Historiann is wondering if there’s solid evidence that Mary Daly actually was transphobic. After a food-fight erupted in comments on Shakesville’s post, “RIP Mary Daly,” Historiann asks:
Did any of the very opinionated commenters [at Shakesville] who were so very concerned about Daly’s transphobia offer quotations, or, you know, any actual evidence of her grave sins against humanity? (I mean, aside from citing Wikipedia?) Did anyone do what Mary Daly herself did her whole life–commit scholarship by citing evidence, chapter and verse?
(More here.)
Now, I wasn’t involved in that pile-on because I’m generally uncomfortable with how the laudable idea of safe space sometimes becomes a silencing mechanism at Shakesville, and so I never comment there. I fully agree with Historiann: the snap judgments in that comment thread epitomize a real problem in feminist blogdonia – a tendency to assume bad faith and judge quickly and harshly.
But yeah, Daly did write some nasty things in Gyn/Ecology. I spent some time today digging through it (the relevant passages can all be found online, though you have to cobble them together from Amazon and Google Books). I didn’t find the term “Frankensteinian” applied verbatim to transsexuals, so technically Wikipedia may be incorrect in imputing it to her (or maybe I just didn’t find it). But only technically. I’ll get to the Frankenstein thing in a moment.
First, some context. Saying that radical feminists/hags must find their own selves, Daly cautions against being “swallowed up in male-centered (Dionysian) confusion. Hags find our own boundaries, our own definitions.” So far, so good. What’s not to like about defining one’s own boundaries? It’s smart and healthy, both personally and politically. But then Daly starts crossing my boundaries:
The Dionysian solution for women, which is violation of our own Hag-ocratic boundaries, is The Final Solution. To succumb to this seductive invitation is to become incorporated into the Mystical Body of Maledom, that is, to become ‘living’ dead women, forever pumping our own blood into the Heavenly Head, giving head to the Holy Host, losing our heads.
This is an example of Daly’s language-play leading her into incoherence. Meaning disintegrates: what does it mean to give head to the Holy Host? Last I knew, you chew on the host, which is sort of the opposite of what men appear to enjoy in fellatio – or have I been missing out on something important? There’s no substance in that metaphor, only a drive-by condemnation of blow jobs.
But that’s a frivolous point. What made me flinch here – and we haven’t gotten to the transphobia yet – was her appropriation of the Holocaust. It’s legitimate to look at genocide in comparative history. It’s not okay to use it as a metaphor for women identifying with men.
This notion of a Dionysian Final Solution forms the launching pad for Daly’s attack on trans people:
Dionysus sometimes assumed a girl-like form. The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing “black face,” he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it. In the phenomenon of transsexualism, the incorporation/confusion is deeper. As ethicist Janice Raymond has pointed out, the majority of transsexuals are “male to female,” while transsexed females basically function as tokens, and are used by the rulers of the transsexual empire to hide the real nature of the game. In transsexualism, males put on “female” bodies (which are in fact pseudofemale).
(This and previous quotations are from Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism
, 67-8)
Here, Daly uncritically appropriates Raymond’s notion of a transsexual empire – a sort of conspiracy by men to invade and colonize women’s bodies and the feminist movement. She expresses no skepticism, only approval. I don’t see any way to redeem this. It’s transphobic through and through.
Two pages later, the next section is titled “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon.” Daly positions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as “prophetic,” claiming it foretold “the technological fathers’ fusion of male mother-miming and necrophilia in a boundary violation that ultimately points toward the total elimination of women.” (70)
So Daly’s appropriation of the “Final Solution” is no accident. She literally warns against a genocide that would wipe out all women.
How would this occur?
Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes.”
(Gyn/Ecology, 70-71)
Other “manifestations of phallotechnic boundary violations” include “male-created genetic engineering” and cyborgs along with behavioral psychology and “other Master Mothers, such as physicians and surgeons (especially in gynecology/obstetrics and in neurosurgery), psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors of all kinds.” (71)
Not to make any excuses for the history of gynecology, which is absolutely rife with human rights abuses, but “transphobic” almost seems like too weak a word. The most charitable reading of this passage positions MTF (male-to-female) transsexuals as the unwitting dupes of evil surgeons. Alternatively, MTF transsexuals are themselves agents intent on destroying the female world.
So no, I didn’t catch the word “Frankensteinian” in the midst of all this, but that doesn’t make it any prettier. Transsexuals are at least associated – and possibly identified – with necrophiliacs and power-mad men. They are described as modern-day, real-world Frankensteins. This is defamatory. This is hate speech.
Daly returns to transsexuals in her flights of fantasy at the end of Gyn/Ecology. While describing an “Amazonian Dissembly,” she imagines a group she calls “the Obsessors” who are purveyors of women’s sexualization, bearing such items as cosmetics, Penthouse, and the Pill:
It is also noted that among this faction there are some who appear to be eunuchs. One is carrying a placard which reads: “I am a lesbian-feminist male-to-female transsexual. Take me in.” As they begin to file off the platform two Harpies swoop down into their midst, causing them to stumble and stagger in all directions.” (420)
It’s clear that Daly denies trans people the basic respect of acknowledging their own identity. Even more, she calls them “eunuchs,” implying they are sexless. And in the end, she gleefully imagines them being driven off from the gathering of women.
