MNHQ transphobia guidelines part 2

[QueenStromba]

First thread here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2120841-MNHQ-are-going-to-decide-what-constitutes-transphobia-on-MN-What-advice-guidelines-would-you-give-them?

Sitestuff thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/2117350-MNHQ-now-email-posters-with-how-to-get-around-the-talk-guidelines?

The thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2107862-Following-on-from-the-TERF-thread?

Oh I agree that social constructs are important and real. I just don't think philosophy about them should have the influence that it currently does in areas such as sexual politics.

If we take Butler's 'sex as a category is a social construct' philosophy, it has contributed to the idea that transwomen are female and that this is possible because sex is a social construct and we can decide to change that construct. Except the reality is that the construct has only been changed in ways that the regime of patriarchy is willing to be flexible on. Men as women? Sure thing! Females no longer oppressed due to sex as a category? Fuck off!

Which is why this discussion became about post-modernism.

Buffy, I don't think it is the case that either the natural or social sciences are just putting in little bricks of knowledge. Both have to be applied right now, to the world. That means the actual evidence based is very much relaxed and does not meet stereotypical standards of positivism, because it is neither possible nor desirable to sit around and wait until a well evidenced solution emerges. It is more of a case of taking informed action and seeing what happens, whether the issue is social, environmental or both.

There are plenty of people asking sweepy, risky questions. At lower levels or maybe even at every level they just do so while also throwing in some non-controversial new data they've created in a lab or in the field to avoid destroying their career in pursuit of the big risk.

But I am not advocating an end to everything subjective. It is still useful. It just isn't about being in opposition to other forms of analysis, but working with multiple approaches instead.

Buffy, Marilyn Waring, for example:

www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/waring_m.html

And although she technically 'won' in 1993, and the FAO operates in a very different way, which has no doubt improved and saved the lives of millions of women, her approach hasn't been adopted everywhere. We still have to fight for this and women working on those questions still need to research in this way to push it.

Elinor Ostrom, only woman to have won the Nobel Prize for economics. Provided social,economic and environmental evidence that collective community organising, not the market, was the sustainable way of managing shared resources. Has changed the way environmental managers work. Women, the people least likely to be in the market in the first place, have a voice in discussions about shared resources they use:

www.economist.com/node/21557717

Katherine Dettwyler, hugely influential in the current understanding of breast feeding. Influenced the campaign over aggressive marketing of formula to mothers who had neither the money to pay for it nor the water or facilities to prepare it. Provided women with nutritional education. Changed attitudes to breast feeding in Western countries leading to legal changes. Helps individual women who have been threatened with having their children taken in divorce cases because the the mother is an extended breast feeder:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Dettwyler

Environmentalist activist and women's rights activist, Wangari Maathi, making sure women were paid for their work in making land sustainable for future generations. Won the Nobel Peace prize:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai

No, they haven't achieved gender equality for women everywhere. But they have success in some places and have changed the lives of millions of women. So shouldn't we still be fighting to have their ideas implemented in the right ways?

Unless we're going to change the whole world overnight, it requires a series of immediate small scale changes that we keep pushing for. That is how feminism has always worked. Someone opens one women's refuge for DV, and eventually we end up with Women's Aid as we know it today, and we keep on fighting for it.

And yes, they are co-opted very easily if people don't keep arguing that the actual theories are applied not some vague nice sounding principle. And it requires academics to keep improving the theories to make their implementation just.

The fact that any theory can be co-opted for negative purposes doesn't change the evaluation of whether or not a particular theory can be used for changing the lives positively for millions of people, or if it does little at all for anyone.

But I am not against subjectivity, or things that are just about social constructions. There are also works of fiction that inspire people to go out and change the world.

I don't know, buffy, but I think you definitely need some :o

I don't know Buffy, because I didn't closely follow the entire thread.

Theories can be co-opted, but they can be strengthened against that risk. And the people critiquing and strengthening Ostrom's theory are other people in the same field, improving and modifying it.

I don't really know who the role models of postmodern feminism are. I don't know who they are, what they achieved or what footsteps we are following in there. And without that, it doesn't seem like it is a good idea that has been misused, misunderstood and co-opted. without positive examples, it just seems like solely a bad idea.

