by Laurie Penny
Unfortunately, I am personally exempt from this particular dilemma by virtue of being a human axolotl who doesn’t grow much hair anywhere. I am literally unable to be the furry-legged, forest-crotched feminist hellwraith I often find myself accused of being. This makes shaving a largely academic issue, and puts me in precisely no position to judge any woman for her intimate topiary decisions, and I wish my friends would stop asking me to validate theirs. Seriously. Do what you want. I just want you to be happy.
As a teenager, though, I used to shave anyway – gamely saving up my pocket money for popular brand equipment I really had no use for – because I wanted to be part of that secret club of skin nicks and ritual complaints about razor burn. Did you shave, sugar or wax? Did you remove the hair up to the top of your shortest gym skirt, or all the way up, implying arcane and enviable sluttery? I remember these conversations as among the few times I was permitted, as a nerdy, nervous, weird-looking kid, to chat to the cool girls. The pain, expense and wasted time of womanhood was something we were all supposed to share. Few of us had the language of feminism – this was before Tumblr, Twitter and Internet activism brought gender politics into every schoolgirl’s back pocket. We complained about shaving and straightening and eyelash-curling because that sort of complaining was a safe, accepted way to express discomfort with the basic fact that, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’.
Gender policing is all about the little things. It’s the daily, intimate terrorism of beauty and dress and behaviour. In this as in so much else, feminists who are not transsexual can learn a great deal from trans writers and activists. I’m indebted to the work of Charlie Jane Anders and Julia Serano, both of whom talk about how femininity gets captured by capitalism, and how that homogenous, compulsory performance of femininity becomes a scapegoat for all society’s bad feelings about women in general and trans women in particular. So it is not enough to feel that you are a woman – you have to prove it with a hundred daily conformities and capitulations. The reason the Veet advert is so hurtful, the reason the ‘Women Eating on the Tube’ site and its backlash went so viral, is that they both spell out gender policing at its simplest level: behave, be quiet and pretty and compliant, control your messy, hairy, hungry self, or you are not a woman at all.
None of which is to say that girliness can’t be a good time. Dressing up, playing with makeup, fashion – all of that is a lot of fun right up until it becomes compulsory, until you have to do it to prove you’re a real woman, a good employee, a person worthy of love and affection. The same goes for all of the bizarre rules that go along with being female in this society, the rules you have to engage with whether or not you choose to follow them: be pretty. Be nice. Be thin. Try to look as young and fragile as possible. Be sexy, but not overtly sexual. Don’t eat in public. Don’t eat at all. Your body is all wrong: shave it down, starve it smaller, take up less space, be less physical, be less.
The little things turn out to be about the big things. They’re about race, class and gender status. For trans women, or women of black, Middle Eastern or Mediterranean heritage, the question of body hair is extra fraught, because ‘passing’ as a woman these days turns out to mean looking as much like a nubile white cissexual supermodel as possible. Shaving or waxing is an ongoing expense, even if you do it yourself at home; getting hair removed professionally or lasered away permanently can run to thousands of dollars over a lifetime.
The same principle applies to eating on public transport: doing so is not considered ‘classy’. ‘Real ladies’ conceal their bodily functions from the world as much as possible. ‘Real ladies’ are blank, smooth, pale slates, with nothing inside, no guts, no gore, no appetite, no personality.
Cultural disgust for the female body is deeply political. It is tied into reproductive and social control, which affects all female-identified people, whether or not we plan to have children or are biologically capable of pregnancy. Gender policing is about making sure that women don’t get above ourselves, that we can be seen as less than human, with no real interiority, without real bodies that eat and shit and hurt and die. If the female body remains a beautiful mystery, if it retains an ethereal, abstract quantity, you don’t have to feel so bad when you do bad things to it.
