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 the 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.

Gamesmanship

On the NZ left wing site, The Standard, an article written by a woman about the fairness and safety issues implicit in the presence in women’s boxing of two athletes who may / probably have a 46XY disorder of sexual development or differentiation (DSD) of the sort that grants them some degree of androgen-related performance advantage over their 46XX opponents, prompted a response from a man.

The heading and the tenor of the second piece was guaranteed to trigger the, now usual, heated debate about the implications for women’s sex-based rights of gender-identity related shifts in legislation, policy, and procedure.

 

Even though the debate was largely measured in tone, it resulted in a threat to the very existence of the site, and then to the original article being removed. 

 

It’s not appropriate to speculate about the reasons for the threat to close the site being issued, but the invariably intemperate responses swirling around the questions of sex versus gender identity, and specifically, gender self-identification by statutory declaration, may have played a role.

 

Transgender and intersex issues do not overlap usually but the inclusion of the latter in the ever-increasing number of groups jostling for position under the transgender umbrella, means that some people don’t acknowledge any difference. 

 

The problems inherent in this lazy conflation are exemplified by the likes of JK Rowling, Donald Trump and Elon Musk weighing in on the women's boxing.  It was a rerun of the furore when Caster Semenya of South Africa, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took the medals in the women’s 800m at the Rio Olympics. All three athletes were found to have had an XY karyotype and to produce levels of testosterone in the male range, with no definitive evidence of how much their bodies benefitted from it. 

 

The resulting controversy saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) now World Athletics, impose a differential standard for athletes with male levels of testosterone, which affected African athletes disproportionately. That in turn provoked a storm of protest which led to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developing a broad framework for fairness, safety, and inclusion within which the various international sporting bodies would develop their own rules for eligibility. 

 

It is worth stating that only the female category in sports is at issue; men's sports are not in any way affected by these fairness, safety, and inclusion issues.

 

There can be no doubt there is a wider geo-political back cloth to all this in the claims of corruption and ties to the Kremlin swirling around the International Boxing Association (IBA) ie the US-led boycott of the 2023 IBA world champs; the formation of World Boxing as an alternative body, in competition with the IBA; the IBA’s disqualification, mid-competition, of the two boxers on the grounds of having an XY karyotype; the removal of the IBAs Olympic accreditation, and the IOC decision to set up an ad hoc committee to run boxing which allowed the two IBA disqualified boxers to compete.

Both swept through their weight grades with unprecedented 5-0 wins in all rounds.

 

Many of the women in the sport of boxing are likely to be on the high side of the standard reference range for female levels of testosterone. On average they are tall for women and are physically tough, and the women at the Olympics will be the best in their respective countries. 

Either Lin and Khelif are both atypical in respect of their physical abilities in the sport, or they possess an androgen-related performance advantage in the male range. 

 

The rise of Islamophobia and the far right across Europe, the specifics of the experience of Algerians when it was a French colony and as migrants to France, all form a backcloth of which the likes of JK Rowling should have been aware.

 

I never expected any better from her because before the issue of sex self ID hit the political fan, she threw her considerable  weight and influence behind the anti-Corbyn faction in the UK Labour Party, and she is a firm ally of Israel. It would have been more surprising if she had refrained from inflaming the situation.  

 

Some people who comment are simply not au fait enough with the issues; some are angry for a wide range of reasons which I have written about extensively – albeit polemically – on this blog, and some of them are engaged in various sorts of divisive and diversionary behaviour. 

 

Without re-entering the ring to engage in further ideological fisticuffs, I will just say that the bottom line for me is as it has always been, we must be able to address these and related issues in a way that doesn’t demonise people who are caught in a geo-political shit storm not of their making. We must avoid division, and diversion of time and energy away from more important issues. 

 

We must also remember the reasons why those who rule us encourage people to obsess about obscenely expensive circuses like the Olympic Games. 

 

I thought the Paris games would be a focus for attention grabbing protests about such issues as Gaza and climate change but if any happened, they didn’t make global headlines. 

 

The brave individual gestures made by athletes to try to get the world's focus onto what is happening across Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine etc were obscured by an obsessive media and public focus on one person competing in a fringe sport. 


 

And that was not the fault of one side only; it takes two to politically tango.

 

I will not readdress the issues of transwomen’s participation in women’s sport as this is a different, albeit linked issue. 

 

As I try to see all these issues through a wide political lens, for me, this firestorm Illustrates why it’s so important always to pull aside the ideological veils to see if there is anything sinister lurking behind them. 

 

With regard to DSDs and how a decent society responds to people affected by them, the individual’s rights to privacy, to personal dignity, to wider formal tights, and to timely treatment when needed, are a given. There should be no debate. 

 

There are formal, codified rights and informal social rights which are embedded in the social compact. The two don’t always neatly align and sometimes they clash.

 

Neither sort of rights is absolute, as sometimes one set of rights affects others. Also, all rights carry with them a range of duties and obligations to the wider collective. 

