According to Young, although this model might be appropriate for some forms of domination, it is not appropriate for the forms that domination takes in contemporary industrial societies such as the United States Young a, 31— In this section, I discuss the specific ways in which feminists with different political and philosophical commitments — influenced by phenomenology, radical feminism, Marxist socialism, intersectionality theory, post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analytic philosophy — have conceptualized domination.
Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status of the transcendent subject, women have been relegated to the status of the immanent Other. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsible for submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid the anguish of authentic existence hence, they are in bad faith see Beauvoir xxvii , she maintains that women are oppressed because they are compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence xxxv.
Beauvoir's frequent use of such analogies, critics contend, erases the experience of Black women by implicitly coding all women as white and all Blacks as male Gines Belle and , Collins , —, and Simons As Kathryn T. At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism and racism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression comparatively, arguing that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering.
Her comparative analysis of race and gender is most problematic in her frequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the slave. At other times, Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression as competing frameworks and argues that gender subordination is the most significant and constitutive form of oppression.
Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the former for its erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter for its privileging of gender oppression over other forms of oppression.
Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir's work while extending her insights into power.
Young argues that feminine bodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit the same tension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses in The Second Sex. And yet women are also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as mere bodily objects.
Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, for useful resources for feminist phenomenology Al-Saji and Oksala More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feminist phenomenology as an exploration of gendered experience against poststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelessly essentialist.
This means that there is always a gap between our personal experience and the linguistic representations that we employ to make sense of that experience, and it is this gap that provides the space for contestation and critique. For Oksala, experience plays a crucial role in reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radical reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and collective resistance to and transformation of those power relations.
The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega's analysis of Latina feminist phenomenology Ortega By highlighting the experience of marginalized and oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in a state of in-betweenness, Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortega reads it, offers an important corrective to and expansion of the critique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenological tradition. For other influential feminist-phenomenological analyses of domination see Bartky , , Bordo , and Kruks For helpful overviews of feminist phenomenology, see Fisher and Embree , and Heinamaa and Rodemeyer For a highly influential articulation of queer phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon, see Ahmed For a compelling phenomenological analysis of transgender experience, see Salamon For example, in the work of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, domination is closely bound up with her understanding of gender difference.
According to MacKinnon, gender difference is simply the reified effect of domination. If gender difference is itself a function of domination, then the implication is that men are powerful and women are powerless by definition. In this passage, MacKinnon glosses over the distinction, articulated by many second-wave feminists, between sex — the biologically rooted traits that make one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be natural and immutable — and gender — the socially and culturally rooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits, characteristics, dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man.
If men are powerful and women powerless as such, then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. As a result, she tends to presuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to which individual women are subject to the will of individual men. Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power that seems to presuppose a dyadic model of domination.
Frye identifies several faces of power, one of the most important of which is access. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is worth the name entails some form of separatism. In addition to access, Frye discusses definition as another, related, face of power. Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not have the power to define the terms of their situation, but by controlling access, Frye argues, they can begin to assert control over their own self-definition.
Both of these — controlling access and definition — are ways of taking power. Although feminists such as Fraser, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown have been highly critical of the radical feminist account of domination, analytic feminists have found this account more productive.
For example, Rae Langton has used speech act theory to defend MacKinnon's claims that pornography both causes and constitutes women's subordination. More generally, Langton and Sally Haslanger have drawn on MacKinnon's work to develop an account of sexual objectification and to explore the ways that objectification is often obscured by claims to objectivity for further discussion of Haslanger's work, see section 3.
According to the traditional Marxist account of power, domination is understood on the model of class exploitation; domination results from the capitalist appropriation of the surplus value that is produced by the workers. Young calls instead for a more unified theory, a truly feminist historical materialism that would offer a critique of the social totality.
In a later essay, Young offers a more systematic analysis of oppression, an analysis that is grounded in her earlier call for a comprehensive socialist feminism. The first three faces of oppression in this list expand on the Marxist account of economic exploitation, and the last two go beyond that account, bringing out other aspects of oppression that are not well explained in economic terms.
According to Young, being subject to any one of these forms of power is sufficient to call a group oppressed, but most oppressed groups in the United States experience more than one of these forms of power, and some experience all five Young , Nancy Hartsock offers a different vision of feminist historical materialism in her book Money, Sex, and Power : Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism This applies, in her view, to theories of power as well.
