The Mote in Their Eyes: Transgender Critiques of RadFeminism

Writer and Radical Feminist Lierre Keith writes:

“ . . . There is no such thing as ‘woman’ or ‘man’ outside of patriarchal social relations. These are not biological conditions–they are socially created, by violence in the end. If I can’t be a rich person born in a poor person’s body, then I can’t be a woman born in a man’s body. Not unless you are going to argue that man and woman are biological or essential conditions. The whole point of feminism is that they are neither; gender is social to the roots, and those roots are soaked in women’s blood.”

My critique of Ms. Keith . . .

Notwithstanding the distracting hyperbole, many who work in Trans Theory are suggesting precisely that:

Male and female are essential neurological schema, reflections of genetic and hormonal hardwiring – innate and present at birth.

Moreover,

While Butler’s gender performativity does indeed account for the social dynamics of gender and our social relationality based upon learned discrimination, it does not account for the “predicate to transition.” That aspect of the lived experience is essential beyond and before the social overlay of gender and the enforced gender norming that invariably follows. The Predicate to Transition is grounded in the struggle for ontological completeness. How one works out social presentations of gender following transition is demonstrably reducible to the learned and internalized behaviors grounded in gender performativity and social relationality. In short, understanding that gendered behavior is a social construct makes it equally clear that it is also a choice to comport one’s self to it.

Ms. Keith would benefit I think from a rereading of Milt Diamond, Eric Vilain and V.S Ramachandran just for starters . . . and picking up John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him wouldn’t be a bad idea either.



©2010 Renee Thomas all rights reserved