What Am I Missing?

[Catiette]

I may not be able to check in on responses to this very much - I hope that isn't hypocritical or rude. I read something that left me feeling a bit unsettled and just wanted to formulate my thoughts on it, really. Any responses - whether to agree with me or to highlight where I'm going wrong - would both be helpful and reassuring whenever I can return!

It relates to the article posted on the "Which Stories Could Change Someone's Mind" thread: https://philosophersmag.com/the-transgender-rights-issue/. I didn't want to derail that discussion, and also really don't want to discourage people from using it as one of the best representations of our position I've seen - so thorough, lucid and convincing... up to a very few paragraphs near the end, which I didn't think reflected the nuanced thought of the whole. It left me wondering what I'd missed?

I'll try not to be too wordy (famous last words...)

I'm going to respond in good faith although I'm finding this post pretty hostile.

Do you believe that when males present in this way, it does not represent an expression of contempt for or mockery of women?

Not in all cases no. I don't think we should assume the intentions of others and apply a blanket label in that way.

But even if I did agree that all trans women are expressing contempt for/mocking women, the other part of his point was about "excoriating" e.g. the contempt/mockery is so bad it must not be tolerated under any circumstances and should be harshly criticised. I don't agree with "excoriating" people for the way they choose to express themselves. Even if I find it offensive. It's basically cancel culture.

Society is entirely built around mockery/contempt of women. To me, trans is a manifestation of that. Banning trans women is to treat the symptoms, not the cause.

So women with breast implants can make those noticeable, but a man with a penis extension can't?

I wonder why!

You are the one who keeps insisting we treat everybody equally.

CassieMaddox
Thanks for replying.

I don't think we should assume the intentions of others and apply a blanket label in that way. But even if I did agree that all trans women are expressing contempt for/mocking women,
It's the dressing up as a woman which is itself either a misogynistic land grab, or a fetish, or a combo of both. Whatever the individual man personally thinks of women.

..the other part of his point was about "excoriating" e.g. the contempt/mockery is so bad it must not be tolerated under any circumstances and should be harshly criticised. I don't agree with "excoriating" people for the way they choose to express themselves. Even if I find it offensive. It's basically cancel culture.
Would you say this if it was a case of a white guy doing blackface?
Dildo butt monkey at children's birthday parties? That it would be wrong to criticise them because it's just the way they express themselves? In practice, most women wouldn't severely criticise a man dressed as a parody of a woman in public, in case he got violent. And also in practice, ignoring would be the best option because he craves our attention.

Cancel culture is preventing someone working, going after their income, destroying their reputation, denying them access to social media platforms, etc. Removing them from public life. You're going to have to explain how objecting strongly and vocally - privately or publicly - to a man dressing up as an over-sexualised parody of women is similar to that. Is being criticised for wearing frilly knickers/no knickers under a very short skirt equivalent to being kicked off TwiX, or being ditched by your publisher?

And just to be clear, excoriating means delivering harsh criticism. It does not mean banning. We speak up about things that we do not like all the time - that's also part of living in a free society. The freedom to criticise the choices of others, especially when they affect you. So let's have no more talk of bans. Societal pressure discourages inappropriate clothing in public. Only in a work context could you actually ban inappropriate clothing - not people, clothing. So how would banning over-sexualised women's clothing at work be a ban on men who claim to be women? Are they only MCW if they are wearing over-sexualised women's clothing at work? What about gender identity? If they claim a trans identity, surely it is still there whatever they are wearing.

“(Plesae don't do the wide-eyed thing. This article is not the first time you have come across the term Ultra. You embraced it then and you have seized on this article as an excuse to double down.)”

Here’s the article from BBC news today, posted upthread, showing where the term “ultras” come from, and to whom the women JT disagreed with were being compared.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20r7wzke97o

"I'm finding this post pretty hostile"

Glad to see that this comment has not stopped women posting their views. Recently on this board I've noticed quite an increase in "if you use that word, fail to genuflect deeply enough, make any comment critical of my words, you are guilty of bullying, intimidation and driving me off the board"

There have been a number of threads where posters (who seem to be new to Mumsnet) have engaged with discussions and then wailed and complained if they get anything other than applause in response to their posts, often alleging bullying etc. Numerous deletions have ensued.

Mumsnet is a place where women talk and debate - often rigorously and in a way that is forbidden to women elsewhere online and in the world. Long may the tradition of rigorous debate continue.

