Why do women support gender identity ideology?

[DonkeySkin]

Saw a tweet saying the no-platforming of Selina Todd at a feminist conference was ‘patriarchy in action’, and it got me thinking. The conference was run by women, and it was the female organisers who no-platformed Todd after several other women threatened to withdraw if she appeared. I don’t think it’s right to blame this on ‘patriarchy’, IMO something else is going on.

I’ve also seen some GC feminists dismiss TRA-supporting women as ‘pandering to men for cool girl points’, and I don’t think that’s accurate either. ‘Cool girls’ most often deny sexism is a problem at all, which these women usually don’t do. Indeed, feminists are MORE likely to support gender identity ideology than non-feminist women, and not only to support it, but to advocate ardently for it.

IMO, there are three main reasons for this:

1. There seems to be an assumption on the part of many women that men who are coded as feminine share a basic political condition with women. Men who adopt feminine appearance norms and/or men have sex with men are often derided as ‘woman-like’ by other men. I think this is the real logic behind the slogan ‘trans women are women’. I don’t think the women parroting this truly believe that men are women if they say so; they can still tell the difference between male and female human beings. But I do think they believe that women and men who ‘identify as women’ share a common condition and therefore a common cause. Many women also assume that a man declaring he wants to be one of us is performing the ultimate act of solidarity, and it would be churlish to refuse to offer solidarity in return.

However, this analysis is in error. If you look closely at what is done to women and girls under male domination, you can see that it is quite distinct in both degree and kind from what is done to feminine-coded men. Further, there’s little evidence that men who are excluded from traditional ‘manhood’ have any special sympathy with women or understanding of our lives. These men seem just as capable as any of assuming that women exist to serve their needs. You can see this in the sexist attitudes of many gay men, and in extremis in the current trans movement, which displays a sociopathic disregard for how its demands will impact on women and girls, all the while expecting boundless empathy from us.

2. A central tenet of second-wave feminism, liberal AND radical, has been that sexual biology is largely irrelevant to who we are as human beings. I don’t often agree with Camille Paglia, but she said something a while back that struck me as very insightful: she said that when women’s studies were first being established at universities, she was surprised that none of the programs included a module on female biology. Paglia said that if you were purporting to be studying women, surely you could not ignore biology – but that is exactly what the feminist academics did. They assumed it was either of little importance, or a danger zone to be avoided because of the way men had used it as an excuse for excluding us from the public sphere.

I think that most women in the West have internalised this message: to be treated as equal in the world means that we should be regarded, and regard ourselves, as basically interchangeable with men, bar some superficial gendered coding. It’s therefore not surprising that many women assume that having male biology should be no barrier to being regarded as a ‘woman’.

3. Finally, at the heart of the appeal of gender ideology to women is utopianism: transgender ideology offers a dream in which humans can transcend our bodies, a world where being male or female truly no longer matters. It’s easy to see why this vision holds irresistible appeal for many women, when it is our sexed bodies that have been used as the reason for our subordination for millennia, and the targets of so much violence and scorn. Nor are the (mostly young) women who take up this dream the first to do so. In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin offers a scathing account of the 60s anti-war/free love movement, which she joined enthusiastically as a young woman (pp.88-91):

It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and beautiful. They wanted peace. They talked love, love, love, not romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). They grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one…

The dream for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality based on what men and women had in common, what the adults tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a sexual community more like childhood—before girls were crushed under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence: transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the adults who made war not love. It was—for the girls—a dream of being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling equality, not the traditional male dominance.

I know that women are a very broad group, and there are no doubt other dynamics at play, but I think the ones I’ve articulated here are important to understand, because otherwise we will keep having the wrong arguments with other women. Our disagreement with TRA-supporting women isn’t a genuine disagreement over whether sex can be changed, or whether men can be female if they say so. They know as well as we do that it can’t, and they can’t. Like the girls of the 60s, they have a dream of sexual transcendence, of being in sibling solidarity with males, and naturally they hate the women who would spoil this dream.

That is the point where they need to be reminded that the inventor of the lobotomy received the Nobel Prize in medicine

And was supported by publications such as the New York Times. History repeating...

