Tell Me Why

I posted this blog post on my FB page because I was struck by the expression of frustration and anger from a highly intelligent, articulate and principled person who adds enormously to feminist discourse – always in a balanced, well-informed and logical way. One of the responses was from another intelligent and principled woman who I know would agree with the author on most issues – except this one.

I don’t feel threatened by genuine trans people and I know that most trans people just want to get on with their lives, the same as most other people. Nor do I think all the extremists hurling misogynistic abuse at women on social media are genuine trans people; some might be but I strongly suspect a lot are trolls or MRA/INCELs taking the proverbial. (More on that in a later post)

 

I don’t argue that all women are equally oppressed, any more than I would argue all men are equally oppressive. I don’t think that all men are a threat to women but I know that a lot of women have good reason to feel that men are potentially a threat and it is a fact that we live in what is still a phallocratic world, made so by the continued existence of a host of social structures and arrangements that cement male authority over females. 

 

It’s great if some women don’t feel their sex is being erased or feelings invalidated or safety threatened by the conflation of gender and sex and the privileging of gender identity over biology, which is at the heart of transgenderism as a political movement, but a lot of women do. And a lot of them are being told if they feel like that, they are bigots, or stupid or brainwashed – and, bizarrely, they’re mostly being told that by people who claim to be on the Left. 

 

We need to be able to examine why this has become such an acrimonious and divisive issue, when it’s obvious that women have co-existed with transgender people quite happily in the past.

 

In my opinion, four main things, which gained rapid momentum popularly, commercially and politically, tipped the unremarkable issue of trans rights into the most acrimonious, polarised and divisive issue of any I’ve witnessed, in over half a century of being a left-wing feminist.

 

1. The emergence, on social media, of the phenomenon of “transgender lesbians” - that is trans women  (TW) who are sexually attracted to women, and the outgrowth from that, of:

a) claims that male genitalia are female if the person identifies as a woman; and,
b) lesbians are being transphobic bigots if they are not open to having a sexual relationship with a TW who retains male genitalia.

 

2. The insistence, by transgender radicals, that TW, even without any type or degree of physical transition, are literally women, and as such are a subset of the sex category woman, and cis women are another, albeit vastly larger, sub set. (1)

 

3.  The issue of gender self-identification and change of sex on official documents by statutory declaration, which has been introduced more by a process of procedural creep here in NZ but which became the subject of heated dispute in the UK with a review of the Gender Recognition Act and accompanying potential for changes to the Equality Act-  not because the country is a hotbed of transphobia but because:

a) the review was a dead cat thrown into a fraught political arena by the Tories, which people in the Labour, Greens and Liberal Parties immediately ran with and declared any opposition to it to be equivalent to fascism; and, 

b) because there is a very strong feminist tradition in the UK, and a wide range of women fought back. 

 

4. The explosion in, and response to, sudden onset gender dysphoria among gender non-conforming girls in the anglophone world in particular (2) and the adoption of variations on the Dutch protocol for the treatment of pre-pubescent kids who believe they are trans. (3) 

 

For women's liberationists, the debate is not about trans rights per se– it is certainly not about removing trans rights, or the ludicrously hyperbolic claim that trans people’s very existence is being denied.

 

Most of the women who are demonised as TERFs did not ever and do not oppose trans rights; most would fight to protect existing formal rights and would like to see services and outcomes for trans people improved – along with services and outcomes for all vulnerable groups.

 
What will never gain wide support is the extension of trans rights into the unrestricted right for any male-bodied person to be able to self-identify and gain full legal status as a woman; and, as a consequence of that, have full and unfettered access to women-only spaces and services that are currently protected in law and – more importantly – are widely accepted socially, ie have become part of the informal social contract such that, most men respect them, and most women feel they have a right to them, and a right to a say in who uses them.

 

Those sex-based rights only exist because women fought for them and they needed to fight for them because women and girls were, and – in what is still a phallocratic world – remain, a vulnerable class of people.

 

Trans radicals demand we accept the premise that a self-declared, subjective, possibly shifting, unverifiable (because medical and bureaucratic gate-keeping is deemed to be a breach of trans rights)- sense of individual gender identity must be privileged over the biological fact which is a foundational reality for the overwhelming majority of people. 