Thus, she criticizes theories of power in mainstream political science for presupposing a market model of economic relations — a model that understands the economy primarily in terms of exchange, which is how it appears from the perspective of the ruling class rather than in terms of production, which is how it appears from the perspective of the worker. She also argues that power and domination have consistently been associated with masculinity. Socialist feminism fell largely out of fashion during the latter part of the 20th century, fueled in part by the rise of poststructuralism, the prominence of identity and recognition based politics, and the emergence of a neoliberal consensus for a trenchant critique of these developments, see Fraser and However, in the wake of the global financial crisis of , socialist feminism, now often referred to as Social Reproduction Theory SRT , has made a comeback.
SRT has a long history, with important early contributions by Silvia Federici and Maria Mies and connections to the Italian wages for housework campaign that began in the s; for more recent discussions, see Tithi Bhattacharya , Federici and , and Alessandra Mezzadri SRT is a Marxist feminist project that orients itself to a question that remains implicit in Marx's theory of value: how is labor power, which is the source of value and thus of exploitation in Marx's account, itself produced, reproduced, and maintained?
SRT maintains that labor power is produced and reproduced outside of the official economy, largely through women's unpaid labor within the family or domestic sphere. For social reproduction theorists, the production of goods and services is thus possible only on the basis of largely unpaid social reproduction, which includes childbirth, domestic work, caring for children, the elderly and others who cannot work for wages, and so on.
For Federici, this represents an ongoing process of expropriation akin to Marx's notion of primitive accumulation Federici Social reproduction theorists understand production and reproduction as parts of an integrated system; indeed, they view the distinction between the two as ultimately misleading inasmuch as it obscures the ways in which social reproduction is itself productive of value Mezzadri For a related attempt to understand capitalism as a social totality whose relations of production are made possible by the expropriation of socially reproductive labor, environmental resources, and the labor of dispossessed and colonized peoples, see Fraser in Fraser and Jaeggi Theories of intersectionality highlight the complex, interconnected, and cross-cutting relationships between diverse modes of domination, including but not limited to sexism, racism, class oppression, and heterosexism.
The project of intersectional feminism grew out of Black feminism, which, as scholars have recently noted, has a long tradition of examining the interconnections between racism and sexism, stretching back to the writing and activism of late 19th and early 20th century black feminists such as Maria W. Stewart, Ida. In other words, the concept of intersectionality has a long history and a complex genealogy for discussions, see Cooper , Collins and , —, and Nash Still, it is widely acknowledged that the contemporary discussion and use of the term intersectionality was sparked by the work of legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw Crenshaw a and b , specifically, by her critique of single-axis frameworks for understanding domination in the context of legal discrimination.
A single-axis framework treats race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience. In so doing, such a framework implicitly privileges the perspective of the most privileged members of oppressed groups — sex or class-privileged Blacks in race discrimination cases; race or class-privileged women in sex discrimination cases.
Thus, a single-axis framework distorts the experiences of Black women, who are simultaneously subject to multiple and intersecting forms of subordination.
Moreover, intersectionality is not without its feminist critics. Some sympathetic critics of intersectionality have suggested that the concept is limited in that it focuses primarily on the action-theoretical level. A full analysis of the intertwining of racial, gender, and class-based subordination also requires, on this view, a systemic or macro-level concept that corresponds to the concept of intersectionality. This is the model describing the social structures that create social positions.
Second, the notion of intersectionality describes micro-level processes — namely, how each individual and group occupies a social position within interlocking structures of oppression described by the metaphor of intersectionality.
Others have worried that discussions of intersectionality tend to focus too much on relations and sites of oppression and subordination, without also taking into account relations of privilege and dominance. In response to this concern, philosophers such as Ann Garry have offered a broader, more inclusive conception of intersectionality that emphasizes both oppression and privilege see Garry Rather than supplementing the notion of intersectionality with a macro-level concept of interlocking systems of oppression or broadening it to include relations of oppression and privilege, Naomi Zack argues that feminists should move beyond it.
Zack maintains that intersectionality undermines its own goal of making feminism more inclusive. From a very different perspective, queer theorists such as Lynne Huffer and Jasbir Puar have also criticized intersectionality as a theory of identity. Puar argues further that the primary concepts of intersectionality, including gender, race, class, and sexuality, are themselves the product of Eurocentric, modernist, and colonial discourses and practices and, as such, are problematic from the point of view of postcolonial and transnational feminism Puar Finally, Anna Carastathis has argued that the problem with intersectionality theory lies in its very success Carastathis and In response to these sorts of criticisms of intersectionality, some scholars have attempted to reformulate the concept by understanding it as a family resemblance concept Garry or by highlighting its provisionality Carastathis, Others have argued for an expansion of the intersectional framework to better account for the experiences of diasporic subjects Sheth or for a rethinking of this framework in relation to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage Puar and Collins has proposed the development of intersectionality as a critical social theory through a reflection on its genealogy, epistemology, and methodology.
