Lesbian separatism class (2 of 2): My main point.

Overall, I really tried to hammer home the point that even though gender is socially constructed, “socially constructed” doesn’t mean “unreal”, and people have real experiences constituted through those categories, and just because you can pass as one gender now, it doesn’t mean you have the total life experience from which to relate to someone who’s been that gender forever.

I said that esp. b/c students couldn’t understand why some “womyn-born-womyn” would want to exclude male-to-female transsexuals from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

“But they’re womyn,” they were like.

At one point, before I made my point explicit, I asked students since race was a cultural construct, too, whether I could drop into Democratic National Convention events for African-Americans only, if  I learned the cultural norms of speech, manners, etc., which idea most of my students were really resistant too, initially.

“How many of you have seen the original Hairspray?”, I was like.  “And I’m not talking that musical remake crap.”

A couple had, and I brought up the scene where Ricki Lake and Link are on the run from the law and are making out in an alley and they pause from frenching to say, “On our insides we're black,” and after they say that, they start frenching even harder.

“What if I’m black inside,” I was like, “And I can act black, couldn’t I go to that event?”

At that point, the students were kind of befuddled, and I brought up how if you switched babies in a hospital, they could conceivably be brought up in totally different racial cultures, since the example of intersex babies being able to get raised as male or female gets brought up a lot in gender discussions.

“And you can get surgery to look like a different race,” one of my thoughtful (white) (female) students volunteered, the one who’s into gamer events (! - go her for thinking through the analogy farther than I did!).

 All of that made some of the (white) students kind of start volunteering that maybe it was okay for someone like me to go to an all African-American DNC event.

Then, my one (black) (female) student stepped in, and was like, “But there’s something different, you don’t know what it’s like...”

She really was the only student who got the argument from experience, the rest didn’t.

In fact, my one (white) (gay) (male) student said it was cis-gendered privilege to exclude transwomen from womyn-only spaces.

Then, since we had to move onto other things, I dropped the explicit point about “socially constructed” not meaning “unreal”.

Overall, I didn't want to put my one (black) student on the spot by discussing race, but the analogy was worth laying out, and it's not like I called on her to be a spokesperson or something.