 

Gender as a concept only hangs together because of the concrete reality of sexually dimorphic reproduction. Without the reality of dimorphic biological sex there would be no such thing as gender or gender identity – there would just be individual and collective identity. 

 

That may very well be a good thing to strive for - but we live in a stratified, dangerous and largely phallocratic world, and if we are not permitted to define ourselves as women, how do we formulate a resistance to being oppressed and hyper-exploited as women?  

 

That oppression and hyper-exploitation may not be as much of an issue for older, white, educated, affluent, geographically and socially mobile inhabitants of the imperial bubble like me –  but certainly still is for the majority of women and girls globally and it is not going to magically go ‘pouf’ and disappear because a few people inside the imperial bubble declare individual gender identity trumps biological sex.

Notes:

(1) In the oppression hierarchy, so beloved of the politically infantile, misère is the winning hand and being in a majority is deemed to be automatically oppressive of minorities. By this stunningly stupid numerical measure, the poor must oppress the rich.

(2) Largely because of pressure from trans radicals and allies, too little attention has been paid to the effects, on girls especially, of appearance obsessed youth culture and exposure to porn, 

 

(3) We now know that the decision-making centre of the human brain is the last to mature (a fact of huge importance to people who argue against things like trying and sentencing kids as adults), and the approach advocated by trans radicals and widely adopted as a result, is in stark contrast to the “no medical gate-keeping please, we’re trans” approach for themselves. The Dutch protocol is almost always irreversible, relies on automatic affirmation, use of cancer drugs to delay puberty with no evidence of their long term effects, leads to major surgery with attendant exposure to anaesthesia, analgesics etc etc, and a life time of synthetic hormones and of constant medical surveillance. The rationale is to give kids time to find out if they are really trans - in reality it's delaying secondary sexual development until the current legal age at which cross sex hormones can be prescribed, and it is not known if delaying puberty also affects neurological and decision making development or has effects on wider physiological development.

 

It's Not That Bad

Some years ago, in a different life, my deputy (a black woman) and I sat in a room full of white men in suits and uniforms, looking at shopping bags full of photographic and other material that had been found, in a workplace, by a black officer who was covering an absence.

 

It was a "game" that the  all-white, male team of workers played - adding ‘funny’ captions to photos, leaflets etc. 

 

The small sample that follows are a few that became glued to my consciousness. 

 

A newspaper photo of a starving African toddler holding an empty bowl: "Greedy little w** bastard". 

 

A photo of a traumatised elderly black victim of gang rape: "Be gentle with me boys".

 

A leaflet with a photo of an elderly woman: "Piss ridden old hag". 

 

A photo of an old woman:  "Your c**t smells like rancid shit”.

 

A photo of a Downs Syndrome lad on a beach:  "Mong Watch".

 

... and on and on and on. 

 

Scrapbooks full of it; plastered all over the inside of cupboard doors. Some of it just stupid and crass; some of crude and cruel, and some betraying a visceral loathing of the targets. What made it worse was that some of it was material taken from facilities visited by these men in the course of their work.

 

And there we were, looking through it all and what disturbed me most, was my feeling that not one of the men in that room had any understanding of or concerns about how my deputy and I felt. 

 

This was in an area of employment in which staff interacted closely with members of the public all the time. They were well paid from the public purse and expected to be held in high public esteem.  

 

I could not imagine how a woman or a black person could have felt or been safe in that work environment, or how those men could have been trusted to carry out their work to the high standards rightly expected of them.

 

My advice was, that as it was gross professional misconduct and something all the team members has participated in, or been aware of, immediate dismissal for the entire team, and those less culpable could be allowed back on appeal. 

 

That was greeted with horror - as completely disproportionate - and my boss said dismissively: "It's not that bad, I've seen far worse on the walls of rugby locker rooms."  

  

My advice was ignored. The main offender went on sick leave on full pay for a year claiming stress, and then took medical retirement. Those in charge were demoted one rank, enrolled in an officer development programme and advanced beyond their original rank within six months of completing it. 

