Really really pleased to announce that the new quarterly feminist magazine I’ve been working on is now taking subscriptions! The first print edition will be out at the end of the month.

Subscribe here:

This is a guest post by @hatpinwoman

————————-

Yesterday gave us the revelation that the English MP for Reigate has been attempting, behind the scenes, to weaken and remove women’s rights and safeguards in law, through the gender recognition reform that would have seen us getting self ID. Last night, in his capacity as the Chair of APPG, he also called for Liz Truss to be removed as Minister for Women and Equalities due to her decision on GRA reform.

Given all this, we thought that a little investigation into this MP was warranted. What kind of man would think that such an undemocratic way of proceeding was acceptable?

There is a lot of information to be found about Crispin Blunt. He is an ex-army man, who resigned his commission as a Captain in 1990, having been awarded the Queen’s Medal. In the early nineties he was a representative of the Forum of Private Business.

In 1997 he became MP for Reigate, a relatively small, busy and picturesque town, about an hour from London, which used to be a bustling staging post in the days when horses were the surest means of travel. Aptly, it is also the town where anti-suffragette Etta Lemon, the founder of the Royal Society for The Protection of Birds, is buried.

According to Crispin’s voting record as analysed by the “they work for you” website, he mainly votes with the party on key issues, though he deviated from that in order to consistently vote for bills around assisted dying, that would mean a “terminally ill person could lawfully be given assistance to end their life if the consent of the High Court is obtained.”

I won’t get off topic by talking too much about that, but I will say that issues of safeguarding around things like euthanasia are very thorny and in disabled communities we are extremely divided about how a society that still tends to treat sick people as a burden would go about ending the lives of those people in an ethical way. And it makes sense to me that a man who does not understand safeguarding would be especially likely to vote for such bills, without truly reckoning with the more complicated questions that surround the issue.

In the year he became MP for Reigate there was a series of events that, later, would lead him to seek a change in the law. A local boy of 9 was repeatedly sexually molested between July and October of 1997 at a private school in the area. The games teacher, Nick Drewett, was accused and suspended from the school pending an investigation which led to a court date being set. However in 1998, before he could stand trial for six counts of indecent assault, he hung himself.

You might imagine that as a people’s representative in a friendly little town any efforts Crispin Blunt made as a result of this case might be on behalf of the child and his family. The concern might be in helping them to cope with what would have been an overwhelmingly traumatic experience. Instead his public efforts have been to use this case to try to help gain anonymity for those accused of rape and sexual offences and to cast aspersions on the accusations in question. And he has gone so far as implying, on record, that the allegations against Nick Drewett were false.

During the debate around the anonymity for arrested persons bill he spoke at some length and said:

It was also in 1999 that I introduced the Sexual Offences (Anonymity of Defendants) Bill. As I reminded the House last summer, I have some form in this area. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe referred to it, but in the context of the debate about rape anonymity, and as I will come to reflect on, we have proposals that achieve the objective that I set out in the Education Bill that is before the House. The purpose of my Bill was to protect teachers from the consequences of accusations by children who have anonymity, and from the subsequent reporting of such allegations. As some hon. Members may recall, my Bill was prompted by the suicide of a constituent, Nick Drewett, a teacher who took his own life after being accused of behaving improperly with pupils in his care. This was a tragic example of the cost of unfounded allegations. The headmaster who was accused alongside him was subsequently acquitted. My experience here is one reason why I am delighted that the coalition is bringing forward legislation to deal with the problem of false allegations against teachers.

Let’s be clear that here we have an MP arguing for the anonymity of those accused of sex offences against children because he believes, and is willing to insinuate on record, that a nine year old falsely accused a teacher. His motivation is to protect other adult men from the consequences of the accusations of children. Rather than, as many might consider to be an imperative, to protect children from certain adult men.

In another debate in Parliament about the anonymity of rape defendants he mentions the case again. This case incidentally has not been highlighted by any official body as being poorly handled by the police, nor has there ever been any suggestion that the evidence was unsound. Yet Mr.Blunt felt able to assert, again on record, that “the combination of the way in which the accusations were investigated by the police and their reporting led to his [Nick Drewett’s] death”.

He later asserts this again while talking of the “tragic case of Nick Drewett”. He baldly states that “It was the reputational damage that caused him to take his own life”.

This kind of speculation rather goes against Samaritans advice to not assume motives for suicide, ignores the possibility that being caught may have been some kind of factor in the decision to end his life, and instead paints the assumed villain of the piece as a tragic victim of circumstance.

He does assure us though, lest we worry that injustice is being done, right in front of us during this debate, that the accusations against Nick Drewett fell “very short of rape”. I’m sure to the child’s parents reading their MPs statements about this, it is of great comfort to them that he takes time to try to quantify their child’s suffering in a way he can dismiss.

In the debate for this bill he uses the popularity of Nick Drewett (700 people attended his funeral!) as some kind of argument. Only unpopular people molest children in Blunt’s worldview, I guess.

He also argues that Drewett’s case is not unusual, noting that Nick is “not alone.” He continues:

The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers has had recent experience of three members who have taken their own lives in similar circumstances. Since 1991, there have been 974 police investigations into abuse allegations made against NAS/UWT members. In 792 of them, no grounds were discovered for prosecution. Publicity in 80 per cent of those cases did serious injustice to innocent teachers.

We should say here that sexual offences tend to be hard to prosecute, and we shouldn’t leap to assuming that failure to proceed is the same as innocence, as Blunt does. We could also note that using suicide as a means manipulating political discourse is not an unfamiliar or democratically legitimate tactic.

Blunt goes on:

The Bill attempts to protect teachers from injustice that can do them permanent professional and personal damage. There is a popular view that an allegation of child abuse, unsubstantiated by investigation, is in itself sufficient cause for concern to disqualify permanently a teacher from being in charge of children. There is little awareness that teachers are liable to be the victims of false or malicious allegations. It is therefore just to take measures to ensure that teachers as well as complainants undergo investigation with their identities protected. That is what the Bill aims to achieve.

While it is of course important to investigate allegations of abuse thoroughly, what Blunt shows us here is a recognisable prioritisation of the needs of those accused of abuse over those abused. Moreover he doesn’t even stop at suggesting teachers *can* be victims of false accusations or that there have been occasions when they have been. No, he states they are liable to be victims of false or malicious accusations, which is an extraordinary claim. What epidemic of spiteful, untruthful school children claiming to have been molested does he know about that we don’t?[1]

If the suspicion is that Crispin Blunt only fails to understand the concerns of children, never fear, his support for a bill that would see the sentence of rapists cut in half if they plead guilty will disabuse you of that notion. In a country with a low conviction rate perhaps one could consider it admirable to encourage rapists to admit their crimes. Except that of course when there is such a shockingly low conviction rape, the only rapists motivated to actually take a guilty plea are going to be the ones who have no hope of being proven innocent already.

