Radical Transfeminism: Future Justice in the Present

2016

Journal of International Women S Studies, 2013

Trans Liberalism, capitalist restructuring, and the praxis of radical transfeminism In regards to the position of trans people, our current historical moment is one of materialising fresh extremes. While, in the West, public discourse and consciousness of trans issues is increasing, with increased positive media representation and trans celebrities, intertwined with a fresh push for transgender legal rights (such as legal gender recognition, employment rights, rights for trans-related healthcare, marriage rights, etc.), the stratification of liveable trans and gender non-conforming lives along the line of race, class, gender, dis/ability, indigeneity and migration status remains firmly and increasingly in place. This paper will argue that our current moment of liberal transgender politics -of 'trans liberalism' -harmonises and reassures global capitalist restructuring and this stratification. Such capitalist restructuring takes forms known as austerity, structural adjustment and the extraction of wealth from surplus populations (such as incarcerated people, alongside migrant people and refugees). Now is the key moment to ask if a socially reformist trans rights agender is predicated on the inclusion of a privileged few into capitalist society, pulling up the ladder and dividing trans and gender non-conforming populations along material hierarchies of race and class, gender, dis/ability and migration status.

The sage encyclopedia of trans studies, 2021

The women’s movement has had complex and often contrary views of trans people, particularly trans women, and their place in the movement. The question is not whether the movement should include trans women, as trans women were a part of the early feminist groups and helped create feminist and lesbian feminist cultures, but how the movement has responded to their presence. The ways in which feminists and feminism in general have addressed trans people rests on a sexed ontology—whether one asserts that sex is constructed or natural. It is this analytical divide that is absolutely fundamental to understanding how and why many radical feminist opinion leaders and organizations braved violence in order to be inclusive of trans women, as well as how and why sex ...

Hypatia, 2009

The subject of passing has been a key issue within feminist debates about trans. ‘Many of the earliest non-trans feminist perspectives on transsexuals were marked by hostility’ (Bettcher, 2009), and this was, at least in part, due to the apparent reinforcement of gender roles that passing trans individuals ¬engage with. Such a view may be seen most emphatically in radical feminist Janice Raymond’s text The Transsexual Empire (1980). Bettcher notes that ‘Raymond’s position is underwritten by a substrate view about sex according to which sex exists as a given prior to the machinations of culture’ (Bettcher, 2009), a position that has since been largely, in many cases, replaced by Butler’s notion of performativity. Third wave feminism's dismissal of the concept of female essentiality and its subsequent renunciation of the gender binary that led to poststructuralist views and the development of queer theory has also led to the disavowal of many of Raymond’s arguments. However, Penny notes that ‘[t]he institutional misogyny of the global psychiatric establishment is something that radical feminists and trans activists can usefully oppose together’, as a way of overcoming the fact that ‘“trans liberation” and “feminism” have often been cast as opposing movements’ (in Heyes, 2003, p.1094) and to bring intersecting communities together. This paper will look at the ways in which trans identity and feminism have intersected, how the views of radical and intersectional feminists’ opinions differ on the topic of trans and the emerging field of trans-feminism.

Women’s Studies in Communication 37:1, 2014

The Time is Now. Feminist Leadership for a New Era, 2019

This essay aims to reflect upon the necessity to integrate the experiences of transsexual women to the discourse of misogyny—voices which still seem to be nowadays border identities within the feminist movements—so as to empower and strengthen the feminist fight. The activist, geneticist and author Julia Serano opens the discussion about trans feminism and suggests that transsexual women are biased not only for their condition of being trans, but also for being women. Furthermore, she offers a different view based on her personal experience transitioning about the traditional perspective of gender performativity admitted and regarded by feminism for many years. Serano denounces that trans women have been accused of reinforcing the traditional and sexist gender system simply because they were born male and want to transition to the sex they actually feel natural with. For this reason, many trans women are demeaned by feminists and queer activists, and excluded from these communities. In this paper I will briefly review traditional assumptions about transsexuality in academia so as to underline—through Julia Serano’s work—the need to listen to and to incorporate trans discourses in the feminist and queer movements. Her vision—from a transgender point of view and through an “alliance-based” perspective of activism—aims to include trans women’s voices into the feminist and gender discourses so that the fight becomes more inclusive and stronger with the aid of more allies.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2017

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are under-theorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize transfeminine brokenness for a radical transfeminism. It argues that the material basis of transfeminine brokenness involves the marginalization of the labor of trans women and trans feminine people within a radicalized and gendered division of labor under capitalism alongside transmisogyny within queer, trans and feminist spaces and communities. The essay defines radical transfeminism as a collective political praxis and critique which centers transfeminine bodies that are or find themselves precariously employed, poor, overworked and/or pathologized. Radical transfeminism is oriented around forms of care and support amid conditions material precarity, which include cultural production, political protest and solidarity and forms of socially reproductive labor. The essay historically situates such bodies and the labor they undertake at the crossroads of the political ascendency of the far right in parts of the world, and the ‘transgender tipping point’. Focusing on the context of the United Kingdom, it argues that the securing of national borders throughout the fabric of public and private spheres undermines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Responding to recent discussions considering transfeminism, trans people of color and the politics of prison abolition, the essay argues that the cultivation of radical transfeminism as both a life praxis and political practice may inaugurate a more livable world. The essay calls for the transformation of the material conditions that fracture transfeminine life.