New article by Michael Biggs that I imagine will be controversial - how feminism paved the way for transgenderism

[AnotherLass]

quillette.com/2019/08/01/how-feminism-paved-the-way-for-transgenderism/

Rough summary: it is largely females who have pushed gender ID ideology and some of the reason for it may be "blank slate" feminism

I think that this is an interesting article, although I am not sure if I agree with him or not. I found it uncomfortable reading and I imagined that it would be controversial here, so I'm interested to hear what people have to say.

Overall, though, powerful men have done rather less than powerful women to institutionalize gender identity.

They’ve also done less to stop it. Women are more interested in this issue overall.

Also, ‘feminists’ think lots of different things and I think he should of focused on ‘liberal feminism’ as that is the issue for me. There are plenty of feminists who don’t describe themselves as either radical or liberal as well. I’ve always thought denying biology was a nonsense and I actually don’t know many women who think it isn’t. So it’s interesting that all these powerful women are the liberal feminist kind huh... would they be powerful if they weren’t?

Virtually the entire feminist establishment has embraced transgenderism

Female socialisation is usually the answer and he is questioning this.

Looks interesting,
Wiil come back later.

It's an interesting article - I need time to think about it.

I did like this passage:
On average, men are taller than women, and this fact is primarily biological ... Notwithstanding this overall difference, some individual women are taller than the average man, and their exceptional height also has some genetic basis. It would be absurd, however, to treat such a woman as having a man’s height trapped in a woman’s body.

He raises some good points. I agree with a lot of what he says as i believe biology is an important fact. Sex characteristics are fact. Hormones are a major part of our biological makeup especially from the onset of puberty and creates huge differences in the sexes.

I think some people are more easily influenced by social expectations whereas others are natural 'rebels'. Those that are more vulnerable are likely to suffer more when society pushes gender stereotypes. Rippon's brain studies show the brain is flexible and reinforces the idea of practise makes perfect - ie the more a girl participates in stem activities the better she will get at them.

As for the so called 'feminists' in positions of influence - who has influenced them and how? Certainly Butler was influenced by a very expensive jolly to the US paid for by a lobby group. I think many are scared to loose what power they have and those like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry are all the more remarkable for speaking up.

Female socialisation is usually the answer and he is questioning this.

YY this. That, and I'm sure none of the women named in the article wanted to be subject to the abuse or rape and death threats. And of course, the politicians don't want to lose votes either.

Fear is a powerful motivator.

I quite like it. I think too few feminists speak about the structural role of elite women in queer theory and genderism: we tend to reduce it to interpersonal bunfights between the lessers, as we've seen in several (pointless) threads here lately. It's partly a class issue, partly an issue of victorious individualist neoliberalism, but I think partly also what Biggs writes about.

Blank slatism is why I see myself as more of a socialist than a radical feminist. I think nature and nurture come in to play - that men and women are - by population average - somewhat different, and also that social forces have a profound impact on behaviours. As my friend Isabelle puts it, this nature/nurture impact is recursive over time. We have yet to accurately separate them.

The elephant in the Biggs room, as I see it, is that he is analysing female behaviour in the context of activity in institutions and structures that are mature and evolved over more than a thousand years of ownership patriarchy with the partial liberation of women being incredibly recent. Again: we can't put that down to either nature or nurture - it's both.

Overall I think a very good article, it's tight and to the point.

He supports his claim that women are actually more likely than men to support transgenderism, and he also talks in a useful way about who that includes and doesn't include.

I think he's quite right to say that this isn't mainly about female socialisation, and to look specifically at which women are affected, his linking their age, that they are university educated, that they haven't yet had children, seems on solid ground.

As for his argument, yes, I think he is very right that over-blown claims for socialisation as the only significant cause of sex differences in behaviour or role plays a part, and probably so does the fact that this seems more plausible than it once did as men and women's lives are more similar.

