What A Privilege

While I was resting my poor old post-menopausal bones yesterday - before I went out to start planting another 100 native trees to add to the thousands I've already grown and planted or donated to community groups - I thought about young males who would instruct old females on what it means to be a woman.

I also thought about choice feminism - or what might be described as socially endorsed liberal feminism (SELF) - a strand of populist feminism committed in various ways and degrees to neo-liberalism’s Project of the Self, central to which is the belief that meaningful social change can be brought about by attitudinal change, ie if enough people can be persuaded to make the right choices and create better versions of their spiritual / intellectual / emotional and physical selves, all will be well with the world.

Such processes are of course conditional upon people possessing the means by which choices may be accessed and exercised, and the most foundational of those means -in a world dominated by corporate and state capitalism - is money which is the route to accessing and exercising most of the choices capitalism dangles in front of us. 

SELF sits alongside another sort of feminism - queer feminism - which is very attractive to young-ish, left-ish, actually or potentially affluent people in search of a cause, and a possible basis for claiming to be oppressed.  

Queer in this sense is partly a nod to gay men’s appropriation of the pejorative use of the word, but is mostly used in the sense of social practices and beliefs that run counter, or obliquely to prevailing social norms. 

Queer theory owes its greatest intellectual debt to American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, and through her, the French iconoclast, Michel Foucault. Both are highly influential and owe quite a bit of their influence to their respective writing styles.  

The density and complexity of a lot of Butler's prose often leaves it open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, while Foucault's elegant and clever use of allusion and metaphor blinds his fans to the gaps in his theorising and to the ethical and political thin ice on which he often skates. Furthermore, the windows he claimed to create where there had been walls, allowed him to escape when he wanted to distance himself from his ideas or interpreters of them. 

Both were/are products and members of the coordinator class - critiquing aspects of the class and historical location that gave them considerable privilege, whilst never really engaging with the ways in which the “political freedom to live in a more equitable and livable world” might be achieved and retained - given that the power which denies or constrains such freedoms never willingly gives away anything that is fundamentally detrimental to it, and will push back hard against anything it sees as a real threat. 

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church and other religiously conservative institutions see queer theory's gender ideology as a threat to them is counter- balanced by attitudes and responses from governments, powerful governmental institutions, NGOs and the corporate world (including the global corporate media) that - at the moment - are largely tolerant or even encouraging of it. 

But enough of that - mostly I was thinking about a concept from the transgender politico-theoretical orthodoxy that is sort of informed by Butlerian theory – the existence of cisgender privilege. There is even a cis-gaze - the cis version of the male gaze- the ways in which trans bodies are viewed and policed by cisgender bodies. 

This is all predicated on there being a definable state of being that is cisgender -ie where a person's sense of self as a gendered being is congruent with their biological sex,  and of transgender, as a state of being that exists opposite to or across from it - a framing which arguably reinvents the very gender binary that queer politics purports to want to subvert. 

It is a feature of identity politics in general, to fragment into smaller and smaller interest groups (which may then have to re-aggregate for the purposes of being counted in order to count in political lobbying terms) and to jostle for the lowest position in the oppression hierarchy. 

In this political game, misère is the winning hand, ie you aim to lose as many privilege points as possible. Cisgender privilege elevates all cisgender people above all transgender people; cisgender women are elevated above transgender women. The latter lose in the privilege stakes and, by losing, they win. 

In the arguments raging around transgender women's rights of access to women-only resources and services, this idea of cisgender privilege - as an axis of oppression - especially if it can be compounded by claims to intersecting factors of class and race privilege, is a powerful weapon.

So, how about these "luckiest people on the planet" - cisgender women - especially those who live outside the multi-hued bubbles of imperial privilege occupied by the most vocal and visible transgender activists and lobbyists?

I challenge anyone who thinks that any feminism other than SELF or Queer feminism is “so last century” to carry every drop of water they use in a week, by hand, from a tap 1 km from their home and - when they’ve recovered from their exertions - perhaps they'd care to comment on why it is that most of the manual water carrying in the world is done by poor women of colour.  

And then perhaps they could comment on the privilege of the 90k+ women who are known to be murdered every year globally — the overwhelming majority of whom are killed by men; or the untold hundreds of thousands of women globally who are raped and sexually assaulted.

How about the cisgender privilege of the 100+k mainly poor women who die every year as result of complications in childbirth, 85% of them in India and Africa, often as a result of nutrition-related anaemia and easily treatable infections?

How much cisgender privilege is there in an obstetric fistula- a hole torn between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum caused by prolonged, obstructed labour without treatment - almost exclusively a condition of the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalized women and girls?

And when pondering the cisgender privilege of those women of the global south we need to note that rates of death as a result of complications arising from childbirth in the USA are rising for poor women and poor black women especially. 

Linked to this are the 1 million+ neonates who die every year largely of easily preventable causes, and the 4 million + other kids who die before the age of 5? How does a mother's cisgender privilege figure in that? 

And no, the answer is NOT to obscure or deny the reality of female reproductive biology - the answer is to work to remove all the misogyny, stigma, ignorance, and poverty that combines to create the malign conditions in which poor women are so at risk from their reproductive capacity, and which put all women at risk from male violence.

I could go on and on. I could point to the fact that, in the UK, the life expectancy of poor girls has dropped for the first time in a century. I could point to affluent NZ where the life expectancy and incarceration rates of poor Māori women should be a national disgrace, and very wealthy white Australia, whose treatment of its poor and indigenous women is indefensible.

I could point to the dark heart of the male dominated, extreme porn industry with its lobbyists' appeals to the human right of people to do whatever they want to, and with other consenting adults - as if the concept of consent, in a world riven with a mass of deeply rooted, intersecting and compounding inequalities of sex, class, and race, is completely unproblematic; as if those who are exploited, whose vulnerable bodies are the focus and locus of acts of extreme sexual transgression, are somehow the equals of those who do the exploiting.

But I hope I’ve made my point.