It must also be something to do with seeing yourself as ultra liberal and free thinking and permissive. We’ve done so much work in society on promoting rights and freedoms that the knee jerk reaction is to blindly support. No one wants to be the killjoy.
Saying no seems conservative and establishment and old fashioned.

I also think you look at your personal social bubble (nice rational people) to find examples of who it would benefit rather than looking at the whole of society.

Doesn’t a point like this just stereotype performative gender traits into binary categories. A man does this, a women does this, etc. It’s not entirely gender critical and reinforces current systems.

Men and women are socialised in different ways. It's an observation. Anyone is perfectly free to step outside it. The plain fact of the matter is that we aren't talking about women and this male-typical entitlement to take up space and to have their feelings respected is pretty obvious to many women.

It really is just straight up sexism IMO, internalised, yes, but I think quite obvious

Yes, but no, but yes it is. Everything I listed is ultimately about sexism, but I'm not sure about the 'straight up' part. It can be very hard to unpick, and what's uniquely disconcerting about these sexist myths is that they have their roots in feminist theory.

The idea that there is no such thing as a specific oppression faced by women and girls, that 'gender non-conforming' men and boys suffer from the same kind of harms, is based in sexism.

For instance, it is sometimes asserted that 'third gender' males are oppressed in similar ways to women in patriarchal societies, which is demonstrably false. This is not to say that they aren't marginalised or targeted for violence - it's just not the same as what is done to women and girls under male domination. To list only the most obvious difference, 'third gender' males have a great deal more freedom than do females in their societies, which includes the freedom to opt out of their sex class in the first place (very few cultures have 'third gender' roles for women - any guesses as to why?).

The idea that women's unique biology and its impact on our lives should be verboten in feminist thought lest we 'essentialise' or 'reduce' ourselves is obvious sexism. You can see it taken to its cringingly misogynistic conclusion by all those women who express horror at the idea of even having a collective noun for people with female biology ('you're reducing us to vaginas and wombs if you say we need a word for people with vaginas and wombs!)

And young women's passionate longing to be in sibling solidarity with men, usually coupled with scorn for older women, is at least partly about sexism too (although also probably about youth and sexual desire). Dworkin claims that young women's embrace of the free-love movement was driven by a wish to reject their mothers:

They accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more than any other idea or practice, made them different from their mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their moth­ers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the long­ haired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere. This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible home. (Right-Wing Women, p. 100)

I think it's important to talk about these particular manifestations of sexism, because they are perpetuated by women ourselves, and they seem to repeat themselves through the generations, hobbling the feminist project, or, as we see now with the gender identity movement, completely torpedoing it.

“ It's an observation. Anyone is perfectly free to step outside it. The plain fact of the matter is that we aren't talking about women and this male-typical entitlement to take up space and to have their feelings respected is pretty obvious to many women.”

To me, it just read very similar to the transphobic schroedingers box where trans people are prescribing and performing their idea of feminine traits vs “a real woman wouldn’t do that and I know because I’ve met all of them”

Explain then why transmen have next to no voice and have had no success in gaining access to to the Masons, the Garrick Club, the rules on primogeniture, the upper echelons of the Catholic Church. Or insisting that they must be welcome in gay clubs. Or insisting that it’s transphobic for an elderly man to not want to have a prostate exam from them. Or parading around in men’s changing rooms showing off their still intact breasts. Or really making any men feel uncomfortable on any level at all?

What is it about transwomen as opposed to transmen that makes their behaviour and their treatment by society so different ?

It's not transphobic to perceive, accurately, the sex of a person in front of you.
Much as a poker player tries to overcome and conceal their 'tells', I'm sure people who are trying to pass as the opposite sex try to conceal theirs.

It's extraordinarily difficult to successfully conceal the evidence of one's sex though, and even more difficult to attempt to perform in a deliberate manner that is unnaturally contrived for the purpose of imitating the opposite sex.

Dozens of tells are perceptible that reveal the true sex of a person. It isn't surprising that this is so. We're animals, sex is a fundamentally important attribute of life. We're attuned to it. Especially if you belong to the sex that is at risk from the opposite sex. Then, I'd say, our abilities to perceive the opposite sex is even more heightened. Our lives depend upon it.

I think women support this because of the reasons listed already.

I'd like to think a bit more about the role of fear and women trying to protect themselves.

