Faye’s argument for “transfeminism” as a daughter of the second wave, then, has merit. It continues this matrilineal dynamic in one further way: by embracing the “matricidal” dynamic described by Susan Faludi.
Mothers have only the most tenuous presence in The Transgender Issue. Only two get more than passing, warm mention: Faye’s own mother (in the dedication), and the supportive mother of a transgender-identified child.
Mothers as a political group are (in Faye’s characteristically tendentious style) airbrushed out. Reflecting on why British feminism in particular is resistant to the inclusion of trans women, Faye blames this on all manner of things, from a hostile press, to (somehow) the British Empire, while leaving out perhaps the most central rallying-point for “gender critical” activism: Mumsnet, or as it’s sometimes dubbed by those infuriated by its members’ stubborn wrongthink, “Prosecco 4chan”.
Mumsnet’s feminism pages have played a central role in gender critical activism politics for over a decade, a fact not unconnected to Mumsnetters’ (usually) shared experience of maternity. It is, after all, more difficult to take seriously the idea that “woman” is an identity, when you’ve experienced pregnancy, childbirth and the shift in outlook and social role that comes with motherhood. But for Faye, the possibility that mothers might have experiences in common, and views of their own, doesn’t merit airtime.
In The Transgender Issue, mothers appear as bit-part players. Some are kind blunderers who don’t understand their children’s identity needs; others are violently transphobic. Inasmuch we appear as a class at all in connection with the female reproductive role, we’re either gender-diverse “people with uteruses” (ie not mothers), or else women in need of abortion services so they can avoid becoming mothers.
Again, in keeping with second-wave feminism, Faye is keen to sever any connection between women and gestation. In one footnote, the notion that pregnancy is a women’s issue is dismissed as “conservative and regressive”. With that, a key locus of specifically female political interest is reframed as a set of fertility services, that can and should be detached from “woman” as a concept, and whose “postcode lottery” availability represents yet another injustice to the trans community.
Shon Faye’s “transgender liberation”, then, sits in intimately ambivalent mother/daughter relationship with the feminism that birthed it. It embraces the conceptual legacy of second-wave feminism; then, in accordance with that heritage, also rejects motherhood and maternity. And, at the same time rejecting its own second-wave heritage, which (we gather) wasn’t nearly radical enough but instead merely accepted a set of minor improvements to the conditions for bourgeois women under capitalism.
Nor is it enough, in Faye’s view, to replicate such marginal gains for well-off, white, transgender people. Such activism (which the book exemplifies in Stonewall’s corporate “diversity” activism) affords at best superficial improvements without addressing The System that claims the right to determine who is or isn’t “acceptably trans under capitalism”.
For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.
To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs. And it would be boundlessly giving with medical, housing and therapeutic resources – up to and including laser hair removal and gamete-freezing, resources certainly not universally available to other groups on the NHS.
It ought, Faye declares, “to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around”. Even as it rhetorically sidesteps literal mothers, then, true liberation, is a political regime that sets out liberate women from the need to be mothers, by itself embodying the once-archetypal maternal qualities of empathy, nurture and support.
Faye characterises as “frankly unhinged” Germaine Greer’s argument in The Whole Woman that transgender women are engaged in a form of symbolic matricide. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say Greer didn’t go far enough. That is, it’s not just transfeminism that’s engaged in symbolic matricide, it’s pretty much all of it, from the second wave onwards.
Other strands have, of course, emerged over many decades of sometimes rancorous feminist debate. But Shon Faye makes a convincing case for transgender activism as the matricidal inheritrix of a profoundly matricidal strand in that debate.
And perhaps the regime of therapeutic totalitarianism The Transgender Issue proposes, to replace our current social order, is the true inheritance of this matricidal liberation. For since the likes of Dworkin and Firestone were writing, those women who didn’t want to be like their martyred mothers have increasingly swapped caring for toddlers favour of entry into public and working life.
In tandem, the care of even very young children has since been increasingly outsourced to institutional providers. Many of these young people are now adults: generations for whom, increasingly commonly, the earliest infant experiences of nurture are fused with a more impersonal, institutional authority.
Perhaps it’s natural that such adults would dream of a political regime on the same template of nurturing authoritarianism. And perhaps, too, Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again is the true contemporary legacy of the second wave’s mummy issues.
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