Dude says what the real question is
This William Clare Roberts fella wrote a long blog post in May 2019 responding to that Medium piece by a bunch of pesky feminist women.
This is a response to the essay published on Medium yesterday by Sophie Allen, Jane Clare Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, Mary Leng, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, and Kathleen Stock.
He doesn’t link to the essay itself, which is bad form.
I am not a woman. I am not trans. I am a feminist – my earliest conversion experience was reading Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. I love very dearly a little trans girl who I hope grows up in a world where she is safe and free, or at least has a righteous and fierce community of people fighting at her side for safety and freedom.
That is, a little boy, who is apparently being raised by people who subscribe to the dogma, which could make for a bumpy future for him.
3. ‘You want to reduce women to their genitalia, or to womb-possession’.“None of us,” the authors maintain, “hold a view according to which either a woman or a female is defined as such by her current possession of a particular configuration of genitalia, womb, or any other single primary sex characteristic, for that matter. … In the light of this, the correct question should be, not ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to their genitalia, or wombs?’ but ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to a cluster of primary sex characteristics?’”
I disagree. The real question is actually this: how do we police women? When and how do we – in our social and political arrangements and institutions – stop people and ask them if they are “really” women or not? The authors are concerned to keep (some) people who claim to be women out of (some) “women only” spaces and institutions. In practice, that means looking in people’s underpants. It means empowering the police, social workers, volunteers, and people on the street to demand to know what is between other people’s legs.
No, it’s not “policing” women. It’s just refusing to pretend that men are women if they say they are. It’s not subscribing to the view that one’s sex is a matter of assertion as opposed to a matter of fact. Yes it’s boring and humdrum compared to the exciting new approach of pretending that it’s all up in the air and we can’t assume that an obvious man is in fact a man, but then lots of things are boring and humdrum in that way. They sort of have to be if we want to have any kind of society at all. We have to have agreed meanings of words in order to communicate and interact. Roberts is trying to bounce us into agreeing with him by treating the category “women” as Open To All, like a Walmart.
4. ‘You think there is a “right way” to be, as a woman/ lesbian/ mother’ (etc.).The authors think that this objection “trades on an ambiguity between two separate senses of the word ‘right’: normatively right versus descriptively right (i.e. descriptively correct). As such, it’s another rhetorical move. It can quickly and unfairly bring to the reader’s mind a metaphor of our gatekeeping for a special club — ‘you can come in, but not you!’.”
The “gender critical” feminists object, “To say that we think there is a definition of femaleness or womanhood is not to say that there is a ‘right way’ for females or women to be, in any normative sense.” Ah, but it is to say that there are people who shouldn’t call themselves women, and that the police should be able to check your papers (or your genitals) to see whether or not you are authorized to call yourself a woman. The “gender critical” definition of womanhood is normative in this sense: it is political and enforceable. It is, indeed, gatekeeping, and it does say, precisely, “you can come in, but not you!”
That’s because there are people who shouldn’t call themselves women, just as there are people who shouldn’t call themselves Native Americans, or African Americans, or First Nations. It’s not “gatekeeping” and it’s not summoning the police, it’s refusing to have other people’s fantasies imposed on us.
Buried in among the bad reading skills and bad reasoning is a practical question: if a Trans Identified Male decides to go into a woman’s bathroom (or shelter or feminist group) and they more or less look as if they might be female, what will happen? How are those who want single-sex spaces going to keep them out?
The practical answer, I think, is: we’re not going to try. It will happen. If women don’t know, and don’t find out, it’s not a big deal. After all, back when there were just a few dedicated trans-sexuals going quietly about their business and hoping to escape attention, most women were accommodating. Women who felt unsafe around men knew that they could ask the Transexual to please leave and it wouldn’t turn into a civil rights case.
The man who wrote this rebuttal thinks we’re concerned with controlling people. I think it’s more about being able to control the situation.
They always use that “look in their underpants” or “examine their genitalia”. That’s deliberate, because it makes us look like Nazis who checked for circumcisions, or just as people who are going to invade the most private of private spaces, people’s pants.
In reality, we have never looked into people’s underpants to determine whether they are entitled to use the restroom or not. Most people look like the sex they are; some are androgynous, and there may be a bit of discomfort when people are uncertain if they belong in that restroom, but most women I know do not challenge them. If they do, they tend to believe them when they say they are women.
This relates to what Sastra says. If they look like a woman, we will assume they are a woman, even if they are dressed in “male” clothes (Annie Hall, for instance). If they are obviously male, they will be asked to leave, as they have in the past, and as most men have willingly done because they stumbled into the wrong restroom by careless inattention and are embarrassed at their mistake.
So if a man puts on make up and a dress but still looks like a man, they may be asked to leave. If they look like a woman, probably no one will bother them. There are not going to be genital police sitting outside each restroom feeling you up to see what sort of equipment you have.
I’m realising this sounds like another kind of whinefest I and I’m sure plenty of us have been subjected to. ‘How do I know I’m not sexually harassing someone if I tell them they look nice today? What’s the rule? How come some other guy gives you a compliment and you’re fine with it, but I’m not allowed to do it?’ In one sense it is a bit of a challenge, and I and I’m sure plenty of other women have done our best to set rules for allegedly clueless men. Complimenting clothes is OK, complimenting body parts is not OK. Don’t touch me in any way you wouldn’t touch a male colleague. Etc. etc. But, again, I’m sure a lot of us have eventually figured out that it’s not about being genuinely unclear on what the boundary is, it’s about pushing the boundary as much as you can while being disingenuous about it and even eliciting sympathy from women who try to help/explain. I think Jane Clare Jones makes the argument that the question isn’t about some objective determination of ‘who gets to be a woman’ (though of course there is one), it’s about the right of women ourselves to make that determination. As Sastra says, men who don’t act entitled and dominating, and don’t make women uncomfortable with their appearance or behaviour, are often permitted into some ‘women’s spaces’, both in real life and online–it’s when they can’t help but make their (toxic) masculinity visible that we start to voice firm objections and set firm boundaries. (Not that that makes any difference, as pushing boundaries is actually the fun part for them.)
He’s not in the least bothered about ‘policing’ women, is he? That whole long, convoluted essay is an objection to women ‘policing’ men.
Groan, the “policing” argument, about which I’ve blathered here far too many times before. I seem to see it everywhere I look these days. Whenever, for example, anyone proposes any minor change to general practice (say, wearing masks or staying 2m apart). The answer is almost always “well generally, we’re not going to police it because most people don’t act like dicks. When we do need to police it, it means the situation has escalated and that’s what existing laws and law enforcement are for”.
The case of genitals in bathrooms is a topsy-turvy version of this: it’s being suggested that trans women have always used women’s toilets (the narrative is sometimes so hyperbolic that it sounds as though women have always been the minority in there) and women objecting are the ones trying to change the satus quo and have to explain how this astonishing new concept will be policed.
And the answer is “well nobody will have to if men don’t act like twats.”
I like the brilliant Helen Staniland’s response to this: she asks with false incredulity whether people with a penis would really enter women’s spaces when they’ve been asked not to. It’s an excellent corollary to the Staniland Question itself:
(This is just one of the many variants).
It’s a brilliant question, the follow-up about policing is perfect and watching her at work with them in realtime is fantastic entertainment.