Reframe your disappointment

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

Inspired by a couple of other threads about the reaction to the Supreme Court judgment from trans allies, I thought it might be interesting to have a thread to discuss what to say to people if it comes up in conversation.

Comments I've seen so far seem to suggest:

• the judgment was legally wrong and this isn't the end
• the judgment might have been legally correct but it was morally wrong and the law needs to be changed
• trans rights are now being rolled back
• this is a victory for the far right
• this was orchestrated and bank rolled by the far right
• this decision will now embolden transphobes to harass and victimise trans people

Perhaps we could brainstorm the best ways to respond to these (and any other) talking points, should they arise?

Identity is complex and multidimensional.

Our sense of who we are is influenced by a multitude of concepts and constructs. For some people, gendered ideas play a large part in their sense of self. This can be involve embracing social norms relating to femininity and masculinity or rejecting them. For others, gendered ideas hold little significance to their sense of self/identity.

Sex is material and exists independently of identity. Some people may construct social or personal meaning linked to sex and build this into their sense of self/identity, but this reflects something different to the material nature of sex.

Which is why, to some - “woman = adult human female” is reductive.

I genuinely do not understand how you can just reject gender identity like it’s not real - it quite clearly is.

I reject gender identity in the same way I reject any religion. It's a faith based religious belief.

P.s. there are many religious studies courses, that still doesn't mean God(s) exists.

but you would register with an agency who do the nasty transphobic screening for you - so you are presented with the choice of actual honest to goodness womb-having potential surragate mothers to you to choose from.

At a critical point in the process - the women are picked because they are women. not because they are men who want to be women.

Which is why, to some - “woman = adult human female” is reductive.

But they're wrong. It's the most open and freeing definition possible. You can be anything or anyone, do whatever you like. It only notes your sex, with no other baggage. Understanding that is what makes us gender critical, and more progressive than genderists, who think having a word for a social construct is more important than a word for our physical reality.

Why do you believe the state of womanhood is inherently inferior unless men are allowed to claim it? Why do you associate inferiority and limitation with the material reality of womanhood, which is the condition of being an adult human female?

It is the opposite of reductive. It is liberating. The term woman is expansive enough to accommodate all gender expressions by human females.

As long as you're female, you could be infertile, present yourself in any way you want and you won't stop being a woman. It FREES women from patriarchal expectations of femininity.

There is no one proper way to be a woman. You simply ARE one, the only qualifier is being female. You can dress how you like, love who you want, pursue stereotypically male hobbies and none of that would have any bearing on the material reality of your womanhood.

It is gender identity, where men adopt the most superficial trappings of femininity thinking that's what makes a woman, a woman that pigeonholes women. A make-up free, short haired woman post hysterectomy and double mastectomy will always be a woman. A man with gynaecomastia, breast implants, inch thick makeup, long hair, cosmetic facial surgery and penile reconfigurement will always be a man.

Why would you have to scrap a university course based on people’s beliefs because some people don’t believe in the concept?

What about Theology courses? Should they be scrapped because not everyone believes in god?

And why would pieces of writing about someone’s beliefs suddenly cease to exist because the belief itself isn’t true? The writing about that belief doesn’t disappear, Back To The Future-style, does it?

Also, while gender studies courses typically include gender identity ideology ideas nowadays, it’s perfectly possible to believe that gender as a concept exists (gender oppression, gender stereotypes, etc) without believing that everyone has their own gender identity.

Indeed. Had I been the recipient of those mortally wounding observations, I would now be in the waiting room of the Narcissistic Injury and Literal Violence A&E, awaiting treatment and validation.

If you're referring to a PP saying that 'perfomative stupidity' is doing her head in, that's not the same as 'calling someone stupid'.

Performative stupidity is when people feign confusion or invent complications which aren't there - you know, the slight head-tilt to one side, the conspicuously furrowed brows, the look of genuine confusion that doesn't look genuine at all...
Ed Davey did it to perfection the other day on TV, he did a lot of brow-furrowing while claiming that the Supreme Court ruling that 'woman' means 'biological woman' is so confusing that it leaves us in the dark and we await clarification..

People who perform stupidity are probably not stupid at all, they are obviously clever enough to deploy 'It's so complicated, I just can't understand it' about something as clear as this Supreme Court ruling; probably for perceived political benefit in the case of Mr Davey.

If someone says they really can't understand the statement 'woman means biological woman' , and it appears to be true that they are genuinely incapable of understanding it, that's different.

I don't think the PP was calling you stupid.

As a lesbian who grew up in the 80s and 90s, yes it was difficult to be in changing rooms in the 90s when people knew I was gay and I had a horrible time at school because of it. There was a lot of nastiness and prejudice.

Women’s attitudes towards lesbians in changing rooms is strikingly different nowadays, as much as I hate to admit it, largely down to Stonewall pressing the media to help dispel the myths around lesbians fancying every woman around them and normalising being gay generally. Girls’ magazines in the 90s helped quite a bit, as did TV.

That said, I still don’t want biological males in female spaces, because that’s not about a false myth that they might fancy all of us but because they have the physical strength to overpower us.

