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The way IAAF treatment of Caster Semanya reminds me of some tweets I drafted after TERF twitter unleashed themselves a couple of weeks ago. I think now is a good time to tweet them...
One useful thing these TL "ideological clashes" does for me is it pushes me to go back to re-read, introspect & analyze things more. I kept thinking about what [redacted] said about nb folx with "male bodies" and thinking how there are also cis women with seemingly "male bodies"
So thinking again about this idea of womanhood & femininity being constructed in opposition to manhood & masculinity, I went back to read Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins where she says one of the standards of hegemonic femininity is that women mustn’t be like men.
Basically, hegemonic femininity refers to behaviours and characteristics that are defined and ranked as an "ideal" womanhood. It is on the basis of this that other forms of womanhood are marginalized and violated.
So she mentions some basic biological indicators that distinguish women from men to point out that patriarchal constructions of gender are arbitrary. Biology corroborates this thought for me because sex, the basis by which gender is constructed, is not even binary itself.
Biological sex is not only determined by external genitalia & chromosomes. There are other factors by which sex is determined - internal & external sex organs, hormones, genes, hormones & hormone receptors. The complication of these factors leads to more than 2 possible outcomes.
This knowledge doesn't deny the reality of biological sex, but demands an extended understanding of gender beyond a (false) sex binary. Moving away from that, and back to the idea of hegemonic femininity. We see that women who "break the rules" by "looking like men" get punished.
So going back to the book, Patricia Hill Collins talks about how some women are excluded from this category of womanhood/femininity based on race, sexual orientation & class.
She says another benchmark of hegemonic femininity is being "appropriately heterosexual". In the context of patriarchy & this hierarchy of gender dominance, feminine women should couple with cishet men. Women who refuse this (i.e lesbians & queer women) are seen as deviants.
This deviation carries serious consequences. For not giving cishet men full unfettered access to their bodies and sexuality, lesbian/queer women are constructed as sexually immoral and are defeminized. This is then used as a justification for violence against them.
On the analyses of how class and race excludes black working-class women and single mothers, I'm just going to share screenshots from the text because there's a lot of nuances that this thread simply cannot encapsulate.
