Sep 16, 2014

Radfem panic: when demands for inclusivity are a cover for moral disgust

              
‘70% of communication is nonverbal’. I really hate that cliché, because I’m a words person. To me, carefully chosen and logically constructed verbal arguments should take precedence over all of the attendant (and extraneous) signals like tone, posture and facial expression. That’s what I like about the internet: it strips people’s mannerisms away and leaves them with only words at their disposal. It comes with all kinds of problems for interpersonal situations, but in the absence of trolling and abuse has been fantastically useful for thought, discussion, argument and idea exchange. I’ve always thought that was a good thing. I never had reason to doubt that the affect I’m missing on-line mostly conveys information that is of no interest to me as someone who is primarily interested in analysing ideas, not personalities. So it came as rather a surprise to me to encounter a really powerfully emotional, non-verbal situation, which translated to a strong intellectual insight occasioned by a person’s affect and not their words or arguments.

I was on a panel discussing women’s spaces at the FWSA conference 'Rethinking Sisterhood' last weekend, along with my friends and sometimes co-activists Sian, Helen and Shabana. All brought some really valuable insights into the question of women-only organising and the possibilities for interpreting and enacting sisterhood in that context; I won’t get into them here, but do follow the link to Sian's blog. The part of the conversation relevant to this post came relatively late in the session, when an audience member raised the question of trans inclusion: does the panel think that women-only spaces should be open to all self-identifying women, or not?

Well. You can just about imagine nobody wanted to touch that question with a fricking barge pole. We all know what happens, right? Either what you say is interpreted as being bigoted, transphobic and exclusionary, or it gets interpreted as anti-woman, patriarchy appeasing and callous. No middle ground, no way of pleasing everybody, and frankly a lot of the time no way of pleasing anyone at all. So there was a certain amount of foot-shuffling as we all tried to think of a way to not let the issue completely derail the remaining part of the session, and in the end I offered the following observation:

The important point, for me, about exclusion and inclusion in safe spaces, is not so much who they include and who they exclude, but that, as feminists, we keep ourselves obliged to the principle of consent. What that means is that even if a group of women wants to exclude us, on any grounds whatsoever, however spurious those may seem to us, our first duty as feminists is to respect their boundaries and not try to breach them or cause them to be breached.

I illustrated my argument by putting up my hand in a sort of “Stop!” gesture, palm out towards my audience, and saying: “the magic (i.e. feminist politics) doesn’t happen on this side of the hand or on that side of the hand. The magic happens at the hand: praxis is saying ‘no’ and having it respected”.

On the whole the argument was well received; though at least one radical feminist in the audience thought that this was a fudge and an insufficiently direct engagement with what she saw as the real underlying question: ‘what/who is a woman?’. The question of what is prior, definition or action, is a complex one and one I think that is being worked out as praxis within feminist communities rather than ever being resolvable by pure reason. So it will remain unaddressed here. What I wanted to get to was a particularly powerful response from one other member of the audience.

This woman (I’m going to call her Angela) opened her statement by describing her own emotional state: she said that she was very upset, that she was surprised by the level of her own emotional reaction to this issue. Angela described the physical symptoms of the reaction to us: her legs were, she said, jelly, her heart was beating, she felt flushed and panicky. She was basically telling us (I think mostly me personally, but I might be being a bit self-centred there) that our words have induced some kind of trauma response in her, a fully-fledged psychic distress event. She then went on to say she simply can’t understand how I could be so lacking in empathy, that I could reject someone out of my space who wants to be there is she is claiming fellowship with me as a woman. She also said that she finds my forbidding, stopping hand ‘incredibly aggressive’.

My first reaction was to be irritated: here I am, trying to make a careful argument for something I think needs to be calmly talked about and discussed, and this woman is trying to one-up me, to exploit her own obvious distress by manipulating my emotions. How illogical! How childish! How, well, rude! But later, in that over-intellectualising way I have, I couldn’t help thinking and trying to really understand what just happened in that room.

To explain what I think did happen, and in fact does happen a lot in discussions about lesbian separatism, radical feminism, women only spaces and other politics of women’s autonomy, I need to refer to three concepts: moral disgust, the uncanny valley, and gay panic.

