Radical feminism holds that what is currently known as ‘gender’ is not a condition which naturally arises either from an individual’s sex or from any other innate source, instead being an ideology of ‘sex roles’ which support and are constructed by the patriarchy.

While the way in which gender is produced is often described as “socialisation” or “conditioning”, this article suggests modelling it as a lifelong process of sex role education, covering more than just the sex role an individual is expected to play.

This model allows us to explore in some detail the experience of transsexual people under patriarchy and to question some binaries around the political features of transsexual identities.

With these considerations in mind we revisit the political category of ‘woman’ – as used to understand structured sexism – from the point of view of transsexual women’s inclusion.

Trigger and Content Warnings

Trigger Warnings: This article contains mentions of emotional, physical and sexual violence against women and children. It contains one historical account of mistreatment in captivity.

Content Warnings (idea borrowed from Kwerey): This article contains discussion of feminine socialisation and a direct account of the positions of women and men in society. It goes into considerable detail regarding medical establishment gatekeeping of treatment for transsexual women.

Who Is This Article For?

You.

Some parts of this article may be very basic reading for radical feminists, other parts similarly for trans* people and/or those with a queer studies background, but I hope most readers will find that the article as a whole covers some useful ground.

As with any discussion of sex and gender, there may be points which some readers will disagree with, two of which may be worth disclosing up-front. One is that gender will be described in the way already mentioned above, as an ideology and not as an innate property of human beings. The second is that the existence of sex dysphoria, i.e. a loosely binary feeling of discrepancy between one’s physical sexual characteristics and those typically associated with the sex designated as the ‘other’ sex, will be taken as a given and not ascribed to social causes.

However, this piece is as much about the realpolitik as the theory, and so I’d encourage dissenting readers to continue regardless. The point you may dispute is one which defines another reader’s life, and you don’t need to share their viewpoint in order to encounter their attitudes and actions or learn from their experience.

There are groups of people whose life experiences are poorly represented in this piece, and which may be excluded on a structural level by the views taken in this piece. Those groups may include but are not limited to transsexual men, intersex people, other gender-variant people, cross-dressing/transvestite people, other people who experience gendered behaviour as innate, racialised trans* people, more-or-less anyone whose experience of gender is non-white and people who or whose cultures delineate sex, gender and sexuality in ways other than the dominant Western orthogonal systems (more on this here and here).

To those people: this article is an exploration of the consequences of gender-as-ideology for transsexual people, and an exploration of the consequences of transsexual experience under cispatriarchy for radical feminist conceptions of gender and political definitions of ‘womanhood’. In this, I’m writing what I know: I am a transsexual woman, I am a radical feminist. As always, I welcome and will publish comments and other responses from people with lived experience I lack. And I am not trying to lay out a theory that will colonise the ways you structure your own experience. This dialogue is directed inwards towards fellow radical feminists and (probably mostly white) transsexual women and asks us to reflect on each other’s lived experience and wisdom.

Gender and the Sex Role Education

Radical Feminists on Gender

Most articles on gender must necessarily open with several pages defining what gender is and does before any real discussion can begin. This article doesn’t aim to cover either of those subjects and will focus instead on how gender is done to us. This section will briefly introduce radical feminist ideas on the nature and purpose of gender – ideas which will be returned to repeatedly throughout the article – before moving on to the central topic. Those interested in a thorough discussion of the nature and purpose of gender can find it elsewhere in radical feminist writing.

Radical feminism understands gender as an ideology of male supremacy, serving as one of many tools which uphold patriarchy and other dominant orders, and radical feminists consider any attempt to explain gendered behaviours as “innate” to be antifeminist. As Dworkin wrote in Right Wing Women:

Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one way or another) embodies the nature of women, that the way women are treated in sex and in society is congruent with what women are…

We are assigned at birth into either the dominant patriarchal class or the sex class based primarily on genital characteristics (in many Western countries, doctors may alter the genitalia of intersex infants to facilitate this) and subsequently primed to assume the appropriate role: “male” gender for the patriarchs, “female” gender for the sex class. The male-supremacist gender ideology varies across different cultures and sometimes includes additional roles, but these two are the most common.

Because it is a common misunderstanding, I’d like to draw out a particular response often made to this view, which is that it is labelling women who merely perform female gendered behaviour as antifeminist. It is not. Many women who perform female gendered behaviour already understand it not to embody the nature of women. Many more at least suspect that it may not. And when it comes to labelling people – not views – as antifeminist, then my list is long and men are at the top. Women who are not radical feminists may feel threatened by this theory insofar as they suspect that men may push them out in front of us to take the hits. They don’t need to worry; we radical feminist women are smart and will step past them to direct our blows where they belong.

Sex Role Education

The words mostly commonly used to describe this grooming process are “socialisation” and “conditioning”. Both of these imply a process which is done against an individual and are usually followed by words like “as”, e.g. “socialisation as a woman”.

In place of these I would like to introduce the metaphor of sex role education, an activity performed by society as a whole upon society as a whole and containing rich, multi-layered information about multiple sex roles.

Sex role education consists of the continuous propagation of gender beliefs and direct enforcement of gendered sex role behaviours. The process of sex role education ultimately results in the formation of 1) an individual’s gender worldview, consisting of gendered beliefs about ourselves and others based on the sex we are assigned and assign to others and 2) conditioned (unthinking) gendered behaviour.

The curriculum of sex role education is composed of a set of rules about ‘what female-sexed people are like’ and ‘what male-sexed people are like’, alongside a set of cautionary tales of “what freaks are like” (more on this system of female/male/freak gender classification).

Because gender is a male-supremacist ideology, sex role education contains sexist lessons such as, “female-sexed people are irrational” and “male-sexed people’s views are important”. Some lessons are descriptive: “female-sexed people are caring”, and others are prescriptive: “female-sexed people should not make a fuss”. Sometimes the lessons are tagged explicitly with a sex, such as in the above examples, and sometimes they are given as direct behavioural commands in which sex is implied: when you and other people assigned female are repeatedly told to remain indoors while people assigned male are told to go outside and play, the lesson that the female sex should stay indoors is implicit but clear.

Sex role education utilises various teaching methods: general immersion in a thoroughly gendered society, one-to-one tutorials with adults who give direct instruction on how ‘our’ sex should behave, peer-group discussion in which we talk about gender amongst ourselves and exchange the ideas we have received, and severe ongoing assessments in which we are punished for behaviour seen as gender-variant and rewarded for behaviour seen as gender-conforming. School popularity contests such as end-of-year ‘Queen’ and ‘King’ coronations could even be seen to function as final examinations, were sex role education not a life-long process.

Different Educations For Different Groups

This concept of sex role education lends itself easily to articulating how different people receive different educations. Not only are we each educated that women and men are different, people assigned as girls and boys are actually subscribed to different – although overlapping – curricula on what exactly women and men ‘are’ and how they should behave. For example, girls are educated that men are predatory, whereas boys don’t receive the same message about men. This can result in disconnects during adult conversations in which privileged men don’t acknowledge women’s beliefs about men as predatory, or conceptualise those beliefs as individual aberrations based on ‘bad experiences’ or even ‘prejudice’ (and there are certainly also other reasons why these conversations occur, many of which imply more male culpability).

The way in which the information is distributed is typically unequal, with women being taught more about aspects of the male sex role than vice versa. Among other things this reflects the aspect of the female sex role concerning the performance of cross-gender emotional work requiring knowledge of internalised male sex roles.

Sex roles are intersectional with other social educations such as education about race. We are taught different things about white women and black women, for example. And as with sex roles, which racialised beliefs a person is taught will depend on their own race – or the race ascribed to them by society in the case of misracialised people – such that white and black women are taught different things about white women and about black women as classes.

Again, as with gendered roles, the disprivileged class may be unable to escape learning more about the privileged class, whereas one aspect of privilege is the privilege to remain ignorant of the values and internal lives of disprivileged people. Put simply: to survive the condition of being racialised under white supremacy, or being a woman under patriarchy, may require knowledge of the privileged class, but not vice versa.

Thus we acquire a body of beliefs about people, beliefs which are gendered, racialised and otherwise coded, and the specific set of beliefs we acquire is based on the place society assigns us within those systems of coding. We use those beliefs to draw conclusions about others based on the place we assign them, and conclusions about ourselves based on the places we are assigned by others as well as the place we assign ourselves.

Fluidity and Reeducation

The previous paragraph should demonstrate that the process of sex role education is difficult enough to understand for people who remain in the place society assigns them. People who move between positions can end up occupying very complex territory. We can explore this using the example of a transsexual woman’s experience, since that is my own perspective as well as one which illuminates several points I would like to cover.

The key points I would like to make, each of which we will explore in further detail, are:

1. That a person whose assigned sex feels ‘wrong’ to them will acquire different self-beliefs and behaviours than a person whose assigned sex feels ‘right’

2. That as a transsexual person moves away from the sex they are assigned at birth to assert their self-identified sex, they typically apply new beliefs to themselves based on what they have learned about the sex role associated with that sex

3. That this does not lead to identical self-beliefs and behaviour as if the person was cissexual, because people assigned different sexes at birth receive different programmes of sex role education

4. But that society will intervene to try and ‘normalise’ a person’s behaviour, self-beliefs and worldview, through both everyday methods (general sex role education in society) and exceptional methods, such as blackmail over access to medical treatment

What is Sex Dysphoria?

Before we discuss each of these points further, I would like to clarify what I mean by feeling ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in an assigned sex. I don’t mean feeling comfortable in a sex role. As specified earlier, sex roles (i.e. genders) are ideologically constructed in order to uphold patriarchy. Many people rightfully feel uncomfortable to some extent in their sex role, especially many women.

Instead, by feeling ‘right’, I mean a feeling of physical congruence with the identity characteristics used by patriarchy to assign sex (and thence sex roles) to individuals. For example, in a person with a penis – a characteristic typically used to assign ‘male’ sex and hence to educate a person into the male sex role – I mean a feeling of comfort and naturalness that the penis is an appropriate part of the body. And by feeling ‘wrong’, I mean a sense of sex dysphoria; for example, that the penis – along with other sexual characteristics – is not meant to be there, and that the primary sexual characteristic should be a vulva. This is not to reduce sex dysphoria to primary and secondary sexual characteristics; instead, insofar as sex is binary, sex dysphoria indicates a broad dysphoria over a wide range of sexed body characteristics.

Some readers may dispute that these feelings are legitimate, where what is typically meant by ‘legitimate’ is whether they stem from a discrete medical disorder or arise for social reasons. I would encourage those readers to focus less on the perceived legitimacy of these feelings and more on the fact that people exist who experience them. I am personally quite convinced that sex dysphoria is a concrete, indisputable reality, but what I’d like to clarify is that even if you hold another position, transsexual people still live the experience of sex dysphoria and as a result, move between social positions in the way this article describes.

I’ll now move on to my first point about transsexual experience.

Statement 1: A person whose assigned sex feels ‘wrong’ to them will acquire different self-beliefs and behaviours than a person whose assigned sex feels ‘right’

For cissexual girls, the components of sex role education which serve to inculcate gendered self-beliefs work as follows:

You are a girl. Girls are like this. Hence, you are like this.

Many cissexual girls will experience dissonance somewhere between the second and third sentences of that summary. Cissexual girls who have developed a conscious or unconscious critique of gender may object to “Girls are like this”, as they look around them at their peers and notice that, as a group, they don’t perfectly match these gendered roles. And cissexual girls who may be willing to accept general statements about other girls will still feel some discomfort with, “You are like this”, since they are simply not like this – yet.

For a transsexual girl (that is to say, a girl who was assigned male sex at birth, who still resides in that social assignation and who is being exposed to the sex role education aimed at boys), the message follows the same structure but the points of discomfort are somewhat different:

You are a boy. Boys are like this. Hence, you are like this.

The first point of discomfort is, “You are a boy”. The extent to which this statement is dissonant will depend on the extent to which she experiences sex dysphoria and feels that the physical characteristics being used as a basis for that statement aren’t a core part of her body. The second point of discomfort may be, “Boys are like this”. Just as for the cissexual girl, the transsexual girl may have developed an analysis of gender ideology which allows her to identify these general statements as suspect. Finally, the transsexual girl may also feel dissonance with the conclusion, “Hence, you are like this”. The specifics of this for a transsexual girl bear some attention:

• She may feel some dissonance in a way similar to the cissexual girl; she may realise that she is not like this. Since gender roles are a fiction, in some ways it doesn’t really matter which fictional role a child is being told they are like; there will inevitably be dissonance since people do not match those roles.

  • There is something to be said, though, for the fact that the male sex roles which cissexual boys and transsexual girls are told to inhabit are, reflecting patriarchy, more privileged than the female sex roles forced upon cissexual girls and transsexual boys. So the statement, “You are like this [sex role]” may be easier to accept in some ways for transsexual girls than it is for cissexual girls, because an existence which promises male privilege is a more liveable existence than one which does not.

