Another Polemic on Identity Politics

The post war years saw a massive surge in liberation and equal rights movements: anti-colonialist and national liberation in countries within various European empires; the women's and gay liberation movements;  movements to advance workers', students, prisoners', indigenous peoples’ and black and minority ethnic rights; the anti-nuclear, peace, anti-psychiatry and the environmentalist movements.

 

There was a cold war raging and the Non-Aligned Movement was emerging as a massive third political force in the world. 

 

In response and as always, capitalism wielded a range of ideological weapons as well as overt, sometimes brutal, force and coercion. 

 

An alliance of major capitalist nations led by the USA crushed emergent left-wing movements and overthrew or killed left leaning leaders of international liberation movements, eg. the  overthrow of Mossaddegh in Iran; the US backed overthrow of Sukarno and the slaughter of a million Indonesian communists by the army and Islamists;  assassinations of important black leaders like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; the wars in South East Asia …..on and on and on.

 

And domestically – that same mix of coercion and brute force (worst if you happened to be advancing indigenous and B&ME rights) – in the USA ranging from agents of the state firing on students, to the complicity of the state in the assassinations of important black leaders and the imposition of life time sentences and the mass incarceration of black men, which signalled the rise of what Angela Davis calls the prison-industrial complex. 

 

Few other states (South Africa was an ignoble exception) were as brutally and openly coercive as the US which created and orchestrated the game plan. The treatment in the 1960s of Paul Robeson – scholar, athlete, artist, communist and unapologetic radical advocate for black and working class rights and arguably the first and greatest of the "black Messiahs" that white racist America so hated and feared – showed the Anglo Alliance at work. (1)

 

But ideological means are far preferable to coercive and on the ideological front, one of the best ideas the right-wing ideologues ever had was to promote the factionalising and fracturing potential of interest group politics – ie people combining around a particular set of specific interests broadly flowing from sex, race/ethnicity or sexual orientation and in opposition to harmful prejudices in popular lore and unfair discrimination in formal law. 

 

The traditional left had failed to engage sufficiently or at all with issues of sex and race as the two huge elephants in the corner of the political room, and initially IGP found its natural home within the left and the labour movement and drew on that for its wider strength, eg the emergence of specific sections within left-wing political parties, trade unions etc.

 

Capitalism dug in and initially threw all it could into resisting even basic demands; every small advance had to be fought for – especially workers' rights to decent pay and conditions and to workplace health and safety. (2)

 

In the late 70s and early 80s, as the ideologues geared up for the neo-liberal revolution with its monetarist economic doctrine, the gloves came off with the working class and an ideological onslaught was unleashed – portraying militant unions as the "enemy within",  in cohorts with the "enemy without" – communism. 

Militant (in the sense of uncompromising in their demands) women's liberationists were portrayed as hairy legged, boiler suited men haters; black and minority ethnic people were portrayed as disaffected, feckless, criminally minded or potential terrorists; environmentalists – first branded as well-meaning but stupid tree huggers, became eco-terrorists. 

 

The biggest coup however was a far more subtle ideological move – one that parts of the Left enthusiastically embraced – the emergence of identity politics for which second wave feminism had inadvertently laid the groundwork with its distinction between biological sex and social gender,  an emphasis on how we are made or learn to be women, which flowed smoothly into the ideas of gender as performance, and to the idea that not just sex roles but biological sex itself is socially constructed and, as a result, is able to be deconstructed.

 

The most recent and divisive manifestation of identity politics – gender identity – moves away from the material reality of biological sex and of social stratification as the basis of male power (with patriarchal authority as an illusory compensation given to otherwise powerless men), and into ideas about the essentialism of individual identity. Political action was about shifting alliances between groups of people with same or similar  identities, and adding a swathe of categories to the hierarchy of oppression. 

 

The great organising principles of the material reality of class-based economic exploitation and of the hyper exploitation of women – both as workers and as producers of new generations of workers, whose unpaid domestic and reproductive labour enabled greater profits; the hyper-exploitation of people of colour within capitalism enabled by the ideology of race – and all the multiple layers of overt and covert, interlinked forms of oppression heaped upon and wrapped around people to facilitate economic exploitation – have all but been all drowned by a tsunami of agitprop and academic waffle proclaiming the end of history, the end of class, the end of sex, and the rise of the aspirational individual and his/her/their bespoke, unique identity whose very existence we are told, will bring about an end to oppression – conceptualised as whatever unpleasantness looms largest on any individual's personal horizon.

 

That capitalism's drive to obscure – not just the nature of class but its very existence– is being enabled by the Left, is an irony of cosmic proportions.