Most of the work on power done by post-structuralist feminists has been inspired by Foucault. In his middle period works Foucault , , and , Foucault analyzes modern power as a mobile and constantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from every social interaction and thus pervade the social body. It also, according to Foucault, produces subjects. According to Foucault, modern power subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; it simultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power.
I will concentrate on highlighting a few central issues from this rich and diverse body of scholarship. Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of power draw on his account of disciplinary power in order to critically analyze normative femininity.
In Discipline and Punish , Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were developed in prisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century — including minute regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed time schedules, and surveillance techniques — and how these practices shape the bodies of prisoners, students and workers into docile bodies , — The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to relentless self-surveillance.
As Susan Bordo points out, this model of self-surveillance does not adequately illuminate all forms of female subordination — all too often women are actually compelled into submission by means of physical force, economic coercion, or emotional manipulation. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms…..
In Bodies that Matter , Butler extends this analysis to consider the impact of subjection on the bodily materiality of the subject. Thus, for Butler, power understood as subjection is implicated in the process of determining which bodies come to matter, whose lives are livable and whose deaths grievable. In The Psychic Life of Power b , Butler expands further on the Foucaultian notion of subjection, bringing it into dialogue with a Freudian account of the psyche. In the introduction to that text, Butler notes that subjection is a paradoxical form of power.
Although Butler credits Foucault with recognizing the fundamentally ambivalent character of subjection, she also argues that he does not offer an account of the specific mechanisms by which the subjected subject is formed. For this, Butler maintains, we need an analysis of the psychic form that power takes, for only such an analysis can illuminate the passionate attachment to power that is characteristic of subjection. In his writings on power, Foucault seems to eschew normative categories, preferring instead to describe the way that power functions in local practices and to argue for the appropriate methodology for studying power.
He even seems to suggest that such normative notions as autonomy, legitimacy, sovereignty, and so forth, are themselves effects of modern power this point has been contested recently in the literature on Foucault; see Allen a and Oksala Thus, for example, although Foucault claims that power is always accompanied by resistance, Fraser argues that he cannot explain why domination ought to be resisted.
Other feminists have criticized the Foucaultian claim that the subject is an effect of power. Hartsock makes two related arguments against Foucault. First, she argues that his analysis of power is not a theory for women because it does not examine power from the epistemological point of view of the subordinated; in her view, Foucault analyzes power from the perspective of the colonizer, rather than the colonized Despite these and other trenchant feminist critiques of Foucault see, for example, Hekman, ed.
Postcolonial and decolonial theory offer overlapping critiques of historical and contemporary practices and discourses of imperial and colonial domination.
Yet they also have distinct lineages, theoretical commitments, and implications for helpful discussion, see Bhambra and Ramamurthy and Tambe Postcolonial theory rose to prominence in the late 20th century, in association with the groundbreaking work of Edward Said and the Subaltern Studies Collective, and has been most influential in literary and cultural studies.
Taking as its primary point of reference the northern European colonization of Southeast Asia and focusing primarily on the discursive and cultural effects of colonialism, postcolonial theory is deeply though not uncritically influenced by poststruturalism, particularly the work of Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Its primary point of reference is the colonization of the Americas that began in Heavily influenced by Latin American Marxism, world systems theory, and indigenous political struggles, decolonial theory focuses on the connections between capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchies.
Spivak's essay opens with a critical discussion of an exchange betweeen Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, in which they reject the idea of speaking for the oppressed, insisting instead that the oppressed should speak for themselves.
The first part of her essay is devoted to a critique of this claim and of the myriad ways in which Foucault and Deleuze ignore the epistemic violence of imperialism.
In other words, there is no space from which the subaltern as female can speak and no way she can be heard or read. Men exploit, women are exploited. Much of the agenda for decolonial feminism was set by Lugones in a pair of essays published in Hypatia and Seeing gender as a colonial concept enables feminists to break out of the ahistorical framework of patriarchy.
Although most of the approaches to dominaiton discussed above have been informed by the Continental philosophical tradition, analytic feminists have made important contributions to the feminist literature on domination as well.
