WDI USA is a radical feminist organization. As such, we fight to abolish gender. What does that mean in the current “gender identity” climate? Femininity (explained below) is a form of gender. If our organization opposes gender, we have to oppose femininity. What does that mean for women and girls as a sex class, and for women and girls as individuals?
A lot of women are very angry about “gender identity,” and rightly so. We’re angry that men are raping women in prisons, stealing honors and awards from women in sport, and exposing themselves to us in what should be female-only spaces.
Many of us who are rightly angry at these things may not have thought much about how “gender identity” is just another form of gender (or, one might say, how men get away with all the things they do).
Let’s talk about it.
Let’s start by distinguishing between the movement to liberate women and girls (radical feminism, which aims to abolish all forms of gender) from the movement to abolish “gender identity,” which includes a lot of individuals and organizations that are definitely not radical feminist. There is overlap, of course. All radical feminists seek to abolish “gender identity” as a form of gender, which we oppose in all its forms. Many conservatives, female athletes, and scientists oppose “gender identity” without locating the issue as part of a larger struggle to liberate women and girls. WDI USA is grounded in radical feminism and we are starting from that premise in this discussion of femininity.
We radical feminists need to talk about femininity. It’s tricky. It’s said to be divisive, it’s said to be personal and not political, it’s said to be best not discussed. If someone brings it up, it’s said to be policing women’s personal choices, judgmental, bullying, shaming, and more. But we can’t allow it to be a taboo; clearly it needs to be discussed. In our view, women should want to discuss this. Our aim with this post is to inspire women to examine our own participation in femininity and to talk about it in a spirit of honesty and with dignity and compassion.
Femininity is gender. It differs from femaleness, which is simply a biological fact. But radical feminists assert that gender – femininity — is how women are made to be submissive, and that it is at the core of the system of the domination by all males over all females that radical feminists call patriarchy or male supremacy.
It’s important for all women who are involved in the fight against “gender identity” to think and talk about how our fight is part of a larger fight against male supremacy. It’s important that we all think about how we may be participating in the overarching structure of gender.
Although we are taught to believe that femininity is either freely chosen or natural and innate to all females, femininity is not chosen by girls or women. Girls and women are not free to choose femininity where we are not free to reject it. In fact, all girls are groomed and shamed and coerced and threatened and humiliated and abused and beaten and raped, if necessary, into compliance with femininity, and further taught to say they like it and choose it and that it has no collective, structural meaning. Or else to insist that a particular feminine behavior is not femininity at all, but merely a personal quirk that just happens to be consistent with femininity. Perhaps it is, for some women, but discussing any individual woman’s choices derails from a zoomed-out analysis of women as a class. A radical feminist analysis necessarily recognizes that our choices are not always freely made, but rather shaped by the environment around us.
But in fact we are all subjected to enforced femininity. That said, maybe some of us can choose to reject femininity, at least to some degree, when we are adult women with more autonomy.
So what does the movement to liberate women and girls, and WDI USA, in particular, have to say about that? If we are radical feminists, our mission is to abolish all gender. Meaning, to destroy the system of sex-based stereotyping. Meaning, to destroy both masculinity and femininity, the sexual caste system that relegates exclusively to men such behaviors as courage, dignity, independence, dominance, moral integrity, prioritization of function over form, directness, truthfulness, and all those other behaviors that help people to unite and function effectively for social change.
Simultaneously, the sexual caste system relegates to women such behaviors as on-demand empathy and nurturing, dependency, emotional and physical fragility, lack of self-discipline, manipulativeness, and the prioritizing of a pleasing appearance over physical comfort or whatever task is at hand. When all the seemingly minor components of femininity are put together, the pattern that emerges is one in which women spend time, thought, and money displaying their bodies rather than their minds; in which this display inhibits the functionality and freedom of their bodies; and in which men are performing none of these behaviors.
The system of gender tells us that these behaviors are innate and natural, yet paradoxically that they must be rigorously enforced by parents, educators, religious leaders, and the general public, including women. Femininity is designed to impede effective political action in women, and is enforced upon us. Therefore, we must critically and carefully examine whether these behaviors truly serve us as women and feminists.
WDI USA is suggesting that women might benefit personally and politically from collectively examining our culture’s expectations of femininity and our acceptance of them in our own lives while we are also changing the world.
If a radical feminist movement can manage to destroy the power of gender to control women, “gender identity” will crumble because it depends on gender.
We need to understand that “gender identity” is just one manifestation of gender, all of which operates against women and girls as a sex class. Women and girls will lose if the current iteration of gender fails but the larger system prevails.
Because if we only focus on preventing people from performing the “wrong” gender based on their sex, we will lose on both fronts: We will fail to stop the oppression of all women and girls including lesbians, and we will fail to eliminate transgenderism. Because if the system of male supremacy insists that all women and girls must be feminine and heterosexual, then some women and girls will find their sexual status to be intolerable; and they will seek to escape from their sex, as they always have.
