Those who deny the reality

Written by

Ophelia Benson

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Alex Massie points out the familiar inconsistency:

This Scottish government has no time for those who deny the reality of climate change but it is an administration busy enthusiastically denying the reality of biological sex. We must follow the science on one matter but abandon it on the other.

I can see doing that in some contexts – there are some where science is beside the point. Moral conflicts for instance aren’t a scientific issue, although science may be able to bolster a case. But when the core issue is as brutally physical as this one, just drawing a big X through the science is stupid.

Nicola Sturgeon, of course, is “a feminist to her fingertips”, which makes one wonder why she pursues an agenda that would redefine the idea and reality of womanhood so completely the term would, in effect, lose any and all usefulness.

She does it by saying there’s no clash of rights, none at all.

Any appearance to the contrary — such as the fact the majority of women’s organisations who responded to the government’s latest consultation on its plans opposed them — must be ignored or wished away. Women’s experiences and their fears are not so very important after all.

But then that is so often the case. The wonder is not that women are sometimes exasperated but that they are not, frankly, in a state of permanent revolt. 

Oh but I am.

Talking about “people with cervixes” or “people who menstruate” — as though “woman” has now become an inflammatory term — is a means by which women are stripped of their dignity and, worse than that, denied the experience of their own bodies, their own lives. There is something ugly, even something dehumanising, about such language and yet it is ever more fashionable and ever more widespread.

Hence the state of permanent revolt.

As a matter of justice and decency, trans people must have space and opportunity to lead their lives as they see fit. Neither they nor the government, however, has the right to corrupt meaning like this. Which, again, is why this is such a revealing argument. For it is one between those who think truth must matter and words must have meaning, however inconvenient this may be, and those who think wishful thinking may replace truth and by doing so make fantasy a new kind of reality.

I do think truth matters, as it happens.

Comments

6 responses to “Those who deny the reality”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Funny how their promotion of “lived experience” doesn’t apply to those of us who have lived the experience of being in a woman’s body.

  2. latsot Avatar
    latsot

    It isn’t just that words are ceasing to have meaning (although many are), it’s also that they are being classified as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and any meaning they might additionally have is now secondary to that.

    I get called a misogynist on Twitter a lot. Like a lot. I might or might not be a misogynist, but that’s not the point; the accusation is never made because I’ve said something misogynistic (I think), it’s just being used as a generic insult, because I’m a man.

    I’m not complaining about being called a misogynist. I couldn’t care less (unless it turns out I really am being misogynistic) and I know women have been putting up with exactly this kind of thing forever. What I’m complaining about is words with perfectly good meanings being assigned good or bad (at birth!) and then used as insult or praise accordingly. It’s not that the words are meaningless, they convey the goodness or badness associated with the meaning. So when I’m called a misogynist, I’m being assigned all the bad stuff associated with the exciting world of misogyny. But I’m being assigned them without necessarily showing any misogynistic behaviour.

    What I’m saying has changed recently, or has become more pronounced recently, is not (just) that words have become disconnected from meaning, but that meaning has become disconnected from context. Calling someone (say) a misogynist is an easy way of discrediting an argument within the bubble of people who are going to think you won regardless, but isn’t really going to convince anyone else.

    I’m not explaining this well. How about this: it’s a point scoring exercise and always has been, but these days people are suddenly in charge of keeping their own scores. It seems as though there used to be just a little agreement on what the score was, and now there isn’t.

  3. Seth Avatar
    Seth

    I recently had a conversation in which I mentioned the riots of 2020, in which my conversation partner took issue with the term “riot”, saying I sounded “very conservative”. But it is simply a matter of fact that there were several riots, lots of property damage, injuries, and some deaths, in many places throughout the country. But we are not allowed to name these incidents properly, because doing so reveals an unfashionable political affiliation.

    Whether or not something is true doesn’t seem to matter any longer, if it ever did.

  4. Brian M Avatar
    Brian M

    Seth:

    One caution, in defense of your more trendy lefty friends, is to ask the question: Who caused the riots? The history of FBI incitement makes some of us more skeptical. Too often, FBI stooges are/were those “in” the groups most interested in inciting violence. Marcus Ranum has a lot on this topic. The most horrifying example to me is the direct involvement of a paid FBI asset in planning the Birmingham Church Bombings. Somehow, the FBI can often find and stop left wing terror (or find the hapless wannabe Jihadi teenager) but right wing violence is somehow unstoppable. Even when the FBI has an asset in the middle of event

    One should also note the eager willingness of police forces and “guys alighting from unmarked cars” to engage in their own violence

  5. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    What what what what? “the direct involvement of a paid FBI asset in planning the Birmingham Church Bombings”?

    I don’t think I knew that. Fucking hell.

  6. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    I think it’s this guy?

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/40-years-for-justice-did-the-fbi-cover-for-the-birmingham-bombers

    Gary Thomas Rowe. He was an informant, and he helped beat up a guy in the vicinity of an attack on Freedom Riders, but his role if any in the church bombing is undecided.

    Was Rowe involved in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church? At first, the FBI feared that he might have been since they encouraged him to stay away from the crime scene and never showed his picture to those witnesses who later placed Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry in the vicinity of the church the night before the bomb exploded. Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who prosecuted Chambliss in 1977, and U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who won convictions of Blanton and Cherry in 2001 and 2002, did not consider Rowe a likely suspect.

    But given the central role that Rowe played in the violent events that occurred in Birmingham in the early 1960s—the attack on the Freedom Riders, the bombing of black homes, and an aborted attempt to assassinate Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth—it seems likely that Rowe knew that the church was going to be bombed on September 15 and never reported it to the FBI.

    On the other hand he also shot at Viola Liuzzo.

    The FBI considered Rowe too important a source to investigate where Rowe was the night before the explosion—he had difficulty explaining what he was doing—and Rowe initially identified a number of men as the likely bombers but never mentioned Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry until December, 1964, long past the time when it was clear to the Bureau that the three were responsible for the murder of the three girls and the maiming of the fourth. Hoover’s failure to act was later called “a serious error” by a Justice Department Task Force investigating Gary Thomas Rowe.

    Despite the Bureau’s uncertainty about Rowe’s connection to the bombing, they continued to allow him to run amuck. In March 1965, at the conclusion of the historic Voting Rights March, Rowe and three other Klansmen fired their guns at a car driven by Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five, who had come to Selma to work with Dr. Martin Luther King’s voting rights movement. Liuzzo died instantly when a bullet struck her in the head. Rowe denied that he had shot at Liuzzo and his FBI handler accepted his story without further investigation. Following the Liuzzo shooting, Rowe quickly made a deal with the Justice Department: In exchange for immunity from prosecution, he agreed to testify against his fellow Klansmen at their federal trial in December 1965.

    On the strength of his eye- witness testimony, the Klansmen were convicted of violating Ms. Liuzzo’s civil rights, but they served less than 10 years in prison. Mr. Rowe was again rewarded by a grateful Justice Department with a gift of $10,000, a new identity and a job as an assistant U.S. marshal in California.

    He lost that job a year later for being a drunken brawler.

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