What Is a Woman?

Article What Is a Woman?

Elsacat

Dec 11 2024, 10:44 PM

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2

This article in the New Yorker is 10 years old and remarkably little has changed. But here's something we probably wouldn't see happen today. I bolded text for emphasis:

Quote:(Lierre) Keith had an easier time at Radfems Respond, where she spoke on the differences between radicalism and liberalism. Two gender-bending punk kids who looked as if they might be there to protest left during the long opening session, on prostitution. A men’s-rights activist showed up—he later posted mocking clips from a video that he had secretly made—but said nothing during the sessions. Several trans women arrived and sat at the back, but, in fact, they were there to express solidarity, having decided that the attacks on radical feminists were both out of control and misguided. One of them, a thin, forty-year-old blonde from the Bay Area, who blogs under the name Snowflake Especial, noted that all the violence against trans women that she’s aware of was committed by men. “Why aren’t we dealing with them?” she asked.

Exactly. Why are all the violence and death threats toward "TERFs" and women? You don't see marches and protests and posters and violent tweets and Reddit screeds and all that other stuff directed toward the men who actually assault and kill transgender people. Men have a hall pass to do whatever they want to TIMs and TIFs because only women are targeted or held responsible.

Elsacat

Dec 11 2024, 10:44 PM #1

Quote:(Lierre) Keith had an easier time at Radfems Respond, where she spoke on the differences between radicalism and liberalism. Two gender-bending punk kids who looked as if they might be there to protest left during the long opening session, on prostitution. A men’s-rights activist showed up—he later posted mocking clips from a video that he had secretly made—but said nothing during the sessions. Several trans women arrived and sat at the back, but, in fact, they were there to express solidarity, having decided that the attacks on radical feminists were both out of control and misguided. One of them, a thin, forty-year-old blonde from the Bay Area, who blogs under the name Snowflake Especial, noted that all the violence against trans women that she’s aware of was committed by men. “Why aren’t we dealing with them?” she asked.

komorebi
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde

164

Dec 12 2024, 1:31 PM

Thanks for sharing - old but good article. Perhaps the tide has been turning recently, but in the last five years you wouldn't have seen someone writing about this issue in a mainstream publication so directly, and in such clear language.

Quote:Exactly. Why are all the violence and death threats toward "TERFs" and women? You don't see marches and protests and posters and violent tweets and Reddit screeds and all that other stuff directed toward the men who actually assault and kill transgender people.

I am reminded of the first rule of misogyny: women are responsible for what men do. Men may do all the raping, assaulting, and killing, but it's those evil women with their evil exclusive words and thoughts who are the real problem.

komorebi

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde

Dec 12 2024, 1:31 PM #2

Quote:Exactly. Why are all the violence and death threats toward "TERFs" and women? You don't see marches and protests and posters and violent tweets and Reddit screeds and all that other stuff directed toward the men who actually assault and kill transgender people.

YesYourNigel

Dec 16 2024, 3:13 PM

There's been a wider shift lately as minority rights have entered the mainstream to stop trying to prioritise and pander to the dominant group. Women, black people and gay people stopped trying to impress and prove themselves to straight white men because that is a hopeless cause, and instead they decided to prioritise unity and their own ideology. This moved the goals from "prove you're not inferior to people who are irrationally adamant about you being inferior, and won't listen to you anyway" to "gain strength, confidence and voice from your community to fight for equality" and it gave these communities the opportunity to redefine the wide mainstream society in a way that includes them on equal footing.

In trans communities, this shifted the goal from "Keep your head down and hide so no-one can tell what you really are" (aka stay closeted) to "Demand equal treatment and write yourself into mainstream ideas on sex and gender". The problem is that trans ideology is fundamentally incompatible with feminism, is delusional and borderline religious in nature, promotes self-destructive drugs and surgeries, and also feeds heavily off of male privilege, which it refuses to challenge so it wouldn't be "dysphoria-inducing" or "invalidaitng" to poor poor TIMs (no-one gives a shit about TIFs and besides, due to power dynamics TIFs and other NotLikeOtherGirls have always been happy to bootlick men in hopes of getting the their approval and the coveted "one of the guys" card). It's simply not possible to modify the wider narrative of human equality, dignity and rationality to accommodate misogyny, self-destructive tendencies, metaphysical gendersouls and "You can't define a chair"-sophistry, so you get either ridiculous pretzels with batshit insane pseudoscientific unethical propositions which ofc favours male socialisation when it comes to aggression, supremacist tendencies and the whole sense of entitlement over women's lives.