The way our movement can win is to model what it means to be women fighting for civil rights, in all our diversity – not only diversity of race, religion, nationality, class, sexual orientation, and similar; but also diversity in personal presentation and behaviors. The more we look and behave in ways that do not comply with our ascribed gender role in order to model our messaging, the more effective we will be. This does not mean we must unduly limit ourselves; nor blindly adopt masculinity; there are so many different and wonderful versions of how it looks not to comply with gender.
If we look and behave the way women of our demographic are ‘supposed to’ (e.g., clothing that reveals way more skin that men similarly situated, clothing that restricts our movement, clothing that deprives us of dignity, allowing sexual access to at least one man, long hair that we continuously handle and toss), we are likely to lose the fight to liberate women and girls from all forms of gender. If we applaud with relief each young girl who stops using male pronouns and hormones, and instead starts growing her hair and nails and wearing dresses and makeup and heels, we will lose this fight. But femininity-for-girls-only is not the opposite of transgenderism; femininity is gender, and gender is the essence of transgenderism. If we allow femininity to be the predominant face of our movement or our organizations, we will lose.
With a message that is merely anti transgenderist but not radical feminist, we may win broader appeal; but our mission will be fatally flawed, and we will lose the fight against male domination, homophobia, and transgenderism. To win, the faces and voices and behaviors of our movement must reflect dignity, courage, emotional resilience, self-discipline, intelligence, and calm determination. We must present an alternative way of being – neither complying with the gendered demands placed on our sex, nor seeking to escape femaleness along with femininity. We must show that women can thrive outside the confines of prescribed gender, while still acknowledging themselves as women.
Take, for example, the brilliant late British lesbian radical feminist Magdalen Berns. Her YouTube videos on gender identity, women’s rights, and lesbians were delivered with dry wit and razor-sharp insight. She was not feminine; she was charismatic. She aimed to tell the truth, even when hated for it. Her videos continue to peak thousands, years after her death.
Public dignity is precisely what women are denied in patriarchy, and one of the things we are fighting for. We are certainly not denied opportunities to lose our dignity, to call on men to rescue us, to demand emotional comfort from the nearest woman, to wear restrictive or painful clothing in the name of beauty, or to describe our personal feelings and even trauma in public. In our work for this movement, what matters most is what serves our organization and what serves all women and girls collectively, as a sex class. This includes us; we are women, and what benefits women as a collective will also ultimately benefit the individual women who make up that collective.
As our movement grows and gains supporters, it is our hope that we can all examine our own behaviors honestly and with appropriate compassion; and that we not only remain visibly noncompliant, but also that we actively encourage more noncompliance, among ourselves and among all women. Just imagine how much it would mean for girls watching such women to see for themselves that becoming a woman can be something to admire and aspire to. That’s how we can win.
Further Reading:
Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin (1974)
Her complete works are available in PDF form here: http://radfem.org/dworkin/
The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond (1979)
Femininity by Susan Brownmiller (1984)
Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys (2005)
Sounds like a style guide for appearance and code of conduct would help.
Volunteers who adhere will be relegated to public tasks and those who don’t stay behind the scenes. This will allow the organization to maintain the goal of publicly demonstrating non-compliance with femininity and will inform newcomers of the organization’s expected standards of appearance and behavior.
I can’t tell whether this is a serious comment or not…. “The expected standards of appearance and behavior?” And those who don’t adhere to them will be rendered publicly invisible by the organization? Please tell me this is a joke or sarcasm.
I can’t tell whether this is a serious comment or not…. “The expected standards of appearance and behavior?” And those who don’t adhere to them will be rendered publicly invisible by the organization? Please tell me this is a joke or sarcasm.
I’ve canceled my first response to repost and add this caveat relative to the avatar that attached to my name. It isn’t mine, and I didn’t choose it. It just appeared.
What is “femininity”? What would “non-compliance with femininity” look like?
The only definition of “femininity” that I can come up with is:
Femininity is whatever a culture says females should look like and act like, and males should not look like or act like.
(And so “masculinity” would be whatever a culture says male should look like and act like, and females should not look like or act like.)
So please be specific in describing what a woman who is “non-compliant with femininity” must look like and act like, and must not look like or act like? Are soft spoken women “too feminine”? Are women who happen to be “beautiful” by contemporary cultural standards “too feminine”? Are women who wear dresses “too feminine”?
Some mannerisms including ways of moving through space are considered in our culture to be “feminine”, but many woman might naturally, unconsciously exhibit those mannerisms and move in such ways, AND some men might also display those mannerisms and ways of moving, which is why those men are considered “effeminate”.
