Call the editorial department
This op-ed about women who resist some items of trans ideology doesn’t begin well:
Last week, two British women stormed onto Capitol Hill in Washington for the purposes of ambushing Sarah McBride, the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.
“Stormed”? Load the dice much? A decent editor would have edited that out. Nobody stormed; they simply went there. They’re allowed to do that. Poisoning the well six words in is just childish, and clumsy.
Ms. McBride, a trans woman, had just been part of a meeting between the Parents for Transgender Equality National Council and members of Congress when the Britons — Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who goes by the name Posie Parker, and Julia Long — barged in. Heckling and misgendering Ms. McBride, the two inveighed against her supposed “hatred of lesbians” and accused her of championing “the rights of men to access women in women’s prison.”
Ms. Parker, who live-streamed footage of the harassment on Facebook, contended that she had come to Washington because “this ideology” — by which she presumably meant simply being trans — “has been imported into the U.K. by America, so, to stem the flow of female erasure, we have to come to its source.”
No, she didn’t mean “simply being trans.” She meant the ideology: the substantive claims about reality that the movement makes and attempts to enforce with ever-increasing venom and threats of violence.
Sophie Lewis goes on to explain that what she calls “anti-trans lobbying” is more of a thing in the UK than in the US.
Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast “Feminist Current” that she’d changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: “Mumsnet is to British transphobia,” she wrote “what 4Chan is to American fascism.”
Say what? If we don’t know that Mumsnet is evil, consider the words of this random person who says Mumsnet is evil? What kind of argument is that? Where was the editor when this piece got the green light?
It doesn’t get any less stupid as it goes on; why the Times thought this was worth publishing is beyond me. Maybe they have a program for trans-writers (not writers who are trans, but people who Identify As writers without being able to write), and Sophie Lewis is their first winner. Check out this elegant paragraph for instance:
In America, however, TERFism today is a scattered community in its death throes, mourning the loss of its last spaces, like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which ended in 2015. And so the strangely virulent form that TERFism takes in Britain today, and its influence within the British establishment, requires its own separate, and multipronged, explanation.
“And so” – nifty.
Then there’s a random paragraph about skepticism, then another grinding change of gears.
It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)
Oh yes, there was no heterosexuality and no gender binary in India before the colonizers arrived, and that’s why there were no people either.
Simply call something colonial and empire, and you don’t have to do the work to prove it’s bad (or that it’s colonial or empire). Words are magic.
Who knew that western empires invented sexism? patriarchy? homophobia? So all I had to do to be respected for my talents while being woman was get born into an ancient culture in the East? If born in 3rd century India, I’d have had all the opportunities my brothers had?
I guess if I were born in Palestine during the pre-Jesus period, I’d have been great, too? Because that was pre-western colonialism, right? And they so respected women…they would never have written anything in their holy books about women being unclean, or lying with another man as with a woman being an abomination.
And as for biological realities, I am totally sick of the scare quotes. These are creationist tactics, and I’m not done dealing with them, yet, since they are still very busy challenging my right to teach evolution. Now I suppose teaching that a Y chromosome leads to male sexual characteristics is probably verboten, too? Even though I do address the “biological reality” of intersex?
Oh, ZING!
Just an aside: Op-Ed pieces at newspapers are not generally edited for tone or bias–there’s pretty much an expectation of bias in any given piece. Now, ideally, the NYT would also have a piece up from a feminist who is not on board with trans ideology, or a rebuttal piece talking about the issues you raise with the wording and language.
As for why the NYT decided to publish the piece at all, well, the final paragraph of the piece has a big clue:
Like it or not, Ms Parker couldn’t have done any better job of associating ‘TERF’ with “right-wing ideology’ if she’d been wearing a swastika. And it won’t just be the NYT who will see it that way; I can guarantee the HF and other neo-con houses of ill-repute were utterly delighted to find a possible wedge issue they could use.
(Source for the bit about op-eds: I worked at a newspaper for nearly 3 decades. I’m reasonably familiar with the back-channel processes. You submit a piece, and they either run it or don’t. At most, they edit for length.)
No I’m not talking about editing for tone or bias, I’m talking about editing and rejecting for basic competence in writing and arguing…or, if you like, for basic intelligence. This piece is almost Trump-level bad. That bit about “explaining” how Mumsnet is bad by quoting some random person saying “Hey they’re bad!!” should have been a massive red flag.
Apologies for the off-topic post, but this writer seems to be a bit, well, whackadoodle. Her book on surrogacy for sale on Amazon (Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family) is pretty off-rather than a class analysis of surrogacy it seems to argue for using surrogacy as a means to dismantle familial/kinship ties and make child-rearing collective. Her article at Verso (Gestators of all Genders Unite) elaborates on this in between the nonsense language, and shows that that ultimately she seems to mostly care about the ability of trans people (read, male trans people) to have kids through futurist-technological or old-fashioned surrogate means. Pregnancy is very hard work you see, and people who don’t want to work deserve to have kids regardless (note-kids are the ‘products of gestation’ in this framework-yuck). It’s all very dehumanizing-surrogates are still just a resource on the road to gender utopia for her, it seems.
