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.

Thank you Spartacus, that was quick!

Oh wow, there is a lot to take in there.

The first thing that strikes me is they seem to suggest, childcare aside, the most rapid drop in testosterone across all fathers is in the first month of the child's life. Ie, when the mother is most vulnerable (and least interested in sex). At least if I'm reading it right.

Having read through the paper more fully it has left me with both a new found appreciation of men's bodies and unspeakably angry.

Appreciation because while I have often been awe struck at the way women's bodies respond to our babies needs I can't say as I ever given much thought to men's. I will highlight just one line from the paper here.

Our findings suggest that human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture that is responsive to committed parenting

Angry because there are people who right now seek to deny children the opportunity to ever experience the intricate, finely tuned wonder that is the human body of either sex. That there are people so arrogant they presume they can replicate or improve upon the rightful inheritance millions of years of evolution have bequeathed. It is monsterous.

Half a century later, many of the social differences between men and women have been eradicated or at least attenuated—thanks in good measure to feminism. Gender roles are not rigidly enforced, at least for adults.

I think gender roles are more enforced now in many ways then compared to when I was a child (I am 31). I mean things like "porn culture", children's toys and clothes, TV shows and I am thinking mostly of TV aimed at children and teens. Also - why would feminine boys and masculine girls be questioning their identity? They have got the idea that something is wrong with them for having the personality they have while in the body they live in. It doesn't make sense to me that the cause is because we live in a society where feminine boys and masculine girls are considered unremarkable and just accepted for how they are with no pressure to be different (because surely that's how it would be if social differences have been eradicated?).

If parents raise their son as a girl from the age of three, on what grounds can biology-denying feminists assert that this child is being socialized as male? If you really believe that observed behavioral differences between the sexes are due entirely to socialization, then you should readily accept the new generation of transkids in their acquired gender.

My argument here would be that the child is being raised as a transgender girl, not a girl. The experience will not be the same. Perhaps there will be a lot of similarities especially if the child always "passes" but there will be differences. The child's parent, presumably the child themself and perhaps others will know the child was born a boy. The child would have been raised as a boy up to age 3. We know that boy and girl babies are treated differently, even in the womb when sex is known before birth.

Also (I do realise his point here is about those who believe all behavioural differences are down to socialisation) but such a child will presumably have taken puberty blockers and then gone on to cross-sex hormones as they grow up and we don't really know what effects those will have on their behaviour as far as I'm aware. Even if you believe naturally produced hormones make none to little difference to behaviour it doesn't mean the same would be true for artificially given hormones.

Also I don't know but assume there will be other physical differences besides the obvious, and these matter too - likely to be taller, stronger, bigger bone structure? I don't know how much of a role puberty plays in those things so perhaps they're not relevant. Perhaps with puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones the development would be the same as the average girls.

I think the ‘gotcha’ comes from the notion that if greater male variance theory holds up and it is down to nature then we wouldn’t expect to find a simple 50/50 split across women at the top ends of various fields of academia, economics and government.

I don't know that there has ever been a very strong argument that we should accept that all things being equal, men and women would appear across different sorts of jobs and careers and employment in a 50/50 split to men.

It's been an assumption by many people, it could be the case if we are guessing, but there are all kinds of reasons to guess that it wouldn't be true too.

I think it is a bad idea to depend on things that we just don't know and really have no way to discover.

This is such an important article...and such an important thread.

I think the author is, at least, brave. I need to think about this before I post any more, as I would not want to interfere with this awesome discussion!

Continuing to enjoy the conversation, so thanks all.

I'm just going back to one sentence in "How Feminism Paved the Way for Transgenderism" by Michael Biggs:

Michael Biggs: "Virtually the entire feminist establishment has embraced transgenderism, from celebrated feminist Members of Parliament like Jess Phillips (Labour Party) and Mhairi Black (Scottish National Party) to organizations like the Fawcett Society, Engender (the feminist group funded by the Scottish government), the Women’s Equality Party, and Women’s Aid."

