Diving into the Wreck: Trans and Anti-Trans Feminism

An excerpt from Once Out of Nature by Joy Ladin

I won’t even pretend to be unbiased here: I love Joy Ladin. She is a beautiful writer, an expansive thinker, and a genuinely A+ person. When I learned she was publishing a book of essays on gender, trans-ness, and feminism, I couldn’t wait to read it. And I’m thrilled that she agreed to publish an excerpt right here.

Trans rights haven’t just divided the right and the left; they’ve divided feminist movements in the US and abroad. More saliently, the increased recognition of trans people and upticks in trans identity have pressed feminist thinkers into new realms, and made many of us reconsider our own views on and relationships with gender, binary gender identities, and the self. How is gender made? What does it mean to be a woman? Where and why do we draw boundaries around female-only or male-only spaces? How much of our understanding of gender and sex is actually biological versus cultural and social, and can we really even fully cleave off the biological from the cultural and social?

One thing I deeply respect about Joy is that she refuses to default to sloganeering or overconfidence on these thorny questions. She lets things be complicated. She really does take on legitimate critiques and questions even from people whose views are very different from her own — whose views, I imagine, may often even be painful to engage with.

The below excerpt is a wonderful example of why Joy’s work is so interesting and necessary. I hope you enjoy, and I have no doubt that reading this piece through will at the very least shift how you think about some of the most foundational questions of who we are and what feminism is for.

xx Jill

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Diving into the Wreck: Trans and Anti-Trans Feminism

Should people like me, people who identify and live as women despite have been born, raised, and lived as male, be accepted as women?

That question has split feminists for over half a century. On the one hand, as trans and trans supportive feminists argue, feminism is a movement that opposes the oppression built into traditional binary systems of gender—systems that divide humanity into males and females and give the former more power, more authority, more money, more attention, and more respect. By working to free women from the assumptions, inequities and limitations imposed on those on the female side of the binary, feminism has always embraced what Emi Koyama called the first principle of trans feminism, “that each individual has the right to define her or his own identity and to expect society to respect it.” From this perspective, trans women should as a matter of course be accepted (and our gender identities respected) by feminists working toward these goals.

But as anti-trans feminists (sometimes known as “gender critical feminists” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”) have long pointed out, accepting trans women as women radically changes the meaning of “woman,” the term that serves as the foundation of feminism. The biologically rooted, binary definition of “woman”—that a woman is someone who not only identifies as but was born, raised, and has always lived as female—has from the first served as the basis for feminists to argue that people born into vastly different cultures, gender systems, classes, ethnicities, races and religions can and should see themselves as sisters, united by shared experiences such as menstruation and pregnancy as well as male oppression. For these feminists, feminism’s efforts to transform binary gender paradoxically depend on the binary-gender distinction between the men who are the beneficiaries of gender-based oppression and the women who suffer it. They see accepting trans women as women not as an outgrowth of feminism’s liberatory purpose but as undermining the very terms, “men” and “women,” “male” and “female,” that enable feminists to identify gender-based oppression and unite to oppose it. That is why, in the increasingly heated culture wars and legislative battles over trans rights, we often find anti-trans feminists who oppose traditional patriarchal gender systems fighting on the same side as cultural and religious conservatives who support them. Though anti-trans feminists and conservatives disagree about many things, both see acceptance of trans women as women as threats to the binary gender distinctions on which their identities, institutions, and communities depend.