The enormous pain
From the Maya Forstater hearing day 2:
Let’s stop there to talk about this business of “the enormous pain of misgendering a TW.”
These are adults we’re talking about, not children. This is a workplace we’re talking about, not a nursery school. These are grown men, not toddlers with soggy diapers. These are grown men with a fantasy of being women. Why are we talking with such solemnity about the putative “enormous pain” they feel when other people don’t join them in their fantasy? And if we must talk with such solemnity about that, why are we not also talking about the Enormous Pain of women forced to pretend that a man in their workplace is a woman? Why does his claimed Enormous Pain cancel out hers? Why is the assumption that he has Enormous Pain and she just has – what – some cruel bullying desire to call him a man just because he is one? How did we get here?
“Creating.” Yes, it’s all Maya’s idea, that women are women and men are not women. How dare a woman see women as women and men as men?! It’s beyond the pale!
I’ll never understand how we got here. Never.
A: Is everything in the world a woman?
B: Of course not.
A: So there are two classes, then, “women” and not women?
B: That seems reasonable.
A: Are all those in the class of women “real” women?
B: Without question. That is what I’m trying to say.
A: Very good. I can agree to that. What about those in the class of not women? Are they also real women?
B: No, and don’t be silly.
A: Suppose you ask for an apple, and I hand you an orange with “apple” written on it. Being not an apple, would the orange be a fake apple?
B: I really don’t see where you’re going with this, but yes. If you give me an orange when I ask for an apple, it’s fair to call the orange a fake apple.
A: And would this hold more generally? That is, is it fair to call something fake if it is presented as something it is not?
B: That does seem fair, but what doe–
A: So it would be fair to call a not woman fake if it is presented as a woman? Oh, sorry, presents as a woman?
B: … That’s … Well, you see … A transwoman is a wo–
A: I didn’t ask about transwomen. I asked about the class of not women. If you ask for a woman and I show you a not woman, which could be an orange or an apple, with “woman” written on it, would it be fair to call that a fake woman?
B: … Ye-es? I think … I mean, I guess that doesn’t contradict the dogm—er, I mean, that seems acceptable.
A: Good. So there can be things that, not being women and therefore real women, are instead not women and therefore fake women?
B: Well, yes.
A: Congratulations on creating two classes of women: real women and fake women. Tosser.
[exeunt]
So, let me see if I’ve got this right: there’s someone blogging under the handle “Sex Matters,” whose principal point is that sex doesn’t matter?
Papito, no. Sex Matters is live-tweeting the main points from the respondent’s lawyer, Jane Russell. That last tweet, which I assume is the one that mislead you, is quoting Russell.
Sex Matters is an organisation with a strongly gender-critical viewpoint.
Yes, that. Sorry, I should have said it at the beginning – I was relying on having said it yesterday but that’s silly.
It would seem there are at least three classes of women:
Biological women
‘Sincere’ trans-women
Misogynist bullies
If we allow the last class to hide behind the second, we’re screwed.
I think what really concerns me about ‘woke’ culture is there is so little introspection, and no balance between considerations of what we can change about ‘the world out there’ and what we can change about the internal ‘world inside’.
I remember when I began lecturing I was crippled with anxiety about public speaking. I almost changed career, but I was determined to push through it and, luckily, I was able to. At all times though, I was aware that this was my problem and that only I could deal with it.
It’s concerning that students today, and young people generally, are often being wrapped in a ‘cotton wool culture’ that tells them that they don’t need to work with or through their issues but that the ‘world out there’ must bend to accommodate them. As an example I have a colleague in academia who has given up with student deadlines altogether as she is compelled to give endless extensions to students with (I would consider) perfectly normal stresses and anxieties around their work. Rather than being encouraged to get therapy to deal with their problems, these students are given much greater flexibility in exams, essays and other course work and are frequently exempted from oral presentations.
While I have great sympathy for these students, having suffered similarly myself, I’m not sure how these measures are going to affect them when they leave the relative shelter of university life. There is little encouragement to learn any resilience, or to deal personally with the stresses of the external world. The ‘world out there’ must bend rather than the individual develop and grow.
A lot of progressive activism has (rightly) focused on changing ‘the world out there’ to make it a better place for all those people who aren’t able-bodied middle class straight white men. Woke culture though seems to have lost any sense of where the individual needs to meet the world head on. There can be no interrogation of when someone might try to make positive changes to themselves in order to make their lives easier and to tackle to normal stresses that the world brings to us.
I remember reading a blog by a trans identified individual (it might have been here) who was bemoaning the fact that they were in massive debt because they were trans, and that this was something that ‘cis’ people needed to understand. It turns out that they were so pained by seeing their ‘deadname’ on bank statements and utility bills that they left them unopened and unpaid. I remember reading this and being astounded that this person had not considered seriously that the problem might be theirs (not the bank’s, not the electric company’s) and that they really needed some very robust therapy if seeing their old name sent them into such paroxysms of terror.
It’s at the heart of trans ideology that only the ‘world out there’ can change. It must absolutely and unapologetically bend to fit the internal ‘authentic’ mental state of the trans individual even when other people in the world reasonably, and rightly, point out that such bending materially and negatively affects their existence. It’s a culture of absolute victimhood where any request to accommodate the ‘world out there’ is seen as a vicious attack on the precious internal world.
Oops – that turned into an essay.