Yes, I agree with him, there.

I would consider that alongside something that Margaret Atwood wrote, in the introduction to my edition of 'The Handmaid's Tale':
"Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: we see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even - and, possibly, especially - in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: all power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, they think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: at least they haven't been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won't get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism - such as the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault - and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life."

Food for thought - for me, anyway.

If parents raise their son as a girl from the age of three, on what grounds can biology-denying feminists assert that this child is being socialized as male?

The boys who are being told they are 'really' female and given puberty blockers and hormones are not being socialised like girls. They are being socialised like boys caught up in an abusive medical experiment. As BooLooBoo points out, these children will be treated differently by everyone around them who is aware that they are male and they will also absorb an awareness of this. In the reality show I Am Jazz you can see this play out as Jazz is treated very differently to Jazz's sister and female peers at school.

I don't believe that behavioural differences between the sexes are due entirely to socialisation - I think this is a faith position that feminists should abandon. It is biology denying in that, as Biggs says, it assumes that 'humans [are] the only mammalian species where evolution did not produce sexual differences in behavior'.

Second-Wave feminist theorists like Shulamith Firestone and Gerda Lerner tended to examine women's role in society in terms of the recent past (Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy asserts that male-dominated societies arose in West during the Middle Bronze Age). That their scholarship took this direction made sense given there are no written records from before about 5000 years ago, and an archaeological consensus around the origins of the human genus only began to emerge in the 1960s. Primatology at that time was also a very young discipline. So a Marxist-influenced analysis that emphasised civilisation as an artificial social form that naturalised unequal power relations through its ideological superstructure understandably dominated the early Second Wave texts.

I would not suggest throwing out this valuable analysis, but it should be tempered with awareness of the 2.5 million plus years of human existence (emergence of genus Homo) that came before, and the multi-disciplinary body of research that has grown around this. Taking this into account, it is IMO not reasonable to assert that millions of years of selection pressure worked in exactly the same way on human males and females, given our very different reproductive roles.

In terms of why the whole ‘feminist establishment’ supports transgenderism, one reason may quite simply be because of what happens to those who do not.
From right back in 2012 when TRAs managed to get the RadFem conference closed down in Conway Hall, any criticism of transgenderism has been hunted down and the critic risks losing funding, job, reputation.

If women held equal power in allocating funding, jobs and reputation, then this kind of control would not work.

When I was thinking about this yesterday, it reminded me of Evan Stark’s argument (which is well accepted) about the societal control of women which existed through laws and social norms in the 19th century shifting as women gained independence into the domain of personal relationships (so in coercive control, the dominant partner (usually the man) regulates aspects of life which previously the state would have regulated).

Part of the point is that women’s equality is illusory - the stats he gave if I remember for the US were something like the average salary for a man is $55k and $18k for a woman (that may be wrong, I do not have my copy to hand), and LangCleg made a good point about the continuance of patriarchal structures upthread.

Part of Stark’s argument was that, for women trapped in controlling relationships, it is hard to recognise and to admit precisely because of the prevailing belief that women are equal. So it is difficult for women to acknowledge to themselves and their social circle that their relationship is not equal and indeed abusive.

Violence is not even needed to control women in intimate relationships. I remember my ex saying that he could understand why a man had murdered himself and his DC when contact was in question. Words are powerful if they threaten something dear to you.

Since 2012, if one listed the women and organisations who had been threatened (and I include the threat of losing funding to exist and continue to help women), how long would that list be? Would you have a parallel ‘feminist establishment’?

One way to learn more about why some women support transgenderism would be to ask those who do. The ones who are active TRAs are unlikely to respond, but a number of women who post on here have said they used to be on board with those ideas, and there is a growing number of detransitioners.

In terms of why the whole ‘feminist establishment’ supports transgenderism, one reason may quite simply be because of what happens to those who do not.

Believers in genderist ideology are ferocious in going after those who show even a hint of disagreement, so this has likely contributed to a false consensus on trans issues within feminist orgs and other institutions.

