Sex roles – now referred to as gender – are a powerful and ancient social construct with a tap root deep in the material reality of reproductive sex which, at its core, is biological and dimorphic.
The conceptualisation of, and discourse around sex are social
processes. We wrap up the material reality of sex in layers of social
meanings, processes and rituals – the most powerful and opaque of which are
beliefs about how females and males should look, behave and be treated.
The degree of human sexual dimorphism is moderate; there are wide physical, psychological and behavioural overlaps between the sexes. As a
species we are ineluctably social, flexible and adaptable – as much in when,
and with whom, or with what we will have sex, as we are in what we can, and will
eat.
But it is the case that it takes a functional ovary to
produce an egg, a functional testicle to produce sperm, and a functional uterus
to gestate a foetus to the point of viability, i.e. where it can survive outside the body of its mother.
The female of the species is the one who possesses the means
by which new humans are both gestated and – for all of evolutionary and most of social history
and for the majority of people alive today – are fed as infants. She is more
crucial to species and group reproduction than the male for reasons that are obvious.
A sexual division of labour was conditioned by the material
realities that underpin human reproduction, i.e. long gestation, bipedalism, big
head, utterly dependent offspring, slow sexual maturation etc, and this current debate centres around the extent to which and manner in which that foundational reality resulted in ideas
about an immutable basis to both sex and sex roles, and how gender was forged
into an ideological weapon used to subjugate people – most especially women.
The biological process of sexual differentiation in utero is complex, completed early in pregnancy and sometimes throws up
anomalies. This is neither remarkable nor surprising and is not proof of a range
of sexes or a 'spectrum of reproductive sex’.
Capitalist production has saturated the world with DNA damaging and endocrine disrupting substances. If these do make humans less fertile, as seems to be the case, or causes an increase in the incidence of reproductive anomalies, it may be that the current sanguine attitude towards "gender fluidity" will change.
And if reproductive anomalies are
increasing and male fertility is decreasing due to the presence in
the environment of massive amounts of DNA damaging substances and endocrine disruptors, there are people who would have a
massive vested interest in obscuring that fact.
Our social world is dominated by a system of production which
commodifies everything – even intangibles like debt – and it commodifies sex and
all the social stuff which is wrapped around sex.
It enables and promotes individualism, social fragmentation
and a rampant consumerism which serves to blind the main beneficiaries of the system to the vast and
growing gulf between their beliefs, priorities and concerns, and those of the rest
of humanity.
The beliefs, concerns and priorities of the main
beneficiaries of the capitalist mode of production that has dominated the world
over the past 400 years, and more specifically the last forty years of rampant
growth under neo-liberalism, are not those of all humans. Fact. Get over it.
This is still a world in which every day of every year, around
200 women – mostly poor women of colour – die in childbirth, many of them because they are anaemic and malnourished.
Yet human rights
organisations refer to "pregnant people" in order to be "inclusive" of the tiny number of affluent, well nourished and mainly white transmen who choose to give birth – in safe, hygienic conditions.
No one comments on why it is that transmen only get media
attention when they give birth, or why it is that anyone who wants a say in
this mass interrogation of the categories of woman and female risks being subjected to a
torrent of abuse from transactivists and from their liberal and leftwing allies.
The modern era is a mere blink of the eye in the evolution of
the species and it has thrown up and given power to people (mostly male) hell-bent
on replacing human labour with technology – including technology to replace the
humans who gestate new humans.
In the view of some people, our world is over populated and
some of these people see this "surplus" as dehumanised "useless
eaters" whose deaths are just "collateral damage".
In the forty years of the spectacular growth of global corporate capitalism,
200+ million children under the age of 5 have died, 40 million of them in their 1st
week of life, and 3 million women have bled to death in childbirth or died of
post-partum infection. Almost all of these were easily prevented deaths.
Control of the reproductive capacity of females is no
longer needed to ensure generational replacement or population growth – now it
is about controlling the number and the type of people who are born, and
to whom.
Those who are behind the capitalist drive to technologise do
so, not to free humans from soul and body destroying labour, or to free women
from their role in reproduction – they do it to exert control. Technologise a
thing or a process and those who control the technology, control it.
Something transactivists slide around or ignore is the fact that,
as a population, trans people are among the most surveilled and medically
controlled on the planet.
Gender self-ID may remove one aspect of bureaucratic and medical
gatekeeping but it will be at the price of a greatly enhanced public profile. People already have become way more aware of, and interested in the previously fairly sequestered private
lives of those within the trans community.
There is
the other quid pro quo – if you want to argue for a higher priority on the
triaging system which is at work in ALL publicly funded health care – you must
expect to have your priority and eligibility publicly debated.
Gender self-ID as a human right that is denied to trans people, is strengthened if the idea is extended into the need for ALL people to have the human right to declare their bespoke gender identity – hence the widening of the project to include removing the entire
process of categorising people as female or male at birth.
Gender self-ID by statutory declaration is not essential to ensure the legal
equality of trans people in NZ or the UK as this is already guaranteed by statute. Nor will it, in and of itself,
guarantee greater levels of social acceptance, in fact it may have the opposite
effect, which is what some transsexuals fear.
Questioning
the effects of gender self-ID on women is not a denial of trans rights, and the
incessant repetition of the hyperbolic assertion that any questioning of any
aspect of the trans project literally kills trans people, is wearing thin.
In fact, some of the
trans rhetoric is so torrid, so abusive, so absurd and so potentially damaging to the cause it claims to
support, that those who indulge in it have either lost the plot, or they’re plotting a
loss.
There is no
free lunch in any of this, and what sensible people know is that some transactivists' GO line is already way past a lot of other people’s WHOA line – and a conservative
backlash could sweep away a lot more than trans rights.
