What is a Woman?

Oh yes, it is that issue again. This was inspired by a Facebook post by a woman whose feminist scholarship I admire who was expressing her concerns about the recent UK supreme court judgement on what constitutes a woman for the purposes of the UK Equality Act (2010).

It’s a pretty narrow and forensic judgement about the meaning of "woman" as stated in an omnibus law, which is being hailed by the various women’s rights groups as a huge victory, and by trans rights groups as the latest salvo in a fascistic, Trumpist style attack on pretty much everyone who isn’t right, white and heterosexual.

The trans rights advocates and allies seldom address the fact that gender identity theory and praxis was embraced initially by global corporations, by centre-right, corporate-enabling governments all over the west, by state organisations and enterprises, NGOs, Trade Unions, the media…. 

It was the Tories in the UK who threw the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform into the political arena. Gender identity was wholeheartedly supported by the US Democrats whose liberal wing is only left in the context of the right-wing mess that is US electoral politics. While Biden was enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his administration wholly embraced GI.

In unstable, unnerving conditions many socially conservative people will cleave to the known and to leaders who appear to be strong. 

The same conditions may encourage socially transgressive people to push boundaries beyond sustainable limits, i.e. to the point where the moderating influence of the centre on both extremes is weakened and popular opinion starts to slide towards the conservative pole.

Anyone who knows anything about the politics of diversion and division could see how much utility this could have for the right. It was obvious, or it should have been, that the way the trans rights movement developed would be weaponised by the far right and by religious and secular ultra conservatives. It was never a case of if, but when and in what ways. 

This isn’t a criticism of the cause, but it is a criticism of the air-headed, myopic strategies deployed by some trans-activists. That air-headedness may have been inevitable when you consider how individualistic and individualising an ideology it is, and how fragmented it quickly became as a political movement – made more so by how rapidly the trans umbrella grew to provide cover for a mass of gender identities, not to mention how reliant it was and is on media that can easily be manipulated by malign or vexatious agents.

For me, the clearest warning signal about the direction it was likely to take came in 2015 when an influential INCEL posted a video on his You Tube channel calling on his supporters to claim to be “transgender lesbians” online to mess with feminists and the left.

Trans rights also had and has utility for those liberals and leftists who’ve done nicely out of neo-liberal capitalism’s hyper-commodification and who have a place in its well remunerated, high status buffer class.  

It's a cause which:

- Supports a tiny minority whose demands pose no threat to the economic status quo and which even contain some market opportunities. 

- Doesn’t put your job at risk because your bosses support it also. 

- Assuages guilt about relative privilege and the abandonment or continued disregard of the great unifying theories and praxis centred around class, race and sex.

- Lets you believe you are on the right side of history without having to actually confront the social and natural chaos that’s looming because of the very socio-economic system from which you are benefiting. 

- Allows you to forget for a time, the child slaves in the Congo, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the proxy war in Ukraine, the heating up of the new Cold War against China, the accelerating and mutually reinforcing global issues of climate change, species extinctions/habitat loss, chemical and particulate pollution.

- Allows you to self-soothe, secure in the knowledge that you're fighting the good fight on at least one narrow front. 

What worries me is the GI issue being stretched beyond breaking point between, a) the notion that being a woman is an essentially subjective, empirically unprovable state of mind, and/or a costume drawn from stereotypes that feminists fought to break; and, b) the narrowly deterministic notion that “a woman is an adult human being with no Y chromosome”.

I get worried when people haul intersex issues into the debate around trans rights with no regard for the fact that those with any form of DSD are a hugely diverse population many of whom don’t want to be used as political pawns. 

I get worried when those who use intersex issues as political pawns have no regard for the very real possibility that DSDs (in number, type and severity) are increasing because of the chemical soup we’re being forced to live in by the same corporate and state drivers that have supported the GI orthodoxy.

I get worried when the World Health Organisation publishes information about intersex issues and makes the claim that there’s such a thing as a “Y monosomy”, and that ludicrous claim is repeated by influential people in defence of GI rights. 

I get worried when no one asks whether there is a political-commercial imperative behind the current emphasis on the idea of “sex being on a spectrum”, and whether this process of normalising these deviations from the reproductive norm into something natural and therefore palatable is because, like the global epidemic of obesity, there is something that needs to be hidden. Something like the vast number of endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging chemicals in the environment, perhaps. (1) 

I get worried when I see trans activists demanding the right to medically transition with apparently no regard for the implications of becoming one of the most medically surveilled and pharmacologically dependent groups on a politically and ecologically unstable planet – let alone considering the hellish nightmare of the interactions of pharmaceuticals with the mass of chemicals we cannot avoid ingesting, inhaling, absorbing.

