ANY DISCUSSION of the coalition implied by the letters in “LGBT”—ignoring for a moment the many other letters that sometimes follow—needs to acknowledge a historical friction between two of its components that has erupted into open hostilities intermittently over the past three decades. The letters in question are the “L” and “T”—for once the “G” is out of the picture—and it hinges on a question of gender definition that could not be more elementary or easily framed: what constitutes a woman?
Second Wave Feminism traces its origins back to the 1960s and ’70s and was grounded in a clear-cut distinction between the sexes, between men and women: the oppressor and the oppressed. The exclusion of penis-bearing humans from women-only festivals and events was mostly uncontroversial (though male children of participants presented a dilemma). The emergence of transgender people as a visible presence with social and political goals in the ’80s and ’90s threw an ambiguity into the works and called for a clarification—though only after much debate, as one can imagine. One faction that towed the line of “radical feminism” would insist on a definition of woman that excluded anyone not identified as female at birth. This often led to explicit policies of MTF exclusion from women-only events, and there were well-documented cases of transwomen being asked to leave such spaces.
Needless to say, such policies have provoked outrage in the transgender community—and sometimes in the larger LGBT world—often with passions, and rhetoric, running exceptionally high.
This magazine got into the fray a few years ago in a feature by Bonnie J. Morris titled “The Hijacking of Lesbian History” (July–August 2015). Morris would probably answer to the label “radical lesbian feminist” but regards “TERF” as a “slur.” She was involved for many years with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a women-only event that struggled for decades with the question of transgender eligibility. As far back as 1991, a transwoman was asked to leave the festival, and a “womyn-born-womyn intention,” if not a hard-and-fast policy, was in effect until the festival’s demise in 2015. In her piece, Morris denies that a policy of exclusion was in force but goes on to stress the importance of female assignment at birth for participation: “To clarify the policy: the festival does not ban, inspect, or expel transwomen. Its intention is to be a temporary gathering for women to address diverse experiences of being born female. It asserts that being female-assigned at birth fosters a unique identity. And as a weeklong, clothing-optional campout, it’s a trusted sanctuary for countless women and girls.”
Having laid out the basic plotline, let me step back and present a few perspectives on this controversy that both exemplify and complicate the argument, quoting at some length to allow each writer to make their point without interruption.
The radical feminist position is represented here by Pippa Fleming, a successful African-American performance artist and scholar who has spent her life chronicling and preserving the art and culture of black lesbians. Her piece, “The Gender-Identity Movement Undermines Lesbians,” appeared in The Economist (London) last summer (7/3/18).
Fleming’s approach is to establish lesbianism as an ancient institution that has weathered the centuries, one that’s worth preserving and nurturing, and to contrast that durability with the current fashion for seeing gender as mutable and sexual orientation as situational. What she finds most problematical is the claim that one can change one’s gender—become a woman, for example—through a simple declaration. Feminists have long maintained that womanhood is a sacred space admission into which requires a lifetime of socialization and experience, including oppression by men. Fleming upholds the special prerogative of lesbians “to say no to the phallus.” Her multiple minority status allows her to make a comparison that white lesbians might not. No one argues that race is “fluid” or a matter of personal declaration; she finds that the infatuation with “fluidity” subtly undermines the position of racial (or other) minorities whose status is considered immutable.
Lesbianism is as ancient as the cosmos, yet it is a threat to patriarchy because it does not center males, nor does it seek male wisdom, power or validation. Instead of finding solace within our community against the threat of misogyny and homophobia, lesbian identity is being written out. When black lesbians attempt to navigate pop culture’s “gender-identity matrix,” searching for their kindred’s place in history, they often come up empty-handed. What matrix, you ask? It’s that maze that has people running around in circles, as they attempt to reconcile new language and theories forced upon them by the elites in education and the corporatocracy, like “cisgender,” which means you were cool with the sex you were born in, or that biology is irrelevant and has no connection to one’s concept of self.
