It's still a phallocratic world

I have written about aspects of this issue on this blog more than any other single issue over the past few years – a level of scrutiny that is grossly disproportionate to the tiny number of trans people, even by the widest definition of the term – or to any objective measure of the weight of issues confronting them exclusively as transgender persons, i.e. when intersecting issues of race, class and age etc are taken out of the equation.

 

It's hard to estimate the size of the transgender population, both because of a lack of reliable data, and because of issues of where to draw the boundaries now that the trans umbrella has been expanded to cover a very wide range of gender identities, but estimates vary from 0.3% to 0.6% of the global population, i.e. between 21 million and 42 million people.

 

The demographic’s size, and its political weight and influence – exercised mostly in the affluent world -– becomes interesting when measured against:  

• race: people of colour make up the majority of the world’s population; 
• sex: over half the world’s population is female; 
• poverty: half the world’s population are poor and an estimated 800 million of them live in extreme poverty, most of them people of colour;
• disability: 2 billion people are disabled; 
• age: one billion people are over the age of 60;  
• sexual orientation: around 200 million people are lesbian or gay.

 

In transgenderism, as it has come to be framed in the past decade, there are strands of regressive ideologies that are essentially individualistic and individualising, the worst of which encourage people to see, and to treat their body as a sort of mouldable shell which can, even must, be altered to match their inner sense of self, their personal identity.

 

It is impossible to be "born in the wrong body", and even using that as a figure of speech is unwise because it feeds into a narrative which, at its root, is a quasi-religious belief in an eternal and superior, essence or spirit inhabiting the mortal and inferior, body.

 

People who buy into the notion that there can be a female brain in a functionally male body need to stop and ask where might the re-emergence of such a notion lead, in what is still a profoundly phallocratic world?

 

That the same people often rail against the “essentialism” and “biological determinism” of gender critical feminists, makes it all the more a cause for despair for those of us for whom it makes no sense to politically or critically conflate sex and gender, or to privilege gender identity over biological sex.

 

For me, that's as nonsensical as it is to try to separate body and mind, or body and sense of gendered self, or to separate either from the social context into which we're born, and within which we are formed – constantly – as persons.

 

For some extremely alienated people, the body is framed as a "flesh suit" or "meat sack", in which the essential "self" resides, like some sort of "pilot". The links to gaming – in which people enter a sort of twilight zone as the operator of a digital avatar – are pretty obvious.

For trans humanists, arguably the most alienated of all, the promise of eternal life exists in the possibility of uploading the individual's consciousness to the Cloud, or into a synthetic, infinitely repairable robotic body.

 

These of course are possibilities which can only be envisioned, or have even a remote chance of being realised, within the imperial bubble; and even if they were achievable, would only ever be accessible to the elite.

 

Outside the bubbles of privilege, the wider social and natural worlds move to more ancient and fundamental rhythms, and we ignore these at our peril.

 

I know it's all very passé and boring to talk about stuff that affects actual women but :

Femicide and rape of women remains both endemic and epidemic.

Every year, tens of thousands of mainly brown and black women die from easily preventable birth complications – often related to nutritional deficiencies. 

Upwards of 1 million newborns and as many as 5 million other kids under the age of 5 die from easily preventable causes.

Untold numbers of foetuses are aborted, and neonates are killed, because they are biologically female. 

All over the world at this very moment, thousands of women of colour are walking a total of thousands of kilometres to fetch and carry water to keep themselves and their family alive.

In Yemen, at this very moment, almost an entire population is on the verge of starvation and the first and worst hit – as always – are women and children.

 

I am – as I've always been – committed to the right of all people to live in ways that make them secure, happy and fulfilled. But there are always provisos, conditions, and restrictions on what people may do because life is a series of compromises. The problem for many of the children of the imperial bubble is they've been conditioned to not acknowledge that – compromise is always for the other.

 

Stripped of all its ephemera, sanded down to its naked essentials, we live in a rigidly stratified and increasingly dangerous world dominated by what all sane and sensible people know to be, essentially destructive institutions which, and individuals who, use all manner of overt and covert devices and strategies to keep the mass of people compliant and divided. 

The more atomised we are, the better the elites and their high ranking servants like it, as long as we keep consuming and doing their bidding.