For example, Ann Cudd draws on the framework of rational choice theory to analyze oppression for related work on rational choice theory and power, see Dowding and ; for critical discussion, see Allen c. Cudd defines oppression in terms of four conditions: 1 the group condition, which states that individuals are subjected to unjust treatment because of their membership or ascribed membership in certain social groups Cudd , 21 ; 2 the harm condition, which stipulates that individuals are systematically and unfairly harmed as a result of such membership Cudd , 21 ; 3 the coercion condition, which specifies that the harms that those individuals suffer are brought about through unjustified coercion Cudd , 22 ; and 4 the privilege condition, which states that such coercive, group-based harms count as oppression only when there exist other social groups who derive a reciprocal privilege or benefit from that unjust harm Cudd , 22— Any satisfactory answer to this question must draw on a combination of empirical, social-scientific research and normative philosophical theorizing, inasmuch as a theory of oppression is an explanatory theory of a normative concept Cudd , That oppression is a normative — rather than a purely descriptive — concept is evident from the fact that it is defined as an unjust or unfair set of power relations.
Cudd argues that social-theoretical frameworks such as functionalism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology are inadequate for theorizing oppression Cudd , 39— Structural rational choice theory, in her view, best meets reasonable criteria of explanatory adequacy and therefore provides the best social-theoretical framework for analyzing oppression.
Having made this distinction, Haslanger then argues for a mixed analysis of oppression that does not attempt to reduce agent oppression to structural oppression or vice versa. Haslanger also connects her account of structural domination and oppression to her analysis of gender. Other things — such as norms, identities, symbols, etc — are then gendered in relation to those social relations. On her analysis, gender categories are defined in terms of how one is socially positioned with respect to a broad complex of oppressive relations between groups that are distinguished from one another by means of sexual difference see — By claiming that women are oppressed as women, Haslanger reiterates an earlier claim made by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon see, for example, MacKinnon , 56— Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in terms of an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship.
In order to avoid such masculinist connotations, many feminists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds have argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity or ability, specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneself and others. Thus, these feminists have tended to understood power not as power-over but as power-to.
Wartenberg argues that this feminist understanding of power, which he calls transformative power, is actually a type of power-over, albeit one that is distinct from domination because it aims at empowering those over whom it is exercised. However, most of the feminists who embrace this transformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitly define it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternative to putatively masculine notions of power-over.
This conception of power as transformative and empowering is also a prominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. Hartsock finds it significant that the theme of power as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work of women who have written about power.
Although this movement has had more influence in mainstream media and culture than in academia — indeed, in many ways it can be read as a critique of academic feminism — it has also sparked scholarly debate. In contrast, power feminists endorse a more individualistic, self-assertive, even aggressive conception of empowerment, one that tends to define empowerment in terms of individual choice with little concern for the contexts within which choices are made or the options from which women are able to choose.
In order to prompt such a rethinking, Caputi turns to the resources of the early Frankfurt School of critical theory and to the work of Jacques Derrida. Focusing on empowerment in the context of international development practice, Khader develops a deliberative perfectionist account of adaptive preferences. This allows her to acknowledge the psychological effects of oppression working through the mechanism of IAPs without denying the possibility of agency on the part of the oppressed. Khader draws on her deliberative perfectionist account of IAPs to diagnose and move beyond certain controversies over the notion of empowerment that have emerged in feminist development practice and theorizing.
While acknowledging that the language of empowerment in development practice can have ideological effects, Khader addresses these concerns by providing a clearer conception of empowerment than the one implicit in the development literature and emphasizing what she understands as the normative core of this concept, its relation to human flourishing.
This definition of empowerment enables her to rethink certain dilemmas of empowerment that have emerged in development theory and practices. For example, many development practitioners define empowerment in terms of choice, and then struggle to make sense of apparently self-subordinating choices. If choice equals empowerment, then does this mean that the choice to subordinate or disempower oneself is an instance of empowerment?
For Khader, empowerment is a messy, complex, and incremental concept. The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates in feminist philosophy. Indeed, the very centrality of this concept to feminist theorizing creates difficulties in writing an entry such as this one: since the concept of power is operative on one way or another in almost all work in feminist theory, it is extremely difficult to place limits on the relevant sources.
Throughout, I have emphasized those texts and debates in which the concept of power is a central theme, even if sometimes an implicit one. I have also prioritized those authors and texts that have been most influential within feminist philosophy, as opposed to the wider terrain of feminist theory or gender studies, though I acknowledge that this distinction is difficult to maintain and perhaps not always terribly useful.
