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.

Bingo! I would love to know that too!

@ArabeIIaScott isn't Butler's Gender Trouble also saying that sex is socially constructed? Presumably she's on that path?

I'm no academic so can't name what they are describing, but I can see that categories are a human invention in that language is a human invention, and we use categories in ways that are highly sociallyand morally coded, eg descriptions of different races , and I agree that bizarre gender rules are applied to both sexes for purposes of social control, and it takes some unpicking.

I make no apology though for thinking that you can't just extrapolate ideas off the edge of the graph paper without some pushback from reality. At some point there are physical limits and you can't say they are purely social.

I understand 'biological essentialism' in this context to mean that those who believe in it assume that 'biology is destiny' though mostly only for women; that average observed differences between male and female behaviours are almost entirely biologically determined and not amenable to change.

To argue that the definition of 'woman' as 'an adult female human being' is biological essentialism is incorrect, unless the definer already assumes that being an adult female human being absolutely means to be required to behave and live in certain biology-determined ways. That is untrue.

The only way that definition would make any sense is if the writer believes that 'woman' is something not based on the material world but a lifestyle choice, perhaps, which should be open for all who wish to pursue it and free to exit for all who don't wish to pursue it.

But were this the case then women and girls in Afghanistan could just identify out of their oppression, no nonbinary female person would ever be raped because of the body they have is female and so a desirable target for most rapists, there would be no sex-selective abortions as we wouldn't know how the foetus might one day identify and so on.

I think seeing 'woman' as some type of a gendered soul turns the category into a meaningless one, seeing at defined by sexist stereotypes about being feminine (which is where this is inexorably going) dooms us to holding passive, submissive, emotional and nurturing roles with the extra understanding that now we are choosing that because we have not transitioned out of the group.

The fundamental problem for me is that misogyny and sexism will not alter their definition of what their prey is, and to remove our ability to use clear language on that will be devastating.

I think McKinnon explicitly dismisses Butler and postmodernism in this essay. So, fuck only knows, I'm afraid.

The existence of sexual reproduction in most animal species is not socially constructed, and neither is the fact that almost all of them require just two types of sexes. Language, for humans, at least, does assign additional meaning to many concepts, but the underlying categories exist in a biological sense.

No amount of deconstructing language can affect that.

The only way that definition would make any sense is if the writer believes that 'woman' is something not based on the material world but a lifestyle choice, perhaps, which should be open for all who wish to pursue it and free to exit for all who don't wish to pursue it.

I think it might be backwards logic?

Biological essentialism says 'women bear children, therefore women must be motherly, kind, caring, modest, whatever'.
McKinnon's feminism says 'women don't have to be mother, kind, caring, modest, whatever, therefore don't tell them they are the category that bear children'.

I think. But I find it all very woolly and slippery.

• and for what it's worth, I understand 'gender critical' feminism to say 'women can be whatever they want to be, they are the sex that bear children'

I have a slight suspicion McKinnon lives in a world where feminism is broken down into interminably more and more complex and laboured theories that reference other theories, define themselves in relation to other feminist theories, react to other theories, and have at some point started leaving reality quite far behind.

Ignoring bearing children would, of course, make McKinnon's arguments much stronger. And if there were no physical sexes in humans, we wouldn't have to be concerned with that! But then neither would such parthenogenetic human society have any sexism, so it couldn't be a problem though other types of bigotry most likely would abound.

But I do get the feeling that she can so easily dismiss with the physicality of the body for the reason that she is not thinking about reproduction, only sexuality.

Which is exactly why so much of 'social science' (in German we nicely have Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften, natural sciences and thought/mind sciences) is exactly that - waffle. Not only does it make you sound smarter, it makes it harder to understand and harder to argue against if you waffle.

Meanwhile as the academics crow over their philosophical musings, in the real world women are dealing with the same old shite.

Humans are animals and follow the same traits as male animals eg more aggressive. Don’t they have any idea of biology? Do they own pets? Go outdoors and look at nature?

If they hold up Jan Morris as a philosopher, they might want to look at what Jan’s children thought of him and how they were treated.

But I do get the feeling that she can so easily dismiss with the physicality of the body for the reason that she is not thinking about reproduction, only sexuality.

That's a rather staggeringly limited view.

If people can't write with brevity and clarity it makes me strongly suspect that they're making shit up

100%. Or they are trying to obscure the gaping flaws in their logic with waffle.

It's the professional jargon that can be difficult to decipher, but it's also true that using long words which most people don't know sometimes allows trivial things to sound deeply significant.

And to be very clear and brief can be difficult, requiring very very high levels of understanding and good communication skills. Even then some things just can't be explained thoroughly AND clearly and briefly.

But I have read many things from McKinnon, and this one does seem more filled with sentences which ultimately don't say very much, perhaps because she is building her arguments on quicksand.

She doesn't seem to have looked at any evidence on mixed sex dressing rooms/changing rooms etc., to be able to argue that those wouldn't be a problem for women and children. Or any other kind of evidence, really.

We could have a debate about the relative frequency of assaults in them or in women's prisons and so on, but it's not good to simply dismiss those possibilities as not being based on evidence when there are several cases in the media.

I agree. But she is a legal researcher, so much of what she has focused on would have been about sexual violence, and that could have affected her judgement on what is central to women's subordination.

I see, thanks. I didn't grasp that she was a 'legal feminist'.

I do get that some concepts can be difficult to understand/explain, that's fine. I don't think the concept of sex being immutable and women being the sex that bears children is difficult - or even possible to make difficult.

And to be very clear and brief can be difficult, requiring very very high levels of understanding and good communication skills. Even then some things just can't be explained thoroughly AND clearly and briefly.

It is a skill - and a too-rare one. But there are vanishingly few things that are impossible to explain clearly. If someone in MacKinnon's position - with decades of experience in teaching and public speaking - is unable to do so, that is a very strong indication that either they don't understand it themselves or it is fundamentally nonsense (or both).

That's why they generate the big fees. In proportion to their big words.

Like Scrabble with money.

One of my Dds verbal reasoning scores are extremely high and she is amazing at putting things in a simple way that people understand. I researched her ‘profile’ and there was a bit that made me laugh and that I must remind myself to watch for - if there’s something she can’t argue for/doesn’t know much about but wants to win/get, she will obscure the argument with long words and complex phrases so that it seems she knows what she’s talking about. Apparently she’d make a good politician! We had a chat about it and she is fully aware she does it but I hadn’t realised - she can sound like an expert on anything. If she wrote it down you would see the knowledge and logic were missing/flawed.

This article reminds me of that.