10 Responses to “Feminists do not police patriarchal gender norms”

• #1

  Lady Mondegreen

  December 8, 2018 at 12:16 pm

  Wow. Brilliant.

  A very large number of people need to read this, who won’t.
• #2

  Acolyte of Sagan

  December 8, 2018 at 1:24 pm

  And despite not reading it, those same people will use it to label Jane Clare Jones an evil transphobic bigot and do their utmost to destroy her career.
• #3

  Dave Ricks

  December 8, 2018 at 2:59 pm

  I liked this post, so I signed up to her Patreon account.

  https://www.patreon.com/janeclarejones/overview/
• #4

  Ophelia Benson

  December 8, 2018 at 3:05 pm

  Like
• #5

  Skeletor

  December 8, 2018 at 4:34 pm

  Someone posted this comment:

  mjaysongraham

  December 8, 2018 at 11:33 pm

  So if a KKK member wants to use “it” as a pronoun to identify me because he or she doesn’t see me as a human being, then that KKK Member is within his or her rights?

  Would not accepting being called “it” technically be narcissistic entitlement? But most people (other than extreme libertarians) would flinch at going along with “it”. Certainly the person doing that would be called out and shunned. Trans advocates would probably see things the same way, hence their calling out and shunning.
• #6

  Cressida

  December 8, 2018 at 4:52 pm

  Skeletor, that’s not the same thing. The pronouns Jones is referring to have a material reality behind them. “It” doesn’t.
• #7

  Ophelia Benson

  December 8, 2018 at 5:09 pm

  Is Skeletor’s point that it’s bad to call people “it” so it’s also bad to call people her or him?

  I can’t tell. It’s a bizarre comment.
• #8

  Lady Mondegreen

  December 8, 2018 at 6:26 pm

  Skeletor, #5; everybody–

  JCJ’s reply to that question is characteristically thoughtful and well worth reading.

  It’s a good question. I think in this case it would be a pretty grave form of moral injury, because it’s a refusal to grant recognition of someone’s humanity when they are clearly a human. So it would be a) factually incorrect and b) morally heinous. I’m not sure, however, that we have a right – how would it be enforced – to prevent people having factually incorrect and morally heinous views, providing they don’t do anything to enact those views. Calling someone ‘it’ may well be enacting those views – this is tricky, because we don’t actually have laws about ‘hate-speech’ in this country, providing you are not inciting violence/hatred. Certainly a strong argument could be made that that is inciting hatred, and in the case of the KKK, that would certainly be given weight by the fact that such speech is associated with a whole raft of actions designed to enact those views and to target Black people with violence. And those acts are an actual harm to the people they are directed at, and can therefore be legitimately proscribed.

  I don’t think the analogy holds in this case though. It is by no means factually obvious that male people are female people because they assert or believe themselves to be. It is absolutely the case that a person has an absolute right to hold that belief, that they have a right to enact that belief in the way they present themselves, that they should be absolutely protected from discrimination in doing so, and that they should be accepted *as a trans person.* It is not evident, however, that other people are obliged to share the belief that a trans person is the sex that they identify with – because sex is not mutable, and hence, many of us believe that *it is not true.* Secondly, it’s not clear that refusing to believe a male person is female, is the same type of moral offence as not believing someone to be human. When I don’t share someone’s belief that they are female, I am not denying their humanity – I’m just denying something which I don’t believe to be factually true about their identity.

  Lastly, the refusal to believe that someone who identifies as the opposite sex is, in fact, the opposite sex, would, for a strong case that it is an act designed to incite hatred to stick, have to be placed inside a pattern of actions designed to target those people with violence etc. Much as people like to claim that this is what is going on here – the whole evidence for that rests entirely on characteristing the refusal itself as an act of hatred. It’s entirely circular. The gender critical feminist movement is not in any way committed to propagating violence against trans people. We have repeatedly said that we want their rights to express their identity and be free from discrimination and violence to be protected in law. There is no empirical relationship between the violence directed at trans people and feminist thought. There is, within the trans rights movement, a great deal of energy being pushed into telling trans people that feminists hate them and want them harmed, and that our refusal to believe that male people are female people is an act of ‘phobia.’ It’s not. Phobia is a form or moral disgust or hatred. Not believing female people to be male is not hatred – it’s just our belief about reality. None of this noise about our hatred is coming from us. It’s coming from the trans rights movement, and it’s functioning in order to produce political pressure. It is, in fact, deleterious to the mental health and wellbeing of trans people and I happen to think its morally repugnant. Because a political movement genuinely committed to its constituents well-being would do a great deal better than to keep telling people that people who have an ideological disagreement with them are actually intent on harming them, when we’re not, and we keep saying we’re not.
• #9

  John the Drunkard

  December 9, 2018 at 7:14 am

  Another clause that might have made its way into the initial post:

  17. Violence directed at people who violate patriarchal gender norms is an artifact of patriarchy, not an artifact of feminism.
• #10

  Ophelia Benson

  December 9, 2018 at 9:02 am

  Well all the clauses might have made their way into the initial post but I wanted y’all to go read the whole thing!

  And yes, selection was difficult.