Well put. I like that you put the focus on temporality. Right now, I am more properly a “teenage girl” than a woman.

However, I personally am very concerned with the crippling effects of the feminine role.

Same here. We share those effects. Only I lack the years of experience in dealing with it that you do, and I lack the support of other women in doing so. That is why shared space is so important.

I wonder if I can even communicate how violated as a person I have felt after realizing that was done to me?

With me, you don’t have to. It is an experience that we share, along with many others. The details are no doubt different, but I’ll bet that you heard many of the same things that I’m hearing now. Of course, you’ll never know how similar they are if I am ghettoized to “trans only” space.
My girlhood/adolescence is happening right now and I am still struggling to find my voice, so I can empathize.

I am saying to a substantial degree those who were not born women never lived as a GIRL

True and untrue. We just do ours later and largely without social support by mainstream women. We DO have an adolescence, and we grapple with many of the same issues, as well as a few of our own. As a girl “just like you?” No. As an adolescent woman coming to terms with being a woman? Yes.

I think focussing on our commonalities will get us much further than focusing on our differences. We don’t have to ignore them, but we do have to work extra hard not to let them divide us. This is what fails when we are excluded. Plus, we fail to learn from each other.

My experience with other nontrans women has generally been very positive. One of the things that was most suprising, though, is that I had something to contribute as a woman to the groups of women that I hung around with, and talked about serious things with. Rape, menopause, HRT to name a few. So I must caution against making the same mistake that I did- thinking that my experiences precluded me from relating to women on OUR issues because our experiences are “diffrerent.”

So there is a tricky balancing act.

Yes, it is. You made it a lot easier with your post. I think your commentary is sensitive and well thought out. Thanks for making it safe for me to reply.

However, I personally am very concerned with the crippling effects of the feminine role. Which those born with a particular set of genitals are forced into (the degree of force used and the success thereof varying across cases.) Specifically, those gendered behaviors which are taught to women, given as the only option for women, and which frequently correspond with the behaviors of those who are easier targets for victimization. Those attitudes toward self, which lead to all the words in defense of ourselves never spoken - because those who patriarchy favors do not even have to explicity put us in our place; we do not even think to speak, we suppress ourselves (for fear and shame and many other reasons), and many of us have never even seen any other way that things can be. Do you see what I’m getting at? How deep seated this is? How it reaches into our very minds, so that we have to fight to own our own thoughts?

I wonder if I can even communicate how violated as a person I have felt after realizing that was done to me? I’m not saying there is no such experience from the perspective of one who indentifies oneself as a woman while the world sees a man. But I do not think the experience is the same. I do not see that one who has not had that done to them can feel it in the same way. Of course, I cannot feel your experience either. I do not say this to preclude empathy as tool of understanding, or to deny anyone’s experiences as a woman. I am saying to a substantial degree those who were not born women never lived as a GIRL. Think about all the things that word means in our society, and I think the gist of it becomes clear.

I would never support such hurtful behavior and biased attitudes as you describe in any context. But I think that unfortunate, but true, difference, should be acknowledged. To set it aside — and it seems to sometimes it is set aside, and lightly, as if it were unimportant — is troubling to me. It is not an essential difference. It is a constructed one. It is a terrible thing, but in this world what controls the construction of identity is essentialist. And that is harmful to all of us. No one should ignore the scars that that construction inflict, and every kind of woman is harmed by it - but some in different ways than others. So there is a tricky balancing act. Not to value one over the other because of the particular type of harm done to each, but also to allow space for each to come to its own understanding, and at the same time make space for all to negotiate and work together.

This is a good point. If this happened, my experience as a woman of trans experience would be erased. But excluding me from women’s groups erases my experiences of being a woman with a body that is functionally identical to many women’s bodies. That is the magic of transition- and why I transitioned in the first place. In other words, I did it so I can feel “inside” my body, connected to it, if you will. And like you, I have to deal with the social consequences of being a woman.
This is where our experiences are similar, or as similar as two women’s experiences can be. And this is where we can benefit by sharing space. Like you, I was assigned the role “woman.” Unlike you, I was assigned later in life. Is that difference enough to tell me that I’m not a woman? Or less of a woman? Or perhaps that I am woman enough to be a peer for some things and not others. I think it’s fair to say that I don’t belong in a group that focusses on childbirth or menstruation. But I also think that I can listen to women’s music, work side by side with women in a “women only space” and benefit by doing so. I think that the women who I’d be working with would benefit as well.

