Susan Stryker writes about the history of transgender people, and this excerpt focuses on the transgender experience within the feminist community. According to Stryker, a considerable amount of conflict started in the 1970s, when Beth Elliott, a male to female transsexual, was excluded from feminist conferences. Elliot was proclaimed by radical feminists to be “not really a woman” (130). The quotes that Stryker uses from radical feminists at the time are incredibly transphobic and hateful; in many cases, I was surprised at how explicit their hate was. On the other hand, we shouldn’t be surprised that the transgender community was so vehemently discriminated against. This is another case of the feminist community, which should be a safe place to the oppressed, are excluded. Many radical feminists refused to refer to transgender women as “she,” saying that they don’t have the right to identify as women when they have not experienced the oppression women struggle with. These radical feminists say that for transgender women to identify as women is encompassing the mentality of a rapist, for how they are taking from “real women.”
The idea of transgender people having a mentality of rape is obviously drastic and untrue. Where that notion stems from seems to be that trans exclusionary radical feminists desire women-only spaces, and that they view male-to-female transgender people as appropriating women’s bodies.
Talking about feminist conflict throughout this semester has shown how central conflict is to any political movement. In feminist spaces, I’ve seen that conflict frequently results from exclusionary practices, and that it’s necessary to put differences aside and adopt inclusive methods. It seems like the radical feminists are a drastic and harmful example of how explicit and hateful the exclusion can be. While many white feminists were exclusionary towards black women, they often tried to claim that they were on the same team. This shows a different and explicit way that some radical feminists were exclusive.
I was also very surprised by the hate portrayed from the radical feminists, one thing specifically was the discussion of a section from “The Transsexual Empire.” It really troubled me that they would compare the ethics of transsexual surgery to that of Nazi Science. It was a great stretch to claim immorality, based only on the fact that “incidentally” *some* transsexual research was funded by the government, but it surely caused a great deal of harm to Trans* communities.