Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory

Contested Sites

Patricia Elliot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317154327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Transgender studies is a heterogeneous site of debate that is marked by tensions, border wars, and rifts both within the field and among feminist and queer theorists. Intersecting the domains of women's studies, sexuality, gender and transgender studies, Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory provides a critical analysis of key texts and theories, engaging in a dialogue with prominent theorists of transgendered identity, embodiment and sexual politics, and intervening in various aspects of a conceptually and politically difficult terrain. A central concern is the question of whether the theories and practices needed to foster and secure the lives of transsexuals and transgendered persons will be promoted or undermined - a concern that raises broader social, political, and ethical questions surrounding assumptions about gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; perceptions of transgendered embodiments and identities; and conceptions of divergent desires, goals and visions.

Chapter 1 Feminist Embattlement on the Field of Trans

DOI: 10.4324/9781315576008-2

The relationship of non-trans feminists to transpersons constitutes a relatively new crisis in the way that differences with “others” are addressed, differences within what gets considered the collective identity of feminism and differences in our understandings of sexual politics. This chapter explores one of the contemporary struggles taking place over the meaning we make of these differences. I offer a specific example of what Sandy Stone (1991: 294) calls “the rage of radical feminist theories” and what I will call the disparaging view. At stake is the question of whether feminist efforts to end the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of all women will be extended to transwomen as well. According to Judith Butler, feminism has been part of the new social movements that challenge normative restrictions on gender and sexuality, especially with regard to non-trans women. One interesting set of questions Butler (2004: 2–3) raises might historically have been asked by non-trans feminists of our own status as women:

If I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human? Will the “human” expand to include me in its reach? If I desire in certain ways, will I be able to live? Will there be a place for my life, and will it be recognizable to the others upon whom I depend for social existence?

Butler makes a convincing case that groups involved in what she calls “the new gender politics”—feminist, queer, antiracist, trans, and intersex—share many common grounds in terms of overall political goals. As she (2004: 11) points out, these goals concern not just avoiding phobic attacks against bodies, but also “presumptions about bodily dimorphism, the uses and abuses of technology, and the contested status of the human, and of life itself.” However, if Butler is suggesting these as the basis for future coalition building, in a way showing that this potential exists, it is because it has yet to be wholeheartedly embraced. At the present time, her list of questions concerning the status of transgender persons can be posed to non-trans feminists. And if the need for persuasion is there, it is because large differences of opinion concerning the status of “others” continue to divide the non-trans feminist community.

The disparaging response of non-trans feminists to trans persons unfortunately tends to be associated with feminism as a whole, despite the existence of more promising feminist responses that have grown in popularity especially since the early 1990s. Associated with the early, transphobic work of Janice Raymond (1979) (whose views were reaffirmed in the subsequent 1994 edition), the disparaging response continues to find adherents among radical feminists of the women’s movement (Nicki 2006; Sweeney 2004). Like those who oppose transwomen’s participation in the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, these feminists perceive transwomen’s desire to participate in “women only” spaces as a threat to a well-guarded gender boundary.¹ Promoted by the polemical writer Sheila Jeffreys (2003), the disparager’s perspective often exudes an unconstrained hostility directed at transwomen who are construed as enemies of women’s liberation. It is therefore not surprising that other “women only” spaces, such as rape crisis shelters, should become the focal points for battles over the meaning and limits of gender identity. As will become apparent in my analysis of these battles, the central question here—who gets to be a woman?—arises from a politicization of feminine identity that has historical roots in the feminist movement.

1 For recent discussions of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, see Boyd (2006) and Koyama (2006) who usefully discuss its racist dimensions.

Some 20 years ago, Jacqueline Rose (1986: 103) argued that we should consider the difference between “the idea of a political identity for feminism (what women require) and that of a feminine identity for women (what women are or should be).” If feminism is based on what women require, it involves an ongoing process of defining our needs in all our differences. Alternatively, if feminism is based on ideas about what women are or ought to be, then we become embroiled in interminable disputes over how to define who counts as a woman, and over what or whose criteria to employ. While it has always seemed to me that the former conceptualization provides a stronger, more inclusive basis for feminism, recent encounters of non-trans feminists with transwomen have made it more difficult to separate these two formulations, with the result that it may no longer be possible to separate the two, either theoretically or practically. It also seems that problematizing the question of identity—what it means to be a woman, a man, or some other identity—is not necessarily the same thing as politicizing the feminine, at least not in the narrow sense of prescribing who gets to be a woman. But it is difficult to make claims about what women require without having in mind a specific group of people, as recent claims for inclusion by transwomen make abundantly clear. One of the problems suggested by Rose’s formulation, then, is the implication that working to meet women’s needs somehow lets one off the hook of having to define who women are, or that the question of identity is somehow peripheral or secondary.

