Feminism is not primarily a movement to make women happy. It is a movement to free women from sexist oppression. Come the revolution, some women will still be unhappy, because the things that are making them so are not a result of sexism (or racism, or ageism, or whatever).

Three comments come to mind when this topic arises; the first one is from

Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins’ book Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology:

Anything that saves women’s lives, anything that makes women happier, must be feminist: mustn’t it? Well, no. First of all, it’s possible to patch women up and enable them to make changes in their lives without ever addressing the underlying political issues that cause these personal problems in the first place. Psychology and feminism offer different and competing explanations for the same difficulties in our lives. Feminism tells us our problems are caused by oppression: psychology tells us they’re all in the mind…As Carol Tavris (1992) says, ‘women get much more sympathy and support when they define their problems in medical or psychological terms than in political terms.’ [And] as Anna Lee (1986) says, ‘Many wimmin have been strengthened by many things which we would probably not consider intrinsically good. It does not matter if one woman is helped, unless it helps wimmin free ourselves from the institutions which hold us down and keep us weak…’

The second is from Andrea Dworkin :

It is important to understand that we will live with a fair amount of pain for most of our lives. If your first priority is to live a painless life, you will not be able to help yourself or other women. What matters is to be a warrior.

The third is from Audre Lorde:

It is easier to demand happiness than it is to clean up the environment. The acceptance of illusion and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine the realities of our lives. Let us seek ‘joy’ rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness. In this disastrous time, when little girls are still being stitched shut between their legs, when victims of cancer are urged to court more cancer in order to be attractive to men, when 12-year-old Black boys are shot down in the street at random by uniformed men who are cleared of any wrongdoing—what depraved monster could possibly be always happy?

The happiness imperative is evident in so much of the discourse about all sorts of feminist topics, particularly ones relating to choices about what patriarchy considers “private” life. The distinction between “private” and “public” itself is a feminist issue. Feminist writers like Catharine MacKinnon have covered the topic at great length, but suffice it to say that the ideological separation of public and private has served to support male supremacy and the absolute control of men over “their” women and children and “their” other human property, such as slaves (not to mention “their” animals, “their” land, “their” rivers, etc.). Hence, the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” and the assertion, by me, that any feminist worth her salt ought to be willing to consider the political implications of her “personal” choices.

For multiple reasons I won’t go into, hardly a day has gone by since my infancy that I have not felt, been made to feel by the words and behaviors of the people around me, that my body, my bearing, my presence and way of being in the world is wrong. Despite this, I still argue that resistance is worthwhile. It is possible to understand that immobilizing people with fear and anxiety about their acceptability or their safety is politically useful to the ruling classes. It is possible to understand that there is no way for any individual oppressed person to escape oppression by changing herself. The individual solutions that are offered to us are lies. They exist for the benefit, and the profit, of the ruling classes.

White supremacist capitalist patriarchy is an interlocking system of oppressions, and it doesn’t make sense to stop feminist political analysis at just one phenomenon. It’s important to connect transgenderism with the other types of body modification that are relentlessly promoted these days. What is a feminist analysis of breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, labiaplasty, eyelid surgery, skin whitening creams or lye-based hair straighteners? Attempts to suggest that these are DIFFERENT things from transgenderism reflect, I believe, the way that we have been taught to think about them. Some characteristics of our bodies are described and conceptualized primarily as adjectival—a woman might be fat, small-breasted, have large labia, but those are considered descriptions of her, rather than as constitutive of her identity. However, some characteristics of our bodies are treated as representative of WHO WE ARE —socially, we ARE men and women, because of the socialization we receive due to the anatomy we were born with. Physical sex is fundamental to how we are treated from our earliest days, and therefore it becomes fundamental to how we think of ourselves. It follows that elective removal of breasts or elective reconstruction of genitals is conceptualized very differently from, let’s say, gastric banding —which is conceived of as changing an aspect of the self but not as transformative of The Self. Despite declarations of “See the new me!”, I don’t need a new name if I lose 100 pounds the way I (supposedly) do if I have my penis amputated.*

But I think this differentiation is false. Because thinness is promoted and preferred, it seems normal and understandable to thin women that fat women would want to get our stomachs stapled so we could be like them. Because whiteness is dominant, because patriarchy’s ideal woman is white (as well as thin and blonde and depilated and young and putatively heterosexual), it seems reasonable to white women that nonwhite women would want to look as white as possible. To straight and/or sex-role-conforming people, it makes sense that sex-role nonconforming people would want to conform to the sex role within which they “fit” the best, even if it’s not the one that matches their genitals. Like whiteness or thinness, conformity to sex role stereotypes is expected and rewarded; therefore, it might be easier to move through the world as a “man” than as a “butch” lesbian, or as a transwoman rather than a “failed man.” But the easy road for the individual is by definition NOT the one that leads to fundamental changes in the structure of oppression.

