On Thursday, March 8th, as part of #8M, I took a few minutes on my television show Intruders to reflect on the importance of this fight for all people who express their femininity in many ways. “Today it commemorates the fight for the rights of women, lesbians, transvestites, trans, bi, non-binary and intersex people of all ages,” were the introductory words that tried to consider this approach. I received a cascade of insults on social networks, since it was endless to include all these ideas in this “celebration of women only”.
For a while in this column I wondered how it was possible that a five-letter word (female) in the definition of identity responses generated so much hate. For years, the perfect excuse for hate compulsives and transphobics has become the repetition of the speech of mechanics and long ago biologists, to support an unconvincing argument that has lost its strength and disappears in time.
Unfortunately, many are still ignorant who do not understand the meaning of #8M, let alone this feminist struggle. It is true that at the beginning of politics the subject of feminism was only women. But it is also true that dissensions were not yet subject to law. Many years ahead of the gender identity laws, which came into question of the binary and the mother of all violence against heteronorms, the two biggest causes in this fight.
Today, fortunately, there are many of us who are fighting so that no one is left behind in this world. Without further ado in Spain on the same day, Irene Montero, minister of equality, psychologist and feminist, also attacked the #8M act of defending trans women. In the event, a group of radical feminists was attacked for asserting Montero’s opinion, demanding that he explain his definition of the term “woman”, to make it clear that for them, this was only based on a biological fact: “you can’t think about a woman. If you have a brain” was the argument. The minister then responded that he did not recognize trans women’s human rights as a problem. And he said that his enemies were not trans women, but everyday patriarchy.
According to the minister’s line, it is clear that the target of this fight is machismo. According to Mumalá monitoring of civil society in 2022, 233 femicides were registered, of which 9 were transfemicides or transvesticides. More than 125,000 calls answered by line 144, 24,558 communications were referred to different channels to help for the consequences and 91% responded to situations of domestic violence (in all these cases of crime within the close circle of the victim). In other words, trans people are included in crime statistics whose motive is gender. Women have a two-fold motive for the hatred we suffer from our society: hatred towards women and hatred towards those of us who want to express our gender identity as women.
What is a woman if not a product of culture, symbolically constructed? Who established women’s affairs? What law dictated that painted nails, skirts, heels, cooks, dolls, women’s color should be pink? Is bijou women a phenomenon that happens naturally? Certainly not! There is something that girls learn when they first put on open earrings, this act must be distinguished from boys. Cultural constructions of gender are assimilated from childhood. If we say that something is feminine, we have been taught that way. When we decide that someone is feminine or more masculine, we are basing it on the parameters that we have built up since childhood to define ourselves.
And if we go to the biological, binarism is not an option that is found in nature in a unique and exclusive way. We have already said many times in this column and we can repeat and even observe: from the point of view of biology, the spectrum of sex also presents. Between the masculine and the feminine there are intermediate stages, intersexualities as well as natural ones. For this reason, when one is a woman or a man, it is more likely to feel like women or men to the cultural environment.
We have a long way to go to disarm a lot of prejudice. Fortunately, we have feminism, which should be a philosophy of life for everyone, an identity, politics of human rights, with a gender perspective in the search for equality and freedom, to eliminate all forms of oppression, discrimination and violence. which affect me). Feminism is not a political party determined by the doctrines of individual leaders: a horizontal movement built in common, but lived individually.