I do agree with Buffy that there seems to be a lot if head shaking going on at the idea that if a form of thought isn't seen as practical enough then it must be rubbish. I never see this argument being employed in other areas. I mean, I've literally heard of no-one saying You know, that Homi Bhabha talks a load of obtuse Pomo rubbish. He's the reason why young black men are turned off the civil rights movement. He's the reason why the establishment isn't interested in race! But somehow Judith Butler is on trial for all the alleged crimes of postructuralism, a relatively harmless French philosophical movement of the 1060s-1990s, which was already roundly attacked by much of the (male) establishment at the time for daring to suggest that philosophy wasn't as cut and dried as all that.

I really do think this is barking up the wrong tree. If you wan to know what I think postructuralism gives feminism, I think it gives us the tools to interrogate the way powerful groups use language. It points out that "woman" always functions as a negative term, that femininity is routinely associated with all sorts of other negative terms. It tries to rewrite and open up the philosophical tradition to take account of women's writing, racial difference, all sorts of different firms of thought that have been marginalised. It helped create spaces in the university system where this could be articulated and discussed. It excited people and changed their ideas about what culture and philosophy might be. Is this not important work for feminism as well as the practical kind? Or are women meant to always concern themselves only with direct action until such a time as we are allowed into the hallowed portals of male philosophy? Analytic philosophers (of whom there are vanishingly few women) pride themselves on their "common sense" approach, but are in fact far less engaged in the material world or readable by the layperson than postructuralists (you'd need to be taught formal logic first, for a start), but they rarely if ever get accused of obscurantism, because they go about laying claim to a masculine rigour and scientism.

Quite a lot of Butler's Bodies That Matter is nothing to do with performativity but about showing how Greek philosophers imagine the world in gendered terms that actually undercut their philosophical objectives. Guess who often gets those bits? It's the male public schoolboys who have been taught Greek at school. I have never taught a female student who knows Greek that well. I wonder why that still is the case in our current education system. That to me is rather telling. Women are still the ones outside of the great traditions of male thought.

Yes, of course it matters to make a real impact on women's lives in the third world. But no-one holds that requirement up to men. I never hear a single person complaining that, I don't know, Kant, didn't do enough practical activism. From time immemorial women have been regarded as the practical ones, unsuited to thinking. I'm a bit puzzled as to why feminism should have to reproduce that dynamic. We are all here on these threads having a very intense and philosophically and ethically engaging discussion, so presumably we're interested in ideas of many kinds? I have really enjoyed these threads, which have been full of passionate feminists engaging in a wide-ranging debate about both "real" material things and theoretical ideas. I think it's a shame to start denigrating particular schools of thought or particular posters for being too academic, when the discussion is very sophisticated and lively and that's what is enjoyable about it.

A bit like Butler describing sex (as in biological sex) as a social construct. So there we go, a material reality, that women carry and birth babies, becomes a social construct. And how does that help women who need abortions, contraception, men to stop raping them, childcare, breastfeeding support, birthing support, etc??

My problem with this is sex is not a social construct, gender is a social construct. Gender is how society sees us, sex is what we are. Obviously, being new to this I am probably wrong due to not understanding the subject enough, and if I am please tell me so I can correct my way of thinking.

Before I joined this site a couple of years ago I never thought about transgenderism, nor how it intersects with feminism. I only thought about feminism because of my DDs.

I don't think anybody is being too academic.

I'm not arguing for a division between real material things and deep thinking.

I am arguing that people should think deeply about material things with an aim of changing the world.

It is entirely untrue that men have not been criticised for not improving lives in the developing world, or indeed the developed world as well (as all the women I listed did both). In fact is that not the whole point of activism? To say that the whole way the world is operating is wrong and we should change it?

Perhaps you were not responding to me, but I don't understand how I can link to four amazing and influential deep thinkers who are all female and then have that dismissed as practical stuff and a criticism of the real female deep thinkers, who are presumably post modernists?!

Doctor, I agree with you. A lot of people on this thread do. I don't think it is a case of correcting you if you are wrong! It is just people disagree about it.

I'm puzzled - I didn't criticise you or the links you posted, almondcakes, or criticise anything at all. My point is that male thinkers on race or sexuality, no matter how niche, really don't get told they are responsible for derailing practical activism and progressive movements. Homi Bhabha gets criticised for being obscurantist in his prose style but no-one says that because of this he's a kind of traitor to the civil rights movement. I've never yet heard a gay man blame postructuralism for the oppressions suffered by gay men. Judith Butler's not my favourite writer - I'm a Marxist radical feminist if I was to be anything - and I don't like all of her thought but I do think she's getting a bad press here.

For example:
A bit like Butler describing sex (as in biological sex) as a social construct. So there we go, a material reality, that women carry and birth babies, becomes a social construct. And how does that help women who need abortions, contraception, men to stop raping them, childcare, breastfeeding support, birthing support, etc??

