Dawn Butler and biology

[HDDD]

Clip from GBM interview this morning.
twitter.com/JammersMinde/status/1229439480064610308
She said "Babies are born without sex"
Unless she said something after to clarify what she meant by this or backtracked then I guess this is her starting point....
Astounding. Labour have lost the plot, and me.

Al Keir Starmer needs to do is keep his head down, resist the pressure to sign the pledge and the job is his: both women candidates have obligingly shot themselves in the foot

No! During the recent debate on Channel 4 he refused to discuss why he didn't sign the pledge......and furthermore, he thought we " could further" as they have done in other countries. Don't be fooled.

could go even further

Re Libertarians in my experience they tend to be libertarian only regards to themselves and not bothered about libertarianism for the rest of us. Unless they need like minded thinkers for weight in numbers. Also, Libertarian trans advocates will have chosen to leech onto Labour because that was the way the wind was blowing, they thought Labour's preoccupation with "wokeness" would be more amenable than Conservatives. Look at Harrop! He was Tory until he realised he could use Labour better for his purposes.

Libertarians don't believe in compelled speech, or criminalization of pronouns or no platforming people or sending agents of the state to check the thinking of those who refuse to participate.

Libertarians don't believe in compelled speech for themselves certainly.

Ideas don't remain discrete, they tend to be rather promiscuous. Just as identity politics takes some ideas from Marxist analysis but uses them in a way incompatible with Marxism, they take ideas from other thought traditions and use them in new ways. Particularly from libertarian and neoliberal approaches they take a kind of belief in society as atomic, this is where this business of "rights aren't a pie" comes from for instance.

I think Goosefoot nailed it here.
Trans ideology, and wokeism more generally, is an odd hotchpotch of individualist identity politics and personal actualisation on the one hand, and a nod to structural oppression on the other.

I think the trans ideology stands out among all identity politics as the far and away most influential, and it has very little to do with individual actualisation, in spite of the rhetoric used. It is tremendously successful, because it is a men’s right movement, but without saying so in so many words.
It is therefore entirely structural, as it re-entrenches men’s supreme right to rule and the right to define reality on their terms.
So the labour party at the moment, seemed to have abandoned class-based, structural analyses in favour of individualised identity politics, but is actually engaged in class based warfare, where the classes are men and women, and they have come down firmly on the side of men.

I had been thinking their big mistake was jettisoning structural analysis in favour of identity politics, but it now seems to me that they are very much engaged in structural, sex-class struggle.

I don’t many of them realise this, though.

It's the way that so many women are aggressively behind it that is the strange part for me.

This may not be a popular thing to say here, but I think it's become a part of the way some women are maintaining their place in social hierarchies, against other women and men. Totally analogous to the was some high school girls would maintain their status by having the right clothes, listening to the right music, and so on, whether they were popular, goths, or whatever.

In the adult world of these people, embrace of whatever counts as progressive is what places you in the hierarchy and divergence gets you kicked out very quickly.

I doubt people like Nandy think about it that way, but that's how the pressures are working. And that has always been a woman's game more than a man's game.

I don’t many of them realise this, though.

I don't think they do either. IMO it's an educational failure, the educated elite, generally speaking, no longer have the sort of education where they know what class analysis is, or Marxism, or indeed anything about any of the major philosophical systems of western civilisation.

They don't know that they jettisoned class analysis, or what they've replaced it with. They think their belief system is just facts.

I think there's a certain strand of feminism that thinks being feminist is being like a man. Or an imagined idea of a man. LibFem maybe? That taps into prostitution being a good profession for a woman, "empowering" or some such. Whereas women would be much better being themselves.

Tbf the patriarchy is so strong and has been in place for centuries, in most cultures and countries, and feminism having traction for such a comparatively short number of decades that there still aren't enough examples of "being a woman".

think there's a certain strand of feminism that thinks being feminist is being like a man

Yes, much of the emphasis has been on 'equality' as sameness.......and equality of opportunity - at the expense of difference and honouring & valuing that......This was an inevitable stage on the journey, though.

But it is also that which has caused many young women to think that equality in law means that everything is now all hunky dory - but at the expense of their own female selves. That so many now think there is no difference between men & women at all..to the extent that biological sex means nothing at all.

Wrt the conversation about terms to describe what is transpiring in what is currently colloquially called 'the left' - I think 'liberal progressive' misses the mark because this is not liberalism, with it's understanding of the balance of rights in the public sphere.

I think the loss of effective class analysis and the revering of the individual's interests above all is definitely the feature we are all trying to grapple with here, but the defining part of this political outlook is Authoritarian. This is not a live and let live movement. This is a top down enforcement of untestable individualism, one that ignores class analysis almost entirely (except when it is deemed useful to the furtherance of individualist interests)

So my suggestion for a potted label for this pervasive politics is 'Authoritarian Individualism'. That's what Labour looks like now - most egregiously on the women's rights issue, but also very much in why they have lost their base so thoroughly, and continue to wilfully misunderstand.

Well the LibDems call themselves liberal (obviously) but we know they are TRA allies which they cloak in the guise of liberalism. It's not a new thing either. LibDems/Liberal Party have harboured some dubious types over time. Cyril Smith springs to mind.

I think it's tempting to think of LibDems as politically middle ground - in their general policies. But that's not actually the case.

What a dick. However, I find this really disturbing. The repetition of this kind of shite is just too widespread and high profile for this not to matter. Needs to be called out.

I'm finding this fascinating.