Except, of course, this scene didn’t only occur in Daly’s imagination. Self-identified radical feminists have often excluded trans women in real life. They just haven’t had the aid of flying Harpies.
But that’s only the end of Gyn/Ecology, which was published in 1978; it’s not the end of Daly’s career. (In my head, I’m channelling Paul Harvey: “And now you know … the rest of the story.) In comments to my previous post, Xochitl – a young woman who worked personally with Daly – states that Daly renounced such transphobic views later in life:
I got to know Mary in the last few years of her life – and of course I had to speak up for my trans friends – I’ll gladly report that Mary no longer held the same trans-phobic views that Jan Raymond expressed in her dissertation decades ago. I cannot report changes about Raymond’s thoughts only because I have not followed up on how her ideas developed. But I can attest that Mary’s own thoughts and perspective on this definitely changed – which only makes sense considering that for her to live is to change and move and grow with the movement of Ultimate Intimate Reality – Goddess is Verb for Mary Daly – there is no way she would have maintained static ideas.
One day I will write more on this – I do not want future generations of feminists, trans friends included, thinking of Mary Daly as their enemy.
She really is an ally. Of course this is not to diminish the harm and effect that any trans-phobic expressions will continue to have. That’s the risk any of us take when we put something in writing – it seems so permanently true. But in reality, all texts simply capture one moment – it is only a reflection of that one moment in ones developing thoughts and theories…
I have no reason to doubt Xochitl and pretty good cause to believe her. Judging from her blog, she strikes me as smart and principled. She describes herself as queer and Christian in an unorthodox way (if I’ve read it right). Yes, she’s got some personal loyalties, but her political and religious commitments are her own, not Daly’s.
It would have been wonderful if Mary Daly had publicly renounced those transphobic passages from Gyn/Ecology. I’m not aware of her having done so – but if anyone knows better, please correct me. (I’m not so interested in static ideas, myself, especially if they’re wrong!) Daly could have sent a signal to the younger generations of women who’ve embraced radical-cultural feminism and its attendant idea that the mere existence of trans people poses a danger to “real” (cis) women. Whatever one’s feelings about the content of her work, Daly lived a remarkable life. Disowning her transphobia would have been a generous gesture that might have influenced younger generations. It might even have opened up her legacy to the trans people and their allies who know her only as the philosopher who called them power-mad, necrophiliac monsters in the shadow of Frankenstein.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
[...] this post is a quote that accuses detractor’s of merely quoting wikipedia, and I find that so [...]
In her final, backward glance over the linear history of “her” feminism, she repudiated separatism in the form that not only existed but that she had largely midwived.
She felt that it had produced a partiarchal matriarchy, with women filling the roles of men as oppressor and hed become largely exclusory rather than inclusory.
Which is why she didn’t make quite so much headway in European feminist academe’ .
Nonetheless, she saw what she had brought into being, the outcome, and pointed out its inherent discriminatory and frequently anti-women nature, a discordant element in feminism and the sort of thing that my own mentor decried; “I tell you Chica that no greater abomination exists than women denying their spirit of sisterhood and instead becoming the oppressor.” -Rebeca, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Daly saw what had happened, she did renounce it. Not trans-discrimination by name, but the root of trans-discrimination, an elitist, purist , “more feminist than thou” heirarchal structure that become as much as an oppressor within our ranks as the patriarchy had been.
And Mary had the academic honesty and integrity and sense of personal morality to repudiate herself.
Maura, I agree with the analysis of radical (cultural) feminism having produced a patriarchal matriarchy, albeit one confined to certain pockets of the larger culture.
However, I’m still looking for citations to any article or interview in which Daly renounced any of her previous views! I know she later believed that her first two books didn’t go far enough in elevating women over human being. But as for her later years? Evidence, please, if you’ve got it!
I ask not just out of arcane academic interest, but because such evidence might force at least some cultural feminists to rethink their transphobic presuppositions, as well as other problematic parts of their ideology.
Arguably, she may not just have been appropriating Raymond’s notion of a transsexual empire. Notice how this book was published in 1978 and Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” was published in 1979.
Supposedly, Daly was the dissertation advisor on Raymond’s dissertation that was later published as “The Transsexual Empire”. So she would’ve had access to a copy, but it’s far from clear who inspired whom.
Well, having gone through the dissertation process, I’m reasonably certain that I learned more from my advisor than she did from me. We can’t know how the relationship worked between Raymond and Daly, but it’s clear that Daly quite uncritically embraced the ideas that Raymond published. You’re right that it’s not clear who inspired whom. It’s easy to imagine a process of mutual influence.
Thanks for your comment!
In the acknowledgements section of Gyn/Ecology when Daly thanks Raymond, she says something about how she can’t tell where Raymond’s thoughts end and hers begin or something like that. Given the massive numbers of references to Gyn/Ecology in Raymond’s book (and then vice versa as the New Intergalactic Version, or whatever it’s called, of Gyn/Ecology added references to Transsexual Empire), it seems a fair characterisation.
