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

Well. It's quite a long piece, for the internet. If one is seduced by what is relatively well composed prose - again, that's quite rare! - then one may be lulled into the argument. I can imagine that without thinking too hard about it, one could blandly accept the faux logic.

It is true that nobody asked to be born. Nobody 'consented' to be alive. The leap that's required to go from that assertion to 'therefore there can be no real consent to anything' or more importantly 'therefore consent is meaningless and unnecessary' can be glossed.

I read this with a basic knowledge of some of the other things ALC has said. And with my critical thinking head on.

Undergrads? Groomed in 'be kind' ideology? Are they going to question any of it, or are they going to accept it wholesale, given that any kind of questioning is 'literal violence' and verboten?

Also this is presented as lofty theory. The real world, prosaic consequences of this are not even touched on lightly.

So yes, in theory, one can argue that every adult male has the moral right to castrate himself. That's a long running argument. Yet most people will see some flaws with it if they think about it for five minutes. Most people would suggest checks and balances, and understand that this kind of self harm is illegal in the UK for pretty good reason. Most people might consider what the physical, emotional consequences might be.

People like ALC seem very very invested in their own sexual expression (the blank, blank eye etc thing for example) but desperate that kids should have treatment that will leave them without the ability to enjoy sex themselves. Is this a lack of empathy or some kind of darker control? I don’t get it.

There’s nothing in ALC’s repulsive description of women that suggests they should enjoy sex or have any active part in it. Just receptacles. Presumably ALC is excited by this idea.

Maybe ALC extends that to thinking that these children should also grow up to merely be receptacles.

I read it.

Not sure about 'lucid'. In fact, there are so many (deliberate) equivocations, particularly on 'sex' and 'gender', it reads more as a poem than an argument. Perhaps 'vague' or 'deranged'? 'Imperspicuous'? 'Opaque'?

That's OK, in a way. It's probably intentional. There is a sort of neatness to the prose, it's true. Not really appropriate to try to argue with vagary or discuss opacity, though, hmm?

[One other thing btw. I don't think the Butlerian-poststructural-bollocks branch of the tra brigade has ever agreed with the, erh, more popular out-on-the-street-in-green-and-blue-hair bunch of believers about 'gender identity'. Just another glitch in the total ideology which pops into the light when the shades are drawn back.]

It seems that ALC used his article to tweet (and then delete) a call for funds to aid a friend who is suffering from complications due to sex change surgery.
https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1767574814019965066?s=20

Brutal takedown by Matt Taibbi (anti-establishment lefty in the Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss orbit, recently worked on the Twitter Files):

https://www.racket.news/p/the-dumbest-cover-story-ever

(I hadn't registered it was a cover story! OMG...)

Paywalled, but someone posted the full text on Ovarit. Here's an excerpt:

Am I comparing pedophile writing to trans advocacy? I am, a little! The “kids… have a right to the hazards of their own free will” idea in Chu’s essay and the NAMBLA-endorsed “children’s liberation” concept aren’t exactly miles apart, but that’s not even the point.

No serious person bothers reading past the headlines of NAMBLA essays because we know no matter how flowery the rhetoric, the endgame is a stranger jonesing to bugger your 13-year-old. As anyone who’s raised children knows, leaving kids to “the hazards of their own free will” is a completely unworkable concept, apart from its outrageousness and moral insanity. The editors of New York should have reached the “Sorry, that’s just fucking stupid” stage one paragraph in. The American intellectual mainstream is now so infected by cowardice before academic shibboleths that it kowtows to ideas the average kindergarten teacher would flunk without a thought.

😁

Thanks. Highly enjoyable. I didnt realise it was a cover, either. Or that ALC was inspired by Valerie Solanis, that's absolutely batshit.

The through-lines connecting all the inanities of the modern left are a belief that history started ten minutes ago and the demand that people believe the unbelievable. The trans issue seems to occupy a central place in the new mythos because a) it’s a place where upscale white dudes can reinvent themselves as victims of oppression, and b) it demands a rejection of biological fact that doubles nicely as a test of faith.

Yep. Those who would have us believe absurdities ....

Yes, lucid isn't the right word ... it seems lucid, the words flow well (imo). Fluid?

Yes I suppose its poetic!

And as discussed, utterly raving.

I appreciate Chu's honesty tbh. He's prepared to say publicly what other TRAs obviously believe but try and claim they don't.

Eliza Mondegreen write about it in Unherd

https://unherd.com/newsroom/andrea-long-chus-gender-advice-is-a-danger-to-children/

A cover story, ffs!

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/19/a-pornified-view-of-womanhood/

An old article but worth a reread.

'the concept of gender is incredibly weak. It’s clear now that the stakes of placing our hopes on gender identity were very, very high. And it has failed us'

https://nymag.com/newsletter/2024/03/the-critics-march-15-2024.html

Operation Let Them Speak continues.

Excellent writing by Taibbi!!!

But why, I wonder, when he seems to have finally become peaked enough to write such a compelling critique of Chu (and GI theory in general), is Taibbi still doing the pronoun nonsense for Chu? I find it mystifying 🤷‍♀️

Taibbi has an oddly misogynistic past (when he wrote from Russia). He is left-wing in terms of economic commentary, but I have never been able to figure out if his views on women have changed or if his critique of GI theory might have more in common with some right-wing commentators.

The old problem of two different fronts against the GI ideology, with almost diametrically opposite goals. One wants 'woman' to refer to female sex in order to rule over it, the other wants 'woman' to refer to female sex in order to fight those domination attempts.

