Tag Archives: Meghan Murphy

An Open Letter to Meghan Murphy, fwiw, from an Other Side of Feminism.

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Editorial Note: This was originally posted by Nix on her tumblr on July 1, 2015.
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Hi Meghan,

I hope you’ll permit me to address you by your first name.  I do so not out of any disrespect or desire to minimize you or your work, but because I want to speak with you directly, a bit intimately, as one woman to another, as one Feminist to another, as one human being to another.

I’d like to tell you a bit about my life and the experiences that led me to choose sex work at the comparatively late age of 33.  I sort of want to confide…

I’m 34 years old, white, and from a Leftist, activist, middle class background (in Southern California).   My family has been torn apart by all manner of deceit, greed, abuse (including sexual), and hypocrisy, but I can assure you that there has never been a conscious moment in my own life when I wasn’t a Feminist.   I wasn’t permitted Barbie dolls unless I worked for the money to buy them for myself. I was given unlimited puzzles and books. I was told I could be anything that I wanted to be.  And I was encouraged to invest in my intelligence and physical capacities, as opposed to being “pleasing” to men.

I was not raised to see myself as an object.  I was raised to see myself as a subject, and a talented one at that.

Anyway, in 2008, I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of reporting two of my colleagues for sexual harassment at Northwestern University.  I was two years into a PhD program there.  One colleague had grabbed my ass at a bar (he was married and I thought we were meant to be discussing Deleuze) and another had told me that he had raped me and I didn’t remember it because I had been so drunk the last time he saw me (and technically, that was possible).

I did not want to ruin anyone’s career. But I did want to report for record, in case this sort of thing happened to someone else. I also requested sexual harassment training for my entire department in an effort to make sure that it would not.

Unfortunately, the Chair of my department was a woman who would not permit any training session to occur unless she knew which students were involved.  Conflict of interest much?

I had planned on letting it all slide.  I wasn’t about to out myself like that, as my department was so tiny and gossipy, and there would undoubtedly be negative repercussions.   Further, I was TAing for the Chair with that married colleague who had grabbed my ass.  I figured that I just needed to make it through the quarter… Until she asked me to compare grades with him at a coffee shop.

So I confessed to her, for lack of a better word, because I wasn’t about to meet with him off-campus.

She told me: “People get grabbed.”  She told me: Rape was “unthinkable” and “why would anyone say such a thing?”  She told me: “The Sexual Harassment Office is just an excuse for a sad, incompetent woman to hold a job and drink from her Northwestern coffee mug.”  She told me: “Americans are too uptight about being touched… Why, even her yoga teacher had to ask before touching students!”  She told me: “Reporting sexual harassment is a weak act.”  She told me: I needed “to take better care of myself and not worry so much about other people.”  She told me, in short, that: The only problem was me!  I was just too sensitive, weak, and fragile.

I’ll be honest with you, of all the words used to describe me over the course of my life, that is the only time I’ve ever heard “weak.”   She maintained this line and I eventually reported her to the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention for gender discrimination and a toxic work environment.

She was investigated over the course of a 24 hour period, which is an amazing turnaround, don’t you think? And then, nothing happened!  So I eventually attempted to report the entirety of Northwestern University to the Office of Civil Rights for violation of Title IX, arguing that NU has absolutely no protocol to speak of and pointing to their own lack of staff, myriad conflicts of interest, and lack of training, generally.

I still maintain this. And they’ve had three public scandals since I attempted to file a complaint against them with the OCR in 2010: one concerning a fucksaw, one concerning Ludlow and an undergrad, and the latest over this piece of pablum.

Of course, the OCR didn’t take my case.  I wasn’t raped, or at least, I don’t think I was.  And nothing that happened to me was a big enough offense to move a federal agency like the OCR, even if I was pointing to NU’s bureaucratic structure and lack of training as the root cause of my problems which would necessarily produce more problems for others.

