The Goldberg Variations: Trans Exclusion and Old School Dialectics

 “Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary and symbolic theatre!”

— Gilles DeleuzE, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

You know the joke? . . . how are Londoners like smarties?

They both melt in the tube!

And outside a London tube station in 2012, avoiding the summer broil, a nondescript gathering took place. A dozen or so biological women … emh … “women born women and living as women” were standing about. Note the wording change: the original phrasing as to who were  permissible attendees was changed when their somatic illogic of “biological” were pointed out.

The summer light had sufficient gloss that concessions to sunblock were required. The hurried commotion of British metropolitan transit, that up and down smash of a commute between passengers and time constraints, didn’t even notice the patriarchy smashing going down, right there, in the open.

They were planning — preparing — for the universal elimination of gender.

Dossing, chatting, comparing blueprints for dismantling the symbolic order of caste structures based on the ‘feminine’, exposing the latest transgender conspiracies to reinforce said ‘femininity’ — these activists collaborate under the ideology loosely known as radical feminism. And these tube station bystanders were permitted participants for an international conference, widely advertised and receiving copious attention from the Big British press, known as RadFem 2012.

Typically, such a forum of scholars and activists would meet in more suitable environs than the clatter and shake of a hot subway line. There’d been a snag, however.  The hired venue cancelled the booking when they learned that almost all of the entirety of the programme would be dedicated to excluding and excising transgender women, since they’re covert operatives of men’s rights activism. Given that Conway Hall has historical connections to both the anti-slavery movement and Irish expat communities, and thus knowing a thing or two about discrimination . . . they were most swift to disassociate themselves with an event predicated on expulsive labels of “us” from “them”, of the valid and invalid. They decided that this private, closed congregation, dedicated to securing legitimate womanhood from non-legitimate womanhood, wasn’t a monologue they wanted to host. Like the RadFems, they made a decision about who could and could not “belong”. And Conway Hall wasn’t alone in this; the usual institutions of conversation and conferences had no interest. No universities had any interest in sponsorship.

And so RadFem2012 transpired outside of a Tube station — or so that portion of the conference transpired, as was  related to me by a “woman√woman + lives as a woman” individual who dropped in on the sunburned colloquium.

Despite almost 40 years of activity, this group remains almost entirely unknown, even to the most RSS-obsessed feminist issues reader. Yet Michelle Goldberg selected this sect as an article for the hallowed New Yorker. Because, as she lets us know, “transgenderism” has achieved too much visibility and, as she quaintly puts it, “cachet”. (“Transgenderism is getting to be kewl!”)  Corrective balance — the dispute must be given its due — is required.

But Goldberg is seeking “debate” in some kind of false equilibrium of comparison.

“Balance”, as an introductory plea to begin an essay, whistles out of the sheathed paragraph like a blade. And if I read that word at the beginning of a pop media essay on trans issue? — my eyeballs roll back inward as far as they’ll go and I think “oh, shite.” It never ends balanced.

It’s exhausting: the tedious discourse of cis attack and trans rebuttal that has played out with iTunes-worthy repetition throughout the year. (Katie Couric and Piers Morgan kicked off the festivities back in early winter.) It’s the deliberately numbing protocol of trans as social issue of the moment: and it goes like this. A trendy journalist needs trendy topic. Hey, I know, trans stuff! Page views = ka-ching! Wasn’t Laverne Cox on Time? And so trendy article gets written and published to amplified attention. As the ‘attention’ is more often ‘badly researched misinformation’, trans journalists — invariably from a circle of three or four names — write takedown tear-up responses for a glossy feminist website within the week. It’s an awful pattern; and Goldberg’s piece was no exception. Always put on the defensive, see responses by platformers like Marie Brighe, Leena Ginelle). To my mind, perhaps the most comprehensive in response to Michelle Goldberg’s New Yorker piece would be Julia Serano, who writes unnervingly as to how her her own contribution to the article had been malformed during editing phases.

