The most extreme elements
It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.
If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy.
It’s so extreme of us to refuse offers of a compromise on the rights of women. It’s so extreme of us to think and argue that we get to have rights just like anyone else. It’s so extreme of us to grasp that it is of the essence of rights that they don’t admit of compromise. It’s so extreme of us to understand that our rights aren’t something Andrew Sullivan gets to whittle down, not even a “smidgen.”
However when he gets to the actual suggestions they turn out to be not compromises at all.
Defend the rights of both women and trans women. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is no conflict. In the few where there are, compromise. Women who have been abused by men and need a space free from any inkling of maleness and penises deserve such a space. Some shelters can include both trans women and women, but some shelters solely for women should absolutely have a right to exist.
Provided there are enough women-only shelters, I doubt that any of us crazy extreme feminists object to the existence of shelters for women and trans women (although we probably think they will in practice be just for trans women).
In prison, when we are dealing with criminals, trans women need to be housed separately to minimize the horrible abuse and rape many currently endure at the hands of men; but by the same token, women should not have to be imprisoned alongside trans women, for the same reason. We’re not talking about regular trans people here; we’re talking about criminals, some sex offenders. Separate facilities for trans people is the sanest and least dangerous option.
That’s not a compromise, that’s what we say. By all means separate trans women from men, just don’t dump them on women.
So that’s Andrew Sullivan for you. Call us extreme and then argue for what we argue for. Jerk.
It’s a sign of how effectively they’ve suppressed what GC feminists have been trying to say. He probably thinks he’s being genuinely helpful.
Of course, he’s not the most consistent of thinkers to begin with. So who knows?
If someone didn’t pay him money to write this shit, he could easily be reduced to penury and take to picking through garbage bins. Might even turn to crime. So I would suggest that you go easy on the criticism; purely in the interest of the wider welfare of society.
Think outside the square. Stuff like that.
Well I think he probably thinks he’s being genuinely wise and reasonable and unlike those stupid extreme others. It’s not about being helpful so much as being better than everyone else.
This whole “compromise” thing is a non-starter for me. I am sure I have used this example before but here I go again — suppose a man breaks into my home and decides he wants my stuff and may want to have some fun beating me up, too. I get to my firearm and now it is a fairer fight. He then declares that I have a duty to “compromise” with him over how much of my stuff belongs to him IF he agrees to take beating me up off the table.
My counter offer will probably be that he gets one free hail of gunfire before I call the cops.
But this is so like what men like Sullivan are telling us —- yeah, men want your rights/safety/spaces and they have threatened to beat you up and kill you if you don’t give in but, sheesh, ladies, if the men take beating up/killing you off the table, now it is your duty to compromise with these men about how much of your rights you have to give up because those men want something.
Compromise is the thing that should be off the table. These men have NO right to what we “have” and they can choose to go away and leave us alone any time. So why don’t they get to leaving rather than us get to “compromising” away our rights?
On the “plus” side he’s probably getting pilloried as an awful terf and will be forced to issue an apology within a week.
The transgender issue affects a miniscule number of people, does it? If a male person claiming to be a woman wants to gain access to a women-only space, by my reckoning that affects 100% of the women in that space. I can only assume that Sullivan doesn’t count women as people.
Yes, and they don’t actually take beating up and killing you off the table, they just tell you not to worry about that, because it won’t happen because reasons.
I’ll come at this from another angle: it’s pseudoscience. People can’t change sex; sex is not a spectrum; there’s no good reason to think the human species evolved a gender identity ; there’s no good reason to think we are all born with one; and there’s no good reason to think it would even so override sex as an identifier. There’s good reason to see transgenderism as cultural and social, not some new discovery in science.
Truth matters. “A relatively minuscule number of people” is not what’s going to be effected if a culture endorses something that rests on poor evidence and isn’t falsifiable. Watch our capacity to hold ourselves to reality start crumbling faster and faster. Sullivan ought to consider this perspective very carefully.
That too.
What Andrew Sullivan would say: “It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical skeptics, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the truth as a grotesque enforcement of obscurantism.”
Sastra, you’re right. It seems to me to be an overwhelming cultural issue in the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia. It doesn’t seem to be such a big issue elsewhere, although please correct me if I am wrong.
Homosexuality is a part of our evolved nature and can be seen in species other than us. With the exception of Inklast, I am yet to see examples of trans gender in the rest of the animal kingdom. Yes, PZ, I KNOW some species can and do change sex, but that is a complete change, not performance art and is in no way the same as pretending the one can become the otter.
That seemed to be the upshot of his comment about housing trans identified males in women’s prisons being a “humane” though “risky” “experiment.”
iknklast, or they tell you they aren’t taking beating and killing you off the table, but hey, since non-trans males also beat and kill you, you have nothing to complain about when trans males do it, too.
I don’t know if Sullivan’s full article (available only to paying subscribers, and that would not include me) lists more “compromises” for women than the shortened free article, but like Ophelia, I was struck by how his proposals were basically re-wordings of the arguments the dreaded terven have been making for years. Somehow, I suspect that Sullivan will not be subjected to quite the same level of death and rape threats.
