WHERE EXCLUSIONARY FEMINISM IS ABOUT PRIVILEGE RETENTION.
The fifth Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, whose name adorns a bank, a radio network, a Port city further to the north of that state and a university, Lachlan Macquarie, condoned and ordered massacres of the First Nations Peoples, but at the same time, came into conflict with the establishment because of his belief that once convicts who had been transported from the British Isles had served their sentences or been granted a ticket of leave, that they could return to their place in society. A noted case of this was Francis Greenway, whose image adorned the paper ten dollar note (with Henry Lawson on the rear), an architect convicted of forging the signature on a building contract, in 1812, who arrived in the colony, in 1814, who worked closely with Lachlan Macquarie once he was granted a ticket-of-leave, and some of his buildings, such as the Hyde Park Barracks, can still be seen today. Those who objected to Macquarie’s actions, Jeffrey Bent, a magistrate, Samuel Marsden, a chaplain, and John Macarthur, a wealthy merino farmer, were the exclusives.
To have been born a male in many societies was to be privileged in many ways. You had more rights than a female. People sometimes say that women have rights because men granted them, which is partly true.
A common misconception amongst exclusive or exclusionary feminists is that transwomen are men who dress as women who want to control women’s spaces and work with the patriarchy to further oppress women. An important distinction to be drawn here is that a man who performs in a drag act over accentuates femininity and whilst not acting, may live as a man. A transwoman, on the other hand, is a person who was assigned male on account of genitalia at birth, and whose gender does not match it.
What cisgender women need to remember is this. A girl becomes a woman through developing secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts, and she starts ovulating. A boy becomes a man when he develops facial and bodily hair, his voice deepens, and the like. Gillette made an advertisement where a man taught his trans son how to shave. A teenage boy does not instinctively know how to shave; he needs a role model to demonstrate it. I remember, when I developed three whiskers on my chin, my mother came into the bathroom and had been popping pimples on my face when she told me to raise my head and she grabbed a razor and shaved them off. What she should have done, in my view, was said, “Okay, use the same principle as I use to shave my legs. Put a bit of shaving foam on your finger and apply it to your chin. Now, using the razor, gently move it forward and you should remove the whiskers.” When a teenage girl begins menstruating, she needs a woman to show her how to use panty liners and help with which ones to use.
If my ex-girlfriend had been honest with herself, she would hopefully have said that I was darn good to her when she had her periods. I used to buy her analgesic pain relief, apply hot and cold packs to her belly and was not embarrassed to go into a supermarket and buy her some panty liners.
But I do remember with my mother, when I was at school, a girl taking the proverbial asked me if I’d had my periods yet. My response was, “I don’t have them, time does.” I knew about periods at high school, too, as in, period one is English, period two is History, but for all of my mother’s dominance in shaving off my whiskers on my chin, she was decidedly sheepish, when I told her what the girl had asked me, in explaining what the girl was talking about.
The fact of the matter is, a transwoman, despite not ovulating, needs to learn about how to be a woman. As she transitions, she needs to find her own style of clothing. She needs to learn how to apply make-up, if she wants to use it. And she needs to be accepted as a woman. Okay, having gone through male puberty, she may still have a deep voice if she hasn’t had a tracheal shave, but she’s still a woman.
A right-wing political candidate in Australia, claimed that transgender people were autistic, and a right-leaning academic claimed that the gender clinic in Melbourne had around 45% of its patients were autistic. What the anti-trans community needs to understand is, it’s NOT simply the case that if someone referred to the gender clinic is given an autism diagnosis that that’s all they need and then they’re fine. What can cause a number of autistic people to experience gender dysphoria is that we don’t conform to gender stereotypes and we reject traditional gender roles. So, to quote Professor Tony Attwood, “an autistic boy thinks, “I’m not like the traditional male. I’m nice. I’m what a girl is expected to be, so I must be a girl.”” Professor Tony Attwood has also said that he has seen some clients who are autistic and when they’ve transitioned their gender, they’re the happiest he’s ever seen them.
I remember the same right-wing horror, hanson, carrying on because some people protested against trump, and she was asking why people were protesting about a democratically elected president and not protesting for women in some countries who don’t have a choice. What she failed to grasp is, trump did not win the popular vote, and, the Australian voting system is preferential, meaning that you have to number all the boxes, and when she scored 37.1% of the primary vote, meaning she scored the most of any one candidate, but 62.9% did not want her, she decried the system. So, if her preferred candidate wins, she’s happy, but if they don’t, she wants it changed. People can protest about agendas of certain leaders, but an Australian Prime Minister can apply trade sanctions against another country, but they cannot say, “Oh, you must do this, or you must do that.” But hanson is also not calling for women in some countries to be accepted in Australia, in fact, the refugee policy of the Howard and then the latest Liberal Government, was copied from her party’s policy agenda, and wants to outlaw some things that some women do by choice! So, she is exclusive but not a feminist!
Yes, I know that women’s rights have been hard fought for and hard won, but feminists should really be allies to the transgender community not calling to exclude them. Especially as, by their exclusionary stance, they are aligning themselves with the very people they fought against for the rights that they now have, and are seeking to deny the trans community their rights!