Goldberg gives legitimacy to debate validity. Not to be outdone the accused plagiarist and apologist for Israel Margaret Wente — Canada’s smash and grab journalist of anti-intellectual conservatism — followed up Goldberg with an op-ed, basically a rehash of what she wrote back in February.  Wente, like Goldberg, directly puts to issue the legitimacy of trans identities, which she casually ascribes to the faddish millennialism. And, unsurprisingly, both authors cite virtually the same anti-trans sources whilst investing minimal or nil effort in ‘balancing’ the invectives with actual trans voices.

So much for balance (Goldberg), or, in Wente’s parlance, “objectivity”.

When these authors invoke such a canard as justification,  I’m reminded of this quote from Derrida: “What is called ‘objectivity’ . . . imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions.” In Wente and Goldberg, the “established network” is a form of patriarchy and misogyny in which the trans woman cannot possibly be permitted to be equally recognised. The trans women is an abject piece designed through deliberately mis-shaped to not fit the jigsaw framing what is, in short, cissexism. If not cissexism, and I reckon it is, then at the very least an entrenched episteme that is antagonistic to the possibility that transgender people exist, that the medical technology to transition is there and recommended to those who desire it.

Why else would the transgender phenomenon, which is recognized both legally and medically throughout North America, still remain an issue of “dispute” among the ill-informed commentariat? Why are trans women turned into topic fodder for cross-country airport reading in  The New Yorker?  Why else would our person or not-person status be a permissible topic for debate? To be or not to be? You enforce the question upon us do you get to be at all? Even as Goldberg concedes via quote from Janice Raymond — radical feminism’s central philosophical tenet is the eradication of trans women as an identity, experience, and legitimate sexed subjectivity.

The term radical feminism calls up such vast vista of activist praxis that it’s rather self-proclaimed. Many people call themselves feminists and perceive themselves as radical.  However, an identifiable ideology that Goldberg and Wente describe as “radical feminism” is in fact recycled Janice Raymond, probably the only radical feminist who has had a substantial readership. Raymond’s feminism argues for the exclusion of trans women from the static biological corporeality of woman a trans-historical, trans-cultural, and trans-contextual reality of universal embodiment. Trans women are not women because they are, de facto, men. As reinventors of the tropes and traps of prescriptive womanhood, they directly reiterate patriarchal norms that subjugate woman, as bodies, through the coercive constraints of “gender”, which patriarchy encodes and perpetuates to maintain women in the servant’s caste. Indeed, trans women are the most insidious trick of patriarchy, being the hallucinatory mimesis of femininity. (Imitation is the most dangerous form of reinscription.). Raymond’s condemnation is not exactly nuanced. As she claims explicitly, “the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have moulded women” (Raymond  99). Furthermore, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves …. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive” (Raymond 104).

Does anyone really believe this stuff? Well, sure. But In terms of scholarship in feminist philosophy, not really. Goldberg has to go all the way back to the 1970s to find an articulation of this form of feminism. Goldberg, with almost nil attention to the countless intersectional feminist scholars who are trans inclusive, focuses on Raymondian feminism and its recent redux in a publication by Sheila Jeffreys, whose scholarly impact has bee negligible and amply critiqued. (No words of those critiques, of course. Remember what I said about “balance”?) Indeed, Judith Butler, undoubtedly one of the foremost scholars on gender and society in the English language, decries Raymondian feminism as a deplorable and unethical viewpoint:

“It once again sets up the feminist as the prosecutor of trans people. If there is any mutilation going on in this scene, it is being done by the feminist police force who rejects the lived embodiment of transwomen.”

 But that’s ‘gender is only costume’ gobbledygook, we’re told. That’s just the ivory tower? Then consider how these front line abortion escorts describe their females of Raymondian biopolitics:  “I am amazed that a TERF movement even exists because it is so contrary to what I consider to be the fundamental values of feminism.”

