Happy International Men’s Day! Today, we celebrate the men in our lives and honor the struggle for men’s liberation. Learn more about today and find resources about male mental health here: https://internationalmensday.com/
Confused? Maybe my branding as a feminist newsletter has you thinking that I’m anti-man. Maybe the fact that I’m a lesbian (and have divested from manhood via gender transition) has you thinking that I believe all men are inherently trash. But I’m here for the liberation of men, and I’m tired of pretending that I’m not. In fact, my experience with masculinity has only enhanced my appreciation for what men go through.
The pop-feminist party line for the past few years has been that men are the main perpetrators of patriarchal violence; most (if not all) are inherently trash on a biological level, irredeemable and worthless. #NotAllMen but certainly #MoreThanEnoughMen.
Here’s the thing: phrases like “men are trash” and “we don’t need men” emerged as a response to the very real infrastructure of patriarchy, where women are coerced into unpaid reproductive labor for tyrannical men who own the products of that labor (the home, the children, the finances, etc.) Unfortunately, “we don’t need men” is little more than a slogan, a rallying cry, if an effective one to get people talking. It can’t hold the weight of an entire political ideology, and we don’t need it to. I do hope that society one day gets to a point where women can, economically, not be 100% dependent on a man, where everyone’s needs are met by communities of care, the state, or both (ideally mostly the former). But trying to enact a separatist lifestyle on an individual level, while the infrastructure of patriarchy remains fully in place, is only accessible to a certain class of women, leaving the rest of us behind.
Let’s back up here. I freely admit that many men are misogynistic pigs, and I get why to many women, patriarchy seems intrinsic to manhood. If you’re a woman in America, the patriarchy seems absolutely inescapable. The more you look critically at the world, especially if you’re a lesbian or occupy other axes of marginalization, the sheer scale to which our society is male-dominated in every capacity is crushing. It can feel like patriarchy is this Lovecraftian, unbeatable evil. For many other feminists, there’s this mindset that being “biologically male” is something that makes you a part of that unbeatable evil. In fairness, that’s a mindset built after years of data collection saying “male = bad”. Who am I, someone who’s only been a woman for six-ish years, to tell someone who’s been sexualized since childhood that she needs to buddy up with her oppressors?
To reconcile with the crushing reality of patriarchy, there’s this strong desire among many feminists to divest from anything related to men. “Feminist separatism”, mainly based on the theories of “political lesbianism”, is the idea that freedom from patriarchy can only come from women’s separation from men. The idea is that you, as an individual, should reject any participation in heterosexual relationships with men, or anything else “male-dominated”, and that the only hope for liberation is for women/lesbians to form separate, autonomous communities devoid of men.
I myself have formed this kind of mindset out of survival. Cisgender men are dangerous to trans women, so when I started transitioning, I made it an explicit point to avoid them. Apart from my professional relationships, I had almost no strong friendships with cisgender men, for years. And that worked pretty well, at least for a while.
Nothing lasts forever, though, and I eventually came to realize that leaving men—yes, even cis men—out of my life entirely was detrimental.
The Combahee River Collective Statement is an open letter penned in 1977 by Black feminist writers Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier and Beverly Smith. They cover a lot of ground in just a few pages, but of great interest to me are their discussions of lesbian separatism, which was far more prominent at the time…
Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.
The easiest way to explain why feminism needs men is through intersectionality. Black women need Black men to aid in racial liberation. Disabled women need disabled men to aid in disability justice. Stretch this analysis out to all other oppressed groups, including children, the elderly, queers, non-citizens, Muslim folks, and more, and eventually you build yourself up to the idea that, yes, most men are marginalized in some way, and thus deserve our solidarity.
And what about the cis, white, hetero, able-bodied, [insert other privileges here] men of the world? As a restorative justice girlie, I don’t love the idea that people are irredeemably bad and can never change. After seeing many men in my life go from being misogynistic, to sympathetic toward feminist causes, to full-on Judith Butler enjoyers, I can tell you that as long as people want to change, they can. The fact is, men aren’t born misogynistic—nobody is born with the notion that women need to shave their legs or be subservient to men—rather, that is done to them by society. Sexism was created by humans, meaning it can be destroyed by humans. It’s not being “biologically male” that makes people evil, it’s the systems that men choose to participate in.
To quote from the Combahee River Collective Statement once again…
As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.
