Sex, gender and sexuality
Two weeks ago, the 1999 conference organising collective of the National Organisation of Women Students Australia decided to exclude transgender women from the collective.
The arguments used — principally by members of Left Alliance — were based on the idea that transgender women, having been born and lived some part of their lives as men, are not "real" women or, therefore, reliable feminists.
This is a spurious — and dangerous — analysis.
All feminists' struggle for equality and liberation is ultimately a struggle against the capitalist family unit, in which women's and men's roles are clearly prescribed as different.
The ideology of the family teaches that the most natural, or moral, or personally satisfying, way to conduct our sexual relations and child-bearing is within monogamous, heterosexual marriage(s).
It also teaches that women's main (if not only) role in life is to become a mother and take on, without pay, the work of child-carer, cook, launderer, nurse etc.
The price for women in general is a lower and less secure "secondary" income and long periods of economic dependence and personal exploitation — at home, in the workplace, on the street.
This regulation of gender roles is the basis for the hostility to other, different sexualities and definitions of gender. Homosexuality, in particular, stands in complete contradiction to it, and homophobia is one of the first lines of defence for the capitalist family.
Individuals' decision to alter their sex and/or gender is also a direct challenge to the idea so central to family ideology: that men and women are born, not made, and have different, biologically determined, roles in life.
The policy changes being implemented by the Howard government to shore up the capitalist family so that it can re-privatise in the home the costs of child-care, health care, aged care, unemployment and so on, are being supported by an increasingly vociferous pro-family lobby — in the media, educational institutions, churches and the law.
The right wing is on a roll. All of the gains of the women's movement — in terms of economic independence, legal rights and sexual self-determination — are under threat as the calls for a return to good old-fashioned "family values" grow louder and more strident.
In the face of this, feminists — including feminist students — cannot afford to be atomised. With energy and urgency, we must rebuild the strongest possible movement — one that is able to force the right wing back into retreat before it really does become a moral majority, to shape public opinion, to win changes in the law and to change practices.
Such a movement can be based only on politics, not biology. It must consciously involve all people who support feminist demands, regardless of their sex or gender or sexuality, now or in the past.
Of course, an individual's gender or sexuality does influence how likely they are to support feminism's demands. The personal experience of oppression is a powerful impetus to raising one's consciousness and coming to understand the need for change.
But among those people who do decide to support feminism's goals and are willing to help strengthen the movement, gender is irrelevant.
As much as it is true that our own particular oppression as a woman or as homosexual or as transgender influences our consciousness, it is also true that being born a woman, or being a gay man, or being transgender does not, in itself, guarantee support for women's liberation.
Women are not genetically more egalitarian or caring or nurturing. And gay men are not inherently more sensitive, or more sympathetic to women's plight.
I can name many men, and women who were born men, in whose hands the liberation of women, and gay men, would be far safer than it would be in the hands of some gay capitalists or all conservative women, who have a material interest in maintaining the status quo.
Of course women — indeed all groups suffering a particular type of oppression — must lead and control the movement for their own liberation.
But if the history of progressive struggle and social change teaches us anything, it is that women cannot do it alone against such a powerful system as capitalism.
They need every political ally available. If we reject alliance politics in favour of biologically determined separatism, women, whether they're straight, bi, lesbian or transgender, will continue to pay the life-destroying price.
By Lisa Macdonald