7. woman flavoured critters
on 'inclusion' and mobilisation, with Mustang Sally and Lohana Berkins
A popular recent variant on “trans inclusive” feminism says that feminism can be trans inclusive because/if it treats womanhood as a political category, a banner under which one might mobilise or organise certain political forces, rather than a word for a sexed essence. Since trans women are affected by issues that affect all women, there is no reason to exclude them from such a mobilisation; at the same time, the broad categorisation allows room for divergences of interest and the advancement of particular demands.
However, if trans women might be included in feminism under a kind of “political womanhood”, mobilised for organising purposes, this still assumes cis women as the norm to which trans women may be added in a conditional sense. Although the rhetoric of mobilisation and organising may make it more subtle, this is still another variant on the problem of ‘inclusion’: if “inclusion” is a possible tactic to deploy, you are still maintaining control over access for the dominant group.
This particular problem has been noted for a long time, and therefore indicates the failure of cis feminism to really pay attention to trans thinking and mobilising. As early as 1994, Mustang Sally made a similar argument in an issue of the journal, TransSisters.[1] Yet her appeal also demonstrates some of the contradictions in trans feminist debates that have not gone away.
When I look at transsexual women who publicly identify as such and are accepted in lesbian communities, I too often see them included in an “even though they’re not really women like we’re women” kind of way. Some, especially those exploring gender alternatives, may not have a problem with this. While acknowledging disparities in life experience between transsexual and nontranssexual women, I do have a problem with the notion that, instead of having proven ourselves women, we have merely earned a kind of exception to exclusion of the nonfemale. It’s not enough. Yet there are those who not only settle for this, but speak - incorrectly and presumptuously - as though transsexual women uniformly identify as a different (lesser?) breed of women (woman-flavored critters?) Obviously, some of us would rather pass and know where we stand as individuals than be out and wonder whether we are accepted in a women’s community only by a liberal definition of the word. (p. 10)
This paragraph indicates both a conflict with (cis-dominated) feminist communities, and with certain trans strategies for participation in them, insofar as they depend upon an abjection of other trans women. The reference to ‘gender alternatives’ seems to refer to the emerging “transgender” community, and expresses the ways in which certain politics of “gender nonconformity” might accidentally confirm cis genders as the norm.
At the same time, it does concern me that Sally’s own articulation of this does itself seem to confirm cis gender as the norm almost deliberately.
pride in our transsexuality means pride in the things that set us apart from other women, namely having been born with male organs - something we as transsexuals are by definition anything but happy about [… it] would mean deriving a certain joy and positive sense of self from being a transsexual woman instead of a woman born with a normal female genital tract. I don’t. (ibid.)
The contradiction between difference, identity, and subordination, results from the confusion that inclusion in womanhood is precisely the means of trans women’s subordination. Transmisogyny functions by fissuring and exteriorising misogyny from itself; as a figure, the trans woman is the concrete embodiment of alienated gender. And of course, producing ‘the trans woman’ as a figure, from the diverse range of subjects constituted by and implicated in transmisogyny, is itself a function of this process.[2]
So where do we go from here?
The Argentine travesti activist, Lohana Berkins, writes,
The capitalist system has created a single model of the woman: cute, sweet, very beautiful, which is what the patriarchy consumes. And so we, when we begin to live our truth, since the only option for survival that remains is prostitution, if I were to stop, the most I’d get would be spare change, because I weigh 92 kilos. So strong is the idea of that image, that our comrades end up becoming victims of this situation. Because what our society says is, “It’s okay, this boy doesn’t want to be a man, let him be a woman. But not just any woman. Rather, a fine-looking woman,” like the most famous travesti from Brazil, Roberta Close. “Like Roberta Close, or nothing.”[3] These are the models imposed on us. In this way extremely violent situations are brought about. (Selected Writings, translated by Jamie Berrout, p. 14-15)
Perhaps when Mustang Sally spoke of ‘women-flavoured critters’, unconsciously communicating the consumptive dimensions of patriarchal gender, she was more right than she realised. It is in this context that Berkins articulates her travesti/transgender identity[4] as both a third gender and a womanhood. Whilst ‘third gender’ narratives have often been rejected by trans activists as othering and clumsy, for Berkins, this serves to situate her gender as a rejection of both patriarchy and the womanhoods patriarchy demands.
I always say that I’m a Judas twice over. Men feel that travestis are traitors to the patriarchy, because having a penis, that symbol, we have renounced power. The second question comes as a result of rejecting the image of womanhood that this society upholds. (p. 11)
The aim here is not (pace Mustang Sally) a rejection of trans women who seek to interpolate themselves into a norm of womanhood, but to respond to this norm in recognition of its essential violence. This violence might be characterised in diverse terms; dispossession, commodification, so-called “primitive accumulation”, imperialism, rape… But the norm implicates all women in this violence, if in distinct ways.
And it’s in that sense that we should unite under the specific forms of oppression we suffer from. I want to fight for abortion rights, for the freedom to choose one’s sexual orientation, for the rights of Bolivian women to their land... and not in solidarity but rather as part of my own struggle, because it means a struggle against a common enemy: the system... (p. 6)
To approach womanhood as a material category differentiated by certain forms of violence is very different from understanding it as a political category that is thereby differentiated from its material reality. For example, at points, Berkins articulates her politics as part of a wider transgender movement; at others, she distinguishes her politics as a travesti activist from transgender politics as Western and alien to the histories of travesti community and organising in Argentina and Latin America more broadly. Reading as a white Western trans woman, I am only able to identify myself with the struggles Berkins situates herself in insofar as I am simultaneously implicated in the distance created not only by culture, but by imperialism, indicating another necessary struggle. These are forms of relation and mobilisation that do not depend on inclusion or absolute identity. This, in turn, demands an orientation to struggles not reducible to womanhood or even transness, political or otherwise.
I am attempting to unlearn old academic habits, and clearly doing a bad job. So, put more simply; trans politics will never escape the contradictions of inclusion and its violences without a thorough recognition of the internal differences between trans people, and thus, the variety of struggles that will be necessary for our liberation.
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I have linked to the issue of TransSisters containing the article by Mustang Sally that I cite in the body of the text.
You can download Selected Writings, by Lohana Berkins for free from River Furnace Press, here. River Furnace Press do great work making writing by Black trans women and nonblack trans women of colour available more broadly.
On the topic of trans politics and Bolivian land rights, I can recommend checking out Elysia Crampton’s music. I am personally a big fan of this set. Read this interviews with her, on performance and the body, and this article on identity, queerness, and sovereignty in her work.
My argument is indebted to the preface of Not Vanishing by Chrystos, available here (page 1 of the pdf).
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[1] Mustang Sally is the pen name used by Beth Elliott, whose prominent role in trans debates in lesbian feminism is infamous. I was torn about mentioning this at all, between the instinct to recognise her deliberate survival tactic in adopting pseudonymity and acknowledging her historical role. I am still unsure of my decision here.
[2] This analysis is indebted to AJ’s argument in the article, ‘Against Performativity’. I hope to write more in depth on this article at a later date.
[3] Roberta Close is a well known Brazilian model, who made headlines at 20 as “the world’s most beautiful model”. (note mine)
[4] She uses both at different points. I attempt to address some dimensions of this later in the text.