The first of those is quite a familiar concept. We’ll take as a guide the definition proposed by Michael Hauskeller in a 2006 paper: “the expression of a very strong moral disapproval that cannot fully be captured by argument”. Liberals pride themselves on their low levels of moral disgust, in particular in relation to the sexual practices of others. This is why we tend to conceptualise the objections of the right to certain things like homosexuality as “phobias” – irrational fears stemming from an underlying moral disgust. It’s also why the “phobia” frame has so successfully, and without any problematizing interrogation that I could see, migrated to be applied inside the social justice left, in terms like transphobia, whorephobia, fatphobia, femmephobia and so on.

But here was a person literally, in every physical sense of the word, exhibiting a phobic reaction. Angela was terrified by me, terrified of my implacable “Stop!” And much like conservative activists seeking to criminalise or marginalise homosexual relationships, she was using the very viscerality of her own reaction as a strong progressive/liberal moral argument: you have upset me, therefore I am right. What was going on?

To explain that let’s look at the other two concepts: the uncanny valley and gay panic. The first comes from the world of humanoid robotics. Researchers working with robots found that people react emotionally to with high levels of comfort to robots that look completely non-human, somewhat non-human, and absolutely believably human. But at the point on the scale where robots exhibit almost-but-not-quite believably human features, there is a dramatic dip in the levels of comfort people experience (the ‘valley’ of the name). There are a lot of theories as to what could be the reason for this, and no conclusive explanation, but that shouldn’t concern us here; all I want to point to is the discomfort associated with confronting an object that doesn’t fall neatly into one of two categories (machine/human), exhibiting insufficient characteristics of both but not seeming to be fully either. This concept can be useful in thinking about reactions to trans people and the different ways people in general view drag queens or pantomime dames (obviously not female and therefore not triggering discomfort), passing trans women (completely female-looking and therefore not triggering discomfort even when we know they are trans), and non-passing trans women and cross dressers (not quite fitting into either definitely-male or definitely-female category and therefore the focus of a lot of the hostility and discomfort from the general population). It’s a hypothesis that needs testing, more a hunch of mine than a proven phenomenon of course, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

Lastly, ‘gay panic’ is a legal device employed (sometimes successfully) in the defense of men who commit violent crimes against gay people. The contention is that when discovering someone is gay (or transgendered – the use of this defense has transferred to the category of hate crime against trans people too), some people, in practice men, are overcome by an uncontrollable sense of panic, that functions like temporary insanity and drives them to react violently and seek to destroy the cause of their panic by beating or killing that individual. In essence this defense legitimises violence based on moral disgust, claiming that its visceral power is such that it can lead to irresistible defensive (and therefore aggressive) urges. Why these men don’t just run away if they’re scared, don’t ask me – I don’t think it’s a very convincing argument at all, rather an excuse to make male violence seem inevitable and unavoidable (what else is new etc.).

I think when liberal feminists and trans activists talk about transphobia, they are accusing radical feminists of a type of ‘trans panic’, a desire to enact violence on or at least distance themselves from trans women based on a moral disgust associated with the uncanniness of their sometimes ambiguous presentation. I think this is a mistake: there is, as I was saying above, a rational argument to be made for the need for female only spaces in all kinds of different situations, and radical feminists are seeking to make that argument, rather than simply deny trans people full rights and humanity out of a culpable, in the progressive worldview, sense of repugnance. I think that mistake leads people to respond to radical feminist argument the way Angela did: we react with ‘radfem panic’, a kind of moral disgust that ‘cannot fully be captured by argument’, but just is.

Why? What about women seeking to define, defend and police their own social and sexual boundaries causes that visceral, panicky reaction? It seems such an innocuous thing to ask: just leave us these small spaces. Go on with your lives, think, write, organise, work alongside us, ally with us, but respect our demand for some spaces where we would like to be alone. I mean, put like that, it seems completely incomprehensible to refuse, doesn’t it? Who else but women would be denied a small private space to discuss their experiences of childhood sexual trauma, for example? What can even be gained from breaching those boundaries and enforcing unwelcome inclusion in those spaces?
Welp, here’s what I think: I think (and I know this sounds a bit grandiose, but I’ve had a Big Emotions sort of weekend) that the argument between radical and liberal feminists about the inclusion of trans women in women-only spaces boils down to Angela’s reaction to my hand saying “Stop!” And the reason that happens is that the non-compliant woman falls, for many of us, into the uncanny valley of gender, just as much as the non-passing trans woman does. The woman who insists:

“I am not permeable, penetrable, all-containing. I have a border, a definition, a limit to my physical and psychic self which you are not allowed to enter. I contain an authentic subjectivity to which you are not privileged. I get to decide who to empathise with and who to reward with my nurture and my effort; you do not get to claim them as your due. I have an “I”, a real and embodied experience which belongs only to me, which is understood only by me, which I insist must be controlled only by me. I am as fully human as a man. I am a person, and I demand you respect my personhood by respecting my right to set boundaries. Thou. Shalt. Not. Pass.