Of course it is not possible to ban creepy men from being creepy. But it is perfectly possible for society to make clear that their behaviour is creepy, and if it crosses a line it becomes socially unacceptable, and possibly illegal (depending what the creepy behaviour is). Social norms and social disapproval are strong tools.

Please don't conflate or lump together 'trans' and 'gender non-conforming'.
If you were around in the eighties, you will know that Boy George and Steve Strange were gender-non-conforming. Back in the sixties and seventies, many young people were gender non-conforming, in a gender-neutral fashion uniform of t-shirts, jeans, and long hair. (Obvs, it was non-conforming for the boys/men to have long hair, and non-conforming for the girls/women to abandon the skirts and dresses in favour of scruffy jeans).
I absolutely welcome gender-non-conforming and gender-neutral clothing.

This is most definitely not the same as 'trans', which in the case of trans women usually equates to wearing female-coded "feminine" skirts and dresses, and very often overtly sexualised women's clothes.

What's more, it has long been recognised that cross-dressing is a thing - I am of the view that you should do what you want in the privacy of your own home, or even in some particular social settings like certain night clubs.
There have historically been a few people who genuinely attempted to "live as the opposite sex" - when they were discrete and socially appropriate, made every effort to 'pass', and were very few in number, it was not a problem.

But the whole 'trans' ideology of claiming to change sex, not even attempting to 'pass', and demanding access to women's spaces is new, and is most definitely not a good thing.

But this is getting a bit off topic for this thread which is about the article OP discusses.

As well as the football Ultras (known for intimidating the opposition by violence, smoke bombs and chanting fascist slogans) - the similar hockey version, 'ultras' has also been used for an extreme-right breakaway group in British politics that opposed Catholic emancipation, 1960s Malay racial extremists, US pro-slavery secessionists, and by Marxist–Leninists as a pejorative term for those with positions they deem extreme or uncompromising.

So, a nice neutral term to choose for people you disagree with.

The most useful piece of advice I ever saw before I felt that I wanted to post on MN/FWR was to 'put on your big girl pants' before engaging in debate 😊

This is a space where women speak as freely as possible and where they don't have to be meek, delicate little waifs as society would prefer. There's no fainting couch on MN for those who get the vapours; I mean AIBU can get positively vicious in comparison to FWR.

My main concern about the source article was that, after a series of nuanced pages, it devolved into a reductive, binary representation of GC feminism in polarising language. I don't think strong language or one-word qualifiers - "ultra"/"lite" - are particularly well-suited to such a complex situation.

Like it or not, Sapir and Whorf had a point: language does help to construct reality.

We're challenging the post-modern deconstruction of the man-woman/male-female binary precisely because, when language has such power, its conflict with material reality has a dangerously destabilising effect in societies in which accommodating biological difference is key to women's safety, health and well-being.

Where a perceived opposition is, in contrast, conceptual not material - impossible to pin down, and almost certainly on some kind of opaque spectrum - I think binary terms, conversely, serve to solidify courteous disagreement into apparently concrete, but wholly artificial, divisions.

Let's debate, respectfully disagree etc., but all within the overarching understanding that GC encompasses a range of different views unified by the conviction that women are a class in their own right, with their own rights.

I do think that one of the key weak points in this ideology is its impractical, dogmatic compulsion to put the abstracts of human nature into own single, neatly mis-labelled boxes. There's a fab quote from Shakespeare (and no doubt loads of others, too) about an object that's flexible having greater strength and longevity, while one that's unable to bend is more brittle. Let's be the reed in the wind, just inclining different ways. Or something. Wax on, wax off. Ahem.

😁

(It's driving me crazy that I can't place the Shakespeare one...)

We're challenging the post-modern deconstruction of the man-woman/male-female binary precisely because, when language has such power, its conflict with material reality has a dangerously destabilising effect in societies in which accommodating biological difference is key to women's safety, health and well-being.

@Catiette Well said.

Funnily enough, a few decades ago the word 'gender' was just a polite term for 'sex' on official forms, with M and F being the only options. ('Gender' had other meanings in linguistics and the ivory towers of academic women's studies, but to the ordinary person it just meant whichever of the two sexes you were.)

The current onslaught on women's rights has highlighted the difference between 'sex' and 'gender' - a necessary reaction to men who exploited the blurred terms and claimed that changing gender was the same as changing sex.

The thing is, the de-stabilisation can only ever be limited and temporary. Everybody knows what biological sex is, and that there are only two sexes. They may pretend not to know, but deep down they do know. It is so fundamental to our evolution to recognise two sexes. The material reality is obvious. So when people try to use language to redefine reality, they just make themselves look insane.
Reality trumps language in the end, always, even if some people, for reasons of 'kindness', political expediency, or misogyny, pretend to go along with the insanity. Reality remains reality.

