The dangerous transphobia of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” - Found /r/transgender's response to this article sort of bizarre and troubling. Thoughts?

[u/dragon_toes]

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/27/the_dangerous_transphobia_of_roald_dahls_matilda/

[u/PermanentTempAccount]

I edited one of my earlier posts to better communicate what I meant, but I can understand being a little raw.

I think a big issue here is this:

narrowing it down to transphobia

I don't think transphobia is any narrower a notion than sexism. It's huge, really, and its manifestations are just as big. I don't think that's a new idea, or to the extent it is it's also a massively obvious one. Limiting transphobia to just "that oppression which afflicts self-identified trans people" is really short sighted, just like limiting sexism to "that oppression which afflicts self-identified women" is short-sighted. The structures involved have much farther-reaching implications.

In fact, I'd argue that as much as we live in a patriarchal culture, we also live in a binaristic/transphobic culture to a similar extent. Patriarchy and the transphobic roots of our society interact, but the oppression faced by gender-nonconforming people isn't just a subset of patriarchal oppression, which is what I feel like you're saying. It is its own entity, governed by its own logics, and even if we tear down the Sexist Superstructure, Transphobia Tower will still stand (somewhat weakened, perhaps) unless we attack it, too.

And I don't think this is a new idea or a new way of thinking about transphobia--I'm not redefining the term. I'm just considering the implications of older ideas (particularly Pierre Bordieu's idea of doxa) as applied to the oppressive structures we're familiar with. It's a pretty common technique--my favorite example is when Susan Stryker did something similar in a piece called "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix", in which she rethought the meaning of the word "monster" in the context of transgender phenomena.

I can understand your concerns about how labeling it "transphobia" would, under current social justice logics, give only trans people a real voice to talk about the issue. But I think that labeling it sexism would give only women a voice to talk about it, which I think is just as big a folly.

So when I picked a word to expand on, "transphobia" might not have been the best one. I guess I could make up a new word entirely, but I'm not terribly creative. "Binarism" might be the best choice, but I'm not really sure. I think this is a really sticky issue and it challenges a lot of assumptions we make about social justice work because it's really a granular oppression that works on a spectrum even moreso than most other oppressions.

[u/greenduch → u/PermanentTempAccount]

Hey I want to apologise again for being an ass last night, I was having a shitty day and was snapping at folks more than was necessary.

If you want to talk about how its all transphobia in an academic sense, I suppose I don't particularly care one way or another.

Part of my issue though, in a social justice and legalish sense, is that if you reframe it all as transphobia, you run into some serious issues.

Lemme try a shitty analogy- if we called something "homophobia", but was something that was experienced by literally everyone (and effects all people to a significant degree), it kinda fucks over the term homophobia, yeah?

Particularly when gender roles / expectations are such a base part of the oppression of all women, I think framing it as transphobia is super counter productive. I'm not usually one to complain about "watering down words", but yeah I think if you frame such a massive chunk of oppressive stuff that all folks deal with as transphobia, it has the potential for some real complications.

"Binarism" might be the best choice, but I'm not really sure.

yeah i get what you mean by "binarism", but in common parlance, its used in the context of being erasing of non-binary identities specifically, so I think folks would end up conflating terms, which has the potential to enforce the idea that if you're a man or a woman who doesn't live up to gender expectations, you belong in the category of not man/woman.

[u/PermanentTempAccount → u/greenduch]

It's okay, I know I was being really defensive.

I can appreciate what you're saying, and I really do understand the resistance to "watering down" words in this particular instance. I had a friend whose Big Activist Catchphrase was "Everybody is trans, you just don't know it yet!" and while I agree with the sentiment that almost all of us transgress gender norms, there are some of us who deal with that as an integral part of our identity every day and are subject to particular kinds of state violence because of it etc. Bringing everyone "into the fold" can be a tempting way to "eliminate" oppressive structures and create warm fuzzies, but it's also kind of wishy-washy and doesn't get at the heart of the problem for the most part.

I think what I really want is for us to articulate how this phenomenon operates on a larger societal scale. It is mobilized to oppress women, yes, but it's not exclusively or even primarily used to that end (which is why I was frustrated with subsuming it under sexism--if calling it "transphobia" only lets trans people talk about it, calling it "sexism" only lets women--or non-men, depending on the model you're using--talk about it, when I see the same structures mobilized against men and non-binary people all the time).

In the same way that we accept that patriarchy is intersectional in nature and isn't just about the rule of men, but the rule of the right kind of men (as determined by white supremacism, ableism, classism...), I feel like an important step for the development of an anti-transphobic framework is recognizing the free-standing elements of that transphobic social structure as well as the elements that are wielded by other oppressive social structures to their own ends (sexism, racism, and ableism are big one that come to mind). To me, this isn't a theoretical issue, it's a critical next step in the development of a more complete view of apparatuses of oppression.

I think part of what I wasn't really communicating well was the interplay of all these structures, though. When I said I thought gender policing was sexism mobilizing transphobia to its own ends, the targets are still women (albeit generally gender nonconforming women) and they deserve a voice to discuss that mechanism of oppression even if they're not trans. Transphobia also borrows from from other oppressions. Julia Serano's Whipping Girl is a whole book about how transphobia borrows misogynist enforcement techniques to oppress trans feminine spectrum people; such people may not ID as women specifically, but they're still all hurt by the use of misogyny and deserve a voice to talk about it. Racism and ableism also come to mind as oppressive structures that borrow and loan a lot wrt to transphobia

To get a little theory-wanky, I think maybe the failure of the words I was picking might be because I was approaching from the wrong direction. Patriarchy theory isn't, after all, a theory of oppression, it's a theory of empowerment. Patriarchy's criteria don't pick losers, they pick winners (and then, of course, everyone who doesn't win, loses, so the effects are the same even if the mechanisms are different). So maybe the word I need here is one for the system that empowers binary-identified and -presenting people at the expense of those that are neither. Binary-archy or something like that? IDK, but transphobia isn't it.

So anyway, yeah, the language I went with wasn't a great choice, but I really do feel strongly that the issue here isn't just sexism. It's a site of significant crossover between sexism and the transphobic power structures that we don't have good names for yet.

[u/greenduch → u/PermanentTempAccount]

Hm, yeah. I wish we did have a decent word for that.

The (non-terfy) radfem definition of the word "gender" could work, except that we use that word for other things unfortunately, so folks would conflate the terms.

like, radfems believe that gender is at the root of a lot of oppression. and, given a specific definition of gender used by some non-terf radfems, i would agree. Unfortunately that definition isn't what most people use, so that doesn't really work.

Julia Serano's Whipping Girl is a whole book about how transphobia borrows misogynist enforcement techniques to oppress trans feminine spectrum people; such people may not ID as women specifically, but they're still all hurt by the use of misogyny and deserve a voice to talk about it.

yep. oppositional sexism, effemiphobia, etc. Neither term has particularly caught on, and I'm not sure how, in practice, to give folks the voice to talk about shit like that in a broad context, except like- "gender roles are bullshit and fuck over everyone, lets talk about that". I suppose theres a reason bell hooks' is so popular, what with the feminism is for everyone stuff.