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I recommend not playing the pronoun game with people. It is a disservice to your autonomy and really, your allegiance to the material reality we all share. When someone demands your disbelieve your senses for their validation it becomes a problem.
Playing the pronoun game is like a taking a gateway drug as it leads you to endorse even more fantastical claims. Human beings cannot change sex, and yet men will tyrannically try and police one’s correct use of language.
I have no problem identifying that male from his aggressive behaviour. Male violence and dominance displays don’t magically change if men wear their hair long and start wearing pink. Calling him a sir corresponds to reality. What responding to the reality we all share doesn’t do is validate his subjective gender identity – here’s the rub though, no one is obligated to so. And really, we shouldn’t because the bullshit above leads to bullshit like this below:
Men in female prisons. Male sex offenders in female prisons. What could possible go wrong? Of course, here in Canada we’re all aboard the unreality train and have made male sex offender’s dreams cum true.
Yeah, so I won’t be playing the pronoun game anytime soon as I support the rights and boundaries of females in Canadian society.
“Trans activism is a massive experiment in what happens when you accommodate serious mental issues as perfectly within societal norms. Trans activism can justify – or at least mitigate – behaviour like screaming “Witch” in a woman’s face because they’ve essentially adopted a social model of trans rights: the behaviour exhibited by any given trans person is communication in service of being listened to, and fellow trans activists will see the fact that it’s not them being screamed at as supporting the idea that if only society wasn’t so transphobic, distressed people wouldn’t find themselves forced to communicate in this way. And that is what provides a safe space for male people to be publicly abusive to women.”
Something went wrong between the 2nd and 3rd wave of female political action. The class based analysis so firmly rooted in the second wave seemed to have been gradually pushed to the margins and replaced with a the conception of intersectionality that in its initial phase could have gone hand in hand with the more traditional feminist analysis. Intersectionality is the idea that people can experience different layers of discrimination simultaneously based on their race, sex, and class served to furtherfill out traditional radical feminist theory and increase the sensitivity toward women with diverse race and cultural backgrounds.
So far so good? Right?
Well it would be all good if we just incorporated this utilitarian and useful 3rd wave innovation. The notions of ‘identity’ and ’empowerment’ were also gifts from the third wave and where some of the analysis began to go off the rails.
From the notion of ’empowerment’ we get most of the dead branch known as Liberal Feminism that is about doing actions in society, that if they feel good and make you feel good, they are in fact empowering acts. This leads to the idea that activities like pole dancing and stripping can be ‘feminist’ acts because they are empowering the individual woman with agency (?) and power within society.
Many feminists would pause here because like most features of society, patriarchy operates on the macro as well as the micro level. To return to our previous example, the occupations of both pole dancing and stripping may indeed provide empowerment on the level of the individual, but on a boarder social analysis both serve the male gaze and continue to reinforce the commodification and objectification of the female body. So perhaps we can see where some friction exists between these two theoretical feminist standpoints.
The notion of identity is also useful in certain contexts because it allows discrimination and oppression that exist within society to be categorized and analyzed with greater precision. Identity is a tonic against the sometimes homogenizing nature of theoretical work and allows theory and praxis better able to respond to the needs of women from diverse backgrounds.
Identity has now metastasized. In certain ideological circles it rests above nearly all other theoretical concerns. More importantly the notion of identity has been severed from the social, material reality we all share. What we think about ourselves now has a certain reified air that precludes any sort of questioning or critical examination.
For instance, it is now popular to ‘come out’ as non-binary. Being non-binary is a vague notion that an individuals personal expression isn’t tied to their sex – so a male person can have a ‘boy-day’ or ‘girl-day’ depending on their mood. You gentle reader, would not be alone in concluding that people claiming be non-binary may just be fulfilling the need to feel edgy and special in society. It’s nice to stand out I suppose, but adopting male or female stereotypes and demanding that others play along with your wacky pronouns and related charade seems like a rather cumbersome and ultimately anti-social way to go about achieving that goal. Furthermore, since no person embodies all of the stereotypes of their sex but rather a mixture of the two, we are all, in fact, non-binary (just with less narcissism that those boldly ‘coming out’).
Another particularly problematic aspect that has arisen is the notion of self identification and that one’s personal declaration of gender somehow overrides the societal norms and expectations we all follow. The most common point of friction is when men, because they have gender feelings, decide that they are women and should therefore have access to female spaces, services, and sports. The problem is that self id does not change the male socialization, nor the male patterns of behaviour that require all inhabitants of the class of men to be excluded from female only spaces.
