🚀 go-pugleaf

This strikes me as being a difficult question to deal with on a lot of
fronts, but this particular formulation is problematic

In article <2mbjbo$1jb@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> wat@athena.Eng.sun.com (William) writes:
>	What is the nature of female rejection of TS's?  Cases that I know
>of are: the woman who stabbed the 7 yearr post op TS up in the North
>Bay for not being feminine enough; The threats of violence and 
>vandalism against TS's at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival; and
>a rule at the Ecstacy club also stating only "women-born-women".

You are assuming here that there is a single phenomenon causing these
events, and you're giving a name to that phenomenon - "female
rejection of TS's" - that strongly suggests that it is common to all
women. I think the real situation here is a lot more complex, but I'm
willing to let the simplification go by for a while

>	Especially with the title of the Womyns's Music Fest, we see
>evidence of rejection men with a dislike of the masculine.  There
>may be similar feelings at the all-woman safe-sex club.

I think that equating the spelling "womyn" with a rejection of men and
a dislike of the masculine is missing the point. The point is to
define women as something other than people-who-are-not-men. Much as
a woman can love her husband dearly, but keep her own name, women or
womyn can be quite positive towards men without wanting them to be
ever-present and defining. Making this kind of statement is apt to
make it difficult to get along with feminists, whatever your gender or
theirs. 

>	Anyway, so what we have with TS's are beings that are drawn to
>being feminine and repelled by the masculine so much (in themselves) that
>they need to switch their physical sex.  It would seem with such a
>desire to escape "the masculine", TS's should be well accepted in women
>only places.  Not only are they then women -- but they are women by *choice*,
>not by accident of birth.

Many women - particularly women who hang out in women-only places -
find the entire notion of femininity a troublesome patriarchal ideal.
They don't dislike masculinity; they dislike the entire
masculine/feminine paradigm. I don't think that TS's are beings that
are drawn to being feminine, but certainly a feminist group is not the
ideal place to be if you are drawn to being feminine, regardless of
the configuration of your chromosomes.  There is so much baggage
associated with being feminine in our culture - it has to do with
passivity, eagerness to please, helplessness - that truly deeply
wanting to be feminine, as opposed to wanting to wear outrageous
clothes or to be female or to wear makeup, is not a good sign about
one's mental health.

Furthermore, a lot of the point of woman-only space is setting up a
space free of people who have been acculturated the way men are in our
society. It's not just about reduced testosterone living, or a lack of
male genitals; it's much more complex than that. The TS that I know
best, at the time when I knew her, believed in a vision of what it
meant to be female that was not about femininity as such, but that
still struck me as dangerously oversimplified, and she believed that
she was more like a woman than like a man, while behaving like a man
in most of the ways that annoy me most. (Leaving the toilet seat up
never bothered me that much, but being unable to find anything gets to
me.)  Other people in this thread have had similar experiences, of
people who thought of themselves as women, but had "male"
characteristics that in context seemed unsettling and possibly
unpleasant. I don't think it's fair to believe that a person who grew
up as a man in our culture is ever going to behave like a person who
grew up as a woman in our culture. Whether or not that constitutes
sufficient reason to bar them from some or all woman-only space is a
very different question, and not one I care to try to answer;
politically woman-only space isn't something I have any particular
interest in.

	Elizabeth D. Zwicky
	zwicky@erg.sri.com