Conflicts of Interest

Philosopher and radical feminist, Holly Lawford-Smith, in a piece about the current debate between those who organise around gender critical feminism and are pro-women's rights, and those who organise around queer theory and are pro-trans rights, said:

When radical feminists, like me, talk about what we see as a conflict of interest between women’s rights and trans rights, we tend to have a particular type of transwoman in mind; and when trans activists reject the idea that there’s any such conflict of interest (and indeed, that we’re Nazis for even suggesting that there could be) they tend to have a very different type of transwoman in mind. This difference in ‘imagined person’ has come up time and time again in the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues on this topic.

 

I think this sits at the heart of this increasingly fraught political and academic issue - or more properly, clump of issues - and it flows from, and is strengthened by our tendency both to cleave to the things we know and are comfortable with and which confirm our world view, and to reject those which are new, or disturbing or which challenge our worldview.  

 

Some react furiously, and attack; some get anxious and withdraw. Some amend their views; some strengthen them. Some form alliances with other like minded people and, within those alliances, they find support and further validation and confirmation of what they believe, and they may feel emboldened in attacking the other side, verbally or even physically. The deeper the challenge cuts into core beliefs, sense of self, ideas about natural justice, the more likely people are to react in extreme ways.

 

And we all feel it - that adrenaline surge when we encounter a rejection of our ideas about the world and ourselves and our place in it - and it's worse when we perceive it as a hostile rejection. 

It's stating the blindingly obvious that the anxiety or anger and the desire to run or to fight that are fuelled by an adrenaline surge, are not conducive to calm and rational debate. This topic - the intersection between women's and trans rights - needs the latter because it has the capacity to hurt people on an immediate, personal level and more than that, it's serving as a divide and rule tactic that has the capacity to inflict far wider and deeper damage.

 

Transgender women on their own won't undermine women’s rights, nor will even all those highly transgressive men, of whom an alarming number have barged their way in under the ever-widening trans umbrella. What will catapult all of us backwards, is the continued rise of ultra-conservatism and the right wing authoritarianism that will be emboldened by it.

 

This is unlikely to be a surge to power of a small group of armed religious fanatics à la The Handmaid's Tale as they could not possibly seize power without powerful backers and without ordinary people's acceptance of, and compliance with, right wing authoritarian ideology.  

A critical element of that acceptance and compliance is to nurture the belief that the greatest enemies of freedom, democracy and human rights are angry young people (mostly male) who have been drawn to various leftwing causes.  The most obvious of these is Antifa - which is a descriptor of a number of loosely linked political collectives that owe a great deal to anarchism and anarcho-commnunism - and which is being demonised by the American rightwing in a calculated push to have it declared a domestic terrorist organisation.

No-one with any political nous buys into the carefully edited video footage filmed by the likes of Andy Ngo who follows groups of young men he knows are most likely to get drawn into acts of violence and property damage, edits the footage and releases it as proof that the real threats to democracy in the USA are not the ultra-rightwing, white supremacist groups and their powerful backers, but these disparate gangs of self-declared antifascists.  

But, because these antifa groups also declare an uncritical support for transgenderism and, as part of that they often oppose 'TERFs' in extremely hostile terms, some gender critical women see them as an equal or even greater threat to women's rights than the right wing's shock troops - and those in whose interests these shock troops may be deployed.

There are people who are socially conservative, some highly so, and they exist on both sides of the political spectrum; they cleave to the known, to the certain, and never more so than when the social fabric - all that makes them feel safe and secure - seems to be ripping. 

 

There are some who delight in pushing boundaries, sometimes for no reason other than the boundaries are there, and they get some sort of thrill or pleasure out of transgressing social, political, physical norms.

 

Most of us sit somewhere in between the highly conservative and the highly transgressive - it really is a spectrum -  but the more threatened conservatively inclined people feel, the more likely they are to see the transgressive as a major problem and the more likely they are to clump together, shelving other differences in their shared fear and/or dislike of the transgressive other.

 

On the gender critical side there are a lot of very angry women who are infuriated by  what they perceive as a form of colonisation by men of what it means to be a woman and, by obfuscating what it means to be a woman, make it impossible to challenge the material and psycho-social bases of female oppression and hyper-exploitation.

Lesbians feel betrayed by other parts of the LGBT+ agglomeration (with good reason), and are infuriated by the colonising of their sub-culture by transgender women, many of whom still possess fully functional male genitalia, who are sexually oriented to women and who claim to be lesbian.

 

The more obtrusive of these transgender lesbians insist that cis lesbians who reject them as potential sexual partners are expressing transphobic attitudes or vagina essentialism, and need to open themselves -  figuratively and literally - to the idea of a female penis, aka lady penis or girl dick, often referenced in furious invitations to those labelled as TERFs, to choke on it.

 

That so many vocalisers on the Left - or what passes for it these days - uncritically accept those demands and, sometimes viciously condemn lesbians' refusal to entertain them - makes these the most interesting of political times.

