And more of the same ridiculous idea that saying X is not Y is denying X’s right to define her own Xality. The Guardian purses its lips and frowns and says Ian McEwan has been a naughty naughty boy.
Subhead:
Booker-winning author appears to question people’s right to decide their own gender
No he doesn’t. He questions his (McEwan’s) obligation to believe whatever people tell him. People have every right to decide all sorts of things, an infinite number of things; it doesn’t follow that we all have a corresponding duty to believe or endorse or repeat or praise whatever they’ve decided.
Campaigners have criticised author Ian McEwan for comments that appeared to question the right of transgender people to choose their gender.
No, they didn’t appear to do that. See above.
In a speech to the Royal Institution, the Booker prize-winning writer asked whether factors such as biology and social norms limited our ability to adopt a different gender.
“The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number,” McEwan said. “For example, some men in full possession of a penis are now identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms.”
People can identify however they like. That doesn’t mean they can control how we receive their identification. A scruffy white guy age 20 can identify as Barack Obama; if he sits next to me on the bus and tells me he’s Barack Obama, I don’t have to take his word for it.
In a Q&A after his speech, one woman asked McEwan, 67, to clarify what she called his offensive remarks, the Times reported (paywall). “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men,” he said. “But I know they enter a difficult world when they become transsexuals and they tell us they are women, they become women, but it’s interesting when you hear the conflict between feminists now and people in this group.
“It’s quite a bitter conflict. Spaces are put aside, women are wanting to put spaces aside like colleges or changing rooms, and find from another side a radical discussion coming their way saying men who want to feel like it can come in there too. I think it’s really difficult. And I think there is sweeping through American [university] campuses a kind of strange sense of victimhood and a sense of purposeful identities that we can’t actually all of us agree with. Of course sex and race are different, but they also have a biological basis. It makes a difference whether you have an X or Y chromosome.”
It makes a difference where you grew up. It makes a difference who your parents were. (If they weren’t the same as Obama’s parents, there goes your identification as Obama.) It makes a difference where you lived as a child…and so on. Identify how you like, but if the facts don’t support your identification, that’s not the fault of all the people who aren’t you.
Stonewall condemned McEwan’s “uninformed views” as “extremely sad”. In a statement it said: “The complexity of gender identity extends beyond genitalia. Trans people need and deserve acceptance and equality. This sort of commentary doesn’t just denigrate the trans experience, it denies its very existence, and that’s especially hurtful for a group of people who have spent their lives fighting to be heard and understood.”
No, that’s exactly what it doesn’t do. It does not deny the existence of the trans experience. It’s dishonest to say it does.
Comments
11 responses to “How dare anyone appear to question”
But if he says he is a woman, suddenly you do because gender immune to criticism for some reason. Having established her trans credentials, she is now empowered to say any fucking thing she likes on either subject. Gender isn’t sex and is thus not tied to any particular anatomy! Oh but how dare you say that my penis makes me anatomically male, this contradicts my identity as a woman, even thought I just said that gender is not tied to anatomy!
Fuck that game.
Oh my god, I wrote the somments above before I had finished reading the quoted article, and here in the same article we see ‘gender identity extends beyond genitalia.’ That’s funny, I thought it was independant of it?
Serenity now.
Look, I’m not going to get angry or snarky, I just want to make a couple of points, okay?
From the OP:
Zinnia Jones:
(source)
The OP:
I grew up in the same place with the same parents as a woman, sometimes referred to as my sister.
The point is there is no valid comparison between feeling you are a woman, and feeling you are the first black President of the United States.
#2 Silentbob,
I don’t see what earthly difference any of that would make. The fact that I have infinite male direct ancestors doesn’t mean I can be a man if I’m not one. The fact that there are intersex people doesn’t mean I can be a man if I’m not one. How is this supposed to be logical or convincing in the slightest?
Radical? Try reactionary. Men refusing to allow women to get away from them, men limiting women’s ability to have any sort of public life, is not new, let alone redical. The whole trans movement is dead set on erasing women’s rights.