So why this awful pretence to “balance”? First, Goldberg has a habit of writing on ‘problematic women’. This year began with her chastising the activism of women of colour . . . now it’s trans women . . . and from what I’ve seen on the open casting call pleas on twitter, she is now soliciting sex work advocates for a “balanced discussion”. (Dear friends in sex work activism: I wouldn’t answer the phone if she rings you.) As I wrote earlier about contractual sacrifice, this theatre of cruelty known as “discussion” is in fact a kind of public offering up of the trans body as public exhibit for scrutiny and disavowal. We’ve seen it too often not to recognize the pattern.

Margaret Wente — or as I know her, Sister Syllogism — uses Goldberg’s essay as an opportunity for a polemic excused by the smoke bomb promise of “objectivity”. She writes, fingers twitching with anxiety, “I am concerned about the current climate, inflamed by half-baked postmodernis[m] . . .” Ah, the anti-academic argument once more. What will provide the “balance” against such numbers station bafflegab broadcasted by the trans cabal? If postmodernism is “half baked”, then Blanchard — whom both Wente and Goldberg cite as an “authority” — is a wad of cookie dough that slipped out of the bucket and congealed inside the freezer. Citing Blanchard, without contrary scholarship, is a cheap journalistic polemic: a facsimile of “research” by magnification of the extreme. As has been pointed out in every response, Dr Blanchard’s theories on the “motivations” of transgenderism have been repeatedly discredited, most recently by research by my friend and colleague at UBC, Dr Jamie Veale.

Why Blanchard? Again and again! Why not this professor of sexual health who points to the highly unethical selectivity of Wente’s ” objectivity research”. All levels of society, including the fundamental documents of Canadian political citizenship and subjectivity, recognize that trans people have a legitimate claim to their sex and gender. So why not the experts who are educators, psychologists? Wente moans that transgenderism is a like a runaway “freight train”. Actually, we’re more of a slow moving caboose on the human rights locomotive that is finally within whistle distance of Humanrightsville. How else could you print false information about detransition rates, as Goldberg does, with nil evidence, citation, or any of the other things one learns to do as part of “objective scholarship”? Thus Wente’s invocations of “analytic neutrality” and “ethical scholarship” seem despicably inept with such outright disingenuous presentations that show but never ask when it comes to turning trans lives into fraught topics through their engineering of anxiety and ambiguity about who trans women are.

Some trans women explain how such articles constitute erasure. But, in my view, there can’t be erasure when there was never an utterance to begin with. Consistently, the one theme that links so much of cisgaze journalism has been a de-ontologising of trans women through speaking over, of positioning as a presence for discussion but an absence of contribution. Wente, Goldberg, and so forth — the omission of participation by trans women is not only a gross oversight, but a prejudicial admission of preference. In their symbolic theatre, we’re trooped onto the stage and, without even speaking, we’re made to fit their pre-written script. Why ‘trans’ is always a point of arrival at erasure, undone before spoken into existence?

Balance, you say? Objectivity scholarship? Then why cite continuously a single academic whose ideas are almost universally disregarded by her colleagues? You can’t pick up the phone and ask Susan Stryker about the new dept of transgender studies and the launch of a new scholarly journal on the subject?

Both Wente and Goldberg erroneously treat transgender as an -ism, rather than an adjective that describes (with difficulty) a wide variety of personal experiences.There is no transgenderism. There are trans people who have their own point of views.  For example, I saw Stryker recently at a conference. I don’t think we get on. [Kerrist, we must have crossed paths on more than a few wordless passes … I ended up making an Irish exit at the conference . . .] We don’t agree on a lot. And if Julia Serano read my work (she doesn’t), then she would she’d know I have vigorous criticisms of how Whipping Girl outlines a very tenuous sense of ‘unconscious sex’ as determinant to gender identity. In my view, Serano’s central claims problematically lead into the “brain sex” rhetoric that Goldberg rightly criticizes. Many trans feminist philosophers, myself among them, outright reject notions of “lady brains” and other metaphors mainly used by children to explain their dilemma. So, while Serano’s landmark first book remains the canonical cornerstone of trans thinking, I find the arguments readily undone with much philosophy of sex differentiation researched in the last few decades.  We are diverse in our views and hardly unified as an -ism.

