Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

mutilation; women who are androgynously skinny, naturally or because of illness; women who have had hysterectomies; women who are infertile or post-menopausal; or the vast spectrum of women who are biologically intersex, who make up 0.2% of women worldwide. Is the female identity of these people under question too? If it is, feminism has a long way to go.
     
    Greer and her followers seem singularly uninterested in the science behind their binary thinking, which establishes that prescribed gender roles still fall largely into the binary categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, but human bodies do no such thing. The spectrum of human physicality belies binary gender essentialism – as must feminism, if it is ever to be the revolutionary movement our culture so desperately needs.
     
    Trans activism is not merely a valid part of the feminist movement: it is a vital one. The notion that one’s biological sex does not have to dictate anything about one’s behaviour, appearance or the eventual layout of one’s genitals and secondary sex organs, now that we live in a glittering future where such things are possible, is the radical heart of feminist thought.
     
    At the very heart of sexist thought is the notion that the bodies we are born with ought to dictate our character, our behaviour, our appearance, our choices, the nature of our relationships and the work of our lives. Feminism puts forward the still-radical notion that this is not the case. Feminism holds that gender identity, rather than being written in our genes, is an emotional, personal and sexual state of being that can be expressed in myriad different ways that encompass and extend beyond the binary categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Feminism holds that prescribed gender roles are a tyranny that no-one – whether trans, cis, male, female or intersex – should be forced to conform to in order to prove their identity, their validity or their human worth.
     
Trans feminist revolutions
    Feminism calls for gender revolution, and gender revolution needs the trans movement. We must put aside the hurts of the past and look towards a future of radical solidarity between all those who are troubled by gender in the modern world. Whatever our differences, until contemporary feminism fully and finally accepts trans people as ideological allies, it will never achieve what Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Christine Burns, Sally Outen and every feminist who has ever longed for a better world are all working towards: an end to the damaging and demeaning tyranny of gender stereotypes and a coherent resistance to bodily marginalisation.
     
    What part of female experience do trans women not know? How to bleed between the legs? How to adopt a posture of subservience in order to be accepted as one’s felt gender? How to ape commercial sexuality and spend money on the trappings of femininity as sanctioned by the overculture? How to perform, and how to long for the freedom to be oneself without having to perform? Trans women know all of these things, many of them better than cis women, because they have had to fight at every turn even for the constrained right to consumer femininity. All women have to fight for gender capital: trans women merely start out in debit.
     
    The one thing that most trans women largely do not experience is reproductive tyranny, the obscenity of living in a culture that tries to stamp itself all over one’s womb and clamp itself around one’s ovaries and shame XX-genotype women for owning bodies that can create new life. I have stood on too many protest lines beside transsexual women, screaming together for the right to legal abortion on demand after forty years of fighting, to imagine for one second that this is a part of women’s oppression that trans women do not understand. The struggle for medical and legal recognition of trans women’s needs and the struggle for medical and legal recognition of a woman’s right to choose are part of the same dialectic of wresting back state control over women’s bodies.
     
    Trans women and transvestites are despised by gender fascists because they do something unforgivable: they take the rules of the game and they make them explicit. They show that femininity is a mode of being that can and must be purchased. They take the sexual sell and they make it manifest, with the courage and ingenuity that often comes from feeling oneself an outsider from the first. And for this reason, almost as a form