Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 57

In 2014, Time magazine ran a cover story titled “The Transgender Tipping Point,” accompanied by a photo of transgender actress Laverne Cox (Steinmetz 2014). This article signified a watershed moment in not only transgender activism but visibility. That same year, transgender activist Janet Mock's memoir Redefining Realness became a bestseller. It was also in 2014 that Jeffreys's book Gender Hurts was published. Jeffreys's position is that transgenderism – in practice and ideology – is harmful:

[T]ransgenderism is but one way in which “gender” hurts people and societies. Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an “essence” of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities. This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination.

(Jeffreys 2014, p. 1)

Among transgender activists, Jeffreys's book remains heavily criticized. Goldberg discusses this clash between radical feminism and the rise of transgenderism in the New Yorker:

Ordinarily, Jeffreys told me, she would launch the publication of a new book with an event at the university, but this time campus security warned against it. She has also taken her name off her office door. She gave a talk in London this month, but it was invitation‐only.

(Goldberg 2014, n.p.)

Criticism of transgenderism of course, did not start with Gender Hurts. Jeffreys credits the publication of Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire (1980) as being an early inspiration. Even earlier than Raymond, Morgan positioned herself as an early TERF (Trans‐Exclusionary Radical Feminist) in 1973 in a speech given at a lesbian conference following a performance by a transgender musician:

I will not call a male “she”; thirty‐two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers' names and in our own, we must not call him sister

(in Goldberg 2014, n.p.).

With radical feminism already seeming “passé in feminist circles” (Whisnant 2016, p. 68), compounded with the rise of identity politics⁶ and transgender activism and visibility, the radical feminist position is being framed in many circles as exclusionary, extreme and, notably, as anachronistic.