Rishi Sunak says 'a man is a man and a woman is a woman'
 

It's a genuinely fascinating moment in world politics when the prime minister of Britain feels compelled to weigh in on our species' sexual dimorphism.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kQ...TheIndependent

The wee fella's stance on this contentious topic contrasts with the rhetoric of some of the other players in UK politics, including Ed Davey of the Lib Dems. Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon was forced to step down earlier this year, with many citing her policies on the trans issue as a major factor. For Labour's Keir Starmer, dropping the party's commitment to self-ID was another way in which to differentiate himself from his predecessor, the more radical Jeremy Corbyn.

I am fascinated with gender politics in general, and in the UK and Ireland in particular for several reasons. Unlike in the States, the positions on the trans issue don't quite map onto the left-right divide in the same predictable fashion. Literally all the advances made by trans activism were achieved under conservative governments, while a lot of the pushback came from grassroots feminist groups. Much more than the US, it's a political culture with a longstanding tradition of labor unionism, where radical politics were never confined to a few urban centers (let's just say that there are good reasons why E.P. Thompson's masterpiece wasn't entitled The Making of the American Working Class) and feminist activism is a fascinating part of that story.

I think I'm relatively familiar with the discussions: I've been getting my news mostly from The Guardian for as long as I've had a smartphone. First of all, because Canadian media is a joke. Second of all, because I've always liked British culture. And not least, because The Guardian's excellent coverage has set it apart from the lying US media during things like the Snowden leaks (and apparently during the Iraq war, though that was before my news consuming days).

But I don't live there and would welcome the opportunity to learn from UK-based users.

So... What do you think about Rishi's statement? Or Starmer's change of direction from Jezza? Or the Twitter meme about "terf island"? Or Sam Smith's ongoing struggles with gender norms?

All together now:

Gender on the streets of London
Gender on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
"Could life ever be sane again?"

wow what a bs sensational video. right wingers often cite bullying as a factor when they literally aren't creating a culture of harm and bigotry that leads to real people's deaths. You are not allowed to make a judgement on whether people are valid or not to be alive especially as someone who does not experience the sweeping hatred the LGBT community does. This issue has been politicized when it really comes down to lobby money from churches that want to stay pure to their roots and the fact that what harm does it do to cishets? They are literally scared of us and the fact that we understand life in a much broader scope than poltliics will ever account for. Well guess what, transgenderism has been around before any fvcking church existed. And it will outlive any country or politician, the fact that we are who we are should not be up for debate. People deserve empathy and the biggest issues in the world right now are being avoided, it's a carrot on a stick how much politics has become centered on the "LGBTQ issue". Things like rapidly advancing climate change, housing, healthcare, etc are all things that people are dying over daily, this only adds to the carnage. It's no coincidence either that those enacting change are more often than not queer as ****, they want us silenced and dead.

But that's the thing, we're not talking about US conservatives or about anyone who hates gender nonconfirming people. It's a different conversation where, barring a few extremists obviously, all sides agree that everyone has the right to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish.

Many of the most vocal critics of things like gender self-ID in the UK are lesbian feminists.

Their critique extends to the political demands made by the trans activism movement, not anyone's personal identity or inclination.

Again, literally all the advances made by trans activism in the UK were achieved under conservative governments, while a lot of the pushback came from grassroots feminist groups.

well yeah TERFs are full of **** what's new? doesn't cover all feminism it's just the dumb offshoot of it

That there are many currents in feminism and tensions between them is a known fact. But I wouldn't dismiss as an "offshoot" what appears to be a rather mainstream position in a country where feminism has a remarkably rich and long history.

Neither would I call someone like Kathleen Stock "dumb". She is not.

This is such a hilarious thing to post for someone whose life is literally not affected by the way other people identify. The people whose lives have gone insane are ours.

the woke mob is trying to make us all trans /s

it costs 0 monies to just go about your life and not make others lives worse

Was intended as a funny-cause-it's-so-obviously-stupid type of joke to lighten things up. You know the song it's taking off on?

