What do you know about it?
Man tells Martina Navratilova she knows nothing about it.
What does India Willoughby – a man – know about being a woman? Nothing, so what’s he doing telling Martina Navratilova she doesn’t have the relevant knowledge about the way men like India Willoughby try to silence women?
Willoughby has ZERO idea what it’s like to be a woman in the UK (or anywhere else) yet he tries to silence women who talk about it. Sauce for the gander mate.
Updating to add Willoughby’s new level:
The full image doesn’t show; the first word of the headline is “Martina.”
And since he has no experience of being a woman, and was brought up as a man, how can he know that what he feels is the way a woman would feel? How does he know he is a woman? It seems likely that someone who was not born female would interpret being woman in a way that makes no sense to anyone who actually is a woman.
I marvel that Great Britain manages to be “terf island” despite an alleged 99% of its population politically opposing terfdom.
And how can he know there is such a thing as “feeling like a woman”? Rebecca Reilly-Cooper wrote an essay on this years back that was kind of the final nail in the coffin of my ability to believe any of it.
I know what it is like to feel like me. I am a woman. But that isn’t feeling like a woman, that’s feeling like me. I don’t think there is any such thing as feeling like a woman, except of course when I am being sexually harassed, talked over, interrupted, abused, and asked to make the coffee or water the plants.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what TiMs mean when they say they “feel like a woman”.
That was the gist of RRC’s point. Nobody knows what it’s like to feel like anything, because everybody knows only what it’s like to feel like that one particular person.
Sounds similar to this post by Daniel Kaufman, in which he writes:
The “feel like a mammal” point seems particularly apt to me.
Sounds similar and is similar. They’re both philosophers. It all goes back to a famous paper by Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Philosophy can be very clarifying. That’s one reason I dislike Judith Butler so intensely: she uses it to do the opposite.
Exulansic provides a good example of how creepy this dude is. >> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWukNIICsY
I’ve run across this analogy before, that the argument that at least some children and teenagers are identifying as transgender due to social forces (“gender education,” the media, the internet, etc) is JUST LIKE the argument that gays and lesbians were trying to recruit children and teenagers into being homosexual. It’s the same charge made by the same people. Willoughby thinks it’s hypocrisy (or worse) to pretend that they’re not connected.
But of course there’s lots of differences between sexual orientation — who you want to have sex with — and feeling like you’re a different sex than your body. For one thing, in order for a girl to “become” a lesbian she has to be aroused by other women. While there might be some short term cultural effects here, it’s not going to stick. Girls aren’t going to become lesbians to “be like Martina.” Instead, they’d take tennis lessons.
But as you’re all pointing out, “feeling like a woman” doesn’t mean anything. And “being a transwoman” doesn’t have any meaning either, eager as they are to divorce it from any requirements at all. You can be a masculine butch lesbian transwoman who’s comfortable with your body and takes no additional medical steps to transition. All you need do is identify. Being trans and staying trans are then going to be a matter of how the psychological and social rewards pay off. This goes into a completely different area than sexual orientation.
@7 I think Judith Butler has fooled a lot of people into thinking what she does is philosophy. So if philosophy is like a jigsaw puzzle, then she is still working on turning the pieces right side up. :P
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The problem with the counter to “Its social forces”, is that I don’t care that teenagers would experiment with their sexual orientation because of social forces. As long as what they do is consensual it doesn’t matter if a specific encounter is due to curiosity, attraction of social forces. If the teenager eventually evolves to its natural inclination, no permanent harm will have been done by this kind of exploration.
In the digital economy, there is a concept of “security through obscurity”, which is a witty shorthand for “we can feel assured that our product or technical solution is either so little-known, so baroque, or so tightly coupled behind systems upon whose security we can assume, that our vulnerability to attack is quite low”. As a concept, it really took off in those halcyon days of the mid-aughts, when the Internet was taking off in earnest and the ratio of actual hackers to befuddled laymen was at an all-time trough.
Mac users once boasted about how secure their operating system was from viruses or exploits, while Windows was fighting a war of attrition against black hats (though I am certain nobody in Silicon Valley is allowed to utter that phrase any longer). This boast was largely an effect of security through obscurity — not only were Macs then a trivial percentage of market share for home computers, they were manufactured by Apple itself, and so relatively few people had the wherewithal and the opportunity to develop viruses and discover exploits for those systems in the first place.