I wondered a bit about his link to fewer social differences in terms of customs, things like holding doors open. It may be this does feed into people thinking differently. I've thought for a while that there has been a kind of paradox in decrying all social gender indicators as being oppressive, it seems in some way to make arbitrary things like fashion some expression of inner being.

As far as it goes, I think his argument is solid. I would additionally say that many feminists also have been part of other movements on the left that have contributed ideas that were vulnerable to being used to support transgender ideology.

I really enjoyed reading that article, thanks for sharing. It's going to go onto my list of resources.

Before getting distracted by all the trans rights issues, I was growing increasingly concerned and frustrated by the 'blank slate' approach that prevails in a lot of mainstream feminist discourse.

I can understand many years ago when the dominant narrative justified everything as 100% biological to explain why women weren't allowed to pursue higher education and so on, that the feminist backlash would be to swing the pendulum to the other extreme i.e. It was all 100% environmental / socialisation.

This black or white ideological position is not tenable because in the real world, there is very little about human beings that is either 100% nature or 100% nurture.

Biology does play a significant role in our lives in many subtle ways and with the increasing understanding around epigenetics, it appears certain environmental factors can influence what aspects of our biology are expressed or not.

I have also often wondered in frustration why evolution and biology is said to stop at the neck by feminists. It makes no logical sense. We are part of the animal kingdom and evolution affects our entire bodies including our brains.

That doesn't mean biological factors are inevitable or that we cannot shape ourselves in response to our environments. There is a certain symbiosis where nature can shape nurture and nurture can shape nature. It is very hard to disentangle the two, but nevertheless it makes for fascinating study and discussion.

I don't understand the hostility and blanket dismissal of evolutionary psychology and similar branches. Sure, there's guff and conjecture which should be critiqued, but to assert that evolutionary forces have not shaped our psychology as a species in any way nor our interactions with each other doesn't make rational sense to me.

As described in the article, acknowledging that there are biological differences between men and women and that there might be some differences between the two sexes doesn't automatically imply that there are female brains trapped in male bodies the way TRAs try to manipulate the topic or that there are dozens of different types of gender souls aka gender identities that are more real than biological sex.

It's a very interesting article, my only slight criticism of which would be that some of the themes, notably a distaste for evolutionary psychology, do not just apply to liberal feminism but other aspects of wider liberal discourse which influence the current establishment.

I need to think more fully about the issues raised.

He is analysing all this within a patriarchal structure that exists all around us.

Women can only really rise to the top by mimicking the men in some way.

The ability to earn money facilitates the rise.

Men who have very little in terms of money, have very little influence in the patriarchal institutions.
They have no power.
But as they are physically stronger then they can use it to their advantage to influence people around them.

The patriarchy supports these men psychologically by implying it's their right, eg, as head of the household.

The silence of the men in transgenderism is another elephant in the room, imo.

It's almost as if transgenderism gives women the voice that men will listen to.

He is analysing all this within a patriarchal structure that exists all around us.

Women can only really rise to the top by mimicking the men in some way.

Yes. This is what I was getting above when I was talking about the elephant in Biggs's room. We can't say how women would behave within institutional matriarchal power structures: because there aren't any.

I think that Biggs is right that blank slate feminism has had a role in this.

But I think that also - whether it is socialisation or biology - women do have a greater tendency to put less value on honesty and more value on kindness than men.

I think this article is worth reading. Feminism has tried to eradicate all biological basis for differences between men and women mainly because this was always used to justify the ‘inherently inferior’ argument. But I think that men and women are different but equal. By all means encourage men to become care workers, for instance, but also recognise that this is skilled, responsible work and that the largely female workforce that perform it should have this recognised. Encourage women to be engineers by all means but simply trying to make women ‘like men’ to even things up isn’t really equality it’s simply saying that you agree that women’s work is of less value than mens.

I also think men have more awareness and understanding of male fetishism than women do, especially younger women from privileged backgrounds.

I have been continually struck by the naïveté some women express regarding male sexual motivations.

