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It is quite satisfying to see the ideological expectations reversed and watching the resulting apoplexy as followers of the current woke transactivist ideology have to jump through their own imaginary hoops.
Identifying as genderfree looks something like this:
So, in identifying and fitting under the ‘trans-umbrella’ one can safely reject gender, respect biological reality and material fact. As shown here:
Correctly identifying gender as a toxic construct in our societies is but the first of many small steps toward gender abolition . The #genderfree tag has it’s place in rendering the silencing and scare tactics of transactivists effectively moot. Their skulduggery can be used against them and thus the necessary conversation about gender and gender self id can continue.
We need to insure that inclusivity does not become male dominance by any other name. Jane Clare Jones delineates between helpful and harmful inclusion:
“I’ve been meaning to write, and will write soon, something on how the left’s current obsession with ‘inclusion’ and ‘openness’ and ‘smashing boundaries’ and ‘deterritorialization’ makes sense only as a critique of the psychic structure of dominance (like, go and tell it to Donald Trump and leave us the fuck alone). It is entirely, gratuitously, inappropriate, when turned against the boundaries of the violated, of those who are raised in a society which leads them to understand – when they are grabbed or catcalled or made to feel like meat – that that is where they are positioned. It is no wonder that a woman who cannot even bear to think about this fact, who prefers to deny the power that frames it, who prefers to think it could all be rewritten by playing games with superficial scripts, would, when addressing the mess that she has made, avert her eyes so resolutely from what this is actually about. Women’s psyches are far far more than ‘scenes of violation,’ but there can be no feminism which refuses its reality, which recoils from recognising that ‘smashing boundaries,’ when used against women as a class, is the absolute axiom of male power, and, at its core, everything happening here is as it ever was.”
“Intersectionality shows us that everyone could do better; that every attempt at rolling back discrimination could work harder and be more inclusive. But it should also remind us that people themselves are more than a simple label: “white feminist”; “middle-class man”; “posh boy”; “Twitter bully”. Here are some of the things I know that the kind of feminists regularly decried for their privilege have had to deal with, in private: eating disorder relapses; rape; the stalking of their children; redundancy; clinical depression; the sectioning of a family member; an anxiety disorder that made every train ride and theatre trip an agony. (Yes, one of those descriptions is me.)
None of this is to say that feminism shouldn’t be open to criticism. When Caroline Crampton and I got together our bloggers last year for a New Statesman debate about feminism, the response was . . . well, there were two responses. There was criticism that was constructive: for example, the deviously persuasive Karen Ingala Smith managed to parlay her disappointment that we didn’t talk enough about rape into making me join the board of her VAWG charity. And there was criticism that was destructive, aimed at wounding us for not representing every possible permutation of womanhood. (I laughed when one particularly enthusiastic deconstructor, when asked: “Well, how can you possibly make a six-person panel totally representative of half of humanity?”, came back with, “Oh, that’s why I don’t believe in panel discussions.”)”
Menstruator, and other words that rhyme with ‘hate her’
if you wish to be inclusive
please amend your language usage
‘woman’ has now been disabled
this is how you shall be labelled:
ovulator, menstruator, gestator, incubator
procreator, lactator, child-curator, care-taker
homemaker, meal-maker, vacuum-cleaner-operator
titillator, conciliator, erotic-roleplay-stimulator
if a woman should resist
any title from this list
please ensure her full compliance
here is how to squash defiance:
moderate, invalidate, ensure that you re-educate her
irritate her, frustrate her, make sure you exasperate her
do berate her, denigrate her, obviously you castigate her
deprecate her, do deflate her, tell her you depreciate her
dominate, humiliate, and certainly manipulate her
subjugate, domesticate, and if you can, you abnegate her
penetrate her, impregnate her, all her life administrate her
regulate, incarcerate, and you shall incapacitate her
violate her, desecrate her, let your actions devastate her
decorate her, mutilate her, crush her and debilitate her
obviate, excoriate, and with your words eviscerate her
decimate, intimidate, until you can subordinate her
designate her, emulate her, mimic her and obfuscate her
appropriate, adulterate, mock and then impersonate her
exterminate, obliterate, and finally annihilate her
disintegrate, evaporate, replace and then eradicate her
just negate her
just negate her
just negate her
hate her
~Irischild
The Twitter link.
