New Yorker tackles Feminism and Gender

It also doesn't acknowledge male/female power dynamics, which are key.

I see a big problem in the kind of movement which argues that women's movements should cater for all causes worthy of attention in this world, even if they do not directly affect women (as in vulva people, to be progressive here). The problem with that is the lack of resources to fix everything and the obvious question why no other movement is expected to be equally inclusive.

It's about lack of boundaries, or the demand that women have none and that women should always place others ahead of their own needs.

It is.

There are some good threads about her other writing on this.

It was motherhood not mumsnet which radicalised me. It's so patronising to suggest that just because I'm a mother I'm easily influenced in a way non mums aren't. Dare I say sexist too? I had an upward career trajectory in a male dominated field. Outearning my male partner and most of my male friends. Started ivf, had my remit slashed. Got pregnant, happened again. Had to make a formal complaint against my line manager for serious maternity discrimation which was upheld. Got pregnant again. By this point I was being paid by my employer but 100 percent sidelined. I did zero work for months and they said nothing. Made redundant whilst on second mat leave. Got a big pay off because they were shitting themselves. This btw is a very woke employer. 'Use the toilets of your preferred gender'. 'Only white people can be racist'. 'Women in Tech Women in Tech Women in Tech'. Sexism at work has largely been solved..... as long as you can maintain the working pattern of a man in the 1950s.

Here's another quote:

Sheila Rowbotham, though not averse to relitigating old arguments (especially with Selma James, a founder of the Wages for Housework campaign), admits that “connecting the personal with the political” could pose a particular problem for the movement: “when ruptures appeared these proved all the more painful.” She explains, “Theoretically I did not hold with the notion that because we were women we would wipe away political conflicts, but emotionally, like many other feminists, I was attached to a vision of us birthing a new politics of harmony.”

The essay goes on to say that her students quickly discover that there is disagreement throughout the history of feminist thinking. She says that women discover that their personal discomfort is shared by other women, and that their predicament is a social one, and therefore political. I think a LOT of people would agree with that.

She notes that women's political predicaments are affected by other things than being a woman, such as race and social class. Again, not many would disagree.

But then she goes on to suggest that the solution is intersectional feminism in the sense of a theoretical ideal that all can abide by. A "Harmony". But this form of intersectional feminism subsumes feminism into the greater ideal. And by doing this, it puts the power of deciding what women's interests are into the hands of the people who construct the intersectional theoretical framework. It becomes a top down endeavour. The movement has its priorities as a whole, and works as a whole to bring them about. Dissenters are to be disciplined. Then we can have harmony.

The understanding of GC feminism which I have gleaned off this board and other places is not that though. It's much more bottom up - that the political process itself is the way that any harmony can be achieved. And people's interests are their own to define. Disagreement is not a bad thing. It is to be welcomed, because only through disagreement can you find out what other people think, and find some way of living together.

Amia Srinivasan is concerned to build a better movement. She is not directly concerned to make actual women's lives better.

I don’t understand why this doesn’t seem obvious? Is she in a state of denial?

I genuinely think she's looking in the wrong direction.

The idea that the interests of men and women will necessarily differ to an extent because of their different roles in reproduction, and that feminism is based on women's right to identify and work politically for their own interests as a class is not apparent anywhere in the essay.

I don’t understand why this doesn’t seem obvious? Is she in a state of denial?

I thought it was a very interesting article and I have saved it, to read again. The writer has not represented a "gender critical" position in any way that I recognise - though I am quite new to this, and may have missed it. She doesn't address the GC position from the point of view of the people (women and men) holding it. She seems to be more concerned with looking at the effects of the movement on some universal feminist culture, and then reverse engineering it from there. This means that she misses the point, because she's not really looking at it.

The idea that the interests of men and women will necessarily differ to an extent because of their different roles in reproduction, and that feminism is based on women's right to identify and work politically for their own interests as a class is not apparent anywhere in the essay.

One section which really stood out for me is when she said:

Meanwhile, trans-exclusionary feminists often criticize trans women for embracing stereotypical femininity. A few years ago, the British philosopher Kathleen Stock tweeted, “I reject regressive gender stereotypes for women, which is partly why I won’t submit to an ideology that insists womanhood is a feeling, then cashes that out in sexist terms straight from 50s.”

She fails to explain in any way how Stock's statement criticises transwomen for embracing stereotypical femininity. Her example does not exemplify what she thinks it does. Stock is clearly saying here that it is not such stereotypes which make a woman, but something else. It is not a criticism of men who present stereotypically as women, but a claim that by doing so they do not become women. The fact that the writer does not realise this is, perhaps, a result of her complete failure to actually engage with Stock's position.

What happened to Kathleen Stock, by the way? Her twitter account has been down for ages.

So who was she radicalised by?
How did she become so radicalised that she's willing to throw away the rights of British women and put her name to this ideology, that she is willing to put her reputation on the line in an article that she must know is is so scarce on facts and detail.
I doubt she believed that transwomen were actually women 10 years ago.

Surely a proper academic debate needs to include some alternate voices. Not sham mentions as in the New Yorker article, or non existent as in the case of the LSE conference. The MN coven would be able to suggest plenty.

