The toxic meaning attached to “woman”
The Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been relentlessly bullied for liking a tweet that queried the language of an American cancer charity which referred to women as “cervix-havers”, but she is absolutely right. Cancer prevention is about identifying a possibly fatal disease, not affirming someone’s gender identity. If a charity wants to add that women who identify as men should also get checks, that’s absolutely fine. But replacing “woman” with a clumsy neologism risks failing to reach natal females who aren’t familiar with their bodies and don’t know they have a cervix. Nor have I seen equivalent demands to erase the word “men” from medical advice. “Men, we are with you,” begins a message from Prostate Cancer UK. “Penis-havers”, surely?
Now, to top it all, I discover I’ve been ejected from high-level discussions at City Hall about domestic and sexual violence. Eight years ago, I was asked to become Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, after a group of women’s organisations voted unanimously in my favour. Women wanted me there, to provide an expert independent voice, but now I’ve been sacked. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the scale of violence against women in London has reduced in the meantime. (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t.) Women’s organisations in London weren’t consulted before it happened.
Maybe the thinking is “Now we know that if women don’t like being hated and assaulted they can just identify as men, there’s no need for a Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board.”
The toxic meaning attached to “woman” is misogyny in its purest form. Dressed up as “progressive”, as though we have finally reached the stage of recognising an historic injustice, it is actually quite the opposite — an attempt to shame women into accepting erasure from public discourse. This is something that centuries of patriarchy never quite achieved, perhaps because it didn’t feel the need as long as women were firmly in their place. But once the category of “women” has been demolished, everything is up for grabs and literally anyone can claim to be whatever they feel like. How can we fight for our rights if we’re not even allowed to name ourselves?
And we’re not even allowed to name the others, either, not if they “identify as”…us.
There is this big hand that’s put in your face when you attempt to explain how men identifying as women affects women. They don’t want to hear it, they won’t listen. If you attempt to explain any of this misogyny and homophobia, then you are instructed to talk to the hand, transphobe.
There is no reasoning, and I’m starting to think that peaking will only come about through individual revelations based on personal experience.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Sloppy Analogy is one of the major players in turning otherwise reasonable people unreasonable. I’ve long noticed this when it comes to religion and believing in God. A direct examination of the god concept requires too much light on a blurry idea based primarily on emotion. Enter then the popular apologetic of Sloppy Analogies.
“Remember how your mother would put something out for you to find and do something she wanted? God works like that. Think of your mother. God is like that. Think of your mother in another room so you can’t see her. Now you’re starting to understand. God’s like that. Now think of quantum physics. Hard to wrap your mind around, huh? God’s like that, too ….”
Once they start playing Sloppy Analogy, they can go on and on. The game is for them, as much as it is for you. And it seems to me that TRAs play it all the time.
“Think of knowing something true about yourself and not being believed. Being trans is like that. Think of black women not being able to use a bathroom reserved for whites. “Sex-based” spaces for women is like that. Think of religious conservatives disgusted over homosexuality. Opposition to trans folks living according to their Gender Identity is like that. Think of Jews hiding from the Nazis. That’s how trans people feel when Gender Identity is treated like a theory…”
And on and on. Sloppy Analogies are intuition pumps.
“Asking me to define ‘God’/define ‘woman’ is like asking me to reduce someone I love to a math equation. It just can’t be done. You’re making a category error.”
Ha.
[…] a comment by Sastra on The toxic meaning attached to […]
Sloppy analogies irritate me in a way that goes beyond ordinary disagreement – it’s more like mosquito bites, of which I have way too many right now.
Gender is like a mosquto bite. Some people have to scratch and other people ….
Okay, I’ll stop.
I suspect that no analogy that is of any practical use is perfect; all are, to some degree, sloppy. The best protection from being turned to a state of incorrigible unreason by a single analogy, no matter how sloppy, is to have been exposed to lots of analogies of varying degrees of robustness and persuasiveness at a formative age. All together now: “I blame the decline in liberal education”.