How and where we choose to eat lunch. What we do with our hair in the morning and our pubes at night. Whether and when we wear makeup. Whether we wear jeans or a skirt. All of these things are intimate, everyday decisions that wouldn’t matter if we didn’t spend thousands of hours and a great deal of money fretting about them over the course of the short time we get to spend on this planet. We experience all of this on an intimate, everyday level, and it seems like it shouldn’t matter, but it does. The little indignities, the little restrictions, they matter so much. And if we’re smart and pay attention, they give us a language to talk about the big ones. The world in which we fritter away our energies worrying about body hair and eating on public transport is the same world in which the British government has just appointed a Minister for Women who is against both abortion rights and gay marriage. It is the same world in which people on welfare have just taken another hammering, being painted as scroungers even as the outgoing Minister for Women gets to keep almost £44,000 in wrongly claimed expenses. It is the same world in which women are indefinitely detained and then threatened with deportation for being born queer in the wrong country and wanting to live and love in peace.
And the little capitulations wear us down. They soften us up for the big capitulations. Any good dictator knows that, which is why Kim Jong Un has just made it mandatory for every male student in North Korea to emulate his slightly odd haircut.
Ultimately, being a ‘good woman’ isn’t just about shaving and whether you eat crisps on the bus. It’s about how silent you’re prepared to be in the face of social injustice.
WORD GAMES
Language matters. It defines the limits of our imagination. You don’t have to be a gender theorist to understand that if we have only two ways of referring to human beings – ‘he’ or ‘she’ – we will grow up thinking of people as divisible into those two categories and nothing more. So it is significant that, in late August, OxfordDictionaries.com – an online resource created by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary – added an entry for the gender-neutral title ‘Mx’.
This is how it’s defined: ‘a title used before a person’s surname or full name by those who wish to avoid specifying their gender or by those who prefer not to identify themselves as male or female’. In 2015, the OED added to its lexicon the word ‘cisgender’, meaning ‘not transsexual’. That matters, too, because without a word for it, you were either ‘trans’ or you were ‘normal’.
Sweden has also recently added the gender-neutral pronoun ‘hen’ to its dictionary. Pronouns such as ‘xe’ and ‘they’ (used to refer to a singular subject) are already in use in English as alternatives to ‘he’ and ‘she’. Many conservatives and professional pedants are furious – it’s fussy, it’s far too politically correct and how are you supposed to pronounce ‘Mx’, anyway? So whose side should we be on?
By some accident of serendipity, the day I found out about all of this was also the day I met the feminist linguist Dale Spender. At seventy-one, when I met her, she was small and delicate and dangerous, like a cupcake full of razors. She was dressed from head to toe in purple: a lilac handbag, bright violet shoes, an elegant silk dress in swirls of fuchsia and lavender. The activist and author of Man Made Language could be the embodiment of Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’ (‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . .’) but Spender has worn the colour every day for decades, in honour of the suffragettes.
Swallowing my hero worship together with a lukewarm coffee backstage at a writer’s festival, I asked Spender what she thought, as someone who has long pioneered the politics of women’s language, about the recent push towards a more gender-neutral vocabulary.
‘It’s the
same argument we had in the 1970s, when we started using “Ms”,’ Spender told me. The title ‘Ms’ was promoted by feminists and widely adopted as an alternative to ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ – the idea being that there was more to a woman’s life than her marital status. ‘So many of us were getting divorced and leaving bad marriages and we didn’t know how to refer to ourselves,’ Spender said. ‘I wasn’t a “Miss” any more but I definitely wasn’t a “Mrs”. They said the same thing back then – that “Ms” was clumsy, that people didn’t know how to pronounce it. But how about “Mrs” or “Mr”? They’re hardly obvious!’
Spender reminded me that the Oxford English Dictionary has always been run by men and that mainstream lexicography had a male bias; it wasn’t until 1976 that ‘lesbian’ got an entry in what the feminist Mary Daly dubbed the ‘dick-tionary’.
