Against my better judgment (and even against some of the things I write just a few paragraphs down)—I’ll blame the fever I’ve been running—I’ve got some thoughts about the last few weeks… This has all the makings of a frozen conflict. On one side are women whose minds and contributions I greatly respect, who are saying, in effect, ‘just make a statement distancing yourself and our cause from [objectionable groups].’ I get why the refusal to issue such a statement feels like a slap in the face to these women. It seems like such a small ask. And even if the request started out somewhat
If you are at all Gender critical, we face such an uphill struggle for our voices to be heard that it's monumentally depressing to have some kick down others, in the same side of the fight.
Baroness Nicholson, here in the UK is fighting hard for women and posesses 'establishment' clout. We, undoubtedly are on difference political spectrums but by God she works hard for us.
I have had to realise that we need to take allies where we find them.
In Scotland Self ID is about to be pushed through regardless of public opinion. We don't have the luxury of purity politics, we need everyone pulling together .
Don’t ask permission, don’t explain, don’t apologize. Just clearly state your own position. Women need separate women-only spaces in public. That’s it. If some right-winger agrees, great. The more people who support this, the better.
I'm 100% behind the person in question, and attend all the meetings/rallies. I really don't understand why prominent figures can't just support each other. It's frustrating and disappointing
Can you possibly tell me simply/openly what Eliza Mondegreen is talking about (ie some central event/person being obliquely referred to)? I get the global political landscape; but what's this about? Thanks in advance if you can/will.
Addendum: It was funny, because I had plucked a tweet out a week ago to illustrate the trans-flag issue, and posted on my Substack. I had no context for it (except what the photo was saying was perfectly clear); and it turned out to have originated from that Helen Joyce post. I need to go back and add Joyce's explanation plus the women's names.
Posie Parker. She hosted an event at which some "far right" bros showed up at to make some political hay out of. Some dogmatic feminists objected and called for some "purity tests" - which Posie, and Eliza apparently, and many others quite reasonably object to.
Posie - and Kathleen Stock and others - has quite reasonably argued that much of the transgender clusterfuck is due to a great deal of rot in feminism itself. Mote, beam ...
The thing is, everything and everyone is now “far right”. I hate that term. To the trans mob we are “far right”. What is “far right”? I think we also need to stop participating in this need to define, and stop pretending everyone on the “far right” is a woman hater. I see more hate in the pro porn, pro surrogacy, pro prostitution left. It won’t matter how many times we denounce any group or person. It won’t change their minds. TRAs love to gaslight and debase us. Never apologize and never explain. It just gives them ammunition to continue to attack. They see it as a weakness. I’m personally done apologizing.
Sorry TheResistance, I wasn't sure who you were replying to. I'm ex-far-left, religious minority, dissident second-wave feminist...and now referred to as "far right" (and worse) by my nation's sociopath prime minister (Trudeau in Canada)! So, hahaha, the term long ago lost any meaning. My reading of Steersman was that he's using it tongue-in-cheek as well (unless I'm wrong). Crazy times!
🙂 De Nada; share the wealth, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition... 😉
But speaking of which, you might be interested in a couple of Substack posts by "feminist" philosopher Kathleen Stock. Her "Welcome" and "Abolish the dream of gender abolition" in particular.
She's one of the few feminists who's willing to consider that feminist dogma has contributed substantially to the transgender clusterfuck - excuse my french but that is exactly what it is.
Somewhat apropos of which, you might also be interested in my further elaborations on that theme:
Between this post here; and the Helen Joyce post; and your Heather Heying post (and comments); my brain is done for the moment. AND I need to read a transcript from 2017 that originally got the SOGI123 trans-nightmare into Vancouver schools and do a post.
[That reminds me, my husband and sons gave me a gift of an hour at a shooting range for my birthday and I need to cash it in the MOMENT this civic election is done and behind me.]
Thanks for taking a look at my Heying post. But know what you mean about "brain is done" - devils in the details, and no end of those. Someone once quipped that whenever someone goes to change something, they inevitably find it connected to everything else in the universe. 🙂
But, not to overload you, as a fellow Canuck you might be interested in another of my posts on "Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology":
Which sadly includes Canada's own. I had written a lengthy submission to Statistics Canada - link in the essay - objecting to their own "capture" by gender ideology. Been trying to promote something in the way of protest outside their offices - maybe burn the effigy of the Minister in Charge? 😉 Certainly something in the way of an open letter to them. Thoughts and suggestions most welcome. 🙂
Thank you Eliza. Fever or not, this untangles so much and goes to the heart of the broader issues at stake. Our society has lost the practice of tolerance, so we become adrift when conflicts like this arise. In a way, both sides are trapped by the fraying of the democratic fabric. Those trying to distance their voices from the "far right" association SHOULD be able to define their stance as feminists and leftists passionately and clearly. This should be their right in a democratic society. And technically, they have that right. But a toxic mix of social media and the ubiquity of cell phones at public events makes this impossible in practice. The "public square" is no longer a stage for an event experienced in real time by those present, but can be presented in a myriad of ways through any filter. Reality is shaped, enhanced, and curated rather than simply experienced. Technology has changed what we mean by "free speech" and has also created a soft authoritarianism that we are all quite familiar with. For those on the other side of this, who come to the frontlines from "a thousand individual paths," being forced to denounce anyone who shares their goals feels coercive and also anti-democratic.
Personally, I have found myself to be very persuaded by the arguments both sides have presented. And like you, I have found words like "left, right, progressive, conservative" to have less and less meaning, so I am less pulled into any ideological definition of my stance than I might have been at another time in my life. I feel very sad about this rift between people who I admire, who have all done so much in this fight.
Quite agree on the "both sides" thing. Though it's maybe more a case of neither side is actually listening to the other one. "Nobody is right if everyone else is wrong" - a refrain from a song of 50 years ago for any young whippersnappers in the crowd ... 😉
But something that UK/US lawyer & philosopher Elizabeth Finne had elaborated on in some detail in her rather brilliant 2018 Quillette essay on "The Tyranny of the Subjective".
