> regarding #1 "men who want to be women"--I'm not sure what you mean but
> hopefully the men on this list, and the women, too, realize that men are
> wonderful beings with good qualities. I would rather see everybody be
> happier and more positive about what they are rather than wanting to be
> the opposite.
I don't know about men becoming women, but I do believe in the
suggestion that humans born with penises should stop acting like men
and stop identifying as men. There's too much
violence and domination built into manhood for it to be salvageable.
I've also noticed that for many penised humans, feminism is a non-
starter because we can't stop, even for an instance, our self-
identification as men. So our instinct is to defend ourselves by
defending the male sex-class, instead of listening to women and
feminists and holding men responsible for men's crimes. But once that
identification is broken, so that humans with penises think something
like "well, I have a choice, I can be a man or not, and if I'm not a
man I'll still be a human being, in fact I'll be a better human
being, a more just human being," then we'll stop seeing so many guys
who just can't or won't get feminism.
There are plenty of humans with vaginas who've stopped
identifying themselves as women. This comes from the recognition
that "woman" is not salvageable, since it is intrinsically defined in
terms of subordination to men. First there were the changed
spellings, like womon and wimmin, etc., but that's not enough because
it still sounds the same (so "man" is still built into the word, thus
continuing the definition of people with vaginas in terms of their
relation to men). Sonia Johnson mentions in one of her books her
attempts at changing the whole word, not just the spelling--I think
she was trying "wom," or something like that. Also "gynes," as in
"hey you gynes!"
So anyway, if those with vaginas can end their sex-class
identification, so can the rest of us. And we should start right
now. John Stoltenberg writes about this most thoroughly, in
_Refusing to Be a Man_ and in _The End of Manhood_.
BTW, eventually we should stop identifying ourselves in terms of our
genitalia as well, since that is still artificially dichotomous, but
I'm not ready to rewrite the above right now!
> If boys grew up wanting to be women rather than what they were,
> I think it would be pretty sad, too.
It's also very dangerous these days, since now we are developing the
technology so that womb-envying males can actually carry it out. I
take male obstetrics, hospitalized childbirth, cesarean section, new
reproductive technologies, etc., to be just the latest attempt
by men to appropriate the generative powers identified with women.
The internal logic of patriarchy leads ultimately to men bearing
children with artificial wombs, and women performing sexual and
domestic labor for men and supplying eggs. How can we subvert this?
Brian
