Well worth a read.

The writer, Maia, tackles head-on the various arguments for trans-exclusion and comes to the conclusion that even trans woman who do fit the stereotype of reeking of entitlement/privilege should be included in women’s spaces.

Some highlights and more thoughts after the break.

Then I met, or rather came across, a transwoman named Alison. I saw her as a man in a dress. A big man in a dress, a hairy one, wearing – ridiculously – make-up and nylons while camping in a muddy field with a bunch of hippies. She said very little – she was attending a workshop / discussion about what it means to be a woman, and she was there to listen, not to speak*. I didn’t want a man in a dress in the Women’s Dome. I didn’t want her to be there, but I didn’t want to be the one who said “No”, either.

(*It turned out that she was much less intrusive, much less imposing, than a young woman who liked to dress as a boy and play with gender, a young woman whose presence was not put to the vote, and who was so busy denying that motherhood has any necessary connection with womanhood that she did not stop to hear that for many women, for me, experiences of motherhood and womanhood are in fact connected…) [author’s emphasis]


Radical feminists – especially those who are separatists or who advocate (as I do) the need for woman-only space – often struggle with this. We often act as though we know exactly what a woman is, and that a transwoman is not a woman. Even if we recognise that the question is not straightforward, we still struggle with the inclusion of transwomen in women-only spaces.

Sometimes our exclusion is expressed by straightforwardly characterising transwomen as men, so that it is then self-evident that they should be excluded from woman-only spaces. This really isn’t a very profound analysis…

They assume that transwomen are “really” men, and take it from there. They posit a gender binary and place transwomen firmly, unanalytically, on the male side: pretty unradical for a movement that is supposed to be about questioning the gender binary. [author’s emphasis]


There are more subtle arguments in favour of excluding transwomen. The second part of that Ogyn quote is a good example of one of these: the appeal for consideration to be given to women who fear male violence or who may be discouraged or intimidated if they had to worry about the sneering of “non-womyn”...

I do get that this is hard. I get that – especially for women who have been traumatised by men, women who have good reason to fear men, women who do in fact (as I once did) view transwomen as just men in drag – this is very hard indeed. Doing the right thing is often hard. It is still the right thing….

We want to protect those among us who have been hurt, who are still hurting. The question is not whether we want to protect women who are asking for safety. The question is whether we can actually achieve that by the exclusion of transwomen, and whether it is even acceptable to offer such protection when it comes at the expense of transwomen, by perpetuating the poorly analysed othering of transwomen, by ignoring the hurts and the violence that transwomen experience precisely because of their (desire to have) membership of class Woman. I don’t think so.


There is one more argument for trans-exclusion that I want to cover. It is touched upon in the Ogyn quote about “females who were raised as girls.” The idea is that transwomen, because they were raised as boys, cannot understand female oppression, that they have absorbed a degree of male entitlement that is impossible to reconcile with radical feminist women-only spaces. This is a big fat stereotype. If you tell a radical, young, woman-loving transwoman of colour that she is too dangerous and privileged to be allowed into your radfem women-only space then she will, if she is strong enough, laugh in your face. Rightly so….

Undoubtedly there are transwomen who fit this stereotype. I have come across them, or at least come across transwomen who present that way….

These transwomen certainly do have a good chance of ending up with major entitlement complexes – but it is not because they were “raised as boys” – it is because they have lived the whole damn white supremacist hetero-patriarchal male wet dream. They have experienced huge levels of race / sex / class privilege despite their (closet) transgenderism. It is hardly surprising if such a person develops an unhealthy sense of entitlement, leading to an exaggerated (but genuinely felt) outrage at the new experience of exclusion and oppression after coming out or transitioning….

Nevertheless, I still advocate the inclusion of transwomen in woman-only spaces. Even the entitled / privileged ones.

Let’s remember that many women – even self-professed radical feminist women – have entitlement complexes as well. Those of us who are (or in some cases have been) white, middle-class, well-educated, married, able-bodied – we too are indoctrinated into a sense of entitlement, despite our vaginas, that we must fight to recognise and abandon.

