Guest post: Part of an established historical pattern
Originally a comment by G on Captured.
The American right’s weaponized anti-trans politics — which genuinely is about generating and capitalizing on fear and hatred, not about protecting children, and even more clearly not about opposition to patriarchy and misogyny — practically guarantees that what passes for the left in the U.S. will embrace trans rights in the most knee-jerk and thought-free manner possible. And, I strongly suspect, there are some strategists on the right who fully realize this, and hope it will hurt the left with an American voting public that is, on average, distinctly uncomfortable with gender non-conformity in all forms.
This is part of an established historical pattern: When thoughtful feminist criticism of a social practice happens to align with what religious conservatives disapprove of on a completely different basis, the political left has turned on feminists — or worse, has insisted (with sadly high degrees of success) that feminism disfigure itself to embrace the oppression of women. (And, I should note, the ACLU has consistently been a leader in throwing feminists under the first passing bus in this way.) It happened with feminist criticism of pornography and the sex industry, which gave us various versions of “sex positive feminism” that is hardly recognizable as feminism at all. And it’s happening again with trans politics. The thought-stopping slogan “Sex work is work” even has exactly the same sentence structure as “Trans women are women” — and comes with the same assumption and insistence that anyone who dares disagree cannot have any actual reasonable concerns or objections (no matter how clearly they state them), but must be indistinguishable from a Bible-thumping bigot.
The best friends TRAs have are U.S. Republicans, as they give them a handy club to beat feminists who don’t agree that TWAW:
https://twitter.com/FeministRoar/status/1510251828138717191
“The TERF-to-fascist pipeline, and how transphobia is being used to tilt the US, and the world, towards the far right”
According to TRAs it’s all the evil witches fault, naturally. Of course the Republicans are happy to go over the top on transgender laws to better make it a wedge issue that helps them at the polls.
Excellent, excellent point. And I think perhaps it uncovers how skin-deep so much of the American left’s understanding of the principles that underpin feminism are. And to some extent this is now happening with the LGB rights movement, too. Under gender ideology, same-sex attracted people are now getting their first real taste of the nasty business of watching a political divide within our group get exploited to great effect by conservatives in order to disrupt and destabilize the progressive left in general.
I think there’s much that LGBs can learn from the pattern of what happened to the feminists who didn’t go with the flow of heavily promoted choosy-choice superficial-level empowerment and instead dutifully followed their intellectual lines of reasoning to the conclusions they inevitably led to, even in the face of social pressure to look away and just play nice with simple, digestible and not-fundamentally-changing-anything Girl Power sloganeering.
Whatever one’s level of comfort around gender non-conformity, the problem is the batsit crazy denial of reality around trans ideology. If your ideas can’t withstand scrutiny, if they depend upon lies and obfuscation, it shows that yo’ve got something to hide, and are afraid of the truth. Outside the bubble-world of social media, people can still clock a guy. They are not going to believe anyone that he’s really a girl or women, however many times Chase Strangio tries to shame them into it. You can be as sympathetic to dysphoric people as it’s possible to be, but to be forced to deny the evidence of your own eyes is too much to expect of people who are not already primed and committed to the cause.
If the Democrats lose the House this year, and the Presidency in 2024, how many are going to pause and think it might have been because too many people refused to buy the gender Lysenkoism being pushed on them? They think that supporting trans “rights” is an easy, no-cost way to look progressive, but they’re fooling themselves.
It’s not just the Democrats, but the media, too. They’ve betrayed the public trust by using “inclusive” language that obscures the true facts of the stories they are reporting, effectively taking a side in a manner that prevents informed, public debate. There is no debate, and they’ve aided and abetted the forces of bullying compliance, to which they have themselves surrendered without firing a shot. They’ve already made up your mind for you. In this case, believing in a widespread media conspiracy that’s trying to push false, harmful beliefs that can hurt your kids will be true. (The fact that this movement harms women probably isn’t a strong enough selling point, something on which both the right and left seem to be in agreement). These aggressive faux-progressives have become so blinded by their own righteousness that they can’t see that they’ve handed their opponents an honest-to-god example of un-ironic fake news that is so fucking easy to uncover. Too many people can see the truth with their own eyes. It won’t be possible to paint everyone who can see the falsehoods as ignorant, mouth-breathing, tin-foil hat wearing yahoos. They’ll try, but they will fail.