That woman is a monster of sorts, an aberration for which we have no language. She is uncanny; she is neither a man nor fully a woman, for to be a woman is to be the opposite of all of the above. To be a woman is to be permeable, accommodating, open, inclusive. Femininity is inclusion. The aggressive hand raised in a gesture of prohibition is the antithesis of femininity, and to see someone like me, who for all other intents and purposes looks and acts like a woman, enact that transgression, is disorienting and potentially frightening. All the more frightening when many women, whole groups of them, communities of women stand up and say: no more. We shall not contain. This is our space and we get to say who comes and goes here.

None of the above pertains necessarily to the hoary “are trans women women or not” debate. Who knows what a woman is? I sure don’t. A more badly defined concept hardly exists in the history of Western thought, mostly because for at least the last 3 millennia it was not considered worth bothering with. Everybody knew what a woman was: she was that formless Other that contains as its very function, the repository and source of all life, passive and mute in her fecundity. She has no right to ownership, because her borderlessness lets all property slip through and out. She has no right to know, because she cannot control what thoughts flow into her and what thoughts emanate. She has no right to say who comes and goes in her body and on her body and out of her body; her body’s function is only to receive and contain. She can only feel, and include.


When it turns out that other views are available, is it really a surprise that those views cause ‘rad-panic’?


13 comments:

  1. I buy your argument, and consider it well expressed. There are spheres of my life that are public and those that have varying degrees of privacy into which I invite different people. Think of it like Venn diagrams, where I define the set if who is included and entry to a set is by invitation only. This is my right to agency over my person and thoughts: just because history has not favoured women's rights to agency does not mean that the right does not exist. We are human, we are adult, we are not vulnerable or incapable. There is no reason why our rights should be modified, or our privacy infringed unless we have permitted it (ion the assumption that we are acting lawfully)

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  3. Thank you for this insightful and thought-provoking article.

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  4. Thanks for your well thought out essay. But I'm not sure if Angela was reacting out of a panic. She may have been reacting out of strong moral disgust but for logical reasons Reasons like she believes denying trans women into women's spaces has grave effects on their lives.

    Not all boundaries are legitimate or reasonable after all. Discrimination is based on boundaries that minorities have had to break down in order to achieve equal rights. I think most liberals think of trans inclusion in this way. I think trans inclusion is more complicated than normal because there are some trans women who have issues with entitlement but a lot more that genuinely need women's space.

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    1. You may be right about Angela's reaction having been one that was about logic and contempt towards the exclusionary politics. Identity politics have always been problematic.
      I think the whole approach to what transgender is about would need to be reviewed. As a radical, I think that alternative treatments like therapy and more gentle ways of dealing with dysphoria should be examined. The premonition that bodily discomfort, feeling out-of-sync and/or the feeling of otherness within ones sexed community would mean that the person "is" a memeber of the opposite sex is in fact a violent and pernicious concept.

      In fact, this would amend that we leave aside the concept of gender- and not only, but it demands that we start holding men accountable for not welcoming gender-non-conforming individuals in their spaces.

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    2. I think you're not quite getting what I was saying; the point is not who is & isn't allowed to breach women's boundaries, but whether or not we're allowed to have any. It actually shouldn't matter whether we use the right to police our own boundaries in ways which other people may approve of, or which are moral or not - when you say "oh, you're allowed to set boundaries, but not against THIS group of people/situation", you're basically proving my point that our right to autonomy is not accepted as absolute, but is at the sufferance of people judging the merits of each case from the outside.

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  5. Good stuff. I wish you had enlarged upon this sentence: "she was using the very viscerality of her own reaction as a strong progressive/liberal moral argument: you have upset me, therefore I am right. What was going on?"

    The internet and tumblr is whats going on... but more to the point (check out my blog, a few posts back, for a more detailed analysis), I think this sounds like religion: "I FEEL IT, so it is true". As one struggling to get free of religious dogma, I have had to learn to recognize it (not as easy as you think it is, especially when you get OLD), and increasingly I see it all over the social justice left: we are supposed to respect some opinion that clearly isn't true or logical, because someone FEELS it.

