Pass the identity parcel

Some musings on a damp Sunday about the identity politics phenomenon and the way it has become a major focus of the left – which these days is defined more by what its various factions are AGAINST than a broad consensus on what they are all FOR. And who does that benefit?

The most recent and polarising wing of identity politics is our pushy friend, gender identity. Its supporters claim it is the quintessence of progressivism while its detractors claim it is the greatest threat to what they hold dear – from women's sex-based rights and science, to conservative religious beliefs about the heteronormative nuclear family.

I get the sense that gender identity is a practical joker's version of "pass the parcel". As the glossy gift-wrappings are removed, the parcel will get smaller and smaller until what is revealed is a tiny box containing the message, "The joke's on you, suckers."

Why has so much of what passes for the left immersed itself in what must surely be seen as a neoliberal sponsored and promoted theory and praxis which is essentially accommodative, individualist and individualising, and based on the existence of a wholly subjective and thus empirically unverifiable, concept?

Who benefits from the reifying of a bespoke, individualist and individualising sense of a gendered identity, and privileging that over the category of biological sex, a material and collective reality which underpins the millennia-old and still extant oppression of women?

How progressive is the idea of an authentic self, conceptualised as an immutable gendered essence, which inhabits a mutable, inauthentic (ie wrongly sexed) body? (Or in the parlance of the weirdly alienated – flesh suit or meat sack.)

How progressive is it to ignore the fact that states which happily accommodate and promote individualist gender identity demands also serve economic and political interests which have proven themselves to be inimical to traditional forms of collectivism?

Who can take the following exchange seriously, except as a reason to get angry about transactivist airheads giving smug right-wingers an open goal?

TA: Trans women are women.

RW: Okay, so what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman.

RW: What is it they are identifying with?

TA: A woman.

RW: But what is a woman?

TA: Anyone who identifies as a woman....

And so on, ad absurdum, until most of the progressive forces in our increasingly unstable world have disappeared up their own rear ends, or died of embarrassment.

How is it that otherwise intelligent and aware people are happy to stake their political and academic reputations on such a rickety framework of circular definitions, lazy conflations and stark contradictions? 

It's a puzzle.

Well, no, it's not a puzzle at all. There's no doubt in my mind that the astonishingly rapid move from valid and reasonable demands for equality and dignity from people who suffer forms of psychological distress, to the current epidemic of narcissistic toy-tossing and anomie, has been stage managed, to some degree at least.

It also acts as a salve to the consciences of those liberals who either capitulated to, or colluded with the swingeing attacks on working class collectives and the cruel austerity measures that followed – especially those who picked up their middle-class credentials and sprinted for a place in the political and coordinator classes.

It allows lefties who were outflanked and outmanoeuvred by neoliberalism to feel there is something at least on which they can claim a win. 

And of course it's an opportunity for closet misogynists to indulge in a bit of payback to feminists for actual or imagined slights.

Fact is, it's a mammoth con and the sooner that sodding parcel is finally unwrapped, the better.

More on sports

I spent decades arguing against types of social constructivist essentialism in feminism which ignored/side-lined reproductive biology; I now find myself arguing against forms of biological determinism and essentialism in feminism. Go figure.

Women's sports has become a battlefield – not for equity with male peers but in relation to transgender and intersex athletes' right to compete in women's events.

In the past, women athletes were subjected to inferior status, remuneration, and conditions. Training regimes were based on data drawn from male studies, to the detriment of female athletes. Female sports were almost completely dominated by male coaches, administrators, judges etc all without as much as a peep of protest from most people, including a lot of feminists. 

 

That so many people have recently developed an interest in women’s sports and issues of fairness and equity is great and long overdue, but perhaps they also need to consider how much of a role the rampant commercialisation and commodification of sports has played and still plays in all this. 

 

“Bread and circuses” is now "fast food and football".

 

Professional and semi-pro sport in the modern era is ALL about money, and in realms where the mighty $ reigns, aided and abetted by toxic nationalism, fairness struggled to survive even before transgender and intersex issues elbowed their way centre stage and complicated things.

 

We know that men on average run and swim much faster; jump and throw much further/higher; lift much heavier weights; punch and kick way more powerfully than women …. because, evolution. 

We also know the more extreme the endurance element in a sport is, the smaller the male APA gets…. also because, evolution. 

 

At the core of that evolutionary, material reality lies the two different roles in reproduction. Fact.

 

There are a few sports in which women have an average performance advantage over men, they’re just not the "blue riband", big money events largely because sports have been and still are designed to showcase male abilities – and in the modern era, to make money, mostly for men.

