A supposed gotcha annihilated
Jon Pike on the Foucauldian trope about “policing women’s bodies”:
Here’s a supposed gotcha, that bugs me, and deserves a thread on ‘policing women’s bodies’ as a criticism of arguments for fair sport for women. The objection is presumably Foucauldian in inspiration, derived from Discipline and Punish and the [concern] with bio-politics.
My reading of Foucault is heavily indebted to Nancy Fraser’s critique: ‘Empirical insights and normative confusions’ sums it up nicely. Those who talk today about ‘policing women’s bodies’ in the context of sport are normatively confused. That’s to say, any practice that secures sex-based spaces necessarily involves regulating bodies, on the basis of sex. So, if sex based spaces are sometimes a good thing then regulating bodies on the basis of sex is a good thing.
But of course calling that “policing” implies that it’s a bad thing, a bad sneaky domineering powery bad thing.
Sometimes, like in the case of female sport, sex-based spaces are a good thing, so it follows that having eligibility rules (aka ‘policing women’s bodies’) is good in these circumstances. In the same way, of course, governing bodies police aged bodies when they have age eligibility rules. So I’m with (Fraser’s) Foucault who says – ‘notice what is happening here, you are regulating bodies.’ and with Fraser who says ‘ – Yes, and?’
We “regulate bodies” in that way all the time, without even thinking about it. When adults play catch with children they don’t throw the ball with all their strength. Now apply that to countless other activities involving adults and children.
Of course, we can comment on and discuss the ways in which eligibility conditions for female sport are established and enforced, and we can discuss the content of them: That’s what this debate is about. So those who, dismissively, talk about ‘policing women’s bodies’ seem to want #nodebate (again) or want the end of women’s sport altogether. They won’t say this, because, as Nancy points out, they are normatively confused (and Michel is at fault here).
Three final points. (i) The key political move about ‘policing women’s bodies’ is directed at reproductive rights, and it’s pretty unpleasant to shift the slogan around to an attack on women’s autonomy and their right to fair sport.
Yes it god damn well is. Pretty unpleasant aka fucking enraging.
ii) Yes, this is a sub tweet about that silliness from the Canadian hockey journalist.
(iii) Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions, Nancy Fraser, which is in Unruly Practices, 2008 University of Minnesota Press (from p.17)
I think the Canadian hockey journalist must be this guy:
What brazen nonsense. Keeping men out of women’s sports is not at all similar or parallel to keeping women out of sports in general.
See also “anyone who stands up to a bully is a bully”. And black is white. Easy peasy. (As long as you’re happy to cater to the hard of thinking.)
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
@ Francis: Ugh. That’s one of my most hated narrative tropes. It’s the “if you kill him, you’ll be just like him” canard. I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t find that line insultingly stupid, even as a small child sitting in front of our TV on Saturday mornings. How on Earth would killing Hitler make me just like Hitler? Hitler killedmillions; I’d just be killing one.
Back on topic:
Indeed. What we have here is a failure to accept, or sometimes even recognize, the entailments of our goals. That is, a normative confusion. Assuming that I want to become physically strong, I am bound to accept that I must do some form of strength training, consume proper nutrients, get sufficient rest, etc. To reject one of these while retained the goal would be a normative contradiction. Those with a philosophy background may recognize this as the hypothetical imperative. (Incidentally, this sort of error is not unrelated to the error in “you’ll be just like him”. It’s a refusal to accept the necessity of an action in pursuit of an established goal or value.) Likewise, acceding to the importance and necessity of single-sex provisions logically commits us to that which creates and maintains single-sex provisions.
Case study: If I acknowledge the need for female-only restrooms, then I commit myself to what is necessary to have female-only public restrooms. I must exclude males (duh), but how do I do so? I could institute some method of sex verification, but that seems to infringe too much on privacy, so what is left? Appearance. I must exclude those who appear to be male. (NB: This is in addition to the general rule of excluding males. This will be important later.)
A Genderist would now object that I’m now being inconsistent, on the grounds that I’ve been saying that people should use the facilities appropriate for their sex. This reliance on appearance, they would say, excludes passing “trans men”, who are female, from using the female facilities. Thus my position is contradictory and should be rejected. Further, if we only go by appearance, then passing “trans women” should be allowed in female facilities, because by definition they appear female. Therefore, the “anti-trans” position is incoherent.