Roj @#10:
There are an estimated 30,000 or so genes in the human genome. Whatever the exact number is, it has to remain constant through normal body-cell division (mitosis) and the form of division (gametogenesis) that gives rise to gametes (meiosis). Nature has arrived at a solution for this problem.The 30,000 human genes, as in other species, are organised like beads on a string into chromosomes; as 23 pairs in normal human body cells, and 23 unpaired chromosomes in gametes. Without that chromosomal organisation, a normal body cell could divide by mitosis into two daughter cells, one with (30,000 + 1) genes, and the other with (30,000 -1) genes. Chaos would certainly follow; greater or lesser and sooner or later.
Gametogenesis in both sexes requires the formation of sperm cells and ova with half the number of chromosomes as in normal body cells; that number being restored when the two gametes combine to form a fertilised ovum or zygote. All this is high school biology these days.
Natural selection has favoured cells with chromosomal organisation of genes over cells filled with free-floating genes as a horde of virus-like particles, not organised into chromosomes. It has also favoured retention of the zygote in one of the parental bodies, and not dumping it say, into the primordial ocean in the manner practiced by corals and such. So natural selection has favoured division into male and female bodies in animals, but not so much in plants. Many plants carry both male and female parts on the one organism.
For my own part, and in my own time, I have had a most satisfactory number of my sexual offers to women accepted, and have never knocked an approach by a single female back. In various situations, and particularly while travelling, I have occasionally been propositioned by men. Every one of them I have found positively repulsive, and have rejected without hesitation. But I can see how the division into 2 dimorphic sexes in animals can lead to a minority, for whatever physiological reason, favouring homosexual relationships in preference to heterosexual. However, insofar as sexual preference has a genetic component, homosexuality will clearly be selected against over the generations. That is also high school biology.
Most males of most species are programmed to compete with one another for the right to mate with females. This has favoured the development of various mechanisms (vide Konrad Lorenz) to ensure that male-on-male fights are not to the death, but merely to a convincing victory of one male over the other. In our own species, tribal and clan cohesion has demanded minmal male vs male competition, and a maximum of cooperation, leading to some novel arrangements here and there. Our ancestors would all have become meals for carnivores like the sabre-toothed tiger but for that cooperation.
Andrew Sullivan is both a gay man and a (liberal obscurantist) Catholic, so I’m fairly confident he wouldn’t be persuaded by the argument against basing a society on an obvious lie which contradicts not only reality but also the essential dignity of the lie’s subscribers.
I’m still stuck at, “a compromise on the rights of women”. I literally can’t fathom how someone could write that phrase and not use it as an instance of injustice. It’s cliche by this point, but I wonder whether he would see the problem if someone said exactly the same thing with a different group in place of women. Black, gay, Jewish, native American; take your pick.
That’s certainly the bit that made me grind my teeth.
A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.
This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.
That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s about creating options. If there’s something one side won’t budge on, then chances are you – the negotiator – are thinking about the problem in the wrong way. Think about it differently and you might find that new options drop out for free.
That’s what’s happening in this whole argument and why compromise isn’t possible. While putative negotiators like Sullivan are (presumably) looking for a solution that respects the wants of trans people while preserving the rights of women and homosexuals, the most vocal TAs want something completely different: the domination of women. No compromise can be made because the destruction of women’s rights is what – for a variety of reasons – they want. The goalposts will shift alongside any and every compromise. We know this.
Wiser heads than Sullivan’s have been saying for decades that to negotiate our way through this mess we need to scrap gender altogether. Free options! Anyone can live and present however they like without taking away anyone’s rights! And anyone who disagrees can rightly be called a bigot! Everyone wins (except the bigots, and even they aren’t actually losing anything!)
This is negotiation: persuading societies to be more accepting of the non-conforming – something we’d all benefit from – and giving the non-conforming the option to dress and act how they like, with the usual caveats. We shouldn’t even be talking about how rights need to be compromised when that’s not only absolutely unacceptable as should be perfectly obvious to everyone but entirely unnecessary even given the wildly fluctuating demands of TAs.
It is still something of a surprise, even after all these years, that it’s the non-conforming who are proving the most resistant to persuasion. It’s not that I don’t know why, but it will still surprise me as long as I’m still capable of that emotion.
I think this may be the complete article, without paywall:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-truce-proposal-in-the-trans-wars-c49
I like the proposal to put trans women in trans women’s prisons.
And sometimes on the same flower (often, actually). But then, plants also have asexual reproduction as an option, and mammals do not have that, although a few animals do.
Of course, that only works if we still recognize sex as real. Women still need the right to compete in sports without men (no matter what the gender performance of either), and to have women’s shelters, women’s dressing rooms, and women’s bathrooms to themselves, since it is unlikely this solution would do away with the need for segregated facilities.
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iknklast:
As you say, of course. Not recognising sex would be compromising rights.