Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely. Third- and fourth-wave feminists tend to view trans rights as an integral part of intersectional feminism. Former president of the American National Organization for Women (NOW) Terry O'Neill has stated that the struggle against transphobia is a feminist issue, with NOW affirming that "trans women are women, trans girls are girls." Several studies have found that individuals who identify as feminists tend to be more accepting of trans people than those who do not.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminism holds that womanhood is defined on the axis of sex, and thus asserts that trans women are not women and that trans men are not men. The movement opposes trans rights and rejects the concept of transgender identities. These views have frequently been described as transphobic by other feminists.
Authors including Julia Serano and Emi Koyama have founded a stream within feminism called transfeminism, which views the struggle for the rights of trans people and trans women in particular as an integral part of the feminist struggle for all women's rights.
History 1700s to early 1900s Late 18th-century English feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson referenced the Chevalier d'Éon as an example of an inspiring woman.
In 1866, anti-rape activist Frances Thompson became the first transgender woman to testify before the United States Congress when she testified about the abuse Black women faced during the Memphis massacre of 1866.
In 1919, the German Weimar Republic–era Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality advocacy and research institution, was founded in Berlin. As well as advocating for women's emancipation, sex education, and access to contraception, the institute prominently endorsed LGBT rights and oversaw the development of several advances in trans healthcare, including coining the term "transsexualism" and performing gender-affirming surgery. Institute founder Magnus Hirschfeld's closest collaborator in the feminist movement was Helene Stöcker, whose was directly affiliated with the institute. Both Hirschfeld and Stöcker viewed women's liberation as intertwined with that of gay and transgender people. Anarchist feminist Emma Goldman also spoke favourably of the institute's work, writing in one of her letters to Hirschfeld that it was "a tragedy... that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life."Goldman, Emma (1923). "Offener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbücher über Louise Michel" with a preface by Magnus Hirschfeld. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. 23: 70. Translated from German by James Steakley. Goldman's original letter in English is not known to be extant. Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, the institute was forcibly shut down, becoming the first large target of the Nazi book burnings.
Second wave (1970s–1980s) In the late 1970s and early 1980s, corresponding roughly to the second wave of feminism, there were several notable clashes between feminists (especially early radical feminists) over the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces.
A significant early dispute occurred in 1973 during a scheduled performance at the West Coast Lesbian Conference by transgender lesbian folk-singer and co-organiser of the event Beth Elliott. Elliott had previously served as vice-president of the San Francisco chapter of the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis and edited the chapter's newsletter, Sisters, but had been expelled from the group the same year on a 35–28 vote on the grounds that she did not qualify as a woman. After a lesbian separatist group leafleted the conference against her presence, a vote was held among attendees on whether to allow her to remain, with over two-thirds voting in her favor. Despite the results of the vote, Elliott chose to leave after threats of further disruption were made. The following day of the event, Robin Morgan used her keynote speech to criticise Elliott, describing her as a "man" and "an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer – with the mentality of a rapist."Robin Morgan, "Keynote Address" Lesbian Tide. May/Jun73, Vol. 2 Issue 10/11, p30-34 (quote p 32); for additional coverage see Pichulina Hampi, Advocate, 9 May 1973, issue 11, p. 4
Later the same year, a conflict arose between Jean O'Leary, a founder of lesbian advocacy organization Lesbian Feminist Liberation, and Sylvia Rivera and Lee Brewster, after O'Leary said in a speech at the Christopher Street Liberation Day event: "we support the right of every person to dress in the way that she or he wishes. But we are opposed to the exploitation of women by men for entertainment or profit." O'Leary later regretted her stance against trans women and drag queens, saying that "looking back, I find this so embarrassing because my views have changed so much since then. I would never pick on a transvestite now." "It was horrible. How could I work to exclude transvestites and at the same time criticize the feminists who were doing their best back in those days to exclude lesbians?"
After a trans woman asked to join the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) in 1978, the organization voted to exclude trans women. LOOT wrote: "A woman's voice was almost never heard as a woman's voice—it was always filtered through men's voices. So here a guy comes along saying, 'I'm going to be a girl now and speak for girls.' And we thought, 'No you're not.' A person cannot just join the oppressed by fiat."