See my own essay for a link and relevant quote therefrom:
My own feeling is that this split is not just about tactics. It's a real split. On one side are feminists who still believe in leftism, who think the support of the left for gender ideology was a strange and confused aberration, and if we just "PUUUULLLL" as one of those feminists said in a brilliant and hilarious essay, eventually we'll return the left to its once reasonably promising state.
On the other side are feminists who have come to believe that the left's support for gender ideology exposed something really rotten at the core of leftism, and there's no going back after seeing that rotten core exposed. I'm on this latter side and I'm not doing the genuflecting anymore about how "OF COURSE I'm on the left but...". I'm not on the left anymore. I can now see that the right is not full of the monsters I once thought were there, and the monsters that are there are in fact less numerous and mostly less dangerous than the left monsters about whose existence I had previously hardly dreamt.
I think Group A of feminists believe the ship of leftism is listing badly but is still basically sound. Group B believe the ship is sinking like a rock and they are willing to clamber on to whatever flotsam and jetsam is available to get away from it. It's not *safe* on the flotsam and jetsam. The flotsam and jetsam is not a permanent answer. We might still drown anyway. But clinging to the ship as it goes down is certain death.
In my opinion, fear of being associated with the Right keeps most people on the Left from even entertaining the thought that there could be any problem with transing kids. It's only when someone we love gets sucked into the hole that we start frantically researching this phenomenon and find out how insidious it is. This is an opportunity for people to try to find common ground with people outside of our tribes for something that's much more important. Thank you, Eliza.
Ok, this first sentence of BowWow's comment. I couldn't say it any better. Stop being afraid of being right wing. Transing kids is a right and wrong issue, not a left and right issue. Don't be afraid, don't let people smear you. Is it ok to put a 12 year old on the path to sterility? No. Categorically. No.
I truly appreciate this writing! And ... in the future, I hope we can become clear on how using 'radical' in opposite ways undermines feminism. If the right is 'radicalized,' meaning the people mentioned are *extreme,* then radical feminism sounds like 'extreme feminism.' But that's not what it means -- radical for feminists means *getting to the root* of the issue, to fix it at its beginning so as to not have to chop at it unendingly. Radical feminists like me cringe when our word is used to describe those who are clearly not us. Rachel Maddow does this, and in the doing positions herself as a leftist moderate, reasonable ... which is the group that got us into this mess once the big money was thrown at genderism.
You've hit, nicely, on an important point: feminism has a Purity problem. Now if we had venues to choose from we could nod with civility to Tucker and his ilk and move on. (Kara Dansky of WoLF reached a massive audience and made her points well in a surprisingly friendly interview on Tucker Carlson's show.) But we can't. And it's either isolating feminists or it's making us make peace with those who share a view on an issue and not much else. We KNOW that isolation does not create sufficient impetus for wreaking change in the dominant culture, so why are we being told it's the only strategy we can follow? Purity is all I can see. To help counter it, I post what I can in mainstream info-social media, plus I've moved to Gettr -- as have many radical feminists! We have carved out space wherein we reach others without the purity problem looming so viciously.
Re: the confusion about what "radical" in radical feminist means: When I testified publicly against a bill in my state (WA) that escalates the trend of men being in women's prisons, I was trying to work with a lobbyist representing the press, whose organization was half-heartedly opposing the bill as one which restricts the public's access to critical information about the sex of incarcerated people. I was part of a panel organized by WoLF. Employees of WoLF also testified, identifying themselves as radical feminists. This lobbyist later said to me, "why did they have to say they were RADICAL feminists?" He was concerned that this made us look bad, an image black-clad "antifa feminists" or something. I had to explain to him that radical refers to root, not way out in left field, and not associated with violence. But most of the public have no idea about this.
Good for you, and WoLF, on the testifying - direct action of one sort or another is, apparently, the only way to get the attention of public, press, and politicians.
Somewhat apropos of which and ICYMI, a recent comment of mine on GC News about sloppy language in an article that Lee had linked to:
It's basically my open letter to the author of an article at the Washington Examiner that talked about "allowing transgender female athletes to compete in women's sports." What a fraud that phrase is - they're not "transgender female athletes", they're male transvestites, guys in drag.
Absolutely love your comment. Not terribly impressed with GC News. I get most of the most valuable information from comments, and there are generally none on-site because they link most articles off-site.
Not sure how effective my "shot across the bows" of the Washington Examiner will be - I certainly haven't had any expressions yet of undying gratitude from the author of that article 😉 - but it seemed important to at least put her on notice.
But I find GC News quite useful for keeping tabs on the depredations of transactivists and their ilk, although it too has its limitations - I had been blocked there for a week or so for challenging the gender-critical mantra that "sex is immutable". It ain't - at least it doesn't comport with the standard biological definitions that are endorsed by various biological journals and the Oxford Dictionary. Apropos of which, you may have some interest in my recent kick at the "What is a woman?" kitty:
But more broadly and relative to your earlier "feminism has a Purity problem" - which I largely agree with - many people, including many feminists, are starting to recognize that feminism has a great many problems, many of which have contributed mightily to the whole transgender clusterfuck. No doubt there is a great deal of justification for feminism as a political project, although that has generally been attended by no end of rather unscientific claptrap - outright Lysenkoism, in fact.
But fairly decent article here by Helen Dale - which had been touted in a recent tweet by Helen Joyce - that provides some justification for that view in her review of "Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century":
Of particular note are these zingers that I had quoted in a comment on Dale's Substack:
"counterblast to the braindead feminism"; "sincere attempt to anchor feminism in reality"; "what no feminist theorist has done before: take biology seriously"; and "Cordelia Fine, a philosopher now notorious for trying to edit science to fit in with feminism."
I'm a lifelong liberal democrat but I have had several far right friends--good people with well thought out positions that I just happened to disagree with. Just talk to them--you don't have to agree with everything, but the discussion may give your own position more depth. Also, the "right wing" is as diverse as the left, not a monolith of nazis and racists to disparage.
This same tool was utilized against Bernie Sanders. He did renounce ‘Bernie Bros’, despite little evidence his supporters were attacking women who supported Hillary, irl. Hillary was already known for her slander campaign against ‘Obama Boys’ when running against Obama, for those who remembered it. It ended up hurting his campaign, because he basically acknowledged misogyny in his campaign. I volunteered for him in Florida in 2016. The only misogyny I saw was online, which can easily be faked with enough money to pay online trolls.
