The identity of “male” as constructed in the Enlightenment imagination carries with it a double facedness, wherein it retains contradictory aspects as both a non-existent rational objectivity possessed of an access to reality to which everything outside is excluded from, the sick, the female, the racially other, etc, and as a masculine self, wherein it is the outside, the everything, the female here imagined as a specific object which is constructed, such as in the case of a gender neutral silhouette being gendered as “male” and requiring some additions to be made female, such as a bow or skirt shape. The result of this allows an identity to be constructed which solves the man’s internal problem of dualism: he can be both possessing of the “mind” in the former and the “body” in the latter, hence allowing him to sustain his position in society through the “mind” without fear from the overcoding world of the “body”, saving him from the insecurity of lesser developed men towards the enemy-animal, the body embodied as a threat. By doing so, the man is able to enter and push forward the enlightenment-capitalist project, wherein he submits himself to inhuman machines of capital and language while believing himself to hold phallic authority over those actions he performs in his submission, the capitalist or scientist, working in total devotion to the market or to the method, yet by signing his name or emblem on every package or paper. It is through this double-action that the logic of imperialism functions, wherein it is both the objective, impersonal, civilizing mission, and the European conquest and domination of the world.
This equation is taken for granted in the struggle of feminism, in an ideological fashion, wherein it is assumed this is not only unchangeable but the desired “liberation” state that women should aspire to. In de Beauvoir’s writing, woman’s lack of access to this default is written as being a deprivation, a lack which woman must overcome, a schematic that takes for granted the basic terms of there being a default at all. Doing so empowers women, but only to an extent, with its end result if successful being that the original sins of the Enlightenment Man will be repeated by women. In doing so however, women are robbed of the very thing which would allow for them an escape from this terminal rationality, their femininity. This femininity - here imagined as nothing more than a prison which must be overcome (hence the feminist tradition of celebrating their own version of the male celebration of their body as grotesque), thereby making themselves as accessing of the default-masculine as men themselves are. The feminine in feminism has to it, no positive attributes at all, but is only a series of arbitrary attributes forced onto them by an abstract enemy, a spectral devil of whig religion which is slowly being cast off as women transcend to masculinity. This casting off of femininity requires women to repeat the same violence which occured to grant men their masculinity originally, a repetition of the same construction and then oppression of the feminine, committed a second time, against a new other.
It is here that the erroneous assumption that TERFs are merely “appropriating” feminism in the “FART” acronym is false - TERFs are not appropriating anything, they’re taking a more popular approach to the same ideological path that all feminism assumes as an axiom. The difference of TERFs and trans-friendly feminists is an ontological disagreement on what creates one as a woman, with the TERFs being one with a more natural conclusion. Unlike the trans-friendly feminist, who relies on womanhood being constructed by some mentally based subtle, spiritual essence of womanhood, the TERF relies on that same subtle, spiritual essence constructed through the very same medical and sociological languages which construct the entire rationalist project of feminism. The feminist is unable to respond within feminism with any strength therefore, because the project of feminism requires woman to be constructed in a way referring to some real core and not to any femininity or attributes, a construction of womanhood that has stark few variations that include transwomen.
The end goal for transwomen therefore should not be to take up feminism in a new direction - to do so is a false errand, but to abandon feminism as yet another project of the Enlightenment and instead promote femininity as the quality which is to be uphold, against a masculine rationality. It is this femininity which transwomen are in fact more capable of access to, the feminine being the “mind” itself, not as an alien, but as the matter which creates the total self. While man is firmly tied to the physical, purely a creature of the body who must construct of his renunciation and then reintroduction of that body, woman is capable of acting purely outside the body, with woman needing to be constructed in the first place, evident in the example of the women’s bathroom sign or Ms. Pacman. Transwomen, having their entire womanhood constructed, are therefore naturally more akin to this quality of being cyborg between the human and the ahuman artistic, cultural, linguistic, technological, etc, through which womanhood is constructed, thus granting them a more intimate experience of the feminine.
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