And also because, since gender identity is wholly based on an inner, self-declared feeling and is therefore unfalsifiable, there is absolutely no way for anyone else to tell whether that person genuinely feels they are “a woman on the inside” or whether they might be a sexual predator merely claiming to be “a woman on the inside” (or both). As the Supreme Court explained, a scenario could arise where you’ve got a transwoman with a GRC, a transwoman without a GRC and a man, with no material difference between them, so it makes no sense to say one is a woman and the other two aren’t.

Sexual orientation and gender identity are two completely different types of thing, and there’s far more logic in dividing spaces by sex than by sexual orientation.

MariedeGournay Is it possible we are witnessing the weeds of meta performative stupidity about performative stupidity or naivety?

In the mists of time and the Bunbury preamble, I seem to recall a reference to the behaviour of disruptors who would feign their idea of poor education and literacy by making implausible S&G errors.

In my head there’s a sense of poorly executed attempts at Theroux style naivety and the transactional analysis material about the victim-persecutor-rescuer triad. But it’s just a passing thought.

I paraphrase but in a recent piece, a writer referred to Jon Oliver’s tedious use of Michael Phelps to argue against single sex categories in women’s sports. I was left with the impression that people declare TWAW in the same way they profess to believe Phelps is “part dolphin “.

It’s quite sobering to reflect on the performative similarity of those who embrace performative stupidity.

I would say that inasmuch as female gender identity is a real thing, it is a element of our experience over time as females living in the world. That can be a very broad set of experiences but the things that characterize it will be around physical elements like menstruation, or the effects of not menstruating, interacting with other people who recognize us as female, cultural beliefs about women or cultural reflections of female experiences, the experience of sexuality as a woman, and more.

It's impossible for a male person to have a female gender identity because even if he tried to go undercover as a woman, he would be experiencing things as a man pretending to be a woman (though certainly if he did it successfully it might give him some insights about how others interact with women rather than men.)

That's a bit like saying the Jehovah's Witnesses are not Christians. Marxism has been around a long time, like all ideological systems it includes differernt schools of thought and also, in some cases, degraded versions.

a degraded version of something is not that thing, though.
Marxism, IIRC, is very clear on the material reality of people's lives, and that women as a sex class are discriminated against because of that.

I gave up a long time ago on Marxism as any kind of belief system, though I still find it has some useful analytical tools. And I still think that feminism that doesn't have a class analysis is depriving itself of something important.

But a lot of what passes for Marxism these days is the wank you get at the Historical Materialism conference, which IME has very little to do with history or materialism, and is mostly an opportunity for overeducated pseuds to compete with each other in producing word salad where they might namecheck Marx, but really the animating spirits are Foucault and Butler.

I've been a few times, and formed a strong view that this stuff has as much to do with Marxism as Ladies' Day at Ascot has to do with feminism, and I'm happy to do without it.

Another vote for best thread title

This was Nagel's argument too when he said we'd never know how a BAT feels being a bat. Just our human approximation of it, filtered through our anthropic perception. I agree, a man can never have any frame of reference as to how it feels to be a woman.

oh don't!!! i am still suffering flashbacks from having to write my own essay on what it is to be a bat!

Please explain what living as a woman means? As a 65 ur old woman I’m literally dying to know 😵‍💫🤯😂

Why is a degraded versions not that thing?

Ideological positions are modified all the time so there are often many different versions of them, look at feminism - which started out with differernt versions. Look at the differernce between differernt movements in Christianity with differernt ideas about fundamental elements like the Trinity or sacraments.

Marxism has had different schools in the past, the fact that this newer one has rejected material class for identitarian categories doesn't change that it is clearly coming out of the same ideas about power relationships and historical progress. (And for that matter even many Marxists who still use class have drifted, unconsciously I think, into ideas about class that aren't rooted in material reality.)

Well, i don't think you can call something Marxism if it isn't Marxism. For me you'd have to do the thing people do with feminism: Trans-exclusionary Feminism, Sex-worker exclusionary Feminism, etc etc.

Edited to add, even thinkgs like 2nd Wave Feminism, Radical Feminism etc etc

Use a modifier, because Marx pretty much defined what he ment.

Am aware that is more semantics though.

I mean, if you do it that way only Marx was really a Marxist, there are a ton of versions of Marxism that people normally don't label specifically unless it's important for context.

People sometimes call the modern stuff neomarxism if they want to differentiate it from more classical Marxism. I would say it's actually the majority of Marxists now.

When we talk about feminism in general terms we don't need to qualify it. But if we are talking about the kind of feminism that has zero truck with gender stereotypes we definitely need to specify we are talking about 2nd wave feminism.

It's the same with marxism -and i would go so far as to call a lot of modern marxists, neo-marxists and ignore them ;)

Sure, there are really quite a few streams of feminism. Including Marxist feminism, though I actually don't think Marxism maps on to feminism very well.

Gender identity might be real for you, but for many of us it is, well, Butlerian flapdoodle.

Can you think of one good reason why people's access to toilets, changing rooms and rape crisis services should be organised according to gender identity, which most people don't appear to have?

Where do I, a genderless woman, pee?