Current Events > Alice B. Lloyd claims transgender activists and feminists are at war

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Politics is well-known for creating strange bedfellows, but it can also make for some unlikely enemies. Take the free-speech battle that is playing out between radical feminists and transgender activists. For now, the activists and gender theorists are winning on two frontspublic opinion and civil law.

The dynamics are best illustrated by Twitters banning of Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy. First Murphy sparred with a transgender dominatrix and sex worker Hailey Heartless, aka Lisa Kreut, who had launched a campaign to defund the Vancouver Rape Relief Center, a womens shelter, for what activists deemed a transphobic focus on womens safety. Murphys tweets complained about Kreuts support of prostitution and referred to Kreut as a white man. But, more recently, Murphy violated a new rule forbidding users from misgendering trans peoplewhen she referred to a transitioning person who goes by both Jonathan and Jessica as him. It was this latest violation, Murphy tells me, that precipitated her permanent ban.

More noteworthy, though, is that by chastising Murphy and cutting her off from an active online audience, the tech giant has thrown itself into a rift thats divided feminists for decades.

I was still quite shocked when they actually did it, Murphy said, laughing lightly. Online combat aside, the root of radical feminists opposition to transgenderism does not seem so offensive or extreme: What it means to be a woman, feminists have long argued, runs far deeper than the traditional outward signs of femininity. Radical feminists argue that gender is not innate or internal, but a social role that we have imposed on people, as Murphy explains.

Canada passed vaguely worded civil rights protections for gender identity last year, more women across the political spectrum have found themselves drawn to Murphys ideas. For example, she tweeted in October that men arent women tho."

Transgender legislation has made rapid progress in the U.K. as well. And increasingly many women have come to worry about the devaluation of biological sex, according to radical feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys. Author of Gender Hurts and a prominent critic of gender theory, Jeffreys describes an escalating stand-off between the ascendant trans movement and the radical feminist old guard, joined by its new adherents.

There is such an extraordinary backlash happening at this moment because activists are aware that there is a mounting challenge to their demands, Jeffreys tells me. With the government poised to liberalize gender identification so that anyone can change his or her legal sex at will, feminists whod previously sat back snapped to attentionrealizing the risk such a policy would pose to the sanctity of all-female spaces and hard-won feminist gains. That caused an eruption of feminist energy, Jeffreys says, describing a counter-movement of consciousness-raising groups convened by a handful of radical feminists.

In 1973, Jeffreys explained, feminist Robin Morgan sparked a controversy that still simmers. I will not call a male she, Morgan said, responding to the presence of a transexual musician performing at an all-female feminist conference: One walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Women like Meghan Murphy and Sheila Jeffreyswhose scholarship inspired Murphy to reject gender theory as a masters studentare called TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But, We're not really excluding anyone, Murphy corrects. I don't want people to be discriminated against or harassed or threatened because they don't look how people think a man or woman should look, she adds. That's what feminists fought for.


Man Robin Morgan sounds like an asshole
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