The Real Issue Du Jour

This started as a thread on Twitter but it grew too long and so a blog post it is.

Formal rights are never just handed over because the powerful see the natural justice in doing so; they have to be fought for and the powerful will always seek to roll them back – ideologically if they can, but coercively if they must. 

The intensified attacks on organised labour that began with the rise of neoliberalism went hand in glove with extensions of legal and civil rights to women and previously marginalised groups. 

The last forty years has seen a massive growth of opportunity and choice for what has been termed the "coordinator class'"– the buffer zone of relative privilege between the tiny but increasingly powerful global elite, and the vast and increasingly desperate and surplus to requirements, global poor.  This is the core reality of global corporate capitalism.

The issues addressed by identity politics are of critical importance, no-one with any sense can deny that, but it is the way these have been and are being addressed that should be of concern to the progressive forces in the world. The battle between transactivists – some trans people and a range of allies – and women, spearheaded by radical feminists, is a case in point.

I don’t agree with all of radical feminism because it can be blind to issues of class and race, and it often comes too close to blaming everything on men or on a vague notion of a Patriarchy that draws its power from an equally vague coalition of male interests.

I’ve no time at all for either of liberal feminism’s two wings: corporate feminism with its focus on gaining formal equality and economic parity with male peers within existing socio-economic structures; and choice feminism, which concentrates on widening the palette of individual choice and agency. 

Liberal feminism is the feminism of the coordinator class; it often reinforces what radical and socialist feminists see as sexist stereotypes and doesn’t challenge either the corporatocracy or the phallocracy in any meaningful way. As the acceptable face of feminism it’s not subject to the vilification and demonisation its radical and socialist sisters have always encountered.

Socialist feminism, after the heady days of Women’s Liberation, either retreated into the academy – where it has been all but suffocated under the weight of post modernism and queer theory – or its adherents have chosen to fight inside progressive organisations, having recognised that the threat posed to the entire planet by rampant globalised corporate capitalism can only be countered by a strong and united front.

What has brought a lot of radical feminist and socialist feminist women together recently, and into conflict with liberal feminism and the so-called 'woke Left', is in reaction to modern transgender politics.  

This is not because the former women are anti-trans rights but because transgenderism is seen by them as another manifestation of a growing attack on women’s rights, and for many, as symptomatic of a far wider problem – the undiminished and malign power of global corporate capitalism.

At the heart of the transgender politics of the moment, which is powerfully influenced by queer theory, is a conflation of biological sex and gender with a resulting theoretical and political confusion about each. 

Gender identity is seen as an individual and individualised perception of one's self as a sexual entity, which may be at variance with the biological sex category that the person was 'assigned' at birth. (1)

If a person’s sense of their gender varies from the sex they were assigned at birth, there must full legal recognition of that, and access to the means by which physical features can be altered to be as congruent as desired with the individual's gender identity. This may range from drug therapies and full surgical alteration of genitalia and a range of cosmetic surgeries and procedures, through to simply making a declaration of identifying as a woman or a man (or as non-binary).

The theoretically lazy and politically expedient conflation of biological sex and gender allows some people to declare that it is not just gender that is socially constructed and thereby changeable, biological sex itself is a social construct and as such can be deconstructed. 

Furthermore, they often argue, sex is not dimorphic, but is on a spectrum.  The existence of a number of different intersex conditions (disorders of sex differentiation) is often co-opted by trans activists to seek to prove this, ie to challenge the biological fact that humans are sexually dimorphic. (2)

Some transactivists argue that one's gender identity is established in utero – i.e. that after sex differentiation is complete early in pregnancy, there are genetic/hormonal influences on the foetus which ‘feminise' or  'masculinise’ the brain and thus, a reproductively normal male can be born with a feminine brain and vice versa, popularly known as being ‘born in the wrong body’.

It may be there are pre-natal, post sex differentiation influences on neurological development –  we don’t know enough yet to be absolutely certain one way or the other - but the denial or the reduction of the importance and scope of ante-natal influences on the human neurological system is highly problematic, especially given we now know that important parts of the brain may not be fully mature until the early to mid twenties.

Feminists have resisted the idea of a female brain that gives rise to innate feminine attributes and behaviours and with good reason, given the role that this as an ideological notion has played in six millennia or so of varying forms and degrees of female oppression, and over four centuries of economic hyper-exploitation.

It is odd that in 2018 some women fight to be free from the gender straitjacket of how women ought to dress, talk, walk, work, play, relate to others socially and sexually – and other women, many trans women included, fight to retain it, and sometimes in its most extreme and hyper-sexualised forms. 

The fact is that one’s sense of self is more complex and wider than gender identity, although the facts of our biological sex and the associated normative gender roles obviously play a huge part in developing a sense of self. It’s also a fact that no-one develops a sense of self or a gender identity in isolation. It is never an individual process as we are, above all else, social animals.

