Latte Leftie weighs into the increasingly bitter conflict between womyn, women and wom*n
Dear LL – Happy New Year! Am I alone in wondering when smug white feminists are going to check their privilege in the way their American sisters are belatedly beginning to? Not about being highly educated, middle class and Anglo (Goddess knows, the whole edifice of progressive politics would come crumbling down if having those characteristics disbarred one from feeling oppressed) but lording it over we transgender people just because, thanks to nothing more than an accident of birth, they possess a natural vagina. I was heartened to hear that an all-women’s college in one of the more civilised parts of the US has finally opted to dispense with its annual staging of the Vagina Monologues on the grounds that it is “blatantly transphobic” and “offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman” while failing to acknowledge “gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions.”
LL replies: It fills me with shame that this redneck nation has barely moved on from the days when it was considered appropriate to laugh at a Corporal Klinger’s ‘zany antics’ in M*A*S*H. As painful as it will be for those of us on the Left to accept that women might be capable of less than saintly behaviour, I think it is high time that the cis-sexist ‘womyn-born-womyn only’ matriarchs who like to gather in culturally appropriative, incense smoke-filled backrooms and plot the continued subjugation of those courageous folk who aspire to throw on a frock then use the women’s change rooms, join lesbian dating sites and give birth were finally called to account. Surely until every “man”, regardless of their vaginal status, can declare “Je suis une femme” no person of any or indeterminate gender can be free.
