It's still a phallocratic world

I have written about aspects of this issue on this blog more than any other single issue over the past few years – a level of scrutiny that is grossly disproportionate to the tiny number of trans people, even by the widest definition of the term – or to any objective measure of the weight of issues confronting them exclusively as transgender persons, i.e. when intersecting issues of race, class and age etc are taken out of the equation.

 

It's hard to estimate the size of the transgender population, both because of a lack of reliable data, and because of issues of where to draw the boundaries now that the trans umbrella has been expanded to cover a very wide range of gender identities, but estimates vary from 0.3% to 0.6% of the global population, i.e. between 21 million and 42 million people.

 

The demographic’s size, and its political weight and influence – exercised mostly in the affluent world -– becomes interesting when measured against:  

• race: people of colour make up the majority of the world’s population; 
• sex: over half the world’s population is female; 
• poverty: half the world’s population are poor and an estimated 800 million of them live in extreme poverty, most of them people of colour;
• disability: 2 billion people are disabled; 
• age: one billion people are over the age of 60;  
• sexual orientation: around 200 million people are lesbian or gay.

 

In transgenderism, as it has come to be framed in the past decade, there are strands of regressive ideologies that are essentially individualistic and individualising, the worst of which encourage people to see, and to treat their body as a sort of mouldable shell which can, even must, be altered to match their inner sense of self, their personal identity.

 

It is impossible to be "born in the wrong body", and even using that as a figure of speech is unwise because it feeds into a narrative which, at its root, is a quasi-religious belief in an eternal and superior, essence or spirit inhabiting the mortal and inferior, body.

 

People who buy into the notion that there can be a female brain in a functionally male body need to stop and ask where might the re-emergence of such a notion lead, in what is still a profoundly phallocratic world?

 

That the same people often rail against the “essentialism” and “biological determinism” of gender critical feminists, makes it all the more a cause for despair for those of us for whom it makes no sense to politically or critically conflate sex and gender, or to privilege gender identity over biological sex.

 

For me, that's as nonsensical as it is to try to separate body and mind, or body and sense of gendered self, or to separate either from the social context into which we're born, and within which we are formed – constantly – as persons.

 

For some extremely alienated people, the body is framed as a "flesh suit" or "meat sack", in which the essential "self" resides, like some sort of "pilot". The links to gaming – in which people enter a sort of twilight zone as the operator of a digital avatar – are pretty obvious.

For trans humanists, arguably the most alienated of all, the promise of eternal life exists in the possibility of uploading the individual's consciousness to the Cloud, or into a synthetic, infinitely repairable robotic body.

 

These of course are possibilities which can only be envisioned, or have even a remote chance of being realised, within the imperial bubble; and even if they were achievable, would only ever be accessible to the elite.

 

Outside the bubbles of privilege, the wider social and natural worlds move to more ancient and fundamental rhythms, and we ignore these at our peril.

 

I know it's all very passé and boring to talk about stuff that affects actual women but :

Femicide and rape of women remains both endemic and epidemic.

Every year, tens of thousands of mainly brown and black women die from easily preventable birth complications – often related to nutritional deficiencies. 

Upwards of 1 million newborns and as many as 5 million other kids under the age of 5 die from easily preventable causes.

Untold numbers of foetuses are aborted, and neonates are killed, because they are biologically female. 

All over the world at this very moment, thousands of women of colour are walking a total of thousands of kilometres to fetch and carry water to keep themselves and their family alive.

In Yemen, at this very moment, almost an entire population is on the verge of starvation and the first and worst hit – as always – are women and children.

 

I am – as I've always been – committed to the right of all people to live in ways that make them secure, happy and fulfilled. But there are always provisos, conditions, and restrictions on what people may do because life is a series of compromises. The problem for many of the children of the imperial bubble is they've been conditioned to not acknowledge that – compromise is always for the other.

 

Stripped of all its ephemera, sanded down to its naked essentials, we live in a rigidly stratified and increasingly dangerous world dominated by what all sane and sensible people know to be, essentially destructive institutions which, and individuals who, use all manner of overt and covert devices and strategies to keep the mass of people compliant and divided. 

