Uh oh, there’s a range of views here
That is the first and most glaring conclusion to be drawn from the extraordinary letter signed by 338 Guardian and Observer employees lamenting the paper’s willingness to run a column written by the great Suzanne Moore earlier this week, in which Moore argued that “we have gone through the looking-glass and are being told that sex is a construct” and that “you either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all”.
The signatories to the letter sent to Kath Viner, the paper’s editor, deplore what they deem the Guardian’s “pattern of publishing transphobic content” though, vexingly, the letter itself provides no evidence of this alleged transphobia and instead merely assumes it.
What I keep saying. The “activists” merely assume everything, to the point where they think endless repetition of slogans is absolutely all that’s required.
According to Buzzfeed News which received a copy of the complaint – as, doubtless, was intended all along – staff at the paper were “deeply distressed” by the resignation of a transgender employee earlier this week who had, allegedly, received or overheard what are described as “anti-trans comments” from “influential editorial staff”. No details of what these remarks may have been has been furnished by Buzzfeed.
Or anyone else. Details are never furnished by anyone.
Again, according to Buzzfeed’s account, this all followed what is described as “a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights”. One editorial column even had the temerity to argue that trans rights are sometimes in “collision” with more orthodox interpretations of women’s rights.
Because they are, as Massie goes on to say. If there is no collision what are they protesting about?
The evident implication of the letter sent by the disappointed 338 is that the paper should cease publishing opinions with which some Guardian employees might disagree. A question arises, then: should the Guardian remain a newspaper at all? It is difficult to avoid the thought that 338 of its employees think it should not. As it is, many of them appear shocked by the discovery they have inadvertently wandered into a workplace in which they may discover a range of views. Perhaps they should reconsider their positions.
Check the help wanted adds under “freelance fanatics.”
Well there wasn’t supposed to be a collision. Women were supposed to politely step out of the way, or quietly let themselves be run over. They weren’t supposed to block the way. HOW DARE THEY!
Women have interrupted the coup. They have derailed what was supposed to have been a fait accompli. The existenceof any opposition to or questioning of trans ideology is a profound embarrasment for TRAs, because it means the delusional, fringe nature of the beliefs and demands of trans ideology have a greater chance of being laid out for all to see. Worse yet, it allows the reasonable, reality-based concerns and reservations of gender critical feminists wider circulation. The more people learn of the legitimate concerns for the health, safety and wellbeing that feminists are raising, and that TRAs are ignoring or denying, the more support the gender critical position will gain. In this case, knowledge is power; and for TRAs, ignorance is strength. The longer the delay in enactment of TRA demands, the lower the chances of their being enacted become. They cannot allow time for thought and consideration, as thought and consideration are exactly what feminists are insisting upon.
Consequently, any and all opposition to trans “rights” must be framed as hateful and bigoted. The actual points of contention must not be discussed, lest the GC, pardon me, TERF position be given any publicity whatsoever. There must be no debate, no discussion, no compromise. They have nothing beyond simplistic slogans, hyperbole, and wilfull misrepresentation of the legitimate points of gender critical feminists, and they know it. They cannot afford open, honest discussion on a level playing field because if that happens, they will lose.
Which it is, as it has been manifestly obvious to all right-thinking people over the centuries that males can be women and that being a man or a woman has always only been of matter of having certain thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Any opinions to the contrary are a modern corruption of the One True Revealed Feminism, which has always said (nay: insisted) that women are women because they‘re into woman stuff. Like shopping.
The explanation makes sense for the more fanatical trans people, but not so much for feminist women. Why are they so invested in the success of the move to force men on women? It’s some kind of mass political hypnotism, but that just restates the problem. Jennifer Saul didn’t have to write this piece; she chose to. Why? I don’t know.
Feminism has become a modern Ouroboros
Is this referring to the trans person that claimed to be resigning for transphobia related reasons, but turned out to have resigned three weeks prior for unrelated reasons?
Also, I really enjoyed that final quoted paragraph. How is a large news and commentary organisation ever going to function, if it is not permitted to run anything with which 338 employees disagree?
#3 OB
I suspect that it is because the TRAs have at least achieved one of their goals: hitching the trans cause to the LGB wagon. As a result, there are loads of people jumping aboard purely because they see it as part of the LGBT cause.
I can’t see what feminists get out of it personally either. It’s all too easy to say they’ve “drunk the Kool-aid’, but again, that just restates the problem.
