Conflicts of Interest

Philosopher and radical feminist, Holly Lawford-Smith, in a piece about the current debate between those who organise around gender critical feminism and are pro-women's rights, and those who organise around queer theory and are pro-trans rights, said:

"When radical feminists, like me, talk about what we see as a conflict of interest between women’s rights and trans rights, we tend to have a particular type of transwoman in mind; and when trans activists reject the idea that there’s any such conflict of interest (and indeed, that we’re Nazis for even suggesting that there could be) they tend to have a very different type of transwoman in mind. This difference in ‘imagined person’ has come up time and time again in the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues on this topic."

 

I think this sits at the heart of this increasingly fraught political and academic issue – or more properly, clump of issues – and it flows from, and is strengthened by our tendency both to cleave to the things we know and are comfortable with and which confirm our world view, and to reject those which are new, or disturbing or which challenge our worldview.  

 

Some react furiously, and attack; some get anxious and withdraw. Some amend their views; some strengthen them. Some form alliances with other like minded people and, within those alliances, they find support and further validation and confirmation of what they believe, and they may feel emboldened in attacking the other side, verbally or even physically. The deeper the challenge cuts into core beliefs, sense of self, ideas about natural justice, the more likely people are to react in extreme ways.

 

And we all feel it – that adrenaline surge when we encounter a rejection of our ideas about the world and ourselves and our place in it – and it's worse when we perceive it as a hostile rejection. 

It's stating the blindingly obvious that the anxiety or anger and the desire to run or to fight that are fuelled by an adrenaline surge, are not conducive to calm and rational debate. This topic – the intersection between women's and trans rights – needs the latter because it has the capacity to hurt people on an immediate, personal level and more than that, it's serving as a divide and rule tactic which has the capacity to inflict far wider and deeper damage.

Transgender women on their own won't undermine women’s rights, nor will even all those highly transgressive men, of whom an alarming number have barged their way in under the ever-widening trans umbrella. What will catapult all of us backwards, is the continued rise of ultra-conservatism and the right wing authoritarianism that will be emboldened by it.

This is unlikely to be a surge to power of a small group of armed religious fanatics à la The Handmaid's Tale as they could not possibly seize power without powerful backers and without ordinary people's acceptance of, and compliance with, right wing authoritarian ideology. 

A critical element of that acceptance and compliance is to nurture the belief that the greatest enemies of freedom, democracy and human rights are angry young people (mostly male) who have been drawn to various left wing causes.  The most obvious of these is Antifa – which is a descriptor of a number of loosely linked political collectives that owe a great deal to anarchism and anarcho-commnunism – and which is being demonised by the American right wing in a calculated push to have it declared a domestic terrorist organisation.

No one with any political nous buys into the carefully edited video footage filmed by the likes of Andy Ngo who follows groups of young men he knows are most likely to get drawn into acts of violence and property damage, edits the footage and releases it as proof that the real threats to democracy in the USA are not the ultra-rightwing, white supremacist groups and their powerful backers, but these disparate gangs of self-declared antifascists.  

But, because these antifa groups also declare an uncritical support for transgenderism and, as part of that they often oppose "TERFs" in extremely hostile terms, some gender critical women see them as an equal or even greater threat to women's rights than the right wing's shock troops – and those in whose interests these shock troops may be deployed.

There are people who are socially conservative, some highly so, and they exist on both sides of the political spectrum; they cleave to the known, to the certain, and never more so than when the social fabric – all that makes them feel safe and secure – seems to be ripping. 

There are some who delight in pushing boundaries, sometimes for no reason other than the boundaries are there, and they get some sort of thrill or pleasure out of transgressing social, political, physical norms.

 

Most of us sit somewhere in between the highly conservative and the highly transgressive – it really is a spectrum –  but the more threatened conservatively inclined people feel, the more likely they are to see the transgressive as a major problem and the more likely they are to clump together, shelving other differences in their shared fear and/or dislike of the transgressive other.

 

On the gender critical side, there are a lot of very angry women who are infuriated by what they perceive as a form of colonisation by men of what it means to be a woman and, by obfuscating what it means to be a woman, make it impossible to challenge the material and psycho-social bases of female oppression and hyper-exploitation.