• A transsexual girl may already have developed an identification with cissexual girls, based on the fact that she rejects “You are a boy” and is looking for another sex assignment she can accept. In that case, “You are like this [male sex role]” may be dissonant for another reason. She may already have started to absorb sex role beliefs about herself based on the information she is exposed to about the female sex role. While this is not the same information being given to cissexual girls – remember, the sex role education one receives is based partially on who society thinks one is, and society thinks she is a boy – it is still a sex role which can be internalised as self-beliefs. When told, “You are like [the male sex role]“, she thinks, “No, I am not. I am like [what I know of the female sex role]” and tries to resist the conditioning.

Regardless of this dissonance, the messages are powerful – and, as discussed earlier, are driven home in many different ways – and it’s likely for every child that much of the conditioning will to some extent get through.

But what I am trying to highlight here is that there are actually more than two kinds of childhood sex role education. While society attempts to give the same education to transsexual children as it does cissexual children – since it typically does not recognise the existence of transsexual children – it often produces different results. Though definitely a simplification, it may be useful to think of there as being at least four broad types of childhood sex role education when considering cis/trans* (and of course more along other axes): that received by cissexual girls, cissexual boys, transsexual girls and transsexual boys.

Statement 2: As a transsexual person moves away from the sex they are assigned at birth to assert their self-identified sex, they typically apply new beliefs to themselves based on what they have learned about the sex role associated with their self-identified sex

As a transsexual woman begins to understand herself as transsexual and as a person of female sex, she may – depending on the extent to which she accepts gender ideology – begin to identify herself more with the female sex role. As a result, many transsexual women will begin to form self-beliefs based on what they have learned about the female sex role in their sex role education.

They are not starting from a place of no knowledge. Society is thoroughly gendered, and everyone’s sex role educations, including those of transsexual girls and women, include considerable information on “what women are like”. This may involve a transsexual woman beginning to conceive of herself as more compassionate, or less capable of logical problem-solving. It may also involve changes in behaviour such as speaking up less in group environments or taking on more emotional work.

Of course, new self-beliefs don’t always translate into conditioned behaviour. Two women, one cissexual, one transsexual, may both hold the same poisonous self-belief that, “as a woman, I must present myself as attractive to the heterosexual male gaze”, but the transsexual woman may not yet reflexively perform acts of subservience under the male gaze such as dropping eye contact, adopting submissive physical postures and performing public smiling. As acts like these are key to gendered behaviour, this may cause the transsexual woman to be misgendered by cissexual men and cissexual women alike and treated as a ‘freak’.

Lack of alternative models of womanhood and the punishment of misgendering are two of the reasons why we can understand a adult transsexual woman’s ‘choice’ to adopt the self-beliefs and behaviours of the learned female sex role as a choice made under duress. There are other reasons; we’ll explore the full extent of this duress later when we discuss the ways in which society intervenes to ‘gender’ transsexual people.

The extent to which the identification is formed under duress should also be kept in mind when attaching political meanings to the act of transsexual women’s identification with the female sex role. It’s an act which some cis radical feminists can see as antifeminism: that a person may first identify themselves as female-sexed, and then as a result of this identify themselves with the female sex role, suggests that they see the female sex role to be an inherent quality of the female sex.

I don’t disagree, but I’d invite those who follow this line of reasoning to consider how many cissexual women do just the same thing. The association of female sex with the female sex role is both an expression of internalised antifeminism and also typical of most people who are not radical feminists, both cis and trans*. It’s unfortunate – and a natural consequence of patriarchy – that there is very little instruction available in society upon how to “do” womanhood apart from the sex role education which sets out the female sex role. Radical and other feminisms suggest alternate models of womanhood, but not all people have access to these or the time or energy to apply feminist critiques to their own lives.

There are women of every kind, all the time; there are always women who will ignore egregious wrongs. My aspirations for dignity and equality do not hinge on perfection in myself or in any other woman; only on the humanity we share, fragile as that appears to be.

- Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 2nd Edition (1989), Introduction

Dworkin was speaking here about women’s political responses to pornography but she could just as well have been talking about women’s responses to sex roles. And insofar as radical feminists should understand transsexual women as women in a political sense – a topic I’ll address below – I believe her argument applies to transsexual women as well. We are all – even those of us who embrace it with the limited agency we have available – entitled to liberation from the oppressive work done on us by the female sex role.

Statement 3: This does not lead to identical self-beliefs and behaviour as if the person was cissexual, because people assigned different sexes at birth receive different programmes of sex role education

If you recall our earlier point, the lessons on ‘what women are like’ have different content based on the sex society considers the (oft-unwilling) pupils to be. This means that transsexual women raised as boys will have absorbed a different idea of ‘what women are like’ from cissexual women raised as girls.

But it’s not just the lessons learned about women which are different. The ways in which they are given are different too. One flaw of the ‘sex role education’ concept is that it sounds gentle, like warm days spent at school. Perhaps it is worth remembering exactly what school was like for some of us before we associate education with benevolence, as Kwerey writes in her excellent new blog, querything:

It’s just about little increments of damage, it’s about how the way we grow up shapes us. It’s about the climate there: a climate that got more hostile the further you obviously you broke rules about things like gender, and I’m sure similar climates sit heavily on people all over the country as they grow up and as they start to look for a sexual identity. I’d put it behind me, those schools, the time I spent there not very happily, but looking back now I think it’s worth remembering the place, and remembering all the holes it didn’t fill in my identity.

Sex role education is punishing and vicious. Its methods are inhumane in proportion to the inhumanity of the role which is being enforced. This means that it is especially inhumane in its treatment of those who are being groomed for the female sex role, because the female sex role is less fully human. Part of the sex role education must necessarily be corporal, the infliction of psychic (and sometimes physical) wounds aimed to suppress resistance and to break girls for womanhood; a kind of foot-binding of the spirit. Emotional and physical violence against women and girls is endemic and this is one of its functions.

Other groups are also subject to gendered forms of violence. As is frequently remarked, Patriarchy Hurts Men Too. But we should also place considerable weight on the violence done to trans* children. Properly, this isn’t ‘gendered’ violence, it is ‘cisgendered’ violence since it’s administered, not to a gender, but to people whose gendered expression is perceived to deviate from the sex role education in such a way as to suggest they identify themselves with the ‘other’ sex role. (Though of course transsexual boys may also be recipients of the general gendered violence aimed at girls.)

There are some points of commonality between cisgendered and gendered violence as they relate to sex role education. They are typically administered by people or systems which understand there to be two sex roles and who wish to force a child (or adult, but we are discussing childhood) to conform to one of those roles. The admonishment delivered, explicit or implicit, alongside the violence is, “Be a man!”, or, “Act ladylike!”. (Isn’t it interesting how one is ‘be’ and one is ‘act’? If I didn’t know better, I’d say the patriarchy is self-aware and self-satirising.)

A second admonishment embedded in these violences is, “Your sex is your sex role is your reality”. Assuming the impossibility of transitioning between assigned sexes, sex-immutability acts as a pillar of the sex role education by constructing sex roles as an inevitable consequence of sex, which apparently is inescapable. Both cis- and transsexual people experience the assertion that sex roles are reality as a form of violence. But only transsexual people also experience violence in the assertion, implicit in the above, that your sex is your reality.

Put another way, we can understand “your sex is your sex role is your reality” as a combination of cissexism (sex-immutability) and sexism (sex/sex role correspondence), with the two systems working together to close the circle of sex role assignation.

Only transsexual children betray the doctrine of sex-immutability in visible ways which prompt people and systems to target them with cisgendered violence. There is a difference between the violence employed against girls who won’t stay quiet (a requirement of the female sex role and a transgression under sexism), and children-assigned-as-boys who try on dresses (a violation of sex-immutability and a transgression under cissexism). But there is a similarity in that both forms of violence are applied to keep us in, and to make us conform to, gendered roles.

Cisgendered violence isn’t necessarily ‘more’ or ‘less’ violent than gendered violence – I would like to reject these terms as absolute properties of violence, since the hurt is in the experience of violence, which varies with the survivor – but it is violence with a different purpose and it will be applied in different ways. None of this is an appeal to “oppression olympics”, in which transsexual and cissexual women can compete to decide who had the most unhappy childhoods. Cissexism and sexism are not comparable, are both tragedies, and cannot be traded off against one another.

Instead we should continue to see the issue as complex, not as a simple case of oppressed and not oppressed; something Dworkin acknowledged in Woman Hating:

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual.

- Dworkin, Woman Hating (EP Dutton, 1974)

Statement 4: Society will intervene to try and ‘normalise’ a person’s behaviour, self-beliefs and worldview

While the previous section discussed a function of gendered and cisgendered violences against children, here we will address the methods employed against adults who are perceived to be gender-variant, and some of the reasons for them.

For patriarchy to function, it is necessary that most people behave according to the sex role assigned to them. If there were too many people visibly acting outside of sex roles, those roles might lose their claim to universality. And as sex roles directly support patriarchy, sufficient non-compliance might actually weaken patriarchy. The dominant order clearly will not allow this.

In my article, The Gender Ternary, I described how society rejects individuals who it cannot fit into the gender (sex role) system, classifying them as ‘freaks’ to avoid the need to deconstruct the two predominant sex roles.

But what about when a person can be conceivably fitted into a sex role, and it’s just that this sex role is not the one they are assigned at birth? This was the realisation reached in Western society when it became clear that transsexual people, like cissexual people, typically absorbed enough binary-gender ideology that they could potentially be incorporated into the system rather than placed outside of it.

The cultural response to this realisation resembles nothing more than a programme of remedial sex role education, designed to bring transsexual people into line as quickly as possible with the sex role associated with their self-identified sex. Some readers will be familiar with what this entails, but for those who aren’t, a brief summary.

First, a transsexual woman must survive childhood and, potentially, cisgendered violence. If she does, she must then come to terms with transsexuality. Most of her models are media portrayals of transsexual women as freaks, held up as cautionary tales to reinforce cissexism. Despite this, she overcomes trepidation to register with her doctor and attend an initial consultation to discuss her feelings about gender.

Note how the discussion is already framed in terms of gender and not sex. While it’s understood that sex dysphoria is part of transsexual experience, gender dysphoria is thought to be an inevitable, medical component of transsexuality, despite the fact that great numbers of cissexual people experience what could also be called gender dysphoria, in that they feel a discomfort with the sex role expected of them.

She now enters the first part of a long ‘gatekeeping’ phase. Ostensibly designed to prevent delusional cissexual people – thinking themselves transsexual – from passing through the treatment system for transsexuality, this involves years of consultations, assessments and hurdles. She will be judged on her body language, her dress, her ‘dedication’, her history, her family background, her relationships and her good manners.

Unfortunately, very few of those gates have anything to do with sex. If the function of the gatekeeping was to ensure that cissexual people do not mistakenly access sex hormone treatment or surgery on primary and secondary sexual characteristics, then wearing a skirt and lipstick to the psychological assessment would not be a tacit requirement for diagnosis.

At best, gatekeeping acts to determine whether a transsexual woman who accesses medical treatments has absorbed sufficient education on the female sex role that she will be able to assimilate into the gender system as a woman and not be a ‘freak’. (I would like to defend transsexual women who make this so-called ‘choice’, by the way, just as I don’t attack cissexual woman who consider their survival tied to their performance of the female sex role.) That is to say, looked at in the most generous possible light, it is patronising and infantalising.

In reality, the primary effect of gatekeeping is to act as an advanced component of sex role education. By requiring certain criteria to be met before treatment may progress, the gatekeepers are like teachers who teach to a test, a test they are also responsible for assessing. Gatekeeping both produces and enforces sex roles in transsexual people.

One common criteria for beginning treatment is that a woman must disclose a convincing transsexual history. In the minds of gender-confused, antifeminist doctors, the only transsexual history they find convincing is a history of cross-gender identification, an unbidden arising of the ‘other’ sex’s gendered thoughts and behaviours. It should not be surprising that many transsexual women, having suffered for years with sex dysphoria and only accessing medical treatment when they are desperate, will disclose a perfectly potted traditional transsexual narrative complete with borrowing their mother’s dresses at age seven and total identification with the female sex and sex role at least since puberty.

For some, coming to believe in such a history may even be a psychological precondition for attending the assessment in the first place. The history above may be a fair representation of the occasional transsexual woman’s experiences. But as it is the only representation we are ever shown by the media, many women who understand themselves as transsexual must resolve any cognitive dissonance between their more opaquely gendered history and the traditional transsexual narrative. One way of doing that is to reject the traditional transsexual narrative as the only transsexual narrative, but another is to internalise the traditional history and to selectively reimagine one’s own history as if it had followed this commonly portrayed pattern. (It’s certainly a pressure I’ve felt myself.)

