danthepoetman
11-03-2012, 07:13 PM
WARNING, LADIES: THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HERE ARE EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE
I fell on articles of, or about, radical feminists whom expressed opinions so outrageous and extreme I couldn’t believe what I was reading at first. Then, what slowly emerged from those opinions was the simple logic of widespread feminist thesis pushed to the last extremity of their logic, which I find a somewhat defendable reflection –if you think something, you go to the end of your own logic, you address the following consequences. This being said, I completely disagree with these statements, of course. They contradict precisely what I personally strongly believe on these questions. In fact, they’re so absurd in my eyes that they touch possible insanity.
I will summarize the ideas defended in one of these articles, by Julie Bindel, then ask the questions they seem to pose, and finally post large extracts of it with the links. Here it goes; the summary first:
Transsexualism revolves around the idea that genders are determined, that there is something in nature (humans) such as typical male and female. It is the very antithesis of feminism. In reality, genders are pure social constructions, psychological structures of stereotypes. The concept of gender dysphoria was invented by a reactionary male psychiatrist as a defence against the progress of feminism. There is no robust scientific evidence to show a biological basis to gender dysphoria, nor to suggest that sex reassignment is any efficient. Indeed, in a world of equality between men and women, transsexualism wouldn’t exist at all. The concept of transsexualism is based on purely superficial criteria, touching essentially this aforementioned socially constructed image of one’s gender. Following the extreme example of Iran, srs is simply an expression of aversion for gays and lesbians. It has nothing to do with the health of the subjects.
Moreover, sex reassignment treatment is brutal and imperfect: it results in an alteration of male body parts and cannot turn a male into a female. It is mutilation. At worst, transsexualism is comparable to Body Dismorphic Disorder, a psychiatric condition in which the patient feels the desire to be amputated of a limb.
The main idea expressed here is that genders are constructed (and therefore if you will, that sexes are irrelevant). So the essential question it raises, to me, the only question which really address all of these unbelievably outrageous statements, is this: is the idea that genders are socially constructed still a valid idea? In my opinion, if we find merit in the idea, we give strength to such opinions against transsexuality, but reinforce the efforts of feminisim. If we don’t, and validate the idea of a natural reality of the sexes in human beings, we justify the very basis by which transsexuality is possible, but do somewhat undermine efforts of creating gender equality by affirming biological propensities –or at the very least, some efforts made by feminists in decades.
Am I right that the whole topic revolves around such questions? What is your opinion on this precise question if I’m right? In what way am I wrong if I am?
What do you think of the relation between feminism and transsexuality? Can the association of transgenders with homosexuals (male and female) in the LBTG body go beyond purely strategic purposes? Are feminists right to accuse transsexuals of perpetuating stereotypes? Is the desire for femininity (or virility) as we understand it, a kind of fetichism, sociologically constructed and unnecessary, or does it answer a deeper propensity?
(OK, I’m nuts. We’re Saturday, why am I obsessed with this, and why do I bother to ratiocinate about such an intricate subject? I don’t know! I guess I was somewhat shocked by what I read. If I’m annoying you, please just ignore me…)
____________________________________
Extracts of Julie Bindel's article:
JULIE BINDEL
The Operation That Can Ruin Your Life
November 2009
Standpointmag
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/the-operation-that-can-ruin-your-life-features-november-09-julie-bindel-transsexuals?page=0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C 0%2C0%2C0
Despite campaigning against gender discrimination, rape, child abuse and domestic violence for 30 years, I have been labelled a bigot because of a column I wrote in 2004 that questioned whether a sex change would make someone a woman or simply a man without a penis. As a leading feminist writer, I now find that a number of organisations are too frightened to ask me to speak at public events for fear of protests by transsexual lobbyists.
Transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is "natural" for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism. Those who ‘transition' seem to become stereotypical in their appearance — f**k-me shoes and birds' nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls. Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.
Gender dysphoria (GD) was invented in the 1950s by reactionary male psychiatrists in an era when men were men and women were doormats. It is a term used to describe someone who feels strongly that they should belong to the opposite sex and that they were born in the wrong body. GD has no proven genetic or physiological basis.
A review for the Guardian in 2005 of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery was clinically effective. It warned that the results of many gender reassignment studies were unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants.
Apart from Thailand, the country with the highest number of sex-change operations is Iran where, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death. When sex-change surgery is performed on gay men, they become, in the eyes of the gender defenders, heterosexual women. Transsexual surgery becomes modern-day aversion therapy for gays and lesbians.