For those working at the Vancouver Rape Relief Centre in Canada in the mid-1990s, the question of identity became, and it continues to be, an extremely contentious issue. One of the oldest (if not the oldest) feminist organizations for sexual abuse survivors, Rape Relief has always been a much admired institution with a deserved reputation for defending women’s lives and their rights. I have no desire to belittle the work carried out at Rape Relief, or to suggest it should not continue. My view is shared by Kimberly Nixon, the transwoman whose exclusion from that organization is at the heart of the legal dispute discussed in this chapter.² However, as the following discussion makes clear, the failure to recognize transwomen’s claims to legitimacy challenges the political identity of the women’s movement itself. That is, the case assumes a wider symbolic value for the meaning and self-understanding of feminism as it questions the goals of inclusivity and support for sexual minorities that many feminists deem indispensable to the movement.

2 Details of the Kimberly Nixon case were found on the web site of the Rape Relief Centre (www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca) between 2001 and 2005. My understanding of this case is based on reading legal documents, on website discussions, and on interviews conducted in 2004 with Kimberly Nixon, her lawyer barbara findlay, and supporter and activist Becki Ross. For an excellent critique of the case by Nixon’s lawyer, see findlay (2003).

Since 1995, the bitter legal dispute over whether Nixon ought to have the right to train as a counselor at the Vancouver Rape Relief Centre has raised questions about feminists’ complex relationships to and assumptions about gender, sexuality, and support for diverse sexual struggles. When Nixon arrived for training as a counselor at Rape Relief, her credentials as a woman were questioned and she was told that despite having lived as a woman for 14 years, only women who were “born” women and socialized as such could work in that capacity. Nixon filed a complaint with the British Columbia Human Rights Commission (in 1995), argued her case before the Human Rights Tribunal, and won (in January 2002). Subsequently, a petition to the Supreme Court of British Columbia was filed by Rape Relief (June 2002) to quash the Tribunal’s decision (“Petition to B.C. Supreme Court for Judicial Review”) on the grounds that the Tribunal “erred” in several areas of judgment, including that it ignored “all of the evidence before it,” a claim that is telling in itself. Rape Relief’s petition met with success in December 2003, and an appeal (December 2005) was unsuccessful. Although Nixon sought leave from the Supreme Court of Canada to appeal the decision of the BC Court of Appeal in 2007, this request was denied.

What interests me here are the arguments made against Nixon both in the petition and outside of it, arguments that illustrate what I am calling the disparaging response. The success of the 2003 petition was due to the decision that transwomen like Nixon do “not meet Rape Relief’s community membership criterion” of women as “those who have lived their entire lives as females” (Vancouver Rape Relief Society v. Nixon, para. 103, 118), that Rape Relief does have the right to make this distinction, and that excluding Nixon was not a discriminatory act.³

3 As is customary, the Court gave no reasons for its denial. My thanks to barbara findlay for updating me on this case. Personal communication, August 2009. Further references are to specific paragraphs from this 2003 document.

One’s response to this decision will of course depend on one’s allegiances to Rape Relief and to what the Honourable Mr. Justice E.R.A. Edwards calls its “article of faith” (para. 54). This article of faith refers to Rape Relief’s contention that “the experience of living exclusively as a female” has “political and therapeutic significance” (para. 125) for its work and that those without such experience ought to be excluded. The question of who gets to be a woman, specifically whether living only part of one’s life as a woman makes one “woman-enough” (para. 118), has been and continues to be the main issue. Before discussing some of the disturbing ways this question has been taken up both before and after the various judgments, I will comment briefly on some of the other implications of the case as I understand it.

