Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Or, as one cis friend of mine put it: “If I’d had the income that some trans people do when I was a teenager, I’d have owned a cupboard full of fuck-me-boots.”
     
Buying and selling gender
    The fact that socially acceptable female identity is something that must be purchased and imposed artificially on the flesh is something that trans women understand better than anyone else. If we locate contemporary patriarchal oppression within the mechanisms of global capitalism, the experience of trans women, who can find themselves pressured to spend large amounts of money in order to ‘pass’ as female, is a more urgent version of the experience of cis women under patriarchal capitalism. In Western societies, where shopping for clothes and makeup is a key coming-of-age ritual for cis women, all people wishing to express a female identity must grapple with the brutal dictats of the beauty, diet, advertising and fashion industries in order to ‘pass’ as female.
     
    Whilst radical acceptance of mess and fluids and flesh are part of the ideological core of feminist resistance, the biological feminine essentialism of anti-trans feminists and conservatives alike is misplaced. In truth, not a single person on this planet is born a woman. Becoming a woman, for those who willingly or unwillingly submit to the process, is torturous, magical, bewildering and utterly politicised. In the essay “Mama Cash: Buying and Selling Genders”, trans author Charlie Anders explains: “Transgender people… understand more than anyone the high cost of gender, having adopted identities as adult neophytes. People often work harder than they think to maintain the boy/girl behaviours expected of them. You may have learned through painful trial-and-error not to use certain phrases, or to walk a certain way. After a while, learned gender behaviour becomes almost second nature, like trying to compensate for a weak eye. Again, transgender people are just experiencing what everyone goes through.” 14
     
    The concept and practice of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is the territory over which ‘radical’ feminists and trans activists traditionally clash most painfully. Bindel, along with others, believes that the fact that SRS is carried out at all means “we’ve given up on the distress felt by people who identify as gender dysphoric, and turned to surgery instead of trying to find ways to make people feel good in the bodies they have.”
     
    Bindel makes the case that the SRS ‘industry’ is part of a social discourse in which homosexual and gender-non-conforming men and women are brought back into line by “psychiatrists who think that carving people’s bodies up can somehow make them ‘normal’”. Were SRS an accepted way of policing the boundaries of gender non-conformity here, Bindel, Daly, Greer and Raymond’s equation of the surgery with ‘mutilation’ would be more than valid – it would be urgent. However, SRS is nothing of the sort.
     
    In fact, SRS is carried out only very rarely, and only on a small proportion of trans people, for whom the surgery is not a strategy for bringing their body in line with their gender performativity but a way of healing a distressing physical dissonance that Outen vividly describes as “a feeling like I was being raped by my own unwanted anatomy”.
     
    Surgery is normally a late stage of the transitioning process and falls within a spectrum of lifestyle choices – for those who opt for it at all. Trans activist Christine Burns points out:
     
Julie Bindel is quite right that we ought to be able to build a society where people can express the nuances of their gender far more freely, without feeling any compulsion to have to change their bodies more than they really want to.
     
However, that is precisely what many trans people really do. Only one in five of the people who go to gender clinics have reassignment surgery – the other four in five find accommodations with what they’ve got. Bindel’s thinking cannot admit that, far from emphasising the binary, 80% of trans people are doing far more to disrupt gender stereotypes than she imagines. With or without surgery, trans people are living examples of the fact that gender is variable and fluid.
     
    Of course, like any other surgery, SRS has its risks, and a minority of patients will regret the procedure. But for most of the trans people who decide to pursue SRS, the operation allows for potentially life-saving progression