The first problem with this objection is that it attributes to me positions that I don’t advance. First, I actually don’t think that someone who looks like Randy “Macho Man” Savage has any business using a female restroom, regardless of his or her sex. To allow such a person would require females to reduce sensitivity to and awareness of indicators of potential male threat; i.e., the first and best line of self defense. Second, I never said that we can’t use other information, only that we don’t always have access to it. All males are to be excluded; that is both the primary goal and the first rule. To allow a female-passing male would contradict the overall goal of having single-sex spaces and break the first rule that no male is to be allowed. If someone is known to be male, then he is not permitted access.
Does this mean that some people won’t be able to use sex-separated public restrooms? Yes, it does. I’m willing to accept that this is a necessary consequence of implementation, because I’m bound by the hypothetical imperative to accept as necessary that which is entailed by my normative judgements. Likewise, someone who undertakes a serious effort to appear as the opposite sex must accept that there are consequences linked to that decision. Among those is loss of access to female public restrooms. It’s unsurprising that there’s opposition to these consequences, as the whole of Genderism is essentially an attempt to deny reality and the consequences of biology.
Whoops. Somehow forgot to close the first [a] tag. The link was supposed to enclose just the text inside the quotation marks: if you kill him, you’ll be just like him
Sorry. God, I miss the preview button.
@Nullius,
Another way to think about it: With any test, there’s a certain degree of measurement error. The best you can do is minimize the error as much as reasonably possible, and then decide before setting the cut point whether you want to minimize false negatives (male-appearing women being denied entrance) or false positives (female-appearing men being allowed in). When you don’t have direct access to the thing you want to measure, you need a proxy, and proxies are by their nature imperfect. So there’s no contradiction, just recognition that trade offs are necessary.
And a male who insists on breaking that rule has immediately shown himself to be a threat to women.
One of the consequences for TiMs is (or should be) that such efforts can and should be seen as an attempt to decieve, in order to gain access to women’s single-sex spaces. The fact that TiMs attempt to break the rule outlined above while attempting to pass as women makes them even more of a potential threat, not less. That women are being bullied into supressing these natural, personal safety instincts is disgusting.
This really isn’t about transwomen, though. This is about athletes like Caster Semenya and Christine Mboma who are males misidentified as females at birth. So when these athletes are restricted from competition or told they have to supress testosterone (which is a ridiculous solution) it gets turned into policing “women’s bodies” to make sure they are sufficiently feminine, or conform to Western, white standards of beauty. The problem is that the various international governing bodies have been too cowardly to state the truth that they are not policing women’s bodies, they are policing men’s bodies to make sure they stay out of women’s sports.
WaM: Absolutely true. Whenever we have to use one thing to determine another, unless there’s a strict logical relation between them, there’s a possibility of error. Some proxies are better or worse than others, and all we can do is try to find and use the best proxy we can. The false negative vs. false positive thing is really important, too, and it’s another one of the things Genderists try to gloss over. When exploring the jungle, it’s better to have a false positive and think there’s a tiger in the tall grass then it is to have a false negative and get eaten. Males are the tiger, and asking that women shut up and let obvious males into their spaces is like asking them to walk into grass where they see a tiger.
Eava: That’s also true. People in general, not just sports’ governing bodies, are and have been unwilling to straightforwardly state that men are men and women are women. When you’re in a position of authority, such unwillingness can only be called cowardice.
It’s worse than that; the tigers might very well be following the women, who didn’t suspect they were entering a jungle at all, having entered a space that was supposed to be 100% tiger free. The TiMs who say “We’ve been using women’s facilities for years, ” don’t have the winning argument they seem to think they do. They’re actually saying “We’ve been violating your boundaries, and violating your spaces, and getting away with it for years. You’re not allowed to say no to us now. It’s too late. We’re here to stay, and you can’t make us leave.” A woman’s lack of comment or complaint doesn’t mean the TiM “passes,” or that their presence is accepted and acceptible; it is likely the result of fear. How likely is it that a lone woman, confronted with a male who has violated the boundaries of a female, single-sex space, and has gone to the trouble of disguising himself to do so, is going to challenge this man? What is more likely, that this man is a supposedly “harmless” TiM, or a predator? They would look identical. How would one tell the difference? They are both tigers, entering a space which is not supposed to have tigers at all. The tiger trying to hide his stripes is no less a tiger, and is to be trusted less because he’s claiming he isn’t a tiger at all.
This is so good that I wish I’d said it myself, and I don’t say that often. I’m gonna shamelessly steal it.