Spender is dismayed to see this kind of linguistic activism falling out of fashion – ‘We used to spend days coming up with new words for concepts that needed to be talked about’ – and she was delighted that Internet culture had brought it back with gusto.
‘I love the word “mansplaining”,’ Spender said. ‘It’s perfect. You know instantly what it means. And “manspreading”, “manterrupting” – did you know that in mixed-gender conversations, most interruptions are by men?’
There is nothing new about activists working to move language forward to create cultural change but it is easy to underestimate the effects of that change over time. Listening to Spender talk about the importance of ‘Ms’ reminded me how radical a proposition it once was for women to claim their own names and titles after marriage. My mother retained what is still referred to as her ‘maiden’ surname, Penny, and always used ‘Ms’. I remember asking as a child why she wasn’t a ‘Miss’ or a ‘Mrs’ and being told that she didn’t want the first thing people knew about her to be whether or not she was married. That seemed fair enough. Why would a woman want to go around with a label on them that described who they belonged to – like a dog tag – when men didn’t have to? That didn’t seem fair. Also, Penny was a much nicer surname and I made a note to adopt it myself when I was older.
Now that I’m the age my mother was when she had me, I am beginning to understand what an impression that simple, powerful statement made. I always understood that Mum was her own person first and a wife second and that I could be, too. My relationships with men didn’t have to be the core of my identity. The feminists of the 1970s and 1980s had to fight to make that possible but I grew up with that assumption, partly because of a simple act of linguistic activism.
Perhaps the generation being born today will grow up with different assumptions: not just that women should be equal to men but that gender might not be the most important part of your identity. That’s an uncomfortable idea for a great many people, and that discomfort is at the heart of the predictable pedantry over ‘Mx’, ‘xe’ and ‘they’.
We can only become what we can imagine and we can only imagine what we can articulate. That’s why language matters to our lives; that’s why little changes in grammar and vocabulary can affect the entire architecture of our political imagination.
Today, signing ‘Mx’ on an application form or an electricity bill is an act of linguistic rebellion but tomorrow it could be ordinary. And that is how you change the world.
TRANSPHOBIC THROWBACKS
In early 2013, columnist Julie Burchill used her platform in the Observer to launch what may be the most disgusting piece of hate-speech printed in a liberal newspaper in recent years. I’m not the only reader who was shocked to the core at her smug attack on transsexual women as ‘screaming mimis in bad wigs’, ‘a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing’ and other playground insults too vile to repeat. Burchill claimed to be protecting a friend, which is a noble thing to do, but I suspect that the friend in question, the writer Suzanne Moore, who penned a far less vituperative article on the same subject, would rather she hadn’t been associated with the popping of this particular pustule of prejudice.
Burchill’s article is an embarrassment to the British press, an embarrassment to feminist writing and a shameful exploitation of a public platform to abuse a vulnerable minority. The Observer has now issued an apology, and rightly so, although I believe the decision to depublish the piece is not wrong so much as bizarre, since Google Cache never forgets.
It’s even more dispiriting to see other mainstream media outlets, including the Telegraph, rally around Burchill’s ignorant screed as a ‘free speech’ issue, as if the right to free speech and the right to publication in a major national newspaper were the same thing at all in the age of Tumblr.
But let us get back to the issues. I’m partly writing this piece out of selfishness. I want to make it clear to the readers around the world who were rightly disgusted by the Observer column that Burchill and Moore do not speak for all British feminists, and that not every British columnist is prepared to rally the waggons around bigotry. A young, powerful feminist movement with transsexual and queer people at the heart of the debate is gathering in strength in this country and across the world, and we know that gender essentialism and bigotry hurt all of us, cis and trans, men and women.