Lesbians feel betrayed by other parts of the LGBT+ agglomeration (with good reason), and are infuriated by the colonising of their sub-culture by transgender women, many of whom still possess fully functional male genitalia, who are sexually oriented to women and who claim to be lesbian.

The more obtrusive of these transgender lesbians insist that cis lesbians who reject them as potential sexual partners are expressing transphobic attitudes or vagina essentialism, and need to open themselves – figuratively and literally – to the idea of a female penis, aka lady penis or girl dick, often referenced in furious invitations to those labelled as TERFs, to choke on it.

 

That so many vocalisers on the left – or what passes for it these days – uncritically accept those demands and, sometimes viciously condemn lesbians' refusal to entertain them, makes these the most interesting of political times.

 

I've taken issues with some radfem theory and practice over several decades but I reject liberal feminism entirely and I often want to slap its smug face – especially in its latest manifestation, with its heedless acceptance of gender and sexual stereotyping; of sex work as being no different from any other work; of the commercialisation of sex, and the normalisation of extreme porn centred on the debasement of people who are often highly vulnerable – economically, psychologically, socially; and its uncritical assertion that everyone has a right to their kink – a soft focus term for a spectrum of behaviours that runs out into the darkest of perversions – never getting to grips with who gets to draw the line.

 

There seems little doubt that the looming global ecological disaster will result in some form of authoritarian rule; we can't identify our way out of the appalling mess we, in the privileged parts of the world, have had a hand in creating but for which none are more culpable than those who rule us and who control the way we organise production and exchange.

They're the same class of people who've also had and still have a very big say in the way we organise reproduction.

We can't seriously expect the mass of humanity to all just decide to be better people, any more than we can expect the vast and essentially malign power that is global corporate capitalism, to roll over and turn into a obedient puppy dog. 

The trans issue and the various other projects of the self in which the privileged people of the developed world willingly immerse themselves, are all insignificant in comparison to the problems posed by the mass chemical pollution present in every aspect of our lives (i.e. we drink it, we eat it, we breathe it, we absorb it through our skin), of species extinction, and not just the cute furry or feathered animals but the mass of invisible life that supports all other life, and anthropogenic climate change – the triple whammy of a looming global disaster.

It is in this context that we have to consider the role of superficial identity politics, (SIP) not the underlying issues it claims to address, but the way in which the promoters and supporters of IP choose to address them.

SIP takes critically important – foundational – issues, isolates them, strips them of commonalities with other struggles, narrows down the focus of their history or eradicates it completely, and encourages presentism.

It divides, it diverts, it creates antagonisms where, logically, none should exist. It subverts the core principle of the socialist international which did not seek to deny sexual, national or ethnic differences but, by emphasising that which unites, strove to weaken that which can be used to divide – because for the common people, only in unity is there strength.

There is only one reason the queering of the affluent world is being permitted and even encouraged by those who hold the reins of economic and political power, and that is because it in no way queers the pitch for the ruling class and its help-mate, the coordinator class, members of which are queer politics' most enthusiastic enablers and cheerleaders. 

The preposterous suggestion that a few lesbians with handwritten banners are as much of a threat to trans people as are a group of white supremacist men waving swastikas is either accepted or even lauded by people who seem to have lost any connection with wider political realities.

The claim – in the context of the monstrous human rights abuses rampant across the world –  that  "trans rights are the pre-eminent human rights issue of our era"  is accepted either as true, or its extreme hyperbole and narrowness of focus are not challenged.

The lazy conflation of sex and gender – which undermines the key element of feminist discourse – goes unchallenged by people who, politically, academically and intellectually, should know better.

People on the left  perform astonishing feats of political and intellectual gymnastics to avoid addressing even the very obvious issues such as the fact that men on average have a large performance advantage over women in most sports.

They get sucked into creating their own hyperbolic assertions such as – because they do not have gender self ID, trans people in NZ (a country that has granted residence to a trans woman on the grounds she is safer here than in the UK) are experiencing a form of apartheid. 

People who see themselves as progressive respond to the Jessica/Jonathon Yaniv human rights farce by attacking the immigrant women who refused to wax his scrotum. (And no, I will not extend to this manipulative narcissist the courtesy of a female pronoun.)

People who claim to be philosophically materialist or empiricist ardently defend the idealism and metaphysical nature of the proposition that the genetic foundations and material reality of the human body can be altered by an individual assertion of a subjective gender identity.

