Words as steps up the ladder
I’ve been meaning to get back to that paper by Alison Phipps, kind of the way one gets back to a mosquito bite.
Reactionary feminisms, which coalesce around debates about sex workers’ rights and transgender equality, magnify the political whiteness of the mainstream and deliberately withhold womanhood and personhood from marginalised Others.
Now there’s an outright lie. Feminism that opposes pimping doesn’t withhold womanhood or personhood from prostituted women, it argues that prostitution exploits women. Gender critical feminism doesn’t withhold womanhood or personhood from anyone, it simply doesn’t repeat the lie that men can become women by identifying as women. It’s not “witholding womanhood” from men to say they are men, any more than it’s witholding bearhood from rabbits to say rabbits are rabbits. Being a bear is not an option for rabbits and being a woman is not an option for men. We are what we are. We can comfort ourselves with fantasies, but we can’t bully and threaten other people into pretending our fantasies are reality.
Trans women are defined as ‘biological men’ while trans-exclusionary feminists are ‘adult human females’. Sex workers’ rights are juxtaposed with ‘women’s safety’, a manoeuvre in which the womanhood of sex workers is implicitly denied.
She can’t be that stupid, can she? Prostitution is extremely dangerous for the prostitutes, aka sex work is extremely dangerous for the sex workers. How does saying that implicitly (or explicitly) deny the womanhood of sex workers? Farming is also extremely dangerous, as is mining, as is construction work, as is meat processing – is it denying the manhood or womanhood or humanity of the workers in those industries to say that? Hardly; it’s the first step in reforming the industries and improving the protections for workers in them.
This reasserts the normative economically productive body and reproductive sex. It conjures up colonial sex difference and bourgeois white womanhood as a symbol of moral order, set against the racialised and enslaved inhabitants of colonised and settled territories and the multi-racial, ‘dangerous, immoral, and libidinal lower classes’ of the metropolis…
She’s not really even trying to say anything there. There’s no real meaning, and no real thinking, it’s just deploying a set of Approved words and phrases so that people will think she’s one of the Good Ones. It’s frivolous, it’s vain, it’s self-admiring, it’s careerist – all while pretending to be very very extra enlightened and left-wing. It’s such crap.
She doesn’t see our calls for women’s safety as applying to the women exploited by the sex industry? I think of their safety as central to our calls to abolish the exploitative sex industry in total, whereas the way the sex industry impacts all other women’s safety is an obvious subsequent issue. I mean, if your industry is predicated on the notion that it’s ok to treat some women abusively, and further that these women like it that way, then it’s obvious that those notions will impact all women if unchallenged.
She seems to be trying to say…without actually saying…that we disapprove of prostitution because we are old moralistic prudes. In short, she doesn’t understand (whether by design or ignorance) a damn thing we’re saying. She is obtuse and obfuscatory. She is willing to throw any accusation at ‘white’ feminists…by which she means any feminist who has a so-called TERF worldview…just to distance herself from said ‘white’ feminists, in spite of the obvious fact that she is white.
And she is willing to throw sex workers under the bus to do so. Not to mention women of all ages, classes, ethnicities, and places of origin.
Prostitution, especially street prostitution, is inherently dangerous. It is even more dangerous if the prostitute is a woman of colour.
Many of the murdered transwomen we hear about
arewere street prostitutes. Black prostitutes.It seems to me that she doesn’t care about transwomen at all.
There’s no rational and logical entailment more powerful than that of “conjuring up.” The act of conjuring invokes the exotic orientalist paganism of occult, nonwhite, non western forces swaying to the steady beat, beat, beat of those jungle drums as spirits are summoned from non-binary, holistic realms. Phipps is thus revealed as of the earth, earthy, and has no truck with that there thing they call “civilization” — nor is she down with the bourgeois sensibilities of the Muggles. Nay, she’s set against them, in fact, and has been so for quite a Spell.
If Ben Shapiro or some other asshole wants to call this nonsense “cultural Marxism” I won’t argue against it; it’s as good a description as any.
Really? Only TERFs are adult human females? But trans-inclusionary females aren’t? Who knew?
See? TERFs are witholding womanhood!
If Phipps admits that she is in the category of “adult human females” alongside gender critical women, she automatically becomes White. Any daliances with biology result in immediate expulsion from the “I’m not a White feminist” club. I think this is why Phipps and Hines can only use WOC, but can’t respond to their criticism of that use.