In the West, however, supporting the diagnosis and availability of surgical intervention is seen as a view right-thinking liberals should adopt. But no oppressed group ever insisted its emotional distress was the sole basis for the establishment of a right. Indeed, transsexuals, along with those seeking IVF and cosmetic surgery, are using the NHS for the pursuit of happiness not health.
Treatment is brutal and the results far from perfect. Male-to-female surgery involves removal of the penis and scrotum and the construction of a "vagina" using the skin from the phallus, breast implants inserted and the trachea shaved. Painful laser treatment to remove hair in the beard area and elsewhere and cosmetic surgery to "feminise" the face is increasingly common.
Recent legislation (the Gender Recognition Act, which allows people to change sex and be issued with a new birth certificate) will have a profoundly negative effect on the human rights of women and children. Since 2004, it has been possible for those diagnosed with GD to be assigned the sex of their choice, providing that the person has lived as the opposite sex for two years, has no plans to change back again and can provide evidence of the above.
It is not necessary to have undergone hormone treatment or surgery. In other words, a pre-operative man could apply for a job in a women — only rape counselling service and, if refused on grounds of his sex, could take the employer to court on the grounds that "he" is legally a "she".
A definition of transsexualism used by a number of transsexual rights organisations reads:
Students who are gender non-conforming are those whose gender expression (or outward appearance) does not follow traditional gender roles: "feminine boys," "masculine girls" and students who are androgynous, for example. It can also include students who look the way boys and girls are expected to look but participate in activities that are gender nonconforming, like a boy who does ballet. The term "transgender youth" can be used as an umbrella term for all students whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth and/or whose gender expression is non-stereotypical. According to this definition, a girl who plays football is trans-sexual.
A number of transsexuals are beginning to admit that opting for surgery ruined their lives. "I was a messed-up young gay man," says Claudia McClean, a male-to-female transsexual who opted for surgery 20 years ago. "If I had been offered an alternative to a sex change, I would have jumped at the chance, but as soon as I told the psychiatrist I felt trapped in the wrong body, or some such cliché, he was writing out a referral to the surgeon."
Transsexualism is becoming so normalised that increasing numbers of children are being referred to clinics by their parents. Recently, an 18-month-old baby in Denmark was diagnosed as suffering from GD. Last summer, a primary school headteacher held an assembly to explain that a nine-year-old boy would return as a girl.
Ten years ago, there were an average of six child and adolescent referrals per year in Britain, but in 2008 numbers had increased six-fold. Although the minimum age for sex-change surgery is 18, puberty-blocking hormones can be prescribed to those as young as 16, and transsexual rights lobbyists want that age to be reduced to 13.
Medical science cannot turn a biological male into a biological female — it can only alter the appearance of body parts. A trans-sexual "woman" will always be a biological male. A male-to-female transsexual serving a prison sentence for manslaughter and rape won the right to be relocated to a women's jail. Her lawyers argued that her rights were being violated by being unable to live in her role as a woman in a men's jail. Large numbers of female prisoners have experienced childhood abuse and rape and will fail to appreciate the reasons behind a biological man living among them, particularly one who still has the penis with which he raped a woman. (Some transsexuals choose to retain their genitals.)
Dr Caillean McMahon, a US-based forensic psychiatrist, defines herself not as a transsexual but as a "woman of operative history. The trans community has an unforgiving global sort of condemnation towards critical outsiders. I have to be suspicious that the insistence of many of those demanding to enter it is not for the purpose of celebrating the spirit and nature of women, but to seek an enforced validation, extracted by force in a legal or political manner." With the normalisation of transsexual surgery comes an acceptance of other forms of surgery to correct a mental disorder. In 2000, Russell Reid, a psychiatrist who has diagnosed hundreds of people with GD, was involved in controversy over the condition known as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), where sufferers can experience a desperate urge to rid themselves of a limb. Reid referred two BDD patients to a surgeon for leg amputations. "When I first heard of people wanting amputations, it seemed bizarre in the extreme," he said in a TV documentary. "But then I thought, ‘I see transsexuals and they want healthy parts of their body removed in order to adjust to their idealised body image,' and so I think that was the connection for me. I saw that people wanted to have their limbs off with equally as much degree of obsession and need."
In a world where equality between men and women was reality, transsexualism would not exist. The diagnosis of GD needs to be questioned and challenged. We live in a society that, on the whole, respects the human rights of others. Accepting a situation where the surgeon's knife and lifelong hormonal treatment are replacing the acceptance of difference is a scandal. Sex-change surgery is unnecessary mutilation. Using human rights laws to normalise trans-sexualism has resulted in a backward step in the feminist campaign for gender equality. Perhaps we should give up and become men. »
________________________________
An article about extremism in feminism:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/25/radical-feminism-trans-radfem2012
And the answer given by a feminist figure:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/29/transgenderism-hate-speech
I fell on articles of, or about, radical feminists whom expressed opinions so outrageous and extreme I couldn’t believe what I was reading at first. Then, what slowly emerged from those opinions was the simple logic of widespread feminist thesis pushed to the last extremity of their logic, which I find a somewhat defendable reflection –if you think something, you go to the end of your own logic, you address the following consequences. This being said, I completely disagree with these statements, of course. They contradict precisely what I personally strongly believe on these questions. In fact, they’re so absurd in my eyes that they touch possible insanity.
