task must be to destabalise and desacralise gender, and this cannot be done whilst upholding a belief in the ability to “match” bodily organs to gendered behaviour. The critique of gender cannot be held back because it offends the sensibilities of marginalised groups, and whilst we recognise the difficulties transgender people face, we can’t let those difficulties be an excuse to suspend critical thought.
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good stuff.
were you on the boards when the last transphobia accusations got thrown around, twas hilarious.
good blog. for all the insults i've had thrown at me for asking, i've never heard an argument that reconciles this contradiction.
As to where we start, to use a largely trivial example there was a recent outcry over sussex university renaming some female and male toilets 'toilets' and 'toilets with urinals' - i don't think there were actually any transexual students demanding this, so it was a bit right-on random - but it does seem to treat gender as irrelevant (an alternative would have been demanding 'transexual toilets' say). i mean i was at a festival this summer and they'd divided the toilets into male and female, as the queues grew people just started queuing for cubicles or urinals. a minor negation of gender? i mean i can't see any argument for male/female toilets rather than urnials/cubicles... as to more substantive matters, i'm equally unsure where to start, but i agree about where it can't. that in itself is a start, of sorts.
edit: i would add that i don't think there's such thing as a "revolutionary gender politics" per se, only a gender politics with a class analysis. this is because i don't think (binary or otherwise) gender roles are essential to capitalism, whilst clearly it makes extensive use of them (and has done historically; particularly with regard to 'a womans place' and reproductive labour). a capitalism freely embracing plural, self-defined roles completely decoupled from biology is perfectly conceivable, so long as those roles are arrayed within the labour-capital spectrum. this isn't to say it would be a bad thing, only it's not revolutionary without being part of a class politics.
Yeah i agree, clearly the 'queering' of heterosexism can be accomodated by capitalism reasonably well - going for a night out in the Village in manchester or even looking at some mainstream advertising which uses homoeroticism tells us that. Clearly that doesn't mean that capitalism doesn't also make use of heterosexism, but as a form of class society what is important is that it will make use of whatever contingent oppurtunities are made available for it.
So we can't necessarily see an abolition of heterosexism as 'revolutionary', as the class basis of the society is the same. But nonetheless pro-revolutionaries should have an analysis of these issues, and one that is coherent, as the lack of this has caused obvious problems not least in discussions on here. And we shouldn't see them as being secondary or diversions either, even if in my view these issues are always figured through the relations intrinsic to the total social from - capitalism. You've mentioned some good examples. Also on a more organisational level, the potential for a feminism which makes material demands of patriarchy while remaining organised on class-conscious lines has been demonstrated pretty well by the Mujeres Libres and their precursors. The historical anarchist movement has been pretty strong on that front actually.
Good post.
Just a couple of points, Joseph the articles I saw about Sussex University stated that the toilets were demanded by women to prevent male to female transsexuals using them alongside "real women."
Also, the initial blog post seems to state that all transgender people are either gays or lesbians whereas there are straight transsexuals.
Also, the catch all tag for issues around gender and sexuality "sex and sexuality", not gender:
http://www.libcom.org/tags/sex-sexuality
no sure, it's not about setting up a 'hierarchy of oppressions' or whatever, or saying that sexism's not important because struggles against it aren't inherently revolutionary. part of my argument in the politics of affirmation/negation blog was that the reformist/revolutionary dichotomy is useless - the important thing is concrete material demands for the class. women in northern ireland getting abortion rights would be such a gain (especially since wealthier women can just travel to the UK), without in any way being a threat to capital. the mujueres libres are a good example of how class struggle needs to explicitly address the particular demands of sections of the class as well as the general, or it will fail to be truly liberatory.
fwiw i'm reluctant to use the word patriarchy in a general sense in relation to liberal democratic societies with notional equality. sexism is a reality, and is used by capital (and to an extent opposed by sections of capital too), but i think the UK is a sexist society rather than a patriarchal one (like Iran say), as i don't think there's a systematic rule of men over women. open to persuasion on this though.
i know jack was really irritated by it. but he's a contrarian on stuff like this. if that's the case, it may be a case of the right thing for the wrong reasons. i mean as a trivial example of the normalisation of binary gender roles, is there any argument for male/female toilets not urinal/cubicle ones?
Ally McBeal?
lol, more radical than most lefty feminists unfortunately. i mean without wanting to drag out what was meant as a trivial aside, is there an argument against it?
Well the Spain of the 1930s was in the classic sense. Lots of feminists would use patriarchy in a much broader sense though, meaning a society which is simply dominated in terms of political and economic power by men through to one in which universal subjecthood is gendered male in various ways. I'm not quite sure how i feel about it though, if a word can have lots of different meanings and political implications its not that useful.
The argument about seeing stuff like this as of secondary importance comes more from seeing things like the demand for access to abortion being dismissed as 'not a class issue' by some communists (where the demand for access to free healthcare would never be dismissed in the same way). I'm not suggesting that people having class analysis as the foundation of their politics constitutes a hierarchy of oppressions, like I said i do think these kinds of issues are always expressed in and through the relations intrinsic to capitalism so having a coherent class politics has to be central if we're going to pose a response to capitalism as a whole. The problem is that people with good class politics often a) dismiss these kinds of issues or ignore them b) bolt on some form of liberalism to deal with them.
