Different complex views
Tim Adams chats with Billy Bragg for The Observer:
He smiles. “One thing was I had never met an out gay man until then. I’m sure I had met gay men in Barking but none of them were out. And then on stage Tom Robinson starting up with (Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay and all around me these blokes started kissing each other. I thought: ‘Fucking hell, what’s this?’ But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a common cause – that the fascists are after anyone who is different, any minority. But you need those experiences to discover that solidarity.”
It’s a memory of that moment, I think, that has prompted his partisan anger on the issue of trans rights, his opposition to feminists such as JK Rowling, who argue for biological women’s right to their own protected spaces.
Right, because women are not a minority and not different. We’re just those same old boring annoying mommies who tell you to pick your clothes up off the floor and those same old frustrating annoying bitches who won’t open their legs on command.
Speaking to the self-styled “luxury communist” Ash Sarkar earlier this year, Bragg suggested he was embarrassed to have come to the issue fairly late. His instincts went back to old ties of solidarity against discrimination.
But not solidarity against discrimination against women. Oh god no. Women are horrible, and women are not discriminated against.
My own strongest feeling, I tell him – I reported on the cultish-seeming evangelism of the Mermaids group lobbying for the untested certainties of hormone treatment way back in 2016 – was that if ever there was an issue that social media is ill-equipped to debate, it is this one. I haven’t seen evidence for Bragg’s assertion that his most prominent opponents are “saying that trans people don’t exist”. Surely it is more the case that we are talking about different complex views in a genuine conflict of rights.
No. It’s not a genuine conflict of rights. It’s a genuine conflict between women’s rights and the notional, invented, unworkable, bogus “rights” of men to force everyone to call them women and let them steal everything that belongs to women.
“My problem with people like Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with,” he says. “[Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights. I agree with them about abortion. But we don’t agree on this.”
Because he’s a bro and he all too obviously does not give one tiny shit about women.
But Billy, you don’t find solidarity with absolutely every “different” minority, do you? You don’t accept them all. Murders, arsonists, and rapists are all “different,” and all (thankfully) minorities. So are fascists themselves. I daresay that some of them would claim to be unjustly persecuted. Do you find common cause with them? How is it that you choose the “worthy” minorities whose struggles you support?
Couldn’t stand the thought of being outdone by a “luxury communist,” could you?
Well, your instincts led you astray. You cashed in your solidarity chips before doing your research and due diligence. You just gauged the way the wind was blowing at that moment and went with it, as powerless to resist as a dandelion fluff, going willy nilly, wherever it took you. And here you are, a full blown misogynyist, attempting to cloak your contempt for women with a threadbare, self righteous “solidarity” with abusive autogynophiles and their allies. Congratulations Billy, you found your people! Not only that, you’re spokesman too! Nice gig, eh?
Trans people don’t exist in exactly the same way that invisible people, astrologers, and psychics don’t exist. The people certainly exist, but they are mistaken in the claims they make about themselves. At this point, I would say that like invisibility, astrology, and pychic powers, “transness” itself does not exist. Humans can’t change sex. Nobody is born in the “wrong” body. Certainly many people have serious psychological discomfort with the nature of their bodies and their sexual orientation, but none of this has anything to do with any sort of structure or entity like a “gender identity.” Replace the phrase “gender identity” with terms like “unclean spirit” or “demon” and you’ve lost nothing of value; they are all equally meaningless.
What about you, Billy? There’s a nearly infinite list of things that you know or believe that “line up” exactly with the knowledge and beliefs of “fascists.” What colour is the sky? How much is two plus two? What’s the name of the tall, splotchy, spindly-legged, long-necked animal that lives on the savannahs of Africa? Does agreeing with “fascists” on the answers to any of these questions make you a fascist? Then why should Rowling’s and Bindel’s belief in the reality of sex make them fascists?
No, Billy, you really, really don’t.
Zing.
I don’t think this is a conflict about rights — not even women’s rights vs invented, bogus “rights.”
This is a conflict about truth.
Trans people aren’t asking for additional rights if we simply grant their premise — that a transwoman (a woman who is male) is simply a variation of “woman” just as tall women, lesbian women, black women, and blond women are all variations. If tall women were forbidden from using the woman’s room, lesbian women were locked out of women’s sports, black women were kept out of women’s shelters, and blond women refused entrance to a Women Only event, we wouldn’t think they were claiming super special invented- just-for-me status when they protested. In fact, black and lesbian women demanding inclusion are two popular examples of a civil rights struggle.
