#transwashing

You know, I'm pretty unhappy with the Wonderful Acceptance of Trans Women in Europe being used as a way to show how unenlightened, backward and barbaric Them Foreigners are. There are a couple of reasons for that, perhaps you can guess them.

Here's an exercise for you cis folks. When you hear, anywhere, anywhen, about how Wonderfully Accepted trans women are, ask yourself: what does this self-congratulation do?

Yesterday I asked the question, "Is it safe to criticise liberal cis feminists?" There were lots of responses! I've already posted one round of replies, largely saying, "No, but we've got to anyway". So I went ahead and posted some criticisms of cis feminists. ;) Since then a few more replies have come in, so here they are - some longer responses this time!

b-8-n-c-s-t-r-8:

i agree with what cnc said [hyperlink mine -Lisa]. obviously its vastly unsafe for trans women to speak on transmisogyny perpetuated by “ppl in the community” or whatever, but i also think speaking out against it is how we build safety. i’ve seen a great change in myself and others based on how strong our community has come together to shit talk transmisogyny. in a world where having a loud trans female community was kind of inconceivable to me. but we all sort of inspire and encourage and support each other in speaking up, and that i think builds safety for us in a way we’ve never had. even if we’re at more risk of violence from the cafab world, we also are building large and powerful support networks. i can safely say i’ve gotten more support from other trans women than i ever could have dreamed prior to building this community on here just through speaking out against transmisogyny, and supporting others in doing so, and reveling in that space.

that said, i think there is a potential in us speaking out against transmisogyny loudly, especially against those who are “allies” or “community members” or whatever, does bring a lot more scrutiny to other trans women over time. like especially speaking from the positon of being a native trans woman where the stakes are MUCH higher (they are of course still VERY high for white trans women), i have definitely seen when a handful of trans women give shit to cis women in their communities, other trans women are then expected to rebuff those accusations.

but the fact of the matter is… when we start building communities like we have now, by breaking that silence, we give people real options. many trans women are still isolated, but there is a growing potential for trans women to find us when we speak up and choose to join or not. i know it’s not so simple because we all have so much trauma to work through in making our ways to each other, but it still creates that opportunity.

so yeah, i think it can bring violence, but it ultimately opens up the doors for trans women to build a confidence in our experience and a strong sense of sisterhood, and that’s vital to trans women’s safety.

tonidorsay [long comment so I've trimmed it here, click through for original -Lisa]:

... it isn’t about safe.

It is about how much you can take.

If you are low on spoons or personal will or strength or whatever, then don’t speak out in liberal feminist spaces.  If you’ve had a fight with a radfem that has sucked the soul out of you, then don’t speak out in any spaces.

Step the fuck off and get some air and get some strength and get some of you back in yourself.

It doesn’t matter what the tone is — what you say is more important than how you say, and every word has meaning, even all the ofs in this response that you mentally gloss over.

...

Safe?

They are, almost guaranteed, going to be cis people. With ciscentric thinking and cissexism ingrained and a lifetime of being told that trans people are bad just like you have had a lifetime of being told that trans people are bad.

And you want to know if it is safe?

Now, I know I’m being harsh and I’m sorry to all of you.  I apologize.  MY tone may be a little edged (not edgy), and maybe I should consider rephrasing some of the above or not using so many capitals, but see, look, here you are, compromising, here you are talking about safe in a situation where you are going to be dealing with people who both willingly and unwillingly engage in actions and activities that are oppressive.

IF you see a problem, speak up.  Libfem, radfem, anarchfem, thickfem, thinfem, rainbowfem who the hell cares because that’s the job.

If you take it, you get to pick your battles but they will always be battles.  Some worse than others.  But safe?

For every 1 of you there are 250 of them.

Odds of it being safe are not good.

zeroambit:

I agree and echo all the above in terms of relative safety. this situation has always struck me as a ‘damned if you damned if you don’t’ thing. it hurts us to have shitty, harmful, transmisogynstic fake allies. i’ve experienced plenty of that very very personally.

i think it is so vital to create alternatives to silence, even when silence might be a ‘safer’ choice than frankness. it can be a very powerful thing to name the forces and people that hurt you and people like you, but of course comes with its own heightened risks for retribution.

this community has been very important to me, continues to be important—i want it to expand and grow and build strength. i also think there will be costs for that. we all pay them to one degree or another ( and that of course is also subject other kyriachal intersections) but we’re basically paying with that violence and that silence and getting only marginal returns (in an abstract sense).