I will summarize the ideas defended in one of these articles, by Julie Bindel, then ask the questions they seem to pose, and finally post large extracts of it with the links. Here it goes; the summary first:
Transsexualism revolves around the idea that genders are determined, that there is something in nature (humans) such as typical male and female. It is the very antithesis of feminism. In reality, genders are pure social constructions, psychological structures of stereotypes. The concept of gender dysphoria was invented by a reactionary male psychiatrist as a defence against the progress of feminism. There is no robust scientific evidence to show a biological basis to gender dysphoria, nor to suggest that sex reassignment is any efficient. Indeed, in a world of equality between men and women, transsexualism wouldn’t exist at all. The concept of transsexualism is based on purely superficial criteria, touching essentially this aforementioned socially constructed image of one’s gender. Following the extreme example of Iran, srs is simply an expression of aversion for gays and lesbians. It has nothing to do with the health of the subjects.
Moreover, sex reassignment treatment is brutal and imperfect: it results in an alteration of male body parts and cannot turn a male into a female. It is mutilation. At worst, transsexualism is comparable to Body Dismorphic Disorder, a psychiatric condition in which the patient feels the desire to be amputated of a limb.
The main idea expressed here is that genders are constructed (and therefore if you will, that sexes are irrelevant). So the essential question it raises, to me, the only question which really address all of these unbelievably outrageous statements, is this: is the idea that genders are socially constructed still a valid idea? In my opinion, if we find merit in the idea, we give strength to such opinions against transsexuality, but reinforce the efforts of feminisim. If we don’t, and validate the idea of a natural reality of the sexes in human beings, we justify the very basis by which transsexuality is possible, but do somewhat undermine efforts of creating gender equality by affirming biological propensities –or at the very least, some efforts made by feminists in decades.
Am I right that the whole topic revolves around such questions? What is your opinion on this precise question if I’m right? In what way am I wrong if I am?
What do you think of the relation between feminism and transsexuality? Can the association of transgenders with homosexuals (male and female) in the LBTG body go beyond purely strategic purposes? Are feminists right to accuse transsexuals of perpetuating stereotypes? Is the desire for femininity (or virility) as we understand it, a kind of fetichism, sociologically constructed and unnecessary, or does it answer a deeper propensity?
(OK, I’m nuts. We’re Saturday, why am I obsessed with this, and why do I bother to ratiocinate about such an intricate subject? I don’t know! I guess I was somewhat shocked by what I read. If I’m annoying you, please just ignore me…)
____________________________________
Extracts of Julie Bindel's article:
JULIE BINDEL
The Operation That Can Ruin Your Life
November 2009
Standpointmag
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/the-operation-that-can-ruin-your-life-features-november-09-julie-bindel-transsexuals?page=0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C 0%2C0%2C0
Despite campaigning against gender discrimination, rape, child abuse and domestic violence for 30 years, I have been labelled a bigot because of a column I wrote in 2004 that questioned whether a sex change would make someone a woman or simply a man without a penis. As a leading feminist writer, I now find that a number of organisations are too frightened to ask me to speak at public events for fear of protests by transsexual lobbyists.
Transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is "natural" for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism. Those who ‘transition' seem to become stereotypical in their appearance — f**k-me shoes and birds' nest hair for the boys; beards, muscles and tattoos for the girls. Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.
Gender dysphoria (GD) was invented in the 1950s by reactionary male psychiatrists in an era when men were men and women were doormats. It is a term used to describe someone who feels strongly that they should belong to the opposite sex and that they were born in the wrong body. GD has no proven genetic or physiological basis.
A review for the Guardian in 2005 of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery was clinically effective. It warned that the results of many gender reassignment studies were unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants.
Apart from Thailand, the country with the highest number of sex-change operations is Iran where, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death. When sex-change surgery is performed on gay men, they become, in the eyes of the gender defenders, heterosexual women. Transsexual surgery becomes modern-day aversion therapy for gays and lesbians.
In the West, however, supporting the diagnosis and availability of surgical intervention is seen as a view right-thinking liberals should adopt. But no oppressed group ever insisted its emotional distress was the sole basis for the establishment of a right. Indeed, transsexuals, along with those seeking IVF and cosmetic surgery, are using the NHS for the pursuit of happiness not health.
