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I may have to pick up Murray’s book as it appears to have shed some light onto the nebulous core of identity politics. I chose this excerpt because I like how Scruton frames some of the tenets of identity politics i.e. the hardware/software analogy is particularly insightful.
Id-pol may seem unreal and far away, but let me assure you it exists and people have really invested themselves into it. Several boots on the ground encounters with zealots on twitter have left me with a new appreciation of how deeply ingrained this way of thinking has become for certain people. It is frustrating and exasperating to argue with people who somehow have come to believe that they are the purveyors of the common shared reality we experience.
For instance, in dealing with the gender-self-id crowd, getting them to define anything is almost always impossible. They seem to think that being a woman is merely the male interpretation of what what being a woman is, in other words a set of personal subjective feelings that, as long as one holds them, *makes them* a woman. (wtaf, I know, I know…)
Back in material reality the place where, rightly, the term woman is coherently defined as an adult human female is somehow contentious. The argument then always goes into insults and hurt feelings, even the threat of suicide (see abusive male controlling behaviours) for not complying with the notion that men, if they feel strongly enough, can be women. It’s ludicrous.
Anyhow, folks, please continue to speak the truth and do not bow to the ideologues that would have you change your reality to meet the needs of their fantasy.
“More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.
And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.
Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.
As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn.”
This all goes away once you accept the factual nature of biological reality. For instance the term woman does, in fact, equal adult human female. When your faux-progressive ideology takes a left turn away from material reality then you get bullshit laden threads like this one.
What is wrong with the whole barrel of hoopla that is identity politics. Love the Marx reference to weaving flowers/chains reference.
This from a review on the Feminist Current by Jen Izaakson:
“What unites these men’s rights groups with the alt-right is that they believe white, straight, males have been left behind and now exist at the bottom of the social and sexual hierarchy. They believe that while the world once belonged (rightfully) to them, now women, people of colour, and sexual minorities rule. Indeed, their insult of choice, “cuck,” is acute projection — they feel usurped and humiliated by these groups, and believe they have been robbed of the privilege they are entitled to. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the phenomena of what 4chaners refer to as “incels” (men who conceive of themselves as “involuntary celibates”), lamenting that women refuse sex with them, rendering them modern victims of their self-conceived “sexual hierarchy”.
When Nagle writes of “online culture wars,” we must recognize that the main battle is over truth. While Nagle does not explore the feminist dimension of these online street fights, specifically, the implications are evident. Both the alt-right and the anti-materialist, regressive left believe that prostitution is not about women’s position under patriarchy as a resource for men, but sexual liberation and the free market. Both consider the sex trade to be a situation where women come out on top — with autonomy, empowered through profit and/or sexual freedom. Rather than overturning the system of prostitution, both groups believe we need to offer more rights to pimps and johns, in order to allow prostituted women to benefit from an unregulated free market. (So far, so Marxist!) Most significantly for feminism, both these tendencies wish to block certain feminist analysis and activism — specifically, the kind that challenges the system of patriarchy at its root.”
And there you have it folks, your handy guide for knowing that you’re doing effective feminism – if you are pissing off the dudes on the right, and the left, you’re doing work.
I may have to check out this book, as it seems to address the growing problem on the left of getting away from material analysis of societal problems.
I’m sometimes asked why I give such serious side-eye to the term identity politics. This isn’t some sort of dogwhistle like the freezepeach moniker that gets affixed to people who want to say racist or sexist things and then hide behind free speech. Gender IDPOL is a systemic denial of the reality women face and an iron scold meant to silence and shame women who dare to speak out against the arguments IDPOL make.
The good news is that despite the abuse from the ‘progressive’ left and the usual abuse from dudes, brave women are speaking out against gender IDPOL, precisely because of its insidious nature and the implicit erasure of the female experience from the public sphere.
Ms. Sanchez writes a cogent essay that appears on the Feminist Current, I suggest going there and reading the entire work. However, I wanted to highlight this section in particular as it speaks to the material situation women face in society, and how IDPOL is obfuscating that struggle. Also highlighted are some of the rhetorical dodges genderists use to muddy the water when it comes to the reality of sex based oppression.
“This is because there is an expectation that women are inherently nurturing. Being forced into the position of caretaker translates to women having less savings, being promoted less, and accumulating less money in their pensions.
But gender identity politics reduces this reality — and womanhood itself — to a trivial, malleable identity. It is baffling that in a world where women and girls face structural oppression due to their biology, gender identity politics has thrived.
Susan Cox argues that: “The non-binary declaration is a slap in the face to all women, who, if they haven’t come out as ‘genderqueer,’ presumably possess an internal essence perfectly in-line with the misogynistic parody of womanhood created by patriarchy.” There’s a twisted, neoliberal cruelty in arguing that the primary problem with gender is its impact on the chosen identities of individuals, and not the way it operates systemically, under patriarchy, to normalize and encourage male violence and female subordination.
When confronted with evidence that, historically and globally, women’s oppression is sex-based, gender identity politics simply claims that sex itself is an “invented” social construct.
BUT male/female as two distinct categories is a system we made. bio sex is a classification we invented. these aren’t inherent in nature.
— Riley J. Dennis (@RileyJayDennis) July 9, 2017
In an article at Quartz, Jeremy Colangelo writes:
“Sex and gender are much more complex and nuanced than people have long believed. Defining sex as a binary treats it like a light switch: on or off. But it’s actually more similar to a dimmer switch, with many people sitting somewhere in between male and female genetically, physiologically, and/or mentally. To reflect this, scientists now describe sex as a spectrum.
Despite the evidence, people hold on to the idea that sex is binary because it’s the easiest explanation to believe. It tracks with the messages we see in advertisements, movies, books, music — basically everywhere. People like familiar things, and the binary is familiar (especially if you’re a cisgender person who has never had to deal with sexual-identity issues).”
But feminists don’t argue that sex is real because it is “the easiest explanation to believe” or because of what the media tells us. We argue sex is real because from the moment an ultrasound reveals a baby is female, her subjugation begins. And though “gender identity” is presented as an issue feminism must contend with, it is, as Rebecca Reilly-Cooper explains, completely at odds with feminist analysis of biological sex as an axis of oppression:
“Women’s historic and continued subordination has not arisen because some members of our species choose to identify with an inferior social role (and it would be an act of egregious victim-blaming to suggest that it has). It has emerged as a means by which males can dominate that half of the species that is capable of gestating children, and exploit their sexual and reproductive labour.
We cannot make sense of the historical development of patriarchy and the continued existence of sexist discrimination and cultural misogyny, without recognizing the reality of female biology, and the existence of a class of biologically female persons.”
Far from fluid, the realities of sex-based oppression are strict and enforced through violence — this is particularly true for women of colour and women in poverty.”
If gender identity is so amazing why are not females in large droves identifying as Men to escape their oppression?
Yeppers, many radical feminists have been right here, right at this point. Girlsmoonsandstarts and a rad-fem chorus goes above and beyond with their response, it is made of pure gold.
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