Re: “Gender and Transgender in Paganism” anthology

widdershinsgirl:

I’ve finally managed to concatenate my feelings of betrayal regarding the inclusion of Ruth Barrett’s essay in “Gender and Transgender” as the final essay before the conclusion into thoughts and words. Here they are:

If the book is intended to spark dialogue, the last thing you want is someone dogmatically stating that trans women are men. And that’s exactly what Barrett takes several pages to do. It’s a statement designed to silence trans women. It’s a statement designed to disempower, to destroy, to wound, to kill. I do not give Barrett the benefit of the doubt on this; she knows what she’s doing. She and her other “sisters” have been trying to “morally mandate transsexuals out of existence” for 35 years now. Barrett, like Z Budapest and Wendy Griffin, is trying to end the discussion. They didn’t want to be even HAVING the discussion in the first place, and they want to end it.

Dogmatic statements are the opposite of dialogue. They have been used historically only to end dialogue, to force an end to a messy discussion that’s going in a direction the person making the statement doesn’t like. The best thing that can possibly happen with a statement like Barrett’s is for it to be talked around and treated like the atavism that it is.