@CassieMaddox Much as you would like to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, there will come a time when you have to decide where you stand.

Your problem, not mine.

Interested to see on @NoBinturongsHereMate list at 20.08 that one of the places 'ultra' got used was in the Malay campaign in the 1960s, so not just reminiscent of Kitson's Eton and Sandhurst technique of Gang and Counter Gang divide-and-rule, but actually part of one of his try-outs (the deadliest, worse than Kenya), before he imposed it on Northern Ireland.

That makes me narrow my eyes, not widen them.

There are women, there are men, all human, all needing to thrive if the world is to work well. I am not prepared to be forced into some artificial sub category designed to distract me from trying to free us from servitude to the porn and pharma industries, their advertisers, and their dupes.

Yes, that's right. To excoriate means to harshly criticise.
Reifying the existence of a class of people who are not to be criticised is usually associated with feudalism, not liberalism.
But who knows, perhaps Francione's argument identifies as a liberal one.

I don't think anyone is proposing that criticism, even excoriation, of trans people be made illegal. But they may prefer to criticise ideologies and promulgate policy changes, rather than targeting individuals. That seems to me to fit within the liberal democratic POV.

Something like "Hate the sin, love the sinner?"

Hmm.

"Hate the sexism, love the sexist"?

"Sexism as a concept is not ok and no one should want to be sexist, but while you do then you go right ahead son"?

No, doesn't work for me. Trans womanhood is sexist. A trans woman is acting out a sexist belief system. That should be challenged at criticised at the personal level as well as the political level.

Separating the political/public from the personal/private is one of the core mechanisms through which social power especially patriarchy is enacted. There is a good reason "The personal is political" is a fundamental Feminist insight.

Great post, Flirts.

I always find it helpful to compare attitudes to sexism and misogyny - to which society is largely inured - to racism, which thankfully is still regarded as unacceptable.
Nobody would say you shouldn't criticise someone personally for dressing up in blackface.

Separating the political/public from the personal/private is one of the core mechanisms through which social power especially patriarchy is enacted. There is a good reason "The personal is political" is a fundamental Feminist insight.

Thank you, that's a really interesting insight.

I feel the same, but I usually avoid race as a comparator if I can because I don't directly experience racism so it feels presumptuous to speak about it in other than the most general terms. As a person who experiences sexism I might think my experience offers insight into the experience of racism but I don't know that, and I also realise there is also much that is different between the two that I won't have any idea about.

I tend to focus on the similarities of the social and cultural power dynamics rather than assume I know what racism feels like or what specific racist acts are more important /significant than others.

Do we really want to cancel trans people? That seems like a stretch target, with some tactical downsides.

I'm not convinced I could change anyone's mind on this point, whereas I do have a fighting chance when it comes to specifics like sports or prisons.

(And of course, ifwhen we win on the specifics, it will undermine the ideology, which is why TRAs correctly describe even the most mild-mannered of interrogation or campaigning as "transphobia".)

Cancel them how?

By persuading everyone to treat them the same way they would treat a white person in blackface, for instance.

Yes, understood - it could seem glib.

Edited because I hadn't read your post fully before commenting. <smacks own hand>

"Persuading?"

I think once people start thinking what "as a woman" actually means, it's unavoidable to conclude it is a sexist activity.

To be clear, I'm in no way saying people wearing clothes or exhibiting preferences traditionally aligned to the opposite sex deserve criticism, I'm saying people claiming to somehow be the opposite sex (or a mental version of the opposite sex) and wearing clothes/exhibiting these preferences as the outward manifestation of that belief deserve criticism for their sexist behavior.

They certainly do not deserve to have their sexism accomodated.

That is not what "cancel" means.

I would like men dressing as oversexualised parodies of women to be seen as socially unacceptable in the way that blackface is, yes. Other clothes are available.

I understand you think there's no real harm in men dressing as oversexualised parodies of women, or at least not enough to warrant any push to make it as unacceptable. Why do you not feel the same about blackface? What are the differences to you?

I agree that oversexualised parodies should be socially unacceptable (and PP have debated on this board about how to achieve that).

But Flirt's point is a different one, that a man who claims to be a woman is always being misogynistic, no matter how modest his dress.

I agree. And everyone should be free to say the same if they wish.

I just don't think that saying it is useful tactically, compared to easier targets like sports or prisons. It's a little bit esoteric and it looks to the naive eye like picking on a minority.