The making of the sausage

A peek into ~my process~

When I started writing what would become my latest Globe and Mail column, “What is a woman? An obsession with defining women has become a distraction from fighting for us,” it was shaping up to be your standard issue PMB column about womanhood today, about tradwives and post-genders. Then Trump had to go and do an executive order rescuing women from trans volleyball teammates and I had to rethink the entire enterprise. Not because I have have strong feelings about trans women in sports but, in a sense, because I really don’t.

This got me thinking about how edge cases have come to be all that anyone talks about. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be entertainment value in having Michael Hobbes and Wesley Yang duke this out (discursively of course), but rather that when I think of the things that impact women, anything pertaining to edge cases ranks low low low.

This in turn landed me the same place I often wind up: thinking that trans activists mad at radical feminists and vice versa are all narcissism-of-small-differencing. Don’t you realize your beef is with MEN who oppose gender non-conformity whatever it calls itself? They don’t, though, is the thing.

But then I left the realm of the abstract (who, me?) and noticed op-eds, posts, things of that nature, from mainly British gender-critical feminists, praising Trump for feminism. If it had been more of a ‘worst person in the world right about one thing’ spirit, if it had been more about a broken clock’s capacity to get the time right, then I wouldn’t have made much of it.

What got to me was the reception of Donald Trump, Trump 2.0 in particular, as being someone to celebrate on feminist grounds. Even if you’re someone who thinks that on the specific matter of trans women in sports or jails or what have you he is not just onto something but fantastic, have you not zoomed out to see what the Trumpian project is?

Permit me a quote from my article: “Indeed, it was Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to be such a good ‘protector’ of women that we would ‘no longer be thinking about abortion.’ Some feminism!”

But this article was the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. Not difficult as in personal but as an intellectual challenge. Conveying what I thought, as well as figuring it out, and in a case where there are real-world stakes. Not so when blogging a rerun!

And it was through writing it that I realized why I’m so teamless on these topics. I’m fine with calling trans women “women,” in fact it seems the only way from a dignity perspective, and tend to think a lot of discussion of ‘but what if a trans woman…?’ amounts to sex panic. But I’m very not fine with inventing a whole new all-but-cis-men category of humanity. I wince at “women*’ and think feminism took a wrong turn precisely when it got decided that if you were a cis woman, you were a privileged category of women-asterisk as versus an oppressed category of humanity.

But mostly I’m just fed up with the Trumpian pretext playbook. He’s now done this with women and with Jews. (Yes, I mean the Columbia stuff.) My feelings about the encampment protests are quite possibly your feelings about the assigned-male-at-birth women’s volleyball players, and I’m furious now, and it’s not at Columbia.

There was a version of my article, one I (thank goodness) never even emailed my editor, where I began with an analogy: What if a US president offered all American women a Sephora gift card. Most women would find some use for it, and even the butchest among us could get a sunscreen or something. It would be offering, to women, something women want. But would it be feminist or… massively patronizing as well as an obvious diversion tactic? The reason I cut preemptively was that no, trans-exclusionary policy isn’t cosmetics, and it would require too much reader hand-holding to explain that I am aware of that.