Fake confusion
The great mysterious question again – what exactly is a woman and how can we possibly know? Arianne Shahvisi in the LRB is stumped.
The truth is that sex and gender aren’t so easily divided. One appears to be grounded in hard biological facts, while the other rests on the seemingly slippery notion of identity. Yet most of us have a much firmer grip on gender than we do on sex. Gender is an observable part of our everyday world, while the decisiveness of sex is mostly taken on trust.
Is it? Is it really? Mostly? Are we really mostly guessing who is which?
I think not. I think we mostly know who is which, and ambiguities are rare.
But apparently that’s because I’m one of them dumb gender critical feminists.
‘Gender critical feminists’ adopt a strategic simplicity, describing women as ‘adult human females’, most often defined by their possession of a uterus, or of the right genitals. Penises are associated with sexual assault and vaginas with sexual vulnerability, which sets up exactly the sort of fairy-tale fear-mongering that puts them in league with the far right.
Fairy tale. It’s a fairy tale that men are more likely to rape women than women are to rape men.
Theirs is, as Judith Butler writes, ‘a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality’. Trans women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than cis women, and vulnerability to violence is, for most women, a more concrete definition of what unites and constrains us. Though they might reject the terms of the question, those intent on excluding trans women from their concerns must reflect on some version of Audre Lorde’s challenge: ‘What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel-print on another woman’s face?’
That’s it; that’s her “argument.” Judith Butler said and Audre Lorde said; case closed.
All right, so the various definitions of “woman” are ambiguous and contradictory. I skimmed the article, and didn’t find any attempt to define “trans woman”, ambiguous, contradictory, or otherwise. Maybe she could help us out with that.
Evidence? Oh, wait, there isn’t any, the actual evidence shows the opposite, so she isn’t going to point us to the evidence about sexual assault.
Sure they are. Sex is real, gender is bullshit. But if you’re being paid by the word, succinctness is a liability. Stirring the pot and feigning bafflement is more lucrative.
One is grounded in hard biological facts, and the other on social structures intended to restrict the sexes (particularly women) in what they may or may not do. It might very well be true that most, if not all cultures have had socially enforced sexual divisions of labour, but the labour apportioned to each sex as their “natural” lot varied from culture to culture. Warfare and hunting might be the closest you might come to finding a universally “male” occupation (for many of the same rmale physiological advantages that have, until recently, barred men from women’s sports), but even then there have been exceptions to this “rule.” (Hi Joan!) With other trades and occupations, it’s not so easy. Weaving, pottery, healing, farming, and fishing might be practiced soley by one sex in a given society, but there would be no way to determine in advance, based on the activity alone, which sex, without visiting. With these trades and pursuits, there’s nothing apart from tradition, social convention or taboo, that preferentially bars or favours one sex over another in their practice. In our own society, there was never anything other than the unjust, wasteful enforcement of restrictive, gendered sex-roles that prevented women from being pilots, surgeons, astronauts or bank managers. Or from even voting. Sure, there were “arguments” and “reasons,” but if any of them had been true, then women would have turned out to have been incapable of doing these things because of their “lady brains.” We still have a long way to go to fully liberate the wasted human potential of the female half of Earth’s human inhabitants.
That some people embrace and internalize those wasteful, destructive, sexist social strictures, reifying them into something that they call “gender identity,” does not actually make the definition of the sexes any more difficult or problematic than it was until very recently. Nor does it make “gender” any more “real” than it was when it was the pretext for the enforcement of confining, stereotypical, sex-role pigeonholes. Sex is still real. Gender is still bullshit. Does Shavisi not see the irony and contradiction inherent in trans-identified-males wielding stereotypical male entitlement and aggression in their demands that everyone recognize, respect, and validate their “lady brains?”
The essay’s confusing. There’s no real difference between male & female brains, so how is there a mismatch between trans people’s identity and their bodies? Answer:
Say what?
And what “subversion?” None of the advocates of Gender Identity seem able to give examples of what sorts of attributes and elements fit into the Man Gender but not the Woman Gender category, or the Woman Gender, but not the Man Gender one. What differentiates them from each other?
No, they’re so eager to fall all over themselves insisting that trans people can be like anything — anything at all! — that they haven’t seemed to notice that this is a glaring problem, a fundamental flaw in the concept. They’re claiming that we have a “firm grip on gender” but are unconscionably shy about putting together a handy guide. It’s a problem which can’t be fixed by saying that Men differ from Women by virtue of the fact that they identify as Men, full stop. Wishing vacuity away never works.
Trans and non-binary “identities” make no sense without gender-enforced, sex-roles for everyone else. What kind of “subversion” is that? It’s like escaping from East Germany, but being fine with the continued existance of the Berlin Wall. If they let everyone out, you’re no longer special. Can’t have that. “Smashing the binary” is only for the chosen few, not the mass of humanity.
Haven’t read the article, but I assume that the “people harmed” she’s talking about are more likely to be British TiMs being kept out of women’s rugby, than Saudi women not being allowed to leave their homes without a male “guardian.” Not really the kind of “inflexible gender categories” she’d be interested in if she’s downplaying the importance of sex.
Yes, and the body is primary. To drug it and carve it up in order to conform to sexist, gender-prescribed sex-roles is a signal failure to recognize the importance of the body in all this. Belief in mind over matter, applied to disphoric children, results in infertile, mutilated, sexually disfunctional adults. Or is she only concerned about AGPs?
Again, letting men on women’s sports teams (or in women’s shelters, or women’s prisons…) is not “subversive” or “progressive.” It’s not something we should be “cheering.” Such men are not “escaping” anything. They are invading and colonizing. “Cheering” these “subversive” men does fuck all to “break” the boxes. It only makes the box that women have been forced into that much smaller.