Whether it be in feminist studies, gender studies or the history of gay pride, black lesbians often go without their names or sexual orientation being mentioned. The trend toward claiming that “all sexuality is fluid” and to brand everyone and everything queer and transgender means black lesbians are rendered invisible. A queer identity embraces sexual and intimate relationships with males, females, and intersex people who identify as transgender, gender-queer, trans masculine or gay, just to name a few. My, we are a diverse crowd.
In this current wave of “free to me” gender politics, any man with a penis can claim to be a female and expect entrance into female-segregated spaces, such as locker rooms, sports teams or colleges, without question. But don’t twist it; the generosity does not flow in both directions. Just ask the women who crashed the party at the male lido in Hampstead Heath in London in May: they were promptly escorted out by the police. Lesbian identity is now being dubbed as exclusionary or transphobic. You’re damn right it’s exclusive: lesbians have a right to say no to the phallus, no matter how it’s concealed or revealed. Imagine if white folks ran around claiming they were black or demanded access to our affinity spaces. They would be called deluded racist fools! …
What I think is striking about Fleming’s elaboration of the radical feminist position is her willingness to call the problem by its anatomical name. Radical feminists such as Mary Daly and Judith Butler have expressly stated that they understand “the phallus” not as a literal object in space but as a manufactured idol of male aggression and power over women, a cultural weapon of domination, expressed in language. Not so Pippa Fleming. Sure the phallus is a symbol of male power, but then there is its physical presence in the room, which—for that very reason—can stir fear and loathing in some people.
Similarly, abstract arguments about contested sites and assumed identities give way to talk of male and female anatomy in a piece by Meredith Talusan, a widely published trans writer who resolutely rejects the implication that anatomy is destiny in the previous passage. For Talusan (in “We’ve Always Been Nasty,” a chapter in 2017’s Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America), the problem is not the phallus but the vagina, which has its own power and privilege in these times. Rejecting the feminist claim that having a vagina is a precondition for being considered a woman, Talusan finds a disturbing trend in the women’s movement of the Trump era: a fetishization of the vagina as symbolized by the ubiquitous “pussy hats” in women’s marches and protests, starting in January 2017, and in slogans such as “Pussy Power” that reflect “gender-essentialist” thinking. These obsessions with female anatomy implicitly disenfranchise transgender people:
Trans women and gender-nonconforming femmes have always been marginalized at best if not outright excluded from the American feminist movement. Even among cisgender women who don’t believe that someone needs to be born with a vagina to be a woman, we continue to be seen not as potential leaders with unique knowledge, but either as victims or as tokens to include, as long as our opinions don’t stray too far from the majority. Cisgender women who lead other women boldly are lauded; transgender women are accused of behaving like men, and those of us who are feminine but don’t consider ourselves women are commonly excluded altogether. These exclusions are particularly glaring in light of Trump, as trans women and femmes who have a long collective and individual history of battling for our rights are relegated to the margins of discussions about how feminists should fight this unjust administration. …
The Women’s March on January 21, 2017—the largest one-day demonstration in U.S. history—has been post-Trump feminism’s most visible manifestation, and a prime example of how the movement marginalizes trans women and femmes. The organizers included no trans women or gender-nonconforming femmes. Even the march’s name adheres to the strictures of binary gender, leaving no room for lives that exist between the lines.
Trans marginalization in post-Trump feminism is embedded in the continued use of gender-essentialist rhetoric and symbols. Slogans such as “Pussy Power,” “Pussy Grabs Back,” and the ubiquitous pink pussy hats worn by a large proportion of women attending the march centered genitals as the primary symbol of womanhood. While designed to counter Trump’s controversial remark that he routinely “grabs women by the pussy,” these instances demonstrate ignorance of the long and ongoing history of trans-exclusion on the basis of genitals.
