jessica murray
the comments on this blog seem to completely ignore the third wave criticism of agency involved with accepting "patriarchal" norms of femininity, or the female power that comes with accepting them. instead, they view women as this monolithic entity that all thinks the same way and has the same opinions. what that does is erases identity in favour of a different kind of oppressive paradigm - one where women are merely chained to a different collectivist ideal. it's no solution, it's just a new type of oppression.

now, certainly a lot of women profess a lot of discomfort at being unable or unwilling to uphold these expectations, and a truly free society would acknowledge that and lift those requirements. i'm going to skip over my anarchistic opposition to a portion of this thinking; if the argument is about how to climb the hierarchy, i need to interject that we ought not have a hierarchy at all. but, this is in some ways "next level" and beyond any kind of immediate concern.

what needs to be addressed is why so many women *don't* feel such a violent reaction. and, on a base level, it has to be acknowledged that it couldn't continue without mass consent. at some point, you need to concede that the reason that so many women are so ok with this is that they are really ok with this. not due to biological determinism, and only partly due to conditioning - mostly due to conscious, individual choice. that doesn't negate your own personal reaction, or delegitimize your own desire to get out of it, but it does necessitate a level of mutual respect for the opinions and desires of others.

when you get to that point, it's no longer such a jump to see how some people born with penises can identify with some concepts of traditional femininity. it's a social construct, disconnected from biology. if people born with vaginas can identify with it, it follows that people born with penises can, too - and that is base, egalitarian logic. it doesn't all come bundled together, of course. i don't make any sense when pushed into a male role, but that doesn't mean i'm going to let myself get chained to a kitchen counter and make sandwiches on command. rather, i'm going to uphold the same concepts of female empowerment that my third wave allies uphold - i'm an individual person with individual opinions and individual aspirations. it just happens to be that, when compiled together, those opinions and aspirations fit into one arbitrary binary partition far better than the other one.

none of this applies to drag queens, who tend not to transition for this precise reason - they don't find themselves on that side of the arbitrarily constructed binary, they just like to put on a costume from time to time and pretend they're somebody they aren't.

www.feministcurrent.com/2014/04/25/why-has-drag-escaped-critique-from-feminists-and-the-lgbtq-community/

Anna
This whole comment makes me sad. I bothered to type out a response that points out the glaring inaccuracies and erasure, but then I realized: this person doesn't care. If they cared, they would never have posted such an ignorant, offensive comment in a feminist space. They would have read the words of the women here, and analyzed their own position. But they didn't do that. Instead, they either ignored the words of the women here, or they read them but disregarded them. And then they gave us paragraphs that others before them have written here, paragraphs that have been disproved and refuted.

So, I'm not giving this person the benefits of my time and effort today, because it will be wasted. It's too bad they keep making the points for us: talk over women, ignore women's words, downplay/disregard women's experiences, tell women what's the correct way to do gender, etc. etc.

Poor thirdwavers, can't see the forest OR the trees, just the pretty branches.

jessica murray
see, i don't really consider you rad fems to really be "feminists", because you don't seem to understand equality - you just want to enforce your warped concepts of masculinity on women, and entirely erase femininity in the process. you seem to think women would behave exactly like men if they weren't brainwashed otherwise, that women exist in some kind of natural hobbessian state. i actually find this very misogynistic; it's typical right-wing bullshit, hidden in the typical foucaldian conservative disguise. you don't seem to want to liberate women, you seem to want to destroy femininity.

i've read your words and decided you're not just incorrect, but you need to be debated and ultimately held accountable for your oppression in denying and erasing my identity. you do not have a monopoly on womanhood because you were born with a vagina. rather than pretend you're beyond criticism, you need to open your mind and listen to what i'm telling you.

and, again: this princess complex you're demonstrating is not feminism. it's misogyny.

i should be more precise: who is the topic of conversation here? it's not you, it's me. that means you need to listen to me, not that i need to listen to you.

mary
" needs to be addressed is why so many women *don’t* feel such a violent reaction. and, on a base level, it has to be acknowledged that it couldn’t continue without mass consent. at some point, you need to concede that the reason that so many women are so ok with this is that they are really ok with this. not due to biological determinism, and only partly due to conditioning – mostly due to conscious, individual choice. that doesn’t negate your own personal reaction, or delegitimize your own desire to get out of it, but it does necessitate a level of mutual respect for the opinions and desires of others."

Chattel slavery was legal for thousands of years not solely because of brute force. Slaves were trained to think of their status as natural. We are facing the same dutiful obedience to capitalism. It's obvious and tragic that people can learn to accept their own subservience and even take pleasure in it.

Many opinions don't warrant respect because they condone structural inequality.

jessica murray
i don't think you understood what i typed. please try again.

Meghan Murphy
Perhaps if people are having trouble understanding what you typed, you might consider making your points more clear. I'm having trouble deciphering your arguments, as I mentioned earlier.

jessica murray
i think i dropped a few words from the initial post , but it was clear from context.