 

The whistle blower was targeted as a grass and eventually went to an IT, won a settlement, and transferred out, and it confirmed for me, yet again, how very, very deep institutional racism and sexism can run.

 

Epic Fail

I posted this rant on someone's Facebook page. I’m posting it here also because I am getting so annoyed by the mindless divisiveness of this debate.

 "I've been attacked by right-wing men for over fifty years for being a socialist and a feminist and, over the past half-decade or so, I've encountered a lot of the same old rank misogyny from men who claim to be on the Left but who are almost all united by one thing - no real commitment to structural change. 

This may be why they are so comfortable with the diversionary and divisive potential of identity politics in general, and the essentially reactionary nature of aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy, which seeks to privilege an essentially individualistic and individualising notion of the aspirational SELF, over wider biological and social realities and which, IMO, is doing harm to the cause of women's and trans and wider LGB rights. 

It's D grade politics:

Divert into what's obviously a political and critical cul-de-sac, and instead of getting the hell out of it, declare it to be the moral and political high ground on which the Left must make its stand;

Demonise heretics - in this instance the heretics are mainly women, so it's great cover for some men's unexamined misogyny;

Disseminate Dogma -because it's so much easier to chant a variety of off the shelf slogans and bite sized bits of low grade agitprop than it is to engage with the complex underlying political issues;

Divide into smaller and smaller groups, each loosely orbiting some relatively insignificant point of Difference thus Detracting from what binds people together and Distracting people away from the massive global issues confronting all of us.

D grade -no, I'll go one better - it's a faddish, false-hearted, fabricated, fanatical, fracturing, fragmenting, fallacious, fucking fiasco.

Not to put too fine a point on it."

The Woke Wars

In this Twitter thread, publication of which coincided with Trump’s overblown appeals to what all sensible people see as the worst in US culture – the writer strives to defend the freedoms of capitalism, the neutrality of money and the infallibility of science - by attacking what he calls the “Woke war on merit”.

“Woke” has been ripped from its roots in the African-American vernacular and is applied by the Right to the pretty much anything it wants to belittle or to demonise in order to protect or advance its political and economic interests. 

The term has replaced “political correctness” – which morphed into the once ubiquitous “PC madness” – a phrase so beloved of the right-wing when in hot pursuit of political advantage in the 1980s and 90s. 

 

The Woke – inasmuch as it can be said to be a definable 'thing' – is especially aligned with identity politics and critical social justice theory and praxis – much like political correctness before it was aligned with interest group politics. 

 

For the person who wrote the Twitter thread, the “woke war on merit” is actually an attack on “equality” -– by which he means "liberal equality” – by which he means, as far as I can ascertain, equality of employment opportunity which, because of the existence of innate differences in ability, results in “winners and losers". 

 

Liberal equality both enables and rewards merit, which is a real and measurable thing. The more liberal equality we have, the more merit becomes an important determinant – ie winners are more meritorious than losers and are therefore more deserving of tangible and status rewards.

 

People who are comfortably ensconced in secure positions in the academic, corporate, bureaucratic, technocratic sectors of the buffer class are obviously pretty happy with the neo-liberal status quo and will often defend that position by insisting they got there and deserve to stay there – entirely or mostly – on their own merit. Their success is due to their innate ability and hard work and is objectively demonstrated by such things as having a doctorate, getting published, and rewarded by being employed and well paid.

 

He cites examples of liberal equality that have been discovered and lauded by folk like him. 

 

First up we have capitalism, which he sees as a system that enables people to rise on their own merit –a sort of socio-economic helium that inflates them and allows them to rise above, and be distinguished from, the less meritorious. 

 

He fudges what capitalism is – especially the finance and the commodity-fixated corporate capitalism that dominates the world today – and just says it’s the “freedom to use one's property to one's own profit as one will” which sidesteps some mega issues, like private property, but okay, it is Twitter.

 

Nor does he comment on why it is that corporate capitalism has commodified equality and diversity and is busily making profits from selling it, and saving profits by using it to avoid engaging with genuine economic equality. The diversity industry may have been kickstarted by the Left but it didn't turn it into a multi-billion dollar global market.

