I see more continuity and progression from De Beauvoir to Butler than Susanna Rustin (Feminists like me aren’t anti-trans – we just can’t discard the idea of ‘sex’, 30 September): it is precisely bodies and sex that are present in the social experience of trans women. What could be more somatic than experiencing deep dissociation from some of the bodily material from which one is “made” as a man? Black feminist activists and theorists such as Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw taught us that having a vagina doesn’t mean you can assume shared experiences around sex, power, social meaning and subjugation.
Women don’t all have periods or have babies. To make this some kind of female baseline leads to painful exclusion of lots of women: born, made, fluctuating – the lines are hazy. It is clear that trans women are regularly subject to pronounced violence and discrimination in a way that is bound up with broader and pervasive misogyny: what we see playing itself out when disagreement with JK Rowling becomes abusive. We need to remember this at every stage of these painful discussions.
Dr Vivienne Jackson
Walthamstow, London
