Some things you discover by accident. It was in August that I went to London, mainly to return library books as the end of my university course drew near. I had also planned to meet a friend, but she was unwell and unable to make it. This left me with a day without firm plans. So I gravitated to Brick Lane in search of a bagel (and Brick Lane Bagel is a must visit place, open 24/7 and bagels stuffed with salt beef and gherkins.to the point where you can barely close your jaw round them). And The Star of Spitalfields, a brilliant traditional real ale pub allows you to eat your bagel there, washed down with a pint or something. They also sell Tayto crisps which is a big plus for me. What to do next? The first thing that came to mind was a visit to the Whitechapel Art Gallery and this too is highly recommended. It also seemed appropriate as the friend I was going to meet is a talented artist and we had a gallery visit planned. So it was, in a sense, a way of being with her even though I wasn’t.
I almost missed the bookshop. I am so glad that I didn’t. It is a treasure trove of interesting books, not all of them about art. My eyes first alighted on Stuart Hall’s memoir, and, really it is about time I read that as he was based in Birmingham for a large part of his life, and where I sit writing this is just two miles from the University. Another digression, there will be a few in this piece which is emerging as a stream of consciousness (those of you who have met me will know that my conversation can come across as incoherent and disjointed as idea and thoughts flood my head and I veer off at tangents whose connection to what I was originally talking about is not as obvious to ours as it is to me! I first came across Stuart Hall when I bought a pamphlet of his 1980 Cobden Lecture entitled Drifting Into A Law And Order Society, in which he set out why liberal or neo-liberal economic policies (and a year into Margaret Thatcher’s government we were at the start of an unprecedented experiment in neoliberal social engineering) are accompanied by authoritarian and illiberal attitudes to civil liberties. Nearly half a century this a drama is still playing out. In this sense Hall’s lecture was prescient and it is still highly relevant today ( as are the writings of E.P. Thompson, another lover of freedom on the Left, and like Hall, a founder of New Left Review who drifted away from the journal as it retreated from active political engagement into the Althusserian theoretical wilderness.
But enough of that. I almost missed the slim volume entitled Xenofeminism by Helen Hester. This has proved a very interesting read and has sparked a few ideas, and it is these that I want to talk about, and also how they link back to cultural studies and social theory. As such what I am about to say is not a critique of the book but rather a narrative of the ideas it has inspired in me.
Xenofeminism starts with bodies, women’s bodies, and the facts of the reproductive functions of female bodies. It starts, in other words, where second wave feminism left off, beginning with a look at Shulamith Firestone and the embrace of technology as a means of liberating us from the demands of our bodies. There is an important aspect to this. For women, or, more precisely, for people deemed female, the reproductive function of their bodies and the things that go with it, such as menstruation and menopause which all women experience if they decide not to have children, are limiting and restraining experiences of a kind that men do not experience.
As we have seen elsewhere, these experiences and the experience of pregnancy and childbirth even more so have had a radicalising effect on some women that has fond expression in hostility to trans people. It is not a coincidence that Mumsnet has become a forum for articulation of these ideas. And second wave feminism itself had anti-trans strands. Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire was published in 1979 so anti-trans feminism is nothing new. The strength of the xenofeminist perspective is to take some of the ideas of second wave feminism and turn them into an inclusive and trans positive direction. It is to argue that using technology to free women from their biological destiny goes together with freeing everyone from their biological destiny. In other words, freeing transpeople from their destiny runs totally with the grain of freeing ciswomen from theirs.
This is not to suggest that women should not, if they choose, embrace their biological destiny, and have children, (and Helen Hester, author of the book is herself a mother) but that they should have the option of not doing.
Of course, technology is not value neutral and develops in the context of industrial capitalism, and this raises issues in terms of the technology is available, and to whom, which in turn opens up discussion about class and race. These are themes that are touched o in the book but need, inevitable, further elaboration. The xenofeminist project is work in progress. Of biology is not destiny and we need to move beyond gender, what are the implications for transpeople? I want to look at whether the positions taken up by some transpeople work, as some radical feminists have argued, to reinforce gender stereotypes to the detriment of all.
Whilst I was writing this piece I saw a Twitter thread by the sex educator Joyce Harper who was expressing her surprise (and I think we can assume that is a bit like lawyer speak surprised) at guidance that had been circulating on how to support transwomen during their periods, raising the question of how transwomen can have periods. Some transwomen do experience symptoms analogous to those of a menstruating woman owing to fluctuations in hormone levels, but these are not necessarily symptoms of similar intensity (whilst I accept they may be unpleasant) and they are certainly not evidence of a period which is defined as a monthly discharge of endometrial tissue. Transwomen who, whatever surgery and pharmaceutical interventions they have, remain, in important respects, male bodied, cannot, by definition have periods, and it is stretching the word to meaninglessness to suppose that they can. This stretching needs to be resisted because, for people born female (and not all of them will identify as woman) menstruation raises a number of health and wellbeing issues and dilution of the term helps no one. Period poverty, the inability to afford sanitary products, is exclusively an issue for biologically female people and one with potentially serious long term consequences. I am thinking here, amongst other things, of those teenage girls who miss a week’s schooling every month when they are on.
Xenofeminism speaks to these women and girls, telling them not biology is not destiny. My worry about period having (or allegedly period having) transwomen is that they seem rather too keen to embrace biology as destiny, or rather female biology as destiny. They give the impression of actively wanting periods. As Harper suggests, the half of humanity born to menstruate is actually not so keen on the monthly bleed. My worry is that transwomen making these claims are actually embracing a conservative gender politics. They are like the opposite side of the coin from the TERFs (although the TERFs would be very quick to exclude them from the sisterhood of biological destiny). It should be stressed here that Harper herself is very much a trans ally.
The path of trans liberation does not lie in craving periods. It lies, at least as regards the xenofeminist perspective in joining the women who are determined that biology is not destiny as sisters and allies in forging identities that are not reducible to biology whilst accepting they can never be completely unmoored from it. Or to put it another way: don’t piss off the women who give you support and love. Don’t be a dick (pun intended)
