Finn Mackay in Guardian today

[FFSitsonlyMonday]

I quite liked this today. I am very poorly informed but think I will get reading.

Guardian link Finn Mackay article

@FloralBunting

It's a helpful little primer on the fact that feminism actually has some helpful things to say.

Quite why the Guardian suddenly feels its readership could benefit from a very simple primer on why feminism is a good thing, I'm sure I couldn't say. Perhaps someone there has twigged that pandering to those for whom nothing will ever be enough is a hiding to nothing, so they're hoping to slowly reintroduce feminism to Owen Jones' fanclub.

Good luck with that, chums.

Quite! I think people on both sides (if we must accept that expression) could do with a reminder of what radical feminism is about. The doc is one of the few people who can straddle both sides, too. I expect a constructive challenge to my views from the press, TRAs and legislators, and its not often I get it.

@Summerhillsquare

I think Dr Mackay is thoughtful, way more precise than most commentators, and actually feminist. Well worth a read and share.

Is that you, Emily?

NellWilson I agree with every word of that.

@NellWilsonsWhiteHair

I think the ways in which many lesbians throughout certainly the past 100 years of history (perhaps longer) have experimented with adopting "male" appearances or behaviours or roles or jobs or habits or sex roles are complex, varied, and culturally significant. My shorthand is to describe this as lesbian history and to feel put out when parts of it are sometimes reclaimed as trans history, but the objective truth is probably that there are overlaps (as well as tensions).

I’m a cultural historian working in this field, so I’m well aware of the history of lesbian women presenting as male and male cross-dressing: from the late 19thc. until around the 2WW this was very much still under the aegis of sexologists such as Kraft-Ebing and Ellis, and the highly disputed “inversion theory” - itself quite repressive and something that LGB people were largely delighted to jettison (but which persisted in the popular imagination for some time). There are crucial differences between butch and “transmasc” though - particularly around whether these are experienced as roles or identity categories (I’d argue that “transmasc” is an identity that only exists n relation to “trans”, whereas “butch” has a much longer history of gender role play which is not itself anything to do with the modern senses of either “trans” or “masc”.

In any case, this pinpoints for me some of my discomfort with the disingenuousness of this approach. Despite Firestone (who was a bit of an anomaly), second wave feminism was all about being woman-centred - thinking of women as essentially part of a community of similarity despite difference, a continuum of shared experience (this didn’t, though, crucially, have to be the same experiences).

I find it very strange for someone to be trying to draw on second wave feminism, whilst simultaneously “identifying” outside the female experience as “queermale” or “transmasc”. Those are “identities” that are not only very much part of contemporary queer discourse, but they also fundamentally draw on terms that are male, queer, trans, masc - not to do with women at all. To me, it feels very much like trying to have your cake and eat it - trying to pretend you’re part of a great feminist tradition, at the same time as hedging your bets with “identities” that deliberately and explicitly fall outside that. Second wave and radical or Marxist feminism rejects “identity” as an ideological false consciousness, something that alienates you from the reality of class and sex oppression and prevents you seeing the truth.

There’s an element of obfuscation (or even class traitorousness) about trying to pretend you can have queer identity politics as well as radical feminism - you can’t, because then you’d be kidding yourself. The divergent strains in radical feminism largely centred on what to do about women’s reproductive role, not identity politics. It feels very much like trying to make use of radical feminism whilst also wanting to stay conveniently outside some of its crucial aims and tenets.

I’d be more sympathetic if she made a case for being in tune with some of the French lesbian feminists who were interested in gender binaries and sexuality, like Monique Wittig - but that doesn’t seem to be her argument.

Tell you what she don’t speak to ordinary women.

Just another want to,say posh woman.

But will just say it.

Another posh woman who hasn’t a clue how most of us live in the uk now

I’d argue that “transmasc” is an identity that only exists n relation to “trans”, whereas “butch” has a much longer history of gender role play which is not itself anything to do with the modern senses of either “trans” or “masc”.

I'd argue that "butch" as a concept of female masculinity / homosexuality only really arose in the 20th century while women with a masculine identity go back to at least (and not exclusively) the Old Norse sagas.