Baloney Bernie Bros didn't attack Hillary followers. I got the horde on Twitter telling I was too stupid to be alive along with threats from Dave Sirota's flying monkeys. Women in Brooklyn were afraid to wear Hillary buttons only to find out that a majority voted for Hillary. Women were too unnerved to publicly declare support. And who can forget gauntlet of Bernie Bros screaming obsceneties at women and children leaving a Hillary rally and Bernie refusing to sanction his followers' behavior? Or throwing $1 bills at Hillary's departing car and screaming "whore"? Absolutely gross behavior.
Eventually we have to realize that the "left" we identified with was always going to take us down this path. Supporting the left but not the TRA movement is like supporting pushing a boulder off a cliff but not supporting it falling to the ground.
Thank you, my thoughts were along these lines but muddled, you've straightened them out.
I think of Vaçlav Havel and his colleagues deciding to live as if they were free - to fight tyranny we all should do so, as Iranian and Afghan women are showing.
So when people with opinions we deplore show up we must fight their opinions, without excluding those people - how else will hearts and minds be changed, if not theirs, then the hearts and minds of those watching. Intolerance breeds contempt. They go low, we go high.
I re-read and delete a lot of tweets before sending - if it's personal, mean, ad hominem, it goes in the bin. As you say: "carry yourself the way you wish your own political opponents had carried themselves, despite disagreements".
I value the knowledge and standing of those women who have been in this fight for years. But I don't know what they would have others do, women who have never been political, academic, in 'the movement'. Getting women to speak about this political issue may persuade them to speak about other issues. Women new to political organising will make mistakes... advice is probably welcome, denigration and instruction probably isn't. And no-one is telling anyone not to speak.
This isnt just about women, and it doesn't belong to just women. Safeguarding, privacy, and the ability to recognise reality matter to everyone, male or female, young or old, whatever political colour. 'The movement', whoever is in it, can carry on doing what they do, in parallel, participating, whatever... and may become central when this war is over, who knows. The rest of us can't wait for permission.
I think this is the most important topic the GC movement/not-a-movement has to deal with. Bigger than WPATH. Bigger than Mermaids. Bigger than education, puberty-blockers, or sports. Bigger even than "gender-affirming" surgery. So, thank you for, with your amazing and characteristic fearlessness, stepping into the breach.
There are no rules in this game, aside from the rules we may happen to bring from our particular sociopolitical context. There are no rules because there is no officiating body. Everyone is bringing their own definitions of the rules to the field. Some people are saying "THESE ARE THE RULES!!!" and others are saying "NO, THOSE AREN'T THE RULES, THESE ARE!!!"
But no claim about "the rules" is correct.
And anyone who claims to own the right to set "the rules" is playing power politics.
As you point out, many players in this free-for-all like to believe that "this open society thing still works." While that vision is more appealing to me than its competitors and I would argue for classical liberalism over any other political system, I'm fairly sure that there's a sizable number who disagree with that perspective. In my view, liberalism is aspirational, at best. The presuppositions that ground one's principles are both unshakeable and, generally speaking, very hard to justify.
The post-modernist deconstructionist crew has at least one thing right: power is central to everything in society. And those who control the levers of power are best able to define the rules. Dear reader, in case you haven't noticed yet, you are not one of those individuals.
The question we must ask is what do those with their hands on those levers really want? Hint: it's NOT losing their access to those levers.
One of the ways the controlling elite in multinational power circles keep the hearts and minds of the rest of us in our state of happy slavery is to leverage the basic human tendency to reduce everything to a simplistic binary. *Of course* society is divided into "left" and "right"! That makes it MUCH simpler to keep everyone in check. Please humor me while I take a closer look at "left" and "right."
Let's start with morality. Is that a characteristic of the left, or the right? I'm sure we all know how people on both sides will answer: we have morality on *our* side. It's OUR CAUSE that's right, just, good, etc.
Nobody - and I mean nobody - can justify that answer.
How can I be so sure? Because I've looked very closely, for a very long time, at the possible answers to the following question: "What is the ultimate justification for holding any specific set of moral principles?" I've read many brilliant, erudite, learned scholars (some even still living!) on this topic and, surprise, surprise, they all have opinions. In some cases, those opinions are very well-argued and persuasively presented. The vast majority are not. And the arguments continue apace.
Because there is no single, universally accepted and well-grounded answer. There are only opinions and, as one 20th C. moral philosopher put it, "Hooray for my side!"
Consequently, I have very little patience for all the self-righteous bloviating about politics. Most of it's just one step up from the opinions you will get on a car-lot, from a car salesman. Yes, they ALL have something to sell. And the number 1 reason they'll give you for buying their brand is that "It's right, good, just, decent ... aka morally correct." Press them a bit and it dissolves into, "that's what my mom and dad believed and what I've always been taught."
The famous left/right dichotomy is just a mask for the good/bad dichotomy. And that, most often, is just a mask for "my team/the other team."
Humans love binaries. Our opponents in this (apparently binary) struggle, are fueled by a Great Truth - binaries are problematic. Why is biological sex such a problem for them? It's binary. Could they be right? Well, let's see ... shall we say "yes" or "no"? Hmmm ... maybe they're *partly* right. Maybe this whole debate is afflicted with the curse that they've correctly identified: our very systems of language and meaning are organized around socially constructed categories that serve the interests of the power elite. Maybe we should be a lot more cautious about dividing the world into two kinds of people.
I'm a huge fan of your writing, but I disagree about this. As crucial as the struggle over gender identity ideology is, it doesn't exist on its own, in a vacuum. White nationalists--fascists--are bidding to take over the US. Their agenda includes: 1. the old form of misogynist gender, with rigid gender norms for men and women; 2. massive white supremacist oppression; 3. rule by fundamentalist Christian patriarchs, enforced by the state and street violence. Do we think "It can't happen here"?
Fascism, among other things, is the epitome of male supremacy. How can we not denounce it and oppose it's rise at every turn? Are mostly-white feminist circles going to (again) consider marginalizing the existential interests of Black people and other people of color in the hopes of somehow advancing under the white nationalists' radar--or worse, with their help?