Men who in the past had to try to fit in among women and who actually did have many female acquaintances, suddenly developed deep resentment towards these women over them having to do nothing to exist as women other than, gasp, actually be female! How easy those women have it! And this morphed into women paradoxically becoming the only intersectionalist identity that is both a source of oppression (under feminism) and privilege (under trans ideology) for the exact same reasons.

The fact is that TIMs do need to keep their heads down because their whole existence (both being male and their ideas on womanhood) is rooted in male ignorance and privilege due to being male. There is no way to make men speaking over women or in the name of women progressive. Because trans ideology is so fundamentally misogynistic, anything other than trying to keep it subtle and hidden for damage control is going to make it apparent how destructive to women's rights it is. Trans people are in a lose-lose situation not because of any double standards or because everybody's got it out for them, but because there's simply no way to make their delusional, regressive ideology look good.

TIMs in the past knew they were always on thin ice. They had to watch out for how well they pass before using women's spaces, and trying to fit in among women was a goal that could be taken away at a moment's notice. Not that I think this was done out of any respect for women's opinions - I don't think men ever do things for that reason, which is why any "good" TIM's feminist mask quickly peels off the second it clashes with his desire to pass. TIMs generally either wish to pass to attract men, or to scam lesbians as part of wider incel/lesbian-turning male fantasies (but really many straight TIMs are notoriously unconcerned with passing in the first place). Many get off on passing as a male idea of "woman" in a wider patriarchal society where actual women don't factor much.

You can see the same resentment from men over these same women being able to choose which men are allowed in relationship or bed or even just conversation with them. That's why there's so many incels and 4channers who post male supremacist shite while also waxing philosophical about their girlsoul among other incels. Hell, most modern TIMs who grew up on internet porn barely even have women in their lives and they just jerk off to anime schoolgirls. Women are an abstract idea to them, and one that should be in open domain for everyone to make use of and profit from. Why would actual women "own" this idea? Why should they get to have a say in it? Same attitudes are prevalent with men silencing women who criticise porn, relationships, sexism etc. - men insist that women either secretly enjoy the role they've carved out for them, and if they don't, they're just man-hating prudes who shouldn't be listened to anyways.

Edited Dec 16 2024, 3:32 PM by YesYourNigel.

YesYourNigel

Dec 16 2024, 3:13 PM #3

Clover
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509

Jan 14 2025, 7:21 PM

Thanks for sharing. I think it's an interesting historical summary of radical feminism, especially transgender-exclusive radical feminists. From my understanding, the phrase transgender-exclusive radical feminist (TERF) is pretty new (since transgender is a new phrase), so it's interesting to see stances from the "OG TERFs" of the 70s.

I wanted to specifically write about the audacity of the transgender-identifying men interviewed in this article.

Quote:The last time a feminist of any standing published an attack on transgenderism as caustic as “Gender Hurts” was in 1979, when Janice Raymond produced “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.” Raymond was a lesbian ex-nun who became a doctoral student of the radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly, at Boston College. Inspired by the women’s-health movement, Raymond framed much of “The Transsexual Empire” as a critique of a patriarchal medical and psychiatric establishment. [...]

One of the [transgender-identifying men] Raymond wrote about was Sandy Stone, a performance artist and academic who this fall will teach digital arts and new media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When Raymond’s book was published, Stone was a recording engineer at Olivia Records, a women’s-music collective in Los Angeles. In the late sixties, after graduating from college, and while still living as a man, [he] had bluffed [his] way into a job at New York’s famed Record Plant recording studio, where [he] worked with Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground. (For a time, [he] slept in the studio basement, on a pile of Hendrix’s capes.) [He] moved to the West Coast and transitioned in 1974. Olivia approached [him] soon afterward; experienced female recording engineers were hard to find.

So hard to find that Olivia couldn't manage to find one and had to settle for a man pretending to be one. 😔 With improper female pronouns being used for Stone, this story almost read like a glass-ceiling-shattering woman. No wonder pronouns are like Rohypnol.

