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.