No one's life is affected by another's "identity". As I may have said a couple of dozens time on the infamous cis is a slur thread. Political claims made on behalf on this or that identity, on the other hand, affect us all.

Keir Starmer is so problematic that he insists on using the wrong pronouns for Israel!

https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/stat...47160299037086

Jezza would've never misgendered the Jews like that, while making excuses for the Islamist murderers he calls "friends".

Forever charmed by the British pronunciation of "cock"

https://twitter.com/Wommando/status/1711113169068761588

(This is happening outside the annual conference of the Labour party in Liverpool)

Around the time of the Iraq war, the anti-war left built a common cause with racist paleoconservatives. That's the depressing reality of politics: to stand a chance to achieve certain goals you don't have a choice but to work across the aisle with people some of whose views you find indefensible.

Some of the alleged alliances mention in the video seem, from where I'm sitting, like grave miscalculations. But then the situation vis-à-vis gay and reproductive rights in the UK is different from what it is in the US: they face no real threat afaik. Then I can see the rationnel behind, hypothetically speaking, taking money from rich conservatives idiots so that your organization can keep the lights on. Does it entail an uneasy balancing act? For sure.

Btw in her excellent book Kathleen Stock is pretty critical of certain manifestations of "gender critical" feminist activism, including calls for temporary alliances of convenience with certain strands of the right. They're not above criticism.

The bottom line for me is that building alliances is bound to be difficult and lead to some tough (or maybe unfortunate) choices when you've been excluded, completely unjustly in my opinion, from "progressive" spaces.

Having said all that, I decided to look into one of those examples cited in the video: Maya Forstater's participation in a panel at something called the Battle of Ideas. It was organized not by ADF UK but by something called The Academy of Ideas (whose stated mission is to expand the boundaries of the public debate and who seem to be standard issue libertarians); the one panel on which Forstater sat was organized in partnership with ADF UK. It is stated from the outset by the chair that disagreement is likely. There is one guy on the panel who's from ADF, Jeremiah Igunnubole. The others represent different perspectives, tending toward libertarianism as far as I can tell. It seems like a punishingly boring discussion but the idea that Forstater (a standard issue British liberal) is somehow aligning with the religious right by appearing there is blatant guilt-by-association nonsense that makes me doubt some of the other claims.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhVN...nel=worldwrite

Anyway for my money the most interesting author in that thumbnail is Kathleen Stock, a philosopher of the analytic persuasion.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/...1000_QL80_.jpg

This lucidly argued book is probably the best thing I've read from the British gender critical feminists. Will be posting bits and pieces here.

You're defending and praising people who think trans people are worse than fascists. Got it.

Lots of fascism to go around. A surfeit of fascism. Almost like this word doesn’t mean **** when used as a playground insult by historical illiterates.

Anyway, more of Kathleen Stock's impressive lucidity


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJhndRR4vF0

And now for the latest from the UK's gender wars...

Telling children they can change sex is conversion therapy, say campaigners


Sex Matters say treatments mask sexuality issues and seek to ‘trans away the gay’

Sex Matters said they wanted to see an end to what they call “modern conversion therapy”, under which children who may be struggling with their sexuality are encouraged to change gender.

“Modern conversion therapy is telling children that they can be the opposite sex, which if they are going to grow up to be gay makes them ‘straight’.
“In the strongest possible terms, we are calling for a ban on harmful and misleading practices that are targeting minors and vulnerable people. Puberty is a human right.”

Sex Matters said that, increasingly, these products are being offered to children who are worried their sexual orientation may be unacceptable.
By changing gender, they are told, they will be effectively straight – a process called “transing away the gay”.

The group is campaigning for legislation that outlaws all medical or surgical treatment of minors to modify their sexual characteristics, as well as medical or surgical treatment performed on anyone who thinks it will change their sex.

The group said such legislation could use the model of laws against female genital mutilation and virginity testing.