 

This new form of identity politics was of course best able to be conceptualised and expressed from within the relative safety and affluence of the buffer zone that exists between the mass of increasingly impoverished, marginalised people and the true elites. An important part of this buffer zone is the coordinator class, that group of public and private sector managers, technocrats, specialists, consultants etc who, by organising, systematising and arranging, serve to both obscure and protect and ultimately serve the interests of the hyper-rich.

 

Identity politics does its bit to help keep open the flood gates for an era of unprecedented wealth accumulation and extreme plundering of, and harm to the natural world, and the reconsolidation of gross disparities between rich and poor – and as such it is a regressive, reactionary movement. 

 

 

Notes:

1. After a suicidal breakdown thought by his son to have been induced by a psychotropic drug slipped into his drink by the FBI, Robeson was eventually hospitalised in the UK where for two years he was subjected to 54 ECT sessions and kept on a regime of powerful barbiturate drugs with no psychotherapy until his family had him released and took him to a clinic in the GDR where he recovered somewhat but was never able to appear in public again.

2. The women's movement in the US has still never achieved an equal rights amendment for example; abortion remained in the crimes act here in NZ until this year; denial of equal pay is a crime in only one country, elsewhere it's a civil issue; the principle of equal pay for work of equal value has never really been engaged with even where there is legislation that enables its and in fact - with a loss of collective bargaining, individualised contracts, low wages, zero hours etc, women workers are arguably worse off in 2020,  even with the formal right to pay equity.

 

A Rant on Rowling

JK Rowling is a billionaire and a very powerful, mature, white woman and I don’t feel the need to spend much time feeling sorry for her because she felt unhappy in her skin as a child, was once in an abusive marriage, and like many women, suffered a sexual assault. But I do applaud her decision to write about something private and painful in order to speak up for and to women – as a sex – as a time when the very concept of woman as a sex is under attack.

 

There’s probably an army of people who advise Jo Rowling because JK Rowling is not just a woman, she’s a huge brand; she doesn’t just make a lot of money for herself – she makes a lot of money for a lot of other people who will have a vested interest  in protecting the JKR brand and who will have weighed up the advantages and disadvantages  of publishing this essay, at this point in time.

 

Some people have questioned the timing of it – how sensitive was it for a white billionaire celebrity with a massive social media presence to say #MeToo in the midst of one of the most passionate outpourings of outrage over systemic racism and police violence that the western world has seen in a very long time.

 

Maybe the initial toe dipping tweets about the sex versus gender identity debate were her own decision, as maybe her anti-Corbyn tweets prior to the last UK election were also her own decision, but I suspect this essay and maybe even the timing of it were calculated – and I suspect she and her advisors think the gender identity tide is turning.

 

A lot of women who feel like the fight against the gender identity tide has taken over their lives are euphoric because such a massive celebrity has come out in support of them.

 

People who are on the political right who once thought JKR was “too liberal by far”, have elevated her to virtual sainthood, while liberals who once worshipped her as a genius and lauded her liberality now declare her to be a fascist and a literal killer of trans people. 

 

Many of those who now cast JK Rowling as the devil incarnate, once idolised her and those who grew up with her books now call for them to be burned or banned. Some have set to and constructed partial, one-sided, inaccurate analyses of her argument, accusing her of being partial, one-sided and inaccurate, and/or a coloniser. 

 

Others are combing her works for examples of other forms of wrong-think, and some are hurling insults that are threatening and often - in an irony seemingly lost on many of the would-be-woke brigade - crudely phallocentric and viciously misogynistic. The latter approach is especially popular among the less articulate of the misogynists and the many types of troll that are busy obfuscating the issues and fomenting divisions.

 

People who would claim to unequivocally support the #MeToo movement and deplore violence against women have declared Rowling’s disclosure of her own experience of sexual and domestic abuse to be untrue, exaggerated for effect, manipulative, or even evidence of narcissism and any right to sympathy or acknowledgement or solidarity is countervailed by her “transphobia”.

 

The line seems to be - “we deplore violence against women - except TERFs who deserve to be kerb-stomped.”

 

The Sun came to the party with its trademark cynicism – its Union Jack bedecked front page had screamer headlines about Rowling’s abusive ex-husband.

 

This exploitation and trivialisation of domestic violence, whilst claiming to care about it, is a classic Murdoch gutter press tactic and is being deplored by a wide range of people, including journalist Owen Jones, whose outrage over this is somewhat undermined by never having previously spoken out about – indeed has contributed to – the demonization of other gender critical women who don’t have Rowling’s massive buffer of wealth and power.

 

Rowling's essay has served to harden the edges of this most polarised and polarising of debates – one in which there are fervently held views on either side and a lot of apathy, confusion, misinformation, and ignorance in between.

