A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society even if he chooses to live as a woman-and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position-the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.” Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female-that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. I will not call a male “she” thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman” 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. In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. Then they were going to try to explain why, at a time when transgender rights are ascendant, radical feminists insist on regarding transgender women as men, who should not be allowed to use women’s facilities, such as public rest rooms, or to participate in events organized exclusively for women. First, the organizers hoped to refute charges that the desire to ban prostitution implies hostility toward prostitutes. The conference had been convened by a group that wanted to defend two positions that have made radical feminism anathema to much of the left. On May 24th, a few dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Central Library, a century-old Georgian Revival building in downtown Portland, Oregon, for an event called Radfems Respond. It honestly turned my whole life around.As transgender rights gain acceptance, radical-feminist views have been shunned. I used to party all the time and was very disconnected from my family being in this relationship has helped me see there are people out there who have had it a lot harder than I ever did. Ty has definitely changed me as a person for the better. Transgender people know exactly who they are, and nobody should be able to say anything different. Everyone has imperfections, whether physical or mental, and because of that, we all should be treated fairly. I wish more people understood that transgender men and women are people. Everyone has their own past and everyone has their own demons. Being adopted has made me a lot more accepting of people's differences. We would love to adopt because I was adopted myself. We've talked about the longevity of our relationship - marriage, kids - but it's all within time. I know with time she'll have her surgeries, but I love her either way. Being physically intimate together is very different from what I was used to, but through everything, I still see her as a woman, emotionally and physically.
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