Oh god, I somehow forgot about Taibbi’s past behaviour - things suddenly become a bit more comprehensible.

You make some good points there on that particular intersection of views regarding women.

But why, I wonder, when he seems to have finally become peaked enough to write such a compelling critique of Chu (and GI theory in general), is Taibbi still doing the pronoun nonsense for Chu? I find it mystifying

Another piece on it - Andrew Sullivan this time:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-transqueers-take-the-mask-off

Paywalled again, but full text on Ovarit again, here.

Unlike Taibbi he's not doing the pronoun nonsense, but he's still at the "true trans" stage...

Which brings me to New York Magazine’s “moral case” for allowing children “regardless of age” with no parental consent, to change their sex, simply because they want to. The sub-hed — “The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies”— undersells the piece: it’s actually a case for letting any kid for any reason undergo sex reassignment. It’s not a “moral case” because simply stating a want and demanding it be realized is not an act of morality; it’s an act of unmediated will. And the implications of this demand are immense. In good queer-theory fashion, Chu destroys any and all distinctions between being a child and being an adult. And he does so with aplomb, as if expecting a wave of snapping fingers in response.

(A word about pronouns. I always respect the pronouns of actual trans people, so won’t in this case. Chu has never “always wanted” to be a woman; he has said rather that “sissy porn did make me trans”; he defines womanhood in grotesquely misogynistic terms (“Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”). He is as much a woman as Dylan Mulvaney is, which is to say he is no such thing. He is just a seriously depressed careerist with a new orifice: “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound.” A decade ago, he declared: “I am straight. I am male. I am white (mostly). I am comfortably middle-class.” He still is all those things — but those things, even when declared in self-hatred, don’t get you a Pulitzer. Hence the current piece of performance shock-art. I see no reason to cooperate in this bullshit. It’s an abuse of good faith interlocutors. And it’s a fucking insult to actual trans people, a mockery of the challenges they face.)

He's as much a woman as every other transwoman.

I think I see and understand your perspective, but my experience says that this is a simplification. I come from a left of centre but fairly socially conservative background; it took me several years to accept that women were somewhat oppressed even in the kind, respectful circles I knew best. So I had to rethink many of my assumptions about how men and women should relate to each other, particularly within a heterosexual marriage. This was in some ways a relief, as I am not a born leader. I am very happy that my wife no longer expects me to make decisions that I am ill-equipped to make, and that I can defer to her where she has more expertise or her character is better suited to a particular role.

There are many other people like us, still living in a quite conservative and conventional way, but having learned a great deal from feminism. (I still tend to talk over her, but she points it out and has ways of getting herself heard!). So there are not just the two extremes of “conservative” and “feminist”, and I wonder if it’s more a case of one front with two wings and plenty of us somewhere in the wishy-washy middle. I, and I think my wife, neither want men to dominate women nor are particularly involved in fighting the domination, or only in a quiet way. We are much more concerned about the effect of GI ideology on our family, and the medical scandal affecting children and vulnerable adults.

I listened to Rebecca Lee’s recent interview of Kara Dansky and Stella O’Malley yesterday, and found the discussion very interesting. KD and SO’M have different objectives and ally themselves (to some extent in each case) with different people. Each is criticised for who they are prepared to talk to and work with. In my opinion the crossover between their viewpoints is large and most of their work is mutually reinforcing. But it is always difficult when differing objectives lead to strategies which conflict, even if the area of conflict is small.

I really wish that Taibbi and Sullivan would publish this stuff without a paywall (or with a limited-time paywall as Jesse Singal sometimes does). I know they want to make money from their articles but trenchant critiques of Chu and Butler don’t do much good to counter the TRA narrative if they’re kept isolated behind paywalls. It’s a huge disappointment that magazines will pay Chu et al for nonsense but not pay for anyone to write in rebuttal. There’s a lack of balance in the discourse because of this.

I don't know about Tabibi, but you can read that piece by Sullivan by signing up for the unpaid version of The Weekly Dish.

I don't think that I'd read too much into Tabibi using one set of pronouns or the other, tbh.

Ta for that info Tempest.

I think the only thing that I read into Taibbi and Sullivan et cetera using female pronouns for men they approve of, but withholding them from men they disapprove of, is that it’s frustrating as hell that they will get so far as to see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes but would still prefer to be polite and maintain some level of fiction that the emperor might be dressed rather than be factual about it. Increasingly, I feel that it’s as Kellie-Jay Keen describes it: a very middle-class thing to do.

And this insistence on politeness places restraint on the effectiveness of arguing against queer theory and gender identity because it’s difficult to argue against concepts if you accede to and make use of their terminology, that accession implicitly grants a form of legitimacy to these ideologies and works to limit the effectiveness of any attempt at wholly refuting them. In plainer terms: telling a man that he isn’t a woman but continuing to refer to him using female terms is, to my mind, self-defeating.

Sullivan things there are people who are "really trans". I'm not sure what he means by that, bt I don't think it's just a matter of people he approves of or not. I don't see this as inconsistent, so much as mistaken about the facts. No doubt he'd say the same about me though.

I'm not sure of Tabibi's reasoning. Similar maybe, or possibly he has pragmatic reasons around where he wants to publish.

I think though many see the pronoun issue as a symptom, and see addressing the underlying illness as the real remedy; pronoun arguments are a distraction and muddy the waters.

If anyone wants to read a 1* review for Butler's new firelighter book

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/afraid-gender-judith-butler-review/

https://archive.ph/fZgBu go ahead jump (over the paywall), you might as jump 🎶

That review was trenchant and cogent in a way that Butler and Chu are incapable of being over the course of entire books.