As the title suggests, everything on this blog concerns violence against trans women.
The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project is a trans feminist project addressing issues of systematic, institutional and interpersonal violence and oppression experienced by trans women (those who were coercively assigned male at birth and identify or are identified as women/female) across multiple identities (e.g., race, class, dis/ability, citizen-status, nationality, sexuality, age, HIV status, and form, status, or age of transition, etc.)
Ida Hammer is a writer and social justice communicator. She organizes the Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project. She presents workshops and trainings on cis privilege and being a trans ally. She's also involved in organizing against sexualized violence. She's a proud dyke-identified trans woman and an organizer of the New York City Dyke March.
Apparently, UPI, which claims “over 100 years of journalistic excellence,” thinks that basic equitable access to health care for trans people is nothing more than an oddity to be discussed at the watercooler.
What’s that, a woman won the right to have her breast exam covered by her insurance just like every other woman who pays into the same plan. What is the world coming to? It’s starting getting to the point where you can’t even arbitrarily deny a person basic vital, preventative health care just because they’re trans. We are living in strange times my friends!
CWHC is seeking input from trans women to inform our services. We are seeking both:Transfeminine individuals of any age who would like to share their thoughts and experiences regarding personal or community need for health care services. AND Transfeminine individuals 18 years of age or older who have been on hormone therapy for a minimum of 6 months.
Please contact us for more information!Tuesday, May 1 at 12:00am at Chicago Women’s Health Center
Event page is here.
A new report confirms that transgender
edAustralians suffer the worst rates of general and mental health - but where can they go for help? The women’s sector needs to step up, argues Annelise RobertsLast week La Trobe Uni quietly launched the second national survey of the health and wellbeing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Australians. Private Lives 2 provides us with some of the most comprehensive data yet about these population groups, putting flesh on the skeleton of existing research — which is very scant.
PL2 is very welcome and much needed, but it was no surprise to read that transgender Australians consistently report the lowest levels of general and mental health. This is very much in accordance with other available data. It was also no shock to read that discrimination continues to have a tangible impact on the lives of trans people, paving the way to high rates of drug and alcohol use, heightened exposure to violence and harassment (including sexual violence) and social and economic marginalisation.
The needs of trans folk continue to be overlooked or poorly understood by policy-makers and service deliverers; little population data is available that could help to inform decision-makers about this group, given that more brawny data-collection mechanisms like the ABS or the National Health Survey do not collect information about transgender status.
Essentially, PL2 confirms that trans people are in real, urgent need of support and have very little access to it. So where can they turn to?
Probably not to the women’s sector. Unfortunately, the second-wave [cis] feminist ethos — “by [cis] women, for [cis] women” — that still informs the women’s sector doesn’t mix well with concepts of gender diversity.
After my involvement in Canberra’s Reclaim the Night event last year, for example, a transgender woman confided in me that she didn’t attend because she had understood that “people like her” wouldn’t be welcome to march. And I continue to hear stories about female only organisations that manage their transgender clients with clumsy, restrictive policies or exclude them altogether — domestic violence refuges that only allow “post-op” trans women to seek shelter, for example, and which flatly discount trans men as legitimate clients.
Lorene Hannelore Gottschalk of the University of Ballarat has argued that including transgender people in women’s spaces “compromises the rights of women [sic; trans women are women] to seek support in a context where they are with … people with whom they have shared experiences”: “The inclusion of … MTFs [male-to-female transgender people] results in the elimination of women-only [sic; trans women are women] space and re-assimilation into male dominated institutions,” she writes.
Of course, it’s well recognised that there are both pragmatic and political reasons to provide women’s-only services. The women’s sector is necessary to meet the particular needs of women. It is also a feminist project that is about correcting a long-standing power imbalance, and creating a space for something that has previously been pushed to the margins. This makes sense.
What continues to unsettle me is the fact that the women’s sector, a sector that prides itself on having special insight into the social mechanics of gender, has struggled to cope with scenarios that challenge traditional ways of thinking about gender. It’s one thing to talk about empowering this group of people we have defined as women, but third wave feminism and queer theory have long been more interested in tracing the cracks and inconsistencies in the actual framework we use to describe gender (that organises people into the categories man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine), with the idea that it is actually this kind of binary thinking that creates the power inequalities that underlie sexism.