Thanks for the added info, Lucy.
BTW, I really loved your fisking of Julie Bindel. It was thorough, insightful, and probably more fair than she deserved!
It’s this “uncritical” uptake of ideas that’s so problematic. Sometimes academics quote other scholars in order to critically engage with them. In the case of Daly and Raymond, there’s no apparent critical distance whatsoever.
Sungold, I responded on my thread but in case you weren’t going to check back, I just wanted to let you know that I didn’t mean to hate on you, I linked here because you did a perfect job of finding the truth, the way more people should.
I’ve seen countless threads, like you said, where people just don’t even mention it, yours was the only post actually taking the time to set the record straight.
Thanks, FW. I did go back to your thread, but I appreciate your saying it here, too.
Last I knew, you chew on the host, which is sort of the opposite of what men appear to enjoy in fellatio – or have I been missing out on something important?
No, no, NO! You must NEVER chew on the host! Don’t you know you will GO STRAIGHT TO HELL if you do? It’s what I was taught, over and over, during the late 60s-early 70s in Catholic school.
Any Mass I attended from 3rd-7th grade, I ended up with slimy host goop stuck to the roof of my mouth. Because it was a sin to chew.
After I posted this, I realized that my Presbyterian/UCC roots are showing! We had actual bread – and once I moved to California, it was nice fresh sourdough bread. But I’ve had a couple of Catholic and ex-Catholic partners (including my husband) and so I should have thought of the difference.
I’m imagining the host goop, and thinking maybe it’s not so different from fellatio after all. (Sorry to be gross, but I couldn’t resist!)
Sady’s post at Tiger Beatdown does a good job too, I thought:
http://tigerbeatdown.com/?p=704
anyway, I don’t know any trans people who think Daly is anything remotely resembling an ally; it’s nice that she said whatever in private, but it doesn’t really mean jack where i counts, I don’t think. It’s like saying Falwell had a change of heart wrt teh gay in private and some of his best friends were etc.
Which is why I said she really would’ve needed to publicly repudiate her transphobic writings. It is possible that she didn’t have that much of a change of heart. It’s also possible that any such change happened after her health went in to decline. I read that she suffered from a form of paralysis in her last years (but I don’t know what – ALS or similar?), which must have been pretty tough and might have put an end to her public life.
But I agree 100% that private opinions don’t count for much if your public actions don’t match ‘em. If she ever did apologize or simply recant, I’d like to know where, which is why I left the door open for further evidence in my post. I’d be surprised if any evidence exists, though.
Thanks for pointing out Sady’s post. I didn’t get into the Audre Lorde thing, but like Sady, I think the public accountability is key.
(This is a really good post; thank you. I get a little annoyed when people demand chapter and verse on hate speech, too.)
Some of Falwell’s best friends almost certainly were.
I’m not buying it, either–and there’s a certain amount of hoisted by her own petard, too. Secrecy doesn’t aid the reconciliation process. Cf. The Church.
his speech writer, Mel White….now heads up Soulforce.
and as for that public apology…. it wouldn’t have been generous. it was necessary. you can’t hedge your bets on a career of public scholarship with some conversations with grad students.
i’ve seen profs think out loud, and i’ve seen them write. and the accountability comes in the writing.
Slyc – You’re right. Accountability is much more pertinent than generosity. Thanks for calling me out on a choice of words that was inadequate.
As a scholar myself, I agree that one’s public words are what counts, with a minor caveat: If a fair-minded biographer later interviews lots of people who were close to her subject, and they all concur that this person had a private change of heart, that’s interesting and something I’d want to know. I intended my final paragraph as an invitation for someone to substantiate that Daily really did change her views and that she expressed her revised ideas beyond a small circle of confidantes.
However. The damage done by Daly (and Raymond, and their followers) was public. It cannot begin to be recitified without a public apology. I highly doubt that Daly ever offered such an apology, because her defenders would have trotted it out by now.
also, she was Raymond’s advisor, so it’s not that clear who actually influenced whom, there.
Just a quick explanation of catholic ritual in Daly’s time.
The priest places the host (the literal body of christ) on the tongue of a congregant to be sucked, NOT chewed. To fully understand many of Daly’s references, you really do have to have either been raised catholic, gone to catholic schools or had a very rigorous theological education in the fathers of the church.
All of her work is filled with complex references.
I find her critique of male medical models right on, from lobotomy, to plastic surgery, to gynecolgical practices in general. It may be transphobic to be horrified at male born people being cut up to be made to look like “traditional” women, but then again, years from now, when trans people are dying young from cancer, or the drugs run out, well the MTFs who are dead or not able to get the drugs in “modern” societies are going to be at risk in ways we can’t imagine.
Many intersex groups get very angry at trans appropriation of their issues.
One transwoman I talked to who had surgery in Thailand said that she knew the risks were explained to her, and she expected to die young as a result. I was shocked to hear this, and didn’t know what response to make.
I agree that Daly’s work is complex, and you’re right that she’s reacting specifically to the Catholic context in which she grew up. Tinfoil Hattie already pointed this out above, and I replied that it’s different for Protestants, but I should have been more specific about that to start with.
As for your comments on trans issues – I’m skeptical when I see a phrase like “many intersex groups.” Which groups? While I certainly agree that trans people and intersex people don’t face identical issues, I’m wary of such a broad generalization, which itself could easily be read as transphobic. I would ask you to refrain from sweeping, unspecific criticisms of this sort.
I also don’t see any basis for you contention that there’s a risk that the drugs will run out. There are some risks associated with taking hormones, but if vast numbers of trans people were dying young from cancer, we’d be hearing about it already, because there are plenty of trans people who already in their middle years and beyond, enough to be able to assess the risks. I’m not contending that there are no risks to sex reassignment surgery or hormones – virtually all medical interventions hold some risk – but it would be incredibly paternalistic of me to tell people they can’t assume some risk for a benefit that is very important to them. And if you listen to what trans people say, transition is hard, life can be hard before and after – but they are doing what they need to do.
A statement like “well the MTFs who are dead or not able to get the drugs in “modern” societies are going to be at risk in ways we can’t imagine” strikes me as pure fear-mongering. I let this comment through moderation because I appreciated your comments on Catholic ritual, but any further comments that make broad unsupported generalizations of trans people will not be allowed.
Also, the potential risks of medical transition are for trans people to address and deal with and between them, their doctors, and perhaps their families. We don’t need cis people to insert their agendas and concern, especially when they’re clearly not informed on the topic.
Clicked the wrong reply, meant this to ShielaG’s comment.
Lisa, I think it’s clear that you’re replying to SheilaG, but thanks anyway for the clarification.
I know of no intersex groups that have taken a public stance on transsexual appropriation of intersex experience, and I have been deeply involved in intersex issues, as recently as 2007, and a general reader even today.
As for *many* intersex groups, well, if you think that there ARE *many* intersex groups, you have no reasonable concept of intersex experience at all.
Privately, my conversations with a number of people prominently involved in ISNA (Intersex Society of North America for those not ITN) have involved critiques of appropriation of intersex identity and experience. This comes in 2 forms, one is transsexual people stating that they *know* that transsexuality has a firm, determinative biological basis that simply hasn’t been yet specified, that this biological basis is equivalent to an intersex medical condition, and that *thus* medical interventions should be covered by insurance and transsexuality should not face the stigma associated with mental illness.
The second form is constituted by the actions of various professionals who make money off intersex people by posing as authorities on intersex. This comes in the form of novels, like “Middlesex” and also in the form of pediatric urologists describing intersex conditions as horrible, monstrous, and requiring “cure.”
Guess which one they care about more? Guess which one they have denounced publicly and which they only grumble about privately?
If – and that’s an important if – the conversations I’ve had are with representative people, then the opinion in the activist intersex community [which is, I think, the community to which SheilaG was referring] is primarily, these are people who have a very serious condition, the condition may indeed have a biological basis, they are being discriminated against in a most cruel fashion in many aspects of their lives, they mis-perceive how intersex is treated because they are focused on 2 issues – insurance coverage and stigma,…and all of the above have led them to make rash statements. They should be accountable for those statements, but that accountability should reflect the cruel situation in which they find themselves. Although it is never *ok* to appropriate another’s experience, the people with whom I have spoken most understand why it happens and, while wishing it would stop, don’t want to add to intersex *and* transsexual struggles by taking the topic on.
I say all this b/c it seems information on this was genuinely lacking and a couple people seemed to be looking for more information.
*However*… the bad actions, and when counting bad actions, we’re certainly not talking axe-murder here, of members of a group *do not justify* [i could say that 19 more times all in caps, but it would be tedious] the oppression of that group.
If the behavior rises to actual criminality, the CJS will involve itself. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on how you view prisons and the role of prisons in racism and other oppressive systems, and how you view the entire CJS in general. If the behavior doesn’t rise to that level – or even if it does – we can critique the individual’s behavior. IF there are larger forces that inspire/encourage such behavior, we can address those. But…
the appropriate response is not fantasizing about genocide, or inspiring people to slur an entire group.
Also, the words of SheilaG imply that when Daly wrote Gyn/Ecology she was desperately concerned with not only the long-term health of transsexual people, but also the appropriation of intersex experience.
I call BS.
Daly did some good things. She did some bad things. She was a human being -surprise.
But those among us who more heavily value the good things she did are not enhancing her legacy by making s*t up about how the bad things she did were really actually just before-their-time, prophetically wonderful acts of caring for groups which she never – ever – ever named publicly with love and concern during her lifetime.
Even if I read the apologists right, they do not assert that, in private conversation, when other people said messed-up, trans-hating things she contested the trans-hatred.
Rather, the apologists assert that she said messed up, trans-hating things even near the end of her life, that one particular apologist in question had to “stand up” for trans friends, and that *after* she was called on her BS to her face, she privately told someone with whom she had a personal relationship that…
?She didn’t mean it?
?Sorry, old habit?
?You have to admit that what I am saying now is nothing compared to what I said 25 years ago?
