Helen Joyce & Julie Bindel: Should TERFs unite with the Right?

[ILikeDungs]

By Unherd, a debate-style response to the purity spiral after Brighton. I do admire Helen Joyce and her ability to calmly and logically discuss the issues. Unherd have made it age restricted (because of all the fucks, I suppose!):

I don't think she said enough about her opinion for you to know that.

What do you mean by tightly regulated? Business is very tightly regulated in all kinds of ways right now. Or do you mean that the state should control all business/there should be no private profit?

If you don't believe in a free market then you are arguing for the control of business by the state. This is one of the definitions of fascism.

beastlyslumber so we knew what a woman was and girls weren't having healthy parts of their body removed, yet women were still discriminated against, sexually assaulted, prostituted etc. The 1970s were still a rubbish time to be a woman.

Yes, exactly. That's exactly why trying to tackle gender ideology as separate from broader feminist aims won't be effective.

That seems like a non sequitur. Can you show your workings?

Just when the water is starting to clear it all gets stirred up again.

I agree that she didn't explain her position enough for me to fully understand (hence my saying exactly that several times on this very thread).

You asked if I was saying the same as her and I said I don't think so, based on what she said.

'Tightly regulated' - so that what businesses contribute ie goods and services is in balance with what they take ie profit. As I've said twice already.

And that means I'm arguing for fascism?

How? You've leapt from your premise to your conclusion and I don't follow.

Depends what you mean by 'in balance'.

Because if all we focus on is stopping children being medicalised, preserving same sex services, provisions and spaces and retaining the meaning of the word 'woman' (all utterly necessary) then we still have women being trafficking, prostituted, exploited by grooming gangs, disproportionately living in poverty and with domestic violence, unable to walk the streets safely. Heck, we would still have the sex pay gap and other types of discrimination.

That's not a victory for women's rights.

I'm not saying that individual women or groups shouldn't focus on those single issues - they have to, given that all the work is being done voluntarily in women's own time.

But losing sight of the bigger aims of feminism plays right into the hands of those who would be very happy to preserve the status quo with a bit of tinkering around the edges.

Fascism is characterised by an authoritarian state that co-opts private businesses under its auspices. The merging of corporate and state interests.

If that's not what you want, then maybe you're thinking of something more like the removal of the right to private property, as in communism.

Both systems are thoroughly evil, as we have seen.

I don't know what else you could mean by saying businesses can't make a profit or should have their profits skimmed. Unless you mean more like a windfall tax on utility companies or renationalising the trains - reasonable things which can coexist with a free market, at least in theory.

Yes, I agree.

So it's only a victory for women's rights if we win all the battles? So getting the vote wasn't a victory because women still faced employment discrimination? The criminalisation of rape in marriage wasn't a victory because rape prosecutions are still extremely difficult to achieve?

That's not fair, is it?

I didn't say businesses shouldn't make a profit beastlyslumber.

I've said very clearly that it needs to be in balance with what they contribute. This is the forth time I've said it in the last hour or so.

But losing sight of the bigger aims of feminism plays right into the hands of those who would be very happy to preserve the status quo with a bit of tinkering around the edges.

But conversely focusing on women being trafficked, prostituted, exploited by grooming gangs, disproportionately living in poverty and with domestic violence, and the pay gap - but losing sight of the bigger aims of restoring enlightenment values and stopping this cultural revolution - plays right into the hands of those would be very happy to preserve the status quo with a bit of tinkering around the edges.

I guess this is one of those asymmetric things - my concerns are the "bigger picture", while yours are "tinkering around the edges" of my bigger picture.

Maybe try reading the whole of my post?

Women achieved so much freedom and won so many rights even within my lifetime. I have never been oppressed for being female. Only now am I being prevented from having a voice.

Without a voice, women can do nothing. So what if some of the people who support my voice don't support my right to have an abortion? If I have a voice I can fight them on that. Without a right to speak I can do nothing, all my other rights can be taken away.

