The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again – this time at the Anarchist Bookfair – and there seems to be more polemic than ever around the proprosed Gender Recognition Act, I am posting it again here.
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This week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I’m also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being used by cynically by certain feminists in these milieux, whose main politics over the last decades has been to whip up hatred against trans* people, to try to gather a crowd behind them. I know that quite a few people who are currently lining up behind the likes of Julia Long (or who at the very least refuse to recognise the deeply divisive positions and gestures that people like her are taking and making) read my wall. My hope is that some of the stuff below will make you see this differently.
1. There has been a small but vocal scene of feminists around London – people like Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Chester, Julia Long – whose politics over the last couple of decades has centred on making the argument that trans* women aren’t women. A good proportion of these people’s opinions go further though: they claim that gender reassignment surgery is nothing other than self-mutilation; that trans people demanding protection from oppression are “male rights activists” (that is, aligned with certain far-right movements); and that the main aim of trans* people’s lives is to undermine the gains of the women’s movement. But what has been peculiar to this politics – and I only know about London here, but I hear the same from other places – is that its mode of expression has been to attack trans* people themselves. Far from making theoretical interventions or arguments, far from entering into conversations, this group of feminists have gone about instituting their politics by publicly outing, doxxing, and monstering trans people. They do this in a context (and take full advantage of this context) in which transphobia predominates in the mainstream press and many other institutions of civil society. In more immediate social interactions their politics consistently and deliberately misgender all trans people they come into contact with. Ultimately their politics amounts to the idea that trans*-women, in their very being, undermine feminist movements, and they wish to undermine them in every way possible, playing opportunistically on wider social transphobias.
2. It is significant that this pattern has been known to feminism in the context of debates over sex work. On that question certain feminists have attacked women sex workers (most prominently on Reclaim the Night marches.) They do this instead of