All this and much more is why I dislike and distrust both extremes of this argument. It has yet again diverted the time and political energies of those best placed to demand and get positive change in respect of the constellation of horrors facing us. 

In the time it has taken me to type this  … how many innocents have died or been maimed and/or traumatised?  

As to looking back on this in five years, as one commenter on the post said she planned to do, the planet is in a state of accelerating social and natural disequilibrium; it may already be at the point where equilibrium cannot be restored, in which case all bets are off because chaos will ensue. 

That’s what worries me most.

(1) When researchers were looking for an endocrine disrupting chemical that might be implicated in the global increase in precocious puberty, they tested 10k before finding a likely culprit… a cheap synthetic scent. 10k sounds a lot but that’s a tiny percentage of the total released into the environment in various ways over the last half century. Endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging, carcinogenic chemicals that we cannot avoid; the adverse effects of any given one on any given organism at any given stage of its development is hard enough to determine; their interactions, as I’ve said repeatedly, are a nightmarish unknown.

Going Around in Circles

A post inspired by yet another person blaming the entire Left for what they see as the transgender debacle.

People need to stop doing the Right’s job for it by using gender issues as a stick to beat the entire Left with. Americans need to realise that the Left elsewhere in the world is a very different thing from the modern, liberal wing of an essentially Right-wing party of empire.  

In very broad (and simplistic) terms, Neo-liberal capitalism’s (NLC) ideologues and commentariat attacked Red Left theory and praxis. The resulting dominance of NLC ideology had the effect of pulling the political fulcrum point to the right, making centrism appear to be “leftist”.

The left of NLC,  the White Left, abandoned the old Red Left’s class-based theory and praxis.

Many of the White Left did so nicely out of NLC’s hyper-commodification and its creation of a well-remunerated “buffer class”, they either didn’t notice, or chose to ignore the fact that identity politics in general and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, are essentially individualistic and individualising. 

As such they pose/d no threat to NLC, and in fact they created a load of ideological and market opportunities.  

As NLC economic policies pushed a lot of the western working class into forms and degrees of economic and social “precarity” that they’d never experienced, but with which their ancestors were well acquainted, some of them were easily persuaded by the Right into blaming it all on some designated “other”, and to cleave to apparently “powerful” leaders, etc etc.  

While the majority of people did not drift to the Far Right, in the absence of any sort of unifying political-economic theory and accompanying forms of mass organisation on the broad Left, they remained easily diverted and divided.

The utility to the Right-wing of identity-focussed politics and praxis in general, and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, lies in its capacity to both divert and to divide. 

For the Left-liberals who remain/ed attached to the idea of some sort of opposition to capitalism or to the “establishment”, IP provided a theoretical focus and a rallying point – with a load of slogans, tropes, mantras and memes to put in place of solid theory and action. 

It made them feel that they were doing something tangible even though, as I have said elsewhere, it’s like a bunch of people on a train with a maniac at the controls driving it towards a cliff, arguing about who gets to sit in first class. 

It’s all complicated by some, on what we used to call the Ultra-Left, having gone full circle to meet up with the Far Right. 

Identity politics, and its most divisive manifestation, transgenderism, was possibly not created by the Right other than in the sense of someone rolling an ideological snowball down a steep mountainside, but the Right has been quick to take full advantage of the ensuing social, political avalanche, which now puts a mass of wider social advances at risk of being swept away.

If we can’t agree on anything at least let’s agree on the utility to those who hold the reins of power, of the old maxim, “divide and rule”. Just as with older forms of left sectarianism, splits and divisions among any oppressed sector only ever benefit the powerful.

Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains, the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse. "Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right wails as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the new corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other which allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to slip the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

On Propaganda

I just had a conversation on Facebook in which some people were trotting out Israeli propaganda in its most undiluted – almost self-parodying form – in which the harm done to Israelis is amplified and magnified, whilst the harm done to Palestinians and others is denied, or minimised, or justified as necessary and proportionate.

In fact, such is the breadth of the Israelis' denial of harm, where it is acknowledged at all it is excused as unavoidable collateral damage caused by the actions of the enemy “other”. 

By means of the argument that by having forced "the world's most moral army" to be killers of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the enemy has inflicted psychological harm on them, the slaughter is then added to the harm done to Israelis. 

In both the style of warfare it wages, and in the type of propagandising about it, Israel follows the US.

I was accused by one of the people in the conversation of claiming that "Muslim extremism" is “Israel’s fault”, which actually occurs because Islam is an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler religion". As proof of that she claims Islamic terrorists have committed 40,000 acts of terror across the globe in the last decade alone, and cites several especially horrible examples.

This is classic Israeli spin. Israel's critics describe it as an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler state" so the Israeli spin doctors turn that back on Islam which, like Christianity still is, was the religion of empires. 