For supporters of Rape Relief, two things are at stake: preventing men from demanding access to women’s organizations, and confirming women’s rights to organize separately. Yet these related concerns are difficult to credit unless one reads transwomen as men. So what looks to this group as a victory of women’s rights to organize among themselves, looks to others, including myself, as the right of specific organizations to impose discriminatory standards as long as these can be “justified” in court as necessary to meeting its goals. As Nixon’s lawyer barbara findlay (2003: 72) claims, the goal of ensuring the safety of women victims of male violence does not logically require the exclusion of transwomen from the role of counselor. Clearly we need to ask whether or not it does. Less clear is why the BC Supreme Court Judge took this on faith, stating that “Rape Relief was not required to prove its primary purpose was the promotion of the interests of persons who were ‘woman enough’ to meet its ‘political definition’ of women as persons who had lived their entire lives as females” (para. 118). Even more disconcerting is the judge’s decision that “a reasonable person excluded for having experienced part of her life as a male … would recognize that … the basis for her exclusion … did not compromise the excluded person’s dignity” (para. 125). Thus, Nixon is deemed unreasonable. Presumably this is because a “reasonable person” in Nixon’s shoes would have recognized and accepted Rape Relief’s “article of faith” that “woman enough” refers to those assigned female from birth. In any case, her experience of a “loss of dignity” at being excluded is judged to be merely subjective, an experience “no reasonable [that is, rational or objective] person in her situation would experience” (para. 132). Moreover, the objective impact of exclusion on her dignity that is required to prove discrimination is said to be negligible because it is “quite evidently exclusion from a backwater, not from the mainstream of the economic, social and cultural life of the province” (para. 154).

No doubt there is much to dispute in this judgment from a legal point of view: claims about how other “reasonable” transsexuals might act; the right of service providing groups to exclude legally recognized women; and the role of legal discourse in defining women’s rights.⁴ My focus here is on disputes among non-trans feminists around the definition of woman and the implications of those disputes for our relationship with transwomen in particular. Much of what follows is based on claims made when the case was still before the Tribunal, but the wider concerns and the arguments made for and against remain much the same today.

4 For an incisive analysis of the legal dimension that contests the outcome, see Chambers 2007. For an analysis that supports the outcome, see Harris 2006.

Transsexuals pose a challenge, intentionally or not, to mainstream feminist conceptions of sex as a stable and immutable basis of gender, a challenge which raises questions about the presumed “authenticity” of identity and about the inclusiveness of feminist politics.⁵ Defending Rape Relief’s rejection of Nixon, Judy Rebick, former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), claims: “The challenge is ‘who is a woman?’” It is a question she believes “we’re just beginning to deal with” (cited in Bailey 2000). But as Joanne Meyerowitz’s (2002) study of the history of transsexuality in the United States shows, the question of whether “male-to-female” transsexuals are women has been tossed about in popular culture at least since Christine Jorgensen’s story hit the press over 50 years ago. It has been in the feminist literature at least since Raymond’s famous diatribe against transsexuals in 1979 and has been discussed with respect to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival since the early 1990s. In 1996, Leslie Feinberg (1996: 109) noted that the “one pivotal question … being discussed in women’s communities all over the country” is “how is woman defined?” Perhaps those who experience this question as new ought to acquaint themselves with its history before making public and potentially damaging statements about transwomen.

5 For a discussion of the concept of authenticity with respect to trans identities, see Hird (2002a: 581–2).

The division of opinion over the Nixon case is symptomatic of a longstanding and deep divide among non-trans feminists whose theoretical commitments to identity politics on the one hand and deconstructive politics on the other may not be reconcilable. Ann Snitow detailed this internal division in her 1990 essay, “A Gender Diary,” and it seems she was right to contend it cannot be bridged. At the risk of widening this divide, I would describe the location of feminist politics in a presumed universal and stable identity of “women” as the problematic basis on which Nixon’s claim to womanhood has been rejected by the women at Rape Relief and by their supporters. In terms of Rose’s distinction mentioned earlier, this problematic feminist position politicizes identity by foreclosing it i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface Trans-positions, Fugitive Poetics and Educated Hope
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction Exploring Rifts in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theories
• 1 Feminist Embattlement on the Field of Trans
• 2 Revaluing Gender Diversity Beyond the Ts/Tg Hierarchy
• 3 Desire and the “(Un)Becoming Other”: The Question of Intelligibility
• 4 Risking the Unfamiliar: Psychic Complexity in Theories of Transsexual Embodiment
• 5 Still Not in Our Genes: Theorizing Complex Bodies
• Conclusion Fielding Contested Desires
• Bibliography
• Index