Sastra @ 4 – *applause*
That’s just gibberish, afaict. It’s incoherent. It doesn’t say anything. It’s just words that have been stripped of any cognitive content. Pretty much like transgender religious doctrine in general.
I know, that’s what I said. It looks as if it’s saying something, if you don’t pay too much attention, but really it’s just a string of approved words.
Her tiny threadbare (misogynist) idea is clear enough from the beginning, and most of the paper is just padding and signaling. It infuriates me.
What is it? Simply “Women are horrible and shitty, and they shouldn’t report it when they get raped, because that is a use of their whiteness to oppress people of color, even if the women aren’t white”?
That plus white women’s tears are the mark of Satan.
She’s very very stupid. Barely literate, despite all the fancy words. Take for example the phrase “magnify the political whiteness”. “Magnify” makes no sense at all. If you magnify something you make it bigger. You can’t make whiteness bigger. The word the stupid woman needs is “intensify”. But she’s too stupid to see that.
One of the keys to understanding the way trans activists work is to realise they’re nearly all as thick as pigshit. Their failure to grasp basic biological facts shows that. Their stupidity is what make them dangerous: as anyone who has ever managed a team knows, the most dangerous people are the stupid and industrious.
Well that’s just a fact, which we didn’t know until Phipps discovered it through her diligent scholarship. No?
Which makes it sad that some biologists have signed on…people who are teaching biology to young people, and are almost certainly peddling this shit as “science”.
No, because diligent scholarship is a white western imperialist colonialist construct. I imagine she got in touch with the ancestors and her inner essence. You wouldn’t want her to act white, would you?
What on earth can biologists possibly say that’s relevant to the issue? I guess “sex is a spectrum”, by confusing sex with secondary sex characteristics?
Right, right, I was unable to esacpe my whiteness and my ingrained Westernist Imperialist Colonialist ideas. I’m going to need to check my privilege now.
How very white of you to think that your Whiteness is something that you have control over, that you can just “escape” it. You need to Do The Work and understand that you have been, are, and always will be complicit in Whiteness, and do your best to aid marginalized folx and amplify BIPOC voices. Also, buy my book.
Interesting comparisons can be made with religion vs. science in other realms. “Creation Science” of course is a thing, and a staple of home-school curricula, though shunned by mainstream science and education. But there’s been enough noise made by vociferous, powerful religious interests to turn evolution into a “controversial” subject that is watered down or avoided altogether by maistream, secular education in the US. As far as I know, Catholic scientists and teachers don’t try to include the “science” behind transubstantiation in their science courses. The promolgation of trans ideology talking points is an interesting mix. Institutional capture has given the trans position a more favourable position, with more support in “mainstream” educational institutions than creation science. The latter has had various legislative efforts attempting to insert it into curricula, but gender ideology is firmly entrenched in the academy, even if it is in Social Studies and Literature departments, rather than the biology department. Trans ideology, though reaching for clown fish, and other examples of non-mammalian sex-changing organisms, is rooted in human exceptionalism. Do biologists concern themselves with how their subjects “identify?” (From what I’ve heard here, PZ gets pissed off if anyone asks him how he knows what gender his spiders are.) If gender is supreme and sex is irrelevent, then why look for sex-changing animals at all?
The gender critical position seems to be being pushed to the margins, at least for the moment. It doesn’t help that it is smeared as right wing, religious bigotry. I don’t think genderism will prevail in the end, as there’s only so long you can fight material reality and get away with it. In the meantime, as Roj pointed out on another thread, there’s going to be a lot of pain and damage while it holds sway.
That’s the risk. All it takes is one slip-up: you can never be too pure. If she’s not careful, her audience will suddenly realize that she’s A WHITE WOMAN, and react accordingly. If and when Phipps (and Hines) do slip up and face condemnation, they might put a bit more thought into why this is a war on one front only, how only women are forced to put up with “inclusive” language and how they pay a much higher price for being gender critical than men ever do. They might also have a greater understanding and appreciation for the “lived experience” of abuse and vilification to which women defending their sex-based rights have been subjected, abuse in which Phipps and Hines have been complicit.
Funny though, how one’s “maleness” is something that one can deny, reject, and “escape” from, with blessings and acclaim. Laurel Hubbard Good, Rachel Dolezal Bad.
I mean, Christianity flew in the face of material reality for two thousand years and still has a strong cultural hold on at the very least the United States so I’m not so sure…
At the same time a lot of New Religious Movements have flared into existence and then died, especially in the age of internet information churn. Who knows?