So it makes no sense to me to say I must only work with Feminists or only with the left. The people who are fighting for women to have a voice are the people on my side.

Yes but what does that mean? I set out three possibilities and you apparently don't like any of them, so I'm at a loss. It's meaningless unless you can actually explain it.

Losing sight of the bigger aims of feminism plays right into the hands of those who would be very happy to preserve the status quo

I feel that you are getting to the crux of what you mean here.

In what ways do you believe we are in danger of losing sight of feminisms bigger aims?

I did. You said it's not a victory for women if we retain single sex spaces and stop child abuse, as long as other inequities remain.

What did you mean by this, if not what you said?

I don't understand why women 'working with' (whatever that means) 'the right' (whatever that means) means they lose sight of those other battles.

Or once again, why this supposedly only works one way. Imagine if the religious right 'lost sight' of how much they hate lesbians.

I just don't think women are that stupid.

Or once again, why this supposedly only works one way. Imagine if the religious right 'lost sight' of how much they hate lesbians.

To be frank, I think you missed a "(whatever that means)" after 'lost sight'. But I think we're getting a bit clogged up with them...

Maybe we could have WTM instead of commas

I don't understand how stopping child abuse and retaining single sex spaces wouldn't be a victory for women's rights.

It's almost like those things are being leveraged by left wing Feminists in order to get to the things they really want to achieve, rather than being meaningful goals in themselves.

Or is it that if we win those battles, Feminists will be back where they started and all those lucrative career opportunities will go away?

Maybe that's too cynical but I really don't understand this.

Honestly I think it's because it's dogma. It's using language to obfuscate rather than reveal. Repeating things that leftists say to one another which they all agree on but no one ever manages to articulate exactly what they mean.

What are feminists' bigger aims and what does it mean to lose sight of them? How does working with the right (wtm) cause Feminists to lose sight of their bigger aims? Why doesn't it work the other way around?

Can anyone break it down into a clear argument, linking these ideas together step by step with logic? Examples would be welcome too.

So what do you mean by 'in balance'?

Honestly I think it's because it's dogma. It's using language to obfuscate rather than reveal. Repeating things that leftists say to one another which they all agree on but no one ever manages to articulate exactly what they mean.

That's the conclusion I've reached as well. It's a milder form of what reaches its pinnacle with people like Butler, but you have the same problem that you can't pin down the definitions to the point you can actually identify an argument well enough to counter it.

Clearly it feels meaningful to the person saying it, but it's not clear the meaning can be successfully conveyed to someone else, at least not in concrete terms. Certainly as a feeling, or mood, or an essence, but not something objective, rather than abstract.

Latest issue of Helen Joyce's newsletter actually touches on some of this stuff. Paywalled, sorry, but an excerpt:

But that first editor was right: what the hell does it mean? Are queer theorists simply saying that “nothing means anything”, or “everything good is really bad”? Is their point to do with the difficulties of definition or the difficulties of action, or both? Are they nihilists or are they cynics? Or is the point something else entirely?

I often re-read “The Professor of Parody” when my rage at the sheer futility of much of what now calls itself feminism bubbles over. This wonderful essay by philosopher Martha Nussbaum excoriating Judith Butler was written in 1999, but reads like Nussbaum had a crystal ball that allowed her to see the dire state of mainstream feminism today. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to do so.

She writes:

> “Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.”

I couldn’t agree more that the point of activism should be to make life perceptibly better for people who are getting a raw deal—not to provide fancy redefinitions, or justifications for doing nothing. But I’m also someone who has a pretty high tolerance for abstruse definitions, and for “academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness”. So what is it that bothers me so much about this particular sort of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness?

I think it’s that it’s not just obscure and abstract; it’s uselessly so. And I don’t mean in terms of the activism it does or doesn’t support; I mean on its own terms.

Forgive me for a somewhat lengthy detour into my long-ago degrees in mathematics. [...]