Trans Feminism At Umass

Ultimately, women must ask if transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists are our peers. Are they equal to us? Questions of equality often center on proportional equality, such as "equal pay for equal work," or "equal rights to health care." I do not mean equal in this sense. Rather I use equality to mean: "like in quality, nature or status" and "capable of meeting the requirements of a situation or a task." In these senses transsexuals are not equal to women and are not our peers. (Janice Raymond, 117)

Who is controlling whom? Presently, the controllers are the gender identity clinis and the transsexual experts who staff them... it is not inconceivable that such clinics could become sex-role control centers, for defiant, nonfeminine females and nonmasculine males, as well as for transsexuals... The use of behavior modification and control is presently very widespread. (ibid, 136)

I believe that the First Cause, that which sets other causes of transsexualism in motion... is a patriarchal society, which generates norms of masculinity and femininity." (ibid, 70)

Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society." (ibid, 30)

The problem with considering the issue of trans-feminism on the UMass campus is that the Women's Studies department is host and supporter of one of the most vitrolic and well known transphobic feminists alive today. Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979, Beacon Press) is the most well known anti-trans book still in print. The UMass library has several copies, and in one I found notes in the margins saying "excellent point Jan" and "cool" and several blindingly transphobic passages underlined or similarly marked.

Raymond blatantly says that transsexuals are not equal to women, especially, it seems, lesbian feminists. She seems terrified of transsexual lesbians, as if they are on the verge of invading. Throughout her book, she uses the pronouns associated with transsexuals' birth sexes, referring to MTF transsexual women as "he" and FTM transsexual men as "she." She cannot even respect how transsexuals are politely referred to. Would she appreciate being called "girl" or "babe" or "bitch" by another feminist?

What does this say to the local trans population, and to transgendered people who support the goals of the Women's Studies department as a whole? Would they not think that they are not welcomed? That they are in fact denied their humanity by a department that supposedly works for the emancipation of all people?

As a transsexual feminist who is a Women's Studies minor, and who has built many Women's Studies classes into his BDIC major, I have also struggled to find my place within the department, and within the various strains of feminism. To realize that the department that I so value, and respect, and frankly love, is home to someone who hates the very idea of my life, is disappointing, hurtful, and discouraging.

Yet, first and foremost, as I have been my entire conscious life, I am a feminist. I have visited Seneca Falls and enjoyed college lectures on women's history since I was in elementary school, thanks to my mother. I grew up with the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth on my lips. I first read the words of Sojourner Truth in elementary school, and have defended women's liberation since I could speak. As a feminist, I find strength in when she said - "if de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn de world upside down all her one lone, all dese togeder, ought to be able to turn it back and git it right side up again, and now dey is asking to, de men better let 'em."

As I join my feminist sisters and brothers and siblings - gay, straight, bisexual, male, female, intersexed, trans and not, black, white, brown, yellow, red, poor, rich, capitalist and socialist, radical and conservative, of all religions and backgrouds - I know that I have a place in feminism. Even the great hater Janice Raymond cannot convince me otherwise. No matter the damage she has done to me, to my community, she will not overcome the power of all the people who stand up, and say that gender or sex or gender identity or sexuality or race, color, creed, faith, or physical ability, none of that matters, and that we shall together change the world. We shall make it a world where it is not what you are that matters, but who you are.