I've realised a few things:

• the politics is a right old mish mash

• whatever political persuasion we are, we wish they weren't in 'our' group

• there really is a strong authoritarian streak there*

• this has been an eye-opener for me. I kind of new that - but I think it took this thread to drive home just how authoritarian it all is.

politics is a right old mish mash

I get the impression that people think there is a shared understanding of politics because they’ve done humanities type degrees and know all the lingo.

As someone with a maths degree, I know absolutely bog all about the ins and outs of Marxism or liberalism or whatever bar what I’ve picked up from here and there. Expecting people to have a coherent political position that makes sense across various issues is baffling to me. I’ve got my opinions on this, that and the other but if anyone asked me what my core political philosophy was, I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start.

I don’t think that’s unusual for people on the other side of CP Snow’s Two Cultures.

The politics are indeed a mish mash. I think some of the reason so many on the left/centre don't speak up on this issue is because they don't want others to think they are being 'right wing' about it.

Well, I've never studied politics, though I'm widely read on a personal level and good at analytical linguistic stuff. I was talking to a colleague, a woman in her mid twenties, the other day. She is intelligent, she has opinions, she enjoys thinking and questioning. She's worked in a supermarket all her working life and her understanding comes from reading widely and asking questions - we've had brilliant conversations about feminist and other political issues, and one thing that comes across is that she is absolutely ready to engage politically, but her main concern is that so many terms she thinks she understood turn out to have no solid meaning when you talk to people who claim those labels.

The last conversation we had, she said she was beginning to see those words were no longer meant to communicate specific ideas, they were loyalty pledges, a sort of tribal lexicon, rather than a way to communicate and debate ideas.

Supermarkets are hotbeds of intelligent thought.

The last conversation we had, she said she was beginning to see those words were no longer meant to communicate specific ideas, they were loyalty pledges, a sort of tribal lexicon, rather than a way to communicate and debate ideas.

Your colleague is bang on. People are using terms to signal compliance and shared goals to each other. The fact that other people were already using those terms and have been left with no effective way to communicate what the terms used to communicate is of no concern to them at all. The correct term for what is happening there, ironically because the people doing it love accusing others of it, is "colonization".

I think these words are dressed up as modern but really they are just about lazy thinking.

As someone with a maths degree, I know absolutely bog all about the ins and outs of Marxism or liberalism or whatever bar what I’ve picked up from here and there.

Honestly, there are plenty of humanities students in the same boat. Maybe not from the best schools, but lots of schools aren't the best ones. Unfortunately they have learned enough to think they know what they are talking about. And others think, these are educated people, they know what they are talking about.

The more I think about this the funnier it gets, honestly.

Shorter Dawn - A newspaper has reported that I, senior Labour Party member, said something sensible. How very dare they! I would never do such a thing and they should already know that!

It's like they're all vying for some sort of Least Credible Political Figure 2020 prize.

Postmodernism. Where words don’t have meaning and reality is up for grabs.

I think the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ used to indicate ideological positions, or even whose side you were on in class struggles. The owners of the means of production v those who have to exchange their labour for money, to use Marxist terminology. In day-to-day politics this also indicated what someone’s view on how wealth should be distributed would be.

These positions have then been used as more or less useful markers on how left and right would position themselves on other issues, e.g. immigration, women’s rights etc.

But these guidelines no longer hold, and even the older notion that the right’ would be individualist and ‘the left’ collectivist don’t hold any longer.

‘The left’ is getting hopelessly lost in what Floral aptly named ‘authoritarian individualism’. I do wonder though, if they really are as individualist as it may seem. Sure, when it comes to their view of women, they are fully embracing individual ‘empowerment’ claptrap, and they certainly believe any man has the right to use women (as people and as a category) if it means he is being his true authentic self.
But isn’t this just individualist rhetoric disguising their collective action for men as a class?
And does Labour actually maintain this individualist ideology on any other issue, other than men’s sexual rights v women’s rights?

Does Labour even have an ideology, other than ‘the white affluent men in the party top are awesome’? -and lately edging ever closer to the gulags for dissenters.

I don't thin their intent is actually a war between the sexes though.

Rather, they are behaving as if we are all individuals with no group characteristics or memberships, or no common relations. They are talking as if men and women aren't important categories at all.

But of course they are real, perhaps the most basic and significant division among humans, one that can't be erased. Because that is true, their actions result in a war between the sexes even though they are acting on the basis of individualism. So some of us are saying, "look here, your policies are having this differentiated effect between the sexes," and they are all, "nothing to look at here, it's just a lot of individuals, no pattern in the effects we are seeing".

So they are individualists, and also very much a meritocracy which also comes from the liberal end of things. Whoever can get to the top deserves it on the basis that it must mean they are pretty darn good.

The authoritarian element seems to have come out later I think. The individualists wre evident, maybe even dominant within the 1980s, and I think they must have begun to establish themselves in the leftist parties by the late 70s but my memory doesn't go back that far. The seeds of the authoritarianism were beginning to be visible in the 90s.

I would say (warning sweeping generalisation alert) that feminism was not a Conservative movement traditionally; as traditionally, by the very name, adherents of that party wanted to keep things as they have long been, upholding traditional gender roles. (Despite the fact that, I believe, the suffragettes were largely upper class women). The Tory wife was, stereotypically, their to help her MP husband, look pretty at events, bread children etc. Supportive of and behind her husband.

But feminism and the left have also had a tricky relationship, the working man stereotypically also holding entrenched views of the women at home while he went out to work. Working man would have seen women as a threat, would have been against equal pay. Unions were very male when I grew up in the 70s, (probably still are) and the unions would have been expected to protect the working man, (presumably) also from the threat of women taking over their jobs.