Increasing numbers of same-sex attracted children are being prescribed drugs that halt the natural progression of puberty, and cross-sex hormones that cause secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex to develop.
Some go on to have irreversible surgery to remove their breasts, genitals or internal sexual organs.

Another one of the alleged fascists is Allison Bailey.

This is who she is:

And this is what she has to say. I guess I wasn't listening at school when they taught what fascism is.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9Xba9zb...g&name=900x900

That's not fascist but still a very superficial and overly simplistic statement. Does a very effeminate man get a treatment or experience that's even close to that of an average man? Is my frame of reference close to that of most women? Absolutely not. Of course there are parts of it that all cis women have in common, but it's not so simple as a binary divide between men and women. What we consider 'man' and 'woman' is much more than just a bunch of genitals; that's due to cultural conditioning and such but it is an inevitable fact. We can't wish it away at once, so in the meantime the better option is to allow people to navigate those categories more freely

No Marie, that's precisely what this statement does not say or imply. It is not an endorsement of gender norms. A definition of the female experience as synonymous with or confined to that of gender-confirming or "feminine" women is the precise opposite of what this is about.

This is what Allison Bailey looks like:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c491c...5&dpr=1&s=none

What it entails is that we should embrace the real diversity of our world, that women who look like her should be accepted as nature made them. The experience of a future weightlifting champion growing up and the experience of an effeminate boy who you know is going to be gay at age 4 are male experiences, because both were born men.

I'll be the first to admit that how we think of our bodies is mediated through the classificatory networks of meaning residing in our language and culture. And where you have classification you also have norms and normalization. Developing an awareness (sometimes heightened and sophisticated, as with Judith Butler) of this leads different people to different conclusions and strategies.

The radical position (let's call it "gender ideology") is to conclude that we should fight and subvert the norm. But its proponents' hyperfocus on our semantic and cultural networks of classification runs the risk of making them oblivious to the actual, real diversity that already exists in the world prior to our normalizing and repressive classifications. To acknowledge that diversity we do not need to invent new pronouns or "correct" bodies through medical intervention. Being born as a man or a woman need not and does not pigeonhole you as one culturally determined version of either.

Shaving bone off your brows and jaw to look more like what you imagine women should look like is not freedom from stereotypes. It means you operate wholly in the realm of stereotypes.

[Part of the problem is that so much of gender theory's verbiage comes from the humanities. Natural scientists know that norms are amenable to expansion, shift, transformation in ways have nothing to do with our crude sloganeering about "subversion"]

Hi! I'm back from my two weeks of having this site blocked.

It's pretty funny that you seem to think trans people are just playing into stereotypes. Like yeah, I do play into performative stereotypes sometimes. Because I don't want to get misgendered! Do I actually think woman = dresses/makeup/femme stereotypes? Of course not. But I'm gonna get more people calling me "sir" if I don't wear a bit of eye makeup or paint my nails or wear a skirt or something. Not the most ideal way to say "hey I'm a woman", but I don't have that by default so those femme stereotypes are a quick and easy way of signifying that. It's society that directly associates all that with being a woman. It's their world, I'm just living in it, y'know?

I thought you had trans friends? This is pretty basic trans stuff lol.

you have not understood my point. None of these thoughts are new to me.

You're saying that you need the more stereotypical paraphernalia of femininity to signal to other people that you're a woman, cause otherwise they would take you for a man. I agree that it's very basic trans stuff and don't think one needs to have trans friends to understand this. We know. But I don't see how this addresses the emphasis in the Allison Bailey quote, which is not placed on playing up stereotypes but on something more basic and ontological: to those not born women, the experience of being a woman is only accessible from the outside. Meaning, inevitably, through stereotypes. She says nothing about any particular MTF's motives for self-expression through stereotypes, merely that it's the only path open to them.

Could you pls explain it?