The BBC News story link.
Good job on naming part of the problem, Dave (from the twitter thread).
One cannot identify into nor identify out of the class you’re in. I’m curious as to how many more sexual assaults, in this case, and rapes of females in others it will take before we as a society can acknowledge that importance of grounding the distinctions of biological sex in empirical reality (human beings are generally sexually dimorphic). Because, clearly, prioritizing the gender feelings of men over the safety and security of women is not acceptable.
Isn’t it interesting that this sort of experiential sharing can only go one way. This sort of paradoxical thinking is rife within transactivist ideology. Consider the claim of being ‘non-binary’. The only way this term works is by creating, you guessed it, another binary between “cis” people (those who mostly follow gendered expectations) and “trans” (those who mostly go against gendered expectations). Or… the other possibility within the gender spectrum idea is that, in fact, we’re all non-binary as we all possess a distinct combination of masculine and feminine gendered traits and behaviours.
As with most debates when it comes to gender, there is always a good deal of heat and friction, but not much desire to go outside of established positions. As food for though, consider what Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has to say on the subject of gender:
“Once we recognise that the number of gender identities is potentially infinite, we are forced to concede that nobody is deep down cisgender, because nobody is assigned the correct gender identity at birth. In fact, none of us was assigned a gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals. We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for people of that sex. We are all educated and inculcated into one of two roles, long before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on the gender continuum. So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people.
The logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this a profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion, and one that serves both to obscure the reality of female oppression, as well as to erase and invalidate the experiences of transsexual people.
The way to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then build our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed all the way through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes, occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity over femininity.
The truth of the spectrum analogy lies in the fact that conformity to one’s place in the hierarchy, and to the roles it assigns to people, will vary from person to person. Some people will find it relatively easier and more painless to conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, while others find the gender roles associated with their sex so oppressive and limiting that they cannot tolerably live under them, and choose to transition to live in accordance with the opposite gender role.
Gender as a hierarchy perpetuates the subordination of female people to male people, and constrains the development of both sexes
Fortunately, what is a spectrum is human personality, in all its variety and complexity. (Actually that’s not a single spectrum either, because it is not simply one continuum between two extremes. It’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, humany-wumany stuff.) Gender is the value system that says there are two types of personality, determined by the reproductive organs you were born with. One of the first steps to liberating people from the cage that is gender is to challenge established gender norms, and to play with and explore your gender expression and presentation. Nobody, and certainly no radical feminist, wants to stop anyone from defining themselves in ways that make sense to them, or from expressing their personality in ways they find enjoyable and liberating.
So if you want to call yourself a genderqueer femme presenting demigirl, you go for it. Express that identity however you like. Have fun with it. A problem emerges only when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you start demanding that others call themselves cisgender, because you require there to be a bunch of conventional binary cis people for you to define yourself against; and when you insist that these cis people have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the conformist binary people, while nobody really understands just how complex and luminous and multifaceted and unique your gender identity is. To call yourself non-binary or genderfluid while demanding that others call themselves cisgender is to insist that the vast majority of humans must stay in their boxes, because you identify as boxless.
The solution is not to reify gender by insisting on ever more gender categories that define the complexity of human personality in rigid and essentialist ways. The solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to naturalise and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people, and constrains the development of individuals of both sexes. Reconceiving of gender as an identity spectrum represents no improvement.”
Essentially, creating new ‘gender-identities’ is akin to making new prison cells with the penitentiary system we call gender and then insisting that your prison cell is more oppressed that some other persons prison cell. Why not buck the system instead and drop the gendered stereotypes that the penitentiary is based on and that are currently hurting everyone. Dispensing with the gender hierarchy is the goal we should be striving for, not gilding our particular cells at the expense of others.
bleatmop
The Intransigent One
Mystro
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