Atheists effectively accept the proposition that there is an essential, innate, gendered self that exists somehow independently of the sexed body – seemingly oblivious to the echoes of the religious ideology of a material, mortal body and and an immaterial, immortal soul.

There are some equally closed minds and paid up members of the hyperbolic tendency on the GC side but there does seem to be a lot more coming from the trans camp, along with the hurling of misogynistic, masculinist, genital-focussed threats and insults.

Most people who are engaged with the issue politically or academically tend to get a very one-sided idea of how the wider world sees it.

I'm a socialist and feminist, with over fifty years of being a trade unionist and campaigner for a wide range of progressive causes, and I find aspects of the current drive to normalise public expressions of extremely transgressive behaviour unnerving – the more so because it most commonly involves men exercising power upon highly vulnerable bodies.  

If I feel uneasy; if some of what I see causes me to feel anger and concern for those vulnerable bodies, think how the socially and politically conservative will react when the right wing media decides to really whip up a moral panic.

At the moment, for all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by some who are on the left spectrum, the right wing media are not really attacking trans people or LGBT+ people; the rise in hate crimes against LGBT+ recently reported in the UK is relative, and in relation to trans reports, it includes accusations of things like misgendering on social media while the over-whelming majority of reported hate crimes in the UK remain race or religion based. The awful death toll of working class black transwomen in the USA cannot be divorced from that country's obscene gun laws and its deeply entrenched racism and the growing economic divide which adversely affects black people most and drives some black transwomen into the highly dangerous world of street prostitution.

But the potential is there; the world is fracturing along several old fault lines and when the right wing media take off the gloves, i.e. when it suits the suits, it may unleash the father of all ultra conservative backlashes – to which the left is completely unprepared to respond. 

 

Once Upon A Time

I seldom play the man instead of the ball but on some occasions I feel a little piss-taking of the overly pompous is permitted.

 

Once upon a time, there was a brave and goodly knight, Sir Frank the Bold, who was the self-appointed champion of all the oppressed people in the land.

 

Sir Frank could not see an injustice without sallying forth to do battle with it and his struggles with tyranny were known the length and breadth of the realm  – mostly, it must be said, by his own pronouncement.

 

Of all his many foes, none filled Sir Frank's heart with such dread nor strengthened his noble resolve more than the terrible TERFs, who he had come to see as the very embodiment of evil.

 

One of these fearsome creatures, cleverly disguised as an 80-year-old lesbian, founding member of a progressive party and veteran of the Sex Equality Wars, committed the awful, nay, the foul, heretical sin of publishing a treatise that questioned aspects of the prevailing trans orthodoxy.

 

Sir Frank prepared to do battle but before he could enter the affray (he was having a bit of trouble sharpening his pencil, or it might have been his wits – one of the two) various haughty young fellows – who were still peeing in their pants when their nemesis was already a veteran campaigner – declared she was an "enemy of the people" and must be “re-educated”. 

 

The co-Sheriffs, fearful of being tainted by the heresy, removed the treatise and genuflected deeply and often before the altar to prove their piety.

 

Eventually, with his pencil sharpened and his wits gathered, Sir Frank mounted his hobby horse and bravely rode out to face the TERF beast, determined to defend those who the TERFs sought to destroy, the most oppressed and disadvantaged of all the persons in the land. 

 

Wielding his mighty metaphorical pencil like a sword he cut the offending article to pieces – line by heretical line. 

 

The fact that it had already been removed from public gaze took a bit of the shine off Sir Frank’s noble efforts, but undaunted by that, he proclaimed triumphantly to the assembled crowd : 

 

“Behold!! I have slain the beast. Do not be fooled by the guise of an elderly, planet-loving lesbian  – she is the Devil and the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape – yea and perhaps out of our weakness and melancholy, for the Devil is very potent with such spirits, abuses us to damn us. For make no mistake, there is none so evil as the TERF, and whenever they raise one of their growing number of monstrous heads it must be struck off – without mercy! Or they will destroy us all! Hide under our beds and murder us in the night!  Return us to the dark ages when the land was ruled by dragons!!”

 

“All hail Sir Frank,” the crowd intoned obediently, though some could be seen to be smirking behind their hands and several looked very confused.

 

For his noble efforts in fighting to free the land of TERFs, Sir Frank was granted membership of the Exalted Order of Overkill, and he was greatly pleased.