This course seems to me to be wrong, not only morally, but strategically. Right now millions of anti-racist and anti-fascist women (and men) of all nationalities already wonder if gender critical/abolitionist views should be considered suspect because they sometimes "sound like" the Right. Whose support is more important in the long run--theirs, or fair-weather white nationalist, misogynist fake "allies"?
What should we actually expect to happen to us afterwards, if we allow fascists to use gender issues as a wedge to rise to power?
Despite the ugly behavior of many brainwashed gender-besotted leftists and progressives, I think we need to differentiate our politics from the Right more urgently than ever. I would argue that, even when the going is hard, the only just and responsible way forward is to closely link the struggle for women's liberation--liberation of billions of women all over the world--with the struggle against imperialism, fascism, racism and homophobia.
I don't anywhere say not to oppose the rise of far-right movements but that the way we carry ourselves in the political/civic arena should be all the repudiation anybody needs. Denunciations don't help: they create an association that does not exist and replicate a broken politics of purity. I do think we should be open to limited strategic alliances with conservatives, but that's not the same thing as working with the far right, only working with people we disagree with on many other things but agree with on this one thing (wrong to teach this to kids in schools as fact, wrong to send kids down medical pathway, etc.)
On a general level, I don't think powerful far-right movements can be effectively opposed only by carrying ourselves in a particular way. Active resistance to violent, misogynistic, racist politics doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with purity politics; it has to do with survival and fighting oppression. Like Iranian women are doing right now.
We sometimes find ourselves supporting particular practical measures that are also supported by people on the racist, misogynist Right, for their own reasons. It happens. That's not the basis for even limited strategic alliances, IMO. Tactical overlap, maybe?
Dripping with scorn, Putin just blasted gender identity and sex denial during a major war mongering speech. Don't we have to make sure our goals for society are clearly differentiated from his? On the other side, the Iranian regime endorses gender identity, and imposes medical transition for gay people because they are "born in the wrong body." Shouldn't we demand that gender identity ideologists explain why they aren't on the same page as that? These aren't some kind of purity politics "gotcha" questions; they're about what kind of future we are fighting for in a dangerous world.
Those are extreme examples. But how about co-sponsoring friendly conferences with people who organized for years to overturn Roe? Where do we draw the line? Right now, a US conservative is somebody who supports Trump authoritarianism, endorses separating migrant families, claims the last election was stolen, and is trying to take away voting rights from Black people. Trump is a racist; he hates women, and trans people. But he's against gender self-ID. Should we make strategic alliances with him and his supporters? Or just some of them? How does that work? How does it build the kind of unity we need to defeat all gender hierarchy?
There's a history here, as you know. Some white feminists made strategic alliances with racist segregationists in agitating for women's voting rights. Some feminists fighting for reproductive rights ignored the forced sterilization imposed on Native, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Black and other oppressed women, treating those as distractions from the abortion issue. These things weakened the movement for women's liberation, and progressive politics overall right up until our time.
Now, woman-hating fascism and racist fundamentalism are on the rise around the world. IMO, single issue strategic alliances with today's Trump loving, white nationalist, anti-abortion conservatives are not just wrong but deeply self-defeating.
This seems weirdly equivalent on the left to QAnon on the right. Both live in a fever-dream of monsters that hate and want to murder everyone and everything they love, whether it be women or men, black or white, equality or freedom, their planet or their country, and so on. Both fanatasize that their tribe is under existential threat, in other words, and try to purge/cancel any suggestion that their imaginations are overwrought. So, ironically, both are in fact driven by the very agenda of the enemies they so passionately hate -- anything the enemy supports must be opposed or suppressed, anything the enemy opposes must be upheld or embraced.
It's a political/cultural sickness, on either side.
Exactly. There's a big difference between average conservatives and far right white nationalists. Ronald Reagan, Liz Truss, and skinheads could all be classified as on the right, but they have little or no affinity for one another. I see Eliza's point about how disavowing fringe right groups could suggest an association that doesn't exist. It's a tricky problem, but it seems that no matter what we do, much of three mainstream press, at least in the US, will continue to falsely paint the GC movement as far right.
The fight for the foundational category of womanhood.
Unless that fight is won, secured and established, all other battles, struggles, debates in pursuit of women’s liberation will fail as there will be no such thing as 'women' to liberate.
Right now nothing else matters. Victory requires the following:
Women are born. Not assigned, not a choice but observed at birth. Female.
No cis- prefix suggesting womanhood is performative, adoptive or can in any way be an achievement.
No male can ever be a woman.
Until those conditions are met all else is a diversion, null and void, built on a foundation of sand.
As we know, gender ideologues and their corporate puppet masters will do whatever they can to paint the reality-based gender critical movement as bigoted, right wing and conservative. This is false. The truth is that we are organized around objectively progressive, democratic, left principles: no one is born in the wrong body; end gender medicalization of children; no men in women’s spaces, etc. We should be open to working with anyone who agrees with these principled, progressive demands.
Few people are 100% left/progressive or 100% conservative. In this, as in other progressive movements, we start from a solid position and then seek to involve as many people as possible who agree with us. If someone thinks of themself as conservative but finds they agree with our objectively progressive position on this issue, then great. The contradiction is theirs, not ours.
So, there is no problem with a self-described conservative attending a gender critical picket, an anti war demonstration, a labor support rally or whatever. That’s how people grow and change. What counts is that each of these events is progressive in nature and, if anything, by joining in, a conservative person is coming over to our side, not the other way around.
It’s not that we are prioritizing working with or reaching out to conservatives, or even “working across the isle”. It’s that we start from principled progressive demands then welcome the participation of any and all who agree with those demands.
If you are at all Gender critical, we face such an uphill struggle for our voices to be heard that it's monumentally depressing to have some kick down others, in the same side of the fight.
Baroness Nicholson, here in the UK is fighting hard for women and posesses 'establishment' clout. We, undoubtedly are on difference political spectrums but by God she works hard for us.
I have had to realise that we need to take allies where we find them.
In Scotland Self ID is about to be pushed through regardless of public opinion. We don't have the luxury of purity politics, we need everyone pulling together .