Halving their sentences, then, is just a further level of injustice.

How does Crispin Blunt relate to the gender recognition act reform discussion though? What are his connections to these ideas? What made him, fresh from trying to protect alleged rapists and child molesters everywhere, divert his attention onto this issue?

Well, as a result of leaving his wife, coming out as gay, and publicly admitting to taking poppers (…?!) he was in the papers, and pink news for a while. In one article they talk about him attending a Stonewall diversity dinner, so I would suggest a close affinity with stonewall might be his mistake here. But a man does have to eat so we won’t make too many assumptions just yet…..

…..oh no

If you go and review the Parliamentary written questions Crispin has submitted you quickly find him asking if the ministry of defence can take time during its busy schedule of, you know, fighting wars and protecting the land and stuff to “make funds available to enable cadet adult instructors to attend Stonewall train-the-trainers courses”. So clearly he is one of The Stonewall Possé. The least intrepid, but still sufficiently aggressive, gaggle this land has lately seen.

He’s also to be found asking several questions about “sex work”. He was, inevitably, against both the idea of criminalising men who buy sex and the McTaggart Nordic Model amendment.

This all brings us, of course, to self ID which in light of the last few days and his own admissions we know he is very pro. I did manage to talk to some of his constituents who made him aware, as early as 2018, of the potential conflict between Self ID and women’s rights. A possibility he outright rejected.

While we know he apparently likes to conduct most of his complete dismissal of women’s rights in private on this issue (while stroking a white cat and looking suitably sinister one hopes), he is on record a couple of times about this before this week.

In July this year, for example, he co-wrote an article with Sue Pascoe that you can read here. Apparently the reform to the GRA would be a “minor change”. (If it’s that minor Crisp, then why is it so important?).

Through this article we also find out about the new science that Blunt knows about and the rest of us don’t. Such as how there is “a durable biological element underlying gender identity”. As with seemingly all links offered on this subject by proponents of gender ideology, the truth of the matter when you click on them is much more woolly. In a situation that reminds me earwormingly of the song about the court of King Caractucus, It links to a piece about a statement about the durable biological element of underlying gender identity by the endocrine society.

I read their position statement and then got covered in cobwebs digging through their sources online. Their primary source for the claim is one entitled “Evidence Supporting the Biologic Nature of Gender Identity.”. This is a literature review of evidence that there is a biologic basis for gender identity. Before this gets too meta for words, this apparently mainly involves (1) data on gender identity in patients with disorders of sex development (DSDs, also known as differences of sex development) along with (2) neuroanatomical differences associated with gender identity.

So we already got to the part where intersex people are used in the service of this then.

The conclusions of this review are “Although the mechanisms remain to be determined, there is strong support in the literature for a biologic basis of gender identity.”

The paper that isn’t about trans people that didn’t identify the mechanisms of gender identity has definitely got to be perfect for MPs to use to justify sweeping statements in online articles. Glad that was all cleared up, then.

Blunt and Pascoe take time to “really wonder if the good people of our great nation realise they are being manipulated through fear and false information to roll-back the basic dignity, privacy and safety of trans people who are just trying to live ordinary lives.”

Us women and our hysterical concerns about male violence. Golly. What are we like!

One wonders who exactly would be making trans people unsafe, if the concerns women have about the existence of Male violence can be so easily handwaved away.

Regardless, when it comes to Crispin Blunt, I’m not sure we can really expect any better from a man who consistently manages to be on the side of a given issue that fails to protect the most vulnerable.

One only worries about what discussion our hero may turn his attention to next.

---

[1] In the 1990s the rate of false accusations of child abuse was considered to be around 10 percent. In line with false accusations of other crimes. Many of these false accusations however occurred during child custody battles, and most of the false accusations were made by adults. I.e we can conclude based on factual information as well as the instinctive sense of most people that when a child comes forward to say they are being hurt by an adult, in the vast majority of cases, they are telling the truth.

Nick Drewett, it should be noted, was accused by a boy and not by adults. Given what we know about false accusations then, this is not a case one would logically choose when highlighting the burning issue Blunt seems to think exists here.It should also be noted that nowhere in Crispin Blunt’s consistent speeches on this subject does he mention any awareness of crucial information like this:

To lay out my thoughts about women’s political representation, I want to first outline my socialist and radical feminist analysis of women’s politics. What I most want to underline is that from my perspective, feminism is a form of materialist class politics, not a form of identity politics. That is, my analysis of the position of women is rooted in understanding that female people have a particular type of body and reproductive capacity and are subject to a system of power on the basis of being female. This power structure exists because of the historical development of a hierarchical system of extraction of the reproductive and socially reproductive labour of female people, otherwise known as patriarchy. Consequently, women have a range of shared material political interests. Most obviously these pertain to issues around reproductive and sexual autonomy, and the violences women are subjected to by male power’s effort to control their bodies as a sexual and reproductive resource. This then extends to how women’s labour is devalued, invisibilised, and appropriated by the intertwined structures of patriarchy and capitalism. This includes women’s disproportionate poverty, the wage gap, maternity cover and child-care, the undervaluing and feminisation of all forms of care labour, the concentration of women in low-paid and low status occupations, and the ways all these issues disproportionately impact working class and racialised women. Lastly, this leads to the demand for a fundamental structural transformation in order to challenge extractive relations, undertake a just accounting of women’s labour, and do away with the symbolic representations and psychological conditioning that undermines women’s humanity by positioning them as a sexual, reproductive, domestic and emotional resource for males. The fundamental structure of patriarchal gender is then a matter of socialising women into the role of a service-class orientated to male needs, and socialising males into a mode of dominance and entitlement. Feminist politics which reinforces female socialisation and de-centers the needs and interests of female people is thus antithetical to challenging gender in its deepest sense.  

On the question of why women’s political representation matters, let’s focus on two key areas. The first involves the symbolic importance of women’s representation, the way it serves as a role model and opens possibilities for other women, and the fact that ‘representational justice or equality’ is an important value in and of itself. With respect to the inclusion of trans women in women’s representation, this immediately forces a confrontation with the bitterly contested ontological question of ‘what is a woman.’ As should be apparent from what I’ve just said, my answer to this question is informed by materialist class analysis. That is, women are a sex-class. This matters not only because it frames women’s class interests, but because the alternative interpretation, from our perspective, relies on essentialising gender, which we consider to be the mechanism of the oppression of women as a sex-class. At the heart of this conflict is the fundamental question of the definition of women being changed from a sex class to a gender class. Given that we think that gender is how women are oppressed on the basis of sex, we consider it regressive for women to be recognised in public life as instantiations of gender, and to be redefined on the basis of an identification with gender that not only bears little relation to our experience as female human beings, but diminishes the way patriarchal gender profoundly harms our humanity.