So, by 2012, after fighting within the system with everything I had, I dropped out A.B.D.  I couldn’t justify writing a dissertation for a university that didn’t care about my own bodily sovereignty and safety, particularly as a “Feminist.”  And how was I supposed to be an authority on any topic whatsoever if I wasn’t the authority of my own personal space?  The entire experience was immensely disempowering.

I moved back to Southern California and I set out to get a job.  Any job!  Because I was starting my life all over!   Clearly, the academic route had been a terrible, terrible mistake for me.

As you might imagine, though, no one – and I mean no one – is inclined to hire someone who left their last post because they found out their institution had no functioning sexual harassment policy.  It’s too likely that you’re… fragile, weak, and sensitive.  And you’re a whistleblower.  Who the hell wants to hire someone that you know will blow the whistle on you if she deems it necessary, according to her own lights?

This left me in the position where I would have to fabricate a biographical lie for job interviews, which frankly I see as censorship and a disavowal of what happened to me.  This seems resolutely anti-Feminist to me and I was unwilling to make prospective employers comfortable with me, my past, or Northwestern.  I was unwilling to deny what I saw to be a fundamental injustice that must necessarily perpetuate itself by way of an almost willful negligence on the part of NU admin.  Not having a functioning sexual harassment and assault policy at a major university seems to me like a fucking crisis if ever there was one.  People should know.  And why should I be ashamed?  I left. I didn’t stay like some obedient slave. That would have been truly shameful, in my opinion.

Thus, I was unemployed for a good 6 months before I started my first business – which failed – after which I finally got into phone sex and camming as an independent domme in August of last year.  I’m a newbie, but the decision to do sex work was a long time coming and there are two important moments/thoughts that brought me there, and which I’d like to share with you.  (I thank you if you’ve made it this far.)

The first was when I was still at Northwestern.  I told a few of the professors, in 2010, that in light of the Chair’s clear policy on ass-grabbing, they really weren’t paying me enough and, indeed, I didn’t think they could afford me, and even if they could, it certainly wouldn’t go down like this.  I am not some unoccupied lot of land waiting for some intrepid male moron to come squat on me!  My existence is not an invitation to anyone for any reason!  I am not your Lady Everest!

The second thought occurred to me in April of last year.  I was very much unemployed and sort of psyching myself out for homelessness when I realized – If I was an exotic dancer at a reputable club, my ass would not be grabbed against my will because there would be bouncers.  Any ass-grabbing would only ever happen on my terms, with my consent, for money.

How in the hell is it that I’d be better protected from sexual assault taking my clothes off as sensually as possible in a designated area for money than as a PhD student at Northwestern University interacting with colleagues?  That’s a very sincere question.  How is that possible?  What insane fucking world is this?  But there you have it.

So, about four months later I spent an entire week researching my sex work options and deciding what I might commence with, what I was willing to do, what I was not willing to do.  I bought stock photos of sexy ladies – no shortage of those! – and framed body parts as if I was creating examples for a Mulvey lecture.  That wasn’t hard, as I’m sure you can imagine.  (I use my own image now, but I didn’t start that way.)

And you know what I thought? If this works, I’m finally going to profit off of the very thing that has been harming me my entire life.  It felt like grifting a system that had only ever grifted me.  And that felt really good.

The clients were not at all what I expected.  There are creeps, to be sure, but most of my clients are not even remotely abusive or rapey, because the most entitled men don’t pay for sex at all.  They just take it.  There are no boundaries with them, only overarching entitlement.  Ratio-wise, though, I encounter far more of these rapey men in my day-to-day than at work.  And I think there may be a plethora of them in academia, but who knows?  Still, there does seem to be a suspicious trend.

This all leads me to making the online acquaintance of Noah Berlatsky, a man you clearly hate, I understand… but I do think you have the wrong end of the stick here.  Please bear with me and grant me the possibility of a free (and stubborn!) will. I do appreciate your consideration and time.