But this still leaves us with the question of why so many of the people fomenting this climate of fear are women themselves. I think it does go back to the idea raised by Biggs that many feminists seem prepared to defend extreme social constructionism to the death - to the point where they are happy to hand-wave or even facilitate truly awful consequences for women and children.

Pure social constructionism does lead to an assumption that humans, unlike other animals, are outside nature, and in that sense feminism has contributed to the situation summed up by Arnold:

there are people who right now seek to deny children the opportunity to ever experience the intricate, finely tuned wonder that is the human body of either sex. That there are people so arrogant they presume they can replicate or improve upon the rightful inheritance millions of years of evolution have bequeathed.

It is astonishing that so many people glibly accept the idea that there is such a thing as 'the wrong puberty' for a child and that doctors can re-engineer sexual biology so the child actually undergoes the puberty of the other sex. But if you accept that girls and boys are basically interchangeable, perhaps you are also easily seduced by the idea that their pubertal development is too. It takes a delusional level of biology denial, and, as Arnold says, an arrogant disregard for nature, to swallow this. But many educated people do. (Usually the same cohort that scorns climate change deniers!)

Of course there is a glaring contradiction at the heart of this, in that the notion of 'trans kids' is ALSO built on the assumption that boys and girls have different 'essences' and it's possible for a girl or boy essence to be 'trapped in the wrong body' and thus require medical correction.

The cognitive dissonance of the two simultaneously held positions - boys and girls are not biological categories but psychic essences! But also there is no meaningful difference between boys and girls and thus it's both easy and liberating to let them 'choose' to be the other sex if they want! - is characteristic of genderist ideology and a big part of why it has hoodwinked so many people.

Some feminists think that if you concede that men and women have evolved some psychological differences (e.g, propensity towards aggression, sexual behaviour), you are endorsing the 'feminine/masculine essence' theory and perhaps also implicitly endorsing transgenderism. On the contrary, if you have respect for human sexual evolution as a deep-time phenomenon that is reflected in every cell of the body, then you understand that being a boy or a girl or a man or a woman is a matter of embodied existence - there is no 'essence' that can be 'wrongly' housed in the other body.

Nor does this position preclude acknowledging the shared humanity of men and women, or individual variance within the sexes (saying that men have a greater tendency towards violence isn't the same as asserting that all men are inevitably violent), or examining the role of culture in shaping behaviour.

As to the feminist establishment - has Biggs considered the Chomsky idea that the only people - men or women - who make it to the top of the mediating class of politics, academia and media are those who are prepared to temper what they say so that it is acceptable to the establishment? In this analysis, true dissenters are always filtered out before they get to any position of influence - eg the Sanctimonious Morph larping as a radical leftist, but who is actually a liberal individualist (because that's what the establishment currently approves of).

(Also: the whole manufacturing consent business, which is what those who make it to power are required to do.)

I think I am out of the discussion now - I am not sure which feminists defend the idea of extreme social constructionism to death or even that social constructionism developed from feminism as an idea.

Until relatively recently, feminism has recognised that men and women are biologically different and need different provisions and protections.

So if extreme social constructionism is a feminist ideal, then it is not one I recognise because it is positively dangerous for women (as I think most of us agree).

Thus, I need to hang up my feminist hat.

Don't go KTara! It's a good conversation.

I think it's rubbish really. Look at how Edward Lord has dictated transgenderism in the City of London Corporation. Look at how the Green party formed it's highly influential policy on transgenderism which was then used as a reference point by the other main parties when pushing self-id. Women served as cheerleaders and handmaidens but they weren't the architects. Look at LOJ in the Guardian and his infamous 'wrong side of history' manipulation. None of these people are feminists.

It is an excellent conversation with many interesting threads and questions.

It makes me think, however, that my understanding of feminism ended in about 1989 though.

I have heard a well-respected female colleague did say that women have always expanded the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman and there was no reason why women should not now include transwomen.