I think it’s worth briefly thinking this under the rubric of ‘Diversity and Inclusion.’ The aim of inclusion is actually structurally contradictory to the aim of diversity. If everyone is included inside one category, then many salient differences between groups get lost, and we undermine diversity. Much present identity politics is focused on a possibly over-stated emphasis on difference, while conversely, the relation of women and trans women is being thought under the sole political directive of inclusion, which is undermining the recognition of important political and social differences. What we should be aiming towards is a model that honours both similarity and difference. We need to recognise that female people and people who identify as women are not identical, and stop trying to erase this difference in a way which many women feel is overwriting their political existence and interests,. This will allow us stand in solidarity with each other, in areas where our political interests are aligned.

This leads to the second area where representation matters, the expression of women’s political interests. This is not simple, because under patriarchy women have the most fractured class consciousness of any oppressed group, and it is far from evident that women in positions of political authority are in the business of representing women’s interests. I would hope, however, that this is less true of the political consciousness of women inside a party set up by and for women. The question then is to what extent women and trans women share political interests. My claim here would be that trans women who respect the difference between trans women and women, and understand why women resist being redefined on the basis of gender, can stand in real and meaningful solidarity with women, although our interests still do not completely coincide. However, at present, given the effort to erase differences, redefine women by gender, and demand access to all sex-based spaces with no gatekeeping, the interests of women and those aligned with the present trans rights project, are, in fact, diametrically opposed. This was evident in Munroe Bergdoff’s much criticised injunction that women shouldn’t centre reproductive issues at the Woman’s March because it was ‘exclusionary’. It is also starkly illustrated by how often advocates of present trans rights discourse diminish the impact of male violence on women’s lives – as indeed Judith Butler did yesterday –  and the extent to which being raised in a society that sexualises women from their early teens, demands that female people have sex-based spaces to preserve their dignity and humanity, as well as their safety. This is source of great regret, as opposition to male violence is one of the places where women and trans women’s interests should most closely align. On the basis of all these factors I would argue that – especially under current circumstances – it is not appropriate for trans women to represent women politically, and I hope in time we can move towards a place where we can stand in close solidarity with each other.

TW: Violent imagery

The last few weeks have been incredibly distressing.

When Joanne[1] Rowling released her essay there was a moment of collective, tearful hope. A woman with enough power had spoken our truth, with all the precise eloquence at her disposal, and, for one suspended second, I think we thought that they would have to hear.

It now seems evident, watching the boot come down, the steady stream of disavowal and dismissal and outright demonising denigration, that a woman’s words about her truth, no matter how eloquent or precise, cannot, still, be given any credit. Our pain, etched into our bodies, mimed over centuries, and finally wrested into speech, will never be taken as intended. As evidence of our humanity, and an explanation of how that humanity is harmed by what is done to us. We are still, only ever, an object and repository, a resource for the needs and wants of others whose humanity matters more. Our pain, like our speech, like our politics, could never be for or about ourselves, because it has never registered – and this moment is nothing but the concatenation of this denial – that we actually, in our own right, exist.

This argument is not, therefore, an appeal for empathy with the damage done to us by male power and projection, by the immemorial and immovable demand that we efface ourselves before the needs of more important others. We know our pain doesn’t count in your economy, that it only registers on your balance books as a sly deceptive weapon or a vicious wilful harm to the interests of the only kind of people given credit. That you’re so certain of the justness of your accounting, you never seem to notice, that this one obvious fact, gives the lie to the ‘validity’ of your catechism. If you really thought that they were women, their pain would be a nought to you as well.

The purpose of this exercise is for myself, and us all, I hope. The last few weeks have been more painful than I remember. After the torrent of cocks, and the exhortations to choke, and the parade of denunciations, and the trolling kids with porn, and the media spin complicity, and the ‘you’re weaponizing your trauma,’ all polished off with tech-bro corporate might coming down on us like a ten-ton digital brick, it was the implacable, imperious requisition of Allison Bailey’s words that finally broke me. Or rather, it was the attempt to justify that requisition by claiming that speaking the violent, often sexual, threats against us, was, in and of itself, an act of ‘severe’ discrimination against the people threatening us. On a quiet Wednesday afternoon, at my desk, something happened I haven’t felt for years. The back of my brain went metallic. I managed a few, incandescent tweets and then fell, quickly, into inarticulate rage. By Friday, on the phone, my ‘discourse’ consisted mostly of a series of guttural, groaning sounds. I stuck needles* in my body, and the vice receded long enough to write and speak a poem, before tightening again. Rage passed into anger passed into despair passed into heavy, body-crushing sadness. Eventually the tears pooled in the centre of my heart and the bottom of my back so strongly I could cry them out. And then I started to see, and needed to try and speak, what was happening.

What is happening is a violently enforced, three-tiered denial of our words, our right to name the reality of our experience, and the reality of the violence perpetrated against us, because of our sex. Two tiers of this denial have long been evident. Now, in this battle between our discourse and their silencing, because we have fought so fucking long and hard for our words, our speech is, finally, beginning to be heard by some, the third tier is becoming ever more obvious. It was this that tipped me off the edge and, for a couple of weeks, stole most my words. It looks, as my friend said last night when I explained it on the phone, like a near-perfect, circular, stitch up. It looks like this:

Tier One:

We know this one well. This is the stealing of our language enacted by the core of trans ideology. The redefinition of the word ‘woman’ as an amorphous meaningless gender class against our consent. The removal of all words that link the word ‘woman’ to the concept of ‘female.’ The imperious imposition of the essentialist bullshit label ‘cis’ (‘IT’S LATIN!’). The dehumanising conversion of female people into fragmented body parts and functions. The command to call conspicuously male people ‘women’ even when engaged in conspicuously male behaviour, like, say, downloading child pornography or getting out their cocks at work. This all amounts, we’ve said repeatedly, to the political erasure of sex. We have said, perhaps too abstractly, we object to ‘the erasure of the axis of our oppression.’ What we mean is this: We object to male entitlement – to our bodies, to our time, to our attention, to our care, to our service, and now, above all, to our existence and the words that name it. We need to name the reality of sex, for yes, medical reasons, and sporting reasons, and because women are oppressed by conversion into sexual-reproductive resource and your idealist gender-bullshit can’t explain patriarchy in the slightest. But we need to name it most of all, because – as you never seem to grasp – gender is the system of entitlement that runs along the lines of sex. And the system that enforces that entitlement by means of threat or force. We need to name sex because we need to speak the violence males commit against us. Because our ability to speak at all depends on it. Which brings us to….