Not wanting to be one of those evil women. Because we have seen demonstrated to us what happens to the witches.

So you first have to try to convince yourself why other women are wrong. If you're curious and intellectually honest enough to examine the question properly, you'll realise you can't. You try to accept that these women's beliefs are yours, too. Through this process, you deal with the pain of seeing just how deep the misogyny really runs. You may despair at just how many failings you see, from the institutions, people and systems you trusted, you thought would think rationally, look for the evidence, have safeguarding procedures, or consider our wellbeing. Nope. So many simply do not seem to care about women at all, they didn't invite us to sit at the table when these decisions were being made. They didn't even inform us of what was really going on.

Then you sit in astonishment at how readily society has accepted the idea that women do not exist as adult human females in our own right.

It's quite wounding.

It's not much different to a Derren Brown exercise, where suggestible people can be manipulated to do abhorrent things because everyone else is doing them too and it is far too terrifying to be the odd one out.

I agree this is a huge part of what's going on Barracker, and that's it's probably even the main dynamic that is driving this. But I do think there is a particular appeal that trans ideology has for women that can't be explained by groupthink and herd behaviour. This appeal IMO is rooted in male-female power relations and women's own pain WRT to 'gender'. I think that's worth examining, because women are the key to turning this around. If enough women refuse to go along with it, the TRA juggernaut will be halted. Men simply aren't impacted to the same degree, although some men are now waking up to the impact of genderist dogma on free speech and science.

I have also come to the conclusion that many of the central tenets of genderism have their origins in second-wave feminist theory, and in saying that I am not suggesting that women throw out the intellectual work of the second wave, but IMO there are some errors in the analysis which we need to confront and correct. Chief among these is the idea that 'man' and woman' are wholly socially constructed categories and that women's liberation is dependent on us transcending sexual biology.

Then you sit in astonishment at how readily society has accepted the idea that women do not exist as adult human females in our own right. It's quite wounding.

I totally agree, Reinstate. It's very painful. And to me what's disorientating about it is this notion seems to have gained traction due to some weird convergence of ancient misogyny (Aristotle's belief that women are merely deformed males) with modern feminist theory:

Case in point: Catharine MacKinnon gave an interview to the transadvocate in which she fully endorsed the precepts of genderism. I won’t link to the interview because the trans activist who runs the site is known to internet-stalk GC women, and I don’t want to bring Mumsnet or its users to that person’s attention. But feel free to google it if you want to hear one of the giants of second-wave feminism say things like: 'Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.'

Why would MacKinnon, who has spent her entire career litigating sex discrimination, be so keen to endorse the theory that sex does not exist as a coherent category? According to her, it's because it supports her foundational theory that both sex and sexuality are social constructs, coupled with a general hostility to 'nature' as being in way connected with women:

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. My particular question was OF WHAT is sex socially constructed? The answer I gave, and still believe, is sexuality. Sexuality is itself not biological, but social, so the constructing is also the constructed, which makes sense since there is no place outside society. Transpeople are doing their best to live and be loved under conditions in which people still pervasively believe the lie that gender is sex-based, meaning biologically-determined.

IMO feminism needs to make a definitive break with this sort of extreme social constructionism. Aside from being intellectually insupportable, it is hurting women and has the potential to wipe out many of the gains made by second-wave feminism.

Very interesting thread. My recollections of second wave feminism are very tied up with biology e.g. women's groups getting us to examine our own vaginas and encouraging us to discuss our periods in everyday language, instead of whispering about 'having a visitor'.

I have absolutely no idea how we got from there to McKinnon endorsing gender over sex and young women telling me I'm sexist for saying males are stronger than females.

Interesting discussion, thanks DonkeySkin and PPs. I've just been watching a bunch of educated, professional women on FB cheering today's Pink News article on NHS guidelines urging staff to treat transphobes like racists. Didn't follow the link but the URL referenced Joan McAlpine. But the thing that struck me was the photograph in the thumbnail, which showed an elderly woman in a hospital bed looking pissed off. The FB comments were along the lines that transphobia is just as bad as racism and should be treated the same way. No thought about what 'transphobia' is or might encompass - they equate it with hating their nice fellow political activists who happen to be transwomen.
And I couldn't help noticing the casual ageism of the photograph: old woman = prejudiced; case dismissed.

