Sorry, Sex-Positive Transwomen: I’m Not Buying What You’re Selling. At All. November 9, 2009

Posted by FCM in authors picks Tags: dilation

sex-pos transwomen–if i were born male, like you were, i might be “sex-positive,” too. you know: exhibitionist, pro-porn, and squeeee!-fully sexually available to men. if only….

i had been lavished with male privilege since the day i was born, and taught that the only thing that mattered was my wants, my feelings, that i was entitled to turn my desires into reality, no matter how trite, fleeting, or bizarre. if i grew up with an entirely misogynist view of women, instead of one interspersed with actual, lived, female experience. like you, believing that girls and women were emotional manipulators, that just have to cry big, black tears to get “their way“–and merely the sum of their fleshly and artificial parts–as observable by men. the clothes, the eyelashes, and always, always how fuckable they are. if i had no cramps, and no fear of pregnancy. you know, all the things you obviously think constitutes “woman” as well as the things that you dont think about, at all, which make your interpretation of “female” so deeply problematic. if i had been taught to stick my dick into anything that moved from day one, and to enjoy it.

if i had to have regular intercourse with men, on advice from my sex-reassignment surgeon, literally on pain of death: lest i lose my “use-it-or-lose-it” neo-vagina or experience life-threatening complications from (gasp) not being fuckable enough! (oh, thats rich. and how “pleasing” to men generally must one be, to ensure oneself of regular access to their sex?)

in other words, if i had grown up a man, like you, i might be as inclined as you are, to tell women that they should be having sex with men. if i literally had to have regular intercourse with men or DIE, that would color my perspective, as well. but guess what? i wasnt, and i dont.

now, there are all kinds of things to be said about transwomen more generally. about their residual male privilege. about their co-opting feminism and the language of social justice to achieve their own dubious ends (born-women are privileged over men because we arent seen as sexual predators, and men are? boo-fucking hoo). about the fact that there are others out there who share the inexplicable desire to amputate healthy body parts, in order for their bodies to conform to “the way they’ve always seen themselves” but *those* people are seen as mentally ill.

while the T’s in GLBT have all the political power and protection that comes from co-opting the GLB movement. crazy + powerful = “eccentric,” doncha know! and “eccentric” is f-u-n, which is about all it takes to be wrapped in the teeny-tiny bosom of the twenty-something fun-fems. without regard, apparently, for the fact that they are spending precious feminist resources on men, and mens problems. radfems are a little more discerning about who they allow into the fold, as it were. (and radfems eat blueberries, therefore they are transphobic!) the trans-identified have also co-oped the movement of the intersexed, by claiming (and hoping!) to be intersexed, even when they arent.

and dont even get me started on the fallacy of cis-privilege, or the fact that mainstream feminism has embraced the trans-phenomenon so completely, to the detriment, i believe, of feminism, and to women as a sexual class, when women all over the world are having not only their female gender but their heterosexuality enforced upon them as certainly as their born-sex. or that transwomen are exercising not only their male-privilege in insisting that their dreams be made into reality, but exercising their first-world privilege as well, by tying themselves to the medical establishment literally forever, to get their hormones, dilations, and emergency treatments when something “goes wrong.” (ask yourselves, feminists: would a 12-year old child bride in ethiopia care about this? is the feminist treatment of the trans-identified helping women around the world, at all? if so, how? if not, why not?)

while i do not accept transwomen as women, and i absolutely grieve for what transwomen have been allowed to do to our movement, its the sex-pozzies that really get under my skin. leave it to born-men to *encourage* women to be exhibitionist, sex-workers, porn-actors, and above all, sexually available to men. how, exactly, is that *different* from what men have been telling women forever?

nothing new under the sun.

h/t to miska of fab-matters.

graphic used with permission, and originally published here.