Don’t ask permission, don’t explain, don’t apologize. Just clearly state your own position. Women need separate women-only spaces in public. That’s it. If some right-winger agrees, great. The more people who support this, the better.
I'm 100% behind the person in question, and attend all the meetings/rallies. I really don't understand why prominent figures can't just support each other. It's frustrating and disappointing
Can you possibly tell me simply/openly what Eliza Mondegreen is talking about (ie some central event/person being obliquely referred to)? I get the global political landscape; but what's this about? Thanks in advance if you can/will.
Sorry, Zelda. A good write-up is here: https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-21/
Addendum: It was funny, because I had plucked a tweet out a week ago to illustrate the trans-flag issue, and posted on my Substack. I had no context for it (except what the photo was saying was perfectly clear); and it turned out to have originated from that Helen Joyce post. I need to go back and add Joyce's explanation plus the women's names.
Posie Parker. She hosted an event at which some "far right" bros showed up at to make some political hay out of. Some dogmatic feminists objected and called for some "purity tests" - which Posie, and Eliza apparently, and many others quite reasonably object to.
Posie - and Kathleen Stock and others - has quite reasonably argued that much of the transgender clusterfuck is due to a great deal of rot in feminism itself. Mote, beam ...
The thing is, everything and everyone is now “far right”. I hate that term. To the trans mob we are “far right”. What is “far right”? I think we also need to stop participating in this need to define, and stop pretending everyone on the “far right” is a woman hater. I see more hate in the pro porn, pro surrogacy, pro prostitution left. It won’t matter how many times we denounce any group or person. It won’t change their minds. TRAs love to gaslight and debase us. Never apologize and never explain. It just gives them ammunition to continue to attack. They see it as a weakness. I’m personally done apologizing.
Sorry TheResistance, I wasn't sure who you were replying to. I'm ex-far-left, religious minority, dissident second-wave feminist...and now referred to as "far right" (and worse) by my nation's sociopath prime minister (Trudeau in Canada)! So, hahaha, the term long ago lost any meaning. My reading of Steersman was that he's using it tongue-in-cheek as well (unless I'm wrong). Crazy times!
Yeah - that's why I put "far right" in quotes.
Such epithets are sort of like the proverbial "race card":
"A tool of the intellectually weak and lazy when they cannot counter a logical argument or factual data"
https://twitter.com/adamcarolla/status/1421138069026074628
"Troll" is another typical entry in the same sweepstakes ...
Thanks, Eliza and Steersman! (I had to look up the mote/beam reference.)
🙂 De Nada; share the wealth, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition... 😉
But speaking of which, you might be interested in a couple of Substack posts by "feminist" philosopher Kathleen Stock. Her "Welcome" and "Abolish the dream of gender abolition" in particular.
She's one of the few feminists who's willing to consider that feminist dogma has contributed substantially to the transgender clusterfuck - excuse my french but that is exactly what it is.
Somewhat apropos of which, you might also be interested in my further elaborations on that theme:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
Between this post here; and the Helen Joyce post; and your Heather Heying post (and comments); my brain is done for the moment. AND I need to read a transcript from 2017 that originally got the SOGI123 trans-nightmare into Vancouver schools and do a post.
[That reminds me, my husband and sons gave me a gift of an hour at a shooting range for my birthday and I need to cash it in the MOMENT this civic election is done and behind me.]
Cheers, All!
Thanks for taking a look at my Heying post. But know what you mean about "brain is done" - devils in the details, and no end of those. Someone once quipped that whenever someone goes to change something, they inevitably find it connected to everything else in the universe. 🙂
But, not to overload you, as a fellow Canuck you might be interested in another of my posts on "Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
Which sadly includes Canada's own. I had written a lengthy submission to Statistics Canada - link in the essay - objecting to their own "capture" by gender ideology. Been trying to promote something in the way of protest outside their offices - maybe burn the effigy of the Minister in Charge? 😉 Certainly something in the way of an open letter to them. Thoughts and suggestions most welcome. 🙂
Thank you Eliza. Fever or not, this untangles so much and goes to the heart of the broader issues at stake. Our society has lost the practice of tolerance, so we become adrift when conflicts like this arise. In a way, both sides are trapped by the fraying of the democratic fabric. Those trying to distance their voices from the "far right" association SHOULD be able to define their stance as feminists and leftists passionately and clearly. This should be their right in a democratic society. And technically, they have that right. But a toxic mix of social media and the ubiquity of cell phones at public events makes this impossible in practice. The "public square" is no longer a stage for an event experienced in real time by those present, but can be presented in a myriad of ways through any filter. Reality is shaped, enhanced, and curated rather than simply experienced. Technology has changed what we mean by "free speech" and has also created a soft authoritarianism that we are all quite familiar with. For those on the other side of this, who come to the frontlines from "a thousand individual paths," being forced to denounce anyone who shares their goals feels coercive and also anti-democratic.
Personally, I have found myself to be very persuaded by the arguments both sides have presented. And like you, I have found words like "left, right, progressive, conservative" to have less and less meaning, so I am less pulled into any ideological definition of my stance than I might have been at another time in my life. I feel very sad about this rift between people who I admire, who have all done so much in this fight.
Quite agree on the "both sides" thing. Though it's maybe more a case of neither side is actually listening to the other one. "Nobody is right if everyone else is wrong" - a refrain from a song of 50 years ago for any young whippersnappers in the crowd ... 😉
But something that UK/US lawyer & philosopher Elizabeth Finne had elaborated on in some detail in her rather brilliant 2018 Quillette essay on "The Tyranny of the Subjective".
See my own essay for a link and relevant quote therefrom:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
A wonderful thoughtful essay.
My own feeling is that this split is not just about tactics. It's a real split. On one side are feminists who still believe in leftism, who think the support of the left for gender ideology was a strange and confused aberration, and if we just "PUUUULLLL" as one of those feminists said in a brilliant and hilarious essay, eventually we'll return the left to its once reasonably promising state.