I'm a lazy and sloppy debater but I'll try to articulate it better. What we think of as 'feminine' encapsulates a lot more than one's sex, and of course we all agree that letting your sex dictate that you should be any of those things is hateful. So you can peel back what femininity means until you're left with anything to do with genitals etc. If we could just do that (which would be ideal) there would be no gender dysphoria, in fact there would be no 'gender' at all.

But in practice, gender does exist and we can't wish it away. A lot of what we consider aspects of female experience are not bound to sex and a cis woman does not nexessarily need to have them, but we do identify them as feminine because, inevitably, the word does mean more to us than things that come with a vagina. As it is, I don't think you can limit the female frame of reference to those few things that cis women necessarily have in common; it's just not that simple, it doesn't reflect femininity as we understand it, and the differences in perspective between people of female sex are great enough that I think the frame of reference would be scant and incoherent.

So we have two options. Either we impose that femininity is just about sex, in which case the flexibility of identifying as trans would disappear, but the associations we have with femininity would remain because you can't force people to just think differently, and trans people would be confined in a role that doesn't correspond to who they are, so we would be back in the old, reactionary situation. Or we can (as long as gender still means something to us) make it more flexible and give people at least the space to navigate these ideas of masculinity and femininity as they wish, while breaking them down naturally and gradually.

Of course I see the problems you see. I've been worried about them since I was 16. I just think that it's still the better option, for the reasons stated above.

I kinda follow your train of thought but not quite, and it's okay. I suspect this is in part because a word like "gender" is used to mean many different things and it can take some effort to figure out what it means in each given instance. I'd recommend (not to try to change your mind or bring you over to my position or anything like that, but because it's great at clarifying the terms we're stuck with) Kathleen Stock's book, written with the express purpose of thinking through these issues (esp that of language) in the most lucid, rigorous and accessible way possible. For instance she lists four distinct meanings of the word "gender" in current usage.

Her discussion of why we want to preserve the word "woman" for natal women and the word "man" for natal men seems to me very compelling but I'd love to hear it challenged (if only because that's how we develop better understanding of complex ideas).

Simply put to me, gender just means any identity to do with being male/female etc. that's not about ones sex. In reality that's a bit more complicated of course, because sometimes what is sex and what is gender is not entirely clear

Beautifully put.

Yet what makes this indeterminacy possible is that sex is one of the two poles here.

Once you "make it more flexible by including trans," you're by necessity discarding sex and are left with gender alone, which happens to be the exact goal of trans activism. My views on why this is ill-advised are known. It's not about flexibility but about power.

Lol

I mean that particular phrasing looks funny yeah. But I think I explained it well enough in the rest of the post.

Once the view expressed in the quote below found its way out of grad seminars (where I was exposed to it and found it fascinating, esp as I've dealt a lot with Butler's critique of Foucault and French thought in general, which is very smart and original) and into societal institutions,

this is where it leads

Btw there's been a lot of talk about Butler in Israel recently after this pearl of wisdom went viral. In her writings about gender there's the same unwillingness to consider the real world applications of Theory.

If one insist on having one single definition of women, then yes, allowing for gender in that definition necessarily excludes sex. But in practice, we use two definitions of 'woman', one about gender and one about sex, and as long as we keep doing that carefully enough many of the problems you are worried about are resolved.

The other stuff (the interplay between our bodies and our culture, shall we say) is far too vast and interesting to require a de-finition. It's pretty much in-finite because it's the very stuff of the ever-shifting history of us thinking about our place in the world.

Part of that history in the past few decades is the elevation of sensitivity over truth, which we more and more see is NOT the inoffensive and slightly goofy thing we've been told to believe it is. This is why I think it's paramount to not give an inch to people who want to compel speech and make us much more confused about basic reality than we need to be.

There's infinitely more room to think about the more interesting stuff that escapes straightforward categorization in a liberal democracy without compelled speech than in a world where there are legal consequences for forgetting to refer to some aggressive dick as a "she".