 

 

PS. Apologies to Mr Shakespeare.

 

What A Privilege

While I was resting my poor old post-menopausal bones yesterday – before I went out to start planting another 100 native trees to add to the thousands I've already grown and planted or donated to community groups – I thought about young males who would instruct old females on what it means to be a woman.

I also thought about choice feminism – or what might be described as socially endorsed liberal feminism (SELF) – a strand of populist feminism committed in various ways and degrees to neo-liberalism’s Project of the Self, central to which is the belief that meaningful social change can be brought about by attitudinal change, i.e., if enough people can be persuaded to make the right choices and create better versions of their spiritual / intellectual / emotional and physical selves, all will be well with the world.

Such processes are of course conditional upon people possessing the means by which choices may be accessed and exercised. The most foundational of those means – in a world dominated by corporate and state capitalism – is money, which is the route to accessing and exercising most of the choices capitalism dangles in front of us. 

SELF sits alongside another sort of feminism – queer feminism – which is very attractive to young-ish, left-ish, actually or potentially affluent people in search of a cause, and a possible basis for claiming to be oppressed.  

Queer in this sense is partly a nod to gay men’s appropriation of the pejorative use of the word, but is mostly used in the sense of social practices and beliefs that run counter, or obliquely to prevailing social norms. 

Queer theory owes its greatest intellectual debt to American philosopher and gender theorist, Judith Butler, and through her, the French iconoclast, Michel Foucault. Both are highly influential and owe quite a bit of their influence to their respective writing styles.  

The density and complexity of a lot of Butler's prose often leaves it open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, while Foucault's elegant and clever use of allusion and metaphor blinds his fans to the gaps in his theorising and to the ethical and political thin ice on which he often skates. Furthermore, the windows he claimed to create where there had been walls, allowed him to escape when he wanted to distance himself from his ideas or interpreters of them. 

Both were/are products and members of the coordinator class – critiquing aspects of the class and historical location that gave them considerable privilege, whilst never really engaging with the ways in which the “political freedom to live in a more equitable and livable world” might be achieved and retained – given that the power which denies or constrains such freedoms never willingly gives away anything that is fundamentally detrimental to it, and will push back hard against anything it sees as a real threat. 

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church and other religiously conservative institutions see queer theory's gender ideology as a threat to them is counter- balanced by attitudes and responses from governments, powerful governmental institutions, NGOs and the corporate world (including the global corporate media) which, at the moment, are largely tolerant or even encouraging of it. 

But enough of that – mostly I was thinking about a concept from the transgender politico-theoretical orthodoxy that is sort of informed by Butlerian theory – the existence of cisgender privilege. There is even a cis-gaze – the cis version of the male gaze – the ways in which trans bodies are viewed and policed by cisgender bodies. 

This is all predicated on there being a definable state of being that is cisgender, i.e.,where a person's sense of self as a gendered being is congruent with their biological sex, and of transgender, as a state of being that exists opposite to or across from it – a framing which arguably reinvents the very gender binary that queer politics purports to want to subvert. 

It is a feature of identity politics in general, to fragment into smaller and smaller interest groups (which may then have to re-aggregate for the purposes of being counted in order to count in political lobbying terms) and to jostle for the lowest position in the oppression hierarchy. 

In this political game, misère is the winning hand, i.e., you aim to lose as many privilege points as possible. Cisgender privilege elevates all cisgender people above all transgender people; cisgender women are elevated above transgender women. The latter lose in the privilege stakes and, by losing, they win. 

In the arguments raging around transgender women's rights of access to women-only resources and services, this idea of cisgender privilege – as an axis of oppression – especially if it can be compounded by claims to intersecting factors of class and race privilege, is a powerful weapon.

So, how about these "luckiest people on the planet" – cisgender women – especially those who live outside the multi-hued bubbles of imperial privilege occupied by the most vocal and visible transgender activists and lobbyists?

I challenge anyone who thinks that any feminism other than SELF or Queer feminism is “so last century”, to carry every drop of water they use in a week, by hand, from a tap 1 km from their home and, when they’ve recovered from their exertions, perhaps they'd care to comment on why it is that most of the manual water carrying in the world is done by poor women of colour.  

And then perhaps they could comment on the privilege of the 90k+ women who are known to be murdered every year globally – the overwhelming majority of whom are killed by men; or the untold hundreds of thousands of women globally who are raped and sexually assaulted.