On the other side are feminists who have come to believe that the left's support for gender ideology exposed something really rotten at the core of leftism, and there's no going back after seeing that rotten core exposed. I'm on this latter side and I'm not doing the genuflecting anymore about how "OF COURSE I'm on the left but...". I'm not on the left anymore. I can now see that the right is not full of the monsters I once thought were there, and the monsters that are there are in fact less numerous and mostly less dangerous than the left monsters about whose existence I had previously hardly dreamt.
I think Group A of feminists believe the ship of leftism is listing badly but is still basically sound. Group B believe the ship is sinking like a rock and they are willing to clamber on to whatever flotsam and jetsam is available to get away from it. It's not *safe* on the flotsam and jetsam. The flotsam and jetsam is not a permanent answer. We might still drown anyway. But clinging to the ship as it goes down is certain death.
Same!! You’ve articulated my thoughts completely.
The left is the side of porn, surrogacy and prostitution. I don’t see them as the good guys any more. Done pretending to fit in with them.
Great analysis!
In my opinion, fear of being associated with the Right keeps most people on the Left from even entertaining the thought that there could be any problem with transing kids. It's only when someone we love gets sucked into the hole that we start frantically researching this phenomenon and find out how insidious it is. This is an opportunity for people to try to find common ground with people outside of our tribes for something that's much more important. Thank you, Eliza.
Ok, this first sentence of BowWow's comment. I couldn't say it any better. Stop being afraid of being right wing. Transing kids is a right and wrong issue, not a left and right issue. Don't be afraid, don't let people smear you. Is it ok to put a 12 year old on the path to sterility? No. Categorically. No.
I truly appreciate this writing! And ... in the future, I hope we can become clear on how using 'radical' in opposite ways undermines feminism. If the right is 'radicalized,' meaning the people mentioned are *extreme,* then radical feminism sounds like 'extreme feminism.' But that's not what it means -- radical for feminists means *getting to the root* of the issue, to fix it at its beginning so as to not have to chop at it unendingly. Radical feminists like me cringe when our word is used to describe those who are clearly not us. Rachel Maddow does this, and in the doing positions herself as a leftist moderate, reasonable ... which is the group that got us into this mess once the big money was thrown at genderism.
You've hit, nicely, on an important point: feminism has a Purity problem. Now if we had venues to choose from we could nod with civility to Tucker and his ilk and move on. (Kara Dansky of WoLF reached a massive audience and made her points well in a surprisingly friendly interview on Tucker Carlson's show.) But we can't. And it's either isolating feminists or it's making us make peace with those who share a view on an issue and not much else. We KNOW that isolation does not create sufficient impetus for wreaking change in the dominant culture, so why are we being told it's the only strategy we can follow? Purity is all I can see. To help counter it, I post what I can in mainstream info-social media, plus I've moved to Gettr -- as have many radical feminists! We have carved out space wherein we reach others without the purity problem looming so viciously.
Re: the confusion about what "radical" in radical feminist means: When I testified publicly against a bill in my state (WA) that escalates the trend of men being in women's prisons, I was trying to work with a lobbyist representing the press, whose organization was half-heartedly opposing the bill as one which restricts the public's access to critical information about the sex of incarcerated people. I was part of a panel organized by WoLF. Employees of WoLF also testified, identifying themselves as radical feminists. This lobbyist later said to me, "why did they have to say they were RADICAL feminists?" He was concerned that this made us look bad, an image black-clad "antifa feminists" or something. I had to explain to him that radical refers to root, not way out in left field, and not associated with violence. But most of the public have no idea about this.
Good for you, and WoLF, on the testifying - direct action of one sort or another is, apparently, the only way to get the attention of public, press, and politicians.
Somewhat apropos of which and ICYMI, a recent comment of mine on GC News about sloppy language in an article that Lee had linked to:
https://gcnews.substack.com/p/thursday-september-29-2022/comment/9397160
It's basically my open letter to the author of an article at the Washington Examiner that talked about "allowing transgender female athletes to compete in women's sports." What a fraud that phrase is - they're not "transgender female athletes", they're male transvestites, guys in drag.
Absolutely love your comment. Not terribly impressed with GC News. I get most of the most valuable information from comments, and there are generally none on-site because they link most articles off-site.
My comment at GC News? Thanks.
Not sure how effective my "shot across the bows" of the Washington Examiner will be - I certainly haven't had any expressions yet of undying gratitude from the author of that article 😉 - but it seemed important to at least put her on notice.
But I find GC News quite useful for keeping tabs on the depredations of transactivists and their ilk, although it too has its limitations - I had been blocked there for a week or so for challenging the gender-critical mantra that "sex is immutable". It ain't - at least it doesn't comport with the standard biological definitions that are endorsed by various biological journals and the Oxford Dictionary. Apropos of which, you may have some interest in my recent kick at the "What is a woman?" kitty:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
But more broadly and relative to your earlier "feminism has a Purity problem" - which I largely agree with - many people, including many feminists, are starting to recognize that feminism has a great many problems, many of which have contributed mightily to the whole transgender clusterfuck. No doubt there is a great deal of justification for feminism as a political project, although that has generally been attended by no end of rather unscientific claptrap - outright Lysenkoism, in fact.
But fairly decent article here by Helen Dale - which had been touted in a recent tweet by Helen Joyce - that provides some justification for that view in her review of "Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century":
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/feminising-feminism/
Of particular note are these zingers that I had quoted in a comment on Dale's Substack:
"counterblast to the braindead feminism"; "sincere attempt to anchor feminism in reality"; "what no feminist theorist has done before: take biology seriously"; and "Cordelia Fine, a philosopher now notorious for trying to edit science to fit in with feminism."
https://helendale.substack.com/p/around-the-traps-ii/comment/9517083
I had also attempted, once again, to correct Dale's apparent misunderstanding of statistics, but I don't think she is terribly "amused" ... 😉
I'm a lifelong liberal democrat but I have had several far right friends--good people with well thought out positions that I just happened to disagree with. Just talk to them--you don't have to agree with everything, but the discussion may give your own position more depth. Also, the "right wing" is as diverse as the left, not a monolith of nazis and racists to disparage.