Well, I'm not sure Butler goes that far. I don't think she does think sex is entirely a social construct in quite the Dane way gender is.

But she is interested in pointing out that the division between social construct and material biology isn't some kind of immutable law - that there are some limit cases, for example intersex conditions - where gender as a social construct actually materially affects what we think the biological is. That gender isn't a kind of social blanket laid on top of underlying biology that we can just strip away in order to reveal biological truths that never change. Instead, she is interested in how gender also shapes the way we think of biological bodies - what female bodies do or should look like. That in an era where we can change bodies - by taking hormones, surgery, body modification, nutrition, and so on - the idea that there is a natural reality to the body that precedes gender and is completely independent of it is a kind of philosophical delusion. What she isn't saying us that biology doesn't exist or is a social construct - she's interested in the limits of where the two get tangled up so that it's difficult to prise them apart.

In intersex conditions, for example doctors often resculpted a child's genitals to give the biological sex they thought the child should be, based in how feminine or masculine the child appeared. Butler is interested here in the ways that cultural ideas of gender have actually had real impacts on how some people's bodily sex is defined and experienced. She isn't claiming that women as a class don't share and suffer repression on the basis of biology. I don't think, from her writings that I've read, that she would ever suggest that isn't the case. She does want to suggest that our biology isn't some kind of pure state that we could get at completely if we only stripped gender away - which point her readers may or may not disagree with.

Sorry for typos - fat phone fingers and bonkers autocorrect!

I'll tell you what - if it felt for one second that academia was behind making the lot of women better, I would be right behind all those involved. As it stands, and as is posted, it seems to involve elevated levels of wankerishness. Can you even hear yourselves?

I am feeling very proudly Yorkshire today, and we don't much go for a lot of what has been posted latterly. Do you even understand that it means fuck all to a woman being abused or one struggling with the fact that their partner sees them as default primary parent?

I am old enough to remember a time in one particular university when there was a campaign to introduce Women's Studies as a serious area of research, writing, study and teaching. Academic feminism was at that time, in that place, a very much needed element in an Arts and Lit environment.

The vanity of the academic establishment of the time (not to mention the tendency to engage in circular reasoning) was such that without some sort of solid scientific basis to the claims of feminism and the claim to a separate parallel history of women [herstory] then what feminism boiled down to, in the views of the (overwhelmingly) male political historians at least was the carping and clucking of a bunch of wimmin. Never mind that one of the ideas feminism had always put forth was that women as a class had been silenced over the centuries. If there wasn't 'women's history' in place from the year dot then it wasn't a serious topic for study...

So I think there will always be a place for feminist theory and for women's history. However, and forgive me if I castigate academic theorists unfairly, but getting tenure in a university requires publishing, and publicising of your work, and putting yourself and your theories forward pretty much shamelessly, as well as putting in the hours teaching. In short, I think that the institutional dynamic in the arts and lit and philosophical arenas of academia itself generates a tendency to take an idea and run with it, defending it against all challengers, not necessarily because the idea is brilliant, or helpful to anyone but because it is your ticket to tenure.

I don't really know anything about Butler. Surgery, changing hormones and mutilating the bodies of intersex children do not change somebody's biological sex.

Of course gender changes people's experiences of biological sex. That's what gender does, pretty much by definition the whole problem of gender is its attack on the female body in very real ways.

I don't think there really is such a thing as tenure in the UK. And while it is very hard to change discipline, it is pretty easy, even expected, that people change theories numerous times as they develop. I could become a postmodernist tomorrow and it would have no impact on my chances of getting my next job, either positively or negatively.

*I don't really know anything about Butler. Surgery, changing hormones and mutilating the bodies of intersex children do not change somebody's biological sex.

Of course gender changes people's experiences of biological sex. That's what gender does, pretty much by definition the whole problem of gender is its attack on the female body in very real ways.*

That's pretty much what Butler is saying.

georgettemagritte I'm surprised that you describe yourself as a Marxist radical feminist and yet you never got back to me on the post I made about the third wave being the patriarchal backlash (with regards to how resistant your students are to feminism).

You never got back to me on clarifying what you said about post-structuralism and solutions for women's issues, despite me saying twice that I didn't understand what you said.

I don't think that any of this actually matters in real life but still.

Butler has clearly stated in interviews that she supports transgenderism and thinks that transwomen are women. Of course she does, she created the theory behind it.