By Zanny Begg
In Djadi-Dugarang, the newsletter of the Indigenous Social Justice Association, Ray Jackson tells the story of Belinda (not her real name), a male to female transgender. In late 1997, Belinda was arrested for drug possession and sent to the Metropolitan Reception and Remand Centre at Silverwater in Sydney's west.
Despite living as a woman, and having all the physical appearances of a woman, Belinda was placed in a men's prison because she was born a male. Since she was regarded as "vulnerable", Belinda was placed in the maximum protection pod home also to rapists, paedophiles and other inmates in need of special "protection". The only concession the jail authorities made to Belinda's situation was allowing her to stay in a single cell.
Within three days of being jailed Belinda had been raped twice. She hung herself on December 27 that year.
Belinda's story highlights the oppression female transsexuals suffer. By living as women, transgender women are subjected to the violence, sexual harassment and sexist assumptions that all women in this society are. Transgender women who want to organise against this oppression should, therefore, be considered part of the women's liberation movement.
Unfortunately, some feminists oppose this view. In the 1998 women's edition of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology student newspaper, Catylist, Jess Whyte argued, "There are several reasons why women may feel uncomfortable with the notion of transsexuals using women's-only space.
"The strongest of these is a belief that a person who has lived their whole life as a man could not possibly be free from patriarchal conditioning. It is this conditioning which teaches men that they are superior to women and causes men to exploit and oppress women that women's-only space seeks to protect women from."
Germaine Greer argues along similar lines in her latest book The Whole Woman. The 1999 National Organisation of Women Students Australia (NOWSA) conference organising collective voted to exclude transgender women from the collective and last year, the Perth Reclaim the Night Collective also decision to exclude transgender women.
The argument that female transsexuals have benefited from "male privilege" is, however, debatable. Belinda clearly was not a benefactor of "male privilege" when she was jailed in a male, maximum security prison and raped. Nor would she have thanked her birth gender as she grew up struggling to reconcile what it meant to be a "man" with her deeply held conviction that she was a woman.
Although they are born as males, female transsexuals have little access to the privileges of being male. When they start to live openly as women they are harassed, intimidated, rejected and isolated for doing so. Because female transsexuals also suffer from sexism, their experiences become intertwined with those of all women in a sexist society. This is an objective basis for their participation as equals in the feminist movement.
Sex inequality arises from women being locked into the institution of the family as unpaid labourers in the home and those responsible for child-care and aged care. Upon this economic base rises sexist ideology which seeks to legitimise the family as the only "normal" form of social organisation and stereotypes women sexually, physically and intellectually so as to justify maintaining their economic and social dependence on men and/or the state.
Female transsexuals are no less the victims of this sexist ideology and discrimination than other women. They are judged by their appearance, subjected to sexual and other forms of violence and denied equality with men in the work force.
This does this mean that transgender women suffer exactly the same oppression as other women. Their oppression comes from the same source (sexist society), but is not experienced in exactly the same way.
Transsexual women are also oppressed on the basis of their perceived sexuality: regardless of whether they have sex with men or with women, they are considered sexually "deviant" because transsexual sexuality (regardless of sexual orientation) undermines the sexist ideology that sex (for women) must be tied to reproduction.
Transsexuals also raise demands for democratic rights which are specific and additional to those raised by the women's liberation movement: the right to change their gender in legal documents, access to gender-reassignment medical care, against discrimination in work and so forth.
Beneath the debate about whether or not transsexuals are benefactors of "patriarchy" lies the question of what defines a women. Some of those who want to exclude transsexual women from women-only space have argued that they are not "real women" (it is asserted that women-only space is for "women who bleed").
But as Simone de Beauvoir explained, "One is not born but made a woman". That is, gender roles are socially constructed. From a young age we are punished for behaving in ways inconsistent with what sexist society deems appropriate for our gender. Girls who "play like boys" are tom-boys and boys who "play like girls" are sissies. These taunts are used to pull young people into line and teach them what behaviours are deemed appropriate for their gender.
Reducing what defines a woman to biological characteristics alone, by ignoring the social construction of "womanhood", is scientifically invalid. Defining feminist consciousness as something only those people with female sex organs can have is equally invalid. Transsexual women whose treatment as women in a sexist society leads them to fight against women's oppression are, and should be considered, part of the women's liberation movement.
Some feminists also argue that transsexual women actually reinforce gender roles by adopting behaviour and attire that is stereotypically feminine. For example, Whyte writes, "For a man to change his sex in order to fit into stereotypical feminine gender roles is to legitimise society's construction of such gender roles".
This perspective lays the blame on the wrong shoulders. Social institutions, not individual transsexuals, create gender roles for men and women. In that light, it is not surprising that transsexuals, when they adopt the opposite gender, adapt to some of the most obvious social expectations of that gender. Rather than legitimising rigid gender roles, transsexuals simply reflect the mass acceptance of these roles, revealing that to overcome them will require collective struggle.
Feminists need to oppose those who attempt to exclude female transsexuals from women-only space. While women like Belinda are dying behind bars, no woman is free. Only by fighting together can we overcome the sexism in society that creates such rigid gender roles which oppress all women.