So 'materialist feminism' originated in France and was something of a response to the post-structuralists, if I have my history right. materialism is used here in the same way Marxists might use it and stresses the importance of a 'scientific' approach, or at the very least asks one to make sure the theoretical models being considered fit empirical observations.

To me, specifically, it's an approach to feminism that is unflinching and does not shy away from describing extant social relations and relations of exploitation, which a school like liberal feminism is very gun-shy about. You can also look at psychoanalytic feminism--a subfield popular among queer theorists--to see what feminism sans materialism tends to look like.

(Full disclosure, I do enjoy the occasional splash of psychfem, but I enjoy it more as a rhetorician than as someone looking for explanations of the mechanisms underlying patriarchy. Sometimes you just have to put the French dictionary down and talk about society's obsession with the phallus.)

I think this would be a more cutting jibe if I hadn't gone through decades of academic literature where the respected scholars who set the discursive parameters on how my culture is discussed in the West all were kind of blatantly making shit up.

We're talking stuff like "Oh, this practice doesn't mean X, it's actually something subtly different and culturally-specific, called <the literal Hindi word for X>."

I've read about the "gender-expansivity" of Hinduism, the "docile nature" of "real" Indian women, and the "enlightened attitude" of people towards gender-variance. All claims made without a shred of substantiation, which might as well be describing an alternate dimension or a fantasy setting if you're someone who actually grew up in the place(s) discussed.

So no, "materialism" is a word that means "let's try to make sure our assertions describe reality, perhaps by empirically observing reality-as-it-is instead of basing entire subfields on wild conjecture". If you talk to any number of overworked and straining marginalized grads in the social sciences, you'll quickly learn that this is very much not the norm in the hallowed institutes of knowledge-production, and is in fact an idea that is rather frowned upon.

This is a really great question! The answer is, however, short and disappointing: It's just (trans)misogyny. Let's discuss it a bit, though!

On a fundamental level, while it's relatively easy to acknowledge that women, as a whole, have been cut a raw deal, taking that to its logical conclusion--a critique of male-supremacy--is a tough sell even amongst the more progressively-minded. Feminism is uniquely burdened with formulating a theory of liberation that does not hold men accountable for benefiting from patriarchy, does not at any point imply that men are actively invested in upholding patriarchy, and advocates a way forward that does not require men to give up anything or meaningfully change their relationship to gendered and reproductive labor.

It is a fundamentally impossible ask. Some of this stems from naturalizing sexual difference and viewing the subordination of women as an inevitable outcome of biology, but a decent amount of the pushback comes from a reluctance to truly unpack relations of intimacy and kinship with a critical eye. Feminism is easiest to do when telling an obviously misogynistic stranger to check his assumptions, or discussing the cold facts of being under-compensated and over-burdened at your job. It's harder to contemplate the destabilizing truth that most men genuinely think you have less internality than they do, will expect you to do the lion's share of domestic labor in a relationship, and will feel emasculated if you at any point demonstrate more competence, wit, intelligence, or verve than them.

It's hard to admit that most men won't put in the work to see you as human.

So instead, we get a lot of rationalizations. Feminism is too white, too bourgeois, too ciscentric, too anglocentric, and unlike every other school of thought or ideology, it is forever tainted and cannot be redeemed. It is not allowed to have factions, contradictions, missteps, or to evolve. Much easier to rattle off a canned line about how feminism doesn't account for something that it has definitely accounted for if only one bothered to treat it seriously and actually engage with the literature, and consequently chuck the entire history of women's liberation into the bin.

There is, at the end of the day, a real psychological cost to being aware of just how pervasive societal misogyny is, and not everyone is willing to pay it.

Manhood is a club that it's easy to be kicked out of but hard to be allowed into.

Trying to express this idea with the least amount of jargon possible, because understanding this is key to avoiding some very common rhetorical and ideological traps when discussing feminism, misogyny, and transphobia.

"when it comes to how people treat you"

Do you see where you went wrong?

Do you see how you've artificially limited the scope of the conversation purely to the interpersonal?

Do you see how things might be different if we also accounted for the medico-legal, structural impacts of being trans?

My birth assignment and my current sex being in conflict is the source of a lot of structural issues, compounded by my status as an immigrant, that wouldn't affect someone whose legal designation and sex aligned.

It's really that simple, but I've realized this website has a tendency to only consider social systems and regimes in terms of interactions with others, when that's really the most superficial aspect of oppression.

On the off-chance that this isn't bait: That is a bad idea. Killing children is frowned upon.