 

In such a world, which is made even more dangerous by the rise of right wing authoritarianism, if trans people are the most vulnerable and marginalised of minorities, their only safe space is within a broad, strong, progressive alliance, but trans issues have become the most polarising and divisive of that alliance of any I've ever seen.

 

Who benefits from such deep and acrimonious divisions? Not women and not genuine trans people.

 

In my view, superficial identity politics is at best accommodative, and at worst essentially reactionary;  transgenderism, as it is currently framed, is a movement in which the individual, and the self-declared needs of the individual, are deemed to be both start and end point of political activity.

 

I've watched the trans movement grow over three decades and I've seen it morph from predominantly transsexuals – mostly gay men who, in a viciously homophobic world, wanted or needed to live as women, and among whom there was a disproportionate number of B&ME people –  into a powerful movement that is dominated by transgender women who, prior to transition, were heterosexual men, often married, having fathered children, succeeded in male-dominated spheres such as the military and tech industries, and mostly white.  

 

It was the latter who spearheaded the transgender push into women-only spaces in the USA – the last of which was Michfest – and they appropriated the marginalisation and vulnerability of poor and black or Hispanic transwomen in the US and South America, in lobbying for transgender rights. They still do but for the most part, they do little or nothing about changing the underlying economic conditions which exacerbate that marginalisation and vulnerability. 

 

Then, the transgender lesbian took centre stage; a social media phenomenon which really took off around five years ago and which probably arose from the dynamic created by the increasing numbers of heterosexual men who transitioned and who retained their sexual attraction to women.

 

However, evidence suggests it has been co-opted by men’s rights activists (MRA) who pretend to be transgender lesbians to play manipulative and sometimes predatory games. They are having a ball. Not only do they get to screw with the left, they get to harass, abuse and threaten women with impunity – especially feminists, more especially radical feminists, who are opposed to prostitution and porn – the so-called TERFs and SWERFs, and most especially, lesbian radical feminists.

Why might that be?  It’s not simply because these women are anti-trans because frankly most of them aren’t, or at least they weren’t at the outset of this. I think they are the primary target of so much vitriol and viciousness because they attack both the MRA/INCEL cabal and the common or garden misogynists, right where it hurts it most – some are not sexually attracted to men; they are radical feminists, and they oppose the porn industry and the prostitution of women. 

 

Everything about them denies these misogynistic men what they believe is their inalienable right to women's bodies. 

I believe these are the authors – along with probably a tranche of state-sponsored mischief makers and agents provocateurs – of the mass of vileness on social media which has been collated by women in an attempt to try to get people to take notice of the growing confidence of these rank misogynists, and the complicity of trans rights activists and allies.

 

Read my earlier post about racism and misogyny in the workplace and tell me that left wing men who join in with the calls to cancel, brutalise, rape, murder TERFs are any better than the rank misogynists who scrawled "piss ridden old hag'" on the photo of an elderly woman; or whether those allies who turn a blind eye or look to excuse the abuse of women on social media, are any better than the managers who sought to minimise bigotry?

For too long, too many people on the lLeft – some with the very best intentions – have reflexively put ALL those who question transgenderism into the “TERF=NAZI” basket;  and ALL self-proclaimed transwomen into the “TRANS=stunning/brave person of good faith” basket. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I’m not anti-trans rights, I’m anti corporatist and misogynistic bullshit posing as progressive politics.

 

Our lives are dominated by a corporate capitalism which is busy destroying the world – aided and abetted by compliant governments and NGOs. We all know this, or should, and if we take off the blinkers we can also see that the corporate world happily embraces the transgender orthodoxy, just as it embraced all the other items on the diversity menu.

That's because it's much easier to buy in a consultant, do an equality audit and some training, get the diversity boxes ticked, get your rainbow badge than it is to engage with structural and economic equality.

 

Why narrow the obscene pay gap between the workforce and the CEO and his senior managers; why pay a decent wage and provide job security for women, B&ME people, trans people, people with disabilities when you can buy a diversity badge for a snip?

 

 

Tell Me Why

I posted this blog post on my FB page because I was struck by the expression of frustration and anger from a highly intelligent, articulate and principled person who adds enormously to feminist discourse – always in a balanced, well-informed and logical way. One of the responses was from another intelligent and principled woman who I know would agree with the author on most issues – except this one.