Tier Two:

In response to your demands, for our existence and its words, all we’ve said is ‘no.’ We haven’t threatened, or intimidated, or besieged, or tried to cancel. We’ve explained, millions of times, why we’re saying no, why we won’t let you take our words, because we need them. But the economy of entitlement that belies all your claims to gender non-conformity, will not respect our boundary. The boundaries here are literal, around our spaces, around the de-lineation of our words, but they are, above all, figurative. They arise from the expression of our own subjectivity. The naming of our needs and interests. They arise when we say ‘no,’ and ‘I don’t want,’ and ‘you can’t have.’ In an ethical economy it should be understood that the demand ‘I want to take’ never, between adults, has right of force over ‘I don’t want to give.’ You do not take from others what is not given freely, you don’t coerce them into giving things they do not want to give. Doing so is an act of narcissistic domination. It subordinates an-other’s needs and interests entirely to your own, and in so doing, annihilates their subjectivity. In its core, this is the logic, and the deep traumatic injury, of rape.

The narcissistic rage trans activists have unleashed on women, to try and force us to be silent and comply, is an exact exhibition of this logic. That so much of this coercive rage is sexualised, from the phallic pink and blue bats to the desire to choke us on their cocks, is far from accidental. That people have been so easily convinced that gender lives inside a tube of eyeliner, while the sexual economy of entitlement is enacted in plain sight, apparently invisible to many, is evidence of how far feminism has left to go. The women using argument and evidence to defend their ‘no’ are clearly monsters. A ‘swarm’ of uptight, cruel, castrating cunts who heartlessly refuse to meet a need so small it costs them nothing but their own existence. And everyone agrees. The litany of slurs and threats are warranted by the provocation of a ‘no.’ Just stop being such bitches. Just shut your fucking mouths and give us what we want you witches. Our desire or your existence. No contest cunts. ‘Be Kind.’

Tier Three:

It is only inside this economy of entitlement that the indictment of ‘weaponising trauma’ makes sense. Trauma is our explanation of why we need our words and the boundaries that they draw. (Although, let’s be clear, people shouldn’t have to give reasons to justify their boundaries, and the fact we feel the need to reveal our trauma to do just that shows how fucked this situation is already.) The claim that our trauma is a weapon, is then, at base, a claim that our boundary is an act of aggression. And this claim, relies, in turn, on the belief that the needs of, and harm done to, those who seek to transgress that boundary far outweighs the needs of, and the harm done to, those who will be violated. (This is precisely how the acronym that became the slur exerts its vilifying power – what distinguishes, we might ask, ‘inclusion’ from ‘violation’ other than consent?) The people pressing, and supporting, this claim, will ground it by appeal to the specific, and extreme, vulnerability of trans people. And while that appeal is not without foundation, the willingness to uncritically accept, and endlessly disseminate, empirically sketchy and appropriative statistics – to accept then, in its fundament, the claim that the oppression of trans people neatly and completely overrides the oppression of women – is, in itself, a product of the economy of entitlement. The readiness of people, both male and female, to identify with and elevate the pain of males not being given what they say they need or want, over against the females who tell them ‘no,’ is the psychic substance that greases the wheels and gears of the whole patriarchal shitshow. And it is the psychic substance that serves to justify, exculpate, and explain away, any violence used to press male claims.

There is no logic, no quantity of need or pain, that justifies male people violating women’s boundaries, that isn’t rapey. What got to me about the response to Joanne Rowling’s words – and by extension, the words of all of us who would defend our boundary – is how audaciously and easily left-wing journalists and politicians lined up to collude with rape-logic, so immersed inside an economy of male entitlement and its narcissistic rage they likely have no fucking clue that that is what they’re doing. Women’s boundaries are not an act of aggression. Painting them as such is part of the economy of entitlement used to justify taking what has not been given freely, and to justify both the violence that is that taking, and the violence often used to enforce that taking. (This is the difference between rape and aggravated rape. Rape is violence, rape is sometimes violence enforced by violence. One of the key feminist fights was the effort to make clear that it was not the enforcing violence alone that constituted the violation). The indictment that we are ‘weaponising trauma’ is hence, both, a contestation and delegitimization of the boundary that we have re-drawn in response to the primary, trans activist requisition of our words and the spaces they inscribe (Tier 1), but is also then, a justification of any force or threat of force brought to bear to press the claim against that boundary (Tier 2). Here, the ‘weaponising trauma’ claim reveals itself as just another, subtler variation of the endless exculpations and woman-blaming bullshit used to justify the violences against us. ‘She had it coming.’ ‘She made me do it.’ ‘She was asking for it.’

It is here too that the contours of Tier 3 emerge. It consists of the effort to justify and/or dismiss both the violence that is the violation of our boundaries (Tier 1), and, in particular, the violence used to press the claim against, or enforce the violation of, our boundaries (Tier 2). This thought has always, in fact, been around. It often inheres in the classic patriarchal reversal underpinned by the economy of entitlement. That is, because female people having boundaries is an act of intolerable exclusion (and by extension then ‘oppression,’ or, in its current usage, ‘anything that stops me getting what I want’), then any violence used to press the claim against the boundary is, actually, just self-defence. It also turned up in another form just last night on Twitter, the wilfully circular ‘the boundaries of bigots do not need to be respected,’ which fails, of course, to recognise that ‘bigot’ in trans activist discourse means nothing but ‘a woman whose boundaries stop me getting what I want,’ viz, in fact, ‘women’s boundaries are bigotry.’ Such is the power of the economy of entitlement that someone can seriously type ‘I do not need to respect the boundaries of someone whose boundaries stop me getting what I want’ and think that it will fly.

Of course, the defenders of the faith won’t accept a word of this. And to return to where we started, at Tier 1, they won’t accept it because its blasphemy against the catechistic sanctity of the Trinity (‘Trans women are women, Trans men are men, Non-binary is valid, Amen’), and its disavowal of the structuring of power along the lines of sex. (Remember, always, anyone who can actually defend their faith need not be so dogged with ex-communicating heretics). Indeed, everything I have said here, because it relies on the sexual economy of entitlement, would be deemed to be hateful – although, as I’ve underlined, the transparent operation of that economy in this whole affair belies the truth of its own dogma. It is here that the denigration and dismissal of Jo Rowling’s testimony, slips into the almost non sequitur of Owen Jones’ reply. Jones’ response here depends, entirely, on ostensibly reversing the balance of power between males and females, by denying that Jo Rowling speaks as a female, and as a member of a class oppressed as female (this is the work of so much Tumblrised intersectional discourse about ‘cis’ women, ‘rich’ women, ‘white’ women, ‘cishet’ women), and denying that the vulnerability of trans people as trans, does not magically negate the fact that the ones dictating that our boundaries are bigotry and can be rightfully overridden are still male. The epithets ‘abusive,’ ‘silencing,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘violent,’ when applied by females, to the behaviour of males trying to coerce their boundaries, is not the sneaky gambit of a ‘powerful’ majority jealously hording their piles of privilege. It is how female people name, explain, and process the violence they experience because they’re female, in a society governed by a sexual economy of entitlement.