How about the cisgender privilege of the 100+k mainly poor women who die every year as result of complications in childbirth, 85% of them in India and Africa, often as a result of nutrition-related anaemia and easily treatable infections?

How much cisgender privilege is there in an obstetric fistula – a hole torn between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum caused by prolonged, obstructed labour without treatment – almost exclusively a condition of the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalised women and girls?

And when pondering the cisgender privilege of those women of the global south we need to note that rates of death as a result of complications arising from childbirth in the USA are rising for poor women and poor black women especially. 

Linked to this are the 1 million+ neonates who die every year largely of easily preventable causes, and the 4 million + other kids who die before the age of 5? How does a mother's cisgender privilege figure in that? 

And no, the answer is NOT to obscure or deny the reality of female reproductive biology – the answer is to work to remove all the misogyny, stigma, ignorance, and poverty that combines to create the malign conditions in which poor women are so at risk from their reproductive capacity, and which put all women at risk from male violence.

I could go on and on. I could point to the fact that, in the UK, the life expectancy of poor girls has dropped for the first time in a century. I could point to affluent NZ where the life expectancy and incarceration rates of poor Māori women should be a national disgrace, and very wealthy white Australia, whose treatment of its poor and indigenous women is indefensible.

I could point to the dark heart of the male dominated, extreme porn industry with its lobbyists' appeals to the human right of people to do whatever they want to, and with other consenting adults – as if the concept of consent, in a world riven with a mass of deeply rooted, intersecting and compounding inequalities of sex, class, and race, is completely unproblematic; as if those who are exploited, whose vulnerable bodies are the focus and locus of acts of extreme sexual transgression, are somehow the equals of those who do the exploiting.

But I hope I’ve made my point. 

Putting the Boot into Women's Rugby

Once upon a time I worked in a uniformed organisation – which then had and still has a largely white and male, single tier entry workforce. It employed some of the very best and unfortunately, some of the very worst of people.

 

The latter were responsible for a culture of work place bullying that was both enabled and exacerbated by institutionalised racism, sexism and homophobia. 

 

An especially egregious instance of the sort of toxic workplace culture this resulted in - a collection of viciously bigoted materials gathered – as ‘a laugh’ – by a team, was dismissed by a senior officer as "not as bad" as stuff he saw all the time "on the walls of rugby club locker rooms".

 

I mention this because of the rugby connection and the fact that World Rugby has just announced it is striking a blow for gender equality by no longer referring to "women’s" competitions. 

It claims this will enhance the women’s game by no longer specifying it as different from the men’s game.

 

But it is different. It is a nationally and internationally structured rugby football competition for women, members of the female sex who would not ever make it into national or international level rugby if forced to compete against the male sex – for startlingly obvious reasons that are nothing to do with gender identity but which arise from average differences in biology.

 

What would enhance the women’s game would be to pay the professional female rugby players something approaching the amounts paid to their male counterparts and put more effort into the grass roots.

 

And why write out "women"? Why not add in "men’s" to the male competition?  

 

It’s like when women demanded equality in the workplace and men said,  'Ah but you retire earlier than us and that’s unfair discrimination" – and, instead of lowering the retirement age for men, equality was achieved by raising the retirement age for women, i.e., women lost out.

 

This is either just PR puffery or it’s preparing the ground for male to female transgender players to enter women’s rugby 15s and 7s – which will destroy the women’s game because common sense says the traffic will only ever be one way, and the moment one team allows it, the others will be forced to follow or lose. 

 

Blacklists

Blacklisting, aka pre-emptive blocking by mass list on Twitter, for the most part is politically infantile – but that also makes it dangerous. There's a strong whiff of McCarthyism and Cultural Revolution style zealotry that emanates from a lot of the people who deploy Twitter blacklists. 

These mass blacklists are the social media equivalent of deep sea trawling for a particular species of fish. You may catch what you want but inevitably you also catch and waste loads you don’t.

I've recently discovered that I'm on several blacklists – mostly I suspect because I've tweeted, and written on this blog about gender issues in ways that are deemed to deviate from the one true path, or I have followed or been followed by the wrong people, or liked or RTed the wrong tweets.