Absolutely everything hinges on whether or not Trans Women Are Women (or Female) and Trans Men Are Men (or Male.) I used to annoy the hell out of Trans Rights supporters in other forums because I usually focused on this issue and dismissed all the attempts to get into discussions on civil rights and politics and bodily autonomy as red herrings. The vast majority of these troubling issues become solvable or at least manageable once both sides agree that either Trans Women are Women or Trans Women are Men. But it’s just not feasible to ask “tell you what — you make your argument about rights, but accept my premise for the sake of the argument.” It’s clearly the crux of the issue. It isn’t about rights.
Hmm. I see what you mean, but at the same time, I do think it’s a conflict [also] about rights. The two are locked together. It’s true that men are not women, and ignoring that truth plays hell with women’s rights.
I keep pointing out that people could have other fantasies about themselves and it wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t make any difference to anything. No one would care. The trans nonsense wouldn’t matter nearly as much if men weren’t taking women’s prizes and spaces and jobs and promotions.
Quite right. Back when there were medical gatekeepers who decided who could transition and who couldn’t (also known as the adults in the room), and a trans identifying person, whether having transitioned or not, simply wasn’t eligible for women’s prizes, awards, spaces, jobs, etc. A handful made use of women’s spaces or were employed as women (I can think of a couple in modelling/acting), but that was precisely because they passed so well, including not mentioning they were trans, that no one noticed and therefore no one cared. Now we’re not supposed to notice or care, except to praise and laud the person while only making the point that they’re valid in every aspect of whatever they say and do. Except when they commit crimes, because no real trans person commits crimes.
Looping back to medical gatekeeping, what that really meant was that a doctor (or a panel of doctors) had to be sure that the desire to transition was genuine, persistent, and not founded in some mental illness. The process may not always have been kind, fair, easy, or cheap. People certainly felt judged and in some cases belittled. What we didn’t get though was thousands of autistic, depressed, gay, questioning, unsettled, or easily lead children and young people irreversibly mutilated. Yes, the old ways were far from perfect, but they were also a damn sight less harmful in the aggregate than where we are now.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Different complex […]
Truth and rights. Yes, the two lean on each other like a couple of drunks, neither of whom is capable of standing on their own. The demands for access to female spaces are ridiculous without the accompanying truth-claim. The claim that TWAW seems pointless if they don’t do anything with it. But at the same time, as we’ve seen, there’s a bit more to it.
If TiMs were actually women, then denying them women’s sex-based rights would be the criminal injustice Sastra describes. But they aren’t, so it isn’t. The “invented bogus right” to “be accepted for who you claim to be” serves as a fallback position if “TWAW” fails to carry the day. TWAW might be termed “strong gender identity” wherein trans identified males are women, ladydick, cervix, and all. It’s bollocks of course (as the English might put it) but there are no end of people who seem to be able to say it’s true and keep a straight face. But we can’t all be Keith Starmer. The “accept me for who I claim to be” approach could be called “weak gender identity.” (It’s a variation on motte and bailey; I’ve styled it after the Strong and Weak Anthropic Principals. The former holds that the supposed fine tuning of physical constants proves that the Universe was “aiming” to produce us all along, while the latter only concedes that observers such as ourselves can only exist in a Universe capable of supporting the existence of observers, no “goals” or “aiming” required. The first is a remarkably self-centred and self-regarding claim; the latter is unremarkable, and an inevitable consequence of our being here to posit it.) “Weak gender identity” is a tacit admission that TiMs aren’t actually women, but that they should nevertheless be accepted as such in order to “be kind.” It allows them to use emotional blackmail where there is no belief in the female penis. Even if few people truly believe the impossibility that TiMs are in fact “biologically women,” if enough people believe that they should be treated as if they were, then that gets the job done, and lets them have what they want. As long as they can get into women’s facilities, they’re not going to quibble about minor philiosophical differences about the nature of material reality.
I love that.
I definitely think there’s an invented, bogus right involved. It isn’t just about women’s spaces. A woman in Oregon recently received a fine and public service for ‘misgendering’. That’s about way more than invading women’s spaces, and whether we are refusing to accept a subset of women. That is about a right that doesn’t exist: the right to have others see you the way you see yourself.
No one else in the world has this right. I doubt anyone else in the entire world (at least those that know me; the rest don’t think about me at all) sees me the same way I see myself. Yet they all see me as female. Why? Because I am. I cannot force them to see me as who I visualize, no matter how many policemen I call when they say something about me I don’t agree with.
So, yeah, it is truly an invented, bogus right.
Well, there’s Kim Jong Un, but I’m not sure that the trans & allies would accept the association, even though the demands of both and the consequences of non-compliance* have undeniable similarities
*actual consequences in Kim’s case, desired consequences in the other.