 

I've taken issues with some radfem theory and practice over several decades but I reject liberal feminism entirely and I often want to slap its smug face - especially in its latest manifestation, with its heedless acceptance of gender and sexual stereotyping; of sex work as being no different from any other work; of the commercialisation of sex and the normalisation of extreme porn centred on the debasement of people who are often highly vulnerable - economically, psychologically, socially; and its uncritical assertion that everyone has a right to their kink - a soft focus term for a spectrum of behaviours that runs out into the darkest of perversions - never getting to grips with who gets to draw the line.

 

There seems little doubt that the looming global ecological disaster will result in some form of authoritarian rule; we can't identify our way out of the appalling mess we, in the privileged parts of the world, have had a hand in creating but for which none are more culpable than those who rule us and who control the way we organise production and exchange. 

They're the same class of people who've also had and still have a very big say in the way we organise reproduction.

We can't seriously expect the mass of humanity to all just decide to be better people, any more than we can expect the vast and essentially malign power that is global corporate capitalism, to roll over and turn into a obedient puppy dog. 

 

The trans issue and the various other projects of the self in which the privileged people of the developed world willingly immerse themselves, are all insignificant in comparison to the problems posed by the mass chemical pollution present in every aspect of our lives (i.e. we drink it, we eat it, we breathe it, we absorb it through our skin), of species extinction, and not just the cute furry or feathered animals but the mass of invisible life that supports all other life, and anthropogenic climate change - the triple whammy of a looming global disaster.

  
It is in this context that we have to consider the role of superficial identity politics (SIP) - not the underlying issues it claims to address - but the way in which the promoters and supporters of IP choose to address them.

SIP takes critically important - foundational - issues, isolates them, strips them of commonalities with other struggles, narrows down the focus of their history or eradicates it completely, and encourages presentism.

 
It divides, it diverts, it creates antagonisms where, logically, none should exist. It subverts the core principle of the socialist international which did not seek to deny sexual, national or ethnic differences but, by emphasising that which unites, strove to weaken that which can be used to divide - because for the common people, only in unity is there strength.

There is only one reason the queering of the affluent world is being permitted and even encouraged by those who hold the reins of economic and political power, and that is because it in no way queers the pitch for the ruling class and its help-mate, the coordinator class, members of which are queer politics' most enthusiastic enablers and cheerleaders. 

The preposterous suggestion that a few lesbians with handwritten banners are as much of a threat to trans people as are a group of white supremacist men waving swastikas is either accepted or even lauded by people who seem to have lost any connection with wider political realities.

 
The claim - in the context of the monstrous human rights abuses rampant across the world -  that  "trans rights are the pre-eminent human rights issue of our era"  is accepted either as true, or its extreme hyperbole and narrowness of focus are not challenged.

 
The lazy conflation of sex and gender - which undermines the key element of feminist discourse - goes unchallenged by people who, politically, academically and intellectually - should know better.

 
People on the left - or what passes for it these days -  perform astonishing feats of political and intellectual gymnastics to avoid addressing even the very obvious issues such as the fact that men on average have a large performance advantage over women in most sports.

They get sucked into creating their own hyperbolic assertions such as - because they do not have gender self ID, trans people in NZ (a country that has granted residence to a trans woman on the grounds she is safer here than in the UK) are experiencing a form of apartheid. 

People who see themselves as progressive respond to the Jessica/Jonathon Yaniv human rights farce by attacking the immigrant women who refused to wax his scrotum. (And no, I will not extend to this manipulative narcissist the courtesy of a female pronoun.)

People who claim to be philosophically materialist or empiricist ardently defend the idealism and metaphysical nature of the proposition that the genetic foundations and material reality of the human body can be altered by an individual assertion of a subjective gender identity.

Atheists effectively accept the proposition that there is an essential, innate, gendered self that exists somehow independently of the sexed body - seemingly oblivious to the echoes of the religious ideology of a material, mortal body and and an immaterial, immortal soul.

There are some equally closed minds and paid up members of the hyperbolic tendency on the GC side but there does seem to be a lot more coming from the trans camp, along with the hurling of misogynistic, masculinist, genital-focussed threats and insults.

 
Most people who are engaged with the issue politically or academically tend to get a very one-sided idea of how the wider world sees it.

 
I'm a socialist and feminist, with over fifty years of being a trade unionist and campaigner for a wide range of progressive causes and I find aspects of the current drive to normalise public expressions of extremely transgressive behaviour unnerving - the more so because it most commonly involves men exercising power upon highly vulnerable bodies.  

If I feel uneasy; if some of what I see causes me to feel anger and concern for those vulnerable bodies, think how the socially and politically conservative will react when the right wing media decides to really whip up a moral panic.

 

At the moment, for all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by some who are on the left spectrum, the right wing media are not really attacking trans people or LGBT+ people; the rise in hate crimes against LGBT+ recently reported in the UK is relative and in relation to trans reports, includes accusations of things like misgendering on social media -the over-whelming majority of reported hate crimes in the UK remain race or religion based. The awful death toll of working class black trans women in the USA cannot be divorced from that country's obscene gun laws and its deeply entrenched racism and the growing economic divide which adversely affects black people most and drives black trans women into the highly dangerous world of street prostitution.

But the potential is there; the world is fracturing along several old fault lines and when the right wing media take off the gloves, i.e. when it suits the suits, it may unleash the father of all ultra conservative backlashes - to which the left is completely unprepared to respond.