This just sort of became a post, and I want to transport it over here just so it doesn’t take over that thread. (Still, some more, again, anyway.) So Amp linked to Chris’s post about why he does not identify as feminist. The thread contains a lot of good comments on when someone may identify as what, including some comments about other terms of affinity.
A commenter called spit wrote as follows:
This became a huge dilemma at dykemarch a while ago when a lot of FTM trannies — who had been members of the lesbian community for years, and who had fought alongside women as women for years, started pushing for inclusion in dykemarch even though they may identify as men. What do you do in those circumstances? If you exclude them, you’re once again basing feminism and womanhood on either “physical sex” or on some “one or the other” oppositional concept of gender, both things that feminism has spent a long time trying to counter.
And I responded:
Spit, while I would err on the side of openness for anyone whose gender identity is complex, I think that people who receive male privilege have a responsibility to opt out of safe space for women. If they intrude upon it, they insult its reason for existing: to provide a haven for people who are _not_ privileged. Ftms are welcome at a great many events focused on queer women, and are welcome to attend all the parties after the march. The dyke march is women-only, not as a nod to essentialism, but as a recognition of the damage essentialism has caused.
And we got into a whole long discussion about ftms and feminist demarcations of women’s spaces and of “woman.”
Basically–and I hope spit comes here to complain if I’m getting this wrong–spit’s position is that these boundaries tend to negate complexity in precisely the way that feminism wants to stop. They divide everyone into “male” and “female,” whether or not that’s an accurate description of their identities or their lives. Concepts like “women-only space” invariably turn on a definition of “woman” that ignores a whole lot of people:
To the extent that not all but many trannies bring the whole categorization scheme into question, feminism and the quest for all “women’s rights” that come out of it is going to have to work to figure out what, exactly, is meant by “woman” — because there will always be some trannies or genderqueers who still identify to some extent with women, even after they’ve transitioned. Any category that tries to have clear lines around it is going to run into problems here — and my inclusion or exclusion from that category, while I agree that it cannot necessarily only depend on how I feel inside, is fundamentally also flawed if it only considers more or less how I pass socially, largely because that will simply wind up reinforcing the social and gender-essentialist norm. And my relationship with the social as a tranny is also often going to be more complicated than a straightforward system will allow for — to the extent, say, that I am out and open about being trans, among other things.
I agree with this–we weren’t really arguing–but worry about a few things. It’s as counterproductive to ignore the dichotomy as it is to uncritically accept it. Spit and I are sort of speaking from different sides of the same idea: a binary that negates people who don’t live within it.
I see a lot of transguys who either do or will live as male and who therefore do or will receive male privilege, but who are incapable of acknowledging their current or future status. They need to believe that they are still vulnerable to misogyny and ill-treatment on a level equal to that of women. This is sometimes because of internalized transphobia; frequently, it’s because of a version of feminist affinity that ends up supporting trans invisibility.