Insisting on “women’s space” at the expense of my identity and the realities of my life as a woman is not okay. Calling me names to defend a non trans woman’s space is not okay. Separate space should not happen without informed analysis. After all, prejudice and transphobia will never be solved by exclusion. The only way for transphobic individuals who exclude “improper” women to overcome their prejudice is interaction. It will make some women uncomfortable at first, but will benefit ALL women in the long run.

And isn’t that what feminism is all about?

Let us say we all live in the same town, Springfield. Some of us have lived there sinced birth. Obviously, our experiences growing up will be different from those of people who grew up elsewhere. We will know inhabitants of the town in different ways. We will know it’s history from having lived it. This is not say that the experiences of those who grew up in different places are less! They are just not the same as ours. And everyone living there now has a stake in what happens to the town. What affects it affects all of us. But should those born in the town not have their school reunions as a space for them only? This is how I think of it.

Of course transgender people experience oppression from the patriarchy, same as women do. Some of it works in the same way and for the same reasons. Some of it does not. I do not believe it is unfair or discriminatory to say that there are different aspects to the same struggle. We should fight on the same side because we have the same enemy, but it only weakens us, only weakens the diversity of our understanding to pretend it is the same.

Great trans website: Numbers in 1080.Gulf Coast Recontruction Watch.Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch is a new project to document and investigate the rebuilding of the Southern Gulf in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Through original reporting,…

It is a superficial excuse to claim ignorance of transpeoples’ motivations when theorizing about them, since the internet provides such a wealth of information written and published by transpeople about their motivations, their feelings, and their quite often lack of adherence to gender/sex/sexual/cultural stereotypes. Their core issues are neither social, political, or cultural. They are physiological, with a physiological solution. Their social expressions range the gamut potential and possibility, and therefore do not attach a specific set of thoughts or behaviors to genitals.

For example, you might read the political writings of Andrea James and others at http://www.tsroadmap.com. Her positions, her inclusion by Eve Ensler as a Vagina Warrior, and more may open your eyes about such concepts.

If feminism, or some other term that describes sexual equality for everyone, doesn’t include everyone and instead devolves into “man hating” and stridently defensive claims for “social space”, it devolves into just another form of polluted hatred, easily identified with and comparable to other hate politics. They are all social failures. Hatred, in any form, is usually anti-social, socially dysfunctional, and apparent for its social insecurity. Our self-confidence as women, our power, independence, and emancipation as women, succeeds best when we declare and inclusive, encompassing, and affiliating conception of ourselves and our sociocultural relationships and perspectives. Feminism fails when it creates enemies instead of allies and when it fails to identify opportunities to create them.

The former is not why people transition. If it were, there would be no trannyfags, no trykes, no “butch” transwomen, and no “femme” transmen.
Most transpeople need to work to attain the cues of the gender they transition into; this is why there are “passing tips.” Most of us are in fact _not_ terribly gender incongruent prior to transition, although many are.

As tekanji pointed out, there is a great deal of pressure on transpeople to assume the cues and roles of the gender they transition to–for a great many years, it was a requirement for approval for surgery and hormones. While it is no longer official, I would be extremely naive to pretend that the doctors who treat us do not bring their own prejudices into work. I have heard a lot of stories of subtle and overt disrespect towards transpeople who are very clear about transition but totally disinterested in butching or femmeing it up.

This motivation is also problematic because it pretends that there’s no gender-role pressure around, y’know, not being a transsexual. That intial transgression would be virtually impossible for anyone who truly believed that men must be one way and woman must be another. Our culture does not merely separate people into two dichotomous genders. It separates them _at birth_ and then insists that they stay that way.

Of course transpeople can be sexist and heavily invested in gender roles–just like non-transpeople. But there are too many transpeople who are proudly gendervariant to make that a workable rationale for transition.

Finally, it’s ludicrous to pretend that Croson is merely talking about women’s space. She’s talking about everything and anything pertaining to women. Her argument rests on her assertion that transwomen don’t experience sexism directly, and that transmen don’t attain privilege. This denies the reality of trans lives, and is therefore transphobic. Also, the question of whether or not we belong in our post-transition gender is inextricable from the question of whether or not we deserve basic civil rights. _All_ of the cases involving anti-trans discrimination and anti-trans violence turn on a definition of “woman” and “man” that excludes or includes transpeople. It’s not a theoretical question or a limited one, and Croson’s answer supports transphobia in practice.