    Conversely: someone will always NOT feel it, or feel the opposite, and that is the start of a religious war. Not a political one, not a theoretical one, not a logical or reasonable or rational one, but a *religious war* over what is "right and wrong"--THAT is what is going on, IMHO. Politics is seen as this big Stalinist meanie that tries to dictate to people that their cozy feels are wrong. (BOOOO, bad politics!) Trying to be strictly political is seen as being oppressive and male (if you are a cis woman, that is to say; trans women can say whatever they want in social justice circles, without criticism.) So we have the sordid spectacle of very well-educated people AMAB who accuse feminists of oppressing them with ... OPINIONS.

    I am virtually the opposite of you, in that I think all those unsaid things and tones and postures and affects are what eventually calls the tune. Digression: I have recently been reading about Neal Cassady (and saw some rare film of him on the History Channel this past weekend), and his mercurial, weird, rapid-fire-talking personality and the effect it had on everyone around him... he became various fictional characters we have heard of and there were several great songs written about him, but he didn't write anything himself, so all we have of him is second-hand, the strong impressions this amazing character made on others. In some ways, that is true of many people in political movements, like Andrea Dworkin. More people have heard of her than have actually read her.

    I feel like these arguments over trans issues are leaving impressions more than actual theoretical words we can rely on. In many ways, the way things evolve (like the accounts of who Neil Cassady really was) will reflect these impressions, these ephemeral impressions we make on each other. Its scary, but true. Because this is about religion, not about facts. Its about faith.

    Didn't mean to babble, but you got me thinkin! Much love! Hope to read more of your brilliance.

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  6. this was intelligent and deeply felt. that last paragraph slayed me. good good work, keep it up. one day we will be free.

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  7. Really enjoyed your piece. I have thought long and hard about the moral disgust that much of the general public still feel for trans people and I have tried to interrogate myself to see if any of my views on trans issues are affected by this. I have certainly experienced the disorientation when confronted by someone who does not entirely fit into the obvious category of man or woman. I have also observed it in others watching people meet my transwoman friend - you can see their discomfort and confusion as they try to make sense of the female name and breasts and deep voice. Yet as you observe a man who does pass as a woman does not invoke the same reaction even when we know he is a man. Humour is often centred around areas of discomfort and is also connected to the element of surprise -there is a twist we didn't expect which fits with men dressed as women being until recently a comedy staple.

    I also agreee with you that it is a religious war, or at least on one side. The radical feminists are trying to fight faith with logic. This was evident recently after a sprawling discussion with a facebook friend over the risk of male bodied trans women being put in womens prisons. I quoted stats of male perpetrators of sexual assault vs female and the study that criminal offending rates of transwomen does not change after surgery. My argument being that if we are calculating risk, from the little information we have, the indication is that women could well be negatively effected by such a change. That their fears could well be real and nothing to do with alleged transphobia He countered with "But the reality is you are sending women to a mens prison and refusing women entrance to womens spaces" at which point I wanted to hit my head against a brick wall. Once the article of faith has been accepted no dissent is possible. It has brought home to me just how susceptible humans are to magical thinking. Those in the west who thought we had reached a new level of secular sophistication in a post religious age have been rudely awakened. It is not just in the middle east where religious fundamentalist thought is gaining ground.

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  8. Thank you for your analysis! It is interesting and overall I agree with it. I do think another cause for this woman's reaction could be a fear attack from past traumatic experiences she's had or observed, when women have said No. Just her awareness of the online abuses of women who've stood up to bullying from transgender activists over the past few years could set off that kind of a fear attack I would think. I have certainly experienced that kind of fear of male violence/retribution for women's no-saying myself, though fortunately radical feminist awareness has allowed me to attribute it to its proper cause (unlike this woman who is attributing it to your very reasonable and diplomatic expression).

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    1. Or else Angela is actually a man, and Marina is just being polite. I have never seen a woman have a fear reaction from another woman holding up a hand to say "no." I do often run across men online who pretend to be women who also pretend to be terrified of anything a woman says that is conveying "no" to them in any way. The fear pretense invites sympathy for the man so he can instigate a pile-on.

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  9. To be a woman is to be an adult human being who was born with ovaries.

    That's it. That's all. Nothing else.

    Because people are sexist and misogynistic and therefore can't accept this, we have to have these stupid arguments.

    (Yes, I am aware of the existence of people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. These are still male people, therefore men, as they were born with testes. The only reason we "treat them as women" is because our culture is sexist and insists upon treating men and women differently even in circumstances not requiring a differential social treatment.)

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