While fewer people openly identify as lesbian separatists today, we see remnants of it in pop feminism today. Articles abound about how “men are obsolete” and Facebook pages making fun of men hit numbers in the thousands, even as the phrase “men are trash” is labeled as hate speech on the platform (“women are trash” is still acceptable”). All of which is good fun, in fact it can be cathartic for us.
I think that if you’re a woman, especially a woman with multiple axes of oppression, separating yourself from men for a little while can be good for your own protection, and even a good tool for liberation. Sometimes you need to take a step back and get a birds-eye view of patriarchy; as a novice media analyst, that’s what I do. But humor can’t make up our whole identity as feminists, and this option to separate isn’t really available to all people, especially feminists of color.
And then, of course, there’s the trans perspective. Queerness has a tendency to add a whole lot of nuance and grey area (or rainbow area, if you will) to any issue; few issues are black and white, after all. That’s what’s so great about us!
While I’m not a trans man, this conversation would be missing something if I excluded their perspectives on manhood. For one thing, many feminists attempt trans inclusion by saying that it’s cisgender men who are terrible, and that transgender men are “the good ones”. While experiences of oppression (re: girlhood) can be enlightening in ways that lend themselves well to being a pro-feminist man post-transition, many trans men find this attitude infantilizing. Worse, it can serve a proxy for calling them “basically women”, amounting to backhanded misgendering.
It also ignores the reality of male loneliness, which serves as the basis for International Men’s Day. From James Barnes’ article, “I'm a Trans Man. I Didn't Realize How Broken Men Are”…
Men started treating me like their guy friends, which was exactly what I wanted. What I didn't know is that male friendships aren't as deep. Before my transition, guys used to open up to me about all sorts of fears, frustrations, and feelings. Now, they would keep it superficial.
The most depleting were new friendships. It was nearly impossible with women, especially being married, and men. I realized that it would take years to build a semi-deep friendship.
Before transitioning, I didn't receive short pat hugs or shake hands; I got deep, long hugs. I didn't get quick answers about life; I got hour-long conversations. When traveling or running errands, and I saw a parent dealing with an exhausting kid, I could help and not be stared at like a creep.
The way I existed in society was the exact opposite of how I move through it now, and with that comes privilege. I feel safer; I no longer walk around at night clinging to pepper spray. I've had to train myself to move out of women's way before they step aside. …
And yet, privilege also came with a cost. While I can take up space in most areas, I don't feel like a welcomed and loved part of the community. I started to see my masculinity as the biggest oxymoron. Frankly, it messes with your brain.
Women, largely in response to patriarchy, have formed communities of love and care and softness. It’s one of my favorite things about being a woman, actually. I can tell you from my own pre-transition experience that men don’t have community the same way that women do. They don’t talk about their feelings as much, they don’t hug as much, they lack that intimate physicality [insert joke about how men invented football just to hug each other]. This is only a small part of a larger conversation about the limitations of “privilege” as a Boolean function; “all men always have it good while all women always have it bad”.
There’s also the reality that transness doesn’t automatically make you a good person; I’ve known trans men who were just as awful and abusive as the worst cis men. Perhaps, as trans-exclusive separatist feminists believe, there’s something “intrinsic/cosmic” about masculinity that “taints souls” and converts them into being evil…or maybe, trans men are awful at roughly the same rates at which human beings are awful.
It’s gauche in feminist circles to bring up violence enacted by women. It’s often dismissed as being “rare” comparative to violence enacted by men. I definitely shrug at reactionary “men’s rights activists” disingenuously proclaiming “bUt wHaT aBoUt FeMaLe pRiVilEgE????” in response to genuine engagements with patriarchal violence. But it should not be ignored that women, especially cis women, enact and maintain patriarchy every day. I would argue that this particular group are instrumental to the continuation of patriarchy; no matter your gender, think back to your own childhood and I think you’ll find that it was your mothers, aunties, grandmothers, and other female elders who’ve told you that you need to dress a certain way, who’ve nudged you to find/avoid certain careers, who’ve made excuses for the male figures in your life, and more. **AHEM half of white women voted for Trump COUGH COUGH**
This is what makes it surreal when cis women accuse trans women of being misogynists on the basis that they used to be men, and therefore we “have the stink on us.” Honey, we were all born into a patriarchal, racist, fucked-up pig pen of a system; we ALL have the stink on us.