That's what it said in the Metro. Googling I can't find anything, but I remember thinking it seemed very weird for student union people to be say because they're usually ultra-PC. But the article was saying that women didn't want people who were basically men using their toilets.
Joseph, as for there being any arguments against it, well it's not an argument as such but I'm pretty sure the health and safety at work act requires separate gender toilets.
as you say, not really an argument that
I think I've been to one cafe in London which has unisex toilets, and they don't have any urinals at all the gits.
I am a transsexual woman - admittedly a mutualist rather than a communist - and thought I'd offer my thoughts.
When I hear gender, I think of culturally-specific gender roles.
When I hear sex, I think of biological sex. And, of course, what can be done with it.
"... surgically altering the genitals of transsexuals is the mutilation of gays or lesbians who identify with aspects of the ‘wrong’ gender and who are attracted to those of the same birth gender."
This is so wrong it defies description, but she expresses a widespread delusion. I am a moderately butch, thoroughly lesbian woman, transitioning male-to-female. I am not attracted to men, if you insist they are my birth gender (sic) - though I can be attracted to other women who are transitioning from that sex.
I grew up without being able to describe or express my transness - my feeling that those were/are the wrong parts defied both my mixed/androgynous gender roles and my male body sex, and exists nonetheless. Honestly, there are certain brain structures, such as the BSTc, where trans women are more like cis women than cis men. And one can assume the reverse for trans men, but there haven't been enough studies. It seems that we have female brains in male bodies, or the reverse. This may sound close to biological essentialism, but it has nothing to do with gender roles or sexual orientation.
Thanks.
I think the primary problem with this argument made by libertarian communists is that it assumes a totally constructionist view of gender as the basis of its argument. This is an argument that has been developed by sociologists from the 1970s feminist movement, usually in opposition to sociobiologists who argue that social roles are based on biological facts. Of course, I don't agree with what socio-biologists argue, but it's important to contextualise this argument.
The problem it seems to me is that lib/coms have not sought to engage with scientific evidence in any way on this point, I have never seen a scientific study on gender referenced in the course of these discussions. Instead, evidence is derived from weighty readings in psychoanalysis, critical theory and sociology, not the most materialistic basis for an argument really.
So, I'm not convinced either way, but I am significantly more interested in the scientific research that has been done than all the arguments of Butler, Zizek and Lacan put together. I'll have a quick look and see what I can come up with.
Here is an article found through a quick search on Google Scholar. I don't have time right now, but I can definitely find more another time. This article had 234 citations. The article was originally published in 'Nature' which is one of the most reputable scientific journals published.
A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality
By J.-N. Zhou, M.A. Hofman, L.J. Gooren and D.F. Swaab
http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtc0106.htm
Transsexuals have the strong feeling, often from childhood onwards, of having been born the wrong sex. The possible psychogenic or biological etiology of transsexuality has been the subject of debate for many years [1,2]. Here we show that the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a brain area that is essential for sexual behaviour [3,4], is larger in men than in women. A female- sized BSTc was found in male-to-female transsexuals. The size of the BSTc was not influenced by sex hormones in adulthood and was independent of sexual orientation. Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones
when i mentioned the hypothetical possibility of sexed brains on a recent thread on this i was shouted down loudly from all sides pretty much. i do think lefties are scared of biology. of course sexed brains wouldn't require social inequality any more than sexed genitalia do.
however, i'm not sure how much sexed brains would map to gender roles, which even if not 100% socially constructed (clearly they're not, women haven't been cast as caring mothers by accident, they can breastfeed for starters) are clearly a social shaping of acceptable behaviour into a neat binary that doesn't seem to fit the desires of concrete individuals.
(of course in that study, differences in brain structure in adults could themselves be the product of social construction due to neural plasticity, since the brain develops according to stimuli etc. i'm no expert on neurology though of course.)
They don't seem to... Trans people face a lot of pressure to conform to gender roles during and after transition. Cis people can usually risk people questioning their gender. Trans people can't always risk that. Nonetheless, many trans people defy gender roles. There are plenty of butch trans women and femme trans men.
that's interesting, since even if brains are indeed sexed it doesn't provide an essentialist basis for binary gender roles; i mean just a look at the variation in behaviours, characterstics, aptitudes, interests etc within non-trans biological males and females would seem to suggest that.
I'm skeptical of some of the most high profile studies about sexed brains, because if you cut through the hyperbole you can get left with very underwhelming data. Take this example which got a lot of media coverage recently, showing a 'link' between the shapes of the brains of heterosexual women and homosexual men:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/16/neuroscience.psychology
Which was critiqued here:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=256
With the conclusions written up in more sane language as:
In fact in that case the data points towards the conclusion that having male and female brain categories isn't a useful way of understanding variation, and is more ideological than anything else - hence the value of the 'lofty' theory which analyses where this categorisation comes from.