I don’t know, but she must have still been saying messed-up things if even the *apologist* asserts that the context in which these conversations took place were other-people’s-challenges to Daly’s ongoing trans-hatred. I would be very interested to hear a fuller description of exactly what passed between Daly and her defender(s).
So, in sum, when you trot out intersex experience to say that:
Daly wasn’t bad when she fantasized about genocide, murder, and assault…while advocating *actual* denial of care, denial of rights & denial of basic human dignity
I’ve to point out…
…Aren’t you appropriating intersex experience in order to create an argument that you think serves your Daly-beatificating ends which actually serves only to inform your audience that you don’t know the difference between current inter-community struggles and advocating death and oppression?
I leave the answer to that question to the judgment of those here assembled. But I’d seriously be careful of that “appropriating intersex experience” accusation if I were SheilaG.
Cripdyke
It may be transphobic to be horrified at male born people being cut up to be made to look like “traditional” women, but then again, years from now, when trans people are dying young from cancer, or the drugs run out, well the MTFs who are dead or not able to get the drugs in “modern” societies are going to be at risk in ways we can’t imagine.
Many intersex groups get very angry at trans appropriation of their issues.
One transwoman I talked to who had surgery in Thailand said that she knew the risks were explained to her, and she expected to die young as a result. I was shocked to hear this, and didn’t know what response to make.
Um. Whoa. I don’t even know what that middle paragraph is doing here, but just, whoa about the rest of it, there. Concern for trans folks’ well-being and access to medicine and appropriate health care is all well and good, but is very clearly not what Daly was demonstrating in the above passages, and, frankly, does not look like what you’re demonstrating here. Seriously, it looks like you are advocating denying trans folks even the care we now get, “for our own good”.
Trans people by and large, like the trans woman you talked to, know that if we ask for medical intervention in our lives, we are largely asking for clinically untested intervention, and that no one even knows what the long terms health implications are. That few studies are done on the effects of hormones and surgery as they’re used by trans people, and that even fewer are done with a primary focus on trans people’s actual well-being. If we then choose medical intervention in our lives, you better believe we’re doing that to fix problems for which it is the best solution we have available (if it even is available to us.) Taking away that best solution doesn’t do anyone any favors. The right response isn’t to wish we didn’t have the ability to fix our lives so they’re comfortable and livable. It’s to ensure our continued access to better and safer health care, if you’re worried about our health.
Allison, I’m glad you chimed in with a first-person perspective. Thanks.
As I said above, I only let SheilaG’s comment through because the first paragraph presented a legit point. But I’m not going to let this thread degenerate into condescending nonsense that suggests trans people are dupes or should not choose medical interventions. Further comments along these lines will not be allowed.
Or the drugs run out?
Where do you think they come from, Alaskan oil fields? Trans women are on exogenous hormones. If anyone’s cutting into the supply, it’s those wasteful fertile cis women on the Pill.
Another commenter and the OP already dealt with this comment, but your blithe ignorance of a whole community’s actual medical issues is transphobia in action. You are ignorant, and yet you don’t seem to have felt any need to educate yourself. You make groundless assertions about transsexuality and medicine as though they made any sense at all. You’re about as accurate, honestly, as those pro-lifers who will not let go of the carginogenic abortion shibboleth. You should stop.
It is also inaccurate to pretend that Mary Daly’s transphobia was even as generous as paternalism. She was not concerned with the wellbeing of trans people. She would have been happy to see them wiped out of existence–preferably by the abolition of medical transition, but by actual violence if necessary. She did not see them as patients in need. They were the disease itself.
Yeah, I spent 10 years on the Pill … which comes in for Daly’s scorn … oh, man, I think it’s turtles all the way down.
Seriously, I love the idea that hormones come from the Alaskan oil fields. We can put ‘em in a pipeline! We can send them to Russia! Sarah Palin needs a new job, so we could put her in charge …
SheilaG’s post was bristling with weasel words like “many” and woefully short on actual evidence. Thanks, piny, for taking the time to add your perspective. Any of us who’ve followed your posts on Feministe know that you know what you’re talking about.
The point should be made–and it bears repeating, I think–that if it’s wrong for men to medicalize women’s bodies, it’s just as wrong for cis people (including cis women. Even cis feminist women) to medicalize trans people’s bodies.
I mean, I think that would follow, ne c’est pas?
Oui, oui. Except I’m not sure that “medicalize” is the only term applicable, or the best. To me, it looks more like “colonizing” – because transphobic feminists aren’t actually offering any medical expertise. Oh, and “pathologize” probably fits the bill too.
By the way, that’s just about the limit of my French!
Es wird besser sein auf Deutsch?
It depends what the meaning of “es” is. If you mean my language capacities – ja, natürlich! If you mean Daly’s ideas – no, they’re no less offensive in translation. And actually all this Final Solution stuff would sound even nastier (to my ears) when translated into “Endlösung” and such.
What is this? I don’t even… Seriously, if trans people were likely to die of cancer from transition-related health care, we’ve already had nearly 60 years of trans women transitioning and remaining on estrogen for years or decades to observe that this simply does not happen.
