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But it’s not about performing stereotypes, honest!
When one takes time to examine the arguments put forward by the gender religious it quickly becomes obvious that past verbal intimidation and name calling, not many debatable points exist.
“That’s the way feminists have used the terms since the 1970s, as they challenged patriarchal claims that men’s domination and exploitation of women is “natural” because of biology. Patriarchy turns biological difference into social dominance. Feminists have long argued that gender is connected to our sex differences but is “socially constructed” in a way that reflects the unequal distribution of power between men and women over the past few thousand years. Anything socially constructed could be constructed differently through politics.
The trans movement flips that understanding, routinely asserting that gender is not the product of social forces but is a private internal state of being, which may be innate and immutable (opinions in the trans movement vary). In other words, transgender ideology asserts that gender is something one feels and has no necessary connection to one’s body and reproductive system. Trans activists routinely assert that “sex is a social construction,” that the biological distinctions of male and female are not objectively real but are created by societies. Stock painstakingly explains why this—again I’ll use the phrase, though it sounds harsh—doesn’t make sense.
In the preceding paragraph, I wrote “routinely assert” not only because there are differences of opinion within the transgender movement (which is to be expected in any movement) but because I have heard trans activists shift arguments when asked to defend a position (which is an indication of a weak argument in any movement). I once asked a trans activist, “If sex is socially constructed, that implies that it could be constructed in some other way. Do you know of any other way for humans to reproduce other than with an egg (produced by a female) and sperm (produced by a male)? By what means would human reproduction be socially constructed differently?” The activist offered no rebuttal to that, but simply dropped the claim, moving on to assert that trans people know what sex they “really” are and that any challenge to this idea was hateful and bigoted.”
This paucity of argumentative integrity has not stopped the gender-faithful from pushing their agenda and colonizing female spaces in society.
Stock also explains why allowing transwomen—again, males who identify as women—to participate in women’s sports will undermine and potentially eliminate sex-segregated activities that create opportunities for girls and women to thrive. Separate athletic competitions for males and females exist because of the physiological advantage males have over females, and those advantages don’t disappear by identifying as a woman.
Does any of this really matter? Well, it matters to teenage girls who may not want to change clothes in a locker room next to a boy who identifies as a girl. It matters to women at a health club that allows transwomen in a “women only” space. It matters to clients in a women’s homeless shelter that refuses to restrain sexually aggressive behavior of transwomen in order to be “inclusive.” It matters to the woman who is bumped from a country’s Olympic weightlifting team when a transwoman is allowed to compete as a woman. It matters to the women who were sexually assaulted by a transwoman who was housed in a women’s prison. It matters to the lesbians who choose not to date transwomen—because their sexual orientation is toward female humans and not male humans who identify as women—and are then called bigots and ostracized. And it matters to the woman who had to fight to get her job back after being fired for publicly stating that she believes “that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.”
Trans activists’ responses to these challenges vary, but they can be reduced to a trans slogan so popular that an LGBT organization in the UKput it on a t-shirt: “Transwomen are women. Get over it!”
To say the least, the meaning of the statement “transwomen are women” is not obvious, either intuitively or logically. It’s a claim that many people find hard to understand, not because they are bigots but because it seems at odds with material reality. It would be more accurate to say: “Transwomen are transwomen, which raises many complex intellectual, political, and moral questions. Let’s work out solutions that respect everyone’s rights and interests!”
Not the catchiest slogan, but accurate and honest. It’s a t-shirt that I think Stock would endorse. She doesn’t condemn or mock trans people but rather seeks deeper understanding to make public policy choices as fair as possible for all.
The problem is that there has never been a public debate or a reasonable discussion of how we are in include the gender religious into society. It has always been ‘accept every demand, otherwise you are bigot!’. It has gotten them far, but at the expense of female rights, boundaries, and safety, which is clearly unacceptable in a society that values individuals rights and freedom.
One of my goals here at DWR is to provide a resource that can help when the arguments start flying and you need a little argumentative boost to counter the tomfoolery going on with the other side. Dr. Jane Clare Jones intellectual rigor and acumen will almost never steer you wrong.
This is an excerpt from Bindle’s article on Unherd titled Trans Activisms’s War on Solidarity.
“I’ve interviewed dozens of de-transitioners who have been cast asunder after expressing regret about transitioning. I also know many trans people who are perfectly happy with their decision — but none of them believe it is reasonable to demand that they encroach women-only spaces such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services, prisons or hospital wards.
The problem, after all, is not trans people. It is extreme trans activism — a men’s rights movement which has grown out of the backlash against feminism, in particular the type of feminism that seeks to eradicate male violence towards women and girls.
For me, the costs of being targeted in this way have been enormous — and not just in relation to my unpaid activism. The mob follows me around, preventing me from speaking on how to end male violence under the guise of “protecting trans-rights”. Whenever I speak about prostitution, an expertise of mine, I am told that I “clearly hate trans sex workers”, as though everything comes back to that.
Faced with such vitriol, my mental health took a hammering. I began to feel ashamed of the trouble I was causing for those who invited me to speak. I would find myself apologising to them, which they would graciously accept as though they had done something commendable by having me there, despite my decades of active feminism and public profile.
I started to wonder if perhaps I was a monster — and I was ridiculously grateful to those who did not hide or apologise for the fact that they had any public connection to me. My self-confidence fell to rock bottom, as I doubted my abilities, skills and knowledge. On hearing of the latest cancellation, I would end up highly distressed and in floods of tears, knowing that mud often sticks. I was offered a newspaper column only to have it withdrawn after several staff members announced they would publicly argue against my appointment.
I spent years trying to warn my fellow feminists that if they stood by and let them scapegoat me, eventually they would come after every dissenter. First on the list would be the lesbians, because we are a thorn in the side of misogynistic gay men. Yet when I appealed to academics to stand with me and not cancel an event I was speaking at, most turned the other cheek and decided a quiet life was better.
And so now, here we are. The witches are being drowned and the bitches burned at the stake. Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd and many other women whose names you will never know are being put through hell.
But another, largely hidden cost of this war is the lost opportunity for solidarity. As a young lesbian, trans people were my friends and allies. That is how it should be. Those of us who live on the margins of society, and who are discriminated against, should have each other’s backs. We are all victims of this bloody battle.”
We have to thank and support these brave female thinkers and activists who raise their head above the parapet and tolerate the abuse generated by the misogynistic blue-haired woke crowd.
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.
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