Catherine McKinnon on Transgender Law and Politics

[ArabeIIaScott]

This has had an inordinately enthusiastic reception among some academics.

So sharing it in case its of interest.

https://signsjournal.org/exploring-transgender-law-and-politics/

'seeing “women” as a turf to be defended, as opposed to a set of imperatives and limitations to be criticized, challenged, changed, or transcended, has been pretty startling'

Odd take, really. I don't see my own body and self as 'turf'. I just live in it, mate.

Anyway, I have to say I started it but drifted off. I will persevere, although it seems like that kind of opaque academic-speak that I really struggle to get though.

God, I don't know what's worse for women...being generally demeaned by men or intellectually demeaned by other women.

CMK has decided that strategic thing is to be "OTRSOH" (on the right side of history) and so she has attempted to construct a convincing intellectual argument to support that position - she has failed in her efforts.

Why? If the misogynistic view is that women exist to provide sex for males, then lesbians are the lowest ranking females because they never willingly provide this service.

'trans people have found they can’t live their one and only life without changing or affirming their gender, at odds with their bodily assignment since birth, such that transition is the only possible form of being, of moving through this world, of resistance to what was imposed on them at odds with their self-conception in relational social space, that makes any sense of their lives in gendered terms.'

blurble blurble blip bloop.

I suppose this is an attempt to define 'gender identity'?

'self-conception in relational social space.'

Which is to say, they insist that other people respond to them in a certain way, or they 'can't live their one and only life'?

That ain't healthy, Catherine.

This was being trumpeted on an account i was reading today 'read it and weep your gender critical numpties'

I think what struck me as I read with initial awe moving to puzzlement is that I've heard all this before.

Welcomed? Welcomed to what exactly? Whose embraces 'should' we welcome, and what is womanhood? Yes, if gender is what is placed on us by the patriarchy, why is 'womanhood' somehow something else, a thing that has nothing to do with our physical reality but is more a kind of.... gendery thing?

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled males yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden fanny door!"

I may be a numptie but at least I know how babies are made.

'.... women’s sexuality [...] has nothing whatsoever to do with biology'

🤔

Mazing, really, how we've survived as a species. Up until colonial bastards enforced heteronormative sex on us, we all just randomly writhed around in the mud, hoping sperm would somehow transfer into the correct type of ungendered receptacle.

The important question for a political movement for the liberation of women is thus not what a woman is, I think, but what accounts for the oppression of women: who is oppressed as a woman, in the way women are distinctively oppressed?

How can you answer that question if you don't know what a woman is? That whole article is a wonderful example of eliding two different concepts together in one sentence to say something untrue. over and over again.

For example Defining women by biology—adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex—used to be criticized as biological essentialism.'

No it didn't. Defining what women could do or be or achieve by biology used to be criticized as biological essentialism. it still is. Like pp said, using the word definition in two different ways.

And, no, Michael Phelps, isn't built like a fish. If he literally were, he'd be disqualified because he'd be .. well a fish.

How about Aquaman, The Man From Atlantis, Namor The Sub Mariner...they're all at least PART fish?

'Catharine, to be honest, I found that the best way to keep men away from me was to become one.' This may be a unique or minority personal experience, or it may not be. I also think that lesbian feminism should take some weight for detransitioning young women not getting the memo earlier that you don’t have to be a boy to love girls. If that movement has undertaken that challenge in this context, I have missed it.

I found this bit fascinating. And unfair. I think lots of gender critical lesbians, and others, have been working quite hard to highlight the fate of young girls now identifying as boys who are likely really 'just' lesbians. And the quote from her friend - wow!

I can see she is trying really hard to square the circle and obviously isn't completely bought in, hence refusing to identify as cis herself. The discussion around prostitution was very interesting. I don't see why she thinks the solution is basically TWAW rather than recognising that there will be common struggles facing some TW and women, just as with gay men. Real allyship, not forced teaming, should be the conclusion from her argument there.

Oops, first para is a quote from the article.

I think her whole take on this as espoused in this article is a bad faith one, motivated my self preservation, it is insincere sophistry and has more holes in it than Swiss cheese but no doubt it will be seized on by people of a similar mindset.

'Unequal sexuality is the substance of women’s substantive inequality.'

What does this mean, can anyone parse it?

I think she's asserting that this is a Bad Thing, fwiw.

She goes on to say:

'The worse the gender inequality is, comparative research shows, the more women deny its existence, because it makes them feel better.[11] This denial also makes it harder to change. Ending all this is what will liberate women. Resisting ending it is what keeps male (meaning masculine) power systemically in place.'

Ending all what? The fact that women get impregnated and bear children and men don't? How does she propose to do that?

I honestly think she means because women get sex done to them whereas men do the sex (sexing?!). But I could be reading it wrong. But it's a good fit with quite a lot of trans ideology imho.

But what is she suggesting is going to liberate women? Cowboy position?

