- Protection from unreasonable discrimination … In earlier versions of this post I spoke of ‘protection from violent attack’ but this is too narrow. As for my ‘unreasonable’ qualifier, some discriminations, like denying me entry to women-only spaces, strike me as entirely reasonable.
- No corollary right … If trans women feel – or indeed are – unsafe in men-only spaces, prisons in particular, the solution is not to place them in women-only spaces. See, in my exchanges with Johny Conspiranoid in the comments below, my reference to Thai high school students.
- I was an early fan of thinkers, notably Michel Foucault, we now call postmodernist. By the late eighties I’d concluded that the insights were eclipsed by the idiocies. I recall reading, circa 1990, a writer castigating Left academia for embracing its superficially progressive ideas. If we abandon axioms of an external reality – in principle if not always in practice accessible to our senses – all we are left with is ‘narrative’. And as this writer – name long forgotten – warned with uncanny prescience, the Right does ‘narrative’ better than the Left.
- My pretty hard science link speaks of a ‘difference … between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorised as either male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and are neither a third sex nor proof of sex as a ‘spectrum’ or ‘social construct.’ Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex in order for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise—to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself—is a category error.’ And as feminist blogger Contrarian Quinn argues – Everybody Knows What a Woman is, Including Trans Activists – ‘even if you accept that intersex people disprove binary sex (they don’t) and sex is socially constructed (it’s not) at best that would lead you to conclude there’s actually no such thing as a “woman”. This is not the conclusion trans activists want you to reach. They do think there’s such a thing as a “woman” and are saying it’s what trans women are.’
Why I bang on about the trans thing
8
Jun
Since I’m more at home calling out the lies on China, Russia and Syria – else laying bare those mechanisms which ensure we have no independent media, hence no true democracy – you might ask why I’m bothering with this “trannie” brouhaha.
I wouldn’t blame you. A year ago I’d have asked the same. Like many others I was slow to see what is happening. Precisely because of the issue’s prima facie absurdity, I failed to appreciate the dangers.
This post is by way of setting out what I believe those dangers to be. It originated in a reply to a comment on my previous post: Transphobia? It’s time the woke woke up! Before wrapping up that post I quoted a Scottish blogger, Gordon Dangerfield:
This elicited a comment by Dave Hansell:
What follows is my reply to Dave. It expresses in their fullest form to date my still evolving views.
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Yes. And Blair was an early sign of that approach’s embrace by a “New” Labour hostile to all talk of class: of the divide between those whose income derives from their ever tightening monopoly ownership of the means of producing wealth, and those obliged to sell their labour power (white collar or blue) on markets our media speak of in meteorological metaphors, as things beyond human agency.
Labour – from its inception ambivalent about class, but once distinguishable from other social democratic parties within the West through its organic ties with trade unions – seeks to fill its ideological vacuity through identity politics pursued as if the social exclusion of black people, women, gays, the disabled – and, yes, transgenders – were simply the products of backward thinking.
As such they are to be corrected by moral education, and “hate crime” laws certain to come in handy when, as we who study the economic realities of an imperialised world say is inevitable, class rule even in the West adopts more authoritarian forms. Such legislation will be tested in arenas of least resistance. As I said months ago, in a footnote to a post on pandemic:
In contrast to such idealism, those who take the oppressions of identity to flow – in ways direct and obvious, or complex and dialectical – from the requirements of class rule draw the wrath of the Keir Starmers of this world, whose name is legion. Take the notion, widely held in the liberal intelligentsia (though some have the decency to be embarrassed about it), that racism is rooted in the uneducated mindsets of the deplorables. Not, mark you, in a historic need to legitimate colonial larceny, slave trade, “settling” of North America and the Antipodes, and so much else.
And the plunder continues in new forms as well as old. As Caitlin Johnstone recently put it:
I use this a lot. It gets more right than wrong, but fails to differentiate America from its ruling class. Tens of millions of US citizens live in third world conditions: below the poverty line, and ill served by criminal justice and medicare systems.
But back to the trans issue. I say, as I’m sure you do, that ‘men identifying as women’ have an inalienable right which – pace Pastor Martin Niemöller – we deny at our peril. That right is to protection from unreasonable discrimination,1 but it implies no corollary right2 to access cis-women’s changing rooms, refuges or prisons; nor to compete in cis-women’s sporting events …
… I see it as a sign of postmodern lunacy3 that we even need the term, ‘cis-women’ …
… nor to protection from having their feelings hurt by we who claim on the back of some pretty hard science that sex is binary and biological.4 But whatever the intrinsic merits or otherwise of the belief, by no means held by all transgenders, that sex is a spectrum – and being a woman a matter of ‘identifying’ as one – the blitzkreig gains of ‘sex as a matter of identity’ should sound alarm bells for these reasons:
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