She’s also an advocate for whatever ‘cyborg ecology’ is, which from a quick perusal seems like a bridge too far in using technology to manage ecosystems (technology inserted into the ecosystems to augment natural processes rather than monitor them). I’m no ecologist, though-perhaps scientists on this board know more?
That’s not off-topic, it’s very on. I saw that she’d written that but couldn’t bring myself to look into it because she’s so annoying, so thank you! And ffs…
This biologist’s take is that we’re in our infancy learning about nature. For instance, it’s only been a few years since we’ve noticed that quantum effects are essential to the functioning of photosynthesis. How, exactly, we don’t even know.
If you tried to inject superintelligent nanoscale microinjectable networked AI (yes, I made that up) into biology at any scale, biomolecules up to whole ecologies, you’d just have yet another cock-up on your hands. (Yes, I’m using that British term on purpose.)
Well, I pointed out what I suspect was the motivating force in selecting the article for publication at all. By publicly staking out a cordial relationship with the Heritage Foundation, Parker pretty much said she was fine with cozying up to the neo-cons if she thought they’d be useful allies. In the current state of American politics, for the NYT, this was basically enough to establish Parker as part of The Enemy. I’m sure that ninetynine percent of Parker’s positions are ones that the Heritage folks would find abhorrent, and vice-versa. But that’s how wedge issues work.
I’m not saying this is a fair or accurate means to make a judgement–but I am saying that you have to have at least a minimal awareness of how you’re presenting yourself, especially when you’ve taken on a role of direct advocacy.
Let me put it this way–suppose she’d had a friendly sit-down with the Catholic archbishop, where they chatted about the need to reign in the trans-rights movement, instead? Would that even give you pause, not about your own views, but about Parker as a representative for women’s rights? There are issues, I’d submit, where the RCC is reasonably consistently on the progressive side of things–not many, but a few, and making alliances with them over those issues, like immigration, might make sense. But when it comes to sex and gender? Hell, no, even when they get it right, it’s the stopped clock scenario–they take the right position for the wrong reasons, and a temporary work-together only bolsters their belief in their reprehensible ideology.
I’d say that goes double for the Heritage Foundation, except that the clock somehow managed to stop at 13:72, and thus is not correct at any time of the day. Parker, by going there, did a dumb thing, and played into the extremists’ hands.
@Freemage #8.
I don’t envy the job radical feminist activists have in building coalitions. Few leftist organizations are willing to even acknowledge that certain issues, like porn or prostitution are even worth discussing. This might not be a good comparison, but it reminds me a little bit of leftist/libertarian similarities on privacy/gov. spying. The similarities on policy are largely coincidental, which makes meaningful cooperation difficult.
Feminism does not have Grand High Poobahs or Popes or Dear Leaders so if some feminists feel that transgenderism presents such a threat to women’s rights that forming alliances with right wing groups is the lesser of two evils, I am not going to give them grief. And Parker can certainly toss this back into the left’s face about how only the right wing orgs will allow lesbians and real women to speak about their rights on this issue. The rights and safety of women is a bigger issue to me than getting cookies from either the male run and male funded right wing OR the male run and male funded left wing. I don’t want to see right wing women and their kids harmed by policies that let all men have access to women’s spaces. If the only shield I can find to help shelter them is the one handed to me by a right winger, I will take and use it.
I mean, isn’t that sort of like the same problem that ex-Muslims and anti-Islamists have? They have few places to turn but the right, because the left is all touchy feely about Islam. So the only supporters those who wish to see women free of the hijab have are those who would like to free them from the hijab to shove them into a Christian kitchen.
The real shame is that no one on the left will touch these issues, and deal with them rationally. Because it is unlikely the right is willing to deal rationally, and making a deal with the devil may come with some clauses you regret once you get what you want.
Anyone who calls the existence of sex “supposed” and puts “biological reality” in scare quotes has no place in the New York Times Op-Ed section. You say it’s Trump-level bad, but I say it’s also Scientology-level batshit.
Jane Clare Jones has a righteous rant about this.
The whole thing is worth reading, but I particularly enjoyed the bit in response to
https://janeclarejones.com/2019/02/07/why-british-feminists-are-such-a-bunch-of-evil-witches/
I was going to say something along the lines of “we have a shield of rwnj filth” to protect us from this sort of thing in the US (for the most part) that they don’t have in the UK but swnow and iknklast beat me to it…
“TERFism Today” sounds like a magazine for TERFs. Probably comes free with the TERF on Sunday.
If we’re going to get all colonial, imperialistic, hegemonic, and appropriative, who is it that demands access women’s safe spaces? Who wants to be able to compete on women’s sports teams? Who wants to have their concerns “centered” within feminism? Why yes, what a coincidence, it’s the same side that twist their invasive demands into fighting “exclusionary” practices. Maybe this is a tactic that could be used to good effect by supporters of traditional Columbus Day celebrations. Columbus was valiantly, courageously fighting for the rights of white Europeans against the evil, exclusionary original inhabitants who wanted to keep TWO WHOLE CONTINENTS for their own evil, exclusive use! They were Terribly Unfair to Righteous Foreigners! BOO TURFS! YAY COLUMBUS!