While it’s important to discuss the specific oppressions associated with vaginas in matters ranging from abortion rights to sexual assault, to deploy the vagina as an overarching symbol for womanhood marginalizes trans women and GNC femmes. Pussy hats may empower cisgender women, but they are a painful reminder of the high price of admission to womanhood for trans women who want reassignment surgery and cannot afford it, as well as those of us who do not think surgery should be a necessary condition for acceptance into the feminist fold.
As diametrically opposed as the previous two positions are, activist Alyson Escalante, in a paper titled “Rethinking Lesbian Feminism” (medium.com, 5/17/2018), tries to reconcile the two sides, or at least put a positive spin on their dispute. Her objective is to show how each group can raise the other’s consciousness through a careful study of their differences.
I’m not sure how successful she is, but Escalante makes the intriguing point, following the French writer Monique Wittig, that there was once a time when the conventionally accepted definition of a woman excluded lesbians out of hand. What Adrienne Rich meant by “compulsory heterosexuality” was a patriarchal norm that equated womanhood with marriage and procreation, implicitly ostracizing women who rejected these roles in favor of, say, relationships with other women. The irony, of course, is that now it is lesbian feminists who find themselves in the position of setting boundaries of exclusion:
Monique Wittig uses heterosexuality to understand women’s oppression, referring to patriarchal society as Heterosexual Society. For Wittig, the domination of men is maintained by notions of sexual difference which insist that men and women are innately different in a complimentary manner, and insists that the proper place for both is in a heterosexual relationship with each other. To be a woman, for Wittig, is to be a heterosexual subject who is sexually available and destined to subordination with men.
Because of this, Wittig suggests that “lesbians are not women.” What does Wittig mean by this bold claim? Essentially, because to be a woman means to be heterosexual, to reject heterosexuality is to fail to be a woman. For Wittig, this failure reveals the ways that lesbianism exists as a form of resistance, not only to male supremacy, but to the idea of men and women as distinct genders. Lesbianism becomes a resistance alternative that can allow us to push for the abolition of gender, by allowing women to organize outside the heterosexual model of woman.
… [The] mass media still portray a happily-ever-after life of the princess finding her prince to young girls world wide, and success for women is still painted in heterosexual terms. Even working women are still expected to enter into heterosexual unions, and Wittig allows us to understand that these expectations, these imposed destinies, are a central part of patriarchal domination.
If there is to be a reconciliation of the “L” and “T” communities, it seems to me it will entail a recognition that they have one thing in common: adherence to a strict bifurcation of the sexes, however differently expressed and to whatever separate ends. The radical lesbian position is unabashedly essentialist in its insistence that gender identities are clear-cut at birth and immutable over time. For transwomen, the test case for acceptance has traditionally been society’s willingness to recognize them as women, full stop. That said, it is worth noting that Meredith Talusan hesitates to refer to herself as a woman.
In fact, the very thing that the “L” and “T” have in common is increasingly viewed as problematical or merely irrelevant by young people, who question the necessity for a “binary” system of genders and sexual orientations. The concept of “sexual fluidity” that Pippa Fleming denounced is up-and-coming in the LGBT world, and some shifting about can already be observed. Thus, for example, a trend began some years ago for butch lesbians to refer to themselves as “transgender”—an ironic twist, perhaps, on the dispute under discusssion, and further evidence that you are who you say you are.
The enemies of LGBT equality have based their opposition on the notion that being gay is a “choice,” something that gay rights organizations have stridently denied. But what if there were an element of choice in gender and sexual orientation—or at least in the labels that one embraces? What if you could just name it and claim it in the way that, increasingly, one chooses a religious faith? Would that be such a terrible thing? We have grown accustomed to the idea that sexual identity has to be immutable to be valid, to be worthy of equal rights. The notion that people can choose these identities will require another paradigm shift, but perhaps it points to a kind of liberation that is yet to come.
Wendy Fenwick is an international writer based in Boston.