Noah wrote an article that I became a little obsessed with on the UVa Rolling Stone scandal and Eden.  I was reading it because I was a sex worker and his work had been referred to often enough. I liked his articles.  But what struck me the most with this one was how it related to what I had experienced at Northwestern.  What happened to me was quotidian, not a big deal, something I was supposed to suffer under to prove that I was “tough.”  In it, he quotes Jessica Luther as telling him that:

 “We are saturated by a culture that sexualizes women but also demonizes them, that celebrates fuzzy consent and certainly doesn’t punish it, that blames victims for the sexual violence done to them, that is sometimes willing to ask people to intervene but is never willing to directly say to men that they should not rape. This kind of saturation makes it so people don’t really want to hear another story about a woman being sexually assaulted—and even if someone is willing to listen to story after story, what has to change to make it so these kinds of violent acts don’t happen with such regularity feels insurmountable. So there is this idea then that to get people to care, the story of that violence that you share (either as a journalist or a survivor) has to shock people so that they say, “Damn, even in THIS culture that doesn’t care much for women, THAT is bad.”

This quote seemed to exactly sum up my problem at NU and with the OCR.  And Noah seemed to be tracking two problems of which I was, and am, particularly aware – Sex worker stigma and sexual assault.  Or to put it another way – If I use my sexuality to extract cash from men, I’m a victim.  But if male sexuality is aggressively thrust upon me, that’s somehow my fault.  It honestly feels to me like my limited agency within this jackass culture is completely inverted, and whatever I say about myself will be turned upside down by those who “know better” than me, about me.

So I tweeted at Noah and told him how much I appreciated his articles.  And that was that.

I’ve had a ton of online exchanges with him and one chat by phone.  He has not once commented on how I look, referred to me by any diminutive, called me food items or pastry titles, solicited my services, pried into my personal life, condescended, or even ignored me, the latter of which wouldn’t be gendered violence so much as modern busyness and I-can’t-even.  That is pretty rare.

And that’s why women, and perhaps sex workers in particular, are willing, and even enthusiastic, to speak with him.  He isn’t objectifying us.  If he was objectifying us we would most certainly be charging him, or he’d end up listed as a loser by STUPIG or some other service like it.  It’s that cold, jim.  It’s that cold.  But there is nothing of the kind.

This leads me to the travesty that you think sex work is.  It wasn’t because I wanted to be an object that I got in to sex work.  It’s because I found myself sexually objectified even in places wherein I was meant to be valued for my intelligence.  It’s because I’m supposed to interpret an invitation to discuss philosophy as a sexual overture by virtue of me being cast as “girl” and my colleague being cast as “boy.”  And this ridiculously heterosexist garbage passes as “common sense” and even “professionalization” amongst people certified in the Humanities.  Ha!  Great. Why would I ever want to finish my degree?

So you tell me: What made me a whore?  It wasn’t sex work. I got into sex work because I wanted bouncers, distance, control, agency, choice, money, and all that freedom that I’m well aware you don’t like.  I got into sex work to capitalize off of what was always and already, my objectification. And before you call me a capitalist, please know that I am not.  But this is a capitalist society.  And I do seem to be reduced to my sex no matter how smart or competent I might try to be.

No.  I got into sex work because I don’t care what men think.  I don’t want their love.  I don’t want their approval.  I don’t want their advice.  I just want their cash, after which point I want appropriate behavior, and then I’d like them to go away.

As for Playboy… I get it.  It’s probably the premiere magazine in which the Beauty Industry and the Sex Industry overlap most overtly.  And that is a problem.  But it does have an impressive readership as well as a history of fabulous interviews with intellectuals.  Further, the sexism is not denied and the women do get paid.  It’s not free as you indicated in The New Statesman.  Sex workers are hustlers, if nothing else.  We want money, not to be told by the 50 billionth schmuck that we’re “fuckable.”  We know we’re “fuckable.”  As dumb as you might think sex workers are, we’re crystal clear on this.  That’s the business.