Treatment is brutal and the results far from perfect. Male-to-female surgery involves removal of the penis and scrotum and the construction of a "vagina" using the skin from the phallus, breast implants inserted and the trachea shaved. Painful laser treatment to remove hair in the beard area and elsewhere and cosmetic surgery to "feminise" the face is increasingly common.
Recent legislation (the Gender Recognition Act, which allows people to change sex and be issued with a new birth certificate) will have a profoundly negative effect on the human rights of women and children. Since 2004, it has been possible for those diagnosed with GD to be assigned the sex of their choice, providing that the person has lived as the opposite sex for two years, has no plans to change back again and can provide evidence of the above.
It is not necessary to have undergone hormone treatment or surgery. In other words, a pre-operative man could apply for a job in a women — only rape counselling service and, if refused on grounds of his sex, could take the employer to court on the grounds that "he" is legally a "she".
A definition of transsexualism used by a number of transsexual rights organisations reads:
Students who are gender non-conforming are those whose gender expression (or outward appearance) does not follow traditional gender roles: "feminine boys," "masculine girls" and students who are androgynous, for example. It can also include students who look the way boys and girls are expected to look but participate in activities that are gender nonconforming, like a boy who does ballet. The term "transgender youth" can be used as an umbrella term for all students whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth and/or whose gender expression is non-stereotypical. According to this definition, a girl who plays football is trans-sexual.
A number of transsexuals are beginning to admit that opting for surgery ruined their lives. "I was a messed-up young gay man," says Claudia McClean, a male-to-female transsexual who opted for surgery 20 years ago. "If I had been offered an alternative to a sex change, I would have jumped at the chance, but as soon as I told the psychiatrist I felt trapped in the wrong body, or some such cliché, he was writing out a referral to the surgeon."
Transsexualism is becoming so normalised that increasing numbers of children are being referred to clinics by their parents. Recently, an 18-month-old baby in Denmark was diagnosed as suffering from GD. Last summer, a primary school headteacher held an assembly to explain that a nine-year-old boy would return as a girl.
Ten years ago, there were an average of six child and adolescent referrals per year in Britain, but in 2008 numbers had increased six-fold. Although the minimum age for sex-change surgery is 18, puberty-blocking hormones can be prescribed to those as young as 16, and transsexual rights lobbyists want that age to be reduced to 13.
Medical science cannot turn a biological male into a biological female — it can only alter the appearance of body parts. A trans-sexual "woman" will always be a biological male. A male-to-female transsexual serving a prison sentence for manslaughter and rape won the right to be relocated to a women's jail. Her lawyers argued that her rights were being violated by being unable to live in her role as a woman in a men's jail. Large numbers of female prisoners have experienced childhood abuse and rape and will fail to appreciate the reasons behind a biological man living among them, particularly one who still has the penis with which he raped a woman. (Some transsexuals choose to retain their genitals.)
Dr Caillean McMahon, a US-based forensic psychiatrist, defines herself not as a transsexual but as a "woman of operative history. The trans community has an unforgiving global sort of condemnation towards critical outsiders. I have to be suspicious that the insistence of many of those demanding to enter it is not for the purpose of celebrating the spirit and nature of women, but to seek an enforced validation, extracted by force in a legal or political manner." With the normalisation of transsexual surgery comes an acceptance of other forms of surgery to correct a mental disorder. In 2000, Russell Reid, a psychiatrist who has diagnosed hundreds of people with GD, was involved in controversy over the condition known as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), where sufferers can experience a desperate urge to rid themselves of a limb. Reid referred two BDD patients to a surgeon for leg amputations. "When I first heard of people wanting amputations, it seemed bizarre in the extreme," he said in a TV documentary. "But then I thought, ‘I see transsexuals and they want healthy parts of their body removed in order to adjust to their idealised body image,' and so I think that was the connection for me. I saw that people wanted to have their limbs off with equally as much degree of obsession and need."
In a world where equality between men and women was reality, transsexualism would not exist. The diagnosis of GD needs to be questioned and challenged. We live in a society that, on the whole, respects the human rights of others. Accepting a situation where the surgeon's knife and lifelong hormonal treatment are replacing the acceptance of difference is a scandal. Sex-change surgery is unnecessary mutilation. Using human rights laws to normalise trans-sexualism has resulted in a backward step in the feminist campaign for gender equality. Perhaps we should give up and become men. »
________________________________
An article about extremism in feminism:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/25/radical-feminism-trans-radfem2012
And the answer given by a feminist figure:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/29/transgenderism-hate-speech