In some cases, the appropriation is imagined, and the person in question is on some kind of personal crusade. Nicky’s reactions to trans people, for example, are not even attached to reality. He uses the appropriation complaint as an excuse to run off at the mouth with anti-trans bigotry.
Most of the intersex people I’ve dealt with directly are pretty positive about trans people. The only group I’ve dealt with (OII) is as well.
Thanks, Lisa. I am partly regretting letting SheilaG’s post through because it’s a derail. On the other hand, you and others have been able to rebut her with a lot more facts than I have at hand – and she certainly does serve as a vivid illustration that Daly’s ideas appear to be alive and well.
Yeah, I’ve approved a few comments I regretted later. It happens.
[...] sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate [...]
Thanks for writing this. I did try to read Daly once, but never got far with it, so it’s good to see a disection of what she did say.
And I thought I was the only one to think that about commenting at Shakesville – I comment everywhere (as you can see) but I have never commented over there. So ta again.
Hi Earwicga – I’m not an expert on Daly by any means. I’ve read parts of Gyn/Ecology (but not all of it cover to cover) and I use a short excerpt from Beyond God the Father in a class I teach. I really like that excerpt (which I discussed in the previous post).
I suspect quite a few people hesitate to comment on Shakesville for similar reasons. You just don’t hear from them because they’re not commenting there.
I’m all for examining one’s privilege, trying to be a good ally, and reflecting on one’s use of language – but I’m leery of the pile-on effect that sometimes occurs and the degree of self-policing that can result. There are lots of people who feel more comfortable there than elsewhere, though, and that’s fine with me too.
I don’t really have anything insightful to add to the discussion, but thank you so much for this post, Sungold.
Thanks, Annaham! I’m happy to read some kind words. I was just being a nerd, honestly, in the service of getting some ducks lined up – the ducks, in this case, being quotations from specific pages of Daly’s work.
Sungold, this is great work. Thanks so much for actually, you know, doing the homework.
I’m less bothered by Daly’s comments on transwomen here than you are, though. It seems like they’re coming from a particular historical moment, when 1) the feminist critique of allopathic medicine was at its height, and 2) when there were some celebrity trans women who were publicly very invested in a kind of essentialism that most feminists had rejected (Jan Morris, for example). It seemed to me that as much if not more of her disdain was focused on modern medicine & not so much on trans individuals. It also strikes me that we have to remember her particular position as a Catholic woman. It may seem overblown to us now to imagine a world engineered to be free of XX-chromosome, cis-women, but to a woman who came of age in the 1940s and 50s as a Catholic, this might have seemed like a fantasy-come-true of Catholic male clerics.
I haven’t written about this before, but I’ve taught at two Catholic institutions in my career. (I’m not Catholic myself, but I’m writing a book about a woman who becomes a nun, and I’ve written about virulent Anglo-American anti-Catholicism before, so I’m wary of feeding contemporary anti-Catholicism.) Sex bias there was different from sex bias in secular or Protestant-dominated institutions, where it’s something that men (and some women) actively did to other women. But, in the Catholic institutions, it wasn’t so much that I was discriminated against actively as I felt like I was invisible, and didn’t exist. (This eventually works as bias, of course. But it was odd to feel like I was almost a non-person to many people and to the hierarchy of one institution in particular.)
This is not a historic issue. Not even close to historic. (Aside from the last post, this is all just stuff I knew about off-hand.)
Plus, this is only just scraping the surface. For example, I haven’t even touched the way Janice Raymond’s work has lead to trans women (and presumably men) in the US being denied healthcare on a regular basis, just for being trans. (This isn’t just about trans-related drugs and surgeries, but normal day-to-day healthcare of the sort that cis people get.) Mostly because I haven’t had time to fully research it yet.
Sorry, last link should be http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/03/womenonly_space – comment features without a preview are annoying, especially when doing a lot of links.
Alternatively, it looks like Questioning Transphobia has put up a very good post pointing out what’s wrong with excusing Mary Daly’s views in this way.
Historiann, thanks for the kind words. I do appreciate the importance of situating the origin of ideas historically. I agree that there are aspects of Daly’s biography that may have made her gravitate toward the positions she took. I’d note, though, that Daly was every ounce as essentialist as any trans person could ever be – and then some! She reveled in it, in fact, proudly calling herself a “quintessentialist.”
But in this case, it’s even more important to trace the legacy of these ideas. Makomk gives a lot of excellent examples of how the ideas of Daly – and more prominently, Janice Raymond – have persisted almost unchanged. It’s as though they’ve been preserved in amber. And that’s why I can’t feel sanguine about these ideas.
Makomk, I’m sorry there’s no preview feature. Maybe it’s available through WordPress.org (I’ve never seen a possibility for it on WordPress.com) but if so, it would require a level of tech expertise that I just don’t have. I’m grateful that you put up the links in spite of the annoyance.
I don’t think the time in which she wrote her hate speech justifies her hate speech. I don’t think a cis person should be telling trans people how to react to language that is still mobilized against us, especially language about elimination.
