Trans Rights: The Conjuring Trick at the Toilet Door

[frazzled1]

https://heartlandstribune.com/trans-rights-the-conjuring-trick-at-the-toilet-door/

Great article - capture of the left, trans rights versus women's rights.

The left is supposed to begin with material reality. Bodies. Labour. Class. Wages. Violence. The analysis of women’s oppression that produced the Equality Act, that built the refuges, that fought for the single-sex provisions now being contested, was a materialist analysis. Women are oppressed because they are female. Not because of how they feel about being female. Because of reproduction, sexual vulnerability, male violence, unpaid domestic care, wage inequality and systematic exclusion from public life. The material conditions of being a woman in this world are not a cultural mood. They are a structural fact.

Liberalism, in its contemporary iteration, has made a different set of commitments. It has committed to the proposition that identity is self-determined, that the sincere assertion of an identity creates an obligation on others to affirm it, and that any structure which resists this obligation is oppressive by definition. That is not materialism. It is idealism. It mistakes the declaration for the thing declared. It confuses the map for the territory, the word for the body the word describes.

There is nothing inherently left-wing in that position. It is, in fact, a philosophy that systematically privileges the subjective over the material, the assertion over the evidence, and the feelings of one group over the physical safety of another. On those terms, it is not the left that has adopted a new progressive position. It is the left that has been captured by liberalism and dressed the result in the language of solidarity.

Of course it is! Oddly when I Google on Baileyonice I get page after page of links to your gay porn star namesake.

BTW the name of the drink is Baileys not Bailey whereas the porn star is called Bailey Onice.

It said in the Equality Act women and man, male and female refer to biological sex.

What do you think it said?

Not read the linked article, but I do feel the need to point out that the strain of feminism I was surrounded by as a young woman in the late seventies and early eighties was ALL about how men and women are exactly the same, women are totally equal to men, women can do any job that men can do, etc.
I think it grew out of two things: one was the Thatcher/Regan economic climate, in which women were encouraged into the workplace full time and it was all about equality at work; and the second was in reaction to the extremes of some early seventies feminism with demands for 'wages for housework' and other such impossible nonsense.

Of course, we young women were being sold a lie of total equality, as we soon found out upon getting pregnant.

It is a more sophisticated form of feminism that recognises the innate biological differences and seeks to recognise the "needs, desires, and experience of women" as valid and different to those of men.

Though you do still get some Gen X and Boomer feminists who are outraged by any suggestion that they are in any way different to men (apart from the obvious but irrelevant bit about reproduction).

(apart from the obvious but irrelevant bit about reproduction).

Please do explain how reproduction is irrelevant.

Every time there's an interesting thread this arsehole swoops in to condescend and sneer while making the most low quality arguments against whatever is being discussed. It's so tiresome.

I am parroting the extreme feminism of a generation, who were told, and believed, that men and women are entirely equal in every way. That having babies was just a small thing you did as a woman, and that you could return to work full time after 3 weeks and put the baby on the bottle.
Because not even reproductive biology should get in the way of "feminism" and women's right to total equality.

Not saying I believe it for one minute - though as a naïve teenage girl I probably did believe it back then.

I am glad that feminist thought has become more nuanced.

I see you haven't been banned or deleted so that must mean you are part of the cult

As over 80% of 'Gen X' and 'Boomer' women will now have given birth, I think they are less likely than other generations to believe that reproduction is an irrelevance.

Quite.
Reality has a way of knocking silly ideology out of people's heads.
Many of us had a big wake-up when the first baby arrived.

Though you do get the occasional old-school-feminist who still thinks it is all about absolute equality and no-differences-allowed.

Unfortunately many young women even today are misled into thinking society is far more equal than it really is, and are blindsided by reality when they have a baby.

I think it's easy to forget the epic levels of bullshit about female biology that the first two waves of feminism were battling against.

Take women's education, for example. At various times in the past it was argued that women shouldn't/didn't need to be educated because:

• God created them to be wives and mothers so that's all they can and should do.
• Their brains are smaller than men's so they literally won't be able to get their head round an education.
• Their body and mind are organised entirely around childbearing to the point where any strenuous mental activity will impair their ability to bear healthy children.
• Their delicate, febrile female nerves won't stand it and they'll all end up as hopeless neurotics.
• Ok they might manage an education of sorts but they'll never be anything other than mediocre; only men can be geniuses.