#2 Silentbob
The OP is not a criticism directed at all trans people, it is a more pointed criticism directed at that relatively small subset that seem to want to have it both ways:
1) sex refers to anatomy, gender refers to something harder to define except that it is not anatomy, and they are independant of one another;
2) but also, how dare you refer to e.g. testicles as male anatomy, this implies that having testicles means you cannot be a woman, an invalidation of trans women.
The above cannot both be true. If being fluid or agender or demiboi or [etc] is not determined by anatomy, then there is nothing invalidating to trans people that certain anatomy is sexed.
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#4
That’s not a fair statement. Some of the trans movement is erasing some women’s rights, and I don’t think there is any point in debating whenther they are doing so intentionally or inadvertently. The old adage ‘don’t ascribe to malice that which can more easily be ascribed to ignorance’ or however it goes.
Roughly two months ago I read an article about a women who acts like a cat, dresses to look cat-like and who claims she’s really a cat trapped inside the body of a human female.
Seriously.
I’m willing to be civil and to address her as ‘Your Felineness’, but I do not consider her to be a cat.
I feel the same way about a middle aged man with 7 children who claim he’s really a six year old girl.
The colleges and changing rooms thing is worth a cringe.
Gender transition is a relatively unprecedented human experience. Gender essentialism, whether from North Carolina Republicans or Alice Dreger’s inquisitors, is still drawing upon standards formed without reference to the present reality.
#2 Silentbob:
Let me give Zinnia another f’rinstance. Some people are born in some countries, & others are born in others. Sometimes countries change shape & people who were in one country are suddenly in another country. Some people (like me) are “inter-country” – the country they were born in no longer exists as a political entity. It is even the case that some people change country & go through a “transition” that gives them a legal identity as members of a country of their choice.
It is neverthless the case that:
1. I cannot demand that people share my belief that I am British
2. I cannot accuse people who assume I am not British based on my accent & lack of British passport of bigotry
3. I cannot become British by decree – I have to do a citizenship test, a language test, fill in a bunch of forms, submit my biometric data to the HO, swear allegiance to the Queen & pay a £1,005 fee (not including the separate fees for all of the above). Transition fron non-Brit to Brit is lengthy, expensive, & often humiliating. I still have to do it if I want people to accept that I am British.
4. EVEN AFTER ALL THAT, if people assume I am not British based on my name, accent etc., they would not be denying my “human right to decide my own naitonality”. Because a) such a right does not exist b) my nationality will remain British regardless of their perception. I can even c) be Nationality-Fluid, by retaining dual nationality with my previous country of citizenship. Other people *still* don’t have a moral obligation to either perceive me as British on spec or take my word that I am in fact British (in the relevant circumstances) without the production of some appropriate documentation, in other words based on nothing but my word.
None of these things are nearly as determined as biology is. They’re all complete social constructs, much more transparently artificial ones than gender. It is still the case that we have rules around the boundaries of the construct, & there is no “right” that inheres in our humanity to have our belief that we transcend those boundaries validated by others.
Sorry to be all meta, but this is a response to Holms: jstuart didn’t say that all trans people are trying to erase women’s rights, they said the whole trans movement is. As much as it feels fair to say “there is no single trans movement,” that’s little more than a platitude unless you can show that there’s a significant part of the trans movement that is fighting to preserve and further “cis” women’s rights and not just pushing trans people up the gender hierarchy while pushing “cis” women further down. It stops being inadvertent when people keep telling the trans movement that it’s doing this and the trans movement keeps doubling down.
I’m willing to allow that I may be looking in the wrong places, but so far all I’ve seen is a tiny number of individual transsexual women pushing back against the trans movement’s misogyny.
What I’m saying is not specifically a criticism of trans people. Given the tiny numbers of trans people, the trans movement appears to be populated by huge numbers of “cis” activists that are using this issue to drive liberal feminists even further from radical feminism.
In the 16th century, “maness” was used to mean “women”. Perhaps it can be pulled into service for some other “gender”. If we’re going to have a variety of genders, we should be able to arrive at distinct words for distinct categories. That would make the whole thing less confusing at least.
Silentbob:
“Identifying as” a woman is not the same as “becoming” a woman. In fact, I’m pretty sure saying that transitioning means becoming a man/woman is a hanging offence, these days.