To quote my own essay from August 2022 (yes, I’ve been at this weekly newsletter this for a while!)…
I find TERFs really interesting from a social psychology perspective. Supposedly, as feminists, they believe in women’s liberation. They believe that women shouldn’t be defined by their reproductive capacity. They believe that women shouldn’t be defined by our relationships to men, and that they’re full human beings with rich, internal lives that deserve to be recognized and respected. They believe in an expansive idea of womanhood that encompasses not only femininity but all sorts of gender expression, like generations of butch lesbians before them. They believe that womanhood is an expansive concept that shouldn’t be constrained by patriarchal norms of what a woman “should” be. They believe that women can be just as strong and just as smart as men.
But then, when trans women get brought up, a switch gets flipped. They launch into talking points about how being a woman is about your reproductive capacity, that the trauma that from experiencing sexism from men is what it means to be a woman, they mock any of our features or presentational styles that could be called “masculine”, and they might even say that males are inherently stronger/smarter than females, all as justification for keeping trans women and cis women separate. What’s going on here? Can they really believe these things and call themselves feminists? Do they actually believe all of these things simultaneously?
…So, where do we go from here? If men are not monsters, that only brings us to an even more unbearable reality: that a) they don’t have to be sexist and choose to anyway, and b) someone now has to do the work of “fixing” them.
I’m not saying that it’s the work of every single woman to forgive and forget the abuse that they faced by men. I definitely don’t want to dump the work of saving men onto women. Rather, I want women to be supportive companions while men help themselves.
Sorry boys, women can’t do the work for you, and not just because we don’t want to. It’s your job to form communities of care and love that are your own, since you understand your own needs better than most women do! There are so many resources to learn about men’s liberation. The Reddit page r/menslib is a pro-feminist male space, as opposed to the MRA crowd. There’s literature stretching back to the 1970s to pour over. The International Men’s Day website has resources to make events. Even colleges like UMass have a Men and Masculinities Center and Men Talking therapy groups. The best part about men’s liberation is that many feminists, including Black feminists like bell hooks, have already done many of the ground work for you. Now you just have to go and enact those values as best you can!
As for me, I’m no longer in my separatist phase out of a need for protection; for the past few years, I’ve been working with men to make change in my community, including police accountability and trying to save a local maternity ward from getting shut down. I’ve formed productive relationships with men at work, including in DEI Committees and feminist research spaces. I reject individualistic solutions, and seek community-level care. How many women would be better off if, in the case that a man was mistreating them, they had many people in their life (of all genders) that they could rely on? What if we had UBI and nobody was forced to “partner up” to survive? What if we all simply had fair, livable wages?
If there’s anything we need to divest from, it’s the “gender wars”. I have, and I truly think my life is better for it.
Action Items
I am once again sharing the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s Action Toolkit. Go learn about the history of Palestine and donate money to help the cause!
Since money isn’t necessarily getting to the people of Gaza right now, another great way to help out is to donate to bail funds. This will help those who are getting arrested at protests, especially those bravely standing in the way of weapons shipments. Find a bail fund in your state here.
Finally, the easiest thing to do right now is call your reps to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Find your reps and contact them here. Better yet, find the folks who have signed onto a ceasefire and thank them!
Currently Reading
Related to manhood, men’s skincare products are marketed completely differently than woman’s skincare products. How curious!
More proof that the emergence of AI will lead to the proliferation of misinformation.
A viral essay about how learning about social justice makes you insane…but that’s good, actually. (Remember that the Stop Cop City protestors are being charged with terrorism, to give you an idea of what the state thinks of as “sane behavior”.)
Finally, good news: anti-trans rhetoric is failing, and left-leaning people are taking control of school boards after local elections! Yes!!
Watch History
PBS Voices has a new series on Indigenous innovations, and I am loving it so far!! Check out this episode on Indigenous fashion.
Related to today’s newsletter topic: heteropessimism, and ways forward, by the great Khadija Mbowe.
A subversive take on the best year in gaming, putting amazing video games in context with the exploitative nature of the gaming industry. Related: members of The Escapist have formed a new employee-owned publication called Second Wind. Hooray for them! Hear more about their takes on the industry here.
Even when cis women beat trans women in sports, they still find ways to complain. It’s almost like the point of all this hassle is to exclude trans people from public life, not to actually make women’s lives better…huh!
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
André 3000 is back with an instrumental album, and I am loving it. After years of dealing with social anxiety and the daunting task of following up his Outkast career, he finally found an artistic outlet that feels right for him. KING!!
Cannons’ new album has hit me right in the feels, especially as I’m starting a new relationship myself! This could be my AOTY, only time will tell!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna