Recognize
Lisa Nandy did an interview with the Guardian the other day. She sounds quite good in many ways. But…
We are meeting a couple of days after Harvey Weinstein received his guilty verdict in a New York courtroom. Nandy says she is appalled that there are women in the Labour party whose sexual harassment cases have still not been resolved years after they made complaints. “We’ve failed a lot of women over recent years,” she says. “It’s very reminiscent of what happened with antisemitism where there are a number of cases which quite simply haven’t been dealt with. It gives the green light to people who harass women to believe they can find a home in the Labour party.” She says she would allow a committee of women to determine what harassment is, introduce an independent complaints process, and robust protections for whistleblowers. Aiming fire at Jeremy Corbyn she says: “There cannot be one rule for friends of the leader and another rule for others.”
Recently Nandy has landed herself in hot water with some feminists over her decision to sign, along with Long-Bailey, a pledge from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights that calls for the expulsion of members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”. It describes Women’s Place UK – which wants to protect single-sex spaces – as a “hate group”. Does she regret it? “No, I don’t. I care deeply about safe spaces for women. I know from personal experience there is a generation of women who fought very hard to create and protect safe spaces, that it matters. Where you have women who want to have a genuine debate about how better to protect them, it’s a very welcome debate. But that has to start with the recognition that trans men are men, trans women are women and that they exist.”
And if it doesn’t then that’s a “hate group.”
We have to start with “the recognition” of a lie, that men who think of themselves as women literally are women. We have to, and if we don’t, Lisa Nandy will call us a hate group.
Progressive movements of the past haven’t ordered people to “recognize” lies. They didn’t say workers were plutocrats, much less that plutocrats were workers. They didn’t order us to “recognize” that white people who want to be black actually are black. This is a new thing on earth, and it speaks of a truly deep contempt for women, so deep that women share it too.
And in fact, to say so is to get strongly dismissed as someone who doesn’t get it (and if you think white people can be black, you probably don’t get it, whether willfully or ignorantly). Why do we suspend that wisdom, that people cannot wish themselves into another group, for men who say they are women?
How can there be (what people actually mean by) single-sex spaces if “transwomen are women”?
@Ben;
It’s consistent if you classify transwomen with black women, disabled women, tall women, and horseback-riding women. They’re all the same sex.
It used to be “transwomen are the male sex, but the gender of ‘woman’.” Now it’s “sex isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum, and transwomen have as much right to be considered to be female as those assigned female at birth.”
“Sex is a spectrum”, “what about intersex people”, and ” human sexual development is complicated and can have a wide range of outcomes and expressions” are only trotted out to sow confusion.
A “spectrum” in which something like 99% of humans can be easily classified as one sex or the other, isn’t really very much of a “spectrum” is it? And those outside of these two groups do not produce some third sort of gamete.
The Venn diagram of trans identified people would, I imagine have much less overlap with “intersex” people than with regular, everyday, vanilla male and female humans, but being able to appropriate the “assigned (insert sex here) at birth” rhetorical device for trans communications is the primary goal of including them. I would also guess that the intersection of TIMs would be larger with AGP males than with intersex people, too.
Sure, human ebryological development is a complex process where sometimes things take a wrong turn, but the distribution of outcomes still results in most people being clearly, unambiguously male or female, including at least some who are “intersex”. The small numbers of individuals falling outside the usual developmental pathways does not invalidate the usefulness of the labels used to designate the two groups into which the vast majority can be clearly and unambiguously sorted. Children born with missing or malformed limbs does not prevent us from describing humans as bipedal tetrapods, and no activists for the disabled (or trans disabled) would get far demanding that we stop classifying humans as such.
But let’s be generous and grant all of that. It’s the confusion that does all the heavy lifting, not the facts used to confuse. Even if sex were an actual spectrum, even though there are intersex people, even if human sexual development is sometimes imperfectly realized, none of these things mean that one can change their sex.
YNNB:
Or that one’s sex is a matter of having certain feelings, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge.
YNNB:
The ‘answer’ to all that is as trite as you’d expect. Humans are more complicated than other things. We can recognise complex, interchangeable roles in society. Uniquely to us, sex has meaning beyond the purely biological. But while all this is being set earnestly forth, the fact that none of it means that feelings determine sex is forgotten. As you say, the confusion does the heavy lifting.
Yes! I didn’t think to look at it from the other direction. I’m glad both of you did.
I’m reasonably confident that queer theorists didn’t reference a lot of scientific literature in their gender/sex formulations and pronouncements. Did Foucault or Butler talk about clown fish? Having the current promoters of the end results of queer “theory” also brandishing as much cherry-picked science as will support their claims alongside the queer theory bits is kinda rich. Any ammunition that works, I guess.