Because of the enormous pressure to fit in and emulate the dominant classes, all kinds of cosmetic products and procedures have become normalized. But that’s no reason to assume any of them are to women’s ultimate benefit. I don’t think the various forms of for-profit body modification are fundamentally separate phenomena, though we are taught to think that they are. I read somewhere recently that transsexing is only a problem if you think changing the body is a big deal. And I do. I think changing the body is a hugely great big deal, such that I refuse to give in to the pressure to do so. White male interventions into the processes of nature, whether we’re talking the environment or the human body, have been short-sighted, ignorant, and fraught with unforeseen consequences. There’s no reason to believe elective mastectomy for teenagers, elective genital surgeries, weight loss surgery, elective limb amputation, or the application of chemicals internally or externally will have different results. The only way women will be allowed to exist as we are in our own skins is if we collectively resist the pressure to do otherwise, and actively support each other in doing so, to help mitigate the indubitable social and economic consequences of resistance. Otherwise, we’re just facilitating surgeons making their yacht payments and helping to reassure the privileged that everyone really does look like them — or at least wants to.

Those of us who defy sex role conditioning WHILE claiming the bodies we were born with, those of us who resist femininity and masculinity, refuse to see our bodies, preferences, mannerisms and traits as wrong. We recognize that the pressure to change the self in order to conform, to get social approval or economic privilege, to be seen as acceptable, or to be “happy,” comes from patriarchy. Compulsory femininity for females and the social acceptability of weight loss surgery is easy to identify when you see ads for lipstick on TV, breast augmentation in the yellow pages of the phone book, when Carnie Wilson** is on Oprah pulling out the waistband of her “fat” jeans, and when all the women in the media look like no one you’ve ever met in real life. The social pressures that cause people to have “gender identity disorder” may be more subtle, but we can all think of ways we’ve been pressured to enact our designated sex role, regardless of how well it fit our own desires and aspirations. Resistance to these pressures and procedures —the absolute refusal to accept the lie that functioning bodies are “wrong” and that chemical and surgical “treatments” will cure the pain of being dangerously different—is a valuable feminist choice which is erased by mainstream transgender rhetoric, the personal narratives of many trans-identified people, and the larger patriarchal universe of discourse.***

Oppression is not simply feeling uncomfortable or disliking something about yourself or your life. Being born with a penis is not evidence of sexist oppression. Being ridiculed or beaten up for wearing makeup when you have a penis IS evidence of sexist oppression—but men, as the sex class in power, are the ones who created and police those boundaries****, and as such, are the only ones who have the power to change them on any large scale. To say, “Women, feminists, should collectively resist sex-role stereotypes because they are the BASIS for the sexist oppression we all suffer” is a direct challenge to patriarchy. To say, “Oh, well, do whatever makes you happy” is privileged apolitical middle-class white liberal spooge and leads us down the garden path to pomo meaninglessness. Some things resist oppression, some things don’t. That’s just the way it is, whatever our individual decisions about our individual lives may be. Are there benefits and rewards for collusion? Sure, and most of us reap some of them, some of the time. But that in no way makes collusion a feminist act.

Footnotes

*Evidence for this supposed change in personhood with bit-rearrangement is not found only in the trans community — for example, patriarchy has created a great deal of anxiety for women who have medically necessary mastectomies and hysterectomies. It is not unusual to hear (mostly from sanctimonious “health care professionals”) that these women “mourn the loss of their womanhood.” Many men won’t get a damn vasectomy or even neuter their dogs because of their issues with their “manhood.”

**I wonder what she looks like now?

***Lesbian-feminist separatist Julia Penelope coined this term and its acronym, PUD.

****Other examples of male policing of sex-role stereotypes include using lack of femininity as a weapon against all women (“What are you, some kinda dyke?”); ridiculing, beating, raping and murdering sex-role nonconforming people; economically and legislatively punishing sex-role nonconforming people. It is probably worth reiterating that radical feminists do not engage in or condone any of these behaviors.