I’ve been deeply struck recently by the narratives I’ve heard from some feminists about transgender people. There is a disconnect, or a tension, it seems, between certain conceptions of feminism and a full embrace of transgender people.
Among many older feminists, for example, there seems to be a general confusion about transgender identities and, perhaps, a too-eager willingness to dismiss those identities.
I mention age here not to imply that older people’s idea are inherently out of date or old-fashioned – this isn’t like when everybody rolls their eyes at the kind-of-racist thing your grandparent just said.
Rather – the women I’m thinking of are deep, liberal, radical feminists. Their age is important because they fought on the front lines of sexual liberation. They’ve personally felt that glass ceiling pushing them down. They know what it’s like to be sexually harassed and discriminated against as part of institutions that didn’t even put up the appearance of condemning such behavior.
They knew the first women in their families who were allowed to vote.
These women have been leaders in the battle not only only for women’s rights and equality, but for women’s freedom of self-expression.
Being a woman, they’ve rightly argued, is no single thing. There is no perfect body type. No thing you must enjoy or activities you must hate. It’s not clothes or hair, attitude or aptitude that define femininity.
In this way, the women’s movement isn’t just about the right to be treated equally, it’s about the right to be ourselves.
This concept runs into challenges with the transgender movement which – correctly or not – is often interpreted as arguing that, for example, a transgender woman is someone who feels like a woman.
A radical feminist doesn’t know what that means.
How can someone “feel like a woman” when womanhood itself is something that eludes definition?
This approach interprets transgender men and women as people who are simply conforming to the gender binary: transgender men were assigned female at birth but were too macho to be stereotypical women. Transgender women liked princesses too much to live by their assigned gender of male.
And while I am not at all convinced that the above interpretation of transgender people is accurate, it does create tension between the two communities as feminists bemoan the reinforcement of gender norms and see people of privilege – those assigned male at birth – claim the title of womanhood.I don’t know the way out of this tension. I have no idea what it feels like to be a gender other than the one I was assigned to at birth, but I have to trust people when they tell me that’s who they are. For me, that is enough. But as a society I think we need something more.
This conflict is particularly tragic because there should be no greater allies to the transgender community than feminists. There should be no one better able to appreciate the struggle of being unable to genuinely be yourself.
In many ways, that is, we are all in the same fight – all struggling to find and be our true selves.
On another evening, seed activist Vandana Shiva – fresh from a series of protests against GMOs at a major food expo in Milan – spoke about the commons as living systems that should not be commodified and sold. To the great satisfaction of an audience of about 600 people, she noted that Italy is one of the few places that still produces juicy, tasty tomatoes; the rest have been so modified by agribusiness to suit global commerce that they amount to biological cardboard. Shiva did a great job of showing how the commons is not an academic abstraction, but a language for explaining why so many aspects of daily life are being degraded and how enclosures dispossess us.
This is highlight #1 from our recent Italian vacation. In the little Umbrian hill town of Citerna, in the church of San Francesco, 
To support the attribution, specialists point to similarities with more famous works, such as the hands of Donatello’s “David.” I would add that this most idiosyncratic artist always visualized scenes in his own unprecedented way. Here the baby senses an unknown danger in the distance. His face is disturbed; his body tenses even as one hand reaches for his mother. He curls the big toe of his left foot. Most of his wrap has fallen away to reveal his vulnerability and humanity. Mary, who knows what lies ahead for him, reflects soberly as she touches her cheek to his forehead and very gently supports his foot.
