Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

of female physical mystery. Greer’s orthodoxy that trans women are simply men who seek surgery because they believe that womanhood is akin to male castration has been supplemented with charges that trans people are merely repressed homosexuals who would rather change their physical sex than live in same-sex relationships. Raymond, who was active in campaigns to deny federal funding to sex-change surgery and to force trans women out of influential roles in women’s culture, claimed that trans women are “trojan horses of the patriarchy”, committing rape by their very existence. 12
     
    Transsexual people have responded to this harassment by demanding that anti-trans feminists be denied platforms to speak on other issues and, in some cases, by renouncing feminism altogether. The deep personal and ideological wounds inflicted on both sides of the argument are reopened with vigour every time the mainstream press gives space to an anti-trans article by a cis (non-transsexual) feminist.
     
    Many otherwise sensible and learned feminists have fallen prey to lazy transphobic thinking. In the vast majority of cases, feminist transphobia does not stem from deep, personal hatred of trans people, but from drastic, tragic ideological misapprehension of the issues at stake. In 2009, Julie Bindel declared in an article for Standpoint magazine: “The Gender Recognition Act [a UK act which allows people to change sex and be issued with a new birth certificate] will have a profoundly negative effect on the human rights of women and children.” Her views are founded on the assumption that “transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is ‘natural’ for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls… the idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.” 13
     
    Bindel and others have, initially with the best of intentions, misunderstood not only the nature of transsexualism but also the radical possibilities for gender revolution that real, sisterly alliance between cis feminists and the trans movement could entail.
     
    Binary femininity is a social construct and anti-trans feminists are right to identify it as such: human biology is not subject to cultural norms of gender polarity, and there is a small but significant no-man’s land of people who are intersex and hermaphrodite between the male and female sexes. When it comes to re-enforcing damaging stereotypes, however, trans men and women are no guiltier than cis men and women. In fact, the misogyny and sexist stereotyping that Bindel identifies as associated with trans identities are entirely imposed on the trans community by external forces.
     
    Sally Outen, a trans rights campaigner, explains: “It is only natural for a person who strongly wishes to be identified according to her or his felt gender to attempt to provide cues to make the process easy for those who interact with her or him. That person cannot be blamed for the stereotypical nature of the cues that society uses, or if they can be blamed, then every cisgendered person who uses such cues is equally to blame.”
     
    Even a casual assessment of the situation indicates that the problem lies not with transsexual people, but with our entire precarious construction of what is ‘male’ and what ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Bindel’s description of trans women in “fuck-me-boots and birds-nest hair” are no different from today’s bewildered 12-, 13- and 14-year-old cissexual girls struggling to make the transition from deeply felt, little-understood womanhood to socially dictated, artificial ‘femininity’. Like teenage girls stuffing their bras with loo-roll and smearing on garish lipstick, the trans women for whom Bindel, Greer and their ilk reserve special disdain are simply craving what most growing girls crave: the pathological trappings of gendered social acceptance.
     
    Amy, a 41-year-old trans woman, says: “Transition in later life is a really weird experience, in that you’re suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into being teenage, plus you have teenage levels of female hormones coursing through your veins. You haven’t grown up through the sidling-toward-teenagerhood that girls get, the socialisation and the immersion in society’s expectations and realities. Trans women get to learn those, just a quarter of a century late, in my case. The results tend to be a bit wild.”