100%
This same tool was utilized against Bernie Sanders. He did renounce ‘Bernie Bros’, despite little evidence his supporters were attacking women who supported Hillary, irl. Hillary was already known for her slander campaign against ‘Obama Boys’ when running against Obama, for those who remembered it. It ended up hurting his campaign, because he basically acknowledged misogyny in his campaign. I volunteered for him in Florida in 2016. The only misogyny I saw was online, which can easily be faked with enough money to pay online trolls.
Baloney Bernie Bros didn't attack Hillary followers. I got the horde on Twitter telling I was too stupid to be alive along with threats from Dave Sirota's flying monkeys. Women in Brooklyn were afraid to wear Hillary buttons only to find out that a majority voted for Hillary. Women were too unnerved to publicly declare support. And who can forget gauntlet of Bernie Bros screaming obsceneties at women and children leaving a Hillary rally and Bernie refusing to sanction his followers' behavior? Or throwing $1 bills at Hillary's departing car and screaming "whore"? Absolutely gross behavior.
Brilliantly put.
Eventually we have to realize that the "left" we identified with was always going to take us down this path. Supporting the left but not the TRA movement is like supporting pushing a boulder off a cliff but not supporting it falling to the ground.
Thank you, my thoughts were along these lines but muddled, you've straightened them out.
I think of Vaçlav Havel and his colleagues deciding to live as if they were free - to fight tyranny we all should do so, as Iranian and Afghan women are showing.
So when people with opinions we deplore show up we must fight their opinions, without excluding those people - how else will hearts and minds be changed, if not theirs, then the hearts and minds of those watching. Intolerance breeds contempt. They go low, we go high.
I re-read and delete a lot of tweets before sending - if it's personal, mean, ad hominem, it goes in the bin. As you say: "carry yourself the way you wish your own political opponents had carried themselves, despite disagreements".
I value the knowledge and standing of those women who have been in this fight for years. But I don't know what they would have others do, women who have never been political, academic, in 'the movement'. Getting women to speak about this political issue may persuade them to speak about other issues. Women new to political organising will make mistakes... advice is probably welcome, denigration and instruction probably isn't. And no-one is telling anyone not to speak.
This isnt just about women, and it doesn't belong to just women. Safeguarding, privacy, and the ability to recognise reality matter to everyone, male or female, young or old, whatever political colour. 'The movement', whoever is in it, can carry on doing what they do, in parallel, participating, whatever... and may become central when this war is over, who knows. The rest of us can't wait for permission.
Excellent comment!
I think this is the most important topic the GC movement/not-a-movement has to deal with. Bigger than WPATH. Bigger than Mermaids. Bigger than education, puberty-blockers, or sports. Bigger even than "gender-affirming" surgery. So, thank you for, with your amazing and characteristic fearlessness, stepping into the breach.
There are no rules in this game, aside from the rules we may happen to bring from our particular sociopolitical context. There are no rules because there is no officiating body. Everyone is bringing their own definitions of the rules to the field. Some people are saying "THESE ARE THE RULES!!!" and others are saying "NO, THOSE AREN'T THE RULES, THESE ARE!!!"
But no claim about "the rules" is correct.
And anyone who claims to own the right to set "the rules" is playing power politics.
As you point out, many players in this free-for-all like to believe that "this open society thing still works." While that vision is more appealing to me than its competitors and I would argue for classical liberalism over any other political system, I'm fairly sure that there's a sizable number who disagree with that perspective. In my view, liberalism is aspirational, at best. The presuppositions that ground one's principles are both unshakeable and, generally speaking, very hard to justify.
The post-modernist deconstructionist crew has at least one thing right: power is central to everything in society. And those who control the levers of power are best able to define the rules. Dear reader, in case you haven't noticed yet, you are not one of those individuals.
The question we must ask is what do those with their hands on those levers really want? Hint: it's NOT losing their access to those levers.
One of the ways the controlling elite in multinational power circles keep the hearts and minds of the rest of us in our state of happy slavery is to leverage the basic human tendency to reduce everything to a simplistic binary. *Of course* society is divided into "left" and "right"! That makes it MUCH simpler to keep everyone in check. Please humor me while I take a closer look at "left" and "right."
Let's start with morality. Is that a characteristic of the left, or the right? I'm sure we all know how people on both sides will answer: we have morality on *our* side. It's OUR CAUSE that's right, just, good, etc.
Nobody - and I mean nobody - can justify that answer.
How can I be so sure? Because I've looked very closely, for a very long time, at the possible answers to the following question: "What is the ultimate justification for holding any specific set of moral principles?" I've read many brilliant, erudite, learned scholars (some even still living!) on this topic and, surprise, surprise, they all have opinions. In some cases, those opinions are very well-argued and persuasively presented. The vast majority are not. And the arguments continue apace.
Because there is no single, universally accepted and well-grounded answer. There are only opinions and, as one 20th C. moral philosopher put it, "Hooray for my side!"
Consequently, I have very little patience for all the self-righteous bloviating about politics. Most of it's just one step up from the opinions you will get on a car-lot, from a car salesman. Yes, they ALL have something to sell. And the number 1 reason they'll give you for buying their brand is that "It's right, good, just, decent ... aka morally correct." Press them a bit and it dissolves into, "that's what my mom and dad believed and what I've always been taught."
The famous left/right dichotomy is just a mask for the good/bad dichotomy. And that, most often, is just a mask for "my team/the other team."
Humans love binaries. Our opponents in this (apparently binary) struggle, are fueled by a Great Truth - binaries are problematic. Why is biological sex such a problem for them? It's binary. Could they be right? Well, let's see ... shall we say "yes" or "no"? Hmmm ... maybe they're *partly* right. Maybe this whole debate is afflicted with the curse that they've correctly identified: our very systems of language and meaning are organized around socially constructed categories that serve the interests of the power elite. Maybe we should be a lot more cautious about dividing the world into two kinds of people.
I'm a huge fan of your writing, but I disagree about this. As crucial as the struggle over gender identity ideology is, it doesn't exist on its own, in a vacuum. White nationalists--fascists--are bidding to take over the US. Their agenda includes: 1. the old form of misogynist gender, with rigid gender norms for men and women; 2. massive white supremacist oppression; 3. rule by fundamentalist Christian patriarchs, enforced by the state and street violence. Do we think "It can't happen here"?
Fascism, among other things, is the epitome of male supremacy. How can we not denounce it and oppose it's rise at every turn? Are mostly-white feminist circles going to (again) consider marginalizing the existential interests of Black people and other people of color in the hopes of somehow advancing under the white nationalists' radar--or worse, with their help?
This course seems to me to be wrong, not only morally, but strategically. Right now millions of anti-racist and anti-fascist women (and men) of all nationalities already wonder if gender critical/abolitionist views should be considered suspect because they sometimes "sound like" the Right. Whose support is more important in the long run--theirs, or fair-weather white nationalist, misogynist fake "allies"?
What should we actually expect to happen to us afterwards, if we allow fascists to use gender issues as a wedge to rise to power?
Despite the ugly behavior of many brainwashed gender-besotted leftists and progressives, I think we need to differentiate our politics from the Right more urgently than ever. I would argue that, even when the going is hard, the only just and responsible way forward is to closely link the struggle for women's liberation--liberation of billions of women all over the world--with the struggle against imperialism, fascism, racism and homophobia.
I don't anywhere say not to oppose the rise of far-right movements but that the way we carry ourselves in the political/civic arena should be all the repudiation anybody needs. Denunciations don't help: they create an association that does not exist and replicate a broken politics of purity. I do think we should be open to limited strategic alliances with conservatives, but that's not the same thing as working with the far right, only working with people we disagree with on many other things but agree with on this one thing (wrong to teach this to kids in schools as fact, wrong to send kids down medical pathway, etc.)
On a general level, I don't think powerful far-right movements can be effectively opposed only by carrying ourselves in a particular way. Active resistance to violent, misogynistic, racist politics doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with purity politics; it has to do with survival and fighting oppression. Like Iranian women are doing right now.
We sometimes find ourselves supporting particular practical measures that are also supported by people on the racist, misogynist Right, for their own reasons. It happens. That's not the basis for even limited strategic alliances, IMO. Tactical overlap, maybe?
Dripping with scorn, Putin just blasted gender identity and sex denial during a major war mongering speech. Don't we have to make sure our goals for society are clearly differentiated from his? On the other side, the Iranian regime endorses gender identity, and imposes medical transition for gay people because they are "born in the wrong body." Shouldn't we demand that gender identity ideologists explain why they aren't on the same page as that? These aren't some kind of purity politics "gotcha" questions; they're about what kind of future we are fighting for in a dangerous world.
Those are extreme examples. But how about co-sponsoring friendly conferences with people who organized for years to overturn Roe? Where do we draw the line? Right now, a US conservative is somebody who supports Trump authoritarianism, endorses separating migrant families, claims the last election was stolen, and is trying to take away voting rights from Black people. Trump is a racist; he hates women, and trans people. But he's against gender self-ID. Should we make strategic alliances with him and his supporters? Or just some of them? How does that work? How does it build the kind of unity we need to defeat all gender hierarchy?
There's a history here, as you know. Some white feminists made strategic alliances with racist segregationists in agitating for women's voting rights. Some feminists fighting for reproductive rights ignored the forced sterilization imposed on Native, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Black and other oppressed women, treating those as distractions from the abortion issue. These things weakened the movement for women's liberation, and progressive politics overall right up until our time.
Now, woman-hating fascism and racist fundamentalism are on the rise around the world. IMO, single issue strategic alliances with today's Trump loving, white nationalist, anti-abortion conservatives are not just wrong but deeply self-defeating.
This seems weirdly equivalent on the left to QAnon on the right. Both live in a fever-dream of monsters that hate and want to murder everyone and everything they love, whether it be women or men, black or white, equality or freedom, their planet or their country, and so on. Both fanatasize that their tribe is under existential threat, in other words, and try to purge/cancel any suggestion that their imaginations are overwrought. So, ironically, both are in fact driven by the very agenda of the enemies they so passionately hate -- anything the enemy supports must be opposed or suppressed, anything the enemy opposes must be upheld or embraced.
It's a political/cultural sickness, on either side.
Have you considered that "both sides" might, possibly, be wrong?
Exactly. There's a big difference between average conservatives and far right white nationalists. Ronald Reagan, Liz Truss, and skinheads could all be classified as on the right, but they have little or no affinity for one another. I see Eliza's point about how disavowing fringe right groups could suggest an association that doesn't exist. It's a tricky problem, but it seems that no matter what we do, much of three mainstream press, at least in the US, will continue to falsely paint the GC movement as far right.
This is a ludicrous fantasy.
Right now there is only one fight.
The fight for the foundational category of womanhood.
Unless that fight is won, secured and established, all other battles, struggles, debates in pursuit of women’s liberation will fail as there will be no such thing as 'women' to liberate.
Right now nothing else matters. Victory requires the following:
Women are born. Not assigned, not a choice but observed at birth. Female.
No cis- prefix suggesting womanhood is performative, adoptive or can in any way be an achievement.
No male can ever be a woman.
Until those conditions are met all else is a diversion, null and void, built on a foundation of sand.
Right now there is only one fight.
As we know, gender ideologues and their corporate puppet masters will do whatever they can to paint the reality-based gender critical movement as bigoted, right wing and conservative. This is false. The truth is that we are organized around objectively progressive, democratic, left principles: no one is born in the wrong body; end gender medicalization of children; no men in women’s spaces, etc. We should be open to working with anyone who agrees with these principled, progressive demands.
Few people are 100% left/progressive or 100% conservative. In this, as in other progressive movements, we start from a solid position and then seek to involve as many people as possible who agree with us. If someone thinks of themself as conservative but finds they agree with our objectively progressive position on this issue, then great. The contradiction is theirs, not ours.
So, there is no problem with a self-described conservative attending a gender critical picket, an anti war demonstration, a labor support rally or whatever. That’s how people grow and change. What counts is that each of these events is progressive in nature and, if anything, by joining in, a conservative person is coming over to our side, not the other way around.
It’s not that we are prioritizing working with or reaching out to conservatives, or even “working across the isle”. It’s that we start from principled progressive demands then welcome the participation of any and all who agree with those demands.
See also https://brucelesnick.substack.com/p/with-gender-ideology-the-left-is