>On Aug 25, 2006, at 3:19 PM, info at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
>>http://www.questioningtransgender.org
>>
>>That's their little piece of propaganda bullshit.
>
>Wow:
>>there are two socially created classes of human, male and female,
>>and that there are social, economic, and power differentials
>>between these two classes that amount to the oppression and
>>domination of one over the other, we must stand opposed to trans
>>politics.
>
>That's not a "socially created" explanation, is it? They don't like
>trannies because they fuck with their binary.
>
>Doug
They claim otherwise. They claim that radfems were the first to articulate the view that gender is social constructed. OK. but, as Butler (and others) point out, they tend to espouse the view that you are made a woman by culture. Those experiences are so deep and pervasive that they simply can't be undone -- by anyone. A man who hasn't been, since birth, exposed to the oppression that is being a woman, cannot ever be a woman. No amount of living on the fringe of his so-called manhood, no amount of experience otherwise, no amount of looking like and living as a woman with surgery (or whatever bit they can afford) could mean that you're a woman.
They basically think that, since this has been allowed to happen -- that patriarchal medicine has opened up space for the possibility of transition through drugs and surgery -- then it can be nothing more and nothing less than the patriarchy helping men get what they want at the expense of women getting what they want.
Of course, they are also offended because transfolk (like .. who was the economist who transitioned again?) sometimes espouse essentialist notions of gender themselves.
They also hate postmodern theory and think that this "fad" is the result of the dominance of pomo in the academy. Pomo, they think, cultivates the notion that gender is something you can just put on and take off at whim. (What the real prob. is, I suspect, is that they are pissed that pomo displaced their hegemony in the women's studies classroom. This is why I think Ariel Levy is a radfem. all the tropes are there: disgust for pomo, disgust for race/class/gender analyses, the refusal to look at sex work as work and insist that you can't look at it that way for it would violate something (what, we're never told) -- right down to disgust with bois and transitioning.)
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org