So feminism was faced with the difficult task of cleaning off all the damaging mythology that had accumulated around the real facts of reproductive difference, and distinguishing clearly between the two.

All this in the face of an opposition hell- bent on construing any form of difference as evidence of inferiority, and in a world where the default assumption was maleness, so any arrangements that took account of femaleness were viewed as tiresome grudging concessions or as oh-look-how-tolerant-we-are favours, instead of as social normality.

It's no wonder that some feminists despaired of the task and took the simpler route of minimising the differences altogether. Which has led to the opposite problem, of ignoring women's real ( as opposed to mythical) physical and social needs.

I guess they’re off the hook now.

That was the strain of feminism I grew up with too. But I disagree it was about men and women being interchangeable.

It may have seemed that way if you weren't paying attention because women were just dismissed out of hand for so many jobs (and tended to dismiss those jobs for themselves, too) so there was a lot of advocating that "Women can do this!". But the focus in terms of political action was about insisting workplaces adapted to facilitate both men and women in role. E.g. not having tools that needed people of a certain height that pushed out more women than men, using powered tools so that not as much strength was needed, not valuing things that men tended to do over things that women tended to do, etc.. The movement also pushed for pay for housework (that went nowhere, though!) and for strong protections for reproductive issues.

I'm Gen X. I don't remember being told any such thing.

Women weren’t allowed to compete in Olympic ski jumping until 2014 because men thought that their reproductive organs would be damaged by high speed landings.

That's one I didn't know about.

We are equally capable and may be cognitively interchangeable from an academic perspective (though the jury's still out on a few edge details). However our experiences are pretty different, partly because of culture and the way we are socialised, but also because of our biological differences. So no, psychologically we aren't interchangeable and even if we were socialized the same we wouldn't be.

Me neither. Not sure what that person is on about, they sound quite angry about it for some reason. Doesn't reflect my experience at all

I grew up in the suburbs where attitudes were still pretty conservative even back then so you were absolutely expected to be "feminine"/"ladylike (ie subservient, 'sweet', traditional) which I just wasn't and always found restrictive and judgemental. When I moved away, I found feminism and its focus on it being okay to just be myself without feeling guilty that wasn't "fulfiling my proper role as a woman" or "appropriately feminine" to be a blessed relief. That wasn't extreme in any way and nobody was 'telling me" to be anything other than myself or that my life experiences were no different to men.

Amazing, isn't it! Only women's organs, not organs that we both have like hearts or kidneys or livers.

Or indeed testicles.

From AI

For instance, as late as 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, then-president of the International Ski Federation, publicly opposed women's ski jumping by claiming the sport "seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view". Elite female ski jumpers like Lindsey Van frequently reported being asked bizarre questions by skeptics about whether their internal organs had been displaced or if they were still capable of having children.

i'm gobsmacked.

I think this thread doesn't deserve to be buried by zombies.

“Interchangeable” and “identical” and “equal” (or expressed as “of equal value to”) do not all mean the same thing.

Men and women are of equal value as human beings, and of equal value in many workplaces and roles. This does not mean they are identical.

In some situations they are interchangeable (the job would get done equally well) but not in reproduction, or working as a labourer, or working as a rape crisis counsellor, or providing intimate care to vulnerable people. Or whatever other examples you want to think up. Sex matters sometimes, but not most of the time.

Individual men and women have huge overlap in personality and skills, so men and women who are outliers in their sex class should never be barred from work that is more typically done by the other sex if they are good at that work. We would lose too much talent in that way.

In the 1970s the emphasis on “women can do anything” was to push against the sexism and restrictions of the time where women wouldn’t be considered at all for many roles, not because of any real limitation such as they can’t lift as many bags of cement in a day, but because “they can’t do maths” or “we don’t have female toilets on site” or “the lads would have to stop swearing if we had a woman around” or “driving is man’s work” or “the law is too complicated and women wouldn’t like arguing in court”. Or any one of a million reasons to preserve much of the higher earning jobs market for men.

So campaigning for equality doesn’t mean pretending that we are interchangeable in all circumstances. But it does mean saying that the skills needed to be good carer of people with dementia are of equal value to those needed to be a train driver. It means not placing a higher value of the skills needed for roles where men dominate over roles where women dominate.

What a ramble.

Good post!