These, incidentally, are still gender roles.
transvestites- more power to them.
transexuals - need conseulling not preyed upon by charltans and the medical industry. They certainly shouldn't be took seriously when they make assertions about being born in the wrong body or other essentialist shite.
yes i wouldn't take any science on what you read in the media. it's invariably misrepresented through ignorance or sensationalism, and obviously represents another layer of ideological mediation (on top of the conclusions, which may not fit the data, and potentially the data itself, dependent on methodological choices.)
but that said, there is a knee-jerk hostility to the very possibility of sexed brains amongst lefites, that isn't there for say sexed genitalia, or the biological facticity of different skin tones (which doesn't mean there's such thing a biological 'races', which clearly are discursive categories). i mean it's not the most implausible hypothesis, bodies are sexed, and the brain is a bodily organ.
i think the fear is if brains are indeed sexed, this might map to aggregate differences in aptitude or behaviour which might provide a rationale for gender roles and/or social inequality. but this would be a reductionist lapse into the naturalistic fallacy; we don't treat women as lesser because they (generally) ovulate every month, so why do it if one or other brain region is on average a few millimetres different in size?
there are so many levels of mediation between genotype and phenotype, and from this to behaviour to politico-social status. so i'm not quite sure why the fear of biology, since only reductionist reactionaries would claim that is implies ought here (even the 'rape is natural' sociobiologists were keen to point out they weren't endorsing rape, although this was somewhat lost through the media coverage where the naturalistic fallacy is a journalistic staple.)
I don't see how *any* gender-role-driven theory can explain the brain differences, or the much weaker genetic correlations.
Here is a follow-up study to Zhou et al.: http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/85/5/2034 Kruijver et al., 2000, "Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus." It does include some of the same researchers as the earlier study. It does not concern the brain as a whole, but one, highly sexually dimorphic, structure in the midbrain.
Besides, there are plenty of people who are androgynous before and/or after transition. And there are plenty of people who adopt the opposite gender role without being transsexual e.g. Virginia Prince. The desire to switch gender roles is neither necessary nor sufficient for transsexualism.
I think that you used the analogy of skin tones is important. I mean the fact that there is variation in skin tones but that this doesn't add up to the concept of 'race' which is clearly a discursive one leads us to not taking race seriously as a biological category. In the case of there being sexual categories in brain shape, (which there may be hypothetically though the evidence I've seen doesnt look very strong) this doesn't necessarily allow us recourse to talking about 'male' and 'female' brains as they've been described in studies in order to essentialise differences in sexual orientation, driving aptitude, the clothes we want to wear etc - this is clearly a discursive category which has its own problems.
Theres clearly a difference between penises and vaginas and variation in brain shapes though, you don't have to be a lefty to see that.
Is there any possible evidence that would convince you that it's not about gender roles?
Queenemily addresses this bullshit here:
http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/transphobic-tropes-3-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Creifying-gender%E2%80%9D/
http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/transphobic-tropes-4-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cmy-theories-are-more-important-than-your-experience%E2%80%9D/
As long as I thought transition was, as you put it, "essentialist shite," I denied my deepest needs and lived in misery. Your theory fucked up my life.
That whats not about gender roles? I've just said that differentiation of brain size by sex doesn't allow us to ascribe gender roles, though there is a point there about how far we are able to talk about 'male' and 'female' as unproblematic categories I suppose. I was replying to Joseph K's post, yours crossed with mine.
even if one were to assume 'sexed' brains as a sort of vague pattern, it still wouldn't anyway justify transexualism than anything more than the reification of gender. Afterall if a person is born a woman but wants to have a sex change because they somehow "feel or know" they have a male brain isn't that a kind of circular argument, "Men have this type of brain, if I have this type of brain I should be a man", essentially erasing the possibility of women with male brains or at best implying they are some sort of mistake or error?
Ofcourse the whole notion of sexed brains is an ideological crock of shit, fuelled on a dogmatic need to assert the biological origin of differences and inequalities between men and women. The fact that it is such a popular and readily embraced assumption despite a massive lack of evidence simply belies just how deep rooted and implicitly accepted sexism is within society in a way that explicit racism simply isn't allowed to be anymore. Infact some of the studies used as evidence actually show the opposite if approached in even the most basic critical manner, for example the study about gay men and women having the same brain shape (with it's heterosexist assumption that gay men are essentially women and lesbians essentially men).
it wasn't an accident
why? because brain shape may have behavioural implications? imho sexual dimorphism only maps to essentialist gender categories if you're one of those reductionists who ignores all the levels of mediation between genotype and politics.
I think Django is arguing against the concept of gender roles per se, i.e. that they're needlessly restrictive categories for proscribing acceptable human behaviour, whether through biological rationalisation or purely social.
there's a difference between your individual means of coping with your situation and a consistent political stance on matters.
For example for many woman with chronic body issues a breast enlargement does serve as a means of giving them greater confidence and giving them some sort of resolution, that does not for a second mean that I support a politics of breast enlargement and don't hold a critique of a society and oppurtunist industry that creates such physcological crisis by upholding certain narrow ideas of beauty and womanhood.