 

Star athletes – mostly male – are paid obscene amounts of money, and trailing behind them like a school of suckerfish, are a host of agents, PR people, trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, consultants ….  And on a wider front, a vast array of mainly male technocrats, bureaucrats, administrators etc. 

 

As some women’s sports move out of the cinders in terms of financial and status rewards, and with the rise of transgenderism as a political movement, there are now people who were born male, who went through male puberty and competed in male sports, who see a financial and competitive / status advantage in identifying as women and competing against natal females. 

 

These are not elite athletes; they are, to date at least, the also-rans and the has-beens. The financial and status rewards in male sports are simply still too great for an elite male to make the switch.

 

I very much doubt the elite pro bike rider who, as Robert Miller, won stages of the European Grand Tours, would have transitioned to compete as Philippa York in women's races back in the day. 

 

Even with the genuinely gender dysphoric, the switch only happens once an athlete is over the top of the elite male performance hill, or if they were never going to make it up the hill. 

The rewards gap is still too huge and it’s natal male athletes who either no longer make the elite grade, or were never going to make it, who are moving into women’s sports.

 

We know that the post-pubertal physiological and psychological performance advantages accrued by male athletes are not all lost with a lowering of androgen levels – and that an average performance advantage still applies, especially in those areas where the APA is huge, like weightlifting. 

 

Most of the world's elite female super heavyweight weightlifters were out-lifted by a 42-year-old transgender lifter who, even at his male peak was never likely to make it beyond national junior level competition.

 

And with the acceptance of a surgically transitioned trans athlete’s right to add back, on health grounds, synthetic androgens up to the IOC limit of 10 nmols/L, the playing field is completely unlevel – tilted even more against natal females. 

Having presided over the debacle, the IOC has raised its manicured hands, rolled over and waved its be-suited legs in the air and tossed the hot transgender/intersex potato to sporting federations to deal with.

 

And there are no easy answers. The simplistically-minded, ideologically blinkered on the transactivists' side say that it's all down to a subjective gender identity and any male APA a trans athlete has must be viewed as no different from any other naturally occurring physiological advantages. 

The simplistically-minded on the other side look for the solution in DNA, eg the presence of a Y chromosome makes a person male and ineligible to enter women's events. End of story. 

 

Maybe the answer lies in decommercialising and denationalising sport, making it about the individual’s love of sport not national hubris and money.

 

Yeah, I know – like action on climate change, mass pollution, and species extinctions, that ain’t going to happen because ... bread and circuses.

Don't Look Up the Robes of the Elite

The film "Don't Look Up"  irritated the hell out of me on first viewing – so much so, I fast fowarded through it but I watched it again properly and I revised my opinion, somewhat.  

Mark Rylance is an acting genius as is Meryl Streep but I'd rather they hadn't made a US female president a raging narcissist who sends pictures of her fanny to porn stars she elevates to the Supreme Court, etc etc.  

It got way too heavy handed – often slipping from satire into a sort of parodic slapstick. I still can’t decide whether the film makers were being self-consciously heavy-handed – deliberately going beyond satire into cartoonish parody in order to reach those they think they need to reach, ie not the already environmentally aware and active, but all those who have been successfully blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by all the plastic shite and disinformation.

 

Did they decide that the target audience needs an apocalyptic beating about the head with the star-spangled obvious because their critical faculties have either not been developed at all or have been corroded by the toxic garbage that is US-style popular entertainment and information media?

 

Were they being doubly ironic? Were they self-consciously and cynically cashing in on the impending environmental catastrophe as much as the Rylance character sought to cash in on a planet-killing asteroid on collision course with Earth?

 

One pretty obvious layer of irony is the title – the injunction “don’t look up” is precisely what all the layers of plastic garbage and fake news are meant to achieve – don’t look up to see what the economic and political elites are actually doing to us and the planet, keep your eyes fixed on the screen and your head filled with ephemera.

 

One thing’s certain, people are watching it, but whether they all get the urgent, allegorical message is another thing entirely – as is whether enough of them will get off their well-padded butts and act. 

 

Another facet that annoyed me was the use of the plot device of a planet-killing comet with all its speed and urgency. The thing with climate change is it's just not that screamingly obvious – yet – and if it were, many people, being what their masters have made them, are as likely to slide into fatalism or nihilism as they are to unite to take the actions needed to save the planet and all who currently survive on her. 

It's a delicate balance – conveying the absolute urgency of acting hard and fast whilst still making people believe that doing so will mean their kids and grand kids will actually have a planet to live well on.