Oh yes, it is that issue again. This was inspired by a Facebook post by a woman whose feminist scholarship I admire who was expressing her concerns about the recent UK supreme court judgement on what constitutes a woman for the purposes of the UK Equality Act (2010).
It’s a pretty narrow and forensic judgement about the meaning of "woman" as stated in an omnibus law, which is being hailed by the various women’s rights groups as a huge victory, and by trans rights groups as the latest salvo in a fascistic, Trumpist style attack on pretty much everyone who isn’t right, white and heterosexual.
The trans rights advocates and allies seldom address the fact that gender identity theory and praxis was embraced initially by global corporations, by centre-right, corporate-enabling governments all over the west, by state organisations and enterprises, NGOs, Trade Unions, the media….
It was the Tories in the UK who threw the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform into the political arena. Gender identity was wholeheartedly supported by the US Democrats whose liberal wing is only left in the context of the right-wing mess that is US electoral politics. While Biden was enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his administration wholly embraced GI.
In unstable, unnerving conditions many socially conservative people will cleave to the known and to leaders who appear to be strong.
The same conditions may encourage socially transgressive people to push boundaries beyond sustainable limits, i.e. to the point where the moderating influence of the centre on both extremes is weakened and popular opinion starts to slide towards the conservative pole.
Anyone who knows anything about the politics of diversion and division could see how much utility this could have for the right. It was obvious, or it should have been, that the way the trans rights movement developed would be weaponised by the far right and by religious and secular ultra conservatives. It was never a case of if, but when and in what ways.
This isn’t a criticism of the cause, but it is a criticism of the air-headed, myopic strategies deployed by some trans-activists. That air-headedness may have been inevitable when you consider how individualistic and individualising an ideology it is, and how fragmented it quickly became as a political movement – made more so by how rapidly the trans umbrella grew to provide cover for a mass of gender identities, not to mention how reliant it was and is on media that can easily be manipulated by malign or vexatious agents.
For me, the clearest warning signal about the direction it was likely to take came in 2015 when an influential INCEL posted a video on his You Tube channel calling on his supporters to claim to be “transgender lesbians” online to mess with feminists and the left.
Trans rights also had and has utility for those liberals and leftists who’ve done nicely out of neo-liberal capitalism’s hyper-commodification and who have a place in its well remunerated, high status buffer class.
It's a cause which:
- Supports a tiny minority whose demands pose no threat to the economic status quo and which even contain some market opportunities.
- Doesn’t put your job at risk because your bosses support it also.
- Assuages guilt about relative privilege and the abandonment or continued disregard of the great unifying theories and praxis centred around class, race and sex.
- Lets you believe you are on the right side of history without having to actually confront the social and natural chaos that’s looming because of the very socio-economic system from which you are benefiting.
- Allows you to forget for a time, the child slaves in the Congo, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the proxy war in Ukraine, the heating up of the new Cold War against China, the accelerating and mutually reinforcing global issues of climate change, species extinctions/habitat loss, chemical and particulate pollution.
- Allows you to self-soothe, secure in the knowledge that you're fighting the good fight on at least one narrow front.
What worries me is the GI issue being stretched beyond breaking point between, a) the notion that being a woman is an essentially subjective, empirically unprovable state of mind, and/or a costume drawn from stereotypes that feminists fought to break; and, b) the narrowly deterministic notion that “a woman is an adult human being with no Y chromosome”.
I get worried when people haul intersex issues into the debate around trans rights with no regard for the fact that those with any form of DSD are a hugely diverse population many of whom don’t want to be used as political pawns.
I get worried when those who use intersex issues as political pawns have no regard for the very real possibility that DSDs (in number, type and severity) are increasing because of the chemical soup we’re being forced to live in by the same corporate and state drivers that have supported the GI orthodoxy.
I get worried when the World Health Organisation publishes information about intersex issues and makes the claim that there’s such a thing as a “Y monosomy”, and that ludicrous claim is repeated by influential people in defence of GI rights.
I get worried when no one asks whether there is a political-commercial imperative behind the current emphasis on the idea of “sex being on a spectrum”, and whether this process of normalising these deviations from the reproductive norm into something natural and therefore palatable is because, like the global epidemic of obesity, there is something that needs to be hidden. Something like the vast number of endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging chemicals in the environment, perhaps. (1)
I get worried when I see trans activists demanding the right to medically transition with apparently no regard for the implications of becoming one of the most medically surveilled and pharmacologically dependent groups on a politically and ecologically unstable planet – let alone considering the hellish nightmare of the interactions of pharmaceuticals with the mass of chemicals we cannot avoid ingesting, inhaling, absorbing.
All this and much more is why I dislike and distrust both extremes of this argument. It has yet again diverted the time and political energies of those best placed to demand and get positive change in respect of the constellation of horrors facing us.
In the time it has taken me to type this … how many innocents have died or been maimed and/or traumatised?
As to looking back on this in five years, as one commenter on the post said she planned to do, the planet is in a state of accelerating social and natural disequilibrium; it may already be at the point where equilibrium cannot be restored, in which case all bets are off because chaos will ensue.
That’s what worries me most.
(1) When researchers were looking for an endocrine disrupting chemical that might be implicated in the global increase in precocious puberty, they tested 10k before finding a likely culprit… a cheap synthetic scent. 10k sounds a lot but that’s a tiny percentage of the total released into the environment in various ways over the last half century. Endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging, carcinogenic chemicals that we cannot avoid; the adverse effects of any given one on any given organism at any given stage of its development is hard enough to determine; their interactions, as I’ve said repeatedly, are a nightmarish unknown.