Since then the concept has taken on somewhat of an ironic tone, as the digital world has come to define the social lives of the generations after the mid-aughts (the so-called “digital natives”, though I am also sure that phrase has or will one day come under fire for the usual reasons). Because there is now a critical mass of people engaged on every hardware and digital platform, we can be perfectly confident that every application on every system will eventually have all of its vulnerabilities mapped and exploited by someone, sooner or later. Note that Macs now warn strenuously against running untrusted applications downloaded from the Internet, and scan them automatically — not quite as obtrusively as Windows still does, but even so, the days of Apple’s security through obscurity have been over for awhile at this point.
Judith Butler’s pablum, like too much of sociology (the worst of which is what her sort of pseudophilosophy reminds one of), is a kind of rhetorical security through obscurity — or perhaps profundity through obfuscation, though of course this lacks the punchiness of rhyme. Far be it from me to condemn another soul for brick-dense writing, but at least in my best moments I like to think the wall my words build have at least a few gaps which allow one to spy through and see my meaning.
Butlerian prose is something like a walled garden, with a razor-wire fence, barking dogs, and overflying helicopters, and a painting that, at a distance, might resemble a window into a scene that may or may not even be there at all. But because of that, she and her acolytes — those who at least claim to have braved the alligators and woven through the mines and outrun the dogs to spy at the painted window through the bars of the fence for a brief moment — can dismiss as unserious cranks anyone who looks at that sodden mire and says “no thank you”.
It may be an unfortunate necessity that we develop conceptual hackers willing to wade through the muck of Butlerian — and wider Butleresque — prose, because these people’s pseudophilosophies have already been adopted by what may be a critical mass of influential people and an absolutely astonishing number of institutions. I’m not sure what profit there might be in such dirty work as mapping this nonsense for exploits, except the knowledge that it is worth doing in order to preserve and extend the freedom to say “shan’t”, which seems to be crumbling away from us on all fronts.
Axxyaan@12
I’m not sure we have a good handle on what “natural inclination” might be, and I don’t think it matters. So long as everyone involved is happy and comfortable and consenting to the relationships, it doesn’t matter whether it can be labeled “natural”. There are lots of things that people do that are not “natural”.
@twiliter(#10):
Extending that analogy, I have to wonder if Butler is perhaps working on turning the pieces *upside down*?
I suspect Axxyaan meant natural as in baseline or default for that individual, as opposed to any moral judgement or typical for humanity as a whole.
The whole issue of consent is a really interesting one. As a broad principle I’m happy to go with ‘if it’s consensual and everyone is happy’. But are there boundaries and edge cases even then? An obvious one is age. Age of consent varies across even western societies. Is it just age or age difference? A combination of the two? Many jurisdictions have quite complex laws that examine the age difference between two parties engaged in consensual sex where one or both are below the age of consent. What about when the consensual sex involves violent or abusive or unsafe practices? is that ok? Is there a distinction between a single mild spank on the rump vs shackling someone in a stress position and driving needles or hooks through their breasts or other body parts? Heavy striking and choking? Repeated penetration with objects so big that eventually damage can only be surgically corrected?
Even where a person consents, that may be because of an underlying mental illness or personality disorder. Should that be taken into account? At the extreme it’s not that different from the trans person wanting their body surgically modified or the cases you hear about where a person wants a perfectly good hand or limb removed for psychological reasons.
Re #16
I took Axxyaan to mean that no harm is done so long as the hypothetical teenager eventually gets to some unspecified “natural inclination” for that individual. I don’t agree that the “natural inclination” is important enough to claim that harm is done if the teenager doesn’t return to it. I agree with your comments regarding consent and happiness being unclear; my point was to say that such issues, with the same kinds of concerns you raise, are more important than identifying a “natural inclination”. If someone enters into a committed, adult, consensual, loving, kind, mutually satisfactory relationship, it doesn’t really matter if it fits their Kinsey profile or other metric. I don’t think going against “natural inclination” is by definition harm.
I’ll try to make my point more clear.
Should the person afterwards conclude that some of his/her explorations were a mistake or a temporary phase, nothing irreversible happened, no real harm was done. So I don’t care about someone trying out a homosexual relationship because of social contagion. I don’t see it as any more of a problem than any other choice that can be influenced by social forces.