Yes, butch is very much a twentieth century construct (cf Leslie Fineberg); though I think the difficulties increase, as you go back through history, in talking about women with a “masculine identity” - largely because “identity” and “sexuality” are both post-1800 constructs in the first place. Even “emotion” as a term and in the modern sense doesn’t really exist before the early to mid 19th century.

We find it very difficult to conceptualise a world where people’s sense of themselves does not quite map on to our post-19thc, post-Freudian notion of “identity”, but that’s part of the interesting thing about history - we really can’t assume we can just read the past as easily as we assume we can, or that contemporary ideas easily map onto past ones.

How can she understand biology if she is referring to herself as a queermale?!

I'll let George Orwell answer:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it....that was the ultimate subtlety"

I think the history and critique of 'butch' as a concept is fairly specific to lesbians, and the overlap with trans is very much the end of it that is internalized homophobia and internalized misogyny. As a butch woman myself, I won't shy away from confronting those aspects because, I think they're important issues to grapple with.
But I should think most women who choose to present as I do have had the question 'Do you want to be/think you're a man?' and it's only now that Trans is a thing with considerable power that this question isn't acknowledged as rude and sexist/homophobic, and is actually encouraged in the form of 'what are your pronouns?'.

I'm still a little 'huh?' about the article, though. If it had been written in the DM or the Mirror, I'd understand the framing of 'I know you think feminists are just nasty women who want to hold everyone back from fun, but let me say why some of their ideas are good'.

But this is The Guardian. An article like this looks like an acknowledgement that this paper hasn't been pro-women's rights for quite some time, and the readership needs the introduction to feminism as an idea.

I mean, I don't disagree, but, wow.

@donquixotedelamancha

How can she understand biology if she is referring to herself as a queermale?!

I'll let George Orwell answer:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it....that was the ultimate subtlety"

Thanks for this. Having never studied 1984 (I did Animal Farm) I am loving learning all the new quotes.

(Wish I'd done 1984 now, though didn't get the choice. And Animal Farm is at least half the number of pages so probably was a good thing I got that option at the time!)

@Summerhillsquare

I think Dr Mackay is thoughtful, way more precise than most commentators, and actually feminist. Well worth a read and share.

I really rate Dr Mackay, I don't agree with her on everything but she's always thoughtful and doesn't appear to have bought into this stupid us vs them mentality. Her book on radical feminism was really good

MacKay believes that women should compromise and that they should allow men to use women's lavatories but not "therapeutic spaces" but then MacKay contradicts herself by saying "I think there should be choice for somebody fleeing – they should be able to go somewhere they feel comfortable.”

MacKay dances around the question of whether or not a human can change sex, too.

So it's a "no" from me. MacKay can sit on the fence getting splinters for as long as she likes but she's certainly not going to "help end the gender wars".

MacKay can sit on the fence getting splinters for as long as she likes but she's certainly not going to "help end the gender wars".

It's rarely:

Dear men,

Please stop rape and violence towards others in daily life. As part of this, you can share spaces like public lavatories with your fellow men, no matter how they dress or present. Let loos be loos and just a space for necessary functions and not the putative thunderdome that they seem to be from all the demands that women's facilities should be used as a universal safe haven.

Yours - women

Bits felt rather like forced teaming to me.

The radical feminists of the 1970s were some of the first to take seriously the gender and sexuality debates currently raging through our society. Many of them looked forward to a gender-fluid world of polyamorous and pansexual relationships, where social roles were no longer defined by people’s sexed characteristics at birth. Their work helped to secure structural equality for women, more expansive definitions of the family and greater freedom of expression for gender and sexual identities that cut against the grain of heterosexuality.

The whole article seems to be twisting things and looking back on history with a modern gender ideology eye. The paragraph I have quoted is a clever mix of truth and half-truth and ignoring the way gender is seen by gender ideology people as opposed to radfems.

It seems rather like it is trying to gaslight feminists into "radical feminism in the 70s is what TRAs believe now" when the two things are very different despite have common words (but not common meaning).

Radical feminism is a revolutionary social justice movement, working for the world as it could be, and for the liberation of women and society

It all sounds terribly well written and reasonable and authoritative, when actually to my eyes it is twisting things hugely.