Well, so be it. I've been on the left for too long and suffered more actual consequences as a result of that than most of the armchair arbiters of what is true and just, so I'm not unduly bothered.

This is not a whinge – well, not much –  more an expression of my concerns about the effects of the politics behind it all at a point in human history when senseless divisions are arguably more dangerous to the entire planet than at any point ever – including when the USA and USSR were at risk of lobbing ICBMs at each other.

I don't reactively block people who've blacklisted me but I did get irked last night when someone, when it was pointed out to him that he'd blocked me, checked out my timeline and declared sententiously – and behind my back – that,  “it's very clear she's on that block list for a reason and I shan't be manually unblocking her.”

The "I shan’t" was so very Christopher Robinish, that shall be his name for the purposes of this post.

My immediate response to Christopher Robin’s patronising and supercilious dismissal of me was adrenaline fuelled and for about five minutes I wanted to rip him up for bog paper but my rational brain kicked in before I put fingers to keyboard – as it almost always does.

One of the other people in the thread is also on the same blacklist – presumably for the same reasons – i.e., being someone who has been declared to be a gender identity deviationist.

Her guilt has been determined by some anonymous person/s who added her account to the mass blacklist, TerfBlocker. However, Christopher Robin doesn't block her, presumably because they share other platforms, which would make it all a bit awkward.

Another person I know is also on the same blacklist and as a result has been blocked by Christopher Robin.

Now, all three us who are on the blacklist that Christopher Robin uses as a sort of force field to protect himself from circuit blowing rage surges, are left wing women who are unfailingly polite and rational – not to mention articulate, erudite, and thoroughly decent human beings.

One is a very dear friend on whose behalf I have decided to be deeply offended. Like me, she has reservations about aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy but unlike me she is too worried about the toxic nature of the on-line debate to engage in it publicly. Yet she is also on the blacklist and so is blocked by Christopher Robin.

I can imagine the enlightened ones would say, "Ah but she's a closet TERF so she deserves to be on the blacklist because she thinks bad thoughts.'"

The likes of Christopher Robin don't matter much because in the great scheme of things, they're inconsequential lightweights – but overall it's the left's loss. 

It's a classic own goal. Self-censorship. Political infantilism.

On the SCAR Intersection

To those who are finding that sitting on the Jessica Yaniv fence is cutting deep into their political and ethical nether regions – let me say this: Yaniv is an exhibitionist with a menstruation fetish focused on girls; demonstrates racist attitudes, and possibly has a personality disorder. 

I think it's fair to say that, on the good ship Trans Rights, which is navigating increasingly choppy seas, Yaniv is a very big, loose cannon.

I don't know if Yaniv is genuinely trans. Who can know for certain in these days of the primacy of self defined gender identity and blurred boundaries? Whatever the truth of it, #WaxMyBalls has become the quintessence of polarisation in this most polarised of debates.

 

In an era in which the concept of intersectionality is tossed around a lot, the busiest and most dangerous intersections of all remain the ones where sex, class, and race meet. A large number of people wearing gender identity blinkers (many of whom really ought to know better) are hurtling into that intersection at breakneck speed, shouting, "we are on the right side of history, give way bigots!"

 

By so doing, they are helping create the conditions for the father of all pile ups, and as in all great ideological crashes, there will be multiple casualties – mostly poor, genuinely marginalised, highly vulnerable people. 

 

The blinkered ones will largely emerge unscathed because typically they wear quite a lot of protection – in the form of varying combinations and degrees of white, male, middle class, educated, affluent, socially and geographically mobile privilege that serves to cushion them from the damage of the pileups they've helped create. 

 

Sure, the blinkers are very trendy and those who wear them no doubt firmly believe they not only look cool but they're on the right side of history (politically speaking the operative word in that phrase may well be right) but it’s a foolish left wing activist who ignores manufacturers’ labels, i.e., who fails to question why the blinkers have been created and marketed and made so very popular in a world dominated by the malign influence of global corporate capitalism.

 

The intersection in the middle of which Yaniv has set up camp, is the deep (think Mariana Trench deep) belief in the fundamental division between : Female, as in possessing a vulva, vagina, uterus and ovaries; and, Male as in possessing a penis, prostate, and testicles.