I don’t feel threatened by genuine trans people and I know that most trans people just want to get on with their lives, the same as most other people. Nor do I think all the extremists hurling misogynistic abuse at women on social media are genuine trans people; some might be but I strongly suspect a lot are trolls or MRA/INCELs taking the proverbial. (More on that in a later post)

I don’t argue that all women are equally oppressed, any more than I would argue all men are equally oppressive. I don’t think that all men are a threat to women, but I know that a lot of women have good reason to feel that men are potentially a threat, and it is a fact that we live in what is still a phallocratic world, made so by the continued existence of a host of social structures and arrangements which cement male authority over females. 

 

It’s great if some women don’t feel their sex is being erased or feelings invalidated or safety threatened by the conflation of gender and sex and the privileging of gender identity over biology, which is at the heart of transgenderism as a political movement, but a lot of women do. And a lot of them are being told if they feel like that, they are bigots, or stupid or brainwashed – and bizarrely, they’re mostly being told that by people who claim to be on the left.

 

We need to be able to examine why this has become such an acrimonious and divisive issue, when it’s obvious that women have co-existed with transgender people quite happily in the past.

 

In my opinion, four main things, which gained rapid momentum popularly, commercially and politically, tipped the unremarkable issue of trans rights into the most acrimonious, polarised and divisive issue of any I’ve witnessed, in over half a century of being a left wing feminist.

 

1. The emergence, on social media, of the phenomenon of “transgender lesbians” – that is transwomen (TW) who are sexually attracted to women, and the outgrowth from that, of:

a) claims that male genitalia are female if the person identifies as a woman; and,

b) lesbians are being transphobic bigots if they are not open to having a sexual relationship with a TW who retains male genitalia.

2. The insistence, by transgender radicals, that TW, even without any type or degree of physical transition, are literally women, and as such are a subset of the sex category woman, and cis women are another, albeit vastly larger, sub set. (1)

 

3.  The issue of gender self-identification and change of sex on official documents by statutory declaration, which has been introduced more by a process of procedural creep here in NZ, but which became the subject of heated dispute in the UK with a review of the Gender Recognition Act and accompanying potential for changes to the Equality Act, not because the country is a hotbed of transphobia but because:

a) the review was a dead cat thrown into a fraught political arena by the Tories, which people in the Labour, Greens and Liberal Parties immediately ran with and declared any opposition to it to be equivalent to fascism; and, 

b) because there is a very strong feminist tradition in the UK, and a wide range of women fought back. 

 

4. The explosion in, and response to, sudden onset gender dysphoria among gender non-conforming girls in the anglophone world in particular, (2) and the adoption of variations on the Dutch protocol for the treatment of pre-pubescent kids who believe they are trans. (3) 

 

For women's liberationists, the debate is not about trans rights per se– it is certainly not about removing trans rights, or the ludicrously hyperbolic claim that trans people’s very existence is being denied.

 

Most of the women who are demonised as TERFs did not ever and do not oppose trans rights; most would fight to protect existing formal rights and would like to see services and outcomes for trans people improved – along with services and outcomes for all vulnerable groups.

 

What will never gain wide support is the extension of trans rights into the unrestricted right for any male-bodied person to be able to self-identify and gain full legal status as a woman; and, as a consequence of that, have full and unfettered access to women-only spaces and services that are currently protected in law and – more importantly – are widely accepted socially, i.e., have become part of the informal social contract such that most men respect them, and most women feel they have a right to them, and a right to a say in who uses them.

Those sex-based rights only exist because women fought for them and they needed to fight for them because women and girls were, and – in what is still a phallocratic world – remain, a vulnerable class of people.

 

Trans radicals demand we accept the premise that a self-declared, subjective, possibly shifting, unverifiable (because medical and bureaucratic gate-keeping is deemed to be a breach of trans rights) sense of individual gender identity must be privileged over the biological fact which is a foundational reality for the overwhelming majority of people. 

 

Gender as a concept only hangs together because of the concrete reality of sexually dimorphic reproduction. Without the reality of dimorphic biological sex there would be no such thing as gender or gender identity – there would just be individual and collective identity. 