 

Second up is money; because currency is “a neutral and universal form of capital"  which doesn’t care who you are and, as such, it’s a major driver of fairness, equality and justice. In fact, he goes as far as to say that “Neutral currency is genuinely anti-racist” i.e. with liberal equality, a genuinely meritorious person of colour will receive lots of it, which will serve to eradicate racism.

 

He does acknowledge that it’s all far from perfect but all we need is more opportunity for money to do its neutral, natural thing i.e. by some mysterious alchemy of market forces and individual merit -  gravitate towards the inherently worthy, and it will abolish racism by the simple mechanism of making some black people rich. 

 

As we say down here in the roaring forties, Yeah Right.

 

The Woke, who are opposed to liberal equality, are trying to destroy this neutral, value free currency, and replace it with the devilish device of social currency – an example of which is, if you are “cancelled” by the Woke banks will refuse to take your business and deny you access to currency. 

 

There is no questioning of course as to why banks have been able to position themselves as the controllers and dispensers of this apparently politically neutral and universal form of capital, or in what absurdist universe, the banks are controlled by the Left, let alone the Woke section of the Left.

 

The Woke also apparently hate science because science deals in facts which, according to the tweeter, are entirely unproblematic in terms of their universality and their application. There can be no dispute about scientific facts.

 

Merit counts a lot in science because “no-one’s pet theory is special”. 

Ideologically motivated doubters may point to the regularity with which science prostitutes itself to militarism, national interest and to corporate capitalism but that’d just be more Woke anti-science, or the exception to the rule that the scientific method is incorruptible and the universality of its results is its foundation and its validity. 

All hail the god of corporately-funded science.

 

And finally, there is the equality in the truth which is true because it’s the truth and the truth is true.

 

Apparently the Woke hate the truth, especially objective truths like test scores, demonstrated competence, having money, producing results, or  the "reasonable person" standards in law.

The tweeter loves them because he’s good at all that stuff, he relates to it, he’s paid lots of it and it reinforces his idea of what equality is ie – it’s what that lets people like him rise to the top.

And no doubt he can very easily answer all those awkward questions about what tests actually measure and why; how competence and results are measured and to what end; how it is that so much of that neutral, naturally levelling currency happens to gravitate towards persons who are demonstrably not meritorious and who by-pass others who demonstrably are; and how many times in history the reasonable person standard in law has fallen flat on its face – or if he can’t, well, he’s also pretty good at taking the piss.

In fact, he made quite a name for himself by somewhat unfairly taking the piss out of the Woke in American academia. IOW he enhanced his own merit by seeking to reduce the merit of others –not by means of utilising the neutral, infallible scientific standard that he lauds but by means of a hoax.

 

He and his collaborators in this hoax were not interested in, and hence did not tackle the reasons why some sectors of the social sciences, especially in the USA, have been channelled into a cul-de-sac of navel-gazing, individualising nonsense, nor whose interests that ultimately serves. 

I suspect at the heart of that little enterprise was nothing more scientific and academically defensible than enjoying taking a swing at a very soft target. 

 

Get Stuffed

I was about to subscribe to Stuff NZ when I read a highly subjective opinion piece by Stuff reporter /columnist, Kylie Klein-Nixon - and I put my credit card back in my wallet. 

 

Klein-Nixon's primary target was another Stuff OP published in the Manawatu Standard, by communications lecturer Steve Elers, in which he expressed his bewilderment over the array of preferred, newly constructed pronouns.

 
Now, I suspect Elers' motives for entering this current round of the language wars are not the same as mine, and I'd take issue with aspects of his rather light-weight analysis but  Klein-Nixon doesn't do that, she just wants to indulge herself in a bit of a rant and thus does the issues a grave disservice - in my opinion. 

 

She attacks people like Elers for "being scared of words" (ie pronouns) - in defence of people who she assumes are scared of being harmed by words like those written by "small-minded, mean-spirited, ignorant", "ill-informed drop-kicks". 

 

She manages the currently obligatory segue into what "uber-Karen, JK Rowling" has to say about the intersections between sex and gender generally, and the current protocols for treating trans kids in particular, and culminates her piece with a tub-thumping, rhetorical flourish :

 "...when a person who is dangerously impacted by the thing you’re selfishly, ignorantly, yapping about, tells you you’re hurting them, you don’t bash on regardless. You shut your fool mouth, sit the hell down and listen."

