Identity politics without the politics
Morning Star reports on the WPUK meeting on Saturday:
Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) know better than most how challenging it can be, simply being able to gather together to discuss women’s rights. Many of their meetings have suffered intimidation, threats of violence, even a bomb scare.
A group of around 30 protesters did make a brief appearance as delegates arrived, claiming that the organisers were trans-exclusionary.
How dare women gather to talk about women’s rights.
In the packed hall, Pragna Patel, co-founder of Southall Black Sisters, helped kick-start the day, telling the crowd: “What a hopeful moment in history we have reached as feminists — and I know you’re thinking ‘what is she talking about’?”
Her optimism sprang, she went on, “from the fact that, all over the world, women are leading an unmistakably secular resistance against tyranny, misogyny and oppression. There is a new kind of feminism stirring in the air … women are on the rise, demanding a new kind of feminist citizenship, based not on identity but political values.
“It is exciting because it feels different … waves of ordinary, marginalised and poor women are rising up to demand economic equality and justice, and to prevent their leaders from ripping up well-crafted constitutions born out of long and painful struggles for freedom.”
On the minus side, said Patel, “we haven’t yet found a way of getting rid of the cul-de-sac of identity politics [which] muzzles voices of dissent from within. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves sliding towards regressive politics, that reinvigorates patriarchy and inequality whilst appearing to be progressive.”
This is especially true, true x a million, when the “identity” in question is based on nothing but a feeling, and is deployed to appropriate the materially real identity of marginalized people, i.e. women.
Joanna Cherry, QC and SNP MP for Edinburgh South West, praised “the bravery of people at UCL in holding this conference — though it is ludicrous that it requires bravery.”
…
She expressed “sadness about the way in which the LGBT+ movement has become fragmented over a resistance to talking about the true meaning of equal rights.
“I really believe that women’s rights are human rights, and I strongly believe in equal rights for everyone, and of course that includes trans people. But it has never before been part of the movement for equal rights that one group’s trumps another’s.”
Naturally enough, since a movement for equal rights that claims one group’s rights trump another’s is not a movement for equal rights. Not treating Xs as inferiors does not take away anyone’s rights; there is no such right as the right to treat Xs as inferiors. It all hinges on how one defines rights.
Maya Forstater, who lost her job at a think tank after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity, said: “My mother’s generation found the words to talk about the unfairness between the way that men and women are treated in society.
But our daughters are being told that it is unkind and exclusionary to even state the material reality that women are female, that being a woman is not a feeling, that being a woman is not a costume; it is not something you can identify out of, or identify into.”
…
Journalist and campaigner Julie Bindel addressed particularly younger women at the event, “for whom things are hellish right now, but also full of possibilities.
…
This was not a revival per se, she said: “We have always had a women’s movement. But we’ve seen that, in the past couple of decades, young women who would describe themselves as feminists got dragged into the neoliberal politics of the individual, where they dismiss any necessity of collectivism, where they would not have it that focusing on ridiculous, meaningless identities would get them absolutely nowhere.
Identity politics, without the politics, is what we’ve got now.”
But did anyone think to consider the feelings and rights of the transotters? Huh? Huh? What about ME? ME? ME?
/s
TRA protests of women gathering to discuss their sex-based rights turn themselves into an instantiation of a subsection of Lewis’s Law:”Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.” Opposition to women acting in their own interest demonstrates the vital importance of them doing exactly that.
As we’re now seeing how ill-fitting the “T” is with LGB, I don’t see this “fragmentation” as a tragedy or cause for sadness at all. Given how TRAs are currently behaving, it was well-nigh inevitable. Also given how the T has ridden on the coatails of LGB rights, I can see how TRAs are resisting having to make their own way in the world without the benefit of the very real advance work that the gay rights movement made before the T gate-crashed the party. The T is an opportunistic, parasitic afterthought that is not really needed in the LGB movement. The T gets a lot more out of the association than LGB people do, and I think more LGB people are recognizing this. TRAs are acting like abusive spouses who refuse to go along with an amicable divorce settlement despite the existance of obvious, irreconcilable differences. They are jealously guarding the reflexive inclusion of the T in the LGB etc. formulation.
I am no longer inclined to include the T when it comes down to it; for the moment it would probably be political suicide for any potential candidates of progressive parties to not bend the knee to the T, but with any luck, as more people are peak transed, this might change. While TRAs might think that their misogynistic silencing tactics might be keeping people from hearing GC feminist arguments, they have no actual counter arguments, nothing but bullying and intimidation as a response, so silencing is their only option.
I’m a libertarian individualist myself, opposed to collectivism, so that puts me at odds with ideologues on multiple sides of these culture-war flaps.
Good for you!
https://xkcd.com/774/
Instead you get to wallow in your own ideology, and are as convinced of your rightness as any other ideologue. Got it.
It’s one of those strange verb tenses; I am principled, you are political, they are ideologues.
I wonder how these hyper individualistic types figure as they drive around, how roads get paved, cars built, cities constructed without any sort of “collectivism”? Hell, collectives are a lot older than any of those things I listed above. There’s a saying I read once, in connection with animal research: “One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee.” That is a member of a social species, kept in isolation from its kind, is deformed and incomplete, and not really the same being at all. Perhaps this is the same for humans?
Still, it’s a good that Dan can’t see how poorly my Mao suit fits over my Borg implants. If you’ll excuse me, this drone will now go into “DORMANT” mode here in its domicile cubicle until the next transmission from the Collective Central Hive Mind informs this drone what has been scheduled for it for the next temporal interval. All Power to the Collective Central!
You really aren’t, you know.
If you were, having raised yourself, you would now be living by yourself in some wilderness; in a shelter you built yourself, out of materials you gathered and created yourself, using tools you made from scratch, having never learned any skills whatsoever from anyone else; and eating only those flora and fauna you could gather from the immediate vicinity despite not knowing anything about what is edible and what isn’t.
But you are, instead, communicating with other people, using the inventions of other people; living in a shelter built by other people, out of materials gathered and created by other people, using tools made by other people, eating food artificially evolved, grown, and prepared by other people; having been raised and educated by other people.
By all means keep telling yourself that you are “a libertarian individualist myself, opposed to collectivism” if it makes you feel happy. Just don’t bother telling other people that over the internet; it makes you look very immature. Like a four-year-old threatening to leave home after a ticking-off.
*applause*