Quote:Stone became a member of the collective the next year and moved into a communal house that it rented, where [he] was the only trans woman [sic] among a dozen or so [...] lesbians. According to “The Transsexual Empire,” [his] presence was a major source of controversy in lesbian-feminist circles, but Stone insists that it was Raymond who created the dissension. “When the book came out, we were deluged with hate mail,” Stone says. “Up to that point, we were pretty much happy campers, making our music and doing our political work.”

Stone received death threats, but ultimately it was the threat of a boycott that drove [him] out of the collective. [He] eventually earned a doctorate in philosophy at Santa Cruz. In 1987, Stone wrote an essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which is widely seen as the founding text of transgender studies. It’s still taught around the world; a second French edition is about to be published, and Stone has received a request to allow a Catalan translation.

1. It was interesting to learn that there was a rebuttal to the The Transexual Empire written by a transgender-identifying man.

1a. Naming his rebuttal to Raymond's book criticizing transexual gender politics after a fucking Star Wars movie is like top-tier male nerd shit omg. I just. So fucking lame I just can't.

2. I am very curious why Raymond would just make up a bunch of lies about Stone's participation in a lesbian music commune being controversial. Certainly, people can lie about such things, like Naomi Wolf's exaggerated anorexia statistics in The Beauty Myth, but why would Raymond feel the need to do that? Surely if there were no controversy, Raymond could still just write her own thoughts on the idea of a transgender-identifying man pretending to be a lesbian and participating in a lesbian commune.

I think about the fact how many women change their behavior around men. Like, a group of women will stop talking about something once a man enters the room. And men are completely oblivious to this, because they don't understand sex differences. Am I really expected to believe a group of lesbian women viewed a man pretending to be a woman completely as if he was a woman? That they did not alter their behavior in the slightest? Or that they felt comfortable bringing up any concerns with such a thing? And a few paragraphs above the following is stated:

Quote:In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said:

Quote:I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Stone claims that Raymond was the cause of dissention, and yet six years prior to the publication of the transsexual empire, Robin Morgan was criticizing men pretending to be women in women's/lesbian's spaces. The dissent was already starting as early as 1973.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing all this up is because I really had to do a double-take when I read the ending of the article and was like is this interviewed person for real? Is this the same transgender identifying man as they spoke about earlier in this conclusion?

Quote:One of the trans women [sic] who showed up at the Radfems Respond conference, a thirty-five-year-old software engineer from California, with a tiny nose stud and long brown hair, agrees. [He] understands why trans women are hurt by their exclusion from Michfest and other female-only events and facilities, saying, “It’s not really wanting to invade space. It’s a deep-seated wanting to belong.” But, [he] adds, “if you’re identifying with women, shouldn’t you be empathizing with women?”

Okay, I have to go off on a tangent though. He claims "it's not really wanting to invade space, it's a wanting to belong" yeah well I'm sure a rapist would claim "he doesn't really want to rape, he just wants to shove his dick in a woman without her consent." It's so ridiculous. Instead of trying to force your "wanting to belong" to something you can never belong to, go find a space with people you actually can belong with. (Lucky for him there's enough TIMs nowadays he can go do just that. And yet they keep demanding access to the ever elusive "womyn-born-womyn" spaces... why?)

Quote:Sandy Stone shares this view—up to a point. Of the radical feminists’ position, [he] says, “It’s my personal belief, from speaking to some of these people at length, that it comes from having been subject to serious trauma at the hands of some man, or multiple men.” [He] adds, “You have to respect that. That’s their experience of the world.” But the pain of radical feminists, [he] insists, can’t trump trans rights. “If it were a perfect world, we would find ways to reach out and find ways of mutual healing,” [he] says. But, as it is, “I am going to have to say, It’s your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you.”

The fucking audacity of those last two sentences. Especially when earlier in the article it talks about how much female-only organizations and events, like Michfest, have been destroyed due to being forced to either accept transgender-identifying men or risk boycott.

But if women dare to tell TIMs "It’s your place to stay out of spaces where [exclusively] female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you," here come the death and rape threats!!

This article has to be written by a crypto-terf being super on the nose, right?! Christ, lol.

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Clover

Kozlik's regular account 🍀🐐

Jan 14 2025, 7:21 PM #4

Quote:The last time a feminist of any standing published an attack on transgenderism as caustic as “Gender Hurts” was in 1979, when Janice Raymond produced “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.” Raymond was a lesbian ex-nun who became a doctoral student of the radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly, at Boston College. Inspired by the women’s-health movement, Raymond framed much of “The Transsexual Empire” as a critique of a patriarchal medical and psychiatric establishment. [...]