Another notorious component of gatekeeping is the RLE, or Real Life Experience. In the UK, transsexual women are often expected to complete two years of RLE before they will be considered for treatment. This sometimes refers to surgical treatment, but the RLE requirement can be enforced before even hormones are offered. RLE consists of living ‘full time as a woman’ for typically two years. This means using a ‘female’ name, female pronouns and wearing ‘female’ clothes.

There are some women who immediately are ‘read’ as women by mainstream society the moment they adopt feminine gender markers in their dress and behaviour. They are in the relative minority. For most transsexual women, going straight into RLE is not an experience of womanhood but an experience of public freakhood, composed of constant stares, transphobic harassment and potentially violence.

Hang on, did I just say “stares, harassment and violence”? Sounds like ‘womanhood’ to me. RLE actually does reproduce experience in the female sex role, but not in the way it claims. By exposing transsexual women to scrutiny, humiliation, stress and danger, RLE functions to ‘break’ transsexual women for womanhood.

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin recounts the life of Joan of Arc, telling her story as the story of a woman who escaped the condition of ‘womanhood’ through a rejection of intercourse and of femininity. We don’t need to consider any question of Joan of Arc’s transsexual/cissexual status in order to understand the relationship between the following passage and the process of RLE:

[Joan of Arc's] male clothing became the focus of [the Inquisition's] sexual obsession with her: ridding her of it became synonymous with breaking her literally and metaphorically; making her female-submissive.

- Dworkin, Intercourse (Arrow, 1988), p118

Patriarchy has no use for women (transsexual women or holy warriors!) who will not tolerate objectification and unwanted sexual advances. Because people assigned the male sex role are not taught to put up with these, there is a danger that transsexual women may also reject these everyday aspects of female experience. This in itself is not too problematic for patriarchy, since it’s far more important that cissexual women are available for harassment. But it doesn’t need transsexual women setting a bad example. Let’s pass the mic to Twisty for a moment, speaking on a related subject (though not specifically regarding transsexual women):

… if the fairer sex go longer than 16 minutes without girlification, ghettoization, infantilization, and condescension, they’re liable to start acting like unfuckable men. From there, as you can well imagine, it’s but a short, slippery hop to the cosmos-rocking vortex of horror that would be the dissolution of the gender binary, followed closely by the total destruction of oppression culture as we know it.

(Twisty’s writing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

It’s understandable that, say, a cissexual teenage girl can be forced to tolerate treatment such as public harassment, since it is relatively easy for society to bring pressure to bear on a teenager. But what about an adult? Why should an adult transsexual woman accept the abuse of RLE? It’s because, and I say this advisedly, the medical system has her by the balls.

Not every medical practitioner will demand RLE, and different treatments are made conditional on it, but it’s common for RLE to gatekeep either hormone replacement therapy or genital surgery. If a transsexual woman is financially comfortable she may be able to buy hormones online, but many women cannot afford this, and many more cannot afford private surgery. Money often requires work, and many transsexual women are kept in a material state of financial inequality because many forms of work discriminate against them. How convenient.

There may be a reason that workers in information technology seem overrepresented among transsexual women who are out as transsexual (itself a crime against compulsory assimilation): they’re often some of the very few people who can afford to bypass some gatekeeping and the breaking for assimilation it represents. Everyone else (assuming they are even accepted for treatment) goes through the system, and the system functions. It aims to breaks down their resistance to living under the sexual inequality common to all women, it compels identification not with the female sex but with the female sex role, and it encourages silence and conformity: not only the silence expected of women who may not speak up about sexism, but the silence of transsexual people who must not speak up about cissexism, who must conceal even their own history.

Conclusions and The Political Category of ‘Woman’

Who owns the term ‘woman’? I’m not interested in defining it biologically. As a feminist, I view ‘woman’ as a political category, tautologically defined as ‘a target of the oppression aimed at women’.

In writing this essay, I’ve looked to dispel simplified views of transsexual women’s experience held by trans* and queer-theory thinkers and by radical feminists. Transsexual women are not identical to cissexual women, because our histories and gender educations (and reeducations) are different. But neither are we completely distinct from cissexual women, in that many of our oppressions are identical or similar and we are both exposed to, and absorb, sex role education about what we – women – should be and do.

Gender ideology is sufficiently potent that it is able to bring both cissexual women and transsexual women to some extent under the influence of the female sex role. This is done using a variety of tactics, with different tactics applied to cissexual and transsexual women, but the goal – however successful it may be – is to gender all women as women, i.e. to place us in a position of submission to patriarchy so that male power can be upheld.

During this process of ‘feminisation’, patriarchy drills us, lectures us, wounds us and examines us, hammering the ideology of gender into our heads and intruding into our lives to ensure that we are living our assigned gender.

For a while, it is male gender which is pushed upon transsexual women-as-girls. The success of this may depend on how keenly she experienced herself as a transsexual girl in a cissexist world.

But soon enough patriarchy realises its mistake, and rather than allow women to exist with a male sense of entitlement it swings its enforcement machine around 180 degrees to ensure sufficient feminisation of this class of woman as well. The process of deconstructing any male sex role privilege which she did acquire in her childhood is blunt and imperfect, the trauma of transition varying between transsexual women. If something remains, it is the memory of once being told we were allowed to be fully human – coincidentally something that feminism has been trying to tell cissexual women for decades.

What to do with these similar-but-different experiences of oppression as women under patriarchy? Insisting that transsexual women and cissexual women are the same doesn’t just erase the traumas inflicted on girls who were assigned female at birth, it also erases the trauma of a transsexual childhood. But considering us as separate categories ignores the common ways in which patriarchy acts to oppress us as women, part of which is the effort to bring us all in line under the female sex role. Transsexual and cissexual women are targeted by rape and pornography. We are sex objects, if we’re ‘lucky’, or else we’re despised. More often, we’re both. We are underpaid, if we are paid at all. We are both viewed as less than human.

A progressive, trans*-inclusive view of the political ‘woman’ does not mean we have to redefine the term to mean, “cissexual women, including transsexual women who are the same”. I suggest not a redefinition of the term ‘woman’, but an expansion. Just as we can recognise that women worldwide have differing experiences, perhaps we can also understand that women may experience different abuses during our childhoods and still make our way to a place where we share common experience of present-day womanhood.

Trigger Warnings

This article contains discussions of rape, rape apologism and narrative examples of the ways in which multiple systems of domination can be used to put pressure on sexual consent. It contains a fictional account of retraumatisation after abuse.

If, after reading this, you feel like you would like to talk to somebody about personal experiences of non-consent:

• Readers in England and Wales can visit the Rape Crisis England and Wales website, which also has info on the national freephone helpline, 0808 802 9999
• Scottish readers and trans* people anywhere in the UK may prefer to visit the website of Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, phone number 0131 556 9437, which has a good track record of trans*-inclusivity
• Irish readers could go to Rape Crisis Network Ireland which offers, among other things, information on finding your nearest crisis centre
• Readers in the USA could visit RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, which offers a hotline, an online hotline and information on local counselling centres
• RAINN also has a page on international resources which may be useful for readers in other countries.

Summary

When rape apologists are using our models of consent to defend rape and to deflect feminist analyses, it’s at least worth considering the limitations of the models. This article is part two in a two-part series of articles examining the issues.

Part One: “No”: Understanding consent as a binary is powerful because it allows us to say that “no means no”, a statement which has had and still has incredible power to change attitudes about rape for the better. However, it can make it more difficult for us to conceive of what else might mean “no”, as well as to distinguish between different kinds of “yes” given in different contexts. It can be used to victim-blame. It doesn’t always accommodate some of the complexities of communication (although we should beware, because “miscommunication” is a shield rapists often like to hide behind). And admitting “no always means no” seems to mean that we must also admit “yes always means yes”; this can conflict with the subtleties of a fully radical feminist analysis of rape culture.

Part Two: “Yes”: Modern feminist views on consent have often been in conflict. One way to resolve that conflict may be to look for unified models of consent which takes into account ideas from multiple feminisms. Here I suggest a non-binary power model of consent, which looks at systems of domination such as patriarchy, and the pressure they enable people to place on consent. In this model, “no” still means “no” but “yes” should be understood as a statement meaning, “I choose to say ‘yes’, understanding the consequences of saying ‘no’”. A focus on systems of domination – plural – allows us to consider other dynamics of rape beyond men raping women without moving away from fifty years of feminist work on rape and consent.

Gendered Language

Where I discuss rape and consent, I have used a mixture of gender-neutral language and male = perpetrator, female = survivor pronouns. Any discussion of rape and consent is almost inevitably pushed into one of two traps in the use of gendered language; it’s written exclusively in terms of male perpetrators and female survivors and erases other dynamics of rape, or it’s written in exclusively gender-neutral terms and erases the strongly gendered power dynamics of most rape. Even attempts to reference gender proportionally are doomed to fail, because when other pronouns are used just once or twice, it can feel more like tokenism than representation. Please read this article recognising that each use of pronouns and genders is completely deliberate but is not intended to be definitive or exclusive.

Contents

This article breaks down roughly into two sections. The first introduces modern feminist views on consent and the second explores a non-binary power model of consent.

1. Modern Feminist Views on Consent
   1. Yes Means Yes? Agency Feminism
   2. Yes Means No? Radical Feminism on Consent
   3. Adverse Encounters Between Radical and Agency Feminisms
2. A Non-Binary Power Model of Consent
   1. Intersectionality and Multiple Power Relations
   2. The Non-Binary Power Model
   3. Interlude: No Still Means No
   4. Severe and Unnegotiatable Power Dynamics
3. Conclusions

Modern Feminist Views on Consent

As a radical feminist who has many friends who self-describe as sex-positive feminists, I can find myself in a complicated position when I write about consent. Some of the disagreements I see can be very frustrating when it seems like in many areas our understandings are close. I don’t feel like we need to be in complete agreement on all things in order to identify areas where we can reach similar understandings and find common cause. I think that consent has the potential to be one of those areas, and so to explore that possibility, I’d like to set out what I feel the territory looks like now, as well as highlight some of the ways in which conflict can arise.

Yes Means Yes? Agency Feminism

First, I’d like to discuss a school of thought in feminism which I’m going to call ‘agency feminism’, which emphasises women as active, not passive, agents. In agency feminism, the basic unit of consent is the individual, and the definition of “consensual” is whether or not the person involves says it’s consensual.

Agency feminism is very closely tied to sex-positive feminism, but I would prefer not to use that term in this article as I don’t consider other feminisms to be sex-negative. I’d also like to be able to treat the aspects of sex-positive feminism relating to the subject of agency separately to other aspects of sex-positive feminism. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge that other feminist movements, such as some socialist feminisms, also feature a focus on agency.

“No means no,” argues agency feminism, has taken women from the point where they existed to be used by men in sex to the point where they can be conceived of as not consenting to sex. The phrase “yes means yes” is used to emphasise positive consent coming from desire, not just the passive ‘absence of a no’ acceptance of a sex act. As Heather Corinna writes in her imagination of a sex-positive future, An Immodest Proposal:

We [see a woman's] yes as the answer to someone else’s desire, rather than as an affirmation of her own… [and later] What if she were the one initiating, she were getting off… We, as a culture, still tend to consider even a woman’s yes to a man’s sexual invitation revolutionary.

That emphasis on women’s desire is picked up on by work which aims to discover those desires. In her blog post, What do you want?, Holly Pervocracy talks about her struggle to get in touch with her own desires, recognising and fighting back against the way in which “… the socialization of young women is all about how to not indulge your desires”:

… you can’t even start that process [of consensual negotiation] until you know exactly what you’re negotiating about, and that requires you to know exactly what your own raw, impractical, selfish desires are.

Agency feminism is also a ‘rights and responsibilities’ model. If the right is for our sexual choices to be considered the equal of men’s, in that we have the sex we want to have, and only the sex we want to have (“only yes means yes”), the responsibility is for us to only ask for and to initiate and give consent for the sex that we want (“yes only means yes”). In the foreword to Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Margaret Cho writes that:

These days, I say yes only when I mean yes. It does require some vigilance on my part to make sure I don’t just go on sexual automatic pilot and let people do whatever. It forces me to be really honest with myself and others. It makes me remember that loving myself is also about protecting myself and defending my own borders. I say yes to me.

But what about when rape culture and other factors make the ‘responsibilities’ of agency feminism different or impossible to execute, or create perverse pressures? The understanding that individual women may choose to take responsibility for giving a “yes” if and only if they really mean “yes” should never be taken to mean that the “yes” of all women is a carte blanche. My experience with agency feminist thinkers is that they freely acknowledge this, so for the purposes of this article, I’ll consider the “yes means yes” of agency feminism to actually mean:

My yes means yes

or perhaps,

This yes means yes

Yes Means No? Radical Feminism on Consent

You could describe the social training of women in part as an education in how not to say “no”, a subject which Harriet J (I don’t know whether she describes herself as a radical feminist, but this is relevant to the subject) writes about in Another Post About Rape:

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways. And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

And it’s not just during attempted rapes (or at least, attempted rapes as they are understood in the mainstream). Sometimes “yes” means, “I can’t handle another argument with you”, or, “I want to please you”, or, “Let’s just get this over with”.