The Tories are trying the same trick as the Republicans, and Labour politicians are constantly being asked things like ‘Can a woman have a penis?’ But (filched off the internet) “In UK law, ‘sex’ is understood as binary, with a person’s legal sex being determined by what is recorded on their birth certificate. A trans person can change their legal sex by obtaining a GRC. A trans person who does not have a GRC retains the sex recorded on their birth certificate for legal purposes.” Now that Jamie Wallis, the Tory MP for Bridgend, has come out as a trans-woman (despite not having a GRC), and has been welcomed for doing so in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister himself (despite the fact that de Pfeffel had a day or two before made a joke at a champagne party for his MPs, the expenses of which were doubtless footed by the taxpayer, about Keir Starmer not being able to define what a woman was), I hope that that the same question which has been posed by journalists to Labour MPs will be posed to Tory ones, who have made no attempt, despite their huge majority, to call for the repeal of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. In fact, in 2017, the Tory Minister for Equalities Justine Greening considered reforms to the Gender Recognition Act to de-medicalise the process, with the principle of self-identification. One of Greening’s successors, Penny Mordaunt, affirmed that the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act would come from the starting place that “transgender women are women”.
That’s probably true for the sociopaths & power-hungry at the top as well as several obvious far-right factions, but conservatives in general seem to be a mixed lot. A good deal of what was radical in 1970 is now mainstreamed today as consistent with conservative principles, including support for “nonextremist, common sense” feminism. I’ve sometimes read articles, blog posts, or other content written by women concerned about puberty blockers or protecting women’s gains towards liberation & equality and had to start searching other content to tell if the writer identified as liberal or conservative. And more than once I discovered it was the latter. They’re not opposed to gay rights — and sometimes they’re even pro-choice.
And they sure seem to be sincere.
G makes a case for deciding the best policy and going with that even if it puts you in the same camp as conservatives. G prefaces this with the implication that conservatives are monsters who do not care about children, presumably including their own, and who instead care about generating hatred they can weaponize, presumably to acquire power for its own sake.
As Sastra says, that is not true. Most conservatives are very concerned about children getting led down a path where they’re taking hormones and getting surgery due to what’s likely to end up being a fad.
Here’s Rod Dreher, orthodox Christian conservative, who has tons of opinions I disagree with, flipping out over the Biden’s administration’s stance on transgender children:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/transgender-youth-democrats-party-of-child-mutilators-kidnappers/
I guarantee you that is not performative. I suppose you can say he’s admitting to trying to generate outrage, but that’s because he’s appalled that the Biden administration is discussing removing children from homes that don’t provide gender-affirming care, etc.
No, Skeletor, that’s not what G does. He didn’t say “conservatives.” He didn’t say it because it’s not what he meant. He said “the American right.” That’s a whole different beast, one that embraces behaviors and claims that many conservatives find abhorrent.
@Skeletor, comment #6 (and to a lesser extent @Sastra, comment #5):
Firstly, no broad and general claim about a group or class should be taken to universally apply to every individual who falls in that group unless it explicitly says so. That’s not the way such claims are intended, so your objection to my claim about the American right as a whole is point-missing in exactly the same way as responding to a claim about men as a class with “But not all men.”
More specifically, picking out individual conservatives who make rational arguments against trans ideology instead of (or, sometimes, in addition to) insistence that their preferred patriarchal world-view is both natural and “God’s way” doesn’t undermine my claim about the weaponized fear and hate of the American right’s anti-trans approach as a whole. Why? Because the same governors and legislatures passing anti-trans laws are also passing laws outlawing abortions and forbidding teachers from addressing “controversial” issues like the racist past and present of our nation. The fundamental function of American right’s culture war hasn’t changed since it became the beating heart of Republican politics in the 1970s: The culture war tactic appeals to religious and racial bigotry to convince the vast majority of white middle-class Americans that Democrats advance the interests of “others” to be feared and despised rather than “decent folk like us.” Anti-trans politics has that same appeal even when its policy proposals also have rational justifications NOT based in faith or bigotry.
Really, that last point is what makes trans ideology so insidious. When I pointed out that many Americans are uncomfortable with gender non-conformity, I wasn’t referring to trans ideology at all: I chose those words specifically to indicate people who have visceral negative reactions to men wearing lipstick or skirts and women with “butch” haircuts. No genuinely feminist analysis or argument supports that kind of gender-policing bigotry, but the rhetoric of trans activism insists that any and all objections to trans ideology are just manifestations of that bigotry. And since that bigotry does actually exist (even if not in the “terfs” most frequently accused of it), and since there are political forces appealing to and exploiting that bigotry, anyone with rational objections to trans ideology faces a massively uphill battle on the field of public opinion, which is not notably attentive to nuance and reason.