No you rethink your commitment
This by Mireia Garcés de Marcilla in the LRB is what used to be known as “too clever by half”:
All the same, those of us who are concerned about the reactionary weaponisation of gender might do better to rethink rather than cement our commitment to the category of womanhood. We should ask what being a woman means, how womanhood is defined, and against what (and whom) womanhood is ‘defended’. Instead of insisting that Khelif is a ‘real’ woman, we should ask how dichotomous ideas of gender have been solidified in the discourse that is being mobilised against her. We should interrogate the colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment, and the construction of femininity through (and conflation with) whiteness. We should listen to athletes whose womanhood is doubted not only because of their outstanding athletic performance, but because their bodies are at odds with Western notions of femininity. In 2009, when Semenya was banned from competing for eleven months after winning the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin, the head of South African athletics asked: ‘Who are white people to question the make-up of an African girl?’
Puhleeze. As if we haven’t been ordered to do all that a billion times already. As if we haven’t been doing that for decades.
Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” – i.e. knowing that women are not men and that men are not women – we can’t defend or argue for women’s rights. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t effectively campaign for our rights, we can’t challenge misogyny and sex-based exclusion, contempt, indifference, hostility. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t say what’s so fucking horrible about the Taliban. Without a “commitment to the category of womanhood” we can’t have feminism.
A serious commitment to fairness and equality has to resist the drive to read bodies along racialised gendered lines.
Oh shut up. No one is doing that. Women don’t have biceps like Khelif’s or necks like Khelif’s or shoulders like Khelif’s. Male puberty is real, and pretending otherwise is the opposite of a serious commitment to fairness and equality.
An obsessive focus on physical traits that can been read as proxies for gender overlooks the extent to which being a competitive athlete is not only a matter of anatomy but also of resources and access. In order to become Olympians, athletes need a healthy diet, the time and space to train, opportunities to compete and financial support.
No shit, Sherlock, but it does not follow that the physical traits don’t matter.
Total word salad.
WTF are they even talking about? Do they think that nobody except white Europeans had the idea of sex, and that white Europeans imposed the notions of male and female on the benighted savages of the world? All human societies must know and have known about the two sexes the whole time; otherwise there could have been no societies. What sort of ignorant tomfoolery is this? How could anyone with half a brain ever think to say anything so rampantly stupid and ignorant? It’s hard to tell what they even mean, it’s so incoherent. How does any statement remotely like that come out of any educational institution?
“An obsessive focus on physical traits that can been read as proxies for gender …”
This sounds, if anything, backwards. An obsessive focus on the dress and grooming and behavior stereotypes that are assumed to correspond to (and are being deemed more important than) the physical characteristics of sex, perhaps.
This has nothing to do with whiteness, or femininity. No one has called for women who look different than the white, perfect southern belle, to be banned from sports. Many of the women these men are competing against don’t meet the description they are giving; many of them are women of color.
Wait, am I using facts again? It’s obvious facts don’t matter. Most people don’t examine the arguments well enough to realize any of that. They throw in racism to bring people in who maybe don’t have an opinion about trans, but are sure racism is bad.
“Dichotomous ideas of gender” FFS!
As stale (and shallow and tedious) as Trump’s shtick.
If only we could lock them in a room with him.
iknklast: “They throw in racism to bring people in who maybe don’t have an opinion about trans, but are sure racism is bad.”
Very true.
A relative of mine (he is Black, and Muslim) posted a few times about how awful it is that they “listened to the white girl” (Carini) and disparaged “the Black girl from a Muslim country”. Lots of his friends agreed. I didn’t get involved. They want to see any criticism of a Black, Muslim person as racism and islamophobia, never mind the facts, which are always interpreted as apologetics. I don’t think my relative knows about or cares about trans issues, DSDs, or the incursion of men into women’s sports; he saw a Black Muslim woman being criticized, in part by a white woman, and that’s all he needed to know.
But why would we read them so? Why would we care about what you call gender? We care about that thing “gender” used to mean: sex. Physical traits are sex; sex is physical traits. Nothing is being proxied.