A mealy-mouthed imitation of robust intellectual inquiry
Sarah Ditum reviews a book by one of the tame feminist crowd:
The Guilty Feminist started in 2015 as a place for [Deborah] Frances-White to share lightweight material for women who liked the idea of the “feminist” label but weren’t sure about the detail. When Donald Trump arrived, though, Frances-White’s audience — and her self-perceived importance — ballooned.
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You could argue that in the 2010s progressives began behaving like a cult: obsessed with internal obedience, utterly dislocated from the outside world.
Many people have made that observation about the left before now. What’s surprising about Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have is that Frances-White has joined them (she knows a thing or two about cults, having spent her adolescence in the Jehovah’s Witnesses). This book is her plea for progressives to rediscover critical thinking.
“The important thing,” she writes, “is that we stop and smell the analysis.” Leave aside the maddening question of who “we” refers to here (Frances-White’s first problem with “conversation” is that she clearly struggles to imagine a reader who doesn’t think like her). She happens to be correct.
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I agree with her, but I’m not sure that she agrees with herself. Because ultimately, Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have is a mealy-mouthed imitation of robust intellectual inquiry. It is a coward’s idea of what bravery looks like. It is a conversation in the same way that shouting into a well and listening to your own echo is a conversation.
Frances-White attempts to tackle the cancellation of problematic historical figures, the limits of comedy and the question of whether history has a “right side”, among other topics. But, in light of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis farrago, let’s start with trans issues as a test of whether she’s actually evolved.
Also, frankly, let’s start with trans issues because they are so very often and regularly and predictably the place where otherwise thoughtful people plunge into a dark tunnel of confusion and lies.
These are addressed in a chapter called The Conversation About Gender Nonconformity. Even that title tells you Frances-White has decided the issue in advance: this isn’t “The Conversation About Whether We Should Give Teenagers Sterilising Medication” or “The Conversation About Whether It’s a Good Idea to Put Male Rapists Who Say They’re Women into Women’s Prisons”.
Not to mention the fact that trans ideology is the exact opposite of gender nonconformity. It’s all about gender conformity, and enforcing it: if you don’t gender conform you must be trans so you’d better admit it right now or you’ll be labeled internally transphobic.
The Cass report into the NHS’s provision of gender identity services for children has come out, as have several alarming cases of male sex offenders abusing gender self-identification. Frances-White can no longer simply call the other side bigots and otherwise ignore them. But because she’s working backwards from her conclusion that “the cis feminist and trans communities must align”, pesky reality still has to be put in its place.
So we are told that the Cass report has “raised concerns”, although conveniently those concerns are too extensive to be summarised by Frances-White. “A deep analysis would require its own chapter or perhaps book.” You’ll just have to take her on trust. Take a deep breath and revel in the distinctive scent of no analysis whatsoever.
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Perhaps most embarrassingly, she claims that “it is difficult to find historical examples of public campaigns that target individuals or call for censorship from the left”. Which revises Stalin out of history in a way that Stalin himself could only admire.
Stalin and his global band of Stalinists. The internecine wars between Trots and Stalinists in the 1930s make even the terf wars look tame. (No axes to the head so far.)
I won’t be reading this book but Sarah’s review is a treat.
It doesn’t surprise me, though. It seems like a lot of the ‘progressives’ who have taken up with the trans issue also frequently are Stalin-apologists. I guess Stalin being a tyrant and a murderer is just another case of the illiberal western world colonizing history?
They are? I haven’t seen that. Can you remember any specifics offhand? (I can never remember any specifics, offhand or not, so I know it’s a big ask.)
Well, I do know that there have been several instances of defending Stalin, but I will have to look up the details. Also, a friend of mine who was pointing out some of Stalin’s crimes was attacked by a number of his ‘progressive’ friends, and told that the ‘Stalin had people murdered’ narrative is a lie.
The tankees will defend Stalin but they tend to be less identitarian.
Well tankies do by definition, but the gender befuddled crowd is a very different crowd from the Stalinist crowd.
Generally the defense, such as it is, is to deny that Stalin was a Leftist. If he wasn’t a Leftist, then the Left doesn’t have to answer for him. (Just like how Christian apologists will deny that terrible criminals are Christian.) More importantly, it means that Leftism itself avoids critique. It’s the whole “true Communism has never been tried” gambit.
Well, maybe, but on the other hand, I have always thought and still think that there is nothing lefty about gender ideology, that it’s a cuckoo in the nest and all that. I still think it’s a fatuous mistake to think that men are the oppressed sex provided they announce that they’re women. I don’t think I say that to defend the left, particularly, but just to try to claw back some reality and accuracy and truthiness.
Well, yeah, gender ideology is factually incorrect and built on unsound premises. I think what the alphabet mafia did with its forced teaming so that LGB is inseparable from TQIA+ is analogous to how Liberal and Left have been smashed and smushed together so that no one even remembers there’s a difference anymore.
At least, that’s how I try to deal with the cuckoo. The cuckoos can have Left, but they’ll have to tear Liberal from my cold, dead hands.
I confess to having some sympathy for the ‘”true Communism has never been tried” gambit’ (which should not be taken to imply that it was ever worth a try in the first place). I don’t believe for a second that Marx and Engels would have recognized what was going on in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China etc as their ideas put into practice. As I understand it, the idea of the classless society was so central to Marxist-style communism that you can’t take it out and still claim that whatever’s left has anything to do with “communism”. I think it’s pretty clear that the Soviet Union was never meant to become a classless society in which everyone was equal and no group held dominance over another. It was always meant to be a permanent dictatorship with the party elite as a permanent new upper class.
If woke activists are indeed defending Stalin, I can only assume it’s another instance of the “any enemy of my enemy is my friend” fallacy, or, as Nick Cohen put it, “any enemy of the West is better than none”. It sure as Hell can’t be because of any particular ideological consistency.
Nick Cohen sounds really “nice”? It’s good his ilk won’t ever come to power?
Nick said that ironically. Very very very ironically.
Brian
The context of the quote was Cohen talking about how so many people who identified with the ”Left” could end up as apologists for Islamism* – a far Right movement if ever there was one! He was explaining the mindset of these people, not endorsing it. On the same note the socialists who supported Khomeini, and who were first against the wall once he came to power, were thinking (in Cohen’s words) that ”any revolution is better than none”. Cohen also pointed out how parts of the ”Left” had previously made the same mistake with respect to Stalinism.
* Apart from the idea that Muslims tend to be non-white, therefore it is racist to criticize them,