Maybe it’s a part of interdepartmental academic politics? “Third wavers” using trans ideology/queer/critical theory as a tool to dislodge “second wave” dialectical materialist feminists? Some right wing critics lump Postmodernism in with “cultural Marxism”, but a number of critiques of “liberal feminism” I’ve come across oppose it from an explicitly Marxist and materialist stance, and show little tolerance for pomo word play and other games of “identity” politics.
Choosey-choice, liberal, sex-work positive feminism certainly seems to be a retreat from a feminism that is a robust, radical, class-based analysis of patriarchy that arises from the material conditions of the lives of women. The latter is much bigger project demanding harder work and, I think, a much deeper and explicit political commitment. Maybe some feminists see this task as too large, too Sisyphean. It’s almost as if practitioners of “liberal” feminism have given up, or been taken hostage or something, and are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
I guess I’m trying to come up with some sort of deep psychological explanation because I find it hard to understand how intelligent people (who are not themselves trans) could possibly, truly believe this stuff. Trans ideology is the incoherent, unholy love-child of a fierce, Lysenkoist anti-realism and a revivified mind-body dualism, garbed in the fashionable high heels, lipstick, and frock of gender identity. Descartes is alive and well, but been born into the wrong body. Who would have thought that anybody would ever seriously argue that some women have penises and that men can be lesbians? It’s the Stan/Loretta scene from “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian” come to life. but without the humour. And why would some women assist in the erasure of their own sex as a biological and political class? It’s baffling.
IMO, trans ideology is one factor in a perfect storm scenario. The successful fight for gay marriage; the election of Donald Trump; the widening political and social divisions; the dominating presence of social media; the worldwide increase of populist politics; the surge of religion and the resulting pushback; the zeitgeist of living in the End Times; the cultural emphasis on individualism and personal belief; the rise of Therapy and Validation; and the liberal commitment to social justice and compassion spiraling into an increasing vortex of virtue signaling. It’s all or nothing. You are on one side or the other. Don’t be on the wrong side of history.
Be kind.
When it gets right down to it, I think liberals and feminists and liberal feminists have latched on to the Trans Rights Agenda and accepted a lot of counterintuitive and poorly supported facts because they want to be kind. The issue has managed to push all the right buttons, starting with sad little children who won’t be be believed, going through suffering teenagers who are going to kill themselves, and ending with folks who have authentic lives to lead and they just want to pee. Be sensitive, caring, nice, and kind.
And hate, threaten, marginalize, demonize, cancel, and attack the f*cking monsters who aren’t.
So, “Liars for Jesus”, righteous fury in support of a Noble and Just Cause, with a touch of Cover Your Ass. The real fight is for the undecided masses who aren’t really aware of (or don’t really care about) the details of the conflict, rather than necessarily trying to win over those who, at least for now, are True Believers. That is why TRAs are desperate to avoid letting the GC case be heard and simply condemn it outright and, instead of arguing against it point by point, misrepresent it through lies and hyperbole. The Gender critical side needs to talk over the True Believers to try to reach those outside the woke-o-sphere on twitter, to get the message across to “ordinary” people.
The requirement to accept or acquiesce to not only lies and ommissions, but to the de-platforming, bullying, and threats is a pretty steep price to pay for being on this side. You’d think it would be exhausting to keep up the pretense and doublethink. I have nothing but praise and admiration for the women on the front line who have to expose this bullshit, having to waste their limited time and resources to fight this fight that did not have to be, but which, having been started, now must be won.
Sastra, I think that is right on, and I think it’s important to add that liberal feminists are very good at guilt. Dishing it out, yes, but accepting and internalizing it, too. If one feminist ever said a racist thing (and obviously some did), we are all guilty. If one feminist ever said a homophobic thing (and obviously some did), we are all guilty. I think it’s the same thing that has so many white middle-class feminists attacking women for being…white middle-class feminists. As though somehow that makes our issues illegitimate, rather than one set of issues in a very large pot of issues for diverse women.
So with all this guilt, the imperative is to not be the one who says that transphobic thing, not to be the one who doesn’t let every woman on the wagon, not to be the one who…it goes on and on and on.
Certainly “be kind” has a lot to do with it, but then again, why is this particular cause the one that leans on kindness so heavily and successfully?
In fact “be kind” is rather odd for a political movement, when you think about it. (I’m not sure I’d noticed this before.) Previous rights/liberation/justice movements demanded rights, liberation, justice – not “kindness.” That’s not the goal at all, for reasons that seem pretty clear – rights and justice are a matter of what’s owed, of what everyone ought to have as of right. They’re not extra, they’re not a special favor, they’re what all people are entitled to – certain unalienable rights. Beseeching kindness is the opposite of what rights movements want to do; we want to remind everyone to stop withholding what is ours.