One of the [transgender-identifying men] Raymond wrote about was Sandy Stone, a performance artist and academic who this fall will teach digital arts and new media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When Raymond’s book was published, Stone was a recording engineer at Olivia Records, a women’s-music collective in Los Angeles. In the late sixties, after graduating from college, and while still living as a man, [he] had bluffed [his] way into a job at New York’s famed Record Plant recording studio, where [he] worked with Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground. (For a time, [he] slept in the studio basement, on a pile of Hendrix’s capes.) [He] moved to the West Coast and transitioned in 1974. Olivia approached [him] soon afterward; experienced female recording engineers were hard to find.

Quote:Stone became a member of the collective the next year and moved into a communal house that it rented, where [he] was the only trans woman [sic] among a dozen or so [...] lesbians. According to “The Transsexual Empire,” [his] presence was a major source of controversy in lesbian-feminist circles, but Stone insists that it was Raymond who created the dissension. “When the book came out, we were deluged with hate mail,” Stone says. “Up to that point, we were pretty much happy campers, making our music and doing our political work.”

Stone received death threats, but ultimately it was the threat of a boycott that drove [him] out of the collective. [He] eventually earned a doctorate in philosophy at Santa Cruz. In 1987, Stone wrote an essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which is widely seen as the founding text of transgender studies. It’s still taught around the world; a second French edition is about to be published, and Stone has received a request to allow a Catalan translation.

Quote:In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said:

Quote:I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Quote:One of the trans women [sic] who showed up at the Radfems Respond conference, a thirty-five-year-old software engineer from California, with a tiny nose stud and long brown hair, agrees. [He] understands why trans women are hurt by their exclusion from Michfest and other female-only events and facilities, saying, “It’s not really wanting to invade space. It’s a deep-seated wanting to belong.” But, [he] adds, “if you’re identifying with women, shouldn’t you be empathizing with women?”

Quote:Sandy Stone shares this view—up to a point. Of the radical feminists’ position, [he] says, “It’s my personal belief, from speaking to some of these people at length, that it comes from having been subject to serious trauma at the hands of some man, or multiple men.” [He] adds, “You have to respect that. That’s their experience of the world.” But the pain of radical feminists, [he] insists, can’t trump trans rights. “If it were a perfect world, we would find ways to reach out and find ways of mutual healing,” [he] says. But, as it is, “I am going to have to say, It’s your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you.”

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YesYourNigel

Jan 20 2025, 1:38 PM

Quote:So hard to find that Olivia couldn't manage to find one and had to settle for a man pretending to be one. 😔 With improper female pronouns being used for Stone, this story almost read like a glass-ceiling-shattering woman.

Oh god this makes me fucking RAGE when I see men bumble their way into powerful positions via their boys' club respect, lack of accountability and chumminess in ways that would be decidedly impossible or unsafe for women (there was a few times I clocked these stories about TIMs solely by what kinds of things they were doing that would've been off-limits to actual women), and then prance around talking about how real women are such privileged [misogynistic slurs] for not accepting their most oppressed 🌸pink ladyfemale girlprincess UwU 🌸 experiences, all while drying their male tears with their male-made money.

Quote:1a. Naming his rebuttal to Raymond's book criticizing transexual gender politics after a fucking Star Wars movie is like top-tier male nerd shit omg. I just. So fucking lame I just can't.

omg 🤣
I am curious to know what the counter-arguments presented in the book would be because I'm positively starved for any trans arguments that at least try to be sensible even if superficially, like stuff that a normal person might find convincing even if it's manipulative and full of fallacies, instead of literal appeals to kindergarten-level magical thinking. Though I imagine it's just going to be skirting around the issue, gaslighting women that male violence isn't a problem, or if it is, that NiceGuys should get special treatment because they're just so nice like that.

Or hell, maybe they don't even have to pretend to be nice - merely saying they're women means they deserve to be treated as women because SeLf-iDeNtiTy, which is the absolute worst most genocidal thing to deny to someone for...some reason. Well, I guess it's bad to deny it to trans people at least, because I don't see anyone get their pitchforks out over a white person's claims to asian-ness or someone's Messiah identity being questioned.

