A woman by any other name ...

There has to be a common sense and widely agreed definition of "woman" and "man’"or we’ll all disappear up our own fundaments – which very likely is the point of all this, i.e. keep us fiddling while the world burns.

 

I don't see trans people per se as a threat to women or to women's rights – it is what is behind the rampant growth of self-declared gender identity as an ideology and a political movement, that worries me. It's a localised battle in a far bigger and potentially more destructive war – and the latter is why I've written more about it recently than any other topic. 

The underlying, material reality is that, in nature – and we are natural beings however much some of us try to pretend otherwise and however hard others work to maintain that pretence – sex exists for reproduction. It does not exist purely for pleasure or fun, or as commodity, a marketing tool, a weapon or a competition. 

 

Peel off all the social layers and the core of reproductive sex is unambiguously dimorphic –  i.e., the creation of new life needs the coming together of functionally distinct female and male elements – of which the female is the far more important because of a long gestation of a, mainly single foetus, and the birth of utterly dependent and slow maturing offspring, the care of which has always fallen mostly to females.

 This arrangement was and is not just because that suits males, but because in the subsistence societies that make up the vast bulk of our evolutionary and social history,  human infants were utterly dependent for a long time on a lactating female – most commonly the biological mother.

 Every human life that has ever existed came out of the body of a human who was functionally female. Despite the best efforts of trans humanists who would argue it is in women's interests to use technology to transcend that fact – to  "free" women from their "reproductive burden" – it will always be that way given the same sort of people who want to create artificial wombs, clone humans from skin cells etc, are likely to destroy the world as we know it before such technologies can come to pass. That's aside from the host of ethical questions posed by such research.

Those who see trans humanism as the new frontier of human evolution also need to be aware that these super technologies only ever benefit the elite – the mass, as always, will be of no consequence.

We form ideas about sex and the roles we occupy in relation to it, the behaviours and characteristics that flow from, and are linked to the dimorphic elements of reproductive sex because our reproductive behaviour is not strongly instinctively or hormonally driven; 

we have big, active, energy demanding brains; and, we are profoundly, ineluctably social i.e., we have to cooperate with, and learn from other humans in order both to become fully human, and to survive, and the key element of group and species survival is efficient reproduction. 

The importance of reproduction may seem to have receded in a world populated by 7+ billion of us but, should reproductive fitness change, for example as a result of the saturation of the world with endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals, it may re-emerge as a powerful social driver – as it almost certainly did in the aftermath of the last great genetic bottleneck. 

 

Gender sits on the bedrock of, and draws its power from, the material realities of dimorphic reproductive sex and millennia of biologically determined and conditioned layers of functions and roles.

 

You can’t just turn all that off by an act of individual will or even by a collective making the declaration that the follow on act from the "end of history" is the "end of sex". Nor can you force a change in reality for all those who live outside the bubbles of relative privilege in which the gender performance artists mostly live.

 

Gender is best understood as a set of norms about what it means to be socially and reproductively female or male. It is enshrined in common sense notions, and encoded in religious lore and secular law and has served, and still serves, an ideological function.  

The aspects of gender which enshrine relations of male dominance and female subordination, were created by, and wielded in the service of the dominant sex class, which – for the past 10k years or so, and across much of the globe – has been male. The dominant social orders across the globe for pretty much all of recorded history, have been, and remain, phallocratic. 

 

Gender in this sense, is not fixed; it shape shifts to reflect societal needs (usually defined by the dominant social class) and it adversely affects women in varying ways and degrees, according to such factors as class, race and age – but the averaged effect on women is negative. 

 

However, the ideology of gender also benefits men differentially; it cements averaged male power over females but, being part of the dominant sex is an illusory compensation handed down to otherwise absolutely or relatively powerless men. 

 

To me, the common sense definition of female is the human being who is presumed at birth to have the potential to bear children, and who is presumed will go through the menarche, and the menopause.

 

Whether she is in fact able to, or chooses to have children, or if she no longer has the ability to have children, is beside the point. She will still carry her share of the weight of thousands of years and current forms and degrees of oppression and exploitation within various sorts of phallocracies.

 

The current trans orthodoxy (which does NOT reflect the views of all trans people) with its dogma, its catechism, and its tactic of branding, demonising and ritually insulting anyone who dissents from it, is actually phallocentric.

 

It is why over the past five years or so, male-bodied people claiming to be trans women have popped up all over the internet abusing and threatening dissenters – especially lesbians – with phallocentric insults like, "suck my lady dick’"

 

If you think saying this makes me a TERF, transphobe, transmisogynist, bigot, literal killer of trans people – then I respectfully suggest that YOU have a problem, because I am none of those things and frankly, I will match my socialism and feminism against all comers. 

 

I have followed this debate for years – not just dipped my toes into it recently and I smell the presence of all sorts of political rats and spin-doctored dead cats – as do a lot of other rational, reasonable and progressive people.

 

The amount of time and energy being expended on this is not proportionate to its importance in light of global warming, mass pollution, species extinction and the growing threat of right wing authoritarianism.

 

In other words, gender is still being used ideologically and the best part of the joke for those driving it lies in making those who are being the most ideological think they're actually being liberationist – that by self declaration of a gender identity which runs counter to social norms, the entire edifice of global corporate capitalism and its servant states will crumble and reform into something positive and sustainable.

 

All those involved – on both sides – need to calm the amygdala, allow the frontal cortex to regain control, take a deep nose breath and see if they too can detect the stench of a classic divide, divert and rule tactic. 