But trans activism, as I’ve pointed out a few billion times, isn’t seeking those universal rights. It’s seeking special treatment, and special new peculiar rights…rights that don’t exist and shouldn’t exist. We don’t see why those rights should be forthcoming, and having no good answer, they have to tell us to be kind.
The kindness is being demanded…from women I think TRAs are taking advantage of the female socialization of their opponents, trying to guilt them into submission. (See iknklast’s above comments regarding feminist “guilt”). And again, this kindness is unidirectional. It doesn’t seem to matter how “unladylike” or downright vicious TIMs are. Smokebombs are not “kind.” The trans movement is a real Jeckyll and Hyde thing, with these whipsaw turns between pleas for the feelings of the most marginalized brought to suicidal ideation and intimidation and threats of violence. “Be kind” my ass.
Ophelia #3, Holms #6, YNnB #7, Sastra #8
I strongly suspect that cognitive dissonance is a big part of the explanation as well. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the pyramid metaphor from Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, but anyway, imagine two people standing right next to each other on the top of a big pyramid and trying to decide which way to go down. At this stage no option may appear obviously better than any other, and neither of our two testpersons may feel all that confident about the way to proceed. Even if they eventually end up picking opposite routes, it may in fact have more to do with a temporary mood or whim than any strong disagreement in principle.
However, once You have made a choice, You have a stake in defending it. The same logic used to justify each previous step in a particular direction, as well as the need for consistency, keeps pushing You further in the same direction, and the further down the side of the pyramid You go, the harder it gets to turn back without admitting to Yourself (probably the hardest part) and the world that You’ve have been wrong all along, that Your justifications were all bogus, and that You may in fact have been a bit of an asshole. In our metaphor we see how these two people, who were initially standing side by side, end up very far apart by the time they reach the bottom.
I don’t doubt that many of the people currently riding the trans bandwagon got on it for reasons that seemed both noble and worthy at the time. Then, as the demands and the thought-policing kept getting more extreme, all those former concession (as well as their justifications) came back to haunt them, and by now they have dug themselves in too deeply and are no longer able to get out.
I can certainly relate to this myself. As (I suspect) so many others, I got into social justice issues following the death of movement atheism/skepticism. When I started hearing from trans* activists, I initially thought what (once again, I suspect) many of us were thinking: “Well, some of the things they say don’t seem quite right to me, but maybe I just need to “shut up and listen” as well as “educate” myself like everyone keeps saying. Don’t want to be like all those guys who mansplain feminism to women and think they understand the issues better than the women who have been dealing with them their whole lives, do I. Trans people are indeed a marginalized group, and social justice is all about standing up for marginalized groups. At least we can all agree on that. Etc. etc.” The borrowed association with LGB issues probably helped their cause as well. I think they even got me to sign a couple of petitions to ban “TERFs” from specific venues (*blush*).
In a way my own cluelessness was what saved me. In my limitless naivety I assumed we were all “in it together” against the Social Injustice Warriors (SIWs) of the far right, and started following every feminist, anti-racist, LGBT activist etc. who seemed to have something interesting or worthwhile to say on twitter. It didn’t take long before I discovered that the diabolical “TERFs” I kept hearing about (who I was told were at least as bad as the MRAs sending death and rape threats to Rebecca Watson) included at least half of the feminists I was following, and I couldn’t help noticing the Trump-level dishonesty of the accusations leveled against them (including Caroline Criado-Perez who was at the same time going through the ugliest cyber-bullying I had ever seen by the MRA mob). One of the earliest red flags (and one of the most bizarre conversations I have had in my life) was when a trans activist PMed me on twitter in order to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger. As I recall “they” assured me that although this woman never said anything explicitly transphobic, it was non the less “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect and that I was not in a position to question.
Had I been ever so slightly less clueless about the various fractions and divisions among nominally pro-social justice types, I might never have followed any of the “wrong” feminists in the first place, and then who knows were I’d be…
Funny thing – one of the several items that combined to push me into “Nope I’m through with all this” was “when a trans activist PMed me on twitter in order to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger.” Actually two feminist writers, but otherwise exactly the same.
I never really bought any of it, but I did keep my mouth shut for a very long time – too long. I tried to suspend judgement, I looked the other way, I talked about other things.
But a warning sign was that time one of PZ’s regulars said “can we please stop talking about abortion rights as a women’s issue?”
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Uh oh, there’s a range of views […]