It’s also a fact that the trans women’s voices that were published at all tended toward a specific narrative, and that one or two published autobiographies that fit that narrative do not in any way present a nuanced view of how trans women in general feel.
What she said enabled and encouraged an environment of virulent and occasionally violent transphobia among cis feminists for decades. One that is not dominant now, and not one that she was alone in encouraging (see Robin Morgan bragging about rousing a mob against a trans woman at a feminist conference in 1973 in one of her books, and of course The Transsexual Empire, Sheila Jeffreys in general, etc).
I do not think it is reasonable to dismiss the seriousness of this, that she not only was willing to mobilize hatred against trans women and call for our elimination, but how this justifies the broader social context of transphobia and trans misogyny, how her writings justify the trans hatred within feminism that exists everywhere else.
If it’s such great work, why haven’t you acknowledged it?
Maybe you didn’t mean your post to imply that this was just some smear by militant trans activists, but that’s the impression you give. People will come away from your blog believing that there’s no textual support for an accusation of transphobia. You didn’t bother to look it up yourself–to do the homework. Why should they?
The answer to your question happens to be, “Yes, she did say transphobic things, and yes, the trans people complaining did actually read them.”
So…don’t trans people have every right to say so? And don’t they have the right to get angry when feminists tell them to shut up?
I agree, every time I read Historiann’s original comment/post, which implies that it is the job of oppressed groups to do book-worthy research whenever we want to call out oppressors, and that us lazy trans people were just too damn lazy to do it or something, and then when I read her non-commital response to sungold’s research where she again implies that and goes on to say that she doesn’t see the big deal with the transphobia which she can’t pretend to ignore anymore, I get a little more angry.
[...] race ricorda un po' il progetto del Dottor Stranamore, senza contare le inclinazioni transfobiche: Frankenstein, Necrophilia, and The Final Solution: How Transphobic Was Mary Daly, Really? « Kittywa… Comunque, un personaggio da non [...]
[...] sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate [...]
Yes, great work, Sungold.
If my Andrea Dworkin post can be summed up as “Wow, she wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought!”–yours can be summed up as “wow, Mary Daly was MUCH WORSE than we thought!”…
Historiann, you’re right about the clerics… this is why I was shocked when Daly treated Catholic women exactly as dismissively as the clerics did. She was rewarded for her scholarship by getting to be an “honorary man” as a professor at a Jesuit university, so she didn’t waste time acting like one…all while criticizing the priests for being priestly! Meanwhile, she called those of us “imitation men” who didn’t leave the Church.
Meet the new boss, same as…
Hi Daisy. Yeah, I was a little shocked at just how ugly her rhetoric was. As someone who supposedly aimed to reclaim the language, Daly can and should be held accountable not just for what she said but for what it clearly implied (e.g., that trans women were agents of genocide against Daly’s narrow category of “women”).
Daly was searching in her own Mary manner for what the French Feminists discussed as escriva feminine or espirit feminine, an existentialist quality that defined woman, inherent to the psyche.
Not coming from a psychoanalytic background(Irigaray was an object-relations theorist/analyst/psychiatrist) I suspect that rather than learn the premises, she simply created her own framework for the escriva feminine(escrive feminine in french academe, but I studied in Spain)
More than a theorist, Dr Daly was a feminist propagandist; she set out to enflame, to excite, to outrage and to provoke. She acknowledges this herself.
She made an entire generation of women angry, successfully, and propelled them forward in search of equality.
I can see the parallels to l’ecriture feminine, but there’s a huge difference between the kind of language play in which Helene Cixous engages, and Mary Daly’s style. I think you nail it when you say she was a feminist propagandist. I’m all in favor of persuasion, but propagandizing is a whole ‘nother thing. I hold a Ph.D. in German history, and so my studies have taught be to be very, very wary of propaganda. Which I agree is a huge part of Daly’s project in Gyn/Ecology.
Historiann, I’m wondering if you’re putting (for instance) Jan Morris’ (and other trans women’s experience) into the appropriate historically context (which seems to be something you’re interested in, yes?). A major reason that many trans women, as recently as in the last decade, appeared to be overly essentialist is that the cisgendered doctors which decided whether they received any care or not TOLD THEM TO. When an entire community is denied any and all medical assistance unless they tow a party line (which was that women act “feminine,” date men, and are “pretty,” and not associate with any other transgender people), is it a big wonder that they might then espouse those ideals?
Additionally, Mary Daly was not frozen in the time as of her first writings. She died in 2010. That would have given her quite a bit of time to PUBLICALLY repudiate her previous writings on the topic of the freakish nature of trans people. But she didn’t.
I’m guess I’m glad that you get to be “less bothered by Daly’s comments on transwomen,” but for many transwomen that doesn’t get to be an option, including the many transwomen denied services by feminist organizations taking their cues from Mary Daly and other transphobic feminists.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I’m a cis woman, in case that wasn’t already abundantly clear). But isn’t it still common that doctors and other gatekeepers will expect someone who wants to transition to demonstrate that they are more “feminine” than cis women? I got this impression from Julia Serano, and I understood it to still be a widespread mindset among gatekeepers.
