I've spent arguably far too much time on the topic of the gender identity orthodoxy. If there is a justification for that focus over the past few years, it is that it touches me personally as a woman; and, as a socialist feminist, I'd have to be a saint not to be resentful of the ways that some people, purporting to be on the left, have treated women like me for daring to have an opinion which differs from their doctrinally approved viewpoint.
I'm not interested in the political-critical equivalent of duck shooting when it comes to the ways in which the religious and conservative right have co-opted facets of what came to be known as “gender critical feminism.” My focus has always been and remains on those whose interests are being served by it.
My start point is, any theory and praxis deserving of the description of feminist is inevitably critical of gender, in that feminism analyses and seeks to change the sets of historically and culturally specific beliefs which, in order to subjugate women, are wrapped around the biological reality of reproductive sex.
Gender has its roots deep in the bio-social realities of species reproduction.
As a species, we are not powerfully instinctually driven in relation to reproduction, which allows us to be highly adaptable. It also makes us highly reliant on learning.
Given how vital learning is to us, and how highly social we are as a species, it may be that the social rites and rituals early humans wrapped around reproduction were an important part of the learning how to be female and male humans which reinforced relatively weak instinctual drives. Not so much straitjackets binding people into a certain role in production and reproduction, but guides to what was of greatest benefit to the survival of the collective.
The nature and purpose of the rites and rituals, and the beliefs which gave rise to them, and which they reinforced and perpetuated, changed profoundly with the emergence of forms of rigid social stratification characterised by the rule of men.
“Gender” became ideology, patterns of belief that underpinned behaviours which protected the interests of property-owning or property-controlling men – those who became a ruling class.
The ideas of what it means to be female and male, with the latter always occupying the dominant place, were set in stone with the rise to prominence of monotheist patriarchal religion, but they were by no means confined to it. Patterns of male dominance existed in pantheistic societies also.
The progression from animism to pantheism to patriarchal monotheism were moves from an acceptance of an essential complementarity between the sexes to extreme expressions of male dominance in which women's reproductive and productive capacities became the property of men.
At its most extreme, even her personhood became an extension of the male – as father or husband or lord, and ultimately, God.
The most binding and enduring chains on a person are the chains of the mind, especially if they are donned willingly or better still, are not even recognised as chains. In that the role of religion in granting divine approval to male temporal rights cannot be over stated, and it is why in the modern world, the resurgence of forms of fundamentalist patriarchal religion is a major threat to women.
It’s stating the feminist obvious that the way gender as ideology and praxis develops and is perpetuated, differs considerably across historical eras, ethnicities, cultures, classes, and ages.
Failure to account for those differences and how they impact the women most affected by them, invariably weakens feminism, and what weakens feminism, weakens all other progressive movements.
For convenience, I work with a broad distinction in the schools of thought which influence feminist praxis – liberal, radical, and socialist.
The former confines itself almost exclusively to gaining parity with male peers within the existing social-economic order. It sometimes sees the liberation of women as being the adoption of stereotypically male behaviour and/ or in accepting the extreme gender stereotypes of appearance and behaviour demanded by men. It morphed into choice and corporate feminism which are a product of Neo-liberal capitalism.
Radical feminism overlaps with socialist feminism and differs from it primarily in how it conceptualises the origins of male power, which in turn influences what is seen as the solution to it.
Radical feminism places the patriarchy front and centre, and at its most extreme, it posits an essential and therefore unresolvable conflict between the sexes. This involves an acceptance of an almost Nietzschean notion of a male “will to power”, a drive to dominate others which was and is enabled by greater average male aggression and strength.
These views lead to ideas about separatism or at the most extreme, the pipe dream of revenge in the form of a reversal of the subjugation of women by men.
For socialist feminists, especially Marxists, the liberation of women is inextricably tied up with the liberation of all, which necessitates a change, not just in the dominant ideas and the superstructure, but in the economic base of the power which historically has been held by the males of the ruling class.
Within capitalism that is the bourgeoisie which exists in sometimes uneasy alliance with the remnants of the older, feudal ruling class. In the capitalist era, that was and largely still is, European men, although it is shifting. Unfortunately for women, it is just shifting from one set of male hands into another.
Patriarchy, as a matrix of ideas and practices, is an ancient and a formidable opponent which has used every means at its disposal to entrench male power – from overt and brutal coercion, to ideologies which draw a legitimating line from man to god.
The ideological is always preferred because it is so much more efficient and effective when people don their own chains, or justify the wearing of them as being god’s will or nature’s way, but the brute force is always there in reserve.
You have only to look at the hordes of misogynists on-line to see how ready and willing large numbers of men are to blame their feelings of powerlessness and all facets of their miserable, abject lives, on women, and who fantasise about the use of force to restore the illusion of power which women's rights appears to erode.
That some women have always colluded with men to gain some measure of power, or sought to appease men by wrapping themselves in patriarchy’s chains was tragic; that women in the era of mass communication actively choose to do so, is closer to farce.
This is apparent in that noisy battleground where the gender identity war is being fought. When new forces entered the fray from both the secular and the religious right to reinforce the Gender Critical Brigades, many of the original GCB withdrew, refusing to be in alliance with the right.
Those who still remain, seeing the far right now lining up with them, are faced with finding ways to justify being in alliance with forces they must know will turn on them in a political heartbeat.
To do so, they have to cast the transgender enemy into the single biggest threat facing women.
In the context of Palestinian rights versus Zionist colonialism that means siding with the latter because Islam is seen as the greater threat to women.
It is almost beyond comprehension that these noisy, attention-grabbing, opposing forces remain intent upon the destruction of the other at a point when all sane persons know the natural world is in crisis, and the social world, which has created that crisis, could tip at any point from a precarious state of relative equilibrium, into the chaos of barbarism.
There is no excuse for it in this world of instant information. The blame for the failure to widen our own focal lens lies with each of us.
It is terrifying that the minds of some people are so fixed on the “enemy of the moment”, their eyes will glide past all the misery and horror and the naked brutality of the wider world, and focus solely on images which fuel their hatred and fear of that single enemy.
They expend all their energy digging their well of rancour and disgust even deeper to justify their promotion of that single enemy to the ranks of the worst ever; to make that single enemy so evil, so destructive, all other battles must be put on hold in order to destroy it…even the battle for the survival of the planet as we know it.
They will ignore or justify wars in which the dead and the permanently scarred are overwhelmingly non-combatants and mainly women and children, and ignore famines in which the victims are overwhelmingly women and children.
These are people in the grip of a Samson-psychosis; they will risk destroying it all in order to defeat the detested "other".
If I was religious, I’d say, God help us.
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