This makes me think that some elite feminists (by which I mean educated predominantly white better off women of which she is one) were so stung by the criticisms in the 1980s that they had not included women of colour in their analysis or considered race and class as well as sex as axes of oppression and indeed their intersection, that they do not wish that accusation again. As such, the use of intersectionality to bring transwomen into feminism works quite powerfully.

I am not sure which feminists defend the idea of extreme social constructionism to death

Try Catharine MacKinnon. She fully endorses transgender theory as the natural outgrowth of feminist theory, even though its full realisation would annihilate much of her life's work (legal recognition of sex discrimination):

"It was obvious to all of us in the early women’s movement that what we live as “woman” is a social construction of male supremacy, and that the notion that it is based in nature is its most pernicious delusion... Male dominant society has defined women as a discrete biological group forever. If this was going to produce liberation, we’d be free."

radfem.transadvocate.com/sex-gender-and-sexuality-an-interview-with-catharine-a-mackinnon/

Since 2012, if one listed the women and organisations who had been threatened (and I include the threat of losing funding to exist and continue to help women), how long would that list be? Would you have a parallel ‘feminist establishment’?

I don't think you would, no, although it would be a fairly long list. Also agree with Lang that many truly radical or woman-centred feminists would have been weeded out of institutions from the start.

Still, does this explain the position of someone like MacKinnon, who has often pursued policies and ideas that have met with serious resistance from the male establishment? MacKinnon can hardly be dismissed as a man-pandering third waver. I think there really is a problem at the heart of (actual, second wave) feminism, a horror of women being 'defined' by biology, which leads to this almost phobic disavowal of it and an obsession with defining 'woman' as a social role only.

Also agree with Lang that many truly radical or woman-centred feminists would have been weeded out of institutions from the start.

Even my beloved Bev Skeggs - class, class, class! - is quite genderism-friendly these days.

I agree with what you say DonkeySkin if one thinks about the slogan ‘biology is not destiny* which can be read in two ways

biology does not define what you can do

Or

Your biology can be changed therefore is not your destiny

But the second is a subversion of intended meaning. Was that really what was meant?

I need to think a bit more about this because of course not only men but women have historically defined women as a discrete biological class - that is what underpins the protections women have developed legally and socially over time.

Also agree that the parallel feminist establishment are or would be in exile from the establishment for the reasons already stated (hounded out)

Pure social constructionism does lead to an assumption that humans, unlike other animals, are outside nature, and in that sense feminism has contributed to the situation

Feminism may have contributed but setting humans outside nature is a much older habit. The Bible in Genesis speaks of 'man created in God's image having dominion over the animals'.

I have been thinking as lot lately about biology denialism more widely, in the context of creationism for example. It is a trait of humans dating back thousands of years and deeply ingrained in our culture so perhaps not entirely surprising that it has found a new outlet. The consequences of the new outlet are horrendous, but the underlying 'need' humanity (or at least sections of humanity) seem to have to be different from, rather than part of, nature is common.

All of which led me to ponder the question of religiosity as I have often heard it said that women are more religious than men and wondered if that more general tendency to religiosity might in some way explain why it is often women that are fervent supporters of trans ideology.

Turns out the claim of greater religiosity, while not entirely without foundation, is much more complex. It is true of Christians where women score more highly than men on all measures of religiosity, but not of Muslims, where men are more likely to attend worship and on other measures there is no significant difference between men and women. Furthermore, amongst Christians the differences are less significant in Sub-Saharan countries, than Western countries.

So it seems to me that women are more religious than men in the context of Western, secular societies. But then these are the very societies in which the trans religion has taken hold. I am aware obviously that countries like Iran have a 'trans or die' policy for gay men but that is clearly rooted in pure homophobia whereas in the west while homophobia is clearly an issue the picture is complex.

All of which brings me to the old GK Chesterton quote 'those who don't believe in God will believe in anything'. Which as an atheist I have never been a fan of because it doesn't hold true for me and many other atheists. I don't believe in transgenderism for the same reason I don't believe in God, there is no evidence to support it. But maybe for some people the need to believe is that deep, and trans ideology is filling some kind of 'spiritual gap'.