This level of critical reflexivity, I would argue, has yet to reach the women’s sector. We have failed to be reflective about the way we use binary gender frameworks in defining the population group we speak for — and we have for the most part failed to recognise the inadequacy of this system to represent the everyday lived experience of sex and gender for many, many people.
Peter Hyndal, founding member of Canberra’s gender rights organisation A Gender Agenda, notes that feminist responses to trans inclusion have “historically been based on a range of assumptions” about the legitimacy of trans people’s experiences of gender. But bound up in that are all kinds of assumptions about women more generally — “what a woman is, how she is defined and by whom”.
“On one level, I really don’t understand why women’s services have struggled so much with the issue of trans inclusion,” Hyndal told New Matilda.
“Feminism has consistently argued that women should not be reduced to their biology, that there is no ‘right way’ for a woman to be — that gendered social norms are oppressive and that women should question and challenge those stereotypes and assumptions that seek to constrain them… Trans people are, by their existence, questioning and challenging the gendered stereotypes that constrain us all. As trans people, we live this experience every day of our lives. It seems to me that this is a real point of commonality.”
Like Hyndal, I believe that the women’s sector should be in the business of dealing with gender diversity. Because some trans people are approaching women’s services and are in real need of support; because I have yet to hear a convincing argument in favour of excluding trans women (or, at least in some cases, trans men) from accessing women’s services; because as advocates we claim to represent women in all their diversity, and this should extend to the diverse experiences and expressions of the gender.
But most importantly of all, because it’s becoming clear that we in the women’s sector need to find a way to reconcile the need to provide specialist services to women with the need to maintain a critical approach to the way we think about gender — an approach that leads us beyond a gender framework that only leaves room for “real women” and “real men”. An approach that can cope with the beauty, subtlety and diversity of people’s real, private lives. Without having the conversation about gender diversity, the women’s sector risks becoming irrelevant.
Count me among the legions of women who never thought our nation would be revisiting Griswold v. Connecticut in 2012. The spirit of the landmark 1965 case, establishing American citizens’ right to use contraception legally, is now publicly under attack from the political right. In the midst of this has arisen one of the most amazing groundswells of women’s activism in a generation. We have a lot to be proud of, even as the fight for reproductive justice grinds on. We are not ceding the field.
But as a woman of trans experience I also have to say that we need to summon more courage as feminists; we need to cultivate a far wider vision of “reproductive justice” than we have hitherto. Even as I raised my voice in defence of Sandra Fluke and in defence of women’s right to choose, even as I opened my wallet to Planned Parenthood, I felt something was amiss. As we argued valiantly for the right to have health care plans cover contraception we glossed over the fact that transgender people still lack a meaningful right to choose in this country.
When I came out, one of the first things my father lamented was the loss of his grandchildren, the loss of progeny who would—by blood—carry his name and his “legacy.” Then came the recriminations about what my body was “for” and what “God put us on this earth to do.” Interwoven in all of this is an ideology about what bodies are for. It is precisely the same ideology that has seen women coerced into having children, that has seen people of colour brutalised under eugenics programs that sterilised them, and that has created a byzantine web of regulations regarding what trans people can and cannot do with their bodies.
It is the ideology behind laws in many countries that require trans people to be sterilised before our gender markers can be changed on various IDs and the ideology that still sees too many psychiatrists enforcing gender norms on their trans patients as a pre-requisite of trans healthcare. We all have different medical needs as trans people, but for those of us who require hormones and surgery we are often spiritually blackmailed for them (“wear this skirt and makeup or I won’t see you as a serious woman”), charged heavily for them and then laughed at if we suggest such things should be covered by either public or private insurance. We may also be denied transition altogether.
At the heart of much of this is the idea that trans bodies should not exist because we defy some mandate about human reproduction. The idea of a man giving birth or a woman donating sperm strikes some people as aberrant. The idea that we would surgically alter our “god-given/natural-born genitalia” is considered heretical. Reproductive justice means standing against those ideas, standing against them firmly, proudly, and forthrightly. It means fighting for trans people’s right to choose, and it means recognising that a right to choose is meaningless is access is denied on the basis of income. If a woman—cis or trans—has a right to reproductive health, it will only be a theoretical right unless a measure of economic justice is part of the package. The same goes for trans people of all genders.