 

That may very well be a good thing to strive for but we live in a stratified, dangerous and largely phallocratic world, and if we are not permitted to define ourselves as women, how do we formulate a resistance to being oppressed and hyper-exploited as women?  

 

That oppression and hyper-exploitation may not be as much of an issue for older, white, educated, affluent, geographically and socially mobile inhabitants of the imperial bubble like me – but it certainly still is for the majority of women and girls globally, and it is not going to magically go "pouf" and disappear because a few people inside the imperial bubble declare individual gender identity trumps biological sex.

Notes:

(1) In the oppression hierarchy, so beloved of the politically infantile, misère is the winning hand and being in a majority is deemed to be automatically oppressive of minorities. By this stunningly stupid numerical measure, the poor must oppress the rich.

(2) Largely because of pressure from trans radicals and allies, too little attention has been paid to the effects, on girls especially, of appearance obsessed youth culture and exposure to porn, 

 

(3) We now know that the decision-making centre of the human brain is the last to mature (a fact of huge importance to people who argue against things like trying and sentencing kids as adults), and the approach advocated by trans radicals and widely adopted as a result, is in stark contrast to the “no medical gate-keeping please, we’re trans” approach for themselves. The Dutch protocol is almost always irreversible, relies on automatic affirmation, use of cancer drugs to delay puberty with no evidence of their long term effects, leads to major surgery with attendant exposure to anaesthesia, analgesics etc etc, and a life time of synthetic hormones and of constant medical surveillance. The rationale is to give kids time to find out if they are really trans - in reality it's delaying secondary sexual development until the current legal age at which cross sex hormones can be prescribed, and it is not known if delaying puberty also affects neurological and decision making development or has effects on wider physiological development.

 

It's Not That Bad

Some years ago, in a different life, my deputy (a black woman) and I sat in a room full of white men in suits and uniforms, looking at shopping bags full of photographic and other material that had been found, in a workplace, by a black officer who was covering an absence.

 

It was a "game" that the all-white, male team of workers played – adding "funny" captions to photos, leaflets etc. 

 

The small sample that follows are a few that became glued to my consciousness. 

 

A newspaper photo of a starving African toddler holding an empty bowl: "Greedy little wog bastard". 

 

A photo of a traumatised elderly black victim of gang rape: "Be gentle with me boys".

 

A leaflet with a photo of an elderly woman: "Piss ridden old hag". 

 

A photo of an old woman:  "Your cunt smells like rancid shit”.

 

A photo of a Downs Syndrome lad on a beach:  "Mong Watch".

 

... and on and on and on. 

 

Scrapbooks full of it; plastered all over the inside of cupboard doors. Some of it just stupid and crass; some of crude and cruel, and some betraying a visceral loathing of the targets. What made it worse was that some of it was material taken from facilities visited by these men in the course of their work.

 

And there we were, looking through it all and what disturbed me most, was my feeling that not one of the men in that room had any understanding of or concerns about how my deputy and I felt. 

 

This was in an area of employment in which staff interacted closely with members of the public all the time. They were well paid from the public purse and expected to be held in high public esteem.  

 

I could not imagine how a woman or a black person could have felt or been safe in that work environment, or how those men could have been trusted to carry out their work to the high standards rightly expected of them.

 

My advice was, that as it was gross professional misconduct and something all the team members has participated in, or been aware of, immediate dismissal for the entire team, and those less culpable could be allowed back on appeal. 

 

That was greeted with horror – as completely disproportionate – and my boss said dismissively: "It's not that bad, I've seen far worse on the walls of rugby locker rooms."  

  

My advice was ignored. The main offender went on sick leave on full pay for a year claiming stress, and then took medical retirement. Those in charge were demoted one rank, enrolled in an officer development programme and advanced beyond their original rank within six months of completing it. 

 

The whistle blower was targeted as a grass and eventually went to an IT, won a settlement, and transferred out, and it confirmed for me, yet again, how very, very deep institutional racism and sexism can run.

 

Epic Fail

I posted this rant on someone's Facebook page. I’m posting it here also because I am getting so annoyed by the mindless divisiveness of this debate.