 

For me, the idea that an amorphous collection of disparate individuals declaring biological sex is a spectrum and performatively bending the gender binary back on itself will somehow end Patriarchy, is a stupid one.

 

Even more stupid is the belief that once Patriarchy has been de-binaried and people acknowledge there are at least six sexes, all the myriad oppressive structures, processes, and relationships which have flowed from Patriarchy will also go “Pouf” and be replaced with …um …..on that rather important subject most of them are as curiously silent as they are about how Patriarchy came into being in the first place.

 

As for me – I have my materialist, Marxist views on that, and as a result of which I’m interested in what's BEHIND the profoundly individualistic, essentially superficial and strongly aspirational gender identity movement which claims to be challenging the status quo at a foundational level but actually is doing no such thing. 

 

What it is doing helping to divide and divert and turn natural allies into sworn enemies. I wonder who might benefit from that?

 

Overall, excluding Trumpist basket-case USA, the zeitgeist in the western world at least is broadly pro-transgender rights, especially here in NZ - despite hyperbolic claims to the contrary and despite the term transgender now covering a wide and increasingly eclectic range of gender identities that have seeped out beyond trans woman and trans man into non-binary and further. 

 

Unlike movements for national liberation, civil and human rights, against racism, and the peace and environmental movements - all of which have been surveilled, infiltrated, repressed, vilified, and demonised to varying degrees - the trans rights movement actually enjoys very high levels of corporate, governmental, institutional, and media support. 

 

Almost every major charity, trade union and professional association is fully supportive – on paper at least; all major political parties fully and openly support trans rights as defined by the current transgender orthodoxy, or at least say nothing critical or oppositional; all government departments and almost the entire media are on message.

 

This signals a degree of institutional capture that is unheard of for any other movement for progressive social change, and it cannot be explained away by the internet effect or the trans movement standing on the shoulders of all those who went before.

 

This is what interests me – along with how and why this has become the most divisive and polarising issues on the Left – ever.

 

Women had to fight inside the trade union and labour movement and the Left more widely for recognition of the need to fight for women’s rights and on women’s issues; black people had to also fight in the Left and in the women’s movement for recognition of the need to fight for black and minority ethic women’s rights and issues - but there was never this amount of polarisation, division and diversion away from pressing issues and common interests. 

 

Never.

 

Anyone with any real commitment to the Left and to progressive politics more widely who is not engaging with that is either on the wrong side of the barricade – or is in the grip of Overactive Amygdala Syndrome – or is a shitty little misogynist using trans rights as an excuse to attack dissenting women.

 

Frankly, I’m sick of the pile-ons and the social media ping pong. I’m appalled by the abusive and the crudely sexist insults that get tossed around like so much confetti but I’m more offended by the politically infantile calls from the would-be woke for the righteous to prove their righteousness by combing through their Twitter followers and Facebook friends looking for ‘mutuals’ with JK Rowling so they can block or unfriend them. #GTFU

 

I’m fed up with the logical and ethical contortions performed by some people who claim to be on the Left to justify some pseudonymous plank, very likely a troll, calling a young lesbian a “terf cunt who needs to be learn to cope with cock” because her vagina essentialism, transphobia and TERF rhetoric literally kills trans people.

 

But I’m also fed up with some of the extremists on the other side - the actual biological determinists who deploy their own forms of harmful reductionism and lines of crude and hurtful abuse - including rejecting trans women who have stood as allies with women. 

 

However, I’ve said this before – I’ve been watching this movement for years now and the ugly misogyny came out first and hardest. If anyone is reacting – if anyone has the excuse of having been provoked - it is gender critical women. And frankly, compare the worst a so-called TERF says about trans people with the worst that’s lobbed the other way – and the trans rights regiment win the abuse stakes by a country mile.

 

A self-serving opportunist on Twitter lectured all who could bear to read the interminable thread, about the awfulness of Rowling’s essay; he cited a tweet by Magdalen Berns – a feisty little left wing, radical feminist, lesbian Londoner who – fed up with being told trans women are literally women even if they still have a penis and testicles and that trans women who fancy women are lesbians– retorted with some abuse of her own. Even dying tragically young from brain cancer and being left wing and lesbian – doesn’t count when the scales of righteousness are being deployed by the trans rights regiment of the would-be-woke brigade.

 

For the WBWB even the suspicion of being a TERF, even being “TERF adjacent” (yes, there is such a thing) weighs so much – it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, what else you believe in, or how good a person you are – the weight of the TERF label is such that the scales of righteousness tip all the way against you. 

 

And what’s more, they will stay there despite anything else you might do or achieve or demonstrate – the only way out of the resulting blanket condemnation is to publicly renounce the TERF heresy but even that might not be enough for some of the truly fervent - for the label leaves a stain and once branded, forever suspect.