Entry points
A reporter for the Guardian US – she calls herself “senior reporter” but the Guardian itself just calls her a reporter, as far as I can see. At any rate it would be good if she had some kind of grip on reality.
That’s just a fucking stupid, uninformed thing to say. We know she’s talking about the radical feminists, not actual far-right street brawlers. She’s talking about Bindel and Stock and Rowling and the rest – feminist women who are about as far from fascist as it’s possible to get.
Her “cause” is frivolous and childish at best – the cause of forcing the world to agree that men get to define themselves as women and force everyone else to agree. In other words it’s a giant game of Let’s Pretend, transferred from the living room floor to the entire world. It’s trivial as well as wrong and stupid. How to make it sound important and serious? I know! Call disagreement the entry to fascism! That’ll do it!
Mostly Cloudy just drew our attention to another one.
We’re not Nazis, we’re not fascists, we’re not the narrow road to fascism, we’re mostly-lefty feminist women. Women’s rights matter, men’s games of let’s pretend don’t.
On one level, Julia Carrie Wong is correct — instrumentalising the concept of “transphobia”, as a particularly-potent example of the more general “phobia”-based political discourse which has come to dominate rhetoric over the last couple of decades, *is* a tributary that leads to a sort of popularist authoritarianism that is becoming the modern conception of fascism.
But of course Wong doesn’t see that it is she who, by attempting to direct the rivers of fear and hatred and contempt into controlling how other people express themselves and even what they are allowed to think, is the mouthpiece for modern fascism. Of course she is simply defending what she sees as the truth, and she is working to protect the most vulnerable minority in the history of the world — it just so happens that protecting this minority requires us to reform society by jettisoning the hard-won freedoms of assembly and expression, along with the presumption of innocence and the ability for a professional to disagree with whatever governing body claims the consensus to be. And she believes that dismantling these things in the name of fighting fascism will only have positive consequences (at least until the society she helps to build decides that she is a fascist after all, and devours her as she wishes it would devour so many others).
The more traditional conception of fascism as blood-and-soil authoritarian nationalism has been dead and buried for about eighty years. But even in its time, the old style of fascists often hid behind tears, claiming to be the victims of a uniquely evil history, grasping for the power to overcome and revenge themselves upon that history. The new fascists, whatever their ostensible cause, are not so different from the old.
Most feminists have been opposed to prostitution and pornography. The Catholic Church has officially been opposed to those things as well. Two different groups opposing the same thing, often for different reasons, aren’t necessarily allied.
Reactionaries who oppose transgenderism because it violates the rules of the traditional, heterosexual, patriarchal Christian family are not allies with feminists who believe that biology is real, that transgenderism trades in sexual/gender stereotypes, and that serial rapists with penises are not women because of some fixed (and simultaneously fluid) sense of their “gender.”
Wong and Kaveney are either very sloppy thinkers or else they’re deliberately ratcheting up the rhetoric because they feel the tide is turning against them.
Maybe some of each.
So it goes from “But you are enabling fascists!” to “But you will become fascists!” to “You ARE fascists.”
The theocratic religious right does not want astrology and energy healing taught to US school children. Scientific Skepticism is therefore one of the most potent entry points to fascism today.
[…] a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Entry […]
I strongly suspect that false accusations of various “phobias” is “one of the most potent entry point to fascism today.” The far Left keeps making the same mistakes over and over again and refusing to learn from them. We saw the same thing when parts of the Left e.g. blamed Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, or Charlie Hebdo for the savage reactions of the Islamist mob. Back in the early 1990s a moderate representative of the Labor Party in my country* tried – and failed! – to start a conversation about some of the unintended downsides of “kindism” (our old friend the “be kind” mindset as applied to immigration). I seem to remember him specifically lamenting how the rightwing populist Progress Party were profiting off the timidity and ultra-defensiveness of everyone else on the issue. Much like J.K. Rowling’s “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you etc.”, it was one of the least hateful statements I have heard in my life, but (again like J.K.) you would never know that from some of the reactions. From the way his words were twisted and distorted, you would think he had advocated re-opening Auschwitz!