Radical (and some other) feminists identify a ubiquitous pressure against women’s consent which is part of and partially created by rape culture. In an interview discussing her book, Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues, Catharine MacKinnon described it as follows:

The [sexist] assumption is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal. That’s the assumption – and I think it ought to be thought about, and in particular what consent then means… My view is that when there is force or substantially coercive circumstances between the parties, individual consent is beside the point.

Radical feminists argue that the concept of a straightforward “yes” is unique to those groups who don’t experience pressure on their consent. A “yes” under pressure can’t be unequivocally understood as “yes” because it may mean “maybe” or indeed “no”. The act of a man taking a woman’s “yes” as a “yes” is an act which directly denies conditions of sex inequality between men and women under patriarchy.

Properly, the radical feminist understanding of consent can’t be summed-up as an “x means y” statement. When under duress, there’s no such thing as a simple “yes” or “no”; the very idea of a statement ‘meaning’ one of those things becomes questionable when an answer may have as much (or more) to do with the power factors at play than with what a person really wants to communicate.

But it’s been my experience that statements like, “this is too complicated to summarise” are mostly ignored by people who encounter them, and that they will attempt to take away a summary regardless. We’ll be talking in the next section about what happens when people take away a summary of radical feminist thought on consent, so here’s an attempt to paraphrase the kind of conclusion which people often draw from listening to radical feminists speak on the subject.

First, let’s imagine that a man does not want to be a rapist, because if he does, any idea of ‘consent’ is out of the window. To a willing rapist, whether he hears “yes”, “maybe” or “no”, society gives him generous permission to press ahead regardless and justify it later (more on this in Intersectionality and Multiple Power Relations below).

As a radical feminist, I’d like to our hypothetical non-rapey man to know that:

Yes means maybe, and maybe means no

- in the context of women answering sexual invitations from men

Breaking down that summary a little: “Yes means maybe…”, because there’s no way for the man receiving a yes to be sure that sex inequality isn’t compelling a yes. “… and maybe means no” because, as discussed in part one of this article, I don’t think there’s necessarily any value in distinguishing between someone who’s cool with maybe raping and someone who rapes.

Adverse Encounters Between Radical and Agency Feminisms

There’s no doubt that agency feminist and radical feminist ideas have clashed repeatedly on the subject of consent. I’m interested in looking at the places where they can inform each other, but before that happens, it might be useful to look at some common encounters between these feminist ideas which have gone some way towards creating that conflict.

“But I said yes!”: A woman is having enjoyable sex with male partners. She doesn’t experience the sex as violating. When she reads a radical feminist article which discusses the significant power imbalances in hetero sexual relationships, it doesn’t seem to match her lived experiences. She feels that she doesn’t experience significant pressure on her consent, and that this invalidates the article. She’s encountered a general position of “yes means [maybe means] no” and individualised it to her situation, hearing “your yes means no”. Because her account is palatable to patriarchy, she is widely platformed to speak about her adverse encounter with these ideas, and many people agree with her. She can easily find other people online recounting similar experiences, and even gets some coverage in the mainstream media. These experiences accumulate and become an agency feminist lobby which is not just for enthusiastic consent but against radical feminism. As a result, more women who encounter radical feminist concepts are predisposed to take one look, think, “This doesn’t match my experience – just like everyone else is saying,” and dismiss them.

“But she said yes!”: A woman is performing sexual acts with a male partner which she doesn’t want to do. She has, however, said “yes” to them, and may even sometimes initiate them. She tries to speak up about it, but nobody listens. She breaks up with her partner and names the behaviour as rape (both of which can be very difficult things to do). Her account is not palatable to patriarchy and she is attacked, silenced and retraumatised. But now, her ex-partner speaks up; he explains that she was saying “yes”, and as such she took responsibility (remember that word?) for the sex acts that occurred in their relationship. “It’s not rape,” he says, “And those feminists agree with me.” He has taken an individualist agency-feminist position – the rights and responsibilities model of “my yes means yes” – and has generalised it to all situations, a kind of “every yes means yes”. His account is recognised as unreliable by many feminists, but it is very palatable to the anti-feminist mainstream, and it is widely reported, as well as being picked up as a cause célèbre by reactionary anti-feminist movements such as MRAs (Male RightsRapist Advocates). These experiences accumulate in the daily lives of survivors and of volunteers working at rape crisis centres and become part of the fabric of rape culture understood all too well by many radical feminists.

Neither woman has done anything wrong. One defended her sex life in the face of what she perceived as a matronising undermining of her agency, and was supported in doing so by a dominant culture which has an interest in covering up inequality and the theory which exposes that inequality. The other gave a “yes” in self-defence, one which was later used against her by an abuser, supported by that same culture. In each case, the blame lies with patriarchy.

How, as feminists, can we embrace the understanding that “yes can mean no” without feeling that our own experiences of good sex – if we have those experiences – are being called into question? And how can we defend our own experience without the means of our self-defence being turned around and used out of context by a patriarchy determined to close ranks behind every instance of sexism and abuse?

Sexists love using 'pro-sex' feminist soundbytes, but rarely understand them

One answer might be to insist on both radical and agency feminist models of consent being firmly kept in context and to maintain loudly that in the general case, “yes means maybe means no” even as in the individual case, “this yes means yes”. Unfortunately, feminists don’t have control over the ways in which our discourses are represented in the mainstream. Even within feminism, the selective-platforming effect and the differing amounts of abuse/silencing directed at different feminisms mean that our positions are distorted.

Ultimately, the subtlety of these two properly complimentary perspectives is undermined, they are held up as ‘contradictory’ – or we are held up as ‘hypocritical’, the horror! – and the discourse is polarised. It’s divide and rule, and we fight amongst ourselves instead of fighting against rape and for our own self-determination.

A Non-Binary Power Model of Consent: Acknowledging Multiple Systems of Domination

This is why I wanted to write this article in the first place. I’d like to talk about a non-binary way of thinking about consent, one which takes into account the ubiquitous nature of pressure on consent, but which explicitly acknowledges that women are intelligent, sensible actors who make decisions in their own interest. It also extends the analysis to cover more power relations than patriarchy.

This may be a model which many feminists have seen before. In truth, it’s not so different to understandings of consent held by both agency feminists and radical feminists, because all feminists admit the existence of domination and rape, and the way we understand consent must match the real world.

Intersectionality and Multiple Power Relations

The common narrative is that in what’s come to be called the ‘third wave’ of feminism – a term I reject, as it seems to imply the ‘second wave’ is somehow over or has been superceded – feminists have gradually begun to extend our work into the area of intersectionality, the consideration of power relations other than sexism (and the ways in which sexism interacts with these).

Personally, I associate this development more with time than any particular ‘wave’ of feminism. Some feminists have always been aware that sexism is not the only power relation which exists; after all, black feminists could hardly avoid the subject. Feminist movements are still notoriously bad at handling intersectionality, but nowadays there does seem to be more awareness, sporadic though it may be, that other power dynamics are worth taking seriously alongside – or integral to – feminist work.

An intersectional understanding holds that sexism is one of a number of systems of domination, along with racism, disablism, capitalism, cissexism, ageism, monosexism, classism, homophobia, rape culture, compulsory sexuality, nativism and others, each of which has some unique features and some features in common.

One feature which shows up in many of these systems is a form of power-over privilege (I introduced this term in another recent article). One of many things that power-over privilege can do is to allow one party, situated in the dominant position according to that system and benefiting from that privilege, to place pressure on the consent of another.

Taking a quick look across the systems of domination mentioned so far, we can identify some ways in which consent becomes pressured when those systems are in play. I’ve picked one example for each, and this isn’t an exclusive or a definitive list. I know much more about some of these systems than others! If you have suggestions which would be more illustrative, let me know. There’s always a risk in drawing equivalence between different systems of domination, in that important differences can be erased. I hope that this list does as much to suggest the ways in which these systems work differently as it does to highlight how they can do similar work.

Systems with which I am personally familiar:

• Homophobia: Since similar-gender sexual relations are not widely discussed in society, a claim that, “This sex act is what real gay people do” has coercive power when made by someone with more perceived experience of similar-gender relations over someone who is or who feels less experienced
• Cissexism: Internalised feelings of ‘illegitimacy’ of trans* lives and bodies can mean that when confronted with the sexual agenda of a cis person, some trans* people may simply ‘go along’ without a legitimate site from which to assert their own desires
• Capitalism: The threat of firing allows easy manipulation of consent in the workplace
• Sexism: Patriarchy socialises women to show ‘politeness’ to men. Many women have felt unable to refuse consent due to dynamics of ‘politeness’ (often dynamics manipulated by the man)

Systems from which I’m drawing my understanding and examples from people personally familiar with them:

• Classism: Taking a difference in educational backgrounds as one aspect of a classist society, there can be an ‘arguing privilege’ whereby a partner who has – or acts as though they have – a more accomplished academic education is able to win arguments with their partner through deploying jargon, rhetorical tactics or by appeals to authority (this article is itself an example of ‘arguing privilege’, though hopefully not a use of it which places pressure on anyone’s consent!)
• Monosexism: Some straight men will simply assume consent from bisexual women for multi-partner sex, acting as if the bisexuality of their partner(s) entitles them to a threesome
• Disablism: In her article, Seeking Asylum: On Intimate Partner Violence & Disability (published in the anthology The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities), Peggy Munson writes about how sometimes an abusive relationship with a person who performs caring duties is preferable or necessary when compared to life (and potentially death) when others are not willing to take on those duties
• Nativism: In her article, When Sexual Autonomy Isn’t Enough: Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women in the United States (published in the anthology Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Miriam Zoila Pérez writes that “[women's] dependency on abusers for their immigration status is the ultimate form of control… this creates the power imbalance that facilitates these abuses”
• Racism: Racism conditions white people to expect racialised people to serve their needs, this can create pressure in itself or when combined with internalised racism/colonialism. It’s worth noting that, while racism and classism are distinct systems and are often wrongly conflated, they have aspects in common and can often work together.

Systems which I’ve mostly encountered second- or third-hand, where I’m suggesting examples based on my very limited knowledge:

• Ageism: There are widely documented cases of rape and abuse perpetrated by younger people against pension-age people in so-called ‘care’ environments
• Ageism (again): I’m finding it impossible to pick just one example of ways in which adults can place pressure on a child’s consent. An adult can completely control the world and experience of a child and essentially pressure their consent at will.
  

  credit querything (kwerey@gmail.com), used as non-attribution, non-commercial, share-alike

• Compulsory Sexuality: Something often clearly perceived by asexual communities is that there is a drive in Western cultures towards sexual behaviour being the norm, and a marginalisation of desires not to have sex. On an individual level, this means that the question, “Why don’t you want to have sex?” is asked more often than “Why do you want to have sex?”
• Rape Culture: Once a person begins to take the dominant position in a dynamic of rape or ongoing abuse, while they may have used other privileges to gain that dominant position, from that point onward they are also directly enabled by rape culture in their role as rapists / abusers (to put it another way, rape culture helps rapists to keep raping and keeps survivors in their place, in addition to any other power dynamics in play)

Even if you disagree with one or more items on this list, there are many more ways in which the systems of domination above can be used to place pressure on consent, as well as many other systems of domination not listed here. I hope that this list of examples shows that consent does not exist in a vacuum, and that one or more dynamics are almost always in play which compromise the act of consent.

A danger of including ‘sexism’ on a list like this is that it places sexism alongside and in implied equivalence to the other systems of domination. This is part appropriate, part misleading. It’s appropriate because each of these systems of domination are different and are used against different people. Some of them are not used against women at all, or are used in varying degrees against women and people of other genders. A great number of them, however, are disproportionately used against women in the context of pressure on sexual consent. This is because under patriarchy, where women refuse to perform their function as members of the sex class – namely, sex and/or reproduction – patriarchy inevitably brings pressure to bear.

People wanting to pressure consent will use the easiest tool to hand, or will allow themselves to passively benefit from the pressure their situation exerts on their behalf. In some cases, that might simply be sexism. In others, racism plus sexism; in others, disablism plus sexism, and occasionally, when the person whose consent is being pressured is not a woman, one or more tools not including sexism. But overwhelmingly, it is women’s consent which is pressured. This does not mean that pressure on others’ consent is unimportant, but a discussion of consent which doesn’t take this fact into account is a discussion which is at odds with (and an insult to!) the reality of countless women’s experiences.

Finally, there may seem to be some exceptions to the cases in which rape culture directly enables rape, but these are as much stories as real scenarios – they do happen, but they are told out of all proportion. The repeated telling of these stories serves a function: through comparison to them, other rapes can be dismissed as, famously, not “rape-rape”. Jaclyn Friedman describes one of these stories in her article, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, where she writes:

The ['Real'/ideal] rapist is a scary stranger, with a weapon, even better if he’s a poor man of color. The victim [sic] is a young, white, conventionally pretty, sober, innocent virgin. Also, there are witnesses and/or incontrovertible physical evidence, and the victim [sic] goes running to the authorities as soon as the assault is over.