so i agree that creating these sorts of communities of vociferous, angry, supportive, keen-eyed trans women is sometimes going to put ourselves individually and our sisters we have yet to meet in positions where they are forced to make a different choice than us, or where the choice isn’t really an option. i don’t see any way around that, really. it strikes me as a direct consequence of trying to protect ourselves and build something to protect ourselves that gives other trans women a way and choice to opt-in.

and of course when the alternative is itself a longstanding form of violence that must be destroyed having to choose it takes on the character of a bargain with transmisogynstic patriarchy. as a forced choice it is one i think we ought not seek, through our own labor, to preserve, but one some people with have to make at one time or another. one i’ve had to make plenty of times before. 

in the end the responsibility for that violence does lie with the transmisogynists—cold comfort, but i think worth reminding myself of as we talk about ways to protect ourselves from others.

vicoactus:

This hasn’t been my personal experience with cis women. I think it’s because most of the cis women I’ve been meeting have already been vetted by other trans women who I’m friends with, and end up being really cool (I’m not trying to discount your experience at all or say that cis women aren’t wholly subject to this dynamic; they are). Most of the time that I have this sort of feeling — I guess it’s a “with friends like these” vibe? It’s from transmasculine genderqueer folk that I’ve known, know now, and probably will meet. I never really expected much from cis women by the way of sisterhood to begin with, but when I see other trans people continually ignore trans women / center their own experiences as the ‘normal’ way to be trans, and act in ways that are not *intended* to take space from trans women but nonetheless *do take space from trans women*, I don’t know what to do or say anymore. Past attempts at bringing these issues up has been largely met with a wall of silent confusion and assuaging platitudes. I’m sick of it. I’m so, so, so sick of it. I have no problem telling cis women that they’re being transphobic, but I do have a hangup about telling trans boys and transmasculine folk I know personally when they’re being transmisogynistic, and I really need to get over it. I thought this was going to be a community I belonged in, and the realization that it is not and never has been is always crushing, and, alas, soon-forgotten.

A couple of days ago a friend gently nudged me on whether this post (asking for cis women to take responsibility for something) was written in complicated language which would shut people out.

While I think the criticism that transfeminism is too complicated to understand is sometimes used unfairly, I think she had a point here. I'm happy with my post, because I think it works in context. But I thought it would be good to have something a bit easier to get into as well.

Though anyone who reads this version and wants to bring up some kind of complicated criticism should probably check out the original first just to get a sense of what it is I'm asking! But for everyone else, here's the more direct version:

Some cis women talk about themselves as friends of trans women and act like we're all on the same side.

Sometimes they get in loud arguments with a particular group of women who are vocally anti-trans. (Some trans women call these vocal opponents TERFs, short for "Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists".)

I wonder if our cis woman "allies" who do this are getting something out of it in a way which makes it dodgy that they're behaving like this.

For example, loudly attacking TERFs makes the woman who's doing it look like she's always on the good side, and makes it hard for other people to imagine that she herself might ever be doing anything anti-trans.

It also really stirs things up. It's not always wrong to get angry at people who are being cruel, but it can mean those people are more likely to retaliate. When something's a difficult call like that, it's probably better to put the decision in the hands of the people who are most likely to get hurt - trans women.

Often cis women even go into conversations that aren't really about TERFs at all - maybe a conversation about some other problem a trans woman's dealing with. And the cis woman will say, "Oh, damn those TERFs! They're so shit! How dare they do this to you?" And the trans woman's left saying, "Um, actually, it wasn't a TERF who did this, it was kinda people like you, y'know?" But it's hard to get that heard.

Given all that - and given that this post here that I'm making now isn't cis women's first chance to find out about these problems with how they're acting (here's another post, for example) - I think cis women should start asking themselves what they're going to do about it!

I made some suggestions in the more complicated post I mentioned at the start. They went something like this:

1. If you're a cis woman, think about if you're doing this (talking up the problem of TERFs, talking down other problems). If you are, how?

2. What are you getting out of it? What might you lose if you tried to argue against it (like I'm doing here)?

3. What (if anything) do you do at the moment to try and fix the problem?

4. What (if anything) do you do at the moment to try and get other cis women to stop causing the problem?

5. What do you reckon is going to have to change so that cis women as a group - coz' even if you're not doing it yourself, others are, and even if you stop it, others will carry on - what's got to change so that everyone does it less (or stops completely)? How are you and other women going to make that change happen?