There’s a “boy who cried wolf” element to all this: If you portray every opinion or statement you happen to dislike as some kind of “phobia”, “hate”, “Fascism”, “Nazism”, advocating “violence”/”murder”/”genocide” etc., people will eventually stop taking you seriously when the real wolf shows up: “The same people who attacked me call these rightwing populists fascists. Well, so what? That’s what they say about everyone. They said the same about me ffs! If they could be that dishonest in their attacks on me, who else haven’t they been honest about? Maybe these rightwing populists aren’t so bad either?”. Of course it doesn’t help that the Left has embraced post-truthism as eagerly as the Right, such that people are indeed right to take anything they hear from formerly “reputable” sources like the Guardian or the BBC – or even Universities and “science” advocates! – with an ocean of salt when it comes to heavily politicized issues.
You may be able to bully a lot of people into shutting up about their experiences, but you’re probably not going to succeed in gaslighting them into unseeing what they have seen, unhearing what they have heard etc. When moderate voices are all silenced, the only voices still talking openly and plainly about the issues tend to be those of rightwing populists who really do hold some pretty troubling attitudes, the last people you would want to represent the other side of the issue. But since they are the only ones willing to say that there is such a thing as “the other side of the issue” (i.e. other than racism, “Islamophobia”, “transphobia” etc.) at all, they end up coming across as fearless truth-tellers. No wonder Ayaan Hirsi-Ali ended up on the Right when the Left gave her nowhere else to go.
And as I keep saying, it may not be rational let alone right, but if history should have taught us anything at all, it’s that human beings are not particularly rational, and the “any enemy of my enemy is my friend” mindset is almost impossible to resist**. If you manage to get people sufficiently pissed off, they might eventually decide that “I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!”
* Rune Gerhardsen, son of former prime minister and probably the most revered politician (besides Gro Harlem Brundtland?) in the history of modern Norway, Einar Gerhardsen.
** And the far Left are as guilty of this as anyone when it comes to deciding – as Nick Cohen puts it – that “Any enemy of the West is better than none”.
And which, pray tell, “existing legal rights” are those, that any feminist is “calling for the eradication of”?
Legal right to protection in employment? Nope, not that one.
Legal right to protection in housing? No, not that either.
Legal right to wear what you want? Change your legal name? Right to participate in “public accommodations,” defined as commerce and businesses open to the general public? No, no, and no.
Right to free speech? Freedom of assembly? Right to petition government? None of the above.
Right to be free of violence and crime? No. No one is advocating to remove protections from criminal attacks.
Right to be free of sexual exploitation? No. The women and others whom TAs cast as “enemies” don’t want anyone to be trafficked or sexually exploited.
The people that TAs are blaming, and calling “fascists” (otherwise jocularly called “FARTs” and “TERFs”), are not seeking to “eradicate” any rights for trans people that are the same as rights for everyone else.
The “rights” that TAs claim — falsely — are “existing legal rights” are not “rights” at all.
No one has a “right” to lie about their sex.
No one has a “right” to force others to participate in individual fantasies.
No one has a “right” to make other people utter lies.
No one has a “right” to use the power of the state to crush anyone who says that biology is real.
Men who say they are women (lies) have no “right” to invade women’s single-sex spaces and facilities.
Men who lie, and say they are women, have no “right” to hold women’s offices.
Lying men have no “right” to steal women’s places, prizes, medals, scholarships, awards.
Male sex offenders have no “right” to lie their way into women’s prison facilities.
Lying men have no “right” to coerce lesbians into having sex with them.
Lying men have no “right” to be in women’s rape recovery shelters and groups.
Tellingly, they never, NEVER, EVER specify precisely what “rights” they are talking about. That’s on purpose. They don’t want you to realize that they are lying, and that the “rights” they want are things that no one has a right to.