The Non-Binary Power Model

When consequences for saying “no” (e.g. social sanction, direct violence) are potentially higher than consequences for saying “yes” (e.g. experiencing rape) or when the sexual negotiation takes place in distorted conversational territory which may severely impede or discourage giving a “no” in the first place, there is no “yes” which can be directly understood as consensual. These dynamics don’t need to be explicitly invoked; simply knowing that they exist is enough to know, for example, that they could potentially be invoked by a partner who turns nasty after being refused. A partner with a knife is threatening whether they use it or not. The dynamics don’t even need to be in the forefront of your mind; many people have subconscious understandings of power dynamics even if they never articulate or even explicitly conceptualise them.

It isn’t always possible to know which systems of domination are in play in any given situation. Some marginalisations are invisible. People’s life experiences differ, so that even though they may be marginalised under one or more systems of domination, they may be more or less marginalised, or some of the tactics opened up by that system of domination may be more or less effective. Different tactics may be differently effective at different times. Different sex partners may be more or less adept at deploying those tactics, or their behaviour may be more or less effective in unconsciously bringing them to bear. Different social situations may mitigate the effectiveness of some tactics.

All of this means that, a lot of the time, a partner receiving a “yes” can’t know for sure the degree of pressure which is being brought to bear upon the person giving the “yes”. They may have a rough idea, based on their relative knowledge of systems of oppression, but through ignorance, carelessness or culpable disinterest they may be missing vital information. None of these are excuses. As raised previously (in relation to drunken consent), there may not be explicit intent to take advantage of pressure on consent, but it’s always the case that the person ‘benefiting’ (I place this in quotes as I don’t consider the ability to rape a benefit) from that pressure knows enough to know that pressure might exist on consent, and that it might even be sufficient to allow them to violate their sex partner’s boundaries in a way which causes that partner to experience rape. Any “yes” may mean “maybe” or indeed “no”, and assigning any number of responsibilities to the person asked for that “yes” does not change the power dynamics of the situation.

I suggest a non-binary power model of consent, under which we understand the word “yes” to mean:

I choose to say “yes”, understanding the consequences of saying “no”.

The word ‘choice’ here is not used in a liberal sense and does not imply a free choice; the more punitive the potential consequences of a “no”, the less free the “yes”.

The keen-eyed will see that this is actually not a model of consent. It is in fact a model we can use to comprehend the meaning of consent acts such as “yes”, when made under multiple systems of domination (i.e. kyriarchy).

Nonetheless, it embraces both the “my yes means yes” of agency feminism and the “yes means maybe means no” of radical feminism. From within the experience of a person asked for consent, we can understand “yes” as the best possible choice in their situation given the possible consequences of a “no”. From outside the experience of the person asked for consent – for example, as a person asking for consent in good faith, or as a bystander – we can understand that the strength of the relationship of this “yes” to a genuine “yes” is in inverse proportion to the severity of the anticipated consequences of a “no”.

For this phrasing of the ‘best possible choice’ concept, I’d like to thank Niki Adams from the English Collective of Prostitutes, who said:

We are not for prostitution. We have never glamorised it, and we never promote it. But we do think in many cases it is the best choice out of a set of very bad choices. We won’t get rid of prostitution until we get rid of of exploitation and poverty.

I’d also like to acknowledge Dominique Millette’s article, Women, Agency and Choices, which says much the same thing in different words.

In the best possible world, there are no consequences for saying “no”, and every “yes” is free. In this world (under patriarchy and other systems of domination) the consequences always exist and we must address them as best we can. Indeed, Dworkin made this understanding clear when she wrote that:

Rape and prostitution negate self-determination and choices for women; and anyone who wants intercourse to be freedom and to mean freedom had better find a way to get rid of them.

- Dworkin, Intercourse, (Arrow, 1988) p170

If we want to talk about rights and responsibilities, we must consider how much freedom a sex partner has to execute on the responsibilities we’ve assigned them, and to consider our own responsibilities to offset the pressure we are able to place on consent through the systems of domination in which we participate in a dominant position over our sex partner. If we want to create a situation where a “yes” is most likely to mean “yes”, we must work, first to understand and then to defuse, the potential consequences of a “no”. This work can be done cooperatively, but the responsibility for it falls on the partner with more power. If they’re not doing that work, we have to assume that they don’t care about consent and act accordingly.

With great power, comes great responsibility.

Spiderman knows it – do you?

If we are in a situation where we are dominant over our partner in some ways, and they are dominant in us over others, then just like the drunk sexual partners discussed earlier, we must not throw up our hands and say, “It’s too confusing”. We must look seriously and soberly, while outside a sexual situation, at what sets of consequences can be brought to bear against a “no”. We must look at how our privileges and marginalisations intersect, paying particular attention to the unique multiple oppressions that can form at intersections of multiple systems of domination. We might identify that in some situations, one partner is able to bring more pressure to bear, and in other situations, the other.

We must also acknowledge a dynamic we’ve barely touched on, that of gendered and other forms of ongoing abuse within a relationship. Where abuse is a system, in which one partner progressively establishes dominance over the other through a broad spectrum of abusive tactics, there’s no question of weighing up multiple systems of domination to determine who can oppress whom, because no matter what potentials exist in theory, only some of them are being actualised. In some cases, it’s easy to understand who is the abuser – in the vast majority of heterogendered cases, it’s the man – in others, more difficult, but people familiar with motifs of abuse can usually recognise tell-tale signs of an abuser operating an abusive system within a relationship.

At this point, some people may find themselves beginning to exclaim, “No! Not my Nigel! He’d never do that.” Well, if you genuinely feel no pressure on your consent, I’m happy for you. That’s pretty awesome and pretty rare. Perhaps you and your partner exist in a situation in which neither of you have the potential to dominate each other’s ability to consent. Perhaps you do have that potential, but it’s never come up. Perhaps it’s come up and Nigel’s expertly defused it. Perhaps it’s come up, you haven’t realised, and it’s in play but hasn’t hurt you yet. Do you know the difference?

Interlude: No Still Means No

Go on, if you’ve been dying to ask it ever since I told you to take a seat in the last part. What if she means yes, but she says no? That is to say, what if she says “no” but means “yes but I don’t want to be slut-shamed”?

With our non-binary power model of consent we can turn around our earlier conclusion, and comprehend her act as meaning:

I choose to say “no” understanding the consequences of saying “yes”.

The answer here is exactly the same as above. If you want to improve the situation, don’t attack the speech act. No still means no, because you are not a damn psychic. Instead, work to remove the negative consequences.

There’s a great quote – I wish I could find where I first encountered it – which goes: “Accurate communication cannot exist within a punishing environment”. Change the environment. Work to fight slut-shaming.

Actually, I know some agency feminists you could start working with…

Severe and Unnegotiatable Power Dynamics

One question worth asking is:

Do power gradients exist which are so severe that any supposed consent up that power gradient is so pressured as to be an essentially meaningless choice?

I’d say, “yesbut”. Yes, because so much power can be drawn from systems of domination. But, the consequences sit with the person taking that consent and not the person giving it.

The person giving consent is still making their best possible choice, even if it’s practically no choice at all because the consequences of any other answer are potentially so severe. It is the person receiving it who knows (and they know!) that they are backed up by massive power and privilege. If they won’t make significant and visibly successful efforts to disarm that power (and some power, like the power of an employer or a carer, may be impossible to disarm) before they ask for consent – an act which, due to their power, is equivalent to demanding “yes” – then they shouldn’t be treated any differently than anybody else who uses power to force a sex act.

For illustrative purposes, here’s a non-exhaustive list of examples of the power dynamics which this blog considers to be unnegotiable – that is, that they are so severe that it is as-good-as-impossible to do this power-disarming work:

• The power dynamic held by adults over children
• The power dynamic held by employers over employees
• The power dynamic held by state-sanctioned ‘carers’ over people in ‘care environments’

I can’t speak for some dynamics. I know I experience the cis/trans* dynamic as very powerful; I require a lot of work – and after writing this, I feel inspired to ask for more – from my cis partners in order to keep our sex feeling sufficiently consensual to me, and it can still feel borderline. I’d like to invite readers who experience other power dynamics, for example bisexual people dating monosexual people, or black people dating white people, to contribute their stories of consensuality or otherwise.

What about sex inequality? Reinforced by heterosexism, monosexism, wage inequality, age inequality and other complimentary oppressions, sex inequality is not immune to this analysis, even though (especially though!) it is considered a condition of normality and goes unremarked outside of feminist space.

Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act and of in itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women. Some men do not have all these kinds of power over all women; but most men have some kinds of power over all women; and most men have controlling power over what they call their women – the women they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male.

- Dworkin, Intercourse, (Arrow, 1988) p148

This blog considers the power relation in relationships between men and women to be severe: a power dynamic over which, unless a man is visibly and significantly offsetting his power, he must be considered potentially abusive and at the least dangerously, wilfully ignorant – myself, I don’t care to make the distinction. I do know women (whose relationship history includes relationships with men) who don’t relate experiences of being hurt by male partners. But I don’t know many, and it seems like every time a women-only space opens up, more of the women I know reveal an all-too familiar history.

Conclusions from Part Two: “Yes”

Few of the thoughts in this article are really new. Instead, what I’ve been looking to do is to take ideas from many feminisms and bring them together in a way which responds to some of the conversations I’ve encountered, online and in person, about consent.

Here’s a quick summing up of the points made in this article:

• It’s long past time we thought of women as people who have their own sexual desire and agency, not just as sexual gatekeepers
• While we do that, we should remember that society does treat women as sexual gatekeepers and punishes them for stepping outside that role – blame society, not women who remain in the role
• Perpetrators can rape down more power gradients than just men raping women
• This should never be used to minimalise or erase the historical and ongoing global reality of male rape against women
• Consent is never 100%; there are always pressures working against it, and so you can never know for sure that another person is consenting
• Saying that consent is not 100% is not the same as saying you, personally, have no agency or ability to consent; whatever your circumstances, you make the best-seeming possible choice at the time
• Somebody trying to understand another’s level of consent must not cherry-pick a feminism which allows them to interpret it as “yes”, when the truth may be “maybe”
• If you would like to have sex which is as close as possible to consensual, work on identifying and reducing power differentials between parties and removing negative consequences for non-consent
• Sexual consent over power dynamics (such as parent-child) is unnegotiable, over others (such as sexism) it’s such that anybody soliciting consent should be regarded with suspicion and potentially resisted unless they make significant and visibly effective efforts to defuse their personal power

And a gentle reminder: if you would like to speak to somebody about personal experiences of non-consent after reading this article, please click here for more information.

As a reward for making it this far, and to stimulate further thought and discussion on the subject, I leave you with a patented Radical TransFeminist infographic on the struggle between rape culture and feminists over the territory of consent. Please share widely!

So, which one will you be?

This article contains discussions of rape, rape apologism and victim blaming. One survivor who previewed this article said they found a definition of rape used here “particularly triggering”.

Summary

When rape apologists are using our models of consent to defend rape and to deflect feminist analyses, it’s at least worth considering the limitations of the models. This article is part one in a two-part series of articles examining the issues.

Part One: “No”: Understanding consent as a binary is powerful because it allows us to say that “no means no”, a statement which has had and still has incredible power to change attitudes about rape for the better. However, it can make it more difficult for us to conceive of what else might mean “no”, as well as to distinguish between different kinds of “yes” given in different contexts. It can be used to victim-blame. It doesn’t always accommodate some of the complexities of communication (although we should beware, because “miscommunication” is a shield rapists often like to hide behind). And admitting “no always means no” seems to mean that we must also admit “yes always means yes”; this can conflict with the subtleties of a fully radical feminist analysis of rape culture.

Part Two: “Yes”: Modern feminist views on consent have often been in conflict. One way to resolve that conflict may be to look for unified models of consent which takes into account ideas from multiple feminisms. Here I suggest a non-binary power model of consent, which looks at systems of domination such as patriarchy, and the pressure they enable people to place on consent. In this model, “no” still means “no” but “yes” should be understood as a statement meaning, “I choose to say ‘yes’, understanding the consequences of saying ‘no’”. A focus on “systems of domination” – plural – allows us to consider other dynamics of rape beyond men raping women without moving away from fifty years of feminist work on rape and consent.

Gendered Language

Where I discuss rape, I have used a mixture of gender-neutral language and male = perpetrator, female = survivor pronouns. Any discussion of rape is almost inevitably pushed into one of two traps in the use of gendered language; either it’s written in exclusively gender-neutral terms and erases the strongly gendered power dynamics of most rape, or it’s written exclusively in terms of male perpetrators and female survivors and erases other dynamics of rape . Even attempts to reference gender proportionally are doomed to fail, because when other pronouns are used just once or twice, it can feel more like tokenism than representation. Please read this article recognising that each use of pronouns and genders is completely deliberate but is not intended to be definitive or exclusive.