Radical feminist Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979. In it, she criticised contemporary medical and psychiatric approaches to gender transition, arguing instead that "the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence," and accused trans women of reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes. Several academics, researchers and writers characterized these views as transphobic and/or hate speech. Empire included a chapter criticising "the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist", devoting a section to Sandy Stone, a trans woman who worked as a sound engineer for feminist record collective Olivia Records. The collective publicly defended Stone, but after continued pressure, including an incident where a trans-exclusionary group that issued death threats showed up to an Olivia event with guns, Stone resigned. Stone later wrote The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, a response to Raymond's Empire and a foundational work in the field of transgender studies.
Not all early radical feminists opposed trans acceptance. Andrea Dworkin, for example, viewed gender reassignment surgery as a right for transgender people. She wrote a letter to Raymond critical of The Transsexual Empire, which commented that of the transgender people she met in Europe (who she called a "small, vigorously persecuted minority"), she "perceived their suffering as authentic", and related their experiences to Jewish and female experiences. Dworkin said that it was a myth "that there are two polar distinct sexes".
The notion that human sex is not a naturally discrete binary, and that this conception is the result of gendered cultural and political processes, was later taken up and developed by authors like Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler. Concerning the oversight of the existence of these trans-inclusive radical feminist views, as well as of the role of trans women in the feminist struggle, historian Susan Stryker remarked that "transsexual women were active in the radical feminist movement of the late 1960s, but were almost entirely erased from its history after 1973."
Third wave (1990–2000s) The third wave of feminism saw much greater acceptance of transgender rights, largely due to the influence of philosophers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Judith Butler, who argued for greater inclusion and examination of other developing fields (such as critical race theory and queer theory) within feminism. Butler in particular argued that women's liberation required a questioning of gender itself, and that accepting gay, trans, and gender-nonconforming people would promote this sort of questioning.
Other feminist authors like Cressida Heyes have embarked on projects of "finding grounds for solidarity" between trans and cisgender women, considering "woman" a family-resemblance concept rather than an essential or univocal one.
In the early 1990s, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MichFest) ejected a transgender woman, Nancy Burkholder. From that point on, the festival maintained it was intended for "womyn-born womyn". The group Camp Trans formed to protest this policy and to advocate for greater acceptance of trans women in the feminist community. A number of prominent trans activists and feminists were involved in Camp Trans, including Riki Wilchins, Jessica Xavier, and Leslie Feinberg. MichFest considered allowing post-operative trans women to attend, but this was criticized as classist, as many trans women could not afford sex reassignment surgery. Lisa Vogel, MichFest's organizer, said protesters from Camp Trans engaged in vandalism. The festival ended in 2015.
Fourth wave (2010–present)
Many fourth-wave feminists are trans-inclusive. US organizations such as the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Planned Parenthood support and advocate for trans rights, as do most Canadian feminist organizations and most African feminists.Camminga B. Disregard and danger: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the voices of trans (and cis) African feminists. The Sociological Review. 2020;68(4):817-833. doi:10.1177/0038026120934695 | quote="Feminists from the African continent have for the most part responded, at least on public platforms, in support of transgender women... the narrative of trans-exclusionary feminism in the Global North, which currently seems to be dominant at least in a popular cultural sense, is seemingly not an issue in the same way on the African continent." The influence of trans-exclusionary feminists has waned significantly, though they are still somewhat influential in some countries, including the United Kingdom.
General perspectives on transgender rights Queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler has argued for feminist solidarity with trans and gender-nonconforming people and has been critical of philosophers, such as Sheila Jeffreys, who they argue engage in attempts to dispute trans people's sense of identity. In a 2014 interview, Butler argued for civil rights for trans people: "[N]othing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world." Butler also described criticisms of trans people by Jeffreys and Janice Raymond as "prescriptivism" and "tyranny". Butler stated trans people are not a product of medical discourse but rather develop new discourses through self-determination.
In 2012, Jeffreys wrote in The Guardian that she and other critics of "transgenderism" had been subjected to intimidation campaigns on the internet, suggesting that trans rights advocates feared criticism of "the practice of transgenderism." The article was a response to
In a 2009 paper in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Canadian feminist Viviane Namaste criticised "Anglo-American feminist theory" for relying on "transsexual women to ask its own epistemological questions", further arguing that the realities of trans lives were "chillingly absent from Anglo-American feminist theory and its framing of the Transgender Question" and the knowledge gained by that feminism consequently "has been of little benefit to transsexual women ourselves."