newyorker | The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the
height of the second-wave feminist movement. In one early skirmish, in
1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split
over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is
what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker,
said:
I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.
Such
views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold
among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves
in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women
say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it,
they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the
notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act
differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them
to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of
Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized
submission.”
In this view, gender is less an
identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege
in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a
correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a
choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really
like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they
are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this
enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination
that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from
achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than
trans people have. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being
transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. A
recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of
anti-trans violence and persecution. Forty-one per cent of respondents
said that they had attempted suicide.