No Means No: The First Rule of Consent

The Basic Message

If you’ve heard just one message about consent, chances are this is it. If she – and it’s always a she; more on that later – says “no”, then the sex is off. If she says “yes”, then it’s on. The message is simple and it’s been a crucial tool in advancing the basic feminist understanding that sex isn’t sex without consent. “No Means No” is the feminist bottom line and all feminists must hold this line at any cost. If you’re already asking, “But what if she says no and means yes?” don’t worry, we’ll get to you in about 6,000 words or so. But for now, please take a seat over there. No, over there. Not too close to me, please.

By saying “no”, a woman is meant to be able to transform herself from a default woman, that is to say, a consenting woman, into a non-consenting woman. But we’re not even there yet; only certain women, owned women – wives, mothers, daughters – are allowed this “no”, as Twisty explains in the link and as Dworkin wrote in 1987:

Men can break sexual laws with the secret but empirically real sanction of the male-dominant community that establishes social policy as long as that community is not outraged: that is, as long as another man’s rights over a woman are not violated and as long as social policy in general is working effectively to protect gender polarity, male “nature” and female “nature” [emphasis mine].

- Dworkin, Intercourse, (Arrow, 1988) p188

(I’m not well-informed about abuse of children, but my understanding is that similar dynamics operate there.)

The Power and Responsibility Dynamics of “No”

But when is this “no” done? Do you say “no” when you first meet somebody? Should you wait until they buy you a drink? Until you’re alone? Until you’re naked? Until you’re having sex? Until you’re having a kind of sex that you don’t want to have? Do you have to interrupt them to say “no”? Is there a threat of violence if you do? Will it break the mood and lose a friend? There are a lot of restrictions which can check the ability to say “no”.

“No” is the answer to a question, but where is the questioner in this approach? Where is their responsibility for consent? “No Means No” claims to give the no-sayer all the power, but what it actually gives them is all the responsibility. Responsibility isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but responsibility without power plain sucks. The only responsibility given to the person hearing a “no” is whether they respect it, and as feminists know, rapists are often let off the hook for betraying even that responsibility.

Actually, What Was The Question Again?

The question, if asked at all, is rarely as straightforward as, “Do you want to have sex?” and it’s often hedged around with codes. “Do you want to come in for coffee?” Asking is a vulnerable act, and the need for self-defence is understandable. Sometimes, ambiguous statements can make a situation easier for everyone involved. “Coffee?” “No thanks, I’d best get back” is a clear negotiation in which nobody loses face. Ambiguity places the asker in a less vulnerable position, which deescalates the situation and allows a refusal to be offered in a way which isn’t socially transgressive according to norms of, for example, female socialisation.

But less vulnerability also means more power, and ambiguity opens up ground for abuse. When the man soliciting sex is hostile (a word which I use in its broadest possible sense), then both “yes” and “no” are lose-lose responses to this kind of solicitation. This can be done via “That’s Not What I Meant” and “You Know What I Meant” as follows below.

“That’s Not What I Meant”: A hostile man can retroactively reconstruct a question to remove a context of sexual invitation and then attack the no-sayer for refusing what he now claims is a friendly, innocent request. This is what happened to Skepchick back in June 2011 when she turned down an offer of coffee in an elevator (link is to a video, Skepchick later produces a written follow-up on the popular response). The context of the request was perfectly clear, but its surface ambiguity allows – barely – its reconstruction as a friendly approach and Skepchick faced an extraordinarily vehement counter-attack by rape apologists for her video.

“You Know What I Meant”: And just because a coffee refusal can also be understood as a sex refusal, doesn’t mean that a coffee acceptance can be understood unambiguously as a sex acceptance. Whatever offer is held out as a code for sex might also be an offer which is welcome in itself. She might just want a coffee. Or, she might want a coffee, and then might want to think some more after that about whether she wants sex. Taking a coffee acceptance as a sex acceptance is a non-consensual escalation of consent from “consent for further company” to “consent for sex”.

In other words, it’s deceptive to describe a request for coffee as just a request for coffee, and it’s deceptive to describe a request for coffee as just a request for sex.

Maybe Means No: The (Unspoken) Second Rule of Consent

Implicit Refusal

I’d like to ask the reader to do a brief mental exercise. (If you’d rather not, just skip to the next paragraph.) I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No”? Did you apologise for your “no”? Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today“? If you gave an outright “no”, what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?

This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner”, “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already”, they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.

K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”

It’s worth noting here that this isn’t the case for everyone; for some people, e.g. some autism/Aspergers spectrum people, implicit refusals can be unclear, stressful, overwhelming or invisible. What’s being discussed here isn’t the clarity of a refusal act to an individual, but the conflict between the general social consensuses that complex implicit refusals are invalid or insufficient in a sexual context and valid outside of one.

(If you’re interested in reading more about this paper, you might want to check out this article, which reviews it in more detail: Mythcommunication: It’s Not That They Don’t Understand, They Just Don’t Like The Answer.)

Drunken ‘Consent’

K&F suggest that claims of non-understanding are in fact self-interested justifications for coercive behaviour. I’d like to look at self-interest in another context, that of drunken sex.

If you’ve spent any time having conversations about consent, you’ll probably have encountered the following question:

Is it rape if somebody has sex while drunk?

Now, when men used to ask me this kind of question, the conversation requests I actually used to hear were, “I have sex with drunk people, or can imagine myself doing so; I want you to tell me that I’m not a rapist” and/or “I like the pressure which alcohol allows me to put on people’s consent and I’m seeking social approval for this tactic”.

Such conversations often centre on legal definitions of rape, with people sometimes liking to say that, “It’s a fine line,” or “It’s her word against his”. Now, this may sound surprising, but I don’t care what the law says about rape, except insofar as bad legal definitions of rape hurt survivors and let rapists escape without consequences. Patriarchy has a vested interest in narrowing the definition of rape as far as possible; remember, overwhelmingly, it is men that rape. Where men rape men – and there might be patriarchal self-interest in defending the survivors – this is often within a prison-industrial system which is vastly overpopulated with black men, who aren’t really the darlings of patriarchy. As such, legal definitions formed by patriarchal cultures are inevitably reductive.

One non-legal definition of rape is that it’s an experience which feels to the survivor like a fundamental crossing/violation of boundaries, which happens using some form of coercion/strength/manipulation. Some things that people do can cause that experience. Someone can attempt to rape without causing an experience of rape. Someone can experience something which they later come to understand as rape (this understanding can be very difficult and painful to reach), and that too is rape. Someone can experience rape without the perpetrator explicitly intending to rape, but it’s always the case that the perpetrator knew enough to know that they might have been raping.

This definition allows us to turn our focus to the actions of someone who presses on with sex while knowing that the other person is sufficiently drunk that their consent may be unclear, or that they themselves are sufficiently drunk that they may not notice signals of non-consent (signals which can be implicit, as above).

Asking, “Is this legally rape?” carries an undertone of, “If you say it’s not, I’ll go ahead and do it”, and is a question which should be turned around and asked back as:

Why are you so relaxed – and even enthusiastic – about maybe raping someone?

You don’t get this in other contexts. You don’t get folks saying, “Well, I’m going to do this thing which may or may not kill somebody. It’s probably fine as long as it’s legal.” One of the reasons you don’t get this is that the law cares more about murder than it does about rape (while that does tend to depend on who’s being murdered, the same could be said for rape). Another is that we live in a rape culture, where it is acceptable to put pressure on consent in a variety of approved ways in order to coerce sex.

We can solve this apparent contradiction by clarifying what our questioner is actually worried about. They aren’t worried about raping. They are worried about social consequences of rape. They are worried about being named a rapist. They are okay with “maybe” being a rapist as long as it won’t come back to bite them.

Now we can understand the question fully through recognising that it’s not a question at all. It’s an act of kicking up dust around the whole question of drunken sex, a dust cloud which surrounds rapists as they rape and allows them to escape the social consequences because “it’s her word against mine”, or because, “drunken consent is a very tricky area”. They don’t need to worry about the legal consequences, of course, because most rapists don’t go to jail.

If you care about not raping, because you care about not raping, then the only way to be sure you’re not raping is to be sure you’re not raping. This means not having sex when you’re not sure whether it’s rape or not. This means that if you’re asking the question, “Is it rape if I…?” then you may not know the answer, but you know what you should do. Here’s a radical point of view for you: If you don’t care whether or not you rape, then I don’t care whether or not you’re innocent.

The last part of the question – or rather, the act of throwing up dust – left to address is:

What if both people are drunk? With your logic, doesn’t that mean they’re raping each other?

This one’s often asked with a special flourish, as one might say, “Checkmate!”, but the answer is simple. The perpetrator is the person who violated the other person’s boundaries.

Now it might be that there have been some deeply unfortunate liaisons in which both people have felt violated but gone along with what was happening because they felt less powerful than the other person. Verbal and non-verbal communication can get pretty messed up when drunk. But what usually happens when two people don’t want to have sex is that they don’t have sex. Drunken people who don’t want to have sex with each other successfully avoid having sex with each other all the time. Sure, people mutually regret drunken sex, but regret doesn’t necessarily mean an experience of rape.

It’s more likely that one person had the power to push on regardless of the other person’s implicit or explicit refusals, or that one person felt violated but unable to refuse, and potentially even obliged to feign consent. That might be because one person was more drunk than the other (it could be either: it’s easier to ignore a drunk person’s boundaries, but it’s also harder to set boundaries to drunk people). Perhaps one of them was even unconscious. Or it might be because one person is backed up by more and more powerful systems of domination than the other. What should happen when one person has that power is that they don’t draw on it. What can happen, when they don’t care about raping, or when they’re drunk (and don’t care about raping) is that they use it and push. On “mutual regret”, there is one more possibility; over time, perhaps one partner will realise that their regret is an indication that something was more deeply wrong with what happened, and gradually come to understand that the other person raped them.

We’ll go into systems of domination in more detail later on when we talk about the power spectrum model of consent, and revisit this question more fully.

Before we end this section, and with it this post – there’s more than enough here for two posts, and I’d like the chance to read through feedback to this one before I post the second half – I’d like to state that, yes, I am being very harsh on people asking the “drunken consent” questions. I’m doing that because these questions aren’t asked in isolation. They’re asked as part of a discourse of victim-blaming and rape apologism. Individuals may blunder in and ask them apropos of nothing, not intending to contribute to this discourse, but the net effect is the same as if they’d joined the many rape apologists lined up to minimalise and victim-blame every instance of rape.

These questions can be engaged with in ways respectful to, and supportive of, survivors of rape. I hope this article sets out one way in which that can be done.

I’m also discussing the subject primarily through the lens of men asking the questions, as reflects the heteronormative context of this discourse. When women ask these questions, it can be complicated. Some women may be looking for reassurance that what they experienced was not rape (Answer: It’s rape if you say it is). Others may be beginning to suspect that someone raped them but are unsure about whether they are allowed to claim that experience if they had drunk alcohol (Answer: It’s rape if you say it is).

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.

- Catharine MacKinnon, “A Rally Against Rape”, from Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Others may be invested in this subject since they drink before sex because the social groups around them shame them as “sluts” for consenting to sex while sober. The subject of slut-shaming is something we’ll explore in Part Two: “Yes”.

Conclusions from Part One: “No”

• “No means no” is an non-negotiable line; no feminist theory allows an undermining of “no means no”
• As well as being a bottom-line, “no means no” is also a resistance against assumed-default-consent in women, a feature of patriarchy
• Even if you respect a verbal “no”, you’re not really respecting it if you don’t create and nurture opportunities for your sex partners to give a “no” at any time before and during sex
• Ambiguous sexual requests can help both parties save face, but they can also be used against women who say “no” – be aware of how this functions, don’t do it yourself, and call it out in simple, clear ways when you observe it – try not to get trapped by the surface logic of the situation
• Sexual refusal can be implicit as well as explicit; implicit is actually much more common
• In situations involving alcohol, concentrate less on legal definitions of rape and more on how willing you are to maybe rape someone (the answer to this should be “I am not”)

The second part of this article is now available and can be found here: Under Duress: Agency, Power and Consent, Part Two: “Yes”

radtransfem.tumblr.com

One issue brought up in comments is that the light-on-dark scheme is hard to read. I actually find light text on dark background easier to read, because the way my dyslexia works means that dark-on-light dances around and it’s hard to keep my place. But I’m aware that light-on-dark can be an issue, so here are some options for viewing the blog in a different contrast scheme:

• If you’ve got access to an RSS reader like Google Reader, then you can read the full posts on there via the RSS feed for the blog
• In some versions of Firefox you can click View, Page Style, No Style and you’ll view the basic page text
• In some versions of Internet Explorer, it’s View, Style, No Style
• There’s a thing that you can bookmark and then click from your bookmark bar to change the colours on a site (thanks, Barry Deutsch)

Any other suggestions for accessibility?

Trigger warnings for graphic descriptions of sexual assault, emotional reactions to it, dismissal of assault, secondary traumatisation from taking an assault through the legal system. One friend says that these are very “consciousness raising” and maybe less useful to those who already have lots of experience of groping / sexual assault.

Weirdly, this post is by far the most common way – by a factor of something like 20 – that readers find this blog via search engines. So hi, reader. I guess you found this by typing “public groping” or something similar. If you’re someone who’s experienced this, I’m really sorry. Hopefully these links will let you know that you’re not alone.

Here’s a list to some resources which you might find helpful.

(If you’ve found this article because you find the subject titillating and you’re looking for stories or images about it, perhaps you’ll read these and disgust yourself, creep.)

• How it happens
• Some reasons why some people stay silent
• When people who gropers have assaulted talk back
• Accounts of revenge fantasies
• One woman who reported that a groper assaulted her

Now that it’s a few weeks on, I’d like to come back to the subject with a roundup of responses. One of the downsides of conversations taking place on Facebook is that they’re taking place in isolation, so part of the idea is to bring some of the threads back together with this post.

If your comment is included here, it’s because I’ve asked you if you’d consent to me including it, and I’ve anonymised it as well except where explicitly asked to leave names in. Some take the form of question-and-answer, other comments I’ve reproduced in their entirety, others are summarised, one or two are satirised and finally there’s a section of further reading at the end of this piece.

One very long conversation in particular took shape around the feeling by some (white) readers that it was not racist for them to feel attraction exclusively towards other white people, arguing that they were “born this way”. I haven’t included all these remarks, because there were too many, but one long quote below includes many of the points of view expressed.

First, though, I’d like to lead with my favourite – a set of demands by pyromaniacharlot made in response to the demands in the original piece:

My Demands

• I demand that you re-examine who and how you love.

• I demand this, because other than being who we are, re-examining who we love is one of the most radical actions any one person can engage in. Loving can change your worldview, and it can define your battles. Love can transform you and free you.

• I demand that in this realm, first you let go of everything you’ve been told is ‘valid’ and ‘proper’. Then start again at the beginning, by *respecting* the people around you. All of them. We are all people, not objects existing for your pleasure. Respect that people have autonomy, and that they have the right to make their own informed choices. Thou shalt not coerce, manipulate or dehumanize.

• From there, I demand that you make up your own rules. Love that is brief is no less valid than love that lasts for decades. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, and can happen between people of all genders, races and ages. Love doesn’t have to be exclusive. Love doesn’t have to be gentle.

• Finally, I demand that you accept your love and carry it proudly. Beauty comes in many forms, and noone has the right to tell you otherwise. Stand by your lovers, support and defend them, even if the world tells you otherwise. Especially if the world tells you otherwise. Because noone has the right to police your heart, and no love is wrong.

My Response: <3 !

Other Comments (and Responses, Where Applicable)

I also wonder how this might be perceived by people who are fearful of sex. Personally, sexual attraction and the discussion/idea of sex was pretty terrifying for me for a lot of my life because of sexual violence I experienced. I definitely think that victims of sexual violence and how they might perceive your demands should also be considered.

Great point about sexual violence. I also think maybe it ties into the “I don’t want to have sex” article that went around recently.

~

Would women class as a marginalised group in this context, or does the fact that sexualisation is part of that marginalisation work against this?

I don’t even know! In some ways I feel that *everyone* is trained to be attracted to women. In others, that woman/woman attraction is attacked and marginalised, or made into a sexual object.

~

As a girl who stopped being slim around the age of about thirteen I think I would be quite offended to be told (either up front or later on down the line in a relationship) that someone had trained themselves to be attracted to women like me….the idea gives me the creeps.

I think it’s a difficult subject. The call, I think, is for people to train themselves to destroy the inner prejudice/received sexuality which means that ‘people like you’ are struck off their list. When that prejudice is gone, a liberated sexuality remains which might or might not include you.

~

sorry but found article full of holes – spent years trying avoid the ‘black shagger’ both male, female and lesbian. Spent years being the vehicle by which others basked in my ‘blackness’, others being 100% caucasion i.e ’cause you’re black and my friend/daughter/my daughters friend/my sons friend it goes on, then I myself are cool/politically sound/special/tolarant/deserving of some medal’. The reflected glory can be sexual in origin or otherwise. Also found article horribly assumptive about what biologically born men am women does and doesn’t find attractive in other human beings, assumptive trans individual are more aware about gender issues than any individuals and bases ideas about cis and cis privalege on hetro-normative ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman.

~

I used to be size 16-18 and I never realised how people would treat me so differently when I got to my size now (12 and I’ll probably shrink further, training for a marathon). It really opened my eyes, as I was still me, just less fat. I don’t think we can force ourselves to change who we’re attracted to however, but we can educate ourselves about our prejudices…

~

For me, the key is to allow yourself to be attracted to the people you would not usually be attracted to rather than to a group. That way, you look at the individual and the characteristic is not the thing you are attracted to.

~

I understood you mean liberated sexuality as transcending socialisation, whereas what I am talking about is an accepting but not condoning (i.e. it’s ok to be who I am even if it’s not ok to create people like me through x mechanisms). I also believe in the importance of picking our battles. We have so many duties (politically, socially, to ourselves and our families/partners) that it can be overwhelming. While it’s great to bring up the point, I would say that to me it read a bit like trying to guilt people if they don’t do it. People can NOT do things for very legitimate reasons, like prioritising other struggles.

~

I take a lot of pride from my belief that I chose my sexuality. There’s an inherent biological urge down there somewhere, but that’s not nearly as fun or gratifying as political eroticism.

~

I’ve noticed from speaking to people on a one-to-one basis that “received sexuality” tends only to be what is shown in outward behaviour. A person’s real sexual tastes can be extremely wide and varied, they just don’t talk about it with most people for fear of the reaction they’ll get.

~

A long comment thread, somewhat paraphrased:

attraction is an instinct, instincts are primal and thus cannot be altered therefore it isn’t racist that I only fancy white people and it is VERY RUDE to suggest that I might be racist. I am heterosexual, and that isn’t seen as a choice, therefore only finding white people attractive is something I have no choice over. If 10% of people are gay, why can’t 10% of people be incapable of finding a black person attractive? If you make the conscious decision to rule out black people as potential partners then THAT is racist. Any subconscious racism is overridden by the conscious mind and therefore irrelevant. If I had a prejudice I would know about it and therefore I don’t I’M NOT RACIST I’M NOT RACIST you don’t have any evidence that I’m racist! To say that everyone is at least a bit racist is prejudiced. Why aren’t you agreeing with me, I’m trying to HELP you!

~

“Challenge accepted!” ^.^

This one made me very happy.

~

Nature and nurture probably both play a part in determining what kinds of people an individual finds attractive, BUT people who do not experience a high level of free will will not be able to do anything about the cultural part, ie will not be able to take up your challenge as they won’t experience their preferences as choices. To argue that we have choice over who we are attracted to is damaging to (eg) the fight for gay marriage, as part of the argument there is that you cannot choose your sexual orientation.

I didn’t respond to this at the time, but I wanted now to make a remark on the comment about gay marriage. I’ve said before and I still feel now that, “You should let us get married because we can’t help it” is not the strongest ground on which to build a defence of gay rights. It’s a useful tactic, in an arsenal of many tactics, because it’s effective on certain groups of people, but it shouldn’t be the only basis – if you even choose to fight for gay marriage at all (I don’t).

~

I don’t think that (eg) lesbians should not challenge their non-attraction to men since lesbian culture can be very anti-man and I think that someone who spends a lot of time in that kind of social space (online or IRL) might end up ruling out all men on principle. Same with other subcultures.

I don’t think that, just because I don’t demand that lesbian women challenge non-attraction to men, that means I’m demanding that they don’t. I just don’t think I have the right to demand it. There are trade-offs involved with dating up the privilege gradient, and this article is about the imperative to challenge non-attraction down that gradient – as tricky as it can sometimes be to speak of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in such a reductive way.

~

Finally, I’d like to end with a reflection on how it can feel to read an article like this. One friend writes that:

I think that it is important to acknowledge that there is a difference between the kind of -isms/oppression that are carried out consciously and with malice, and those which are unconscious/insidious/don’t come from people’s conscious choices. I think that a lot of the offence taken by people in the discussion was because they are well meaning people who are not really aware of their own privilege and think of themselves as not being part of the problem, thinking that I was accusing them of the former, rather than the latter form of -ism/oppression.

This also feels like an excellent time to link to an article about compassionate communication co-written by Meg Barker and Jamie Heckert:

We want to consider our own preferred strategy for addressing such conflicts (‘compassionate communication’), and to interrogate its strengths and limitations, as well as the strengths and limitations of an alternative strategy (‘naming oppression’). Our aim is to raise questions and to chart where we are currently at in our own – often uncertain and uncomfortable – journeys in relation to these issues. Clearly these strategies are not mutually exclusive, but rather there is much to be learned from bringing them into an ongoing dialogue.

Privilege & Oppression, Conflict & Compassion

Conclusion

I think that the conversation about our attractions will continue, in queer space and beyond – this piece certainly won’t be the final word. I’ll continue to welcome responses and I aim to respond to all comments. Most all all, I’d welcome your demands. If you could ask anything, what would you dare to ask?

Further Reading

• Red No. 3: A Message to My Fellow Fat Admirers:

So, I’ve noticed some of my fellow male fat admirers throwing tantrums when women object to be sexualized without consent. These dudes whine about how the women are telling them aren’t allowed to find fat bodies attractive. Cut that shit out. Like now.

• Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability:

We must shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence. That moves us closer to bodies and movements that disrupt, dismantle, disturb. Bodies and movements ready to throw down and create a different way for all of us, not just some of us.

• Glitter Politic: The Precarious Politics of Desire:

I’ve been reading these recent conversations about “the privilege of being desired” bop around Tumblr these past few days… I am queer, trans, white and fat and I find that even in the political spaces and ‘communities’ that surround my life there is a definite erasure and rejection of disabled bodies, fat bodies, non-white bodies and a pretty intense privileging of masculinities – just to scrape the surface.

• The privilege of being “desired”:

… not everyone has the benefit of having their attractiveness reinforced by others. Personally speaking, I get complimented on my looks maybe a few times a year, getting called “cute” at best… The one relationship I had, I was made to feel completely undesirable for being fat and butch and that no man would want me unless I stopped being those things. Culture backs up that assertion, and so does experience.

• The Question Of Fetishization:

One of the most common questions I get asked is about whether or not men having specific sexual interest in trans women is an inherently othering, dehumanizing or cissexist thing. I provided a fairly brief response in my FAQ post, but it’s something I feel is worth investigating a little bit more deeply.

A common understanding among gender activists is that most people think of gender as a binary, and that most institutions are built around a fixed concept of two genders.

I suggest that mainstream society actually uses a threefold ‘ternary-gender’ model of gender, dividing people into ‘women’, ‘men’ and ‘freaks’. I use this model to discuss a common area of disagreement between gender activists: male privilege as experienced by transsexual women.

This article also discusses the concepts of transgendering (gendering somebody as trans*) and unpacking ‘male privilege’ into internalised, social and power-over privileges.

Disclaimers

The way I talk about gender here is definitely limited by the social models of gender I’ve grown up with, based on the fact that I’m white and live in the UK. I’m aware that many other models of gender exist, but I don’t know enough about them to talk about them in a useful way. Likewise, when I talk about coming into contact with others’ models of gender, I’m talking about the models that I encounter, living here and moving in the circles I do. I suspect that the further the locus of experience is from my own, the less accurate this article will be.

Women, Men And Everybody Else

Anyone who’s ever taken an organisation to task over a form containing only the restrictive options ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ knows the first concession that will be offered (if anything’s offered at all, of course). They will add a box marked ‘Other’ to the form. It seems inclusive. Genderqueer people can now complete the form without having to affirm a lie about their gender. But that’s also the problem; a genderqueer person can now complete the form and access the service it offers. The system sustains itself by manifesting an exceptional category into which it puts the people who don’t fit.

Transsexual people might experience this when around cis folks. As a transsexual woman, I’m treated in broadly three different ways when out and about. There are the people who misgender you as male and interact with you in a male gender register. There are the people who gender you correctly as female and interact with you in a female register. And then there are the people who gender you as trans, or, as I like to say, who transgender you, and, if they interact with you at all, can come out with a wide variety of responses, many of them not very pleasant.

In the Matrix: Revolutions (actually, I kind of liked it, now you ask) the Architect describes the secret to creating a perfect binary system:

You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control.

In other words: you cheat. The exception is the pressure valve which allows most people to remain within the two primary categories and to conveniently dismiss anything which doesn’t fit. The alternative, when confronted with a person who doesn’t fit the gender binary, is to contemplate gender in its beautiful and breathtaking complexity. And how often have you had that reaction?

While many people, when asked, will tell you that there are two genders, the behaviour of individual and institutions reveals a more nuanced model of gender. Repeatedly, this ‘other’ category emerges, complete with a feeling of pushing away. As a genderqueer person asserts hir gender, sie is eventually told that sie’s, “just weird”. Safely categorised, sie and hir arguments can now be dismissed, rather than hir existence shattering hir interlocutor’s worldview.

The Ternary-Gender Model

In the ternary model of gender, there are three genders. ‘Man’, ‘Woman’ and ‘Freak’. I use that last word deliberately and not without some affection, as in Mia Mingus’ keynote speech at the 2011 Femmes of Color Symposium.

What about those of us who are freaks, in the most powerful sense of the word? Freakery is that piece of disability and ableism where bodies that are deformed, disfigured, scarred and non-normatively physically disabled live. Its roots come out of monsters and goblins and beasts; from the freak shows of the 1800’s where physically disabled folks, trans and gender non-conforming folks, indigenous folks and people of color were displayed side-by-side. It is where “beauty” and “freak” got constructed day in and day out, where “whiteness” and “other” got burned into our brains.

I think that Mingus uses the word in a stronger sense than I’m using it here, and I hope she (please correct me if I’m mistaken about Mingus’ pronoun) doesn’t mind my borrowing it. I hope Mingus would agree that, while the othering of a white, mid-transition, transsexual woman doesn’t really compare to the othering performed on queer disabled women of colour, our bodies are both delegitimised by the concept of ‘freak’. Because of the differences between the way Mingus and I experience ‘freakhood’, I don’t feel as comfortable reclaiming the term as she does, but this piece doesn’t attempt to reclaim it – here, I use ‘freak’ to speak about a worldview used by others over trans* people, without making a claim about the legitimacy of ‘freak’ as an identity.

Like all models, freaks/women/men isn’t actually real. It’s a useful template to apply to people’s thoughts and actions, offering a framework in which to understand, predict and potentially change them. Real people’s thoughts about gender are complicated and individual, and people can often say one thing and think another.

In this model, most cis people are gendered as a cis gender almost all of the time. Many trans* people are also either gendered as their correct gender, or misgendered as the ‘wrong’ gender. Occasionally (or not so occasionally for some of us) we are transgendered into ‘freak’ by those around us. Some people and institutions will explicitly maintain an ‘other’ category in their worldview. Others will do so implicitly and reveal its existence through their behaviour. Some people and institutions won’t maintain the category either explicitly or implicitly, but it may exist potentially, in that when confronted with information, or an individual who does not match their gender binary, they may create this category. (I’ve often seen this happen.)

A tool is best explained with a demonstration, so let’s talk about…

Male Privileges

A common theme in radical feminist discourses around transsexuality is the assertion that a transsexual woman retains male privilege and that admitting transsexual women to women-only feminist organising spaces admits male privilege to those spaces, undermining the reason they were set out as women-only.

A quick google will find you any number of articles arguing for or against this point, but predictably, as a radical feminist transsexual woman, I’m going to tackle it a little differently, with the help of our ternary-gender model. We’ll need one existing model as well, which is the privilege knapsack model of male privilege, where male privilege is constructed as a network of multiple privileges.

I loosely categorise these privileges into internalised, social and power-over privileges.

• Internalised male privileges are about who you are or who you feel yourself to be

• Social male privileges are about treatment in society or access to institutions

• Power-over privileges are those which give men influence and control over women

Of course, male privileges interact with each other and also inhabit multiple categories. For example, a man might come to feel his opinion is important (internalised) because he isn’t talked over in a group (social); he’s able to avoid street harassment (social) in part due to a confident body language which becomes part of his self-image (social); and part of the pressure he can place on consent (power-over) comes from his expectations (internalised) and the response society would make to non-consent (social). So it might be more accurate to say that male privileges have elements of internalised, social and power-over to differing extents for each privilege or set of privileges.

Traditional models of transition, based on an understanding of a social gender binary, describe how a transsexual woman gradually loses (or doesn’t lose, according to some arguments) male privileges as she socially transitions, and becomes viewed less as a man and more as a woman.

I’d argue that different types of privilege are given away, suspended or destroyed at different times in transition and that understanding when and how this happens can be done with help from the ternary-gender model.

Loss of Male Privilege via Misogyny and Transphobia in the Ternary-Gender Model

My experience of transition has not been that I’ve moved from ‘male’ to ‘female’ in anything approaching a linear fashion. Over time, elements of my body, presentation and psyche have found themselves moving from ‘male’ to ‘freak’, ‘freak’ to ‘female’ and often back again, as different things take personal priority, and work together to construct gender presentations that cause me to be treated differently in different situations by different people.

As I’ve moved from ‘male’ to ‘freak’, I’ve found that my social male privileges have been largely suspended in that, by people not treating me as male, I’m not offered most social privileges. As I’ve moved from ‘freak’ to ‘female’, most of these haven’t returned. In general, I’ve experienced these privileges as ones which are removed from me by society based on its perception of me. Broadly, I characterise the removal of these privileges as misogyny, i.e. the normal condition of being a woman under patriarchy.

My power-over privileges have felt the most situationally different, in that they’ve been most dependent on how an individual genders me, rather than how I’m gendered by society as a whole or how I experience society. Because I’ve deliberately avoided much interaction with people who transgender me as a ‘freak’, my experience is mostly in being treated as female. If anything, I’ve (unwillingly) retained the most power-over people who have previously experienced me in a male social role; power relations are enduring and take some time to change, if they ever do.

As I’ve moved from ‘male’ to ‘freak’, some of my internalised male privileges have stayed with me and others haven’t. I’ve said before (not on this blog) that, if you had to design a system of social conditioning to strip away self-assurance, the transition process expected by the NHS of a transssexual woman would be a good candidate. Some of us have better experiences than others – mine’s been pretty good, all told, so quite a bit of my internalised privilege has stayed with me. I usually feel that I have a right to an opinion, that my thoughts and choices are valid. But broadly, I characterise this process as experiencing transphobia, the normal condition of being considered trans* under cis supremacy.

Still on the subject of internalised privileges, and more problematically, my sense of when to speak up in a group is sometimes still closely matched to the patterns taught to men, which given that I spend increasing amounts of time in women-only organising spaces means that I need to work hard to consciously speak less. As I’ve moved from ‘freak’ to ‘female’, I’ve begun to experience some of the policing mechanisms experienced by women since birth and which act to suppress self-worth and confidence in women under patriarchy. Nowadays I can expect to be censured if I speak in a way that’s perceived to be ‘too confident’ for a woman, in the same way as most people assigned female at birth (AFAB) are censured. Because it hasn’t been happening to me for as long as it has to AFAB women, it hasn’t had as much effect yet. Like with loss of social privilege, I characterise this as misogyny.

Since publishing this article, I notice that it’s been picked up and discussed by Gendercast. In the podcast, Tobi Hill-Meyer disputes the implication here that transsexual women have an entirely “male” privilege prior to transition. I agree with her, and that implication wasn’t intended. I think the situation prior to transition can be complex – complex enough that (along with some other concepts) I’ve since devoted an entire article to discussion of it.

The Double Bind of Transphobia and Misogyny-Recipient-Privilege

Here’s where I think a lot of confusion enters understandings of transsexual women’s experience, and where I hope to dispel it. Not all transsexual women immediately experience the full burden of misogyny upon beginning transition. Paradoxically, the absence of misogynistic treatment can be painful. We learn that normal female experience under patriarchy includes the experience of misogyny. Not receiving misogyny is nice, because misogyny is not nice, but it’s also a sign of not being considered a normal woman – i.e., it is a sign of being transgendered as a ‘freak’.

Sexual objectification is a good example. I’ve been involved in some annoying conversations about street harassment with cis men, which have largely consisted of them arguing that street harassment is a nice thing, because it’s a compliment. Of course, AFAB women’s true experience of street harassment is often very different. The two views are summed up very well in this comic about street harassment (trigger for harassment, rape culture).

When transsexual women speak tentatively of how it feels painful not to receive street harassment, we can be dismissed as holding the view of the man in the comic, who says,

If women on the street said I look nice, it’d make my day!

What we’re actually saying is that one of the ways we know that society considers us freaks is that it treats us differently to the way it treats women, and we know that if we’re not a man, and we’re not a woman, we’re a freak.

In my experience:

• When I used to be mostly misgendered as male, I tended to receive most forms of male privilege

• When I am transgendered as a freak, I experience some but not all forms of male privilege and also experience transphobia,which works slowly to break down some forms of male privilege

• When I am correctly gendered as female, I experience a few lingering forms of male privilege and experience what Julia Serano calls conditional cis privilege, some trans women call passing privilege, and I describe as a combination of conditional relief from transphobia (conditional on not being outed) and misogyny-receipient-privilege, a misogyny which works slowly (as it is designed to work on all women) to strip away confidence, happiness and agency
  

That last phrase is somewhat sarcastic. It’s a cruel irony that the penultimate (more on this later) stage on a transsexual woman’s journey (if you want to construct it as a journey; I think there’s a certain problematic element to that construction but it’s useful here) involves the crowning achievement of qualifying for misogyny, a kind of treatment society reserves for its sex class, women, a class widely treated as less-than-human, disposable and abusable; and that it still feels like a privilege to reach that stage. As Melissa McEwan writes on Shakesville:

What a choice: Acknowledged but harassed, or ignored and denied recognition of one’s womanhood.

To understand why this stage can be desirable requires the ternary-gender model. Someone who has travelled directly from ‘male’ to ‘female’ (do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred thousand pounds’ debt in electrolysis bills) would immediately comprehend misogyny as an undesirable state. If a magical regendering ray existed which could flip somebody’s sex and gender in an instant, not only would it be a wonderous thing for transsexual people, it would also be the most persuasive tool available for feminism – zap a man, let him live for a month in a woman’s place, zap him back and he’ll be a radical feminist, guaranteed. The disparity between men and women’s conditions is too great, too obvious, that it would immediately be apprehensible.

But transsexual people don’t use the gender ray. We go through the process slowly, and in doing so, we move through a place of disprivilege different to misogyny; the ‘freak’ stage of the ternary-gender model and a stage in which we experience transphobia, which is delegitimisation, violence (mostly but not entirely reserved for trans sex workers and trans women of colour), alienation, sexual isolation and exclusion from even queer spaces.

The ‘privilege’ of experiencing misogyny is (conditional) relief from transphobia. For feminist transsexual women, it can also be a recognition of sisterhood with AFAB women and an experience of legitimacy. It’s no wonder that sometimes we aspire to it, and this doesn’t mean that we deny the harm misogyny does to all women.

A Radical TransFeminist

Let’s come back to the word ‘penultimate’. For me, misogyny-recipient-privilege feels like the last-stage-but-one on my so-called journey. The final stage, for me, is a radical feminism which comprehensively rejects every form of misogyny, including trans-misogyny, and every felt entitlement of every other human being and every institutional structure to impose their gender stereotypes on me, whether gendering me as a freak or as a member of the sex class.

That is why I am a radical transsexual feminist, that is why I want radical feminism and transsexual feminism to work together to destroy patriarchy (and its weapon, the gender ternary) and that is why I’m writing here.

Call for Responses

There’s a lot missing from this article. Things I’d like to read about but didn’t have the time, knowledge or experience to write include:

• One-gender models (such as the medieval sex paradigm), where men are considered the most fully human people, and all other people lesser degrees of human. I think these also describe our current situation very well. Perhaps these intersect better with the ways that, for example, impairments and Whiteness are viewed.

• Ways in which the othering of trans* people as ‘freaks’ interact with other othering. I’ve experienced only one or two axes of othering – how does the experience of more kinds of marginalisation change the applicability of this model?

• There’s nothing on trans* masculine experiences which, in a piece talking so much about male privilege, is an huge omission. Bear in mind Asher’s caution on the subject, though.

• Your uses of the ternary-gender model to investigate experiences in your own thoughts about gender, or your experiences of others’ treatment of your gender.

• Uses of the ternary model beyond gender. I think it’s likely that more than one binary out there is really a ternary, sustained by an ‘other’ category. I’m interested to see what other problems this idea can solve.

Trigger warning for sexual assault

This is brilliant, and is something a lover and I have often talked about. It draws similarities between patterns of abuse in relationships (‘relationships’) and patterns of abuse from bosses at work. I wonder how many people really think about the abusive behaviour patterns used by bosses, the constant boundary crossing.

I’d encourage everyone working in a casualised workplace to join a union like the IWW or the Solidarity Federation, just as I wish every woman who had sexual relationships with men had access to a network of female friends who understand the dynamics of gendered violence and could offer advice and support in the case of that relationship becoming abusive.