I don't think anything like that needs a formal definition, that's not what I meant. And I think your 'all or nothing' mentality about this is false

You agree that I make some good points but believe I'm too categorical. I think you're making what some philosophers call a "category error", because what we're dealing with here are, well, categories. That's literally the battleground.

It's not a "mentality" but a recognition of how the law works. The reasons to NOT open up the membership conditions in the public concept of "woman" beyond birthright trump other considerations: once it becomes an opt-in concept, we surrender the legal basis to keep this out of women's spaces and to avoid this in prisons.

You'll say I've already said this a thousand times and you'll be right, but seems to me like your objections rather veer off into the generality of "let's all be nicer and more broad minded about gender and more accepting." Apologies if this is a caricature of your position but it's not without truth.

No it really isn't the truth. I really see it as the most organic way forward, as I've tried to explain, especially since many people use this new flexibility to be unconventional with gender, which blurs the line further. I don't think you're too categorical; you're being too theoretical. In practice, as I've said before, we use 'woman' differently in different contexts (law, social interactions, medicine etc) and treating those all the same just won't do. There are categories, but there is not a single mode of categorisation. I think your nifty little theorising (and I've been there, except I did accept trans people) simply doesn't reflect the reality of how we think about and use gender.

In other words, what we mean by 'woman' often amounts to gender. Saying 'from now on we'll just mean sex' is not realistic and will not work. And it's also not true that acknowledging a trans girl you're chatting to as a woman necessarily implies getting the law involved in acknowledging gender. And anyway, in cases where distinction by sex is important, categorising as 'female sex' often works fine and you don't need to talk about 'women' at all

Good, we're getting to the nub of the matter. There are two things I believe you don't take into account.

1) The tension between the function of laws as broad brush preventive measures and the commendable desire they be as reflective of the diversity of our dreams and desires

2) The political reality that once a sex-denialist, gender ID-based definition takes root in one institution or field, lobbyists and pressure groups say "that's a precedent!" and apply ****ing nuclear levels of pressure to extend this definition into others. To be disabused of the illusion where this is not happening I recommend reading up on how power works and how politics works. For useful primers on how these work in this particular domain, you could do worse than Helen Joyce's Trans and Katheleen Stock's Material Girls.

Depends on what you mean by accept. I accept they exist, I'm unfailingly polite to them IRL (hell, even supportive when it's someone I have a positive opinion of), I believe they should be protected from discrimination in areas such as employment (for instance, the Trump admin on military service was unacceptable). But in a liberal democracy, the right to swing your fist ends where someone else's face begins. In a liberal democracy (in life, I would say), you don't get to compel anyone to share your view of yourself, which is the explicit and unstated goal of trans activism.

Yes, thank you. I completely agree. Like, I have to look up medical information specific to male-born people all the time, I don't get angry about it, I acknowledge that I was born male, and I acknowledge that my cultural upbringing was different than cis women.

And as for "legal consequences for forgetting to say the correct pronouns", like, if you actually forgot, most trans people in my experience are cool with a quick "oh, oops, sorry", and such. And like, cis people can get misgendered too. If I started just referring to an established cis man as "she" that would also be dickish. And if I refused to use that cis man's correct pronouns and repeatedly misgendered him despite him making it clear that he does not want it and it makes him uncomfortable, then I think that would fall under harassment. So why is it a great and bold statement to harass trans people and a dick move to harass cis people? Why does the way people feel comfortable presenting and referring to themselves need to be rigidly bound to the genitalia they were born with?

Like Marie said, for practical situations where the biological sex is relevant, then yeah of course I'll have to go with the "male" category. I don't think most trans people have a problem with acknowledging the way they were born.

You don't have to like trans people, but we deserve to be able to exist with the same basic level of respect and comfort in public life that cis people get by default.

I don't have any illusions like that, you absolute goof

That can only mean that you realize the consequences of opening up the legal category of woman to include natal men, which include putting violent sex offenders in women's jails, and accept them. Because that's what's happening in practice.

"I support all the good things" is not a sustainable position beyond a certain age.