Yeah, you’re right, the HBS are still really prevalent, they just happen to be maybe avoidable, which they didn’t use to be.
It depends on the route one is able to go. The CAMH clinic in Toronto, which holds monopoly power over access to medical transition services for 3 or 4 Canadian provinces under their socialized medical system, is perhaps the apothesis of that trend. They even demand control over what their clients can change their names to, to make sure it’s “feminine” (or presumably “masculine”) enough.
In the US the clinic system has largely collapsed, with most people seeing private shrinks or even finding ways to circumvent the process entirely. There are of course sexist jerks among private shrinks too, but it’s much easier to tell them to stuff it and go find someone else.
Thanks very much for the context, Boo. This is a good argument against allowing *anyone* to exercise monopoly powers in a health care system, whether private, public, or some mix.
Hi there! I’m new to your blog, loving it so far.
In your post about the safe space policy at Shakesville, you link to Apostate. I’m wondering if you know how to access her blog? I keep being told I need to be a WordPress member, which as you can see, I am. I’m assuming that I would need to be personally invited by Apostate to read her blog. Any ideas on how I might be able to do this?
Sorry for such a bookkeeping-tastic first comment =X I promise to do better in the future!
Hi tecnicolorpoodle! Thanks for your kind words.
The Apostate had this terribly interesting blog. She’s a former Muslim, now in law school, whipsmart and highly opinionated. To the best of my understanding, she stopped blogging partly to make space for law school, partly because she felt her comment section was overrun with people who pissed her off. I didn’t always agree with her but we got on fine and I thoroughly enjoyed her writing. She left a good bye message here, if you want to read it. I wish very much she’d just closed comments and left her writing freely available.
She had a couple of great posts on “safe space” and the variety of things that can be triggering to people – her point being roughly that triggers are so various, no one can anticipate them all, and we would do well to assume good faith from people who act as though they’re our allies. Maybe I’ve overplayed my interpretation in that last phrase – without her original posts, I can’t be sure. She ended up having hundreds of comments on those few posts, mostly from people who’d been loyal members of the Shakesville community and who’d become disillusioned one way or another.
I just messaged her through Twitter – asking if there’s any chance of access to her old posts, or if she’s effectively buried them. I’ll let you know what I hear.
[...] Racism, and Transphobia January 8, 2010 I’ve read several, retrospectives, of Daly that remind me of her anti-trans stance and white privilege issues. It was certainly more [...]
[...] as other people have noted: wow, she fucking hated trans women. Here is a good roundup of all the transphobic bullshit in Daly’s work, and here is a good explanation of the legacy of that [...]
[...] Mary Daly Was a Trans-Exterminationist – NO “But”s A good question posed: [T]he transphobia of Daly and other feminist writers has and continues to have consequences, flesh and blood consequences. Why is that feminists can recognise the consequences of inflammatory rhetoric when right-wing Christians talk about the Holocaust of abortions, or anti-gay rhetoric in Uganda, but cis feminists writers who argue for genocide against trans people get a pass on some of those consequences (read here to see a fairly comprehensive takedown of Daly’s genocidal rhetoric in Gyn/ecology)? [...]
[...] January 7, 12:30 a.m.: In a follow-up post, I explore Daly’s Gyn/Ecology to assess whether she really was a transphob…. The short answer: Yes. The long answer: Oh my, and with eunuchs and power-mad scientists to boot! [...]
[...] Daly was the advisor of Janice Raymond when Raymond was writing her transphobic thesis; Daly also printed transphobic comments herself. (One comment on that thread suggests that Daly may have changed her mind late in life, but [...]
Kudos for highlighting Mary Daly’s transphobia, Sungold. I’m a little disconcerted that her anti-male bigotry appears to have gone unmentioned, though.
Hi Ballgame! I agree that her hatred of men is important, and I’ve been working on a post on this – taking her notion of “idolatry” (which she condemns in Catholicism and Christianity more broadly, in her early work) and arguing that she sets a very narrow notion of “women” up as an idol in her later work. And because I started digging into her books instead of just relying on her public interviews, it has stalled out – too many other duties, too little blogging time. I’m hoping to finish it before Daly has been entirely forgotten!
I also didn’t deal with her racism, which – like her misandry – is also well documented on the web. Audre Lorde’s letter to her can be read in full online (I think I found it on Google Books). The intent of this post was to provide rock-hard proof of her transphobia, which was not heretofore solidly documented in the blogosphere. (Sometimes I’m an awful nerd.)
In the meantime, figleaf had a post addressing her misandry, which might interest you.
Thanks for your response, Sungold.
Great post by figleaf, BTW.
[...] (initially) laudatory eulogy (or, at a minimum, an uncritical one), but then Sady at Feministe and Sungold at Kittywampus delved into Daly’s transphobia (prompting Melissa to modify her original post). Mandolin at [...]
[...] distinction that suggests women need to destroy their enemies as a matter of self-defense. As I’ve already discussed here, Daly accused MTF transsexuals of being the necrophilic pawns o…. She postulated that they were the agents of a “Final Solution” that would violate [...]