Have they thought it through?
A guy called Will Roberts has written a post disputing the article by Sophie Allen, Jane Clare Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, Mary Leng, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, and Kathleen Stock on bad arguments against gender critical feminism. The first item snagged my attention.
Section one: fallacious arguments
- ‘Your position has been historically associated with far right-wing thought, and hence fails’.
The authors write: “Associating our intellectual position with a far right-wing one, because some far right-wing thinkers would agree with us in some of our conclusions, and insinuating that our position is all the worse because of it, is an ad hominem. Ad hominems are widely recognised as inappropriate in philosophy.”
Political arguments are different from purely philosophical arguments. The fact that one group of political advocates makes the same, or similar, arguments as another – politically dangerous and loathsome – group is not irrelevant to the political assessment of those arguments. It is true that “the fact that person shares a conclusion with a far right-wing person could never show, on its own, that the conclusion was false.” However, when people claim “that women, by definition, are adult human females,” and conclude, on this basis, that “no trans woman is correctly categorised as a woman,” this is not like happening to agree with a far right wing person about what day of the week it is.
The “gender critical” position is a reactionary political position – in the sense that it is a “backlash” position, reacting to trans people’s progress towards social and political liberation…
That last bit is what snagged my attention. The trans movement, or the gender uncritical position, is not about social and political liberation. It’s about universal compelled agreement that people can change sex (and gender) by self-declaration. It’s not about wanting the same rights everyone else has, it’s about wanting new, peculiar rights, that are in tension with existing rights that other people have. Its fans want it to be like the previous liberation movements, but it isn’t. Roberts doesn’t get to make it that just by saying the words.
Isn’t this where we came in?
There’s a choice bit later on that Jane Clare Jones pointed out on Twitter, which must not be missed.
But, the authors assure us, the “gender critical” position is not “that trans women don’t have full moral personhood. We emphatically and repeatedly assert that they do, emphasising their full human rights.” “The question is not whether they are human,” the authors continue, “but whether they are female, and on the basis of being female should be able to access spaces designed to protect the comparatively greater vulnerability of female people.” “No one thinks a man is denied his full and equal humanity merely because women-only spaces exist, and the same reasoning applies to trans women. Not giving people everything that they desire is not a denial of their humanity.”
Wow. I don’t think the authors have thought through what having your full and equal humanity denied might actually look like.
Emphasis added. This is a man, disputing an article by several women.
You couldn’t make it up.
What an absolute idiot. A man is not “full and equally human” unless he’s allowed to do and assert whatever he wants without encountering criticism?
Jesus, and some people still deny that the trans movement is not a Mens Rights movement.
Gender-critical feminists: We aren’t denying trans people their full humanity.
Will Roberts: There they go again, denying trans people their full humanity.
Knew this reversal was coming. The line “I’m not racist, but…” is a well known trope, in which the sensible denial is then reversed or undercut by what follows. This author perhaps doesn’t even realise they are following this well-trod path, yet the classic pattern is all there.
Let’s lay something out regarding word meanings of the vernacular or natural language. Dictionaries do not define words in the sense that they lay out what the meaning must or ought to be, they describe the common use(s) of the word. Dictionaries describe, they do not prescribe.
Which means the sentence “women, by definition, are adult human females” is a description of how the word is used (even if I might quibble with the phrasing). The meaning ‘adult human female’ is the most reasonable definition of the word, because that is what is most commonly being conveyed by the speaker.
The gender critical position is older than the gender uncritical position, and therefore cannot possibly be considered a reaction to it.
Actually, this could be an admission that trans ideology is hearkening back to an earlier period, a period when “men were men and women were women” – a phrase my dad was (and probably still is) fond of, a golden yesterday when men got to tell women what to do and women had to do it, and they had to vacuum in pearls and high heels while keeping a smile plastered on their face at all times.
The old fashioned view of what makes someone a man or a woman appears to be driving the bulk of trans thought, so technically, it is older than the gender critical position, and the gender critical position was a push against the things we’re seeing now. But instead of reactionary, it was radical. It is those that come and try to push back in a backlash that are reactionaries, so the trans activists and allies – the woke – are the ones that are reactionary, because they are trying to push gender back into two neat boxes. The only difference is they want to add all sorts of other boxes, too, but they definitely want to keep those two distinctly labeled “man” and “woman” boxes to shove people into based on performative gender – or on whether they like that person’s ideas or not. They also want to add a new box – TERF – in which they can put anyone that is gender critical, so they can set it on fire (a grease fire, of course).
It’s also not like happening to agree with a far right person that black people are inferior or Hitler-had-the-right-idea.
It’s more like happening to agree with a far right wing person that cats are not dogs.