Transgender ideology is deeply misogynistic. Women who disagree with gender ideology and men in their spaces are ostracized, threatened, and called bigots because they have the temerity to raise concern with the erosion of their boundaries and sex based rights within society. Transgender ideology is also an impediment to the safeguarding of women and children as again, male gender-feelings are given precedence over female safety in society. The conflict will not resolve until the men involved in the transgender movement respect female boundaries and the female ‘no’.
Being gender diverse is fine, but one must respect the material realities of sex and sex based oppression that exist within our society.
This letter published in the Scottish newspaper The National.
It is a letter that would likely not see the light of day here in Canada where we seem to be beholden to a small subset of society that demands we disbelieve our eyes and perceptions to order to ‘be kind’ and validate their delusions of gender. I’m tired. Very ducking tired of expending energy dealing with entitled queer males who masquerade as women all the while pleading they are the most oppressed people(?) in society. It’s horseshit from stem to stern. And dangerous horseshit at that, as the lunacy extends to putting predatory males in female prisons and defunding rape crisis centres because they have the audacity to maintain a female only service. Women (adult human females) in Canada have to fight for their rights to spaces, boundaries, and services *again* against this latest queered delusional assault by men. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so detrimental to female rights in society.
This letter highlight illustrates the disconnect from reality that is central to queer theory and identity politics. The corrosive politics of the personal (identity) can only survive in a society that has reality based rights, protections, and safeguards for its citizens. Women in Afghanistan can not identify out what is happening to them. Like all of fucking history if you are born female you are automatically second class in society and no amount of queer pandering to the identity gods will ever change that.
But enough of me, let us get to the letter, which is brilliant.
“In recent years it has become fashionable in predominantly English-speaking “progressive” circles and establishments to feign bewilderment at basic evolutionary facts related to our species. Often, this bewilderment is specifically reserved for only one half of the population. Despite millions of years of mammalian ancestry preceding us, it is only now that the female homo sapiens is apparently a convoluted, nonsensical entity.
A cherished argument to prop up this convoluted, nonsensical entity is that female people everywhere at any point in time do not share exactly the same experiences, therefore a “woman” can encompass any male who lays claim to the label.
It is true that women come from all kinds of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and as a result they will have been shaped as individuals by various experiences over the course of their lives. Women differ in our beliefs, political values, personalities and ethics.
Yet, looking at events unfolding in Afghanistan in recent days, many women around the world feel a shared sense of dread and heartache for the women trapped in such intolerable circumstances. The sickening, sinking feeling is an instinctive one that bypasses all pseudo-intellectualism. Strip away the relatively superficial differences between women and that sickening, sinking feeling is an instinctive one precisely because there are some experiences that only female humans can be subjected to. For better or worse, there is a common reality that no convoluted, nonsensical definition can erase.
Looking an Afghan woman in the eyes, what connects her suffering with our struggles here in Scotland? The embodied reality of womanhood that transcends time, distance and cultures. She is me and I am her. It is a visceral bond that no male can ever identify into and no female can ever identify out of.
It is only by an accident of fate that I live in the UK. I am one of the rare winners in the grotesque lottery of life. Life for women in the UK has been shaped by its own cultural and religious heritage. Its historical trajectory enabled British women to organise and win incredible gains for their daughters in a way that women from many other countries can only dream of doing.
The plight of Afghan women is a stark reminder of the iron fist of oppression that men can wield against women on the basis of our sex. It is an uncomfortable truth that without the majority of men on our side, women truly are at the mercy of the vicious whims and savage violence of men. My heart breaks for the women of Afghanistan – so many of them had a taste of freedom, opportunity and being a person in their own right, and now it has evaporated almost overnight. I know what is happening to them could happen to me too, if circumstances enabled it. The incel attack in Plymouth reveals the deep hatred and desires of subjugation that some men harbour for women.
Far too many women in the UK take their precious freedoms for granted. Yes, there’s much that can be better, but it’s important to realise just how rare it is to live in a time and place where women have so many rights and protections within a stable, wealthy society and where most men view us as worthy of full personhood.
Some women are so intoxicated by these freedoms – freedoms they themselves did not win – that they think it’s great fun to indulge in all kinds of outlandish luxury beliefs, such as biological sex being a social construct, women are not oppressed on the basis of sex, and that being a woman is nothing but a feeling and set of sexist stereotypes. They have feasted at the table of liberty for so long that they think they can ignore reality by chanting mantras and “queering” words.
Bloated by their gluttony, they cheer the erosion of the same rights and protections that enabled their arrogance and ignorance. Their fingers and mouths greasy with the remnants of the fruits of labour of the women that came before them, they sneer at those who understand the precarious nature of our rights and personhood and seek to protect it. They might belch out insults and smears in between mouthfuls, but deep in their hearts they know they would never willingly trade places with Afghan women, because all the queer theory in the world won’t save them from the slaughterhouse.
Mel T
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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