Mixed company
God I hate finding myself agreeing with Brendan O’Neill…and not just for political reasons, but because he’s so transparently and irritatingly a Self-conscious Preening Contrarian. But it can’t be helped: for once Preening Contrarian has a point.
If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the liberation of womankind — Germaine Greer — was denounced by a swarm of Stepford Students as ‘transphobic’, someone who should make all right-minded people feel ‘sick to [their] stomachs’.
Does it irritate me that Caitlyn Jenner has been named anybody’s Woman of the Year? Yes, it does. I think there are far better candidates, many thousands of them. I don’t think anything Caitlyn Jenner has done is significant enough or valuable enough for that title. And yes, I also think Caitlyn Jenner won enough titles and trophies and fame as Bruce Jenner competing in a sport that was closed to women; I don’t think Caitlyn Jenner is now somehow magically a great hero or role model to women.
Alarmingly, Cardiff’s feminist students are running the campaign to shut Greer down. The petition for her lecture to be cancelled was started by the student union women’s officer, who says Greer’s views have ‘no place in feminism’. What a spoilt, ungrateful generation, hilariously unaware that their very ability to speak their minds and rouse some rabble is down to decades of intellectual and social agitation by people like Greer. She helped give them a voice; they try to silence hers.
That is, indeed, a big part of what makes it so galling. They contemptuously dismiss us old trouts as “second-wave” while flourishing on the possibilities that feminists like Greer made possible.
‘Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in… society’, says the Greerphobic petition. Who died and made the jumped-up Joe Stalins of student bureaucracy into the gods of what can be said? Greer, and anyone else for that matter, should be free to say whatever they want about trans politics, to critique it and even mock it, to argue that it’s pure hocus pocus to claim someone can change his or her sex simply by declaring ‘I have changed my sex’. Blasphemy is a hard-won right, and we should be free to blaspheme against both the old religions and new ones like transmania. We should be as free to doubt the womanhood of Caitlyn Jenner as we are to doubt the divinity of Jesus.
Of Caitlyn Jenner, yes. Of trans women with fewer advantages and privileges than she has – which would be pretty much all of them – maybe not. Preening Contrarian oversimplifies, as always, but in this case there’s room for him to get some things right.
Doesn’t this give the game away though ? Everyone is free to doubt whatever they want (atleast in the legal sense). But should we also be “free” to doubt that
a. That a womans bodily autonomy is not supreme ?
b. That atheists are fully human
etc …
I remember there was outrage that Hemant Mehta allowed a “secular” pro-lifer to post on his blog without any commentary – Why is it wrong to express disapproval if someone is indeed transphobic (without getting into whether that statement is really true about Greer ) and why is it wrong for some feminists to insist that feminism must be trans-inclusive ? Similarly are the atheists who insist that Atheism must also include feminism , wrong ?.
Glamour’s Woman of the Year hasn’t ever really been prestigious. It has gone to Selena Gomez and Lady Gaga – it’s not like they would have honored Malala if Caitlyn hadn’t come along.
Talk doesn’t go without criticism. Free speech doesn’t mean trans women being told they’re just men in dresses have to smile and put up with it and let people who think so give speeches at their college or else they’re enforcing an evil thought-killing orthodoxy. Really, do you agree with Germaine Greer when she says “Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.” Do you think it’s ok for a university to invite someone who thinks that to speak? If it is, why can’t they invite some sexists to speak – we don’t want to silence them after all. It’s destroying their free speech not to invite them, or to speak out against them if a college does invite them.
I don’t think anyone is saying not to speak out against such views, just that no-platforming seems counter to the ideals of a free society and university. “The proper solution to bad speech is more speech” is how I’ve seen it phrased. Let people speak so that their arguments can be criticized.
Dan, I will try to give my own answers:
Yes, I think it’s ok for a university to invite (sometimes) someone who thinks that. In my opinion it’s also ok to invite sometimes sexist speakers, religious (including radical Muslim) speakers, communists, anarchists, feminists, anti-feminists – a wide variety of types, also those representing views which I myself consider unacceptable and morally horrible. Yes, there are limits, but (imo) they should be determined by (1) the law (“incitement to hatred” in the legal sense) (2) scientific criteria (speakers whose views are *not* controversial but simply debunked by science shouldn’t be invited, as they waste everybody’s precious time. However, it is the opinion of the specialists – not of the students, not of the wide public! – that should be decisive here.)
No. Evidently, choices have to be made (if nothing else, because of the limitations of space, time and funding!) and typically decisions not to invite someone do not have anything to do with free speech.
It depends and there is no simple answer. What do you want to achieve by speaking out? What are your demands and goals? Are you trying to convince others that they should boycott the event? I can’t see any problem with this. If you consider the speaker that bad, sure, go ahead, nobody should force anyone to attend! Do you want to pressure the university into canceling the event? That’s far worse and I hope you will not succeed; otherwise you will deprive the speaker’s audience (people whose opinions are different than yours or maybe just the curious onlookers) of the opportunity to attend! Or perhaps you just want to influence the future choices of the invitees – perhaps you think that these choices have been too one-sided? Fine, please do speak out, your voice can be very valuable! As you see, no single answer here.
Ah, just try to imagine yourself as someone responsible for issuing invitations. How would you do your job? Imagine that one month passes, two months – no protests. Three, four, six – nothing, still no protests, no Twitter storms, no petitions and counter-petitions. Would you be satisfied? What would you think?
I know my own answer. In such a situation I would scratch my head, while saying sadly to myself: “Ariel, you are doing it wrong”!
On what principle could you possibly make such a distinction? If the woman-hood of Jenner is in doubt, why would that of a less-privileged trans person be any less so or more so? What conceivable bearing does the person’s “privilege” have on the question?
We can talk about Caitlyn Jenner because she’s out and has made her transition public. She wants people to know. She feels safe enough to do that. She isn’t going to lose her livelihood if we talk about her.
This article mentions a woman whose transition was made public with tragic consequences.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/23/famous-transgender-help-the-cause-caitlyn-jenner-laverne-cox-kellie-maloney
If we can’t talk about gender and transition, no progress is going to be made. Let’s talk about gender performance and cultural expectations. Let’s talk about the very different outcomes different feminists and trans activists want regarding gender performance.
Greer wrote ‘The Whole Woman’ in 1999. She also wrote stuff about FGM that a lot of people didn’t like and caused huge discussion. No-one is no-platforming her for that.
She makes people think. It’s painful but useful.
Dan @2
“If it is, why can’t they invite some sexists to speak – we don’t want to silence them after all.”
Many speakers at universities are sexists, including many professors. Have all the rape / sexual harassment cases at universities completely passed you by?
A better option than preventing Greer from talking is to have talks about issues of being transgender. Greer has made some incredibly important contributions but she clearly doesn’t understand what it is like to be transgender
‘…why can’t they invite some sexists to speak – we don’t want to silence them after all.’
Well Dan, they DO. So long as they’re Muslims, or sufficiently dark-skinned, they can bellow anti-Semitism and genocide to their heart’s content.
That the ‘transmaniac’ position is so blatantly absurd and censorious that even O’Neill ‘gets it,’ speaks volumes here. When Jerry Seinfeld complains about college audiences, he’s considered silly. But golly! he’s right.
The worst far-Right cartoon of ‘PC’ craziness can scarcely reach the lunatic fringe of the real thing.