By El Común
[Translated from Spanish by Clariana]
27/03/2022
Amparo Domingo, is a feminist activist and representative in Spain of a worldwide feminist organisation promoting the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.
The Patriarchy is given to manufacturing insults to apply to rebellious women who do not obey gender mandates, the latter being understood in the only sense possible as a social hierarchy impose between men and women which dictates that women’s only option is to submit and shut up.
We
have been called witches, frigid, feminazis, and more recently “TERFs”.
“TERF”
is an acronym of the English expression Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,
which despite having been repeated endlessly in every corner of the world,
makes no sense whatsoever.
Radical
feminism is not called such because it is extremist but rather because it seeks
out the root of the structural inequality of women in patriarchal societies,
which is none other than our sex.
It
is sex and everything deriving from it (pleasure, reproduction) which has led
men to seek to dominate women from the beginning of time.
Forms
of exploitation of women such as prostitution or surrogacy are clear evidence
of this fact.
Why
do I say that it makes no sense to refer to radical feminists as “trans
exclusionary” (“TERFs”)?
For
three reasons:
Radical
feminists believe that every person of the female sex is a subject of feminism,
independently of whether at any point in her lifetime she may allege that she
has a “gender identity” different to her sex, a declaration that would make her
“trans” in the eyes of “gender identity” believers.
Therefore,
given that radical feminism does not take into account, either for good or for
bad, that a women may decide to call herself “trans”, it cannot be considered
“trans exclusionary”.
As
our English-speaking colleagues may jokingly describe us, we are not “TERFs”,
but “MERFs”.
This
is an ironic acronym of Male Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a pleonasm
equivalent to saying “climbing upwards” or “descending downwards”.
Radical
feminists, likewise, coherently, also do not take into account that a male
person may declare that he has a “gender identity” different to his sex.
Once
again, this information has no relevance for us, and we are neither for nor
against it.
This
does not imply an aversion towards or fear (“phobia”) of anyone, it simply
means that feminism is a movement by and for women.
We
can explain it using an analogy, for example with the dissimilarities between
basketball and football, two sports that work very differently.
In
basketball points are scored by passing a ball through a hoop suspended at a
specific height.
In
football, on the other hand, points are scored when the ball passes a line
delimited by a structure called a goal.
If
we had to refer to basketball applying the logic of trans activism, would we
say that basketball is a “goal exclusionary” sport? Or
that people who play basketball are “goal phobic”?
Or
is it that they simply practice a sport that pays no heed to the rules of
football?
Feminists
have always defended women’s freedoms and to that end we have fought against
any sexist stereotypes and restrictions imposed on us by patriarchal societies.
Therefore,
any movement or theory defending the existence of “pink or blue brains” or of
some form of sublime essence of femininity cannot, by definition, be called
feminist.
To
assert that sexist stereotypes are in reality part of the “true nature” of what
it is to be a woman is to walk back decades the progress made by feminism and
once again fall into an absurd essentialism, which only differs from the one
before it in that its idea about our “true nature” - this ineffable “identity”
-, has no connection whatsoever to the body which we inhabit, but is rather a
feeling inside us.
A
world-view that seeks simply to restrict the sphere of action of women,
limiting them to the world of emotions, care delivery or superficiality (a
pre-eminent interest in their appearance), while it sets aside for men the
sphere of rationality and public life, as well as qualities like valour and
strength, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be classified as feminist.
Rather,
quite to the contrary, transgenderism/transactivism is an anti-woman ideology
as can be seen every day in its attempts to erase us from our language using
expressions such as “menstruators”, “people with cervices”, “gestating people”,
“lesbian people”, “bodies with vaginas”, “birthing bodies”, etcetera. Nothing
properly relating to our biology can be named just in case it makes those men who
say they “feel like women”, sad, because it reminds them of their true sex.
We
must “be kind” and prioritise their feelings above our rights when it comes to
naming our reality.
However,
it is apparent that they do not have the slightest consideration for our own
feelings.
They
do not seem to worry about the dehumanisation that it entails to say that our
vaginas are “front holes”, nor does it concern them how sportswomen, despite
tough training regimes and all the effort invested, may lose a competition to a
mediocre male benefitting from the natural advantages which his masculine
biology offers him.
All
this shows us that what really concerns transactivism is how those people who
have or had penises may feel:
Patriarchy
2.0.
Thus, it is not feminism that excludes transactivism, rather #TransactivismIsMisogyny,
something in complete opposition to our values.
I
insist, due to what I have set out above, it makes no sense to talk about
“TERFs”.
Those
who are not part of feminism have no rights regarding our movement and their
desires do not constitute orders for us.