Because OJ catechistically believes that trans-ness negates maleness, he can, effectively make a claim which, without such catechistic cover, is something no self-respecting progressive would ever say, because its incel-MRA-speak. That is, that women should not name male violence, and that in doing so, they are demonising and discriminating against males. This is, as Owen is fond of reminding us, a trope picked up from the gay rights movement, and leveraged in a way that was, in truth, wrong. It is true that the association of gay men with paedophilia as an excuse to refuse them rights was reprehensible (and just to underline, the general analogy with gay rights fails because gay rights did not involve violating the boundaries of another oppressed class). It is not true, however, that no gay men are paedophiles, and that suspecting a gay man of being a paedophile is a priori an act of bigotry, if you have reason for your suspicion beyond them being gay. (Just as it’s not de facto homophobia to think there might be a safeguarding issue if a gay man dresses in fetish gear and wanks in the toilet of the national children’s charity and then puts it on the internet). Jones’ claim in that case, effectively, was that gayness negates maleness (which it does not), and similarly here, that trans-ness should provide a negating shield of perfect immunity around males who identify as women, or non-binary, or maverique, or whatever, from any indictment of conspicuous male-pattern violence. (Cue Family Guy cartoon). A society that took the sexual abuse of women and children remotely seriously would understand, off the bat, that creating a sub-class of males who are a priori immune from being suspected or indicted of male-pattern violence is a safeguarding risk the size of a fucking planet.

It is this – the ‘you’re demonising us as predators’ stitch-up gambit – that leads directly to the moment where Allison’s Bailey’s description of the contents of terfisaslur is summarily requisitioned as an act of ‘severe’ discrimination against trans people as a whole. (This is MRA logic again, where ‘NotAllMen’ becomes ‘NotAllTransWomen’ and of course, yes, but a not negligible some). There is no way a decent person of progressive persuasion can look at the contents of terfisaslur, or the memes of gun-toting anime characters emblazoned with ‘Shut The Fuck Up TERF,’ or the gratuitous phallic threats aimed at Jo Rowling, and conclude that these are not ‘abusive,’ ‘silencing,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘violent.’ It is an epic gaslighting piss-take to tell us to choke on cocks, threaten us with rape, make T-shirts soaked with our fake blood, emblazon signs with death threats, erect guillotines with our names on, draw sketches of our hanging bodies, and openly, gleefully, fantasise about the many other ways you want to kill us, and then turn around and say by describing this violence as what it is, we are invalidating and demonising you with prejudicial malice.

The fact that much of this violence is enacted by males who are trans, does not transubstantiate it into ‘not violence’ and it doesn’t mean that people coercing female people’s boundaries with the kind of baseball-bat wielding rapey bullshit always used to coerce female boundaries are somehow, alchemically, ‘not doing male-pattern violence.’ And your catechism-that-we-don’t-believe is no defence, not a get-out clause, not some kind of whizz-bang-magic immunising shield that will stop us naming what we see right before of our eyes. We’ve often noted, sometimes caustically, sometimes ruefully, that if people wanted to convince us that they were women, and not a threat, telling us to choke on cocks and hammering down the door with bats was probably not the way to go. We will keep our words, the boundaries that they draw, and the naming of the violence they allow, because the survival of our subjectivities and the possibility of our healing depends on it. And though we may be silenced sometimes, by your animation of our trauma, and your refusal of our power to name, all you will achieve, with your catechistic dictates, in the end, is demonstrating why we wouldn’t let you take our words from the beginning.

We say again:

No means no.

———————————————————-

[1] I hope she’s okay with this, but I’d like to ditch the JK. The occlusion of her sex is a symptom of – not a remedy for – male power.

* It has been pointed out to me for people who don’t know me, the needles in question are acupuncture ones, not the ones attached to hypodermic syringes. This shit is hardwork, but I’m not doing heroin, well, yet. (We can thank Lorelei’s boyfriend for the need for this clarification 😂).

This letter is a guest post by @hatpinwoman, written in response to the House of Common’s Briefing Paper ‘Gender Recognition and the Rights of Transgender People,’ published yesterday, July 16 2020.

 

———————————————

 

To whom it may concern at the House of Commons,

I am writing to you in response to the recently published commons briefing paper entitled “Gender Recognition And The Rights of Transgender People”. It contains both crucial factual errors and statements the veracity of which have not been ascertained.

In order of appearance in the document the points that are contentious are:

i) The documents states that the term transsexual is a “predominantly historical term”. A significant minority within the transgender community continue to call themselves and consider themselves to be transsexual as they have always done. The discarding of the term seems to be extremely premature.

As an especially vulnerable group of people who have a medical diagnosis and follow a path of full or near full transition, their needs and requirements may be considered to be potentially very different to a much larger group who do not have full (or even sometimes any) medical interventions.

ii) The idea that the term acquired gender should be replaced with the term affirmed gender is surely ideological rather than a matter of the law. It is in line with the language used in current models of care which suggest affirmation rather than the more traditional watchful waiting is the correct medical response to patients presenting with dysphoria and a desire for transition.

The replacing of the watchful waiting approach is contentious among some clinicians in the field, and potentially opens the medical profession up to a situation where many patients will be harmed because gender dysphoria is not synonymous with a need to transition. There are, in fact, many reasons why a person might experience dysphoria and many outcomes for such patients. Transition being of benefit to some of them but not all.

The language of “affirmed gender” is a less robust term for the law to use when “affirmed” is so much more wishy-washy than acquired, and it also seems to endorse one specific way of responding to patients with dysphoria. This is surely beyond the remit of Parliament.

iii) The statement from a quote by Transgender Equality that “each of us is assigned a sex at birth” is completely untrue. Our sex is observed and recorded. It is not a random designation, nor is it a rough guess. For the vast majority of people sex is entirely unambiguous. This holds true in Transgender people who are not substantially more likely to have DSDs than the rest of the population. (DSDs are differences, or disorders, of sexual development. Colloquially people may use the term intersex).

We know this because the medical profession has done some research that involves karyotyping patients. Some have found a higher incidence of conditions like Klinefelters syndrome (in which sex would not be ambiguous), others have found no statistically significant difference between incidence of DSDs in trans and non trans people. The consensus thus far is that because the results were consistent enough with the rest of the population it is of limited or even no use in evaluation, diagnosis and treatment.