6. Assuming you get what I'm on about, what can you do in this particular conversation - in replies to this particular post - to try and stop other people missing the point, or changing the subject, or generally otherwise messing things up?

Some common problems are that cis people will do some of these things, or just not respond at all, or will just click "like" or reblog to make it look like they care without doing anything else, or do transphobic things to attack trans women making this kind of point. Can you make it harder for them to get away with any of that? How?

This post is a collection of responses, in no particular order, to the question I asked earlier, "Is it safe to criticise liberal cis feminists?" (with a special emphasis on cisfeminists who talk up their opposition to TERFism).

Responses are still coming in and I'm still very interested in hearing from trans* sisters (and other trans* women who wouldn't consider themselves sisters with me).

rabidcentipede:

I feel like the criticisms are definitely needed. And while they may not be necessarily “safe”, they are definitely safer than the alternative.

The way I see it, if we DON’T talk about the problems of cis feminists, they are highly unlikely  to change their ways at all. I don’t think we can count on liberal cis feminists to take up our cause for us.

I think we MUST talk about the problems with cis liberal feminists, because I hope that there are enough cis feminists out there who are willing to listen. I don’t know, many might react badly and turn away, but I feel like there are enough who are vaguely open to the idea of “intersectionality!” that it might make them pause a minute and think about what they are doing.

I think there may also be cis feminists who are caught between the camps of liberal and radical - they might see some of the problems with liberal feminism, but also not want to identify as a TERF, and not really know what to do. I think that our criticisms can help them understand that it is possible to be a feminist who is radical *without* being a TERF. In other words, I think our voice is necessary to show that there is a non-liberal option that isn’t inherently transphobic.

I think, however, that when we do criticize liberal cis feminists, it is important to be aware of ALL of the problems with liberal feminism, not just the ones related to trans issues. Because we aren’t the only ones criticizing liberal feminism - there are plenty who take issue with its inherent racism, ableism, and capitalist/colonialist ideology as well. we must create meaningful discussion and community about what it means to *truly* be fighting against systems of oppression.

gayabortions:

i’m personally always in favor of calling out sex-positive and liberal feminists on any topic, but i approach my own feminism from a grumpy leftist standpoint, so calling out liberals for being awful is pretty much my bread and butter. (which is not to say that anarchist / communist / marxist / etc. spaces don’t have their own issues with trans* oppression that need to be made evident, challenged, and demolished.)

specifically to the “safety” question, the only thing i could conceive of as being safest between the options of pointing out oppression and keeping silent is the former, with a possible “give someone who claims to be an ally a chance to prove themselves as an ally” by tossing them a, for lack of a better term, more politic calling out and request for change.

i’m, in general, a fan of the “ask politely once, then come down hard if they reveal more bigotry than naivety” approach, but that’s almost certainly a utopian ideal for a lot of trans people.

this comes from a stateside point of view, though, and i’m unaware of the sorts of inroads being made in the UK, so there might be more to lose in your region through expression than what we’ve got here. but, from where i’m sitting, we’d need to have serious allies in positions of power before we’d have to worry about upsetting them.

gayabortions again:

i’m personally of the opinion that, if we’re so dependent on cis allies thinking we’re polite and acceptable for our inclusion in the public discourse, we’re not actually safe enough to not call out problematic allies, lest they take our tacit acceptance as approval to run free with their own nonsensical theories about our lives. i can think of no other social justice movement, offhand, where a position of relative safety with allies interested in silencing and propagandizing the lives of the oppressed was safer and superior to calling out fair-weather allies and pushing forward towards full acceptance / inclusion.

that’s not to say that’s never happened, and, if it has, please let me know, but if my options are, “sit quietly while someone pretending to be my friend abuses that privilege,” and, “risk losing political allies by pushing for more meaningful change,” i will always choose the latter.

koboldandthebeautiful:

the principle angle of danger i see in this situation is to strengthen the myth of the trans cabal. liberal politics claims to view the world through the lens of individual action, but maintains ideologically what i guess i’d call stereotyped dissenting collectives. they operate as propagandized bugbears, and when a person ceases to be “valid” liberal actor, bucking the system, they become subsumed into the myth construct, and their agency is broadly dismissed. wrt to critiques of capitalism these collectives can be “naive” - college students who don’t know better and haven’t experienced the real world, or “dangerous” - they hate our freedom. liberalism is far from the only ideology to do this, but it’s important to note when it pretends not to.