😂😂😂

On my analysis of the real world—a feminist analysis I reckon—the linchpin of the subordination of women, the impetus and structure of women’s gendered status as second class, is sexuality, socially gendered through sexualized misogyny.[9] We are placed on the bottom of the gender hierarchy by the misogynistic meanings that male dominant societies create, project onto us, attribute to us, which, in my observation and analysis, center on women’s sexuality. This has nothing whatsoever to do with biology, which serves, however powerfully, as sexuality’s after-the-fact attributed naturalized rationalization and supposed ratification.

Yes women's sexuality is stereotyped (by men) but to say that has nothing to do with our biology is like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

We are sexualised because we are the opposite sex to men. Our biology leaves us disadvantaged through unequal strength and childbearing- we are oppressed because of our sex.

The reason they are shoehorning the word sexuality -a person's identity in relation to whom they are typically attracted or sexual orientation - instead of sex is so that transwomen can take part in women's sex discrimination, downgraded to our 'lower caste' through wearing dresses and makeup and 'sexual expression'.
But clothes don't matter, transwomen are males and it's just another power grab to take away things from women, if they can't see it they are naive or being dishonest.

'Second, the notion that trans people are living in a fantasy, are imposters, while women assigned female at birth are living in material reality, and are the only real thing, is central to the so-called feminist anti-trans position.'

Trans people (I guess she means 'transwomen', here) are real. Absolutely. But males are not, and never will be, females.

I'd love to hear her definition of a transwoman.

Oh, she's going into 'sex by deception'. Brave.

'That trans people are deceptive surfaces as an idea in law in especially damaging ways, though, as exemplified in the UK’s gender fraud cases. Here we learn that a man can lie to a woman about his age, marital status, wealth, or education without vitiating her consent (meaning agreement or acquiescence) to the resulting sex. So the sex they had under these false pretenses, by deception, wasn’t rape. But when a young woman, so assigned at birth, interacts with another young woman who is being a boy online, and then they have sex in real life, “the nature of the act is changed,” so it is not deemed consented to, thus is rape, although the court that holds this never tells us what “the act” was.[17] Think about it'

That's not quite true, is it? There are laws about age and consent.

But lying about things like marital status or wealth is not the same as lying about biological sex. I wonder if she's read the few 'sex by deception' cases, and does she have no compassion at all for the women who've been raped by transmen? Or what about a lesbian who's been deceived into sex with a transwoman (at least theoretically possible). Mckinnon has no compassion for her?

'There is no evidence that trans women remain “men” for purposes of all women’s safety from sexual abuse in bathrooms and elsewhere or fair competition in all sports as many who oppose them in these spaces insist there is.'

My lived experience of this is a transwoman masturbating in front of me when I was a teenager, in a ladies' toilet.

But I guess that doesn't count as 'evidence' for Catherine.

And the sport thing? Fuck off.

Right, I give up, this is all just pointless pish.

Didn't this idiot used to associate with Dworkin? How can someone spout stuff like this that shows she's never understood basic concepts of feminism?

I read the whole thing. She has some trouble with statistical data and how to interpret it. For instance, this bit

In fact, it begins to appear, on limited data, that more women assigned female at birth attack trans women than the reverse.[20]

uses data from a survey about transgender people (2005, I think), so the transgender and possibly nonbinary respondents tell about the attacks they experienced and if the attackers included female people (or perhaps female-identifying people), and also they state the cases where the attackers included or consisted of other transgender people.

As far as I can tell, McKinnon uses the larger percentage for the first group over the other group to base that statement. But the data is NOT about natal women being attacked, so we have no way of checking the validity of that argument.

In short, the survey answers imply that a larger percentage of those sexually assaulting transgender people were female or identified as women than were trans-identifying individuals. The survey tells us nothing about the percentage of natal women being assaulted by transgender people. And, of course, the data is from surveys of individuals, not from police records.

The string you need to pull to unravel the whole knot McKinnon creates here is this assertion:

Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies.

I don't think that any gender critical feminist writer would ever argue that women are subordinated or oppressed BY our bodies. That is a strawperson!

The oppression and subordination of women is, however, historically based on the average differences between male and female bodies:

First, the fact that female bodies reproduce the next generation (and the fact that most men want sexual access to that specific type of bodies) makes having societal control over women desirable for societies.

Second, the fact that the average male body is stronger than the average female body, a difference which is further magnified when the latter is pregnant or recovering from giving birth, has historically meant that the subordination of women has been feasible just on the basis of brute strength.

(This does NOT have to mean that individual men or even individual communities forced subordination on 'their own' women as a class, because the differences in average strength and the power of physical aggression has also meant women's exclusion from warfare and tribal disagreements, seen as the need to protect women and children, and because pregnancies and the need to care for small children kept most women away from the public spheres where power was bargained, negotiated, and fought over.

How these arrangements have changed over time, with developments in forms of economic and political arrangements (moving from hunter-gatherer communities to small stationery farming communities to city-states to large states etc.) and with changing technologies is also crucial to understand:

Physical strength and the limitations of frequent child birth have diminished in importance, and so the maintenance of the subordination of women has become more dependent on the gender norms, rules, and stereotypes McKinnon both appears to frown upon and also to see as the proper replacement for sex. I see this as reason to question the concept of gender, not to use it to erase the sex-based nature of women's oppression.