Debatable as such framing choices may be, they do offer some much needed help in delimiting the range of relevant sources and providing focus and structure to the discussion. Arendt, Hannah Beauvoir, Simone de critical theory existentialism feminist philosophy, approaches: analytic philosophy feminist philosophy, approaches: continental philosophy feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on sex and gender feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the body feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self Foucault, Michel identity politics Marx, Karl phenomenology race.
Defining power 2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches 3. Power as Domination 3. Power as Empowerment 5. Defining power In social and political theory, power is often regarded as an essentially contested concept see Lukes and , and Connolly Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches Those who conceptualize power as a resource understand it as a positive social good that is currently unequally distributed.
Power as Empowerment Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in terms of an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship. Concluding thoughts The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates in feminist philosophy.
Bibliography Ahmed, Sara, Alcoff, Linda, Allen, Amy, Al-Saji, Alia, Arendt, Hannah, By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement.
All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution.
Forty-one per cent of respondents said that they had attempted suicide. It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither.
According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery. Having rejected this supposition, radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue.
It is, to them, a baffling political inversion. Radfems Respond was originally to have taken place across town from the library, at a Quaker meeting house, but trans activists had launched a petition on Change. Radfem also had to switch locations, as did a gathering in Toronto last year, called Radfems Rise Up. We questioned the library administration about allowing a hate group who promotes discrimination and their response is that they cannot kick them out because of freedom of speech.
Abusive posts proliferated on Twitter and, especially, Tumblr. She is forty-nine, with cropped pewter hair and a uniform of black T-shirts and jeans. Three years ago, she co-founded the ecofeminist group Deep Green Resistance, which has some two hundred members and links the oppression of women to the pillaging of the planet. In radical circles, though, what makes the group truly controversial is its stance on gender.
As members see it, a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin. Before D. Last February, Keith was to be a keynote speaker at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, but the student government voted to condemn her, and more than a thousand people signed a petition demanding that the address be cancelled.
Amid threats of violence, six policemen escorted Keith to the lectern, though, in the end, the protest proved peaceful: some audience members walked out and held a rally, leaving her to speak to a half-empty room.
Keith had an easier time at Radfems Respond, where she spoke on the differences between radicalism and liberalism. Two gender-bending punk kids who looked as if they might be there to protest left during the long opening session, on prostitution. Several trans women arrived and sat at the back, but, in fact, they were there to express solidarity, having decided that the attacks on radical feminists were both out of control and misguided.
Despite that surprising show of support, most of the speakers felt embattled. Heath Atom Russell gave the closing talk. Expert estimates of the number of transitioners who abandon their new gender range from fewer than one per cent to as many as five per cent.
Russell, a lesbian who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Southern California, began transitioning to male as a student at Humboldt State University, and was embraced by gender-rights groups on campus.
She started taking hormones and changed her name. She had been having heart palpitations, which made her uneasy about the hormones she was taking. Nor did she ever fully believe herself to be male. At one point during her transition, she hooked up with a middle-aged trans woman. She has taught at the University of Melbourne for twenty-three years, but she grew up in London, and has been described as the Andrea Dworkin of the U.
She has written nine previous books, all of which focus on the sexual subjugation of women, whether through rape, incest, pornography, prostitution, or Western beauty norms. Like Dworkin, she is viewed as a heroine by a cadre of like-minded admirers and as a zealot by others. This unwavering belief has made her many enemies.
Ordinarily, Jeffreys told me, she would launch the publication of a new book with an event at the university, but this time campus security warned against it. She has also taken her name off her office door. She gave a talk in London this month, but it was invitation-only.
She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation. Jeffreys is especially alarmed by doctors in Europe, Australia, and the United States who treat transgender children with puberty-delaying drugs, which prevent them from developing unwanted secondary sex characteristics and can result in sterilization.
Throughout the book, Jeffreys insists on using male pronouns to refer to trans women and female ones to refer to trans men. To her critics, the book becomes particularly hateful when she tries to account for the reality of trans people.
Explaining female-to-male transition is fairly easy for her and for other radical feminists : women seek to become men in order to raise their status in a sexist system. For reasons of sexual fetishism, Jeffreys says. She substantiates her argument with the highly controversial theories of Ray Blanchard, a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and the related work of J.
Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Contrary to widespread belief, Blanchard says, the majority of trans women in the West start off not as effeminate gay men but as straight or bisexual men, and they are initially motivated by erotic compulsion rather than by any conceived female identity.
Blanchard is far from a radical feminist.
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