But this business doesn’t function with quite the stringent “boy”/”girl” beauty standard bullshit you might expect.  Really, this industry is built on fantasy, fetish, and to be perfectly frank, I think shame.  There is a performative quality to sex work that has the potential to be very subversive and very political.  But mainstream crap is generally just that, and it’s always been regressive and propagandist, not just in the sex industry.  My point is – It’s not the only type of sex work out there, even if it is the “norm,” which is, of course, a fiction.

With that said, I can’t say that I have a problem with a fantasy sex world existing, pending it is circumscribed and designated between consenting adults.  But I do have a problem when those fantasies start being projected on real people trying to live their lives in peace.

Personally, I am much more disturbed by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is a supposedly non-sexist, sober-minded American standard that has continuously and seemingly willfully made errors of fact concerning specific allegations of rape and sexual assault on my former campus against one professor in particular.  These two cases don’t concern me personally in the slightest, but the negligence with which The Chronicle has addressed them here, here, and here – and the way in which every other news source has parroted Kipnis’ thesis again and again, from Jezebel to NPR to Reason just yesterday – is distressing to me,  to say the least.  I don’t know what to call it, save a snow job.

I think Kipnis, who repeatedly calls herself a Leftist and a Feminist and then gives not one whit of proof by way of any of her arguments is more damaging to Feminism than Playboy, because she’s more sinister and covert.  And if I were to be mad at Noah Berlatsky for being published in Playboy I’d likewise have to be miffed that he’s published by Reason.  I mean, Kipnis actually says in her latest interview that she feels sorry for men making 98 cents on their past dollar when women currently make some 70-something cents.  Ha!  Wow.  I honestly can’t wrap my head around this. And she also re-uses the same example of an “anonymous prof and student dating” which she was specifically taken to task for here because it’s from the professor’s testimony only and concerns a rape case that is still being considered.

Anyway, while I do understand that you’re angered by the existence of Playboy, I’d be really happy if you might consider those day-to-day factors which might lead a woman to choose sex work and attack those much bigger issues, as opposed to attacking sex work, itself.

Because, ultimately, I think the main reason that you and Noah butt heads is because you’re trying to deconstruct Femininity and those with less power, when you really might want to start with Masculinity and those with more power.  Masculinity is a far more damaging and destructive force than Femininity at the moment, as the two genders are currently culturally coded. And Femininity is put down all the time. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see Whorephobia as anything other than internalized hatred that originates from male violence.  Because let’s be honest: We’re called “whore” no matter what we do.  Or to quote Emma Goldman:

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.”

Anyway, I’m rather sorry this is so long and I sincerely thank you if you made it to the end.  I don’t want to start a feud with you and I don’t want to convert you.  Indeed, I don’t really expect anything from you.  But I did want to share my perspective with you because I am angry, I am Feminist, I am activist (albeit despite myself), but my traumas and targets seem to be a bit different than yours.  It sort of seems a shame that we should be on different sides.  But then, I suppose it takes all kinds.

Take care, and thanks for your time, Meghan. – Nix

Whose Gender is Artificial?

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Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.
 

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.
 

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Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

P. Marie, Zoe Samudzi, and Julia Serano on Feminist Exclusion

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Last week I wrote a piece about Laverne Cox’s nude photoshoot for Allure and how various feminisms have often failed black women and trans women. The piece was in particular a response to a post by Meghan Murphy in which she criticized Cox in what I argued were transphobic, racist, and cruel terms.

For my essay I conducted several interviews — but as often happens, I was only able to use little bits of them. The interviews were all really thoughtful and enlightening, though, and it seemed a shame to waste them. So I asked folks if it would be okay to reprint them here, and everyone (including Playboy) kindly agreed. All the interviews are below, from shortest to longest responses, more or less. My questions are in italics; answers are of course by the interviewees.
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P. Marie is a former sex worker; she blogs a mix of trash, nail art, and selfies at pmariejust.tumblr.com and @_peech on twitter.

