Sucked into the gender vortex
Janice Turner writes that Lisa Nandy brands herself as Labour’s truth teller:
Rational, grounded, fearless of factions, the only leadership candidate prepared to tackle the self-delusion and disconnect which lost four elections, she’d won many prospective votes, including mine. Until Tuesday, when Nandy signed up to a witch-hunt of thousands of (mainly female) party members, including me.
It’s that “expel the transphobic bigots” pledge, which Turner calls astonishingly totalitarian.
It not only demands signatories “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” but says anyone who disagrees is a bigot. It names Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups” whose supporters are transphobic and must therefore be expelled.
News flash: not wanting to surrender our rights to men who say they are women doesn’t make women “transphobic.”
I mention Nandy because although every leadership candidate except Sir Keir Starmer has now signed this pledge, she has doubled down. There are no spaces at all, she said on Radio 4’s Today programme, where male-bodied people should be excluded.
Maybe it’s not that gender critical women are transphobic but that gender not-critical women are transphilic? They certainly do put the claimed needs and firm demands of trans women ahead of ours. Women just have to put up with male bodies in formerly women’s private spaces whether we want to or not? Isn’t that a tad rapey? Or does transphilia excuse all?
Nandy is not the first politician who, sucked into the gender vortex, loses all reason. This week Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle confounded biologists by saying that “sex is not binary”. During the election Lib Dem Dr Sarah Wollaston denied that a baby’s biological sex is observed at birth; potential Lib Dem leader Layla Moran believes women can differentiate male predators from self-identified trans women by looking into their souls.
And the window for that is where, exactly?
How have LGBT issues, in particular gender self-ID, become such a moral test of politicians in progressive parties? Sociologists speak of how organisations can be overwhelmed by “purity spirals”. This is when a group grades its members by a single value, which has no upper limit or agreed interpretation. Those who seek power must demonstrate their purity in ever more abstruse ways: those judged “impure” are denounced and destroyed.
That makes sense. The single value and the no upper limit is exactly what we encounter day in and day out.
Working on the 2019 Labour manifesto, Lachlan Stuart observed that LGBT activists were not “driven by a motivation to improve the quality of life for trans people” such as increased mental and physical health provision, only “to erode or erase the political rights of female people.” Their alarming central goal was to open up all female single-sex spaces to anyone who identified as a woman.
How will voters, who have hitherto been unaware of this arcane debate, feel about a Labour Party fully committed to ending historic safeguards? To a party which believes any male person should be allowed to legally change sex without qualification or checks, leaving women and girls vulnerable yet unable to object? Will Labour leaders pull out of the purity spiral and heed the fears of thousands of women members? Or will they, as that nice Lisa Nandy demands, simply chuck them out?
Get out of the purity spiral while you still can.
In these instances, it should rightly be “T issues” and “T activists”. Here’s where LGB Alliance’s point is made for them. We see the flipside of the success of trans activism riding on the coat-tails of the hard work done by LGB activists; LGB activists being blamed for the excesses of the T. Granted there are likely to be some actual LGB activists who have sincerely taken on board the less desirable parts of trans ideology, but it sure looks like transactivism has managed to accrue undeserved credit and goodwill and dilute or avoid a good measure of deserved blame, both to the detriment of LGB interests, which transactivism seems to serve but poorly. It’s entirely rational that the LGB Alliance should wish to distance themselves from the increasingly intrusive and excessive demands of TRAs. The cuckoo in the nest is taking all the food for itself, starving its nestmates of resources, attention, and goodwill. T is now driving the bus and is quite willing to drive over any and all who fail to join the chorus of praise for all things trans, refuse to bend the knee in silent obedience and submission, and particularly, those who dare question the goals or motivations of TRAs.
Very damn true.
I suspect that the purity spiral regarding transgender rights may be partially spun by the force of a larger vortex: the increasing division between liberals and conservatives. If religious conservatives are against it, then secular liberals are for it, and vice versa and contrariwise. The details of any particular issue seem to get lost, and the idea that The Bad Guys are wrong here and here, but partially right here and making more sense in that area over there becomes incomprehensible. You’re either with us — or against us, and to hell with nuance and discussion and gray areas. That’s how Hitler got started!
Filling in the blanks, from this one can also derive ” TERFs are against trans rights, therefore TERFs are religious conservatives (or allied with them) as well as fascists.”
Starmer is keenly aware that winning the Labour leadership is pointless if on the way to doing so, the leader has been completely hamstrung by policies that not only make recovery in their traditional heartlands more difficult, but place them on the defensive in even more seats. A purge is not exactly a great start to recovering relevance.
I was told precisely that two days ago. In an argument on a social media / meme site, my views (that trans women are male, retain most of the physical advantages of the male body, and hence should not be permitted in the female league) earned me one of those flippant memes in which I was depicted as a Trump support. Not a discussion, just a certainty that I was a Trumpet. It really is a purity test, thought be damned.
It would be ironic if the only viable candidate for left-leaning feminists was the posh, white bloke.
@James Howde – the posh white bloke is a former human rights lawyer, so presumably knows how human rights work, including the right to discuss an issue which affects you and a lot of your members.
Also, I would expect any politician with an ounce of nous to at least obfuscate on an issue which is so obviously contentious and which will lose them far more votes than they could win.
I wouldn’t necessarily count on that. Until recently, much the same thing could have been said about the ACLU. But it’s thrown any such caution and circumspection to the wind and gone all in on trans “rights” in such a way that its current campaign for a pair of TIM athletes relies on outright lies and malicious mischaracterization of the aims and goals of those speaking up for and defending the rights of girls and women. Twitter communications on this subject are heavily ratioed against them, yet thy triple and quadruple down, without giving ANY acknowledgement or response to the overwhelmingly negative and critical response to this intitiative.
At least, those biologists not named PZ Meyers.
@9 this reminds me of the stories told by ex-Evangelicals, about how the church leaders send young unprepared kids out to proselytise, and when they get mocked or ignored tell them ‘everyone hates you, just like Jesus [or civil rights activists] so you must be right.’ Very cult-like behaviour.