 

Klein-Nixon would do well to take note of, and address the political implications of the growing number of women who feel dangerously impacted by what they see as a heedless, ideologically motivated conflation of sex and gender, so I strongly urge her to take her own advice before putting fingers to keyboard next time.

And if Stuff wants my money, it had better sharpen up its act, ie more insight, less ideology.

 

Suiting the Suits

This post is apropos of not very much. Some time back, while drinking my third cup of coffee of the day, I read yet another piece about 'Megabit' - a contribution to the dumb-down, divide, and divert war being waged by the mass media in the service of - well, we all know who the vast bulk of the mass media serves - protestations about them being "dominated by the left", notwithstanding. The lie that the media is left-wing is shot from a trusty old cannon fired by the corporate-adjacent right.

 

The piece that energised my tired old brain that morning was a claim that Meghan - I don't use titles as a matter of principle - is a 'feminist' AND what is more, so is her husband, Harry.

 

What sort of feminist this writer thinks they might feasibly be, may be gleaned from the following :

“Like many millennial feminists, we want to approach the idea of taking down the system with evangelical zeal: tossing a lit match and strutting away from a slow-motion explosion just like Rihanna. Yet sometimes the most feminist thing to do – and smartest – is remove yourself from the system completely. Especially when that system is cooked.”

Note there is no explication of what "the system" is, let alone any hint as to what “we” might want to replace it with. 

 

The specific system that this writer is referring to Meghan removing herself from is, of course, the still obscenely rich and powerful remnants of the British ancien régime. The wider system she talks about taking down is not corporate capitalism as, like Meghan, she’s unlikely to want to blow up the goose (1) that lays the golden eggs for the privileged ones who inhabit the buffer zone of the coordinator and celebrity classes. So I'm having to guess "the system" is The Patriarchy.

 

Meghan's pre-royal fame rested on the TV series Suits which I hadn't seen until recently - or at least I thought I hadn't but watching it again after a conversation with some friends - I realised I had seen the pilot years ago and clearly had decided ce n'était pour moi. 

 

But, in the spirit of scholarly inquiry I watched a few episodes - fast forwarding through all the annoying, linky bits. 

 

Corporate law - superficially glossy, essentially sleazy; overtly corrupt or skirting the edges of it -  is the quintessence of the coordinator class, helping prop up and shield the worst excesses of the bloated, wasteful and exploitative system that feeds it. 

 

The series pays lip service to equality;  a mercilessly ambitious black woman is the managing partner having got there by shafting her nemesis, the other named partner who is Jewish. The other character who we are invited to hate is also Jewish and the fact of him being Jewish is much more front and centre and comes way too close to embodying some anti-Semitic stereotypes for my liking. 

 

MM plays a sexy paralegal with exam block - the privileged daughter of a successful black lawyer father and an invisible white mother. There's a black associate lawyer and a few black clients - but the stories hinge around a cabal of white men whose standing is signalled by the cost of their suits, haircuts, and manicures and the rampancy of their ambition. The women - almost without exception - are heavily sexualised in appearance, tottering around in bum revealing tight skirts on improbably high heels - think one step away from stripper shoes - with occasional glimpses of deep cleavage. 

 

The contrast between the men - and the women - is stark; the message is that women who want to succeed in this towering bastion of male privilege have to be at least as predatory, driven, and duplicitous as their male counterparts - and be decorative in a style and manner that owes far more to the phallocracy than it is does to feminism.

 

As for the character who is MM's love interest (and who somewhat resembles Harry prior to the onset of male pattern baldness) we are expected to believe that someone who never went to law school and hasn't passed the bar somehow - due to having the sort of photographic memory usually only found in people with autism, and the protection of the lead sleaze-bag - gets a job in a prestigious corporate law firm that only employs Harvard graduates.

 

As we say in Aotearoa-New Zealand, 'yeah right.'

 

 Notes:

1.  I am of course using 'goose'  in the generic sense of a bird of the family of Anatidae, not wishing to impose a cis-normative binary on the proverb.