In outlier cases where it might be of value the largest study I can find on this, to date, states that “patients with DSDs will typically have other clinical or hormonal signs that would point to a DSD diagnosis” (Inoubli et al)

“Assigned sex at birth” is language specifically taken from a small number within the minority of those who have DSDs and it is used in the rare cases where sex does have to be assigned. It seems wrong to take useful language away from a small group of people and generalise it, in a way that makes no sense, to the rest of the population.

iv) The statement , also from transgender equality, that “Trans identity can be “non-binary” in character, located at a (fixed or variable) point along a continuum between male and female; or “non-gendered”, i.e. involving identification as neither” also raises questions about where these fixed or variable points are, how they are measured and what it means to identity as less or more male or female given that the body is clearly one or the other. It seems that Sex and Gender are conflated here which is wrong.

v) the statement “gender dysphoria is not related to sexual orientation” is a highly disputable assertion given that the vast majority of children and young people who develop dysphoria in childhood will not grow up to be trans, but to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

Additionally current concerns raised by some clinicians at the children’s gender service, GIDS, that gay and lesbian adolescents are being inadvertently transitioned suggest that sexuality is a fundamental consideration when dealing with dysphoria.

Further, clinicians such as Kenneth Zucker, a world renowned expert, notes that “sexual orientation is associated with meaningful differences among GD adolescents and adults”

vi) The statement was made in the report that “Gender Dysphoria is not in itself a mental health condition”. This is concerning.

Gender Dysphoria still appears in DSM-5 which is the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The American Psychiatric Association, who are responsible for publishing the DSM, also state that:

“It is important to note that gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition.”

The assertion that gender dysphoria is not a mental health condition stands to undermine mental health resources for patients, push them towards the singular treatment of transition which is not always appropriate and even potentially fail to offer them treatment at all.

vii) The assertion that puberty blockers are a “physically reversible intervention” is still in contention given that we do not know the long term effects. How can one assert something is reversible if we do not know the full consequences of a treatment yet? All we can state is that puberty resumes in patients. This does not make it fully reversible unless we can ascertain that their bones, brains, pituitary gland functioning and cognitive abilities are unaffected.

viii) The section about the safeguarding of children (and young people) undergoing treatment for gender dysphoria fails to mention ongoing concerns raised by the staff of GIDS about the standard of care these children are receiving. These concerns have been detailed, for example, in The Times and by the BBC. It is not helpful for MPs to be unaware of this issue.

ix) Where it talks of conversion therapies the report says

“The NHS does “not deliver, promote or refer individuals to any form of conversion therapy.” Conversion therapy is an umbrella term used in relation to:

 …a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of gender identity on that basis.”

 This is misleading in its glossing over of things. Conversion therapy is indeed a harmful and heinous practice. Traditionally used to attempt to convert homosexual people to being heterosexual, it was, and is, barbarous.

How this relates to gender identity is unclear. A watchful waiting approach that addresses other issues the patient is experiencing and attempts to ameloriate those is not conversion therapy. It is simply treatment.

Affirmation in a sense is the absence of treatment because it presupposes an outcome: that a patient is trans. The idea that an innate gender identity is responsible for the symptoms in all cases, rather than the symptoms being potentially a product of a variety of things is objectively incorrect.

Any patient who is not trans and is only given affirmation is at risk of medical mistreatment. A growing number of detransitioners are now coming forward to tell their stories which suggests this is precisely what is already happening.

x) When discussing the protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment in the Equality Act, the report states the following about how gender reassignment is defined.

“A notable feature of this definition is that, unlike previous equality legislation, there is no need to be undergoing a medical process of transition. That is because the phrase “proposing to undergo” has a broad meaning.

 The point at which a person is deemed to be “proposing to undergo” was explained by the Solicitor General in 2009 during the Equality Bill’s consideration in committee:

 “proposing” suggests a more definite decision point, at which the person’s protected characteristic would immediately come into being. There are a lot of ways in which that can be manifested— for instance, by making their intention known. Even if they do not take a single further step, they will be protected straight away.

 Alternatively, a person might start to dress, or behave, like someone who is changing their gender or is living in an identity of the opposite sex. That, too, would mean that they were protected.”

I cannot speak to the accuracy of this interpretation but I do wonder at it. We have already seen cases, such as Karen White and Katie Dolatowski, where individuals have been predatory and look to be using transitioning as a cover for this.

We also know, for example, from prior research that there is a “small but concerning minority” of people who will try to transition to gain access to children because they are paedophiles. (Gender Reassignment: 5 years of referrals in Oxfordshire).

The interpretation of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic as explained by the solicitor general does not incidentally or accidentally give these people the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It seems explicitly to allow them such. A person who dresses or behaves “like someone who is changing their gender” is not someone who, in fact, is necessarily changing their gender.

xi) When discussing single sex exemptions that allow for provision of single sex services and spaces for women the report asserts

“Under the genuine occupational requirement provisions, an employer may impose a “requirement not to be a transsexual person”. The Act’s Explanatory Notes provide the following example:

 A counsellor working with victims of rape might have to be a woman and not a transsexual person, even if she has a Gender Recognition Certificate, in order to avoid causing them further distress.

 As with the Explanatory Notes’ description of the services exception (see above), legal commentators argue this example inadequately describes the duties on employers:

 There are very real concerns that such guidance is too categorical and fails to emphasize the lengths an employer …would need to go to in order to demonstrate proportionality as an adequate defence to discrimination.”

This seems to set the bar one is required to meet to offer women single sex services impossibly high. It is not enough, apparently, for common sense and humanity to women to prevail and to consequently allow them to have single sex provisions.

Instead it must be such a hoop for an employer to jump through that one wonders if they would risk doing so.

Yet, many women very much require sex based rights both because being a member of the female sex remains a distinct physical and social experience, and because the group of people most likely to be violent towards them are male.

The fact that it is even in dispute that women might automatically expect their rape service providers will be female (or as per the previous example cited that their female counselling groups will be female only) is astonishing.

No one, except the most churlish among us, would begrudge trans people specific and exclusive resources and particularly when they are at their most vulnerable. One has to wonder why it is the case that women must be expected to forego a similar level of compassion and accommodation. It is unlikely when the bar for justification of these needs is set so high that service providers will feel comfortable insisting on providing female only provisions.

