The idea that gender identity is all that matters
Joanna Moorhead at The Guardian interviews Kathleen Stock:
Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, says the key question she addresses – itself offensive to many – is this: do trans women count as women?
Whatever else about her views is controversial, she is surely on firm ground when she writes that this question has become surrounded by toxicity. But the problem for her is, at least partly, that many people do anything they can to avoid answering it. “Very few people who are sceptical talk about it directly, because they’re frightened,” she says. “It’s so hard psychologically to say, in reply: ‘I’m afraid not.’”
Maybe it’s easier if you just say no, of course not.
Stock is at pains to say she is not a transphobe, and also that she is sympathetic to the idea that many people feel they are not in the “right” body. What she says she opposes, though, is the institutionalisation of the idea that gender identity is all that matters – that how you identify automatically confers all the entitlements of that sex. And she believes that increasingly in universities and the wider world, that is a view that cannot be challenged.
She doesn’t so much “believe” that as know it all too well, including from personal experience.
How, then, in her view, have we got to where we are? Stock takes issue with Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, which campaigns for trans inclusion and opposes the views of gender-critical feminists. The charity’s Diversity Champions programme is very popular on campuses, and Stock believes this has in part “turned universities into trans activist organisations” through their equality, diversity and inclusion departments.
Stonewall, as we read earlier today, started out as a campaigning group for LG; the TQ got grafted on later. Now the LG come in a distant second.
Ah, but does she have stickers?
LG are a distant second? Nay, not even a distant memory. LG are ignored and erased EXCEPT that the presence of those letters gives cover and legitimacy to TQ+. TQ+ are in fact anti-LG, hostile to LG. Stonewall has become all-T all the time. If they could, they would jettison LG in the title, as they have already jettisoned LG in substance.
In case anyone is interested and hasn’t seen it, Daniel Kaufman did an interview of Stock recently at his site The Electric Agora. (Apologies if this was already noted here.)
I was pleasantly surprised to see this piece. The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and even the Evening Standard have all reviewed ‘Material Girls’, but the Guardian has yet to do so, and I doubt it will. The Guardian hasn’t mentioned Essex University’s treatment of Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman either, though it is the newspaper of choice of most academics. It clearly regards some facts as too difficult for its readers (or perhaps its staff) to handle.
However thin and unconvincing it is in reality, I think Stonewall is always going to need that cover and legitimacy, particularly if more institutions, businesses, and organizations decide that continuing to subscribe to its services is more trouble than it’s worth. The T rode in on LGB coat-tails, and will continue to need and use LGB as a shield against scrutiny and accountability. Even if it has lost the support and trust of the LGB “community,” it will keep claiming to speak for them (and use those first three, original letters of the alphabet soup) because the T are nothing without them. What is a parasite without a host?
YNNB,
There’s a broader phenomenon here (and I’m sure it’s not new, but I’ve seen it discussed more recently) of identity-based activist groups whose policy positions do not reflect the consensus of the groups they purport to represent. The most common example is Latino advocacy groups, who are much more aggressively pro-amnesty and pro-looser immigration laws than polling indicates their “constituents” are (and no, it’s not just Cuban Americans). Not to mention the use in elite circles of “Latinx,” which the vast majority of people haven’t even heard of, much less give a shit about or want to be identified as.
The thing about advocacy groups is, you don’t need to win an election to declare yourself the spokesgroup for Group X. You just need money and the ear of people in media and government, and those things only track public opinion in a very loose way if at all.