We often find ourselves unable to pay, and at the mercy of a small number of service providers or adversarial doctors. Our bodies are public property, up for every cis person’s debate and scrutiny, owned by everyone but ourselves.
If that isn’t a reproductive rights issue — if that isn’t about “my body, my choice” — then I don’t know what is.
This is one of many issues I’ll be raising at the upcoming Civil Liberties and Public Policy conference From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom at Hampshire College this weekend. Our focus will be on how to roll back the swelling anti-choice tide, and how to build a truly holistic justice movement around that very issue. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!
To the Chicago Women’s Health Center:
We demand the following things:
1. A statement of apology taking responsibility and accountability for the historical exclusion of transgender women, transfeminine, and trans female people from your health services. This statement should explain why this “women’s” health center chose to prioritize services to transgender men, transmasculine, and trans male people over transfeminine-identified people. This statement should be readily accessed from the CWHC website.
2. Rewriting each line of “women’s” to be “cisgender women’s” where intended and/or applicable on the CWHC website.
3. A comprehensive plan to include services for transgender women that includes public and transparent benchmarks that may be easily accessed from the CWHC website. Those services include:
a. Feminizing Hormone Replacement Therapy
b. Trans prostate examination
c. Fertility awareness and/or options for trans female people
d. Continual education on the particularities of trans female-spectrum health issues
Failure to comply with and/or address such a comprehensive plan will result in the changing of the name of Trans Greater Access Project into Transmasculine Greater Access Project.
Furthermore, we encourage more community development and ties among the transgender women’s, transfeminine, and trans female community. Employing transfeminine-spectrum people to your staff would be encouraged.
Lastly, we encourage anyone supporting the CWHC and/or the Trans Greater Health Project to unabashedly, critically, and courageously point out the disparities between their transgender health services at the current state it is in.
—End of Petition—
For more information, please visit transgrrrlriot.wordpress.com
when they obviously don’t mean people who are actually both women and trans.
This is one of those things that I find so infuriating, even though I’ve come to expect it as the rule.
When people say they provide space and/or services to people who are “women and trans” and they don’t include trans women, what they really mean is people who are either women or trans.
This is a perfect example of failing to account for the intersectionality of multiple identities and forms of oppression. While people often claim to serve both women and trans people, it’s at the intersection where people are both women and trans where those services most often fall flat.
At least when people say “womyn-born-womyn” they are being honest and upfront about their intentions to discriminate against trans women.
I must not understand how entitlement works. I hear cis people complain that trans women believe they’re actually entitled to their own womanhood, and I’m like, “Yeah, if trans women aren’t entitled to their own gender then who is?” Presumably it’s the cis people who are attacking their womanhood. Apparently these people don’t see it as an entitlement for them to arbitrarily dictate another person gender.
I wholeheartedly believe in entitlements. I believe that everyone is entitled to live free of abuse, violence, exploitation and oppression. I believe that everyone is entitled to food, housing, education, health care, employment and a living wage. I believe that everyone is entitled to consensual, nonabusive intimate relationships of their own choosing. I believe that everyone is entitled to their own gender and sexuality.
As entitlements, I believe everyone should be guaranteed access to all the above. I also believe that oppression can be measured by the extent that our society entitles one group of people to any of the above while disentitling other groups.
So, yeah, I believe trans women are completely justified in feeling entitled to equitably access to the very things other women have access to, and that trans women and cis women both have a shared entitlement to those things that our society entitles men. People who confuse trans women entitlement to accessing vital services with “male privilege” don’t seem to understand what male privilege is.
When a trans woman who is a survivor of sexual assault or intimate partner violence seeks help from a women’s crisis center this is not male privilege. She is a woman attempting to access women’s services not unlike any other woman who has been raped or abused.
However, when a trans woman is denied these vital services because she is trans then the crisis center is exerting an unjust entitlement of cis privilege. If cis people wish to deny trans women equitable access to survivor services for nonvital reasons like comforting the cissexist prejudices of staff and clients that is cis privilege. The denial of cis privilege by falsely accusing a trans woman “male privilege” for believing she is entitled to same vital survivor services granted to other women is a tactic of retaining cis privileges while avoiding responsibility for how this harms trans women.
As I believe everyone is entitled to live free of violence, I also believe this means that all women should have equitable access to services and programs as survivors of violence—regardless of whether they are cis or trans. It is cis privilege that systemically and institutionally reserves these entitlements for cis women while denying trans women equitable access to the same services and programs. Those who deny trans women access to survivor services supposedly designed to help all women seeking to leave, avoid, and heal from violent and exploitative situations need to be held accountable for their role in perpetuating social arrangements that make trans women more vulnerable targets of violence.
When trans women who are survivors of abuse seek and are subsequently denied access to survivor services and programs they are being abused a second time. Denying of trans women access to vital women’s services and programs has nothing to do with challenging male privilege and everything to do with retaining cis privilege. When cis people seek to deny a trans woman’s womanhood and prevent her from receiving survivor support it is those cis people who are abusing their privilege. Trans women shouldn’t be punished because some cis staff or clients let their prejudice against trans women get in the way of providing appropriate and necessary services to all women. It is not trans women’s responsibility to deny their own vital needs in order to comfort the prejudices of cis people. Yet far too often trans women do not seek survivor services for the very reason that they wish to avoid the secondary abuse they’ll experience from cissexist providers.
I emphatically believe trans women are entitled equitable access to women’s services. Those who continue to profess that trans women are only seeking access to women’s services because they are exercising “male privilege” do not have the best interest of women in mind and need to stop calling themselves “feminists.” Self-aggrandizement at the expense of trans women is never feminism.
If an institution, program, agency, event, space, or whathaveyou has a mission to serve the needs of women and applies its policies regarding excluding men from services to all men, including those who are trans, the policies are neither cissexist nor anti-trans. However, if those policies with regards to excluding men are applied to women who are trans then those policies are both cissexist and anti-trans.
Excluding men who are trans with respect to their being men isn’t cissexist or anti-trans. That is, they aren’t excluded because they’re trans; they’re excluded because they’re men. It’s the denial of women’s services to women who are trans that is cissexist and anti-trans. This is because those women are specifically being targeted and denied access to services in spite of their being women because they’re trans.
Cissexism disregards a person’s actual lived experience as a man, woman, or nonbinary person in favor of the gender that person was coercively assigned at birth and/or on the basis of body stereotypes. It’s not cissexist to appropriately recognize a person’s gender identity.
WHOA LOOK OUT PEOPLEWE GOT THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS GOING ON HERE
- so the feelings of trans men who don’t want to be around other men are more important than the feelings of women who don’t want to be around men?
- birth assignment is a form of cultural cissexist abuse. by celebrating that abuse you are perpetuating it and perpetuating cis supremacy and actively making life harder for every other trans person
- there’s a difference between being proud of being trans (which I am) and being proud of a particular aspect of cissexism.
- you’re such a transmisogynist douchebag. what you’re really proud of isn’t the fact that you were wrongly accused of being a woman at birth. you’re proud of the fact that you have the privilege of not facing transmisogyny and you’re proud that you can use your CAFAB card to get free access to the queer community and women’s spaces. you are the pinnacle of trans male entitlement and an enormously patriarchal douche bag.
I honestly don’t understand these kinds of arguments.
Wow, the four numbered points below are perfect examples of four of the main arguments used to defend FAAB as an identity. I’ll try to explain just why each is trans-misogynist and how they supports cis supremacy.
1. Why can’t there be women-identifed spaces AND woman-and/or-FAAB spaces (someone help me phrase this, I mean no-cis-men, yes everyone else). Existing separately, so that there are safe spaces away from men (trans and cis) AND away from just cis men. OR, hey, let’s look at the problem of crisis centers not really having ways to address same/similar-sex violence? A women-identified space still might not be safe to someone who was abused by another woman.
First off, this completely erases the existence of nonbinary people who were coercively assigned male at birth. There are serious problems with “women and trans” spaces policing the genders of women and nonbinary people who were coercively assigned male gender at birth that are rooted in trans-misogyny. This has to do with the fact that women’s spaces don’t add “trans” to include women and nonbinary people who were CAMAB. For one thing, trans women should have already have been included as women. All “women-and/or-FAAB” does is make it more obvious that trans women and nonbinary people who were CAMAB weren’t meant to be included.
The problem with crisis centers is not going to be fixed by making sure males who were CAFAB have special access to women’s spaces and services. Rather than attacking the integrity of women’s spaces, how about asking why their aren’t these sorts of services available to people who don’t identify as men, whether they were CAFAB or CAMAB.
Because, guess what, trans people shouldn’t have to hide our genders in order to receive vital services. Trans men and nonbinary people who were CAFAB shouldn’t have to undergo the violation of having their gender dismissed and being forced to deny themselves in order to receive services. This is an example of hwo trans-misogyny reinforces cis supremacy against all trans people.
The fact is, FAAB/FAB is quickly replacing WBW as the identity of choice for attacking the womanhood of trans women and excluding them from women’s spaces and services.
Also, I can’t ignore that fact that FAAB is constantly tagged onto things like survivor spaces and play parties as a way of treating trans women, including trans women survivors, as a threat to cis women. Trans women experience disproportionately high rates of sexual assualt when compared to cis women, as well as men and nonbinary people who were CAFAB. Yet FAAB is used over and over again to treat trans women as perpetrators, when in reality they are much more likely to be survivors. Not to mention how FAAB safe spaces treats all people who were CAFAB as if they are incapable of committing sexual assault or triggering survivors, which is completely false.
It’s a massive mistake to use the systemic and institutionalized coercive assigning of gender at birth as the basis of defining spaces and services for survivors.
2. Arguments like this are born out of the idea that we are only our identities, but many people don’t experience their gender as a role, but rather as a body, and to deny them the ability to identify in that way is damaging and harmful to them.
Bodies? Oh, I know what this is about: PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS. Which adds another layer onto the FAAB survivor spaces as code for “penis-free” spaces. This is what FAAB is being used as code for. You know what’s really harmful? Reducing a group of people to a single body part and then using that to deny their gender identity and life experience.
If trans men want to be proud of their vaginae, that’s great! Conflating FAAB with pride in one’s body is messed up. The State doesn’t assign gender at birth as a way of affirming our bodies, but as a means of restricting and controlling them. Especially in a society where coercive assignment of a gender at birth still means coercive surgical intervention for many. Assuming FAAB implies a certain body type is itself messed up.
3. I don’t understand being proud of being trans but not being proud of another oppressed class. FAAB folks are oppressed. Until recently when someone might be born into a family who accepts them and allows them to transition before being socialized as a girl, being FAAB meant being socialized as a girl and then having to transition out of that. And even now, you have to be born into certain circumstances to be allowed to transition and thus not conditioned in the way the girls and women are. So to be FAAB is to still be on the receiving end of a good deal of misogyny, and anyone who can actively fight against that has a right to be proud of being resistant to the oppression they face.
The old socialization argument, really? Denying that trans women have girlhoods or that they have to deal with internalized female socialization is trans-misogyny. Not all trans people who were CAFAB would agree that they had the same experience. Plus, it’s just messed up in general to assume that everyone shares a universal socialization based on an assigned gender at birth.
If you want to be proud of your childhood and how you were raised, more power to you. But that is not the same thing as being proud of being FAAB — that is, proud the State and medical professionals are forcing institutionalized gender onto people from the moment of birth on.
4. This is completely oxymoronic. How can someone who is proud of being FAAB not be proud of being FAAB? Why does that automatically translate into being “proud” of not facing transmisogyny (I can’t even type this out correctly it makes so little sense)? Yes, to be FAAB and transitioning means that you are privileged instead of oppressed in the realm of transmisogyny. But to be unashamed of being FAAB and unashamed of breaking the prescribed roles is just not as related as you’re making it sound.
Pride in FAAB exists, but lets just admit that it’s pride in cis supremacy and trans-misogyny. Every single example of FAAB as an identity above is based on and perpetuates trans-misogyny and cis supremacy.
TL;DR summary of above points:
FAAB, MAAB, CAMAB, and CAFAB are not identities.
they are descriptors
of a past event
something that happened to us
on our birth certificate, driver’s license, our childhoods and memories, lines in kindergarten, bathrooms. sometimes invasive surgery before we can even…
Yeah, trans men who do not blend as cis and/or are not out may need a womens rape crisis shelter and that’s okay. If they blend as cis they should probably try for a mens shelther though.
I agree with you though. When I see shirts like (faab)ulous and like proud to be faab I simply cannot understand it at all. How is that anything to show off?
Ah, but what do you do with the trans men who are raped by other men that don’t feel safe around men and therefore would not find a men’s shelter to be a safe space? Shall we discount them and their feelings?
As one of those (Faab)ulous people, I can only speak for myself. I am PROUD to have been socialized as a woman, even if it has made re-socializing myself as a man difficult. I have seen “both sides of the fence”, so to speak, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world. As an Ishtaritu, I feel that my experience as a trans man only brings me closer to the Goddess, as She who turned men to women and women to men. As a human being, I feel I have a stronger sense of empathy for those who identify within the binary. Erasing a person’s pride as being FAAB or MAAB is just another way of erasing a form trans* pride. None of our experiences are the same; why should this one be discredited?
WHOA LOOK OUT PEOPLE
WE GOT THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS GOING ON HERE
- so the feelings of trans men who don’t want to be around other men are more important than the feelings of women who don’t want to be around men?
- birth assignment is a form of cultural cissexist abuse. by celebrating that abuse you are perpetuating it and perpetuating cis supremacy and actively making life harder for every other trans person
- there’s a difference between being proud of being trans (which I am) and being proud of a particular aspect of cissexism.
- you’re such a transmisogynist douchebag. what you’re really proud of isn’t the fact that you were wrongly accused of being a woman at birth. you’re proud of the fact that you have the privilege of not facing transmisogyny and you’re proud that you can use your CAFAB card to get free access to the queer community and women’s spaces. you are the pinnacle of trans male entitlement and an enormously patriarchal douche bag.
[On Friday, Nov. 25, Ida Hamer spoke at the “All Women’s Assembly to End Violence Against Women” (#WomensAssemblyOWS) in NYC.]
Last Sunday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. Over the weekend, events took place across the globe where the names of trans people who have been murdered around the world were read. Those who have been killed are virtually all women, the vast majority are women of color, and a large portion have done survival sex work in order to make ends meet under a racist capitalist patriarchy.
It’s dangerous to insist that all cis (that is, non-trans) women have a shared history or universal experience that trans women lack. This idea of a shared, universal women’s experience lacking in trans women is used to deny that trans women are indeed women. And since, according to this argument, trans women aren’t actually women we’re told we can rightly be denied access to survivor and anti-violence spaces, programs, and services for women.
Two weeks ago, trans feminist women involved in the Occupy Wall Street released a statement asking their fellow occupiers to resist cis supremacy and misogyny against trans women. These women specifically challenged their exclusion from women’s support groups and women designated safer spaces.
The fact is trans women are systemically exploited, sexualized, and also experience oppressive socialization as women.
There is no universal oppression of women, just like there is no universal oppression of trans people. There is a reason trans women of color who have traded sex to survive are the main target of violence against trans people. It’s because they aren’t just trans, but are also women, people of color, and people forced out of the formal economy and into survival sex work.
However, because these women are trans they are systematically denied access to survivor services. In this way, excluding trans women from women’s services and anti-violence interventions colludes with a racist capitalist patriarchy by allowing trans women to be exposed to the very misogyny that those services and interventions are supposedly designed to address.
Trans women who are murdered experience multiple forms of violence before they are murdered. Which leaves me wondering how many of these women would still be alive today if women’s anti-violence projects and survivor services hadn’t systematically excluded them.
Before for we can eliminate violence against ALL women, we need to acknowledge that violence against trans women is violence against women! Addressing their oppression needs to be welcomed, respected, and fully included.
I want the street harassment to end. I want the rapes to end. I want the murders to end. I want all the violence against ALL women to end.
Lets work together to make sure that we create and support anti-violence interventions that address violence against ALL women.
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