Why has feminism and radical feminism had trouble respecting black women?

As far as I can see, the problem can be boiled down to (among many things) entitlement and a sense of ownership. For decades, white feminism has said things like “being a voice for the voiceless” – essentially taking ownership of the voices (and bodies) of Black women, sex workers, and Transgender people through exclusion and subscribing to violent, racist, and transphobic rhetoric.

While at points in history, speaking up to protect others was necessary and desired by us from them, it’s now turned into a clear case of overbearing entitlement and greed for the spotlight. Opportunistic hatred is published quickly and easily by both news houses and blogs with large followings, giving bigoted white feminists a platform to share their trash with a digital megaphone.

The shame in all this is how difficult it seems for feminists as a community to see this happening as often as it does.

With dangerous ideas like “women born women”, the new emergence of the “rescue industry”, and anti sex work and anti black feminists these newest waves of feminism are going on the offensive and becoming more harmful by the day. The problem blooms larger when the actuality of “being the voice for the voiceless” is comprised solely of ignoring people who are willing to speak for themselves. Feminism isn’t helping anyone anymore – unless helping yourself to take the stage by way of abusing women you don’t like counts, and I don’t think it should.

Could you talk just briefly as a black woman and a sex worker what your reaction to the Laverne Cox photos are? Is it empowering or satisfying to see black women recognized as beautiful in that way? Do you see sexualized images of black women as a problem at all, or does it depend on agency/the situation?

As for my reaction to Laverne’s pictures, I feel a sense of happiness for her. She’s done interviews and spoken about her self esteem/appearance, and to see her be able to have those photos done and (very obviously) look and feel so beautiful, what a happy moment. It helps me as an individual when I see any Black woman feeling beautiful and sharing that with the world – reminding people we ARE beautiful, desirable, feminine, and strong – which is exactly, thankfully, what Laverne Cox has done for us.

When it comes to sexualized images of us, for me it’s all about agency! Did we consent? Are we respected? Is this our choice? Is this a collection of body parts or erased humanity? There are a lot of questions that run through my mind at that intersection of sex work and being a Black woman.

What Laverne Cox did put a smile on many faces and some hope in a lot of hearts. I think there are very few better things a person could do in life.
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Zoe Samudzi is a researcher and activist; she’s a project assistant at UCSF. You can follow her on twitter, @ztsamudzi.

Could you talk just briefly about how some strains of radical feminism have marginalized black women and trans women? Like, specifically, why does feminism have trouble embracing those groups? Are the reasons linked?

It isn’t just radical feminism, but also mainstream White Feminism that has targeted and excluded women of color, sex workers, trans women, and others marginalized identities. But these radical second wave feminisms emerged in reaction to traditional femininity, a part of which is female sexuality, which they characterized as “slavery to patriarchy.” These radical feminisms, in my opinion, don’t even feign inclusivity: there’s a very prescriptive understanding of what emancipation and liberation looks like and in the rejection of femininity, it fails to recognize women’s agency (including sexual agency). Couple this misogynistic demonization of femininity with the general devaluing of certain bodies and identities – black women, trans women, and sex workers most notably – and you have shaming, commentaries about “self-objectification” (actually the imposition of the male gaze) when women pose nude, refusal to recognise sex workers as agents, and so on. This exclusion and marginalisation links to white female entitlement and the refusal to de-center whiteness. White women have historically been perpetrators of violence against black women’s bodies, and the same entitlement and identity-centerdness in feminism has enabled them to proclaim themselves as the arbiters of womanhood. It’s also worth nothing that it isn’t just radical feminism that has marginalized trans women and sex workers: that has and does happen in black feminism/womanism, as well.

Do you see fashion images of black women as disempowering? empowering? Some mix of both? Do black women have a different relationship to objectification/sexualization than white women do?