A link to the study on sex gaps in religion

www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/

setting humans outside nature is a much older habit

I think that there is a lot in what you say. But humanity’s position as being “outside” nature does not come from a “habit”. It arises because you will not find anything like the human mind and human consciousness anywhere else in nature. Human consciousness then, by its very nature, sets us apart. And science has three big questions that it cannot answer – the origin of the universe; the origin of life and the origins of human consciousness. Evolutionary psychology is a narrative that many find unconvincing when it comes to an explanation for the peculiar nature of the human mind.

Humanity is blessed (or cursed) with a consciousness of self, an intellect and a will and the capacity for purposeful behaviour that we have difficulties managing. This is now reaching a crescendo in the demand to be (and self-identify as) whatever we want to be.
The nature of our consciousness means that we almost have no choice but to claim dominion over nature as we attempt to ameliorate the harsh circumstances of life, sickness and death. But the truth is that this dominion has always been, and will always be, expressed in terrible battles for power. This is what is happening now and the type of feminism that has claimed our “rights” not to be defined by our biology has been a useful tool for those people who want to claim ultimate power over nature. Only today ‘science’ is claiming to have put back the menopause.

It is foolish to say that feminism has caused what is happening now but it has certainly been very useful to some very powerful people.

At every point in the past of human history – be it in religious societies or in the philosophy of ancient Greece moral and spiritual limits have been placed on humanity’s thirst for dominion over nature. These limits are now being abolished and science will change humanity in whatever way it sees fit based on nothing more than our desires, and words like “virtue” are fit only to raise a laugh.

It is probably now unstoppable and each one of us is left alone to decide where we stand as regards what is going on, but most people seem to be unable to grapple with abstract concepts sufficiently to understand what the implications of current trends are. Why so many women seem so fervently committed to allowing certain men to design the future based on their own desires, I am at a loss to explain.

Yes, I agree Goose about women's studies. I think it gave other disciplines a way to ignore or marginalise feminist (of all types) theory and analysis, which meant when women's studies became gender studies there was no easy fit for feminism in academia. The women's studies/gender studies silos haven't proved that helpful longterm IMHO

No, the silo effect may have done more harm than good really.

I wasn't thinking of the deconstructionists so much in terms of trying to oust feminists. I think they were just becoming the next big thing in general, dominating in more and more areas of the humanities. I saw or read an interesting interview quite a while ago with Camille Paglia about this, she was of course around at the time it was happening and she's very anti-deconstructionism. One thing she said was that part of it was actually related to employment issues, all of a sudden there were a bunch of these young European academics who couldn't get jobs in Europe, and who also wanted the better pay from American universities, flooding the openings, and many of them were hired. So all of a sudden some or all of the young academics in a department were deconstructionists. She also said most of the older academics, while they didn't really like their perspective, didn't seem to see the danger of their ideas.

It is probably now unstoppable

I'm sad to say that I think this is true. Not so much genderism but transhumanism. Human beings are arrogant and often stupid: if they can, they will.

I foresee anti-transhumanist communities springing up and they'll likely contain many feminists - we'll be the new Amish!

humanity’s position as being “outside” nature does not come from a “habit”. It arises because you will not find anything like the human mind and human consciousness anywhere else in nature

Habit is perhaps not a great word, fair enough. But I'm not sure we know enough about consciousness to really answer questions on whether other species have such a thing.

Certainly human brains, and hands for that matter, are natural marvels, but in my view both are a consequence of a more fundamental difference. We are bipeds. That seems to me the basic quirk of evolutionary fate that set us on the road to what we are today. It has gifted us an unrivalled ability in tool use, which is not in and of itself unique to humans, but no other species has hands free to use them to the extent we do. We are king of the thing, but that has it's downsides as we are seeing in concepts like transhumanism where some people seem to be of the view that merging humans with things is an unquestionably positive step rather than one with both positives (robotic arms for amputees for example) and negatives such as messing with our as yet poorly understood consciousness.