Good idea Amy. Though I think the root cause of the “conflict” is the false notion that human beings have free will.
Then there’s capitalism and individualism which make it nearly impossible for the individual to perceive him or herself collectively. Nothing less that a spiritually motivated social transformation would be needed in the West to create this kind of awakening.
Zanne, what kind of “awakening” do you mean? How does that look? What does that “awakening” mean for women who are feminine or who “present” in what is perceived as feminine?
Glad you’re having this conversation as an organization. This means a lot to me, and this blog post is so thoughtfully written that I have high hopes we can make constructive changes. It’s so necessary and also compassionate to underscore the gender-prescribed emotional instability which impedes women’s’ ability to organize as a class.
So very true, and so infrequently recognized.
I know how big this is. I have been waiting for this. You rock.
While I applaud so much written here, I’m deeply concerned about what certainly looks like an announcement that WDI/USA has drawn a line in the sand, a very subjective one, regarding what constitutes an INDIVIDUAL woman’s INDIVIDUAL and freely-chosen right to adopt a personal style she sees as entirely consistent with her desire for gender abolition. Are we to police clothing and hair length now, rather than join hands as sisters and comrades against a culture that does it as well? Can a blanket assertion of rules and standards regarding the meaning behind things like hair length be anything other than a subjective, heavy-handed, and arrogant litmus test imposed on our radical feminist disters?
Worse, there is more than a whiff of whiteness here when discussing hair — and contempt, surely unintended, when to have hair of a certain length is seen as having hair for the sheer enjoyment of “tos(sing) it” around for male approval.
Really? You’ve discovered the undeniable motivation of your sisters with longer hair?
Do our Black sisters need (white) women to comment on their locs or their natural, untreated African hair? Do our Latina or our indigenous American sisters, proud descendants of Meso-American and other tribal-ethnic heritages that valued women’s hair as strength, not capitulation, need you to educate them on their proper tonsorial maintenance? How about Muslim women, whose long hair speaks so loudly, so sinfully and seductively, in conservative Islam that it must be hidden away? In the struggle for their liberation, which every non-Muslim feminist must surely believe has the elimination of the mandatory hijab as a goal, do other women — white women — get to tell them that the message their long hair communicates is inconsistent with radical feminism? This essay, taken to its logical end, would call for substituting the stifling judgment of “hairspeak” (messages both you and the Taliban swear are voiced through long hair) with cropped hair. Under the imams, that was and is silenced via the mandatory hijab. Do you not see that you run the risk here of replacing the “silencing of hair” tool, the hijab, with the radical-feminist/anti-gender crew cut, bob, or high-and-tight that also silences the hair as YOU perceive it?
If my objections to a largely insightful and cogent essay were summed up, it would this:
Your qualifying true gender abolitionists and genuine radical feminists on the basis of HOW, not IF, they reject the evils of femininity and masculinity is based on your own subjective hair, clothing models, and other preferences. Your imposition of YOUR form of expressing the intentional absence and denial of gender, while cloaked in assurances of the importance of diversity, is also draped in whiteness’ frankly stunning disregard of locs, natural Black hair, and long hair on women who are just as committed to the struggle as you but who don’t perhaps hold to white radical feminist perceptions of women’s hair. You’ve condemned, along with oppressive conservative Islam, the (lascivious? merely attention-seeking?) message of our Muslim sisters’ long hair. It’s not in any way noble to rhetorically rip the hijab off with one hand, with scissors and clippers in the other, to prevent our sisters’ hair from being attractive to men. It’s a disturbingly white-focused message with an insouciance that will do nothing to combat the sadly well-grounded diagnosis of casual racism in our midst. Beyond that, the policing of other women’s departure from YOUR standards, coupled with the whiteness splashed throughout this call to eliminate gender and, specifically, femininity, is a poison rushing into the clear, fresh, and nourishing spring of true radical feminism — or any other liberation movement. Please reconsider this emphasis, and quickly — before you succeed in making radical feminism even more awash in unnecessary judgmentalism and unexamined whiteness.
Keely Emerine-Mix
I just wanted to leave this comment here for Keely and any others who want to use other people of color to defend patriarchy’s use of feminine gender stereotypes: I happen to fall under the category of “proud descendants of Meso-American[s]”, and currently there is no difference between my culture’s prescription of long hair for women and “white” culture’s prescription of long hair for women. It is used as a gendered expectation in both backgrounds. Please stop using people of color as excuses and shields to help you feel more comfortable with gender conformity. For many other women, the damage done by femininity is obvious and painful.
Unfortunately, plenty of people and establishments agree with your defense of gender. Especially patriarchy and cultural male supremacy. Just say you’re “trans critical” instead of “gender critical”, if that’s how you feel, but I do hope you continue to be open to learning more about this.