Proud to call myself a radical feminist burlesque superstar

[sebastienne]

Think you know what second-wave feminism is, and what its core belief are?

Think you know that Andrea Dworkin was a misandrist who hated trans women worst of all?

Think again.

"[E]very transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition." - Dworkin, 1974

The show's going well! An audience of over 50 for the first night.. I'm not sure where they all came from, but they laughed, and I didn't fall off the edge of the stage, or out of my costume, and yeah.

This is the closest we have to a review thus far - someone who likes our copy, and is fond of the fact that we are an Interpretive Dance Free Zone.

Comments

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Very interesting link, thank you.

Dworkin's stated views there are certainly more "humane" than her compatriots of the time, but she's still labouring under the misapprehension that, were the concept of societal gender to disappear (and I doubt that's actually possible for reasons which I'm not going to go into here), we'd stop feeling the need to do what we do.

That betrays a lack of understanding of our motivations. Societal pressure harms us in so much as it can make the pain worse, but it's not what drives us.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

I don't take her views as being quite so extreme, at least in the linked passage; to me they imply more that transgender experience would still exist, but as part of natural human diversity, rather than all being pathologised as gender dysphoria. I would imagine that under such a system, *some* people who currently get shoehorned into 'textbook transsexualism' would be freer to express their identity without having to be quite so 'Harry Benjamin' about things.. but certainly that doesn't mean that people who *do* have an experience like yours would cease to exist!

Of course, it has just occurred to me, the above reflects my own views pretty closely, so I may just be projecting..

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm certainly not with the HBS crowd... *shudder*

It occurs to me that her thinking on this actually has a bit of proto-subversivist essentialism to it, which is kinda ironic really when you think about it, especially since subversivism is, at its core, hypocritical (it sees non-binary genders as more "real" and "valid" than binary genders, thus creating its very own binary ... oops).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

No, when I used that phrase I was thinking more about how the Harry Benjamin standards of care tend to inform medical gatekeeping, rather than about the HBS people!

I can sometimes be guilty of a little subversism myself, despite being aware of quite how hypocritical it is; but I don't think it's worse than being occasionally a bit pro-woman (or pro-kink or pro-queer or pro-fat), even though in strict political terms I do believe in absolute equality. Until that equality is reached, I will occasionally find myself rooting for the underdog, and I think that's ok.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

But...Emma...she was hairy and fat and had bushy eyebrows! I thought everything she had to say was automatically ridiculous extremism.

I AM SO CONFUSED :(