Read on Twitter
What makes women voluntarily refer to themselves as 'cis' while claiming to be feminist? This has been puzzling me after an altercation with that woman from Edinburgh, who's fairly typical of the type.
I think it's fair to say that in some circles, TWAW has been repeated so often that true believers think it's axiomatic - they've forgotten to interrogate it. The fact that 'woman' has been deliberately redefined by trans philosophers and queer theorists is lost on them.
It's one of those phrases that's been embedded in their lexicon to the point of becoming the basis of an entire moral philosophy; I think it *feels* wrong to them to interrogate it. It's like questioning being anti-racism or something.
Radical feminists have no such qualms of course, because our basic question is "is this good for women?", after Dworkin. I had a go at it here:
https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/953384199184150529
https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/953384199184150529
So from our point of view, extending 'woman' to males who struggle with their gender is the theft of a term used to describe and also circumscribe women as a sex class, and thus as a group with shared political interests. It's harmful, and the impacts are proving us right.
It's deeply totalitarian to redefine a term like this, to shoehorn members of an oppressor class into an oppressed class, and to then shout down any objections as bigotry, and accompany your accusations with threats. https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1057663351550066688
Apart from the very disturbing aspects of language control, it's also sexist. It requires us to redefine women as various kinds of gender identities, and abandon any materialist description, otherwise there is no way to make males part of the group.
But we know this; it's why we're fighting it so hard. What's interesting me is what propels women to take this on board, to defer to male definitions of 'woman', to start referring to themselves in terms of gender identity rather than sex, and to feel virtuous about it.
I'd say this is good old female socialisation and a big helping of what Kate Manne calls 'himpathy'. All our upbringing in patriarchy trains us to centre men. I think that these women's willingness to centre transwomen, and to change their terminology about themselves to .....
..avoid any suggestion of difference, is a tacit recognition of transwomen's maleness. They are doing what well-trained and -subjugated women always do - centering and obeying the nearest male.
I see no difference between a woman willing to call herself 'cis', and a religious woman willing to say that her husband should be the head of the house. Both are deferring to male entitlement. Both will attack other women rather than risk disapproval from males.
The same male-centric attitude allows transwomen to get away with spectacular levels of misogyny that the same women would instantly object to in men, because their feminist credentials are important to their self-image.
Himpathy says that the hurt feelings of a transwoman matter far more than any genuine risk to women. So the real crime of GC women is not that we refuse to consider rights for trans people; I know almost no-one who wants trans people to face discrimination.
It's that we refuse to centre them. We refuse to drop all our boundaries to validate them. We say that any solution has to take women's rights and needs into account as well, and that they might therefore not get exactly what they want.
And thereby we raise the spectre of male disapproval, and there are always women who are too conditioned or too afraid to risk that: the religious, the hot, the cis.