 "I've been attacked by right-wing men for over fifty years for being a socialist and a feminist and, over the past half-decade or so, I've encountered a lot of the same old rank misogyny from men who claim to be on the Left but who are almost all united by one thing – no real commitment to structural change. 

This may be why they are so comfortable with the diversionary and divisive potential of identity politics in general, and the essentially reactionary nature of aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy, which seeks to privilege an essentially individualistic and individualising notion of the aspirational SELF, over wider biological and social realities and which, IMO, is doing harm to the cause of women's and trans and wider LGB rights. 

It's D grade politics:

Divert into what's obviously a political and critical cul-de-sac, and instead of getting the hell out of it, declare it to be the moral and political high ground on which the Left must make its stand;

Demonise heretics - in this instance the heretics are mainly women, so it's great cover for some men's unexamined misogyny;

Disseminate Dogma -because it's so much easier to chant a variety of off the shelf slogans and bite sized bits of low grade agitprop than it is to engage with the complex underlying political issues;

Divide into smaller and smaller groups, each loosely orbiting some relatively insignificant point of Difference thus Detracting from what binds people together and Distracting people away from the massive global issues confronting all of us.

D grade  – no, I'll go one better and give it an F for being a faddish, false-hearted, fabricated, fanatical, fracturing, fragmenting, fallacious, fucking fiasco.

Not to put too fine a point on it."

The Woke Wars

In this Twitter thread, publication of which coincided with Trump’s overblown appeals to what all sensible people see as the worst in US culture – the writer strives to defend the freedoms of capitalism, the neutrality of money and the infallibility of science – by attacking what he calls the “Woke war on merit”.

“Woke” has been ripped from its roots in the African-American vernacular and is applied by the Right to the pretty much anything it wants to belittle or to demonise in order to protect or advance its political and economic interests. 

The term has replaced “political correctness” – which morphed into the once ubiquitous “PC madness” – a phrase so beloved of the right-wing when in hot pursuit of political advantage in the 1980s and 90s. 

 

The Woke – inasmuch as it can be said to be a definable 'thing' – is especially aligned with identity politics and critical social justice theory and praxis, much like political correctness before it was aligned with interest group politics. 

 

For the person who wrote the Twitter thread, the “woke war on merit” is actually an attack on “equality” -– by which he means "liberal equality” – by which he means, as far as I can ascertain, equality of employment opportunity which, because of the existence of innate differences in ability, results in “winners and losers". 

 

Liberal equality both enables and rewards merit, which is a real and measurable thing. The more liberal equality we have, the more merit becomes an important determinant, i.e, winners are more meritorious than losers and are therefore more deserving of tangible and status rewards.

 

People who are comfortably ensconced in secure positions in the academic, corporate, bureaucratic, technocratic sectors of the buffer class are obviously pretty happy with the neo-liberal status quo and will often defend that position by insisting they got there and deserve to stay there – entirely or mostly – on their own merit. Their success is due to their innate ability and hard work and is objectively demonstrated by such things as having a doctorate, getting published, and rewarded by being employed and well paid.

 

He cites examples of liberal equality that have been discovered and lauded by folk like him. 

 

First up we have capitalism, which he sees as a system that enables people to rise on their own merit – a sort of socio-economic helium that inflates them and allows them to rise above, and be distinguished from, the less meritorious. 

 

He fudges what capitalism is – especially the finance and the commodity-fixated corporate capitalism that dominates the world today – and just says it’s the “freedom to use one's property to one's own profit as one will” which sidesteps some mega issues, like private property, but okay, it is Twitter.

 

Nor does he comment on why it is that corporate capitalism has commodified equality and diversity and is busily making profits from selling it, and saving profits by using it to avoid engaging with genuine economic equality. The diversity industry may have been kickstarted by the left but it didn't turn it into a multi-billion dollar global market.

 

Second up is money; because currency is “a neutral and universal form of capital"  which doesn’t care who you are and, as such, it’s a major driver of fairness, equality and justice. In fact, he goes as far as to say that “Neutral currency is genuinely anti-racist” i.e. with liberal equality, a genuinely meritorious person of colour will receive lots of it, which will serve to eradicate racism.

 

He does acknowledge that it’s all far from perfect but all we need is more opportunity for money to do its neutral, natural thing i.e. by some mysterious alchemy of market forces and individual merit – gravitate towards the inherently worthy, and it will abolish racism by the simple mechanism of making some black people rich. 