I mean, Pink News could hardly have illustrated their article with a pretty young woman, could they?

And to me what's disorientating about it is this notion seems to have gained traction due to some weird convergence of ancient misogyny (Aristotle's belief that women are merely deformed males) with modern feminist theory

It's an excellent question, and I don't know enough about what actually happened. But my theory is that due to a combination of factors, mainly to do with power, finance and I think feminism got co-opted from within, in some sense. It would be logical as a form of insidious patriarchal backlash against women's progress, because the kinds of things being promoted as "feminist" now and basically re-branding feminism to mean "whatever women are supposedly choosing to do" often seem to go hand-in-hand with men's and corporate interests. For example, prostitution, surrogacy, pornography, gender identity theories that advocate for the abolition of sex (terrible for women, but very good for those men who want to profit).
It seems to me that much of academic/liberal feminism now doesn't actually create tangible difference for women's liberation, given it doesn't ground itself in the material world. But it does create more "work" and more money in terms of students. Something as impenetrable and nonsensical as post-modern/queer theory is a good example of this, by the time someone has invested in trying to comprehend it, they feel they need to keep going. (It's almost like a pyramid scheme, actually.)
I think this has been coupled with the rise of social media and journalists using Twitter as sources for their thinkpieces, which means that we get connected to each other in strange ways, we don't actually hear anyone's tone of voice, the attention span is short, outrage is high and we are siloed from depending on our echochamber. Plus there is the risk of consequences depending upon what one writes.
Careful thought, courage, lateral thinking, clarity of presentation and solid research is what feminist analyses thrive on, I think.
They take time, space and conviction.
Feminism shouldn't be a popularity contest. But the way it is set up, it feels like it is. So I think a lot of women try to save face. Especially in academic or "career feminist" type circles, where prestige, influence and money may be dependent on the "popularity/acceptability" of your opinions.
Also, let's face it, if a woman in the rebranded "gender studies" department has spent however long of her career dedicated to working on ideas about gender as identity, because that's all she has been taught, she'll find it very difficult to hear other women saying "but... your central premise is fundamentally flawed."

I also think that there is some feminist analysis that needs to be revisited. And this isn't something to see as some kind of betrayal, or disloyalty, it's perfectly normal in any kind of philosophical or ideological movement. There is nothing wrong with looking back and saying, these two elements haven't been properly reconciled, or we did not think enough about that, or even just "wow, that idea didn't turn out the way we thought it would!" There is too much of a tendency among some to see this type of work as a sort of a personal rejection of earlier thinkers.

Anyway, yes, I think the body issue is significant. The getting back in touch with the female body business was nice, and even important for individuals, but I think in a certain way shallow. It's not an alternate for example to real academic inclusion of the biological sciences around the female body, hormones, the brain or behaviour that was alluded to earlier in the discussion.

And study of women should be open to these kinds of ideas and should not be trying to force them into an ideological lens. As soon as that happens, even if it is happening unconsciously, you break the link to material reality, no matter how much time feminists are spending looking at their cervixes. Every time we see a discussion here about the question of a female or male brain you can see this, it's never an open discussion, and it's always asserted that there is no such thing, when scientifically there isn't anything like a consensus.

The reason for this from my perspective is that people are afraid that science will show something that seems incompatible with feminism, that women and men really have some sort of substantial differences in terms of thinking or behaviour. To me that suggests a vision that is really insufficiently radical and not adequately rooted in the idea of human personhood and dignity.

Another problem I suspect is the influence of the sex positive movement. Feminism sees the problem in some areas, like prostitution, but on the other hand wants to keep other elements, like the idea that it is entirely benign to have a society that encourages a transactional view of casual sex if that is what people want. My suspicion is that these are not really separate elements of that way of thinking.

I think that everything that I’ve seen in the mainstream media has been so trans positive it’s had a big impact on public opinion.
Day time chat shows for the last 10 years have had interviews with transwoman ‘born in the wrong body’ & more recently improved plastic surgery, transmen and women bloggers online have captured the middle ground, soft media stories of trans kids being ‘brave’ etc. are a staple of newspapers & magazines & tv.
Reporting of repressed memories of childhood abuse was a pseudoscience popularised on daytime chat shows in America in the ‘80’s and it took years to be discredited, something similar is happening now.