"socialization" isn't programming. It is indoctrination (in this case, patriarchal indoctrination), and it does impact the worldviews we form and how we think, but it also doesn't mean that we are forever trapped in the patterns of thinking our upbringing instills in us. If that were the case there would be no converts, no atheists, and certainly no feminists.

In my perfectly honest opinion, there's no "too late" for unlearning patriarchal conditioning. Men aren't held in thrall by their biological wiring or social code loaded into their minds at a young age. They're capable of unlearning, just like the rest of us, if only they'd take women's issues seriously and see what happens to us as exploitative. Sure, we're immersed in a society that refuses to consider women's subjugation as anything but 'natural', but that doesn't mean that people--and men especially--are blameless for not challenging that notion.

Anyway, if I'm to take this ask's premises seriously for a moment, I think it's best if you don't have children. My wife and I decided a long time ago we couldn't handle it, and it was a really good decision.

So I stopped having opinions on the various genres of leftism ever since I speedran Wittig's disillusionment with leftists, given their neglect of women's issues.

Despite the increasing proletarianization of women the world over, I've seen far too much rhetoric on how women don't have "real jobs" or worthy of organizing with, and the pervasive issues of misogyny and sexual abuse in nearly all organizing spaces irrespective of the specific ideology is particularly telling.

I saw a leaflet that one of the communist parties in Kerala had to print once, chiding men for preventing their wives from attending org meetings and also for treating those meetings like a place to find women to marry, instead of treating women like comrades.

Which is really cutting to the heart of the issues for me: No matter how much an ML tells an anarchist to read Engels, a lot of leftist men have a worse analysis of women's plight than an English factory-owner had in the 19th century. They don't see women as comrades, as fellow proletarians waging a common struggle with them, and they by and large still value the patriarchal benefits of naturalizing the labor women do and want to preserve that.

When they invent a tendency where that isn't the common attitude amongst leftist men, I'll take a look.

I showed this to my cis lesbian wife (who is both bigger and stronger than I am) and she said that if you said this to our faces, she'd kill you with her bare hands.

But that aside--most trans women and transfeminized populations over the world are disproportionately impoverished, pushed to the margins of society, and face acute levels of deprivation. They don't possess "radical Systemic power" (a nonsense term that literally means nothing, but I'll humor you and assume you meant something like societal standing or benefits from male-supremacy) because they are subject to gendered violence, brutalization, and total loss of standing under a patriarchal regime.

You don't understand the theory. You are not good at feminism, at empirical or systemic analysis, and you have nothing substantive to inform your baseless hate except feelings of disgust for a highly marginal demographic that you refuse to extend empathy to.

Which is why instead of doing anything remotely impactful, you're anonymously sending vitriol into my inbox on a Saturday.

Marvelous.

Honestly, you and I suffer under the same regime of heterosexuality and misogyny. I see that, and if you stopped seeing me as an inhuman monster and tried to just think about how trans women are treated in the real world, you might be able to see that too.

Do better.

I wonder if folks realize just how much of modern queer discourse and academic feminism is rooted in theories promulgated by the most rancid transmisogynists to have existed.

From the International Journal of Psychoanalysis:

From chapter seven of Whipping Girl:

Similar to how the most-cited work on the hijra repeatedly misgenders them as "male homosexuals" and confidently declares that the hijra are "too vulgar" to be women, unlike Docile Submissive Well-Behaved Indian Females, so much of queer theory is uncoupled from materialism, from robust feminist analysis, and from the empirical reality of transsexual women's oppression.

Let's leave these blighted pages where they belong, please.

Babe, wake up, new 'Trans/Rad/Fem' just dropped

This week, I'd like to present a short, concise treatment of an important distinction in how different people experience transphobia, and in doing so formalize some terminology that I believe is useful to define.

Read: tinyurl.com/4bmfdh8d

Transition care is being outlawed and institutionally gatekept the world over.

Trans existence is the reactionary scapegoat du jour, a convenient symbol for regressive ideologues to rally against because we constitute a convenient effigy to burn, an existential threat to the patriarchal ideology of 'immutable', 'biological' sex upon which their 'natural order' (of male-supremacy and misogynistic exploitation) is founded.

During a cultural moment where the right's intentions to directly attack bodily autonomy and non-heterosexual, non-reproductive modes of existence are being plainly stated, where the nativist and natalist violence upon which states and their colonial orders are founded is being made most explicit, the response to this overt declaration of war on our ability to do what we will with our bodies is ... non-existent.