Only an ideologue or an idiot would claim that Israel alone has caused terrorism committed by people who are Muslim or in the name of Islam, although the right in Israel has played a major role in its genesis and growth. 

The Israeli state itself was rooted in terror; it always was and still is an “expansionist supremacist colonising settler” state that has cynically weaponised the holocaust, and promoted anti-Arab racism and wider anti-Muslim feeling to ensure enough support for its expansionist, supremacist, colonising tactics. 

Leaving aside the antisemitism implicit in the idea that it is Jews wagging the US or wider West’s tail, the originator and main beneficiary of Islamic terrorism is the USA which has the biggest stake in its creation and perpetuation. 

It's very hard to justify a global, on-going "War on Terror", with all the pouring of $trillions into the military-industrial complex, without the public seeing an obvious and terrifying terrorist enemy.

Trump’s ritual self-anointment (dick-waving) as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the least developed countries in the world, allegedly in pursuit of Islamic State. 

People surely cannot ignore the global manoeuvres of US Inc which have contributed to the genesis of Islamic militancy.

Surely all these pro-Israelis admit how odd it was for an estimated 6000 Hamas fighters inside a geographically tiny and heavily surveilled region to have been able to plan and train for an attack on a vastly more powerful neighbour without that neighbour’s much-vaunted military and civilian intelligence apparatus knowing a thing about it.  

We’re expected to believe that an intelligence apparatus which later could plan what, if it was carried out by an Islamic country or group would be called a "terror attack", on a mass of individual Hezbollah operatives living in a sovereign state, did not know an attack involving upwards of 6000 fighters was being planned by Hamas in an open-air prison? 

Israel is governed by a far right coalition which is being held to ransom by a gang of fascists who’d happily carry out their own “final solution” against Palestinians, and some of them are lunatic enough to use the nuclear weapons they’re not supposed to have on the basis that, “if we can’t have it, no one will”.

Exposing the lies that are pumped out to obscure the truth, is not being antisemitic; in fact, it’s antisemitic to not call the liars and warmongers to account because, however powerful the Zionists think they are, it’s power by proxy. 

If it is expedient to do so, the real power holders will pull the military aid plug and do deals with compliant Arab regimes because this is all about US Inc and control of trade routes, oil, rare minerals and fresh water. 

You could cite endless examples – historical and contemporaneous – of acts of group and individual terror committed by people motivated by some form of religious bigotry / zealotry, and keep ignoring the wider context of the extent to which some states have been and are complicit in those acts of individual/group terror whilst using them as justification for committing vastly greater acts of state terror.

Israel’s primary ally and role model terror-bombed Japanese and German cities at the end of WW2, including using nuclear weapons against civilian targets, and it planned to use them against the USSR. 

It then bombed North Korea into oblivion in a proxy war against the USSR and China, killing upwards of 20% of the total population.

To protect western oil interests, the US toppled a secular government in Iran, installed a brutal tyrant whose repression of the left and intelligentsia opened the door to the current Islamic theocracy which the US now wants to wage on.

It blanket bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, poisoning the land and water with carcinogenic  and DNA damaging chemical defoliants. It used the same tired old excuse that they were not to blame for the mass civilian casualties because the “enemy” hid among them. 

It fomented Islamic extremism in Indonesia to topple the leader of the emergent Non-Aligned Movement, and to destroy the world’s largest per capita communist party, anywhere up to a million of whom were killed.

It armed anti-government rebels in Afghanistan and convinced a load of western liberals that the muhjaheddin were "freedom fighters" against the “Soviet-backed” socialist government. 

Now it lies about who armed the mujahheddin and thus provoked Soviet intervention, and blames it on the new target of its war-mongering, Islamic terror group, Al Qaeda.

It told blatant lies (remember the Kuwaiti babies hauled out of incubators?) to swing public opinion behind its appalling acts of state terror in Iraq. 

After using the twin towers attacks (carried out by nationals of its ally, Saudi Arabia) as the justification to intensify the “War on Terror”,  it invaded and heavily bombed Afghanistan before stealing Afghani state assets and abandoning the place to the Taliban, of which it now stands in pious judgement.

In alliance with NATO it destroyed Africa's richest nation, Libya. Trump’s self-anointment as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world, under the guise of attacking Islamic State.

And then there are US Inc's maladventures across Central and South America, Europe , the Caribbean …. and on and on and on…. 

The defining characteristic of US Inc, of which Israel is a key part, is that in pursuit of the right to carry on exploiting, they lie, and they lie, and they lie ....

With “friends” like that, Israelis should not be surprised when they make enemies of pretty much everyone else and most people do not believe a word they say.