For me, gender, as the set of ideas, beliefs and social norms that flow and eddy around the fact of biological sex, is obviously a social construct but more importantly, it is an ideological construct which, in stratified societies, serves power.

Biological sex is a material reality. We are all born with a biological sex - most commonly XX female, or XY male, and rarely, variants of either of those because, such is the complexity of embryonic sex differentiation, sometimes anomalies occur. 

The rationale for, and the power of gender as an ideological construct flows from the material reality of human sexual reproduction, which is dimorphic – i.e., requires the coming together of two distinct gametes each produced within the gonads of a female person and a male person, and gestated in the body of the female person.

You cannot separate gender and biological sex, or understand gender in isolation from biological sex, or from the class relations that gave rise to, and which perpetuate the ideology of gender as an oppressive tool.

Gender is the ideologically oppressive means by which women have been subordinated to men within stratified, male dominated societies, and the means by which women have been hyper-exploited economically within capitalist society.

Gender ideology involves the ascription of a physical, intellectual and moral inferiority to the female, and a superiority in those areas, to the male.

Religious notions of female chastity as a duty to god are gender ideology in action. Once the guarantee of paternity became an issue for men, the only way to ensure it was through the sexual sequestration of women. Physical sequestration is difficult for obvious reasons. Ideological sequestration was achieved via the demands of female obedience and chastity in which the threat of male punishment for transgressions in the here and now was backed up with the threat of divine eternal damnation.

The oppression of women, to enable the control of both their reproductive and productive capacities, took on a special character under capitalism, which prefers the ideological to the openly coercive, especially when there is a market opportunity attached to it.  Just as the covert coercion and apparent freedoms of the wage contract were preferred to the open coercion and lack of freedoms of slavery for example, the ideological coercion of women was preferred to physical coercion, and it worked via religiously enforced notions of the essential inferiority of females. (3)

Women as the weaker sex, intellectually and morally, were deemed to be in need of both protection and correction; men as the stronger sex were deemed to be capable of providing it.

Given the considerable overlap between the sexes, by every physical and psychological parameter, this rigid gender division forced and still forces both women and men into behavioural straitjackets that can harm and deform.

Women have had to fight,  and sometimes fight men who should have been their allies, for every advance. Every sex-based right women have is compensation for centuries of averaged greater levels of exploitation and harm from the sex-specific forms of oppression used to facilitate that exploitation.

Refuges for women who’ve been raped or abused; compensatory measures to offset the historical exclusion of women from public life, or to aid them in overcoming barriers to public life created by their still greater domestic responsibilities – all women-only services remain important for women, and especially for women who are economically or socially marginalised and vulnerable.

It’s astonishing to many women, after millennia of male imposed modesty standards, and the creation of a climate of fear among women occasioned by the threat and the fact of male violence towards women that suddenly, women who say they’re not comfortable with male-bodied persons sharing their facilities, that they don’t want a male-bodied person performing a personal service, are deemed – by self-proclaimed progressive people – to be vile bigots and equivalent to Nazis.

And that is not an exaggeration. Granted there are a few among the gender-critical movement who are anti-trans rights and there are overtly rightwing people who opportunistically coat tail women’s concerns, but the majority of gender critical women are not anti trans rights. Yet, among transactivists, there are a lot of people whose demands and responses to even the mildest of questions are so disproportionate and so extreme it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’re either in the grip of a narcissistic rage, or they’re trolls or agents provocateurs actively fomenting division.

The mantra, ‘transwomen are women’ – repeated like a catechism – obscures for some and highlights for others the fact that it is exclusively the category of "woman" that is being interrogated and changed.

It is no accident that in the world of transgender politics it is male to female trans voices that are loudest. Trans men mostly get noticed by having babies – an astonishing feat and one that requires much more critical attention. (4) 

Transmen are men’ is always an after-thought and it doesn’t have the same historical, social and political meaning because this is still a profoundly phallocratic world, and however much its advocates hope otherwise, a small minority of people transgressing gender norms in varying ways and to varying degrees, will not shake its foundations one iota. In fact, if that transgression serves to divide and divert people and obscure common interests, it may strengthen it.

When genuine gender critical women say they’re worried about gender self ID because men may abuse it, they’re not saying that genuine transwomen are a threat, they’re acknowledging the historical reality of the lengths to which predatory and abusive men are known to go in order to harm women and children. 

You would have to be deranged to argue that women are unreasonable for being worried about male violence. You would also have to be politically naïve or deliberately perverse to not acknowledge the existence of, and increase in, expressions of extreme misogyny across the globe.

At the moment the Left is busy alienating a lot of people –  feminists, lesbians, transsexuals, and gay men among them. Some may fall into the waiting arms of the Right; some will remain in the Left and fight, and some will become politically homeless because so many on the Left are demonstrating stunning levels of arrogance and disdain – or, refuse to engage with the issue because it is "too toxic" and considered to be a diversion away from, or peripheral to, more important issues.

