History is written by the victors
but now they're conning the vanquished into writing it for them.
A doctoral student at Oxford (let’s call her Flora) recently tweeted this, in response to Professor Kathleen Stock’s cri de coeur after her local branch of UCU (the trade union for academics) threw her under the bus.
Who could be so spiteful, I thought? So I looked at Flora’s twitter feed.
There’s plenty in that profile to laugh at, but Flora’s brief description of her doctoral research isn’t funny. “Oral history and transfeminine experiences in feminist spaces in 70s + 80s Britain.” For starters, there was no such thing as a “transfeminine experience” in the 1970s and 80s. There were transsexuals, and transvestites, and that was it. I don’t want to get myself into a tangle like French philosopher Bruno Latour who denied that Ramses II could have died of tuberculosis, because the tubercle bacillus wasn’t discovered until 1882, but I think it’s reasonable to say that an entirely manmade invention like “transfemininity” could be said not to have existed until the word was thought of.
I wondered how she described her research topic elsewhere. Despite her very different appearance, this is the same person; she only seems to have become “nonbinary” very recently.
“Her research focuses on the experience of transgender women during the women’s liberation movement in Britain.”
“My research explores the experiences of transgender women in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.”
I realise that for Flora, the 1970s and 1980s are an almost unimaginably long time ago. But for me, they’re recent history! They’re the decades when I cut my feminist teeth, reading Guardian Women, and Spare Rib, and going to women’s groups and Reclaim The Night marches and protests at sex shops. And I am 99.9% sure that there were no “trans women”, or, as we called them then, men, involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Of course, the Women’s Liberation Movement had male allies. Male allies, including Stuart Hall, set up and ran the creche at the Women’s Liberation Movement Conference at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1970. But those male allies didn’t expect anyone to pretend they were women.
How is Flora collecting her information? Her twitter bio suggests it will be via oral history, which is wonderful, but we all know that memory is highly fallible, and that people lie. Who will she be talking to about these fifty year old “transfeminine experiences”? Will she be cross-checking information? Will she talk to the stalwarts of the second wave, many of whom are still with us?
This looks to me like the genesis of another of the Great Trans Lies, the biggest of which is the evergreen It Was A Trans Woman Of Colour Who Threw The First Brick At Stonewall. If Flora finishes her PhD, the lie that “trans women” were active in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s won’t be a lie any more, because there will be a PhD (and probably a book, which will get onto the tables in Waterstones with a flattering little note from a staff member) which will prove that it’s true.
I’m saddened for Flora, because she must, at some level, think that women aren’t actually capable of imagining and enacting their own liberation movement - that there must have been men involved. When I was Flora’s age, we knew that women were capable of absolutely everything, and that we needed men like fish need bicycles. How very sad it is that young women now don’t believe this.
This is infuriating!