Trans/Rad/Fem
(By Talia Bhatt)
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| Author | Talia Bhatt |
Second-Wave feminism is, today, nearly synonymous with ‘transphobia’. Any mention of this era or the movement of ‘radical feminism’ conjures images of feminists allying with right-wingers and the authoritarian state, providing legal justification for outlawing gender-affirming care and spreading deeply evil caricatures of trans women to rationalize their exclusion as feminist subjects. In the ensuing struggle to reconcile trans rights with feminism, the specter of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist has often reared its head in opposition. One may be tempted to conclude that the Second Wave, as a whole, has done irreparable harm to feminist, queer and trans politics, and must be discarded entirely.
But is that truly the case?
Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon. It gave us the language to describe patriarchy as a regime of mandatory heterosexual existence and dared to dream of a post-gender existence long before anyone spoke the phrase “breaking the binary”. Modern transfeminism owes much to radical feminist theory, and despite all propaganda to the contrary, the two schools of thought may be far more allied than believed.
This series of essays aims to reconstruct and reintroduce the radical feminist framework that its misbegotten inheritors seem determined to forget and in doing so boldly makes the claim that transfeminism, far from being antagonistic to radical feminism, is in fact its direct descendant. It shows how a comprehensive social theory of transsexual oppression flows almost naturally from radical feminist precepts and dares to declare that a materialist, radical transfeminism is the way forward to seize the foundations of patriarchy at the root.”