The more atomised we are, the better the elites and their high ranking servants like it, as long as we keep consuming and doing their bidding.

 

In such a world, which is made even more dangerous by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, if trans people are the most vulnerable and marginalised of minorities, their only safe space is within a broad, strong, progressive alliance, but trans issues have become the most polarising and divisive of that alliance of any I've ever seen.

 

Who benefits from such deep and acrimonious divisions? Not women and not genuine trans people.

 

In my view, superficial identity politics is at best accommodative, and at worst essentially reactionary;  transgenderism, as it is currently framed, is a movement in which the individual, and the self-declared needs of the individual, are deemed to be both start and end point of political activity.

 

I've watched the trans movement grow over three decades and I've seen it morph from predominantly transsexuals – mostly gay men who, in a viciously homophobic world, wanted or needed to live as women, and among whom there was a disproportionate number of B&ME people –  into a powerful movement that is dominated by transgender women who, prior to transition, were heterosexual men, often married, having fathered children, succeeded in male-dominated spheres such as the military and tech industries, and mostly white.  

 

It was the latter who spearheaded the transgender push into women-only spaces in the USA – the last of which was Michfest – and they appropriated the marginalisation and vulnerability of poor and black or Hispanic transwomen in the US and South America, in lobbying for transgender rights. They still do but for the most part, they do little or nothing about changing the underlying economic conditions which exacerbate that marginalisation and vulnerability. 

 

Then, the transgender lesbian took centre stage; a social media phenomenon which really took off around five years ago and which probably arose from the dynamic created by the increasing numbers of heterosexual men who transitioned and who retained their sexual attraction to women.

 

However, evidence suggests it has been co-opted by men’s rights activists (MRA) who pretend to be transgender lesbians to play manipulative and sometimes predatory games. They are having a ball. Not only do they get to screw with the Left, they get to harass, abuse and threaten women with impunity – especially feminists, more especially radical feminists, who are opposed to prostitution and porn – the so-called TERFs and SWERFs, and most especially, lesbian radical feminists.

Why might that be?  It’s not simply because these women are anti-trans because frankly most of them aren’t, or at least they weren’t at the outset of this. I think they are the primary target of so much vitriol and viciousness because they attack both the MRA/INCEL cabal and the common or garden misogynists, right where it hurts it most – some are not sexually attracted to men; they are radical feminists, and they oppose the porn industry and the prostitution of women. 

 

Everything about them denies these misogynistic men what they believe is their inalienable right to women's bodies. 

I believe these are the authors – along with probably a tranche of state-sponsored mischief makers and agents provocateurs – of the mass of vileness on social media which has been collated by women in an attempt to try to get people to take notice of the growing confidence of these rank misogynists, and the complicity of trans rights activists and allies.

 

Read my earlier post about racism and misogyny in the workplace and tell me that left wing men who join in with the calls to cancel, brutalise, rape, murder TERFs are any better than the rank misogynists who scrawled "piss ridden old hag'" on the photo of an elderly woman; or whether those allies who turn a blind eye or look to excuse the abuse of women on social media, are any better than the managers who sought to minimise bigotry?

For too long, too many people on the Left – some with the very best intentions – have reflexively put ALL those who question transgenderism into the “TERF=NAZI” basket;  and ALL self-proclaimed transwomen into the “TRANS=stunning/brave person of good faith” basket. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I’m not anti-trans rights, I’m anti corporatist and misogynistic bullshit posing as progressive politics.

 

Our lives are dominated by a corporate capitalism which is busy destroying the world – aided and abetted by compliant governments and NGOs. We all know this, or should, and if we take off the blinkers we can also see that the corporate world happily embraces the transgender orthodoxy, just as it embraced all the other items on the diversity menu.

That's because it's much easier to buy in a consultant, do an equality audit and some training, get the diversity boxes ticked, get your rainbow badge than it is to engage with structural and economic equality.

 

Why narrow the obscene pay gap between the workforce and the CEO and his senior managers; why pay a decent wage and provide job security for women, B&ME people, trans people, people with disabilities when you can buy a diversity badge for a snip?