Kat Haché, from Tennessee, is a transgender woman and an advocate of women's rights – two identities which some radical feminists believe are mutually exclusive.
"In the past, I have had some people tweet at me," she says. "I normally don't take them too seriously and have mostly ignored them, but I have heard horror stories of doxing [hackers revealing personal contact information online] and coercive outing of people as trans."
For the most part, Haché says, feminists see transgender women's rights as a natural extension of feminism. Yet at a time when trans rights are on the rise, a number of radical feminists insist on regarding trans women as men, denying them basic access to health care, women's facilities and anywhere considered a women's space.
During the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, leading voices rejected the inclusion of transgender women in feminism. Gloria Steinem, Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys have all expressed exclusionary opinions, although Steinem recently apologised.
In the early 1990s, the third wave of feminism began to chip away at the bedrock of the second wave, introducing a new focus on queer theory, abolishing gender role expectations and replacing the one-size-fits-all theorising and dogmatism with inclusivity for different races, classes and genders.
Some feminists, however, have maintained an anti-trans stance. In The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer compares trans women to rapists: "When he forces his way into the few private spaces woman may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with hate mail, he does as rapists have always done."
No comments:
Post a Comment