Friday, July 10, 2020

An Early TRA Acknowledgement of Transgender-Feminist Tension?

When blogging this post, I looked at some other articles by the same transgender writer and found this interesting one from January 2016 titled, "Jaden Smith as a new face of womenswear might seem progressive - but he's on transgender territory." 

Jumping off from the announcement that Louis Vuitton had chosen Smith as the new face of its womenswear collection, the author of the piece argues that there is, at the least, a tension between the gender progress reflected by Jaden Smith's sartorial choices and the gender progress of transgender recognition and visibility: as the culture evolves to normalize men wearing women's clothes and vice versa without that being weird or wrong or undermining of men's manness or women's womanness, this cuts against transgender people's progress in attaining recognition and validation through their signalling their gender identification through their own clothing choices.

I bring this up here to point to the fact that woman called "TERFs" make this argument all the time--that gender identity doctrine reifies gender roles and stereotypes, and otherwise cuts against feminist fight against gender--and are condemned as bigots for it. 

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