 

As we say down here in the roaring forties, "Yeah, right".

 

The Woke, who are opposed to liberal equality, are trying to destroy this neutral, value free currency, and replace it with the devilish device of social currency – an example of which is, if you are “cancelled”,  the Woke banks will refuse to take your business and deny you access to currency. 

 

If he means actual banks, there is no questioning of course as to why banks have been able to position themselves as the controllers and dispensers of this apparently politically neutral and universal form of capital, or in what absurdist universe, the banks are controlled by the left, let alone the Woke section of the left.

 

The Woke also apparently hate science because science deals in facts which, according to the tweeter, are entirely unproblematic in terms of their universality and their application. There can be no dispute about scientific facts.

 

Merit counts a lot in science because, “no-one’s pet theory is special”. 

Ideologically motivated doubters may point to the regularity with which science prostitutes itself to militarism, national interest and to corporate capitalism but that’d just be more Woke anti-science, or the exception to the rule that the scientific method is incorruptible and the universality of its results is its foundation and its validity. 

All hail the god of corporately-funded science.

 

And finally, there is the equality in the truth which is true because it’s the truth and the truth is true.

 

Apparently the Woke hate the truth, especially objective truths like test scores, demonstrated competence, having money, producing results, or  the "reasonable person" standards in law.

The tweeter loves them because he’s good at all that stuff, he relates to it, he’s paid lots of it and it reinforces his idea of what equality is i.e. – it’s what that lets people like him rise to the top.

And no doubt he can very easily answer all those awkward questions about what tests actually measure and why; how competence and results are measured and to what end; how it is that so much of that neutral, naturally levelling currency happens to gravitate towards persons who are demonstrably not meritorious, and by-passes others who demonstrably are; and how many times in history the reasonable person standard in law has fallen flat on its face – or if he can’t, well, he’s also pretty good at taking the piss.

In fact, he made quite a name for himself by somewhat unfairly taking the piss out of the Woke in American academia. IOW he enhanced his own merit by seeking to reduce the merit of others –not by means of utilising the neutral, infallible scientific standard that he lauds but by means of a hoax.

 

He and his collaborators in this hoax were not interested in, and hence did not tackle the reasons why some sectors of the social sciences, especially in the USA, have been channelled into a cul-de-sac of navel-gazing, individualising nonsense, nor whose interests that ultimately serves. 

I suspect at the heart of that little enterprise was nothing more scientific and academically defensible than enjoying taking a swing at a very soft target. 

 

Get Stuffed

I was about to subscribe to Stuff NZ when I read a highly subjective opinion piece by Stuff reporter /columnist, Kylie Klein-Nixon, and I put my credit card back in my wallet. 

 

Klein-Nixon's primary target was another Stuff OP published in the Manawatu Standard, by communications lecturer Steve Elers, in which he expressed his bewilderment over the array of preferred, newly constructed pronouns.

 

Now, I suspect Elers' motives for entering this current round of the language wars are not the same as mine, and I'd take issue with aspects of his rather light-weight analysis but Klein-Nixon doesn't do that, she just wants to indulge herself in a bit of a rant and thus does the issues a grave disservice – in my opinion. 

 

She attacks people like Elers for "being scared of words" (i.e. pronouns), in defence of people who she assumes are scared of being harmed by words like those written by "small-minded, mean-spirited, ignorant", "ill-informed drop-kicks". 

 

She manages the currently obligatory segue into what "uber-Karen, JK Rowling" has to say about the intersections between sex and gender generally, and the current protocols for treating trans kids in particular, and culminates her piece with a tub-thumping, rhetorical flourish:

 "...when a person who is dangerously impacted by the thing you’re selfishly, ignorantly, yapping about, tells you you’re hurting them, you don’t bash on regardless. You shut your fool mouth, sit the hell down and listen."

 

Klein-Nixon would do well to take note of, and address the political implications of the growing number of women who feel dangerously impacted by what they see as a heedless, ideologically motivated conflation of sex and gender, so I strongly urge her to take her own advice before putting fingers to keyboard next time.

And if Stuff wants my money, it had better sharpen up its act, i.e. more insight, less ideology.