Given that this is already notably the case, the interpretation of the single sex exemptions must be more concrete, more intuitive and more decent towards the female sex.

xii) With regards to the spousal veto, the women and equalities committee has, to its credit, apparently spoken to the trans community about their thoughts on this. What it doesn’t appear to have done is also spoken to the (mainly) women who will be affected by the removal of the spousal veto. This is an oversight when the veto is something that both parties have a vested interest in.

xiii) The statement made that “Some argue that biological sex differences are immutable” is somewhat confounding. This seems to imply that there is some kind of reasonable argument that they are mutable, but biological sex cannot be changed and this is surely the foundational point of understanding for this whole debate. Trans people really cannot exist within the law, or transition in any meaningful way, if biological sex is not a concrete thing. Nor can women expect single sex exemptions to have any meaning at all.

xiv) The section entitled “the self identification debate” has a good attempt at covering the issue of the ongoing disagreements between groups, but really wouldn’t inform someone outside of the debate of the tenor of behaviour women have been on the receiving end of.

I personally speak anonymously on this issue because I was threatened with violence, told I would be executed with a guillotine, socially ostracised, and my friends were told they must disown me, for raising issues on this subject. In a manner no more offensive than the one I am writing with here. I have been relatively lucky in terms of the kind of campaign of terror I have received.

The level of rape threats, death threats, letters to employers, attempts at public denigration and shaming, and the misogynistic hostility women have faced while trying to talk about changes in law that concern them, too, has been unacceptable in a democracy. It is not only trolls and internet ruffians who have engaged in this behaviour, either.

Calling women “terfs” and intimidating, maligning and dismissing them on that basis has been horrifyingly widespread. So has the constant impugning of their character to assume that their motivations must necessarily be hateful.

Thank you for your time in reading my response,

Yours sincerely,

Lorelei

 

Ahead of the discussion on The Moral Maze tonight I did a little digging around into the people who will be representing the TRA position. Up against Graham and Kiri will be Jane Fae and Torr Robinson, a person with they/them pronouns who is the Trans Officer for London Young Labour and one of the founders of the recent pledge defaming Woman’s Place and calling for us to be expelled from the Labour Party.

Torr recently wrote this piece for Tribune Mag which fills out the background thinking behind the pledge rather nicely, so I thought I’d have a little look at it. (At this point I’m also going to add, I’m looking at this because it’s BATSHIT, and because the pledge has caused a SHIT-TON of conflict, and because Torr is going to be on the radio this evening as a result of all this brouhaha. At the same time I also want to say, this person is really fucking young, and it’s a not insignificant part of this absolute mess that the people who are responsible for making our laws and should really know better are being buffeted around by extreme political forces summoned by people who should blatantly not have this kind of influence, especially when they write hyperbolic fact-free nonsense like this.)

Anyway, time is short, so I did some scribbling, which I thought I’d pull together into a few general points:

1. The piece is called For Trans Liberation, and this idea is summoned throughout. There is, however, no specification about what Torr is calling for liberation from, or what the specific demands for liberation are. If Torr is concerned with better access to heathcare, or education, or housing, then I’m sure that’s something we can get behind (with the obvious caveat about the ethics of medicalising teenagers). However, of course, the overwhelming majority of the piece is about the fight against transphobia, and it would seem therefore that the overall thrust is about ‘liberation from transphobia.’ (In this it mimics one of our most common observations about the TRM. Why have you not devoted your considerable resources and organisational power to pushing for the material resources that you need, rather than going all in on trying to politically abolish sex and bullying the many women who object? Answer: Because ‘Trans Liberation’ isn’t actually ‘Trans Liberation.’ It’s ‘Trans Validation.’ And what ‘Trans Validation’ demands is that we all collude with you that sex does not exist.)

2. As is usual in this debate, transphobia is NEVER given a coherent definition here. In the standfirst we hear talk of amorphous ‘transphobic forces’ – which is not at all dehumanising, given that what Torr means is us, a group of feminist women and their allies. Throughout the piece Torr uses pathologizing language to characterise this transphobia. It is ‘incubated’ (p.2) and it ‘infects,’ (p.6) it is “poisoning the well of British culture (p.2)” [Hey left wing people, what does this kind of language remind you of???]…although they never tell us what it is, despite claiming that the path ‘Towards a Trans Future’ (not at all bombastic), requires “free night schools and accessible literature about what transphobia is (p.6).” (YES TORR. BUT WHAT IS IT???). At this point what I’m going to say of course is that all Torr means by ‘transphobia’ is ‘the belief that humans are sexed and that sex is politically important.’ But of course, Torr’s not actually going to come out and say that, because it sounds bonkers, because it is.

3. Which brings us to the fact that what is entirely refused here is that Torr’s talking about a conflict between the political demands of the Trans Rights Movement and women, who have had the temerity to organise against the threat to our rights stemming from the fact that the ideology of the TRM is sex denialist, and is seeking to legally and political erase sex. It is extremely notable that the word ‘woman’ or ‘women’ occurs only three times in the entire six pages. Twice when Torr is forced to use it in order to defame Woman’s Place as a hate-group, and once when they use it in order to outline why the fight for trans liberation demands combatting “lies like the notion that women’s rights and trans rights are in opposition (p.6).” (Maybe if you want us to believe that you’re not in the business of erasing us, it might be an idea to actually mention us as if we were humans and try to honestly outline our position eh Torr?) By contrast, Torr’s chosen vocabulary to name ‘uppity feminist women, their allies and their heretical beliefs about the existence of sex’ is much more frequent. ‘Transphobes’ get 11 mentions, and the amorphous polluting force of ‘transphobia’ comes in at a whopping 18 mentions. So yeah, not erasing or dehumanising women at all there then.

4. On the matter of ‘representing the views of the evil amorphous transphobic hordes’ we get the usual lies and hyperbole. There is an “endemic tide of hatred (p.1)”, we are heading a “counter-campaign of bigotry (p.1),” we believe that “trans people are not deserving of rights,” and that they are “unnatural and abnormal (p.1).” Of course, no evidence or citations are ever provided for these claims. And there is, as suggested above, an absolute refusal to deal even remotely honestly with the substance of our position – that sex exists, that female people are oppressed on the basis of sex, that male people are a statistical threat to female people, and that the demand that society be entirely reorganised on the pretence that sex does not exist represents a significant harm to female people, children, homosexuals and the entire fabric of fucking reality. The closest Torr gets to something approaching honesty is when they note that the left-wing opposition to trans ideology has got something to do with the fact that, um, socialists are supposed to be materialists. But this substantive objection is weakly handwaved away by asserting that our materialism is ‘reductive’ because we allegedly think humans are just “chemical processes (p.2)” (um yeah no, but I’m not sure you want to be lecturing us about obsessions with prescription human chemicals), or because our materialism fails to “account for the material social order. (p.2)” (TORR, IT’S CALLED PATRIARCHY. YOU MIGHT HAVE HEARD OF IT????) Anyway, this glancing moment of almost-truth is rapidly forgotten, and by the next paragraph we’re all a bunch of ‘centrist liberals’ engaged in the “intellectualised and respectable brand (p.2)” of transphobia ‘incubated’ by The NS and The Guardian (what has little OJ been up to?)