One thing that Biggs' argument highlights for me is the class issues at play here.

For example he comments 'The insistence that there are no biological differences in attitudes and behavior between the sexes is no longer a radical dissenting view; it is established orthodoxy.'

I agree that this is an orthodox view amongst the university educated classes, but it is not one seems to have filtered down to my working class community where it is not controversial at all to comment upon average differences in behaviour between men and women, girls and boys, and link them to biology. In fact people would probably look at you like you had two heads if you suggested there weren't.

Which is not to say that working class people have failed to notice not all boys conform to boy things and girls to girl things, but that they don't see any contradiction between that observation and discussing the generalities.

I also think men have more awareness and understanding of male fetishism than women do, especially younger women from privileged backgrounds.

I absolutely think this is true.

I also think men have more awareness and understanding of male fetishism than women do, especially younger women from privileged backgrounds.

Interesting.

When I first started high school there was a boy that all the other boys hated practically on sight. At first us girls felt sorry for the boy. Over time we discovered he was a right creep and that the boys' assessment had been correct.

That boy is now a man and has served at least two sentences for rape to my knowledge.

I have never forgotten how quickly the boys took a dislike to him and how slow us girls were on the uptake by comparison. It has always troubled me.

I also agree that class is a huge issue in this.

This is why I make a point of it being so important for feminists to lay out exactly what feminism is, or mean, so blokes like this can't blame us for shit that never happened that way.

Radical feminists have been fighting Transgenderism since 1979 when Janice Raymond, radical feminist scholar and student of Mary Daly, wrote The Transsexual Empire.

Women's studies was hijacked by Gender Studies, which paved the way for trans ideology and perverting and distorting feminist theories of gender

That's why if in doubt stick with radical feminism

Um, Michael Biggs specifically mentions Janice Raymond and Transsexual Empire. He is not blaming 'us' for anything.

I think it's an interesting piece, and I partly agree with him. It kind of amuses me how some feminists have gone from outrage, for example, at John McEnroe saying that there were 700 male tennis players who could beat Serena Williams, to eagerly embracing the idea that men have a strong biological advantage in sport (which of course they do).

BUT I don't think he's entirely right either. Towards the end, he says: "If my argument is correct, then feminists need to rethink their premise that all observed differences in behaviour between women and men are due to socialization—that humans are blank slates."

To which I'd say: not all feminists. There has always been a strong strand in radical feminism that sees men as innately more violent, innately more predatory, innately more aggressive than women. It's something that liberal feminists would dispute, but that strand has definitely been there for a long time. In fact, you could argue that it's at the heart of the disagreement between radical and liberal feminists. Those radical feminists who set up all-women communes in the 70s didn't even want to admit male children because essentially they saw biology as destiny.

I've spent an awful lot of my adult life thinking about this and trying to work out where I stand. I'm a bit sceptical about the idea that men are innately better at maths and engineering, for example, because the numbers of women entering those disciplines varies massively from society to society. I could be wrong, however. On the other hand, when you look at the huge disparity between violent or sexual crimes committed by men, and the numbers committed by women, it does seem to me quite likely that men, on average, are innately more aggressive than women. It's not all to do with socialisation.

Back on topic

I don't understand the hostility and blanket dismissal of evolutionary psychology and similar branches.

To an extent I do. I personally find evolutionary psychology an interesting topic, but (and this is where I think it is not just about feminism but wider liberal culture) it is a topic that touches not just on sex issues but race issues. People, especially those people who think on themselves as liberal, are understandably wary of race issues given the history of humanity.

It is easier to dismiss evolutionary psychology completely than delve into the nuances of what it has to say about race and ethnicity. I don't blame people for not wanting to open that can of worms.

I've spent an awful lot of my adult life thinking about this and trying to work out where I stand.

Me, too! Biggs should also take into account that innate arguments are, in patriarchal societies, inevitably used against women and so it is hardly surprising that many feminists shy away from them.