From Bitch Magazine: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-long-history-of-transgender-exclusion-from-feminism
by Tina Vasquez
on February 17, 2014
In August, a doctor in Toronto received an unexpected email.
It was from a stranger in Maryland, telling the doctor that one of the transgender patients whose care he was overseeing “regularly attacks women on social media who have a lesbian feminist polititical [sic] opinion. That is, he harasses us and establishes fake Twitter accounts to harass us… Query whether this is the kind of experience one must have to ‘live as a woman.’ – you bully other women?”
The clinic supervisor quickly wrote back, “Please be aware that our centre finds this email in violation of ethical practice, our anti-oppression principles, and offensive to trans* persons.”
That email came from Cathy Brennan, an attorney, radical feminist, and lesbian activist who is well known for her beliefs that transgender women should be considered men. In the name of feminism, Brennan has advocated against a UN policy that aims to protect transgender people from discrimination.
The Canadian patient, Emily Horsman, had been sparring with Brennan on Twitter, mocking and publicly questioning Brennan’s brand of feminism, and even setting up a Cathy Brennan parody account. In recent years, Brennan has become known for taking online arguments into real-world territory. She has contacted a trans woman’s employer, posted the OK Cupid dating profiles of trans women, and contacted the mother of an outspoken supporter of transgender issues.
“There’s something about Internet culture where everyone thinks everything they post just exists in this Internet bubble,” Brennan explained to the website Bustle in a recent interview. “And I’m not of that generation. If you are going to send me abuse, I am going to find out who you are.”
The people who are affected by Brennan’s activism clearly disagree.
“This kind of conduct is incredibly dangerous to trans women,” Horsman says. “We are a very marginalized minority and violence occurs to us constantly. Outing us in a workplace or school environment could easily damage our future and put us at risk for physical violence.” Horsman made the email to her doctor public because she believes “Brennan stepped past a boundary that even other radical feminists think is rash.”
The marginalization of transgender women in feminism is not new, but the decades-long debate has taken on new dimension thanks to social media and the ease of finding strangers’ personal information online.
In her 2013 article “Unpacking Transphobia in Feminism” on the website The TransAdvocate, writer Emma Allen explained that radical feminists such as Brennan assert that trans women are a problem because they perpetuate the idea that “gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed” is the antithesis of feminism. “Radical feminists claim that gender oppression can only be abolished by getting rid of the whole concept of gender and they view transgender people as a threat to that ideal,” Allen wrote.
Continue reading at: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-long-history-of-transgender-exclusion-from-feminism