Let’s also remember that the sometimes disproportionately vocal group of entitled / privileged transwomen are not representative of all transwomen. There are some amazing, consciouis, wonderful, feminist transwomen out there. Women who have been trans since forever, women who have never felt comfort or experienced freedom in the “privilege” of being raised as a gender dysphoric boy. These are the transwomen that I want to reach out to, to welcome, to engage with, to just include. [author’s emphasis]


I’m disappointed this discussion even has to take place—Wow! Trans woman are nearly human, nearly entitled to civil rights! Whoo-hoo!—and I think she’s still setting up some “good tranny/bad tranny” comparions that are grounded in a world-view in the sort of “of course all white men at every time everywhere have perfect lives” thinking. Which is just as much a shallow and facile analysis of gender binaries as the ones the author criticizes. [UPDATE: Maia has clarified some of the comments I was concerned about (see comment #20) and think they were more a case of not communicating what she’d intended to say.] (To borrow from this description of intersection feminism: “It turns out that not all men have the same experience, thus making it impossible to universalize the experiences of women under one group title “man’”—even for successful middle-class white men—and “Instead, [intersectional feminism] presented a picture of identity that involved many factors, including race, sexual orientation, disability, and economic status as well as gender.” [Substitutions mine.])

But it’s hard to admit you were wrong, and Maia takes this a step further and actually details why she was. So I’m glad for a turn-around by anyone who’s transphobic and I don’t demand that she totally agree with me, or assume that someone is familiar with all the intricacies of internal trans rhetoric or politics. Plus, dealing with transphobia in the rad-fem circles in which she moves, to a large extent has to be done from within. I doubt any of the arguments she makes aren’t ones that trans women have already made—but to her peers I’m sure they’re harder to ignore when they’re made by an insider.

I think much of the transphobia among rad-fem is due not only to misogyny—as explored by Julia Serano’s “Whipping Girl” and summed up by Helen Boyd as “the inherent misogyny of a feminist politics that mocks femininity”—but also misandry. It’s one thing to critique institutionalized sexism, male privilege, etc. But the argument that “trans woman pose a threat in the women’s restroom” is predicated on two assumption: that trans women are really men, and that men are all inherently predators, so any man in a restroom would of course automatically attack the women there. (As if a man who was determined to attack women would be somehow magically deterred by the sign on the door.) I thought making pressumptions about people based on what’s between their legs, is well… sexist. Likewise, with the argument about “male energy” in “women’s spaces.” As if women never engage in the bad behavior in the rude behavior that the young women at the Maia’s Women’s Dome did. Not to mention, as Naomi Wolf noted in “Fire With Fire”: “Why should we assume that if men talk too much and try to dominate the agenda, we can’t tell them to pipe down? How is it that men can be environmentalists, and men can be antiracists, but somehow, magically, men cannot, equally legitimately, be feminists?”

There’s a similar anti-trans argument about how trans woman have “unearned confidence” that struck as coming off as if instilling confidence was a bad thing. Granted there’s being confident in one’s skills and having those skill, and having false confidence that one has skills one really doesn’t have—which is problematic.

OTOH, it was also interesting that that argument overlooks that men sometimes project an air of (unearned) confidence because that’s all they’re allowed to do. Norah Vincent (who wrote a book, “Self-Made Man,” about her 18-months posing as a man) had a nice line that she realizing that it was akin to men whistling in the graveyard because it wasn’t socially acceptable (to other men and to women) for them to admit they were scared, or had doubts, or any sign of “weakness.”

It’s symptomatic of a larger problem I’ve noticed with these sorts of feminists, where they deconstruct the constructs of femininity endlessly, but often seem to take the constructs of masculinity at face value. Probably because they’re unwilling to look at men as people (whose skin you might try to inhabit to understand their experiences) rather than theoretical abstractions. Even sympathetic feminist analyzes usually look at how masculinity from a women’s POV of how men interact with women, rather than truly looking at how masculinity is experienced by men. Which leaves these analyzes incomplete, since the men’s motivations are the ones attributed to them, not the ones they may have themselves. Much as I admire bell hooks, I disagree with her assertion that those at the margins fully understand those in power (while the reverse is rarely true). I agree those at the margins generally are more likely to understand aspects of majority culture as a matter of survival, but they still have an outsider’s view of it—as Vincent discovered the hard when she discovered being a white man wasn’t never as privileged as she imagined it to be. (The central lesson she learned was how constrained and powerless men feel, and she ended the experiment after having a nervous breakdown, in part due to the strains she felt in trying to “be a man.”) The irony is trans women and trans men can—but don’t necessary do—have deep insights into the constructs of femininity and masculinity, having literally lived on both sides of the gender binary.

FWIW, reading the Maia’s blog, she’s re-thought other major beliefs of her’s. So I’m hopeful that if someone were to talk with her, she might also rethink other parts of her thinking about trans people. (FWIW, her current rethinking took about two years.)

(BTW, thanks to the other MHBers whose comments I’ve incorporated in my post here—they said what I’d planned to say more eloquently than I could.)