This is in line with what Haidt has been agitating for with Heterodox Academy - some diversity of perspectives.

heterodoxacademy.org/

I attended an interview (non-public) the other day with the authors of The Power of Us - One of the topics was the value of having people who disagree within groups or committees. It was not so much that the disagreement was well founded but the intervention of someone who disagreed seemed to embolden others to disagree - and that might be where the valued basis for disagreement could be aired and scrutinised.

Mumsnet is not a "safe space" so you can't just go clicking on it willy-nilly in case the literal violence of different opinions is too triggering.

But my women students quickly discover, as an earlier generation did, that there is no monolithic “women’s experience”: that their experiences are inflected by distinctions in class, race, and nationality, by whether they are trans or cis, gay or straight, and also by the less classifiable distinctions of political instinct—their feelings about authority, hierarchy, technology, community, freedom, risk, love.

Except there is something that women share - biology and it’s impact.

Everything else is related to cultural and societal expectations which vary from place to place and time to time like gender.

owing to her involvement with Woman’s Place U.K., an organization that advocates the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces.

No, an organisation that, among other things, advocates for the exclusion of men from women’s spaces. How is that difficult to understand?

There is no reason to segregate by gender, (because what does gender mean?). There is sometimes a need to segregate by sex.

That being said, having children is not a necessary precursor to being a feminist. I was just a privileged blinkered fool before having a baby made me wake up (does this make me "woke" ) I didn't know anyone with kids and probably wouldn't have listened anyway, even if someone had tried to get it through my thick privileged skull.

Motherhood was what radicalised me. I read on here once the perfect description of my experience - I never experienced sexism and basically felt 100% equality to my male colleagues and friends, but when I had kids it was like I was a bird flying head-first into the glass door of the patriarchy.

Even GC women who don't have children can make this assumption - I love the blocked and reported podcast but the most recent episode had Megan Murphy and Katherine Herzog discussing how they don't think the patriarchy really exists in the west any longer - I was like, yeah I thought so too...until I had a baby!

In the last 12 months or so I've been increasingly disappointed in the New Yorker and it's bias/ ignorance on this issue. Previously I would have taken its word on anything and it's staff writers are largely excellent. They've shown a real fallibility here that I really would have thought beneath it.

Think I've previously linked to a podcast episode that out and out called Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and JKR t*s.

The attacks on mother’s Abd motherhood are so enraging & patronising

Also she’s quite clearly never gone to the original source ie mumsnet boards to check her facts/interpretation (which is so poor for an academic) because if she had, she’d know that there’s a large number of GC women on this board who are not mothers

On message boards, mothers, justifiably aggrieved by a lack of material support and social recognition, are encouraged to direct their ire at the “trans lobby.”"

This is very much the line that Laurie Penny came out with when she graced feminism chat with her presence all those years ago.

The view is that if you're a mother, you must be a bit stupid. You are gullible and easily influenced into misguidedly directing your ire at trans people instead of at the government.

There are a number of obvious ripostes to this. One is, obviously, that if she'd ever bothered to read this board, she'd know it's full of very highly educated women, including lawyers, doctors and academics - most of whom have a far greater understanding of the trans issue than she does.

Another is that, like Judith Butler, who calls us fascists, she resorts to ad hominem attacks because she hasn't got a decent argument. She can't respond intelligently to our arguments, so she patronises us instead.

Perhaps most importantly, she clearly thinks that women's brains fall out when they become mothers. One of the things we often point out here is that motherhood has radicalised us: once we become mothers we understand the role that biology plays in our oppression. We accumulate disadvantages: we lose our jobs, we are paid less money, we become slaves to our children, and we are patronised by people who don't value what we do. And by her condescending dismissal of mothers as gullible fools, Srinivasan precisely proves our point for us - without apparently even realising that she has done so.

The chair Srinivasan occupies is apparently highly prestigious. If this is the best that Oxford has to offer, then I'd worry for its future.

She could have done some research of her own just by reading some threads, and could even have asked us some questions to help her understanding. Instead she just quotes someone else who clearly doesn't have a clue about what we discuss on here.

She might have chosen to speak to Prof. Sarah Pedersen or read her books about MN. That would have been a reasonable thing for an academic to have done.

However, a polemical text such as Srinivasan's will not incite if it's evidence based and that's the rub of it.

The quote posted above is indicative. Does she ever look at MN?

I don't think she does. She seems to have gained her understanding of MN from articles like this one:

lux-magazine.com/article/the-road-to-terfdom/

...some of these newly “gender critical” Mumsnetters were relatively privileged women who had never felt marginalized until they gave birth and came to feel isolated in their nuclear households and (rightfully!) outraged at the lack of support for mothers in the U.K. They turned to Mumsnet for solidarity, and somehow became fixated on trans women in the process.

Mumsnet’s women’s rights forum didn’t just offer women a safe space to organize. By providing a platform that tolerated TERFism, it had also handed users a convenient scapegoat for all of their problems — not austerity, not misogyny, but the relatively tiny and extremely marginalized and oppressed trans population.

She could have done some research of her own just by reading some threads, and could even have asked us some questions to help her understanding. Instead she just quotes someone else who clearly doesn't have a clue about what we discuss on here.

On message boards, mothers, justifiably aggrieved by a lack of material support and social recognition, are encouraged to direct their ire at the “trans lobby.

I can't get over that sentence. It's so patronising it's beyond. Our concerns regarding our own rights are reduced to a response about not getting social recognition. That assertion is something I would expect to read in certain right wing publications. It completely misunderstands and misrepresents the issue. Unbelievable.