 

The roots of the belief in an essentially binary biological sex were well grounded at the dawn of the phallocracy when the rise to dominance of patrilineal descent systems and the triumph over mutuality and cooperation, of aggressive, individualised competition, provided the material impetus for the drive to control reproduction through the sexual sequestration of women, and formed the foundation for all subsequent forms of oppression and hyper-exploitation of women.

Gender identity activists will not change all that with essentially emotive appeals – generated from within the bubble of western privilege – to the primacy of gender identity over biological sex, but they may very well strengthen deeply held conservative beliefs about the latter.

Some of the comments I've seen about the Yaniv Affair are troubling, and all those who have tacitly or overtly supported this person's ascent into global notoriety should be having a serious talk with themselves. 

 On a linked issue, I saw a Twitter exchange this week that tagged the Twitter accounts of the New Zealand Prime Minister and the Minister of Immigration. 

 

The exchange was between an NHS doctor who is a UK Labour Party member, a former Young Tory, and self-appointed crusader for trans rights, and a Kiwi trans activist. 

 

The former suggested that NZ should provide UK trans kids with "protection and refuge" because they "are facing ongoing systemic oppression and mistreatment" in their own country.

 

The latter responded with enthusiastic agreement and cited the precedent of NZ having granted residence on humanitarian grounds to a British trans woman who had "fled discrimination" in the UK. (1) 

 

I’ve been seeing National Party billboards going up – in preparation for local government elections I assume – and I'm trying to imagine the political mileage that could be made out the preposterous suggestion that NZ should take British minors as refugees because the NHS won’t automatically prescribe puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and perform genital surgeries on kids who are not yet neurologically mature. 

 

For the ideologically motivated participants, those tweets were either a conscious decision to poke a stick into the spokes of the NZLP’s election bicycle, or they demonstrate a stunning narrowness of political focus and a complete lack of political nous.

 

 Notes:

1) In that case, which was reported in the media in late September 2017, the applicant was a TW who had moved here to join family already living here, and the application on humanitarian grounds was made after a failed application for residency under the entrepreneur category.)

 

When A "Mother" Becomes A "Carrier"

In this article the writer of the tweet above – who also stubbornly insists on further depersonsalising and commodifying the role of women who carry a child for someone else by referring to them as "carriers"– takes a theoretical biotechnology that is laden with complex moral, political and legal issues and which is highly unlikely ever to be available to people outside the thin layer of very affluent people who want designer offspring, and weaves a fantasy in which women are all but written out of reproduction.

And not just women. In this monstrous new world, any imperfect human is to be written out at embryo stage – and who knows where the definition of imperfection will end? 

 

The use of the term surrogate was intended to break down the belief that the woman who gestates a foetus, is that child's mother. The idea is a woman capable of producing viable eggs and/or carrying a foetus to term fills a gap in the creation of a child for a single person or a couple who cannot have their own children.

 

Describing a woman as a "carrier" (NB. a carrier is also what we call a person infected with a disease causing organism) depersonalises and commodifies that pregnancy even further, and it illustrates both the vacuity and the rampant narcissism of those people who believe in a future in which female reproductive capacity will be fully controlled and commodified by being technologised, with the ultimate aim of rendering it obsolete.

 

Those who have sunk to this nadir of rank misogyny compound their offence by pretending it is for the good of women – that it is to "free" women up from the restrictions of their biological role in the production of eggs and the gestation of new humans.

 

In this bleak vision, all that is required of the genetic female will be some skin cells and the leasing of her uterus – until such time as science develops a viable artificial womb at which point she will be fully relieved of her role as the mother of the species. 

 

The fact that there may not be a social world in a hundred years, let alone one capable of sustaining this technologised future, seems to have escaped their attention. But of course it would, as they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to conceive of a different, more human way organising both production and reproduction.

 

Trans humanism, which is the soil in which these notions take root, clings to variations on the theme of a technologised future of "perfected" humans – either fully human but genetically manipulated to be free from disease and to possess desired physical and behavioural characteristics; or cyborgs, humans with robotic parts.

 

In the context of a highly stratified world built on the premise that progress equals unending growth and consumption, a world that is ruled by a tiny minority of powerful people motivated solely by self-interest, how would such a project end?  With the development of a super elite whose every physical and psychosexual need is served by legions of genetically designed humans and cyborgs? 

 

Forgive me if I see in that, the most monstrous of dystopian nightmares.

(Added after publication :  see this comprehensive thread on Twitter from Bea Jaspert)