Trap indeed

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

From an article recommended by Mostly Cloudy: The Solidarity Trap.

Young women in their teens and twenties have come of age in an institutional culture that presents support for transgender identity as the natural extension of progressive values they already hold. Feminism, as it has been transmitted to this generation through education, social media, and popular culture, has been substantially reframed around the language of inclusion, allyship, and the rejection of exclusionary boundaries. To question whether a male bodied person should have unrestricted access to women’s changing rooms is, within this framework, not a safeguarding question. It is a question about whether you are a good person.

That paragraph is an article all by itself.

News flash: you can’t have functioning political movements that value “inclusion” above all else. If feminist movements have to be incloosive of rapists and men who bully women and men who sneer at women and men who assault women, then those feminist movements can’t be feminist, can they. Politics is inherently about excluding some values or claims or policies or organizations. Politics is political. That means it can’t be all-embracing without ceasing to be politics.

I suppose that’s why I mock inclusivity by spelling it wrong: because the idea of blanket unquestioning inclusion is death to any kind of Revolt of the Underlings.

Comments

2 responses to “Trap indeed”

  1. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    Yes, that article is very good. It looks closely at the links between social media use and lax clinical standards amongst institutions offering “affirmative” support and “treatment” to troubled young women who weren’t fully informed about the path they were being pushed towards and/or asked to support. But there’s one bit that I have questions about. It’s this:

    Understanding this does not require condescending to young women. It requires taking seriously the social and developmental mechanisms that shape all human belief formation, and asking honestly whether the institutional environment surrounding this generation of young women has given them the information and the conceptual tools they need to form genuinely considered positions on questions that bear directly on their own safety and rights.

    The answer, on the evidence, is that it has not. Correcting that failure is not a political project. It is an educational one, and it is one that respects young women enough to give them the full picture rather than the approved version of it.

    While the educational component is vital, it takes place within a political context that continues to support the closed information bubble that led to this situation in the first place. Is it possible that the bubble would have popped sooner, or even failed to form at all if institutions outside of gender clinics and social media platforms had not been so completely captured as to defend and promote the narrative being fed to these girls and women? If the BBC had reported on “trans” issues honestly, without capitulating to the pressure of trans demands, if government organs and departments had not bent policy in trans-friendly, female-hostile directions, the difference in “pressure” between the gender-friendly information bubble and the wider social environment (which was being steared and engineered to shield genderist claims, demands, and influence from critical scrutiny), would have been much greater.

    Skepticism was not welcome, and, as has been reported here on many occasions, punished. Even neutrality and actual impartiality would have been better than what emerged, which was unquestioning partisan support and boosterism hidden behind media “style guides” and enforced “kindness” at all levels of government, from local town councils, through national government, right up to international organizations and NGOs, all of which turned the trans “rights” bandwagon into a political juggernaut willing, able, and active in the stigmatization and crushing of dissent and questioning. That took a lot more than gender clinics and social to establish, and will take a lot more than (re)education of the victimized girls and women to dismantle. I would go so far to suggest that without a thorough de-capture and “detransition” of the larger, political scene, the goal of educating and helping these girls and women will be much harder to acheive. What good will instilling in them an understanding of the need for single-sex women’s spaces, as outlined in the UK Supreme Court decision, when the government and its agencies refuses to defend them?

  2. Mostly Cloudy Avatar
    Mostly Cloudy

    Skepticism was not welcome, and, as has been reported here on many occasions, punished.

    Indeed. I wonder also if there was a link between the rise of gender ideology, and opposition to the idea of “free speech” among some segments of the Anglo-American left. The outrage the “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” AKA the Harper’s Letter provoked from soft-left commentators like Ernest Owens and Mike Masnick is one example.

    The 2023 essay “The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap” by Andrea Long Chu is a another example of this opposition.

    In such a climate, it was easy to persuade young progressive women to swallow the dangerous nonsense of “No debate! No debate!” The exercise of free speech on the trans issue was not welcome, and as you pointed out, has been punished.

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