To be a transgender woman in this age of rising anti-trans discrimination is to be at once supremely powerful and supremely vulnerable.
Powerful, because in the eyes of our enemies we erase women, destroy women’s spaces, and subject children to the sexual violence of “grooming” simply by existing. Vulnerable, because our supposed omnipotence is no protection against the wave of bills meant to legislate us out of existence in places like the United States, the torrent of harassment we experience on and offline, or the record-high levels of fatal violence committed against members of our community.
Depending on where you stand on the question of whether trans people should exist within the body politic, feminism is either to thank or to blame for this state of affairs. Either way, though, feminism is responsible.
***
Trans-exclusionary feminists have been likening male-to-female gender transition to sexual violence at least since radical feminist Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1980. There, she wrote: “All transsexuals [sic] rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.”
Whether Raymond intended this assertion to be metaphorical is perhaps a matter of interpretation. Whether today’s trans-exclusionary feminists intend the assertion literally is not.
The “Cotton Ceiling = Rape” claims UK-based “lesbian feminist activist group” Get the L Out, referring to the way trans lesbians supposedly pressure their cisgender counterparts into sex in order to affirm their (the trans women’s) identity as women. This is the same group that forced its way into the 2018 London Pride march to distribute pamphlets claiming trans women are rapists.
To the south, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) wrongly insists that including trans women in women’s spaces makes rape possible where it wasn’t “because a man’s biology [i.e., his having a penis] gives him the ability to rape a woman, while her biology [i.e., her lack of a penis] makes her incapable of raping him.” Ignoring the fact that cis women can and do sexually assault people of all genders, in WoLF’s view that possibility alone means cis women need sex-segregated spaces for their own protection—even if no trans woman has ever actually assaulted a cis woman in a women’s space. As they themselves say, WoLF doesn’t “need it to be true that there are any cases of rape in [e.g.,] a woman’s prison to make an argument against a male [sic] being transferred to a women’s prison.”
A version of this argument underlies the organization’s ongoing constitutional challenge to a provision of California’s Penal Code that requires the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to house inmates in facilities consistent with their gender identity. In the organization’s view, this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment of cisgender women inmates because the legislation exposes these prisoners to “substantially increased risk of sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, and physical violence” at the hands of male-bodied trans women—irrespective of whether such violence actually occurs.
The bottom line: trans women are a threat, and if (cis) women are to be safe, trans women must be kept far away from cis women’s spaces.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because in the culture war over trans women’s rights this argument has become a rallying cry for feminists and non-feminists alike. “Male” trans women are the spectre haunting cis women everywhere from bathrooms to sports, and the only way to save those cis women is to save sex-segregated women’s spaces.
Trans-exclusionary feminist rhetoric has gone mainstream.
***
This puts feminism’s future as a political movement capable of materially advancing women’s interests in serious doubt.
Trans-exclusionary feminism substitutes anxieties about the potential threat that trans women pose to cis women’s safety for actual concern for protecting women from sexual violence.
The possibility of trans women committing rape is enough by itself to exclude them, as a class, from women’s spaces altogether. And that possibility will always be there because trans women either have or (in the case of those who have had a vaginoplasty operation) had a penis—the ultimate weapon of patriarchal violence.
Personally, I’d prefer it if the penis were a shield.
As I and other trans women survivors of sexual violence know, however, our genitalia at birth is anything but.
Roughly half of all trans people experience sexual assault during their lifetime, and are four times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than cisgender people.
Moreover, whether the sexual assaults occur in elementary schools, homeless shelters, or prisons, the victims tend to be trans women rather than trans men.
This data confirms what trans social critics have been arguing for years: in a patriarchal society that affords men a higher place within the gender caste structure, those “men” who choose to become women and move “down” the gender hierarchy are dealt with especially harshly.
There’s nothing symbolic, metaphorical, or potential about the sexual violence these trans women suffer.
It’s physical. Material. A story of patriarchal dominance that’s written on the bodies of survivors with each thrust of those who attack us.
***
As a movement, feminism is premised on two ideas. First, that women are more alike than different because we all to some degree experience gendered oppression. Second, that the only way to finally banish this oppression is for the oppressed to unite as a political class and campaign for our liberation.
From its inception, feminism has struggled with the question of whom to include in this class, long framed as the question of whom to include in the category “women.” White feminists have historically answered this question in a way that excludes women of colour; upper-class and upwardly mobile middle-class feminists have historically answered it in a way that excludes women of the working class.
Feminism’s great shame is that the women most in need of gender-based rights and protections have been asking, as African American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth did in 1851, “Ain’t I a woman?”—and feminists have been replying, “No.”
That is an important question, to be sure. But I don’t think it’s the most important one, not in the current political moment anyway.
To see why, we need to look beyond philosophical debates about the nature of womanhood and focus, instead, on material realities.
***
Rape is the archetypal expression of gendered oppression. It is the most potent, violent, and dehumanizing way by which men assert their superiority over women and those they read as women (trans men, for instance).
That’s why, no matter who feminists count as women, rape is the monster that above all others they set out to slay.
The problem with trans-exclusionary feminism is that it not only excludes from the feminist coalition the very people most in need of feminist political victories; but by campaigning to keep those same people in men’s spaces, it actively renders them more vulnerable to the very violence feminism most opposes.
In other words, trans-exclusionary feminism is anti-feminist because it actually promotes gendered sexual violence under the guise of protecting women.
Philosophical questions about whether trans women are really women or trans men are really men is a luxury that goes out the window when a person is being forced to have sex without their consent.
That’s why the foundational question for feminist organizing has to be something more grounded in the material realities of gendered existence. That’s why feminists should never have allowed ourselves to become bogged down in the question of whether trans women are also women. That’s why feminism must rid itself of its trans-exclusionary wing.
Because if feminism is truly a movement against patriarchal violence, those subjected to the worst of that violence are feminism’s heart and soul.
The foundational question for feminist organizing should not be whether trans women are “woman-enough” for the feminist movement. We are, but that only matters so much.
The foundational question is this: Are we not survivors, too?
We are – in horrifying numbers.
Which is why, if feminism is to succeed in dismantling the patriarchy, it must be more than just trans-inclusive: it must actively and unabashedly fight for trans liberation.
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