 

Social life is a series of compromises, and as we live in world riven with structural inequalities, some people are forced to make endless compromises whilst others, the rich and powerful usually, get to float through life making hardly any. 

 

People with DSDs are not a “community”; there is huge range of types of DSD, some of which vary widely in how they present. They were lumped together under the non-scientific descriptor of “Intersex” for political lobbying purposes because historically many people with DSDs had been treated shamefully by the medical establishment. 

 

Within medicine the attitude was, and remains in some countries and cultures, that if a neonate does not have a normal looking penis and scrotum, s/he should be made a girl, legally and if available, via forms of surgery and drug treatments. 

 

Being crisscrossed by wider social factors like religion, by parental rights and expectations and the rights of the infant/child etc, it is not an easy terrain to navigate.

 

Sometimes these days in the developed world we settle on doing only that which is needed to ensure health and well-being, waiting until the person is old enough to make their own informed decisions. 

 

In some societies, parents don’t have that luxury.  Living inside the imperial bubble we forget the grimmer realities of life for impoverished people, especially women.

 

Our self-congratulations on how progressive we are in the way we now see the wide range of DSDs, rings hollow if we fail to ask whether those conditions are increasing in incidence, range and/or severity, or is it merely the fact that they are now being diagnosed more easily and more often?

 

There is a range of political movements that are aimed at normalising pathologies. All too often, the so-called progressive left fails to ask the obvious question when that normalisation is enthusiastically embraced and even enabled by corporations and powerful corporate-compliant institutions. 

 

The first question to be asked is whether these processes of normalisation help to obscure causal factors which are attributable to those corporations and institutions.

 

There is a global increase in childhood cancers, and in developmental and reproductive disorders. 

Microplastics have been found in all organs in humans, including the brain.

 

Clinical obesity was once uncommon in young people and morbid obesity was once rare in adults; it is now commonplace, especially among the poor.

 

Type 2 diabetes was rare in adults and unknown in children; it is now commonplace and appearing frequently in kids.

 

The range of triggers and incidence of life-threatening allergies has increased, as have rates of autism.

 

There is a global drop in sperm quality and an increase in reproductive cancers and conditions like endometriosis.

 

Kids are entering puberty younger, and the incidence of central precocious puberty is increasing with links to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.


 

If we fail to draw aside the ideological veils that we surely all know are used to obscure causal factors directly attributable to profit-hungry corporations and their compliant, enabling governments, we are aiding and abetting the culprits. 

 

Normalisation of the pathological is a widely used ideological veil that is made opaquer when the component of human rights is added to it.

 

Autism becomes something to celebrate as neurodiversity, aka being on the spectrum. 

 

Clinical and even morbid obesity become just normal variations in the amount and distribution of adipose tissue, and any attempts to examine it as a pathological response to metabolic triggers are deemed to be fat-shaming orfatphobic. 

 

DSDs become evidence of human reproductive diversity, or proof that sex is not binary leading to such risible claims as there being 5 or 6 sexes. 

 

Call me a cynic but every time I see attempts to normalise the pathological, I want to investigate further. 

 

Several decades ago, I was drawn into researching endocrine disruption in horses. I was seeing mares with the equine equivalent of polycystic ovarian syndrome; obesity and patterns of grossly abnormal adipose tissue; hind gut disorders leading to catastrophic tissue failure in the hooves; unusual neurological conditions. 

 

There were lots of explanations about why, all pretty much missing the herd of tap-dancing elephants in the corner of the room which included the ubiquity of endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals in the environment. 


 

Studies which draw a link between EDCs in agricultural chemicals, like a study linking CPP to agricultural EDCs in rural France, once languished in the dark or were dumbed down by that part of the coordinator class which is employed to put an ideological spin on scientific studies for public dissemination via a compliant media.

 

These days there is a critical mass of data about these chemicals – some of which fall into the category of “forever chemicals” because of the time they persist in the environment – so the issue is becoming better known.


 

However, the vast petro-chemical industry responsible for their manufacture, and the various industries which use them, won't suddenly grow a conscience and say "mea culpa" and clean up its mess, so it's up to us to keep shining a light on these issues, and keep demanding answers. 

 

Science strives to be neutral in its methodology, but it has always struggled to be genuinely neutral because research needs funding, and with funds, be they from corporations, governments, foundations etc, come with strings. Those strings define not just what will be studied but also what conclusions are drawn, how the data is presented publicly and to what use the findings will be put. 

 

This is never truer than in the Neo-liberal era in which corporate funders often dictate the subject and scope of scientific enquiry.

 

So, whenever I see processes that seek to normalise pathologies  which appear to  have the laudable aim of benefiting people, but which actually benefit hyper-capitalism, I get edgy.

 

We should always bear on mind that anything which divides people, which distracts and diverts political energy and focus away from the causes of these existential threats is very likely serving the interests of the people who created them...for profit, solely for profit.

 

On Matters Ideological

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.