Transphobic men and women who promote prejudice in the name of feminism, including writers like Sheila Jeffreys, Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel and now Julie Burchill, are on the wrong side of history. For far too long, a small, vocal cadre of the women’s movement has claimed that transsexuals, and in particular transsexual women, are not just irrelevant to feminism but actively damaging to the cause of women’s liberation. Their arguments are illogical, divisive and hateful, and sometimes just plain bonkers. I’ve been to meetings where transphobic feminists have argued that if they don’t keep a lookout, horrible sexist men will try to sneak into their meetings, marches and seminars in disguise in order to disrupt proceedings.
What precise form the disruption is supposed to take has not been explained, partly because it has never happened, ever. If Jeremy Clarkson or Bill O’Reilly ever decide to try it, I can assure you that they will be spotted and stopped – but right now, the feminist movement needs no help from fictional men in petticoats to damage our hopes of winning the wider war on women’s freedom. Far more insidious is the insistence by some feminists on mocking transsexual women and denying their existence.
The word that annoys these so-called feminists most is ‘cis’, or ‘cissexual’. This is a term coined in recent years to refer to people who are not transsexual. The response is instant and vicious: ‘we’re not cissexual, we’re normal – we don’t want to be associated with you freaks!’ Funnily enough, that’s just the kind of pissing and whining that a lot of straight people came out with when the term ‘heterosexual’ first began to be used as an antonym of ‘homosexual’. Don’t call us ‘heterosexuals’, they said – we’re normal, and you don’t belong.
To learn that the world is not divided into ‘normal’ people and ‘freaks’ with you on the safe side is uncomfortable. To admit that gender identity, like sexual orientation, exists on a spectrum, and not as a binary, is to challenge every social stereotype about men and women and their roles in society.
Good. Those stereotypes need to be challenged. That’s why the trans movement is so important for feminism today.
Thanks to a global surge in acceptance and discussion of a spectrum of gender identity, trans people are becoming more and more visible, more angry and more open about their experiences. The world is changing, and those of us fortunate enough to be born in a body that suits our felt gender identity are going to have to accept that being cissexual, just like being heterosexual, isn’t ‘normal’, merely common.
Transphobic articles in high-profile publications are not harmless. They cause active, quantifiable damage. They justify the ongoing persecution of transsexual people by the medical and legal establishment; they destroy solidarity within political and social circles; they hurt people who are used to hearing such slurs shouted at them in the stree
t, and do not need to hear them from so-called progressives. Worse, they make it seem to the average reader, who might be a friend or relative of a trans person, that the rights of transsexual people to be treated in a humane way are still a subject for reasonable debate.
Some conservative feminists claim that arguing about trans issues is counter-productive to the wider struggle against austerity and sexual violence. They are right about that. Feminism is meant to be about defending women against violence, prejudice and structural, economic disadvantage – all women, not just the ones self-appointed spokespeople decide count, and at this time of crisis, we need to be standing together to defend women who are poor, marginalised and live in fear of violence. We cannot do that if we exclude trans and queer women, who are more than usually vulnerable to gendered violence and discrimination. Entry to feminist spaces should not be conditional on having one’s genitals checked over by Julie Burchill, Julie Bindel or their representatives.
It comes down to essentialism, and essentialism, as Suzanne Moore rightly pointed out in her Guardian column, is always conservative. Stubborn gender essentialism – the belief that your body and your hormones should define everything about your life – is what women have been fighting since the first suffragettes unrolled their green and purple sashes. For transphobic feminists, though, it all seems to boil down to an obsession with what precisely is inside a person’s underpants, which is at best intellectually vapid and at worst rather creepy.
In fact, as Simone de Beauvoir once noted, nobody on Earth is born a woman. Julie Burchill was not born a woman, unless her mother is a hitherto unheralded miracle of medical science. Just over half of us grow up to become women, and the process is a muddle of blood and hormones and angst and pressure and pain and contradiction. Transsexual women know just as well, and sometimes better than cissexual women, what it is to be punished for your felt and lived gender, what it is to fear violence and rape, to be reduced to your body, to be made to feel ashamed, to have to put up with prejudice and lazy stereotypes.