I just love how they can’t keep their own chosen vocabulary straight. In the first sentence, she refers to gender categories, which are a matter of identity according to her. However, the second sentence refers to bodies. (In case you haven’t been paying attention, your body isn’t a matter of identity but instead of material reality.) This waffling over exactly what she’s talking about makes the third sentence completely incomprehensible, because we don’t know what boxes she’s talking about.
Why is this so intractably difficult for people? The word “sex” has two relevant meanings: (1) the physical act of procreation and (2) reproductive function. The word “gender” also has two relevant meanings: (1) reproductive function and (2) behavioral patterns associated with each reproductive function.
So no, it is not the case that hairdressers shouldn’t be unisex, because the intent is that they serve both male and female customers. And no, it is not the case that a gender reveal party, no matter how cringeworthy, must be called a sex reveal party, because because the intent is to avoid suggesting that the child is engaged in sexual acts. This is how and why English uses synonyms, and I would hope that it wouldn’t require extraordinary intellect to grasp the concept. Fetuses absolutely do have genders: either male or female.
What I find impressive and mysterious is that someone with less wit than earwax can write at such length without imploding in a singularity of imbecility.
To reiterate: denying that gender can refer to reproductive function is the source of the confusion . It quite simply does, and pretending otherwise will obviously lead to apparent contradictions. And let’s not even get started on what it does to centuries of literature written with the understanding that sex and gender have synonymous senses.
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I wonder, though, how much the use of “gender” in place of “sex” with regards to reproductive function is a result of sqeamishness over the use of the latter in “polite” conversation? I certainly do my best to avoid using “gender” as anything but enforced social roles, rather than as a euphemism for reproductive function, in order to avoid exactly the confusion you mention. I believe that trans activists rely on conflating gender with sex by means of that same confusion, in order to supplant sex with gender to establish access to women’s single sex spaces. See the replacement of “same sex attraction” to “same gender attraction” when decrying the “cotton ceiling”; how gender is supposed to now override the segregation of toilet facilities by sex; how all these “bans” on trans athletes are supposedly targeting “trans kids”, while ignoring the fact that sports have been devided by sex, for the purpose of fairness to women and girls before “transness*” existed as a thing with clout, or a thing at all.. Notice how, in all these instances, women’s safety and dignity lose out to male gender “validation*.”
*Yes, there are trans identified females, but the real battlefield is women’s rights in the face of TiM demands. If there were no trans identified males, the demands of TiFs would go nowhere. For every Freddy McConnell demanding to be recognized as a “man who gave birth,” there seem to be scores (if not hundreds) of TiMs invading women’s spaces. And succeeding. That’s what the movement is really about. McConnell is only useful to TiMs to the extent that she waters down, weakens, or confuses the definition of “woman,” particularly through demands for the use of dehumanizing, “inclusive” language that erases women. Women’s abortion rights are thus absorbed in a “larger” movement for “bodily autonomy” which can centre transness without mentioning women at all. This erasure and subordination of women would be a TiM strategy whether TiFs existed or not. There’s no equivalent disappearing or dehumanization of “man” in comparable contexts. Which would be fair, and symmetrical. But this isn’t about fairness. It’s about obedience and compliance Symmetry doesn’t enter into it. It’s a decidedly anti-woman movement, which is ironic, given that TiMs claim to be women.
In modern times? Enough that its perceived politeness is mentioned in its 20th century etymology. Synonymous use dates back several centuries, though. I can’t find any information about the politeness/euphemism angle during that period.
That’s exactly what they intend. It’s all rhetorical sleight of hand, and it works at all precisely because gender has meant reproductive function for so long. Pretending that the sex-synonymous use of gender is mere ignorance is the very thing that lets them engage in logical equivocation and do the so-common-as-to-be-cliche game where they play around in the reproductive function bailey and return to the social construct motte when pressed. “No, you silly bigot,” they say when it suits them, “gender is separate from sex. Educate yourself.” Without the unacknowledged synonymy, however, there would be no confusion, no Trinitarian Mystery for the unwashed, cis-hetero masses to pray over while saying six Our Impregnating Parents and two Transcene Creeds. It’s the inescapable contradiction that creates the Butlerian profundity of vagueness.
What does that even mean?
“I’m so blinded by being oppressed that I don’t realize I’m oppressing poor widdle twanz people who just want to peeeee”
I wonder what Lourd would have made of the inclusion of men in her intersectional definition of women, and further, feminism? After all, what dark corner of feminism includes men, and doesn’t render the wider concept of women (or feminism) absurd? Then of course we have Judith Butler with the idea that being a woman is all “performative”, so we know her concept of woman is indistiguishable from a preferred mental state in so much gibberish, as is her style.
Then the claim gender critical feminists’ description adult human female is somehow “strategic” when it’s inherent in the definition, lacking any kind of strategy whatsoever. It *is* just that simple, both definition and concept. But the definition of woman has to be obfuscated in order to politicize it, then weaponized, calling it a “strategy” to accuse feminists of being what? Far right? Preposterous. The GC feminists aren’t far right, they’re just right.
I believe Queer Theorists refer to the practice as complication. That is, the idea is to “complicate” a word by adding layers of often contradictory meanings in order to render the definition meaningless or useless. Once complicated, whether a word applies is determined by the Theorists themselves. Of course, they don’t acknowledge that this is essentially a somewhat circuitous power-grab, but that’s exactly what we see with the meanings of words like “woman” and “gender”.
It’s a bit Special Master. A bit Executive Privilege.
@14 Right. Perfectly clear, intelligible concepts, corrupted by agenda driven hype.