“the comments on this blog seem to completely ignore the third wave criticism of (how second wavers deny the) agency involved with accepting “patriarchal” norms of femininity, or the female power that comes with accepting them.”

if you're still not sure where i'm coming from, i'd suggest reading up a little on it. i can't outline the entire third wave criticism in this post. i meant to reference something that was already understood. but, i took your post as a facetious grammatical attack.

as for this post, i'm trying to get across the idea that you're erasing agency - and the response i'm getting is to erase agency. again: it's incredibly patronizing to tell people that their thoughts are not their own.

and i need to reiterate: this is a point that rad fems are going to have to eventually concede. you can't hold on to this forever, in the face of so many women pushing back on it. you're just isolating yourself.

what you can say is that *you* reject these concepts. what you can't say is that *women* reject them - or at least not all of them. we're all going to accept and reject different aspects. liberation is the ability to make those choices, and live freely within them. and, once you take that step, the trans issue clarifies itself...

Meghan Murphy
False consciousness is an unpopular concept in today's 'Agency is Everywhere!' neoliberal culture, but it's still a real thing. Plenty of oppressed people are seemingly content with their own oppression, women in particular.

jessica murray
i'm glad that you know what i want and should want, meghan. what should have i for breakfast tomorrow?

Meghan Murphy
I have no idea what you want. But that's not what is being debated here... Whether or not any individual 'wants' masculinity or femininity is irrelevant. Both remain part of an oppressive hierarchy that hurts women.

jessica murray
the oppression is the enforcement. would it shock you if the enforcement were removed and women made these choices anyways? woman telling women what to be, what to want, how to live, etc is not different. i'm not going to enforce that on you. i expect the same in return. i have agency. i make these choices. telling me (or other women) otherwise is doing exactly the same thing that you're criticizing.

and, it's why you have this cis distinction. i'm not going to pretend i was born with a uterus - i'm transgendered, i'm not schizophrenic. i'm not going to stand up and talk about contraception, or any of the other things that are inherently specific to the biological female sex.

but, excuse me for pushing back against the idea that my thoughts are not my own. it's pretty patronizing.

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(several deleted posts)

jessica murray
all of your posts here are incoherent. if you agree that gender is a social construct (as i do) then you agree it can be arbitrarily assigned to people with either birth sex, because you realize it exists independently of biology. otherwise, you're merely contradicting yourself.

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jessica murray
i'm a transwoman that wears (purple-pink) sneakers, (tight) jeans and tshirts and tank tops. most transwomen i've met are similar in terms of fashion decisions.

two things.

1) it's mostly a media stereotype.
2) perhaps you've met transwomen without realizing they're transwomen.

drag queens generally identify as gay men, not as transgendered. nothing is absolute, but it's the overwhelming trend. further, transwomen tend to prefer to fit in than stand out - that's the point.

i think the answer to this quandary is that, by becoming the patriarchal-enforced concept of "women", they're actually expressing an internalized perspective of their suppressed heterosexual feelings, and becoming the women they would desire. because strict heterosexuality and homosexuality are as socially constructed as masculinity and femininity, and they are in truth bisexual like everybody else, but can't deal with it.

is it degrading? well, it can be. i don't like these shows, either, and also tend to avoid them. but it's more complicated than that, because it's acting out a repressed heterosexual impulse - it's sexist on a pretty base level, which is *why* it's so accepted.

Anthony L
If Jenner decided he was a black man instead of a woman, painted his face black and made a play on all the stereotypes of what makes a person "black", would he be given this same worship, or would he be called a racist? Serious question, no straw man arguments.

deathtokoalas
with jenner, specifically, i'm not 100% comfortable making this argument - i think you have a mild point. but, more generally, the idea is that the personality already aligns with the effeminate, meaning the individual is actually functionally impersonating being male and the transition eliminates the fraud. you have to begin with the assumption that humans are variable, and the idea of "female" and "male" - on a psychological level - is actually a completely false human construct to begin with.

but, you actually don't generally see transwomen pushing stereotypes like this. you generally see drag queens pushing stereotypes like this. i'll get back to this.

now, is "being black" a similar false construct? i'd argue it mostly is. there's nothing more inherently "black" about hip-hop than there is inherently "female" about corsets. so, you have to look at context...

let's take a step back and actually look at the scenario of a drag performer, instead. is performing in drag different than back face? i'd have difficulty accepting that there's a difference between being a "female impersonator" and a "black impersonator" on the level of what's actually being done. but, there's a big difference in context. "blackface" isn't a problem on the level of the actual make-up, it's a problem on the level of it promoting negative racial attitudes. i don't really have a problem with a white guy being barack obama for halloween - i think this can be done tastefully and the pc reaction prohibiting it altogether is kneejerking and overreacting. in that sense, i may spin the issue around and argue from the opposite perspective - that, if done without implying something racist, impersonating a black person is not more offensive than performing in drag.

the difference is that i've never met - or seen in print - any comparable reaction to drag performances, for the precise reason that they don't tend to be degrading. the closest is the (mostly accurate...) feminist argument that drag performers are interpreting the female through the male gaze in the first place; that is, that everybody in the room understands that this "female impersonator" is only impersonating the female in the context of a warped patriarchal concept of it. it's consequently actually an expression of masculinity.

but, this is a valid point to raise. and i'm interested in seeing what further reactions to it are.