5. ‘The Roadmap to Trans Liberation’ that Torr advances to counter the transphobic hordes involves the prescription that ‘trans power’ should create “structures and organisations (p.4)” to advance their interests. This is the point where the extent of leave-taking from reality just starts to get silly. Torr, dear, your political movement is being advanced by the most staggeringly well-organised and funded set of institutions and mechanisms any purported civil rights movement has ever seen. Stonewall. Gendered Intelligence. GIRES. Press For Change. Scottish Trans Alliance. TELI. Engender. Mermaids. Most of whom are funded by the government and the lottery. I could go on and on. And that’s before we even get to all the Big Business that supported the GRA reform campaign. Or the fact that almost the entirety of civil society (The NHS. All the universities. The Army, Navy and MI5 and 6) have all signed up for those lovely Stonewall Diversity gongs and put in place policies determined in line with your vision of a world without sex. If you haven’t organised yet, what the actual living fuck will it look like when you do organise????

6. Which brings us to the final salvo of ‘BURN THE WITCHES.’ In order to “change the course of the future of this country (p.5)” and “avoid the coming catastrophe for trans people (p.6)” (which is what, exactly?) the Labour Party must “organise to remove transphobes [women] and transphobia [people who believe in sex-based rights] throughout the party (p.6).” The LP has failed trans people because “transphobes [women] have been able to organise freely throughout the party (p4).” (Women, being allowed to organise, freely, in a democratic political party, to express their political interests, FOR SHAME). Moreover, the Party included the pledge to “preserve ‘single-sex spaces’ (p.4)” in the 2019 Manifesto. (Yes Torr, they’re in the Equality Act, you don’t want to mess with women’s rights as given in the Equality Act do you?)…even though, Torr tells us, according to the Law Decreed by Stonewall (who are not a Trans Rights organisation you understand because none of those exist), women’s single sex spaces are “meaningless legally (p.4)” because they’re entirely accessible to people with GRCs anyway… (What were you saying about us having to accept that there’s no material conflict between your interests and ours again??).

At this point, as we’ve seen playing out over the last week, the whole thing collapses into pure totalitarianism. There’s all the fluffy Maoist talk about developing “education for the rank-and-file” in order to produce “awareness and affinity towards our movement (p.6)” (and what, pray tell, will happen to those of us who don’t ‘respond to education’???) I have to say, this scares the absolute crap out of me. Not because I think they’re really going to cart us all off to a re-education camp (although I’d like to see them try to explain the Genderbread Person while we pepper them with questions about why they’re forcing this sexist bullshit down our throats and whether they’ve considered the analogues between the transcendence of gendered souls and The Resurrection). But because I want to know what has happened to the brains of our young people that they think this kind of wanton authoritarianism is even remotely acceptable in a democracy. And I want to know why, after the most disastrous election in nearly two generations, they think this was a good moment to get the Labour Party to engage in gratuitous acts of self-immolation in full public view. Listen Torr, we are not going to let you bully us into complying with our own political annihilation. If you have the actual brass neck to start waxing on about the ‘arc of justice’ you need to understand this. Justice was never achieved by refusing recognition to any group of persons and their interests. It was never achieved by dehumanizing them as a faceless pathogenic force. And it was never ever achieved by fantasising about exiling and erasing them, by imagining you can purify yourself of an evil you have yourself constructed. LOOK US IN THE FACE TORR. WE ARE WOMEN. WE ARE PEOPLE. AND YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO TALK TO US.

Yesterday Kathleen suggested that, rather than making endless dark subtweets about what an evil toxic force we are, Alison Phipps actually tried talking to us like human beings and engage in debate about the ideas at the heart of this conflict.

Of course, that offer was refused. On the grounds that “’Reasonable debate’ cannot counter unreasonable ideas.’ Which is both convenient, and, if taken at face value, a pretty staggering statement from someone who is supposedly in the business of dealing with ideas. If taken at face value, ‘unreasonable’ here would mean something like ‘lacking in reasoned argument,’ or ‘not capable of being justified with compelling reasons.’ Maybe this is what Phipps means, but if so, she would have to, y’know, actually demonstrate that the many reasons we have given for our position are not, in fact, reasonable. Which would, indeed, be the entire point of asking her to intellectually engage with us, rather than just doing an endless ‘tut and move away’ manoeuvre. We have, over the course of the last years, written a decent pile of blog posts and essays and academic papers and twitter threads, explaining the basis of our objections to the ideology of the present form of the Trans Rights Movement, and the effect we think it will have on women and girls. We have received nothing by way of substantive critique which deals directly with those objections, even though we wrote a handy little guide basically asking for it, all of which leaves the distinct impression that advocates of the Trans Rights position don’t actually have a substantive response to our objections. If our position was actually ‘unreasonable’ in the first and most conventional sense, then engaging in reasoned debate with us would be exactly the way of demonstrating that. Of course, we’re going to conclude from Phipps’ swerve that she knows full well that she can’t answer our reasoned objections, and no surprises there – this absolute refusal to deal with the substance of the issue has been the core political tactic of the TRM from the start, and it’s because, simply, they can’t deal with reasoned objections. What they can, and have done, inveterately, instead, is weave a web of analogical relations to explain why we’re evil, why everything we say is evil, and why they don’t have to engage with us or anything we ever say because we’re SO. DAMN. EVIL.

This is actually what Phipps is saying when she calls us ‘unreasonable.’ It can’t be a (potentially) demonstrable claim about our position ‘lacking reasoned argument’ because if it were, the claim that ‘reasonable debate cannot defeat unreasonable ideas’ would make no sense. What it is, rather, I’d suggest, is a moral claim – a claim that we and our ideas are so morally delinquent that we can, and should, be excluded from the community of legitimate speaking subjects. (For a particularly piquant example of this move, here’s the bit where a bunch of our colleagues compared three lesbians to holocaust deniers and people advocating for the corrective rape of lesbians). For a group of people so profoundly concerned with questions of recognition, validation, and the harms of dehumanisation and exclusion, it is marked how absolute and implacable the TR position is when it comes to refusing anyone who questions their ideology or political agenda the merest hint of basic recognition. We are never to be taken as good actors who have genuinely motivated concerns or objections grounded in our own political analysis of the world. We will not be interpreted or understood in anything resembling our own terms, but are, instead, a venomous horde of boogeywomen summoned by the projections of our opponents. Feminism has a term for fashioning groups of people out of your own projections and flattening them into an undifferentiated dark morass that lacks individuated or interior life. We call it othering.

(more…)