The vitriol and retributive malice that is aimed at gender critical women from some self-styled progressives is alarming. You could be forgiven for thinking that just as support for Palestinian rights can mask an underlying anti-semitism, support for trans rights can mask an underlying misogyny, and one which a lot of women seem to have internalised.

If a rightwing person supports gender critical feminists, transactivists label all gender critical women as rightwing, even though any leftwinger worthy of their political salt should know, if there’s a certainty in any of this, it’s the operation of the rightwing tactic of divide and rule.

Identity politics divorced from class politics tends to be both fragmenting and divisive – acting as an outgrowth of, and supporting and intensifying the Left sectarianism that’s been a significant contributor to the appalling state the world currently is in.

Neoliberal governments which have served corporate global capitalism for forty years, have advanced and extended formal rights to women, and to previously marginalised groups and there has been a growth in greater levels of social acceptance but this has come at the same time as the ability of many economically marginalised people to exercise formal rights and access choices, has been reduced or removed.

There has also been a massive growth in the coercive power of the state – some of it obvious, like paramilitary style police forces, some less so, like massively increased surveillance and financial controls, and the hyper-exploitation of women has intensified both within and outside of the affluent countries of the first world.

Capitalism excels at using ideology to get people to build their own prisons, willingly don straitjackets, police each other, hate and fear each other – but it’s ready and prepared to be openly coercive when it needs to be.

Globalisation means the capitalist class, which has morphed into a global corporatocracy, has appropriated and deformed the old Left’s vision of the socialist international, which did not deny national, cultural or ethnic differences but, by emphasising commonalities, sought to turn them away from being divisive and competitive.

Neoliberalism has embraced identity politics, not because it values diversity, but because, in the absence of a unifying force – a political catalyst – identity politics inevitably fragments and divides people into smaller and smaller competing groups.

Against the might of global corporate capitalism and the state machines which support it, the only way that resistance can be effective is in a unified, mass movement.

In the context of such things as the lurch to the far Right, the scale of the ecological horrors that will be unleashed unless effective action against climate change, habitat loss and pollution is taken now, the on-going nightmare of the millions of easily preventable deaths, especially of children – the time and energy being devoted to gender self ID  seems bizarre until you put it in the context of the divide and divert strategies the Right is so good at deploying. 

The pendulum on gender self ID is centring a bit and a lot more sensible voices are being heard and they need to be, because the father of all conservative backlashes is building and when it has the power of the state behind it, it may sweep away far more than the rights of the tiny minority of people currently sheltering under the trans umbrella.  

Notes:

(1) The use of the term 'assigned' is calculated to imply an element of arbitrariness to the process.

The categorisation by sex is most commonly based on an examination of external genitalia, which, very rarely, is not indicative of the individual’s chromosomal arrangement, and does not predict how the person will respond to established gender norms.  

(2) Many intersex people and advocates object to the often unthinking co-option of their realities by trans activists, to promote the idea that sex is fluid and can be changed.  The widening of the list of DSDs means it now covers about 1% of the population but this list ranges from the extremely rare, to the rare, and from conditions which can be life threatening unless treated and render the person infertile, to ones which have no adverse health implications and do not affect reproductive capacity.

The case of an XY person - ie someone who has a Y chromosome but who has female external genitalia and ovaries and uterus - who had an unassisted pregnancy - is often cited as evidence of the fluidity of the XX:XY dichotomy but this is the only known case of someone with female reproductive organs but a predominantly male karyotype, getting pregnant unassisted, and the child was born XY female with complete gonadal dysgenesis, i.e. infertile.  Given the fact that, in zoological and biological terms, sex and sexual dimorphism exists for the purposes of species reproduction, such an arrangement is both an extremely rare anomaly and is not proof that there are a number of sexes, or that biological sex is a spectrum. There is a child with female reproductive organs whose XY karyotype was identified during amniocentesis, who has histologically normal ovaries. If this person can produce eggs and naturally gestate a reproductively normal child, the debate will shift but even if that were the case – and even if the prevalence of such a condition goes beyond two known cases out of a global population of 7.5+ billion  – it still does not mean humans as a species are not sexual dimorphic.  It simply means that genetics and the endocrine system are vastly complex – and may be becoming more so because corporate capitalism has saturated the world with substances that damage DNA and others that are potent endocrine disruptors. 

(3) There is no clear linear progression in this, and the ideological is always backed up by the fact and threat off the coercive. 

(4) I don’t know how a gender dysphoria powerful enough to drive a person to attempt suicide and to warrant virilizing hormone treatment and a double mastectomy, can be controlled while the person goes through that most profoundly female experience of gestating and giving birth to a baby.