An account of those dealings on the GerBil would be valuable. We are in a disastrous position and we, and those who will have to suffer for it in the future too, deserve to know how it came about. It was always obvious that the supposed minutes of the forum published online were so incomplete as to be just smoke.
I don't think I've really said, here, much on the present day "power and influence" of modern RadFems. I've been talking about their influence at a crucial formative stage of Stonewall, in the late '80s.
It is, I fear, a problem that that we do not know what influence they presently have. Their hate stuff keeps popping up[1] enough to know there's an undercurrent, but we don't know how big, or how powerful.
It is Bindel has a Guardian column and not you, Roz. Her hate gets read by The Guardian's readership of students, journalists, teachers, social workers, civil servants and politicians. It was Bindel who was a Home Office adviser; taught police and immigration personnel. Her colleagues have drafted international treaties on trafficking that exclude T* people, even though we certainly get trafficked. It is they who work in refuges and on violence issues, and get to define us as unwelcome, even harmful.
How much input did they have on Batty's articles on RR that were so widely used against us, not least in parliament?
Who knows just where one might encounter one of them, or just how much blind hatred might suddenly be unleashed? What lies suddenly circulated? But there are religious nutjobs around too, and other dangers. One just has to be prepared. On top of all the other issues we can face.
[1] For example, the director of UK Women in Philosophy, who heads a unit studying victims, presented a RadFem paper last May at this conference. Here is the abstract:
An Ordinary Real Woman’s view Of ‘Male-to Female Transsexuality’ Soran Reader, Durham University ABSTRACT
In this paper I will develop a radical feminist view of efforts to change embodied sexual identity from 'male to female' as unjust because they violate ordinary real women. In 1. I outline how I will understand 'sex', 'gender', 'man', 'woman', 'identity', 'embodiment' and 'trans-practice' in this paper. In 2. I describe the social context which makes bodily 'mtf trans' practices unjust, while leaving 'ftm' attempts unproblematic. In 3. I explore the private effects of mtf-practices. I argue that ordinary real women living with 'mtf' practices are parodied and insulted as women. For them, in the most intimate sexual situations where being a woman is fundamental, their embodied reality as women is taken away from them, and played back to them as un-real caricature, parody which through its 'unreality' and 'freedom' is supposedly (more) 'erotic' than ordinary real embodied, material and necessary female sex. In 4. I explore the public effects of 'mtf' practices, arguing that it has a serious political purpose: to inscribe physically the political fact, that even their own sex does not belong to women. 'Mtf' trans and drag show female sex as belonging to men, not just for use as in sexual use of prostitutes, wives and children, but now also for mimicry, trivialisation, mockery and parody in drag, for bodily occupation in taking hormone-treatments and having operations, and for political and spatial occuptaion, by 'mtf' men demanding – and, in this country, getting – recognition as women. This finally deprives ordinary real women of legal and perhaps if it continues conceptual ability to define and distinguish themselves as women, and to decline to identify with such men. In 5. I consider why so few feminists see 'mtf' trans as an oppressive patriarchal practice. I propose reappropriation of our ordinary real female sex as a first step in restoring the integrity of feminism and its ability to assist ordinary, real women, millions of whom are daily oppressed and insulted in their homes, and all of whom are insulted in public, by the offensive parody of 'mtf trans'.
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Re: Helen says
Date: 2008-11-08 05:27 pm (UTC)The documentary was Lefties: Angry Wimmin.
I don't think I've really said, here, much on the present day "power and influence" of modern RadFems. I've been talking about their influence at a crucial formative stage of Stonewall, in the late '80s.
It is, I fear, a problem that that we do not know what influence they presently have. Their hate stuff keeps popping up[1] enough to know there's an undercurrent, but we don't know how big, or how powerful.
It is Bindel has a Guardian column and not you, Roz. Her hate gets read by The Guardian's readership of students, journalists, teachers, social workers, civil servants and politicians. It was Bindel who was a Home Office adviser; taught police and immigration personnel. Her colleagues have drafted international treaties on trafficking that exclude T* people, even though we certainly get trafficked. It is they who work in refuges and on violence issues, and get to define us as unwelcome, even harmful.
How much input did they have on Batty's articles on RR that were so widely used against us, not least in parliament?
Who knows just where one might encounter one of them, or just how much blind hatred might suddenly be unleashed? What lies suddenly circulated? But there are religious nutjobs around too, and other dangers. One just has to be prepared. On top of all the other issues we can face.
[1] For example, the director of UK Women in Philosophy, who heads a unit studying victims, presented a RadFem paper last May at this conference. Here is the abstract: