Nellie Bowles on anti-racism and white women, four years later:
Much of what I learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”
The course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be “as close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.” We needed to feel uncomfortable.
One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now “sort of being told to step aside.” She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of “being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.”
A woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it.’ Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?”
She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability—like where it kind of makes you want to throw up.”
One participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.
A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”
Victoria Smith on the plight of the ‘sceptical man’:
Poor Freddie de Boer. It must be annoying to be a self-styled voice-of-reason type who’s thrown his lot in with trans activism — on the basis that it’s “kind” to do so — only to have trans activists spoil it for you by being a bit too insane. Following Andrea Long Chu’s recent New York magazine piece, in which the writer argued for no-questions-asked “sex changes” for children, de Boer felt obliged to step in and call for restraint. “To defend trans people,” he writes, “you must think.” But obviously not too much, or else the whole thing unravels.
Here in the UK, our own sceptical, rational, ever-curious male commentators are having similar problems with “the trans issue”. In a recent podcast, Jon Ronson and Adam Buxton discussed how a “mutual friend” of theirs (Graham Linehan) had become “kind of obsessed” with the issue, which they didn’t see fit to examine themselves. The intimation was that it was all a little bit mad and unseemly. Why would anyone get obsessed with that? Isn’t it funny how people go down those rabbit holes? You’d never catch either of them doing that. Anyhow, Ronson did think about the issue once and decided it would be mean to think about it again.
As a topic, sex and gender causes particular problems for the man who views himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madnesses. This is because in order to pass as occupying “the middle ground”, you still have to give a free pass to lots of insane things, as opposed to lots and lots of them. Instead of going full-on Long Chu — which would of course be too far! — you have to ignore plenty of stuff which, deep down, you know to be total bollocks. This probably makes you quite cross, only not with yourself. It’s the people who keep pointing it out who are the problem.
If it wasn’t for all those bigots who keep reminding you that human can’t change sex, no one’s born in the wrong body, and a twelve-year-old autistic girl who’s terrified of puberty is in no way comparable to a middle-aged man who gets off on wearing his wife’s tights, you’d be fine. Sure, these people are saying things that you, too, would have said six or seven years ago, but they’re the ones who have gone insane. It’s definitely not you who’s been radicalised. It’s the people who lack the nuance, curiosity and intellectual ingenuity to have started saying a few mad things and ignoring a few medical scandals on the basis that most people in their social circle are saying and ignoring them, too.
Kathleen Stock on the assisted-dying lobby:
Campaigners for assisted dying seek to eliminate messiness of various physical and emotional kinds, and their language is adjusted accordingly. At times, it can sound as if one is being offered a particularly relaxing spa treatment. With a pleasing ring of supportiveness, you are now being “assisted” in achieving something, rather than killed by a doctor or killing yourself. In van der Zee’s piece, the lethally toxic sedative given to “the patient” was merely a “drink”, and its administration a “procedure”, after which her mother “fell asleep”. Also in the past week, Scottish politicians sponsoring a new bill legalising voluntary euthanasia have stated that, once legalised, resulting deaths will be recorded as “natural” rather than as a result of suicide, with the suggestion that this will reduce the “stigma” around assisted dying. In other words, moral qualms will be framed as bigotry. (Then again, perhaps bureaucrats are just looking for a respectable cover story for Scotland’s ever-decreasing life expectancy rates.)
And alongside the sanitised language, there’s a tendency to place large amounts of trust in the future judgements of relevant unidentified authority figures, even in the face of blatant legal and medical failures of the recent past. Many activists seem convinced that any UK pro-assisted dying law will contain enough safeguards to avoid people being bumped off for the wrong reasons. And perhaps they are right, as far as the first iteration of any such law goes; but they are bound to be wrong about later extensions of it. Changes in social norms tend to roll down slopes rather than hurtle off cliffs; but either way we can all easily end up at the bottom.
Canadians, for instance, used to reject assisted dying, but now significant numbers would agree to expand the existing programme in order to include as respective qualifying reasons, “inability to receive medical treatment” (51% of respondents), and “homelessness” (28%). In the Netherlands, euthanasia is permitted on the basis of “hopeless and unbearable suffering” rather than fatal illness and is sometimes allowed for psychiatric illness alone. Given the degree of concept creep endemic to modern society, as we collectively grow yet more anxious and neurotic, who knows what mundane aspects of modern life will end up counting as “hopeless and unbearable” too?
I am using the future tense here deliberately, for it seems clear that such legislation will pass in the whole of the UK sooner or later. Its arrival has been heralded for a while now, not least by the safe, agent-approved involvement of TV personalities like Dame Esther Rantzen — herself now in the grip of Stage 4 lung cancer and apparently keener than ever on personal choice in this area. (Presumably she has forgotten saying that unvaccinated Covid sufferers should be left to expire on their own, wholly untreated by the NHS.) Other celebrities have been doing their bit by offering personal anecdotes of heart-rending suffering too, including some from beyond the grave.
The main tool their opponents tend to wield in response to such campaigning is a list of potential adverse consequences to society generally, should legalisation happen: for instance, that it might lead to martyr-ish types being guilt-tripped into taking up the option against their own best interests; or that its real appeal to economists is the cost-efficient dispatching of those who disproportionately drain health and social care resources. Indeed, the latter was actually positively embraced by Matthew Parris in his Times column last week. But really, either way, how can such abstractions compete, faced with the visceral power of a story about Dame Prue Leith’s brother’s agonising death from bone cancer? It is not that we care so much about what happens to celebrities and their families, but rather that, in a vacuum of personal experience where most of us have yet to see a dead body, their stories can act as psychic proxy for what we imagine or fear might happen to us.
The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress can’t be defeated — only rejected
The potential population of people who make it through the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and are “allowed” to speak is vanishingly small and likely in perfect lock step with today’s orthodoxy. In other words, the only people who get to speak are those who wouldn’t disagree anyway.
It’s impossible for any speaker to defeat the Obstacle Course, the Minefield, and the rhetorical fortresses, which is why I am trying to urge people to reject them instead. There is nothing about being a conservative or a liberal, and there is nothing about your race, sex, sexuality, or the friends you keep that means you are automatically wrong or right about a given issue. Indeed, there’s nothing about even being a bad person that means you’re wrong or right about any particular issue, and there’s nothing about being “good” that means you are always right.
Even though in my opinion Abigail Shrier is a brave and principled human being, it’s beside the point. Anytime critics bring up the claim that she’s a bad person, a transphobe, or the fact that she’s a cis white woman, the reasonable response must be, “Noted. Can we please get back to the argument now?” The only way to beat these rhetorical barriers and deflections is to recognize that you don’t need to fight your way through them at all.
Then, maybe, we can get to things that are actually worth our time, like Shrier’s fantastic new book. I hope everyone will read it. I hope its publication signals that we are starting to see the end of the weird ideological eruption Matt Yglesias dubbed the “Great Awokening.”
All about xenomelia, or “foreign limb syndrome” (the writing’s a bit dry but the subject is interesting):
One frequent variant of the desire for amputation is the desire for paraplegia, i.e., the paralysis of both legs (Giummarra et al., 2012). From a neurological stance the peripheral absence of one or both legs and their paralysis due to spinal cord injury appear worlds apart. A person with the desire for paraplegia usually abhors the thought of amputation, while one with an amputation desire (even if bilateral) is typically convinced that being paralyzed from the waist down would not make him feel “in the right body.” However, with respect to some frequent correlates of xenomelia, the two variants are surprisingly similar (Blom et al., 2012 for a tabular comparison). The main phenomenological correlates of the different forms of xenomelia concern the erotic attraction to amputees or paraplegics and the urge to simulate the desired state.
Paraphilic pre-occupation with the desired body modification is reported by 46–87% of samples in published accounts of xenomelia (First, 2005; Blom et al., 2012; Giummarra et al., 2012) and preferably targets amputation or paralysis of the legs. While sexual arousal is rarely the primary explanation of the desire to change one’s own anatomy, it is worthy of attention with respect to the ontogeny and phenomenology of the condition. When considering functional neuroanatomy, the association of one’s consciousness for legs (compared to that for arms) and sexual feelings and behavior has its origins in the proximity of cortical regions representing legs and the sexual organs (Kell et al., 2005). It is well-documented that leg, but not arm (although, see Giummarra et al., 2011b) amputees experience referred genital sensations to their phantom limbs (Aglioti et al., 1994). In paraplegia, phantom leg sensations may also spread to the genital area, leading to full-blown orgasmic experiences (Avenarius and Gerstenbrand, 1967). Many paraphilias can be traced to discrete events or experiences during childhood, when children are enthusiastic imitators through the process of developing their self-consciousness, often engaging in socially inappropriate mimicry and role-play (Whiten et al., 2009). In xenomelia, as with other paraphilias, such discrete experiences may become the fetishistic targets during puberty, likely by conditioning (Koksal et al., 2004), into the individual’s sexual interests and masturbatory fantasies (Abel et al., 2008). Rather than forming a springboard to psychodynamic elaborations, the lower limb predominance together with the erotic components of xenomelia may illustrate that “body schema” involves more than proprioceptive, somatosensory, and motor aspects of an individual’s development, but is also tightly linked to a person’s sexual identity (Schilder, 1935; Money, 1984; De Preester, 2011). It may even transcend individual consciousness and embrace cultural dimensions. Thus xenomelia and fetishistic foot-binding practices in traditional Chinese culture probably rest on similar neural mechanisms (McGeoch, 2007).
The second sign frequently accompanying xenomelia is the simulation of the desired state. Persons with xenomelia typically spend a great deal of time obsessing about their desired or “beloved” body-state (Sorene et al., 2006; Kasten, 2009). The majority report “pretending” behaviors, whether these simply involve mental imagery, or motor action in accordance with their desired body form (e.g., binding the legs, sitting on them, using tourniquets to reduce lower limb perception, transferring to/from a wheel chair without using the legs, or trying not to engage the undesired limbs with motor tasks; Riordan and Appleby, 1994; First, 2005; Giummarra et al., 2012). Individuals at the more “extreme” end of the spectrum of xenomelia meet at least some of the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder. While Oddo et al. (2009) found some support for OCD in people with xenomelia, the obsessions tend to be limited to their altered bodily self-consciousness.
Given that both paraphilic and pretending components are equally characteristic to the amputation and paraplegia variant of xenomelia we propose that both variants “belong to the spectrum of BIID” (Giummarra et al., 2012, p. 35). The desire to become incontinent, castrated (Roberts et al., 2008), deaf (Veale, 2006), blind (Johnson et al., 2011), or suffering from neurological dysfunction (Kolla and Zucker, 2009) may be part of this spectrum.
More Kathleen Stock, on what is likely to be the slow purge of wokeness:
So can the rest of us — the ones who knew all along that wokeness was a pseudo-progressive hobby for guilty rich people, role-playing as meaningful political action — relax? Unfortunately not yet. For I’m afraid the demise of woke won’t be like the end of toothbrush moustaches, indie folk music or any other temporary behaviour supercharged by the whims of the young and the hip, then dropped without consequence. Wokeness, in contrast, is a bit like a hulking great boulder launched into the middle of a calm lake: waves will be crashing on the shoreline long after the epicentre bears no trace.
The most obvious difference between wokeness and other passing fashions is that nobody working in HR ever decreed that moustache-wearers or indie folk-listeners be considered uniquely oppressed minority groups. In contrast, thanks to wild and unevidenced claims made at the height of wokemania by lobbying groups, thousands of organisations have been left with unfair, illiberal and sometimes even illegal policies that blatantly cater to the special interests of a few: rules about how social spaces can be accessed and by whom; what data can and cannot be collected; what conversations are allowed and which are not. Policies tend to dictate organisational behaviour long after those who first championed them move on ideologically; and especially when propped up by a raft of specially created career positions, whose occupants have a financial interest in maintaining the momentum.
And alongside such policies, superficially moralised gestures have become embedded in many workplaces, embraced by senior figures for no better reason than they think everyone else is doing it too and by junior figures because the boss is doing it. Students at liberal arts colleges may no longer be listing their pronouns but the head of MI6 currently has his in his Twitter/X bio. Activist-sanctioned holy weeks and days are carefully observed by blue-chip managers. Hospitals, construction sites, police stations, council buildings, banks and hotels are festooned with the visual monstrosity that is the Progress flag. None of this happened with the craze for platform shoes or Agas.
In effect, the storm-surge of wokeness throughout British institutions from 2020 onwards was what the political scientist Cass Sunstein has called a “reputational cascade”: a relatively small number of people started acting in a certain way, each for roughly independent reasons; then at a certain point, a wider group of people started observing the behaviour of the smaller group and copying them, each privately assuming their reputations would be damaged if they did not. Before long, this pattern expanded exponentially, helped by the odd bit of public witch-burning.
Here again is a difference with more benign aesthetic crazes: if you don’t keep up with the moral version, you risk losing your social circle or even your job. But the reputational cascade that was wokeness didn’t just deter dissent from those frightened to swim against the perceived tide. It also incentivised opportunists, who actively used the surging tide to swim further ahead than their competitors. Many organisations latched on to it as a positive marketing strategy, thereby creating workplace structures and habits that, from the inside, now seem very difficult to unpick.
Fascinating conversation with Catherine Coldstream about her 12 years as a Carmelite nun:
On wearing the habit
Putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way. It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down, because there are layers and layers of stuff. The main habit was made of this brown serge, which is a rough, thick wool. And we had basically two layers of that. ... And then ... under that we had a tunic, which was a thick, cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads.
So you felt encumbered by a lot of the cloth at first. And all these pins, which you could easily stab yourself with, and people did — you're always, by mistake, sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit. You felt weighed down, but ... you quite quickly get used to it. [The habit is] a symbol of having been set aside, "consecrated" was the word we use.
…
On the difficult and enjoyable things about readjusting to the outside world
The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world. So I found noise very difficult. And I found talking to people very difficult, actually. I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact. I liked to be left alone, and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on, so that was really difficult. ...
But there were things, of course, I hugely enjoyed. I mean, I loved ... the physical freedom of just being able to just go — go wherever you wanted to. I remember the first time I went to the sea and just sort of running along the beach, hair flapping in the wind, jumping into the waves. The physical freedom was wonderful. I enjoyed going for a drink as well. ... I really enjoyed going for an Indian meal. That was amazing. ... My body was aching for relief and rest and I hadn't had any form of pleasure. ... So those pleasures were great, and I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on.
I feel increasingly uncertain and distant from Kathleen Stock. I have seen at least 5 bodies and watched 1 relative die. In my cultural context (NZ) it’s good to have an open coffin and I have many photos of my father who died last year in his coffin.
A year earlier Dad told me that he was saving pills in case he needed them and I found it a great relief to be able to tell him that he didn’t have to- his doctor could help him die if that was what he wanted to do. I repeated when it was relevant the we (his kids) didn’t want him to go but it was his choice not ours. We still have 3 old people and one of them knows his GP won’t talk about assisted dying so he’s going to his specialist because he wants to know.
Stock seems to live in a different world to me- perhaps she’s had nothing to do with the very old? I once shared her fears but slippery slopes are theory, medical staff are aware and I believe people are entitled to die if they want to do so (I don’t believe individual medical staff can be required to assist them). Reality now is people face dying very slowly as their bodies fall apart painfully and doctors work to keep them alive. I’m grateful I could tell my father he had the choice and happy he actually really wanted to live as long as he possibly could. I’m glad that I can repeat what I told him for the other 3 old people if need be.
I’ve also disagreed with nonsense Stock wrote about mothers being ‘naturally anxious’ about letting their kids play at a distance. Actually often not so. Cultural norms are not biological realities and the current denial of the latter (eg sex) shouldn’t lead us to believe the former don’t vary.
The Victoria Smith article is terrific! Her take on Freddie DeBoer is perfect. I canceled him because of his oh so superior kindness regarding "trans people."