Quote:I am very curious why Raymond would just make up a bunch of lies about Stone's participation in a lesbian music commune being controversial.

Did you know that, according to men, we don't have a patriarchy problem and feminism is just about a few crazy misandrist divisive women who happened to have a bad experience with rare bad men? It's true! I mean, men sure have never experienced other men being creeps to them, or gotten dismissed on the basis of being women, so they don't know what all those over-reacting women are on about. And if they have noticed a slight inkling of it, like all the news articles about murdered women, or all the dehumanising language men use on women and never vice versa, well, it's just a few weird once-in-a-lifetime exceptions, or it's just "jokes".

Trans activists love to hold two contradictory kinds of views: that their identity is very DUH and accepted everywhere and of COURSE everyone uses "woman" to refer to anyone identifying as a woman and you're just out of touch and disrespectful if you don't, but also...trans people are somehow the most oppressed group in existence because everyone thinks it's insane to claim womanhood on thr basis of pretend-calling your asshole a vagina.

Quote:“It’s my personal belief, from speaking to some of these people at length, that it comes from having been subject to serious trauma at the hands of some man, or multiple men.” [He] adds, “You have to respect that. That’s their experience of the world.”

Love how the sheer extent of misogyny is subtly dismissed as "that's just a few women's extreme experiences with a couple of individual men". Like, no, dude, it's objective fact that men resent women and terrorise them en masse as a result of their centuries-long supremacist ideology. It's not just a few women being emotional.

Also I wonder if he tries to cash in the "I respect your weird personal experiences with this ✌"""patriarchy"""✌ thing you claim exists" in exchange for "You better respect that I experience a pink ladybrain that entitles me to destroy women's protections". I've seen them try to pull that.

Edited Jan 21 2025, 12:45 AM by YesYourNigel.

YesYourNigel

Jan 20 2025, 1:38 PM #5

Quote:So hard to find that Olivia couldn't manage to find one and had to settle for a man pretending to be one. 😔 With improper female pronouns being used for Stone, this story almost read like a glass-ceiling-shattering woman.

Quote:1a. Naming his rebuttal to Raymond's book criticizing transexual gender politics after a fucking Star Wars movie is like top-tier male nerd shit omg. I just. So fucking lame I just can't.

Quote:I am very curious why Raymond would just make up a bunch of lies about Stone's participation in a lesbian music commune being controversial.

Quote:“It’s my personal belief, from speaking to some of these people at length, that it comes from having been subject to serious trauma at the hands of some man, or multiple men.” [He] adds, “You have to respect that. That’s their experience of the world.”

Clover
Kozlik's regular account 🍀🐐

509

Jan 21 2025, 12:22 PM

(Jan 20 2025, 1:38 PM)YesYourNigel I am curious to know what the counter-arguments presented in the book would be because I'm positively starved for any trans arguments that at least try to be sensible even if superficially, like stuff that a normal person might find convincing even if it's manipulative and full of fallacies, instead of literal appeals to kindergarten-level magical thinking.

Looks like it's available to read free online here: https://transreads.org/the-empire-strikes-back-a-posttranssexual-manifesto/

So if we ever want to give it a read-through we can make a new thread that goes over it and possibly give rebuttals and commentary lol. (Though I haven't read Raymond's The Transsexual Empire yet, it's on my list. So I may be missing some context.)

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Clover

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Jan 21 2025, 12:22 PM #6

(Jan 20 2025, 1:38 PM)YesYourNigel I am curious to know what the counter-arguments presented in the book would be because I'm positively starved for any trans arguments that at least try to be sensible even if superficially, like stuff that a normal person might find convincing even if it's manipulative and full of fallacies, instead of literal appeals to kindergarten-level magical thinking.

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YesYourNigel

Jan 22 2025, 9:46 AM

I assumed it would be available online but my thoughts were more like...do I have the patience to read a whole book if it can't even be assed to make a point with higher effort mental gymnastics than "transwomen are women because any women who say otherwise are insensitive b*tches and also male violence over women isn't even that big of a deal", but now that I see it's only 16 pages, we should totally do it!

Though I guess it would help if we had someone who had more of a context of the original book in case it gets referenced.

Edited Jan 22 2025, 10:06 AM by YesYourNigel.

YesYourNigel

Jan 22 2025, 9:46 AM #7

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