Feminism is being thoroughly repudiated by the left, by advocates of collectivization and queer activists alike. The "male loneliness crisis" is spoken of as our most pressing cultural issue, eliding the reactionary turn among men who are responding to deepening capitalist contradictions by demanding their patriarchal entitlement over women's labor and bodies. Trans people's existence is considered a luxury belief, established and proven healthcare is called 'experimental', and we are perceived as affluent eccentrics seeking novel forms of costuming rather than a thoroughly brutalized, impoverished, and stigmatized demographic sinking further and further into the margins.

Conservatives who rail against abortion and no-fault divorce now claim the label of "women's rights" because they also call for the eradication of transsexuality. The connections between the opposition to trans existence and the threats to women's political and economic independence are obvious, but no one is making them.

We are not organizing a robust, materialist, ideological opposition to this reactionary backlash on the basis of bodily autonomy, the emancipation of marginalized genders, or the right to exist independently from patriarchal structures such as the nuclear family.

We are arguing with each other about validity, about whether it's "biologically essentialist" to observe that society enables men to exploit women, and about whether anyone who speaks plainly about misogyny is a "TERF".

I stand here seeing things get worse for my sisters and my siblings, cis and trans and non-binary and intersex and queer and even heterosexual and more, watching us devour each other while working class men settle for dominion over their wives and families in exchange for being compliant for their bosses, and I wonder if we'll realize what must be done before it's too late.

I don't know. I don't have an answer for you.

At least, not a good one.

The best one in every trilogy is the fourth installment, right?

It's always funny when people reblog my stuff and talk about non-Western third genders in the tags

Like someone will reblog "The Sexed Regime" and enthusiastically tag it something like "#not to mention that the gender binary is a colonial construct".

It's always a moment of realizing my reach has both gone too far and yet not far enough, because ... honey

Do you know who you're reblogging right now

An interesting dichotomy

I found these two replies right next to each other, under a tweet where a non-binary person was discussing their use of "AFAB" in a thread about how much scarier it is to be "homeless and AFAB"--due to the compounded risk of sexual violence, amidst other harms.

It's an interesting look into how despite vocal, performative opposition to "TERFs" and transphobia, when you really boil down people's beliefs--even queer people--most do believe that trans women's presumed anatomy spares us from the worst excesses of misogynistic violence, or exempts us entirely.

Meanwhile, if you bother to look at the leading causes of death among impoverished, precarious, homeless, usually non-white trans women, you might have a somewhat different idea of the supposedly magical ability of the "male apparatus" to spare individuals from sexual violence and brutalization.

Freedom from misogynistic violence is not, I fear, stored in the chromosomes.

The most widespread form of transmisogyny within the queer community is denying trans women epistemic authority.

Which means: people do not believe us on our own experiences. They frequently assume any and all oppression we face must be mild or must simply be anti-effeminacy instead of "real misogyny". We are considered to be exaggerating the material consequences of bigotry on us and assumed to not experience various harms that we in fact do, including medical misogyny, sexual violence, CSA, being infantilized and dismissed, being inadequately represented (since most popular depictions of us are cissexist caricatures and do not authentically portray our lived realities!), and more besides.

Perhaps the most hysteria inducing aspect of this is being told that our testimony is not frequently dismissed, BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTIVELY DISMISSING OUR TESTIMONY ON HOW MUCH MISOGYNY AND DEGENDERING AND VIOLENCE WE EXPERIENCE.

We are not "new to oppression". We do not have to be taught what it is like to be feminized and dehumanized under patriarchy. We are painfully familiar with how misogyny operates and experience it regularly, in addition to having to justify even to "our" communities that we do in fact experience it!

That, my friends, is the core of transmisogyny: being dehumanized while being denied the right to even name one's oppression or have it be acknowledged as such!

Maybe we should stop calling people "TERFs" for doing basic feminism.

Maybe we should stop promulgating the idea that trans women's interests are fundamentally at odds with feminist goals.

Maybe we should collectively come to the realization that trans women are indeed sexualized, exploited, and brutalized largely by men, like most women.

Maybe we should stop propagating the harmful myth that transmisogyny is based on "misandry".

Maybe we should realize that advocating for men and advocating for trans women are very different things.

Maybe ... and this is the really out-there one, chat, so try to stay with me, no matter how out-of-this-reality the prospect may appear ... but maybe, we should consider trans women ... a type of woman.

Fucking earth-shattering, I know, but let's just give it a try?

The Third Sex

After months of research and painstakingly connecting the threads of transmisogyny theory, queer activism, and field-wide epistemic injustice, I would like to present "The Third Sex": my treatise on a third-world transfeminism.