I guess I don’t pay them much attention, but the models are gorgeous. Beyond being empowering or disempowering, I see fashion images of black women as promoting similar discouraging messages about body images as white ones. But black women lend an element of “cool” and afford a cultural capital to fashion that white models to not (they’re always thrown in there for some performance of athleticism or exoticism). The objectification of black women is both gendered and racialized: there’s not only a gendered sexualization, but also a fetishization as an exotic radicalised “other.”

I know you don’t identify as a feminist right now…I guess I wondered what feminism would have to do to get you back? What needs to change before you’d feel comfortable identifying as a feminist again?

I don’t think I’ll ever identify as a feminist again, though there’s a tremendous amount of scholarship in marginal feminisms (i.e. from sex workers, in transfeminism, from migrant/immigrant women, from disabled women, from women in the Global South, and so on). I’m not spending any more energy trying to convince white women that my identity is worthy: I’d rather invest my energy in gender politics grounded in intersectional understandings, as womanism is.
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Julia Serano is a trans feminist and author. Her most recent book is Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

Why has feminism been so resistant to including trans women?

There was a time when most feminists (like society at large) were very resistant toward trans women, largely because of misconceptions that people in general had about us. But with increasing trans awareness over the last ten or twenty years, most strands of feminism now acknowledge (and sometimes ally with) trans people and issues. One major exception has been trans-exclusive radical feminists (often called TERFs).

While they may differ to some degree in their perspectives, most TERFs subscribe to a single-issue view of sexism, where men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story. This rigidly binary view of sexism erases transgender perspectives. It leads TERFs to view trans men as “dupes” or “traitors” who have bought into patriarchy’s insistence that being a man is superior to being a woman. This framing also leads them to depict trans women as entitled men who are “infiltrating” women’s spaces and “parodying” women’s oppression, or as “gender-confused” or androgynous people who transition to female in some hapless attempt to “assimilate” into the gender binary. Which is so bizarre that they think that, because no one in the straight mainstream views out trans women as being well-respected legitimate gendered citizens!

Is that linked to, or how is it linked to, feminism’s discussions of objectification, or with its discomfort with sex workers/sexualized portrayals of women?

Yes. Their single-issue view of sexism (i.e., men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story) ignores intersectionality—the fact that there are many forms of sexism and marginalization that exacerbate one another, and that people who experience multiple forms of marginalization may view sexism (and feminist responses to sexism) very differently.

Some feminists (including many trans-exclusionary ones) forward the following overly simplistic argument: In patriarchy, men sexualize and objectify women, therefore women should avoid being sexualized and objectified, because it is inherently disempowering and anti-feminist. This seems to be the case that Meghan Murphy is making. But it ignores the fact that all women are not seen and interpreted the same in the eyes of society. If you happen to be a disabled woman, or a woman of color, or a queer or trans woman, or a sex worker, then you are also constantly receiving messages that you are *not* considered desirable or loveable according to society’s norms.

Feminists have long discussed the “virgin/whore” double-bind: If we express our sexualities and/or expose our bodies, many people will sexualize and objectify us. But if we repress our sexualities and hide our bodies, that also has negative ramifications, especially for those of us who are deemed to be non-normative or undesirable for some reason or another.

I completely understand why, in a world that constantly attempts to erase and eradicate trans women of color, Laverne Cox might feel that that photo-shoot might be empowering for her and for other trans women who share similar identities, backgrounds, or circumstances. This does not by any means imply that they are “buying into the system”—rather, it most likely means that they are navigating their own way through society’s mixed messages (e.g., women are seen as sexual objects, but at the same time, trans women and women of color are viewed as sexually deviant, undesirable, or sexual abominations).

Laverne Cox is an outspoken feminist who has been raising public awareness about sexism and multiple forms of marginalization for several years now. Given that history, Murphy’s response seemed especially condescending to me. It is okay for feminists to disagree. But when you accuse someone who is creating positive change in so many ways of “reinforcing” sexism (especially when they face obstacles that you do not have to face), then you should probably consider whether you are the one who is “holding back the movement” by excluding women who differ in their experiences from you.
 

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