There is a strong progressive lesbian feminist politic that recognizes that gender fluidity and transgenderism will help bring about changes in the rigid gender rules that restrain us. It also acknowledges that bisexuality and transsexuality touch the heart of our belief that all of us must have control of our bodies—we must own them. That is why we support reproductive choice, work to end sexual assault, and fight for all of us to be able to love and have sex with the person we choose. —Suzanne Pharr, "Afterword: Where We Are Now," Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (Expanded Edition)
In the post "Is it Safe to Come Out?," I asked "What are we going to do about transphobia among feminist-vegetarians/ecofeminists?"
White ecofeminism and feminist-vegetarianism is heavily influenced by the reactionary and transphobic writings of some dominant radical cultural feminists. Most notably is Mary Daly (a past member of Feminists for Animals Rights' board of advisers) and her book Gyn/Ecology, which is filled with transphobia, cissexism, and trans-misogyny directed at transsexual women. A major influence on, as well as of, Daly's transphobia was Janice Raymond, who wrote the transphobic book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Other transphobic influences on feminist-vegetarians/ecofeminists include Robin Morgan and Sheila Jeffreys.
The most famous feminist-vegetarian/ecofeminist writing on the oppression of nonhuman animals is Carol J. Adams and her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, which was first written as a paper for Mary Daly. And in Neither Man Nor Beast, Adams uses the Cambridge-Boston clique of feminists most closely connected with Daly to justify her inclusion of the oppression of nonhuman animals in ecofeminism. Furthermore, Rape of the Wild by Andree Collard, also came directly out of Mary Daly's influence, as well as the influence of Janice Raymond, and was published a year before The Sexual Politics of Meat.
Notably, Rape of the Wild is based on Daly's oppositional sexist concept of the inherent "biophilic" nature of cissexual women and their "gynergy" or female energy. In Daly's transphobic theory, transsexual women are inherently "necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses," and our exclusion from women's space is justified on the basis that we have male energy; Daly refers to trans women as a "necrophilic invasion." While defining ecofeminism as opposing dualisms like men/women, human/animal, nature/culture, by claiming that cissexual women are superior and "biophilic" and transsexual women are inferior and "necrophiliacs" Daly and other transphobic ecofeminists promote a cissexist, and oppositional sexist, dualism of cissexual women/transsexual women.