Whereas RadFems borgify in order to preserve mono-thought, trans scholarship is lively and diverse in opinion. My point is this: trans discussions involve a vast vista of participants and points of view. Unlike RadFems, trans studies conferences don’t rule out a participant because of there demographic statistics assigned at birth. Trans feminism pursues an alternative to the old school dialectic of “what is a woman?”, the question Goldberg asks (already having an answer). I, as a feminist, ask, “how does a woman become?”  In my view, this entails Internal and external frictions, never wholly interior or exterior in experience. Anyone who is paying attention can see that the debate has clearly shifted from anachronistic models that’ve been around since the false promises of the Enlightenment.

I see Goldberg, Wente, and especially Raymondian feminism as the willful and incessant need to sacrifice the trans person as the disruption or defect that unsettles the comfort of static conflict. Overall, their own authenticity and realness must be shored up at the expense of the other. They have a psychoanalytic project of abjection in which the trans woman cannot ever be eliminated, but cannot be granted equilibrium either. Why else would so much attention be paid to an extremist viewpoint with very few adherents, and even fewer who actually practice what they preach? Why cite discredited health sources but plead ‘fair scholarship’ and ‘objectivity’?

I’d like to see journalists critique the Raymondian feminist position, as academic scholars like myself have done for some time. You’ll note that Goldberg and Wente conveniently elide the aspects of Raymondian feminism that is antithetical to the heterosexual, able-bodied, cosmopolitan elitism that the New Yorker enshrines. They’re asking us, “Are you really women? Cos I dunno . . .”, of playing our hearts against their faux-balanced feature of “realness”, the fulcrum of “are trans women real? no!”

We are forced ever into the defensive position of non-existence before discussion can begin.

Why not ask RadFems about their ideology? Political lesbianism should be chosen by all women? And how exactly will gender abolition come about? Armed conflict? Evangelical radical feminism? A communist version of divine rapture? Are heterosexual women’s erotic activity automatically disempowering? That penis-in-vagina sex always constitutes rape? Why is Raymondian feminism unable to win any entrance into mainstream feminism despite over 40 years of promulgation? Are women just daft or too brainwashed to hear the Word?

You won’t hear these questions asked.

I think there should be a discussion,  but not a dispute or debate.

There is a discussion (not “dispute” or “debate”) about many aspects of trans people. Theory too often leaves out the lived realities. This is a fundamental problem of Goldberg’s title: transgender is an adjective for people — it’s not an -ism. Despite constant attempts to portray us as a singular illuminati with broken walkie-talkies, there is tremendous variation in how trans women interpret and politicize our experiences. We’re not subscribers to mandatory homogeny as is ultimately required of Raymondian feminism.

I know Michigan Fest doesn’t owe me an invitation, nor would I actively seek to get one. (MichFest won’t let me participate … the Catholic Church forbids me from taking communion … neither prohibition really bothers me, nor unsettles my living as a woman.) If they wish to organise autonomously through private assembly in a pastoral setting, I won’t stop them. And I don’t “unfriend” a trans woman if she reads and discusses Sheila Jeffreys. And if a Raymondian feminist insists on calling me “he”, nothing I can do about it. But can one really have much of a discussion without even that fundamental courtesy, if not also concession to empathy? Goldberg presents variations of what she perceives as abusive activism by some trans women, but put the same lens of Raymondian feminism. Take seriously the ample information and evidence given to her by Serano.

Editorial selectivity is also a form of prescriptive sacrifice.

Thus, these articles appear and will continue to appear. The New Yorker and The Globe and Mail are very conservative journals, with an aging middle to upper class audience who prefer treat radical changes in our world like the latest superficial art exhibit in Soho). They seek flattering reflections of themselves, or the version of themselves preferable in the symbolic order, rather than a genuine connection with the trans community upon which they pronounce. Yes, trans people are advancing.  Whenever there is an advance, there is backlash, and the backlash must be confronted and exposed for what it is.