On Fools and Fumaroles

This post was inspired by a Facebook thread shared by someone I know. I haven't used full names because I wasn't involved in the discussion. 

First up is Alex who approvingly posted this meme on his facebook page but made little further contribution to the ensuing discussion apart from bemoaning how sad it is that posts about Syria do not attract the same attention.  

 This meme is one of the host of calls for acts of literal and symbolic violence against women that now litter most of the social media wrangles around this issue. It’s driven by the same sorts of attitude that fuelled the recent actions of trans rights protesters in the UK - squirting water in women's faces at a time when acid attacks are becoming increasingly common. 

It's a call for harm to be done to women and those who make these calls hide behind the claim that so-called ‘TERFs’ are causing a far greater harm to trans people, and are literally all equivalent to ‘Nazis’. 

It is shameful and unworthy of anyone who calls himself a socialist.

And then there is the more outspoken, Shayne, whose attempt to forensically dissect gender critical feminism foundered in the swamp of his own overblown rhetoric and whose hyperbolic views were informed more by misogyny than political analysis, viz: 

"Fucked up bigotry", "Disgusting bigotry," "Hate activists", “Hate preachers”, and - even that favourite rejoinder of anal-obsessed boys - "Eat farts."

In Shayne’s world ‘Terfism’ " ... is about creating an exclusive club for which only those defined by an archaic essentialist conception of sex is allowed into the magic circle of "woman"… "

Woman - that'd be the half of all human beings who have ever lived, within whose archaic and essentialist bodies all humans have been gestated - hard though that might be for pomoblokes to accept.  

Females are the sex that is so often subjected to selective abortion and infanticide because male lives are so much more valued in cultures steeped in millennia of misogyny – a misogyny whose tentacles seem to have wrapped tightly around parts of Shayne’s political and critical anatomy.

TERFism, he claims, is an "arcane system of essentialism that defines a persons worth by the physical attributes they where born with...betrays the whole project of feminisms and winds back the progress of women by decades.”

 Ah, don't you just love a self-proclaimed progressive who sees the four decades of neo-liberalism as having been good for all women. Perhaps Shayne should step outside his bubble of western male privilege and look at the lives of women globally and at the poor within his own, very wealthy country – and consider how many women have been shut out of neoliberal capitalism’s ‘menu of choices’ and how very easily all those things by which the progress of women in the west are often measured, could be lost. 

Doing so might stop him from saying things like, TERFism -  “… actually becomes dangerous to a group of women who are grossly over-represented in statistics on sexual assault victimhood, suicide, and all the assorted cultural and institutional repercussions of being an othered minority.”

Shayne's not referring here to poor women, in case you're wondering. Logic says he shouldn't be referring to all those trans women who, by virtue of being white, educated, affluent and having lived and prospered as men (all of which equates to a considerable level of privilege that's not all lost when they transition to living as a woman) are unlikely candidates for the title of most vulnerable and marginalised people on the planet. But of course he is because Shayne is locked into a rigidly binary paradigm of Trans vs TERF, one of which is as idealised as the other is demonised.

Plunging onwards in his dogged pursuit of reasons to shut the mouths of these troublesome women, he made the obligatory link to racists: “As a society we recognize white supremacists as being harmful people who should be isolated and removed from the body politic”

So Shayne would define those who are white supremacists and along with 'TERFs', isolate them and remove them from the body politic. By what means? Denying them a vote? Refusing them access to public services?  Sending them to a gulag? Guillotining them?  

I think perhaps he needs to slough off some of that adolescent certitude and stop saying things like “....we recognize that misogynists are harmful people and deserve deplatforming.”

This - from a man who says calling for women’s mouths to be glued shut is justifiable.  I think Shayne's a rank misogynist yet I‘m not calling for him to be deplatformed. However,  I would love to see him spend a week or two on a factory floor with a bunch of angry women who’ve just been told that a whole raft of treatments for their archaic and essentialist gynaeocological conditions will no longer be funded by the state.

Ah yes, the state, whose coercive mechanisms Shayne - in the true spirit of pietistic twerpism- would like to see directed at the dreaded 'TERFs - "it''s high time the law got involved,"  he huffed.

“… we've created a situation where hate activists get to call themselves "feminist" and actively infiltrate left wing and progressive movements while prosecuting a campaign of harrasment (sic) and hate against one of the most vunerable (sic) minorities in society. I have seen the damage these people are causing, its an absolute travesty that its allowed to get as far as it is.” 

Some of the women Shayne is referring to here were feminists and leftwing activists when he was probably still pooing in his pants; some helped set up those sort of organisations he refers to so proprietorially; some have devoted a lifetime to fighting for progressive change, and some have suffered actual, real harm in so doing but Shayne is so blinded by self-righteousness, the humbuggery of his pronouncements completely escapes him.

“So do I have a problem with silencing TERFs? Fuck No, for the very same reason I have no problem with silencing Neo Nazis, Women beaters and anti Gay and Lesbian hate preachers.”

Like many others, in 'TERFs' he's found a political fumarole that allows him to vent his resentment of women. These days, blokes like him have to keep their resentment under wraps but in 'TERFs' they've found a group of women- many of whom are leftists and a lot of whom are lesbians - and, by performing a truly astonishing contortion of political logic by aligning them with Nazis, abusers and homophobes, he's able to disgorge his misogynistic bile and get to feel noble and righteous while doing so.

It's quite a party trick.