We all know that, these days, feminism is a dirty word. It conjures up images of man-hating women glorying in the role of social victim, blaming all of societies ills on men. It’s unfortunate that such a simple yet important and life-changing belief that women are equal (not superior, not inferior) to men, has been reduced to such a cartoon caricature.

When one of the most important feminists, a real radical thinker with the ability to hold the world in thrall, died this week we all rightly mourned her. Mary Daly was an icon, a respected thoelogian who constructed a viable theology around what it means to be a woman.

But she was a controversial figure. Many of her assertions, frankly, anger me. She was unapologetically transphobic. Her vitriole for trans people is as hateful as it is inexcusable. She said that transsexualism a “male problem” and claimed that post-operative transsexuals exist in a “contrived and artifactual condition.”

According to Questioning Transphobia:

Mary Daly had a substantial hand in creating the specifically feminist form of transphobia that continues to affect trans women today.  She, along with her former PhD student Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer and others beyond their mistakes in the utopian days of the 70s gave sustenance to yet another generation of transphobes from Sheila Jeffreys to Julie Bindel—feminists who argue in the name of (a certain kind of) feminism against trans women’s rights—against legal recognition, against access to necessary medical treatment, against anti-discrimination policy, and against our ability to access women’s homeless, domestic abuse and rape shelters.

This is part of Daly’s legacy that I reject. I am a feminist, I believe in equality for men and women and their right to define who they are in their own terms. I think this is what is important when dealing with  history as  uncomfortable as Daly’s. Assess her as a flawed individual and take from her what you can but be ready to reject, absolutely, anything so abhorrent.

From GlobalComment:

Another bone of contention for many trans people of my generation is that Daly was the faculty thesis adviser to the transgender community’s bitter public enemy of the 80’s and early 90’s, Janice Raymond. Daly supervised Janice Raymond’s PhD dissertation, which then morphed into the notoriously transphobic 1979 screed, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male. The book argued that transsexual women were agents of the patriarchy infiltrating women’s space. This disco-era book is the underpinning for much of the haterade spewed by current trans-despising radical feminists such as Julie Bindel.

Some make excuses such as “She was a product of her time;” not good enough. Do we excuse all the evils in history in the same way? She was a thinker, a theorist who spoke out and to whom people listened. She is a heroine of feminism but I hope her theories are a step in the road to greater tolerance, that we can learn from her mistakes as well as her victories.

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