the problem for trans people is that their agency is so regularly denied ANYWAY, and their actions seem so bizarre within the context of our gender system, that they automatically occupy the “naive” category. like our naive college student, they can be encouraged to effectively vote labour/democrat/whatever, because it presents to the student the best compromise possible, and to the establishment the opportunity to co-opt radical energy for what they see as best practice. 

the risk then is to shift the perception of trans people, not the trans person, into the “dangerous” category. like with the organizers of the UK feminist party holding votes on trans inclusion because of what they apparently consider to be the serious risk of trans women shouting down cis women from talking about stuff like abortion, etc and general backlash against trans people speaking out. terfs do these things too, but it’s worth noting the the liberal criticisms of the trans community tend to be superficial where at least terfs feign analysis. as a “dangerous” group, we become mystical and cultish, inherently rejecting reason and rationality by our very nature. there is no specific need to critique our politics when we can be broadly dismissed as loud, rude and odd. 

ultimately i suspect that it will lead to more feminist groups and people that engage in trans exclusion, even if not explicitly. unfortunately i think this is an inevitable consequence of going up against existing structures and movements and demanding that they change, rather than being part of organizing new ones, which probably only goes so far, pragmatically. 

i guess i wonder sometimes how hard it’s worth pushing. i really don’t know the best way to prosecute our press for change.

ananiujitha:

Is there an alternative?

Are we in a secure enough position? No. Will that change without speaking out? Not likely. As long as our position is dependent on libcisfem’s good graces, and on our usefulness as symbols of their truths, instead of on recognition of our truths, it’s going to remain an awfully precarious position.

ciscritical-not-cisphobic:

From where I see it, it’s safer than the alternative.

Like, I see the dangers on both sides. If we don’t speak out, we end up silencing ourselves in the name of maintaining a false, one-sided alliance. If we do, we might end up with our false allies showing their true colors and leaving us alone (or more overtly requiring our silence as a condition of “inclusion”).

I think the danger of silencing yourself (and your sisters) and accepting fake solidarity is worse than knowing who your real friends are. But I’m in a situation where I have people I can trust.

(also, it’s shocking (not really) how closely my experience with radical queers mirrors your experience with liberal feminists)

kutekweer:

Yes we can and they deserve it. If they drop their support for the trans* community for any internal politics reason they were shitty allies to begin with, most likely trying to promote their own narrative ON trans people rather then a genuine trans* narrative. Frankly, cis women allies will look out for their own interests above trans* issues and that’s their prerogative, but they should expect trans* folk to have a problem with that an to push their agenda primarily as a result. And we can all still support each other but cis women allies need to understand trans* folk prioritizing their problems and having issues with cis women bringing their narratives into the discussion isn’t a slight against them. True allies don’t back out when it’s inconvenient, allies go to war for you. It’s better to filter out false allies then weaken our cause.

kutekweer again:

It’s not physically safe. But I’m willing to put myself in danger to have my voice heard, because my voice is the voice of others. People ignored, marginalized and brutalized. So it’s not safe, but I willingly take that risk. Because I feel I must. I want it to be safe.

I've posted a few pieces recently which have questioned the contribution of cis women who position themselves as "trans* allies"; especially those who also apparently position themselves against TERFism. I've questioned the self-interest and the material contribution of these cis women.

I'd like to check in with my trans* sisters to ask whether you feel that it's safe for us for me to be doing this. I'm interested in your answers whether or not you agree with me that there is a problem with the way that liberal and sex-positive cis feminists interact with transfeminism and with TERFism. Obviously if you disagree with me you'll probably disagree that I should be doing it - what I'm asking is, do you think it's unsafe?

Safety is a pretty loaded term, of course. In this case, I mean "more unsafe than the alternative". Also bear in mind that "the alternative" means not talking about something I think is a genuine danger. That means "the alternative" includes asking some trans* women to be silent about our experiences of oppression - and silencing ourselves is also dangerous. I'm not trying to morally blackmail here; just saying that this is part of what should be taken into account when thinking what is safer.

There again, at the moment, certainly in England, perhaps also in the US, there's a backlash against our expression, our language. I know a lot of us are deeply traumatised and getting more so. Can we afford to criticise allies even if they're shit (if you even think they're shit)?