Andrea Long Chu on Judith Butler's new book

[ArabellaScott]

'Everyone should have the right to change sex'

https://archive.is/N7Rg1

ALC with an interesting, lengthy article. Very readable. Underneath it all, it seems to me to be roughly the more eloquent version of the fantastically insane Action for Trans Health Manifesto -

https://edinburghath.tumblr.com/post/163521055802/trans-health-manifesto/amp?__twitter_impression=true

'We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.'

ALC

We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care

Why?

'Freedom', I think is the gist.

There is no "sex-changing" medical care, any doctor who claims they can change your sex is lying.

And, really, any adult with sufficient funds can pay for a private surgeon to do whatever plastic surgery they might want, if they can find someone to do it. I don't see that is any kind of universal right, or principal that needs defending. But I can obviously fully understand the motivations of Chu to make that claim.

Andrea Long Chu shared with the world what being female means: "an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes."

Yes. Chu manages two references to 'supple breasts' in this article. I'm not quite sure what that means, really.

The article is useful reading -

1. it offers a lucid, if basically utterly irrational, argument, which makes a pleasant change
2. it confronts several weakness of 'genderism' head on. The benefit of this is that the only place for these arguments to go is from vague and muddled to 'outright batshit' - takes the arguments to their logical, absurd, conclusions. ('everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care')
3. it offers a rough idea of where the US is at the moment (around one half of states appear to have banned children from transitioning, according to this article)
4. It offers a couple of points worth considering about wrt 'gender critical' feminism
5. It illuminates that many if not most people who have given the subject a little thought are not in favour of children being allowed to change sex - here Chu lambasts 'liberals' who are clinging to old fashioned ideas like a risk/benefit analysis or consideration of potential iatrogenic harms.

Expectant asshole ALC has nothing to say that I want to hear. Neither does JB.

But let them speak so that the arsewash that they spout can gain a wider audience - "sunlight.." and all that....

Well that is a term used by no breast owner ever.

I'd be surprised if implants felt like that either tbh. Sounds like it's from the "breasted boobily down the stairs" school of creative wanking writing.

Supple applied to breasts is just weird.

'bending and moving easily and gracefully; flexible.'

I'm now picturing breasts waving about and doing pliés.

It makes me think of 'pneumatic' Lenina from BNW.

I think it means the author had a hard on when they wrote it.

This was another startling assertion:

"if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right."

😵‍💫

Maybe supple breasts is a reference to ones so saggy you can tie them in a bow.

That's just madness. Puberty requires no consent, it is a biological process.
Can we opt out of death now? I don't consent to dying.
It really is a belief that we have the "right" to whatever we want and damn reality. Like a small child insisting that they want to be a whale. Yes dear, that's nice, now go and get ready for dinner.

I quite fancy not having to go to the toilet ever again. I wonder who I have to scream obscenities at to get that wish granted.

I'm way more interested in what Kathleen Stock has to say about Judith
Butler's new book. Especially the part where she points out that JB offers no evidence for many of her arguments relying solely on the assertion that if you disagree with them you are either a bigot or stupid, probably both, in which case it's simply not worth her time bothering to justify or explain.

https://unherd.com/?p=492821

There's another piece in the Sunday Times by Sarah Ditum

Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/25c2ccfd-d9d1-46a9-8c82-c8b501494688?shareToken=742d25b569cb863a66e9b291723a0ae7

I thought this passage was rather remarkable:

The left must reckon with its part in this. It has hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity, a concept clumsily adapted from psychiatry and strongly influenced by both gender studies and the born-this-way tactics of the campaign for marriage equality. This has won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance. But we have largely failed to form a coherent moral account of why someone’s gender identity should justify the actual biological interventions that make up gender-affirming care.

So, a high profile trans extremist abandoning the idea of gender identity?

It's really interesting to see how reason and sense is sort of immiscible with genderism.

Chu is obviously intelligent and well read, and so has apparently looked honestly at some of the beloved tropes of genderism, such as 'gender identity' and correctly adduced they are pish. His response, though, instead of abandoning the whole exercise, is to push it to even more mad extremes.

That puberty is 'non consensual', therefore blocking puberty is totally fine. That anyone should have total bodily autonomy, therefore any person should have any medical procedure they wish carried out.

It does then have some kind of internal logic - Chu is arguing for 100% bodily autonomy, shorn of any kinds of checks and balances and considerations of risk etc - but overall the underlying assertion is really just utterly lunatic.

Is Andrea Long Chu meant to be a very poor pun?

'Everyone should have the right to change sex'

Totally agree - I also agree that everyone should have the right to turn into a cloud, the right to be made of wood and the right to walk on every one of Jupiter's moons.

Well, bodily autonomy is really the only logical outcome he's got left. Gender identity is unconvincing, gender dysphoria is insulting as it's not an illness,.and he doesn't discuss the fetish aspect in this article despite admitting to it in his more infamous writings. That really leaves no other explanation for trans-ness except saying "because I can". And saying well women get nose and boob jobs too.

"It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them!"

I mentioned on another thread - there’s a good article about this book in Unherd.

That was the song it brought to my mind too!

Damn right it is. I’ve not only been put through puberty without my consent, I had years of period pains I never asked for, then believe if or not I was shoved through menopause! And don’t get me started on the unwanted effects of ageing.

Where do I put in my complaint?

Yes, I picked that one out. If I had to choose one word to describe the whole article, it would be: sophistry.

I didn’t consent to conception, birth, delicious food, ageing, illness or death either.

Has anyone else spotted the odd one out in this list, a quote from Butler? “… the basic rights to housing, food, non-toxic environments, unpayable debt, and health care.”

Thanks for drawing our attention to this, Arabella - I feel it's a case of you read it so we don't have to. I liked your comment that it offers "a lucid, if basically utterly irrational, argument, which makes a pleasant change" - a change, presumably, from the usual "opaque, but utterly irrational argument".

When these people express themselves clearly, which they rarely do, it does make it much easier to see how utterly batshit it is. With Judith Butler, you have to spend a few hours working out what she means before concluding that it's probably batshit.

But when you read sentences such as "if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right" then it immediately becomes evident how utterly nuts it is. Presumably even people who go along with this stuff - Evan Davis, say - might be brought up short when they read sentences like this.