@ItsAllGoingToBeFine

Bits felt rather like forced teaming to me.

The radical feminists of the 1970s were some of the first to take seriously the gender and sexuality debates currently raging through our society. Many of them looked forward to a gender-fluid world of polyamorous and pansexual relationships, where social roles were no longer defined by people’s sexed characteristics at birth. Their work helped to secure structural equality for women, more expansive definitions of the family and greater freedom of expression for gender and sexual identities that cut against the grain of heterosexuality.

The whole article seems to be twisting things and looking back on history with a modern gender ideology eye. The paragraph I have quoted is a clever mix of truth and half-truth and ignoring the way gender is seen by gender ideology people as opposed to radfems.

It seems rather like it is trying to gaslight feminists into "radical feminism in the 70s is what TRAs believe now" when the two things are very different despite have common words (but not common meaning).

Radical feminism is a revolutionary social justice movement, working for the world as it could be, and for the liberation of women and society

It all sounds terribly well written and reasonable and authoritative, when actually to my eyes it is twisting things hugely.

This is my thought on the article too. It seems to be trying to reframe Radical Feminism as a kind of gotcha. That gender critical people (who the author would call ‘TERFs’) are doing the RF bit of TERF wrong, and isn’t it ironic that the original RFs were all about being genderfluid.

It completely misses the point that being gender critical is not the same, and has never been radical feminism.

feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity

I'm struggling to view anyone who sees the female sex as an identity as a positive voice for women. Especially in an article that tries to obfuscate what radical feminism is about - the liberation of female people from the patriarchy - by listing some of its more extreme positions as if they were mainstream ones back then.

The entire first paragraph gives us a framing of feminism that betrays FM's allegiance to the doctrine of gender identity as paramount:

Feminism is often portrayed as a dinosaur rudely dying right in the way of progressive change. Younger people today are much more fluent in their understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. There are more terms available than ever before to describe identity categories (Facebook has more than 50 different choices for gender alone). Indeed, research has found pupils in UK secondary schools using more than 23 different labels for gender identity. In this climate, feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity, has become seen as backward, trapped in the past. Added to this are misconceptions that radical feminism in particular is uniquely transphobic, with the label of “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, applied to anyone expressing trans exclusionary views, regardless of their politics or whether they are even a feminist at all.

It starts with a non sequitur, and then posits feminism as being about gender identity (which presupposes that a) gender identity exists as a universal human trait, something hotly contested among feminists and others, b) that feminism is a movement centred not on fighting for one sex but something else, here identity, it c) does all of that firmly from the point of view of trans rights activists campaigning for self-id (feminism has many critics, but few describe it as a dinosaur standing in the way of progress - that is a uniquely pro-self-id take) and d) presents uncritically the idea that we express trans-exclusionary ideas when we oppose self-id when in actual fact we oppose it because we seek to exclude males regardless of whether they identify as trans or not.

And that sets the stage for this article. What follows after that first paragraph are merely arguments employed to support these premises in my view. Steeped in queer and critical theories, with the now customary (if oblique) nod towards the struggle sessions so beloved by its proponents - we must attack our own movements, analyse our privilege and create what? A place where we all think the same?

Just as activists look outwards towards fighting inequality and oppression in society, they also need to look inwards at the forms of oppression within their own movements.

Oppression has a distinct meaning that simply does not apply here. But of course if you subscribe to an ideology that sees women as oppressors of men claiming womanhood, that makes perfect sense.

And how anyone can do justice to radical feminism without mentioning the patriarchy or patriarchal systems even once is beyond me.

Exactly @CharlieParley - radical feminism (which was strongly materialist and Marxist), is not about “identity” at all - in fact undermines the whole idea of “identity”. It’s highly disingenuous to pretend that it is or that it can somehow be folded back in to an identity politics that it rightly critiques.

Can anyone recommend some (accessible/beginner) reading about radical feminism please?

A good place to start - and she’s extremely readable - is bell hooks, feminist theory from margin to center (1984). There’s an online full text at:

funceji.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/bell_hooks_feminist_theory_from_margin_to_centebookzz-org_.pdf

hooks was writing within second wave/radical feminism and engaging with other radical feminists in this text, but also providing a much needed perspective on how black American feminists could add to and change the movement. So she herself is a radical feminist but is also critiquing radical feminism. It’s very readable and passionate - it’s not “theoretical” or jargony at all, but very down to earth - and also shows you just how wrong it is for current “intersectional” feminists to suggest that radical feminism was primarily white - it wasn’t at all (women like hooks and Angela Davis were hugely influential in the movement). Second wave radical feminism was heterogenous and diverse and genuinely engaged with real women’s lives. I really recommend reading a few chapters of the hooks as a good way in!

I’d also suggest some of the classics like Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; and Adrienne Rich’s essays.

@CharlieParley

feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity

I'm struggling to view anyone who sees the female sex as an identity as a positive voice for women. Especially in an article that tries to obfuscate what radical feminism is about - the liberation of female people from the patriarchy - by listing some of its more extreme positions as if they were mainstream ones back then.

The entire first paragraph gives us a framing of feminism that betrays FM's allegiance to the doctrine of gender identity as paramount:

Feminism is often portrayed as a dinosaur rudely dying right in the way of progressive change. Younger people today are much more fluent in their understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. There are more terms available than ever before to describe identity categories (Facebook has more than 50 different choices for gender alone). Indeed, research has found pupils in UK secondary schools using more than 23 different labels for gender identity. In this climate, feminism, a movement led by the experiences of one identity, has become seen as backward, trapped in the past. Added to this are misconceptions that radical feminism in particular is uniquely transphobic, with the label of “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, applied to anyone expressing trans exclusionary views, regardless of their politics or whether they are even a feminist at all.

It starts with a non sequitur, and then posits feminism as being about gender identity (which presupposes that a) gender identity exists as a universal human trait, something hotly contested among feminists and others, b) that feminism is a movement centred not on fighting for one sex but something else, here identity, it c) does all of that firmly from the point of view of trans rights activists campaigning for self-id (feminism has many critics, but few describe it as a dinosaur standing in the way of progress - that is a uniquely pro-self-id take) and d) presents uncritically the idea that we express trans-exclusionary ideas when we oppose self-id when in actual fact we oppose it because we seek to exclude males regardless of whether they identify as trans or not.

And that sets the stage for this article. What follows after that first paragraph are merely arguments employed to support these premises in my view. Steeped in queer and critical theories, with the now customary (if oblique) nod towards the struggle sessions so beloved by its proponents - we must attack our own movements, analyse our privilege and create what? A place where we all think the same?

Just as activists look outwards towards fighting inequality and oppression in society, they also need to look inwards at the forms of oppression within their own movements.

Oppression has a distinct meaning that simply does not apply here. But of course if you subscribe to an ideology that sees women as oppressors of men claiming womanhood, that makes perfect sense.

And how anyone can do justice to radical feminism without mentioning the patriarchy or patriarchal systems even once is beyond me.

Yes, it's really flabby thinking. I have met Finn in RL. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Always makes me think of Sally Hines.

Every time I read her I keep hearing Germaine Greer's words: 'Women fail to understand how much men hate them.'

This whole gender ideology movement has come as a massive reminder of that. Finn doesn't see it at all.

Thank you @foxgoosefinch

Yawn. Lots of words in order to say absolutely nothing. And when did being white become a bad thing? I must have missed that memo.

''They were among the first to study why masculinity is defined through violence, and how it might be changed. Far from promoting a war of the sexes, radical feminists had an even more radical message: women and men, all of us, however we define, are all human beings, and together are capable of growth and humanity.''

My understanding of radical feminism is that it's non violent, and Finns statement about multiple sex shops being burned down doesn't square with anything I've heard, or Finns previous statement (in bold), or feminist involvement at Greenham and other peace camps.
That claim makes it sound like a hit piece to me.

www.amazon.co.uk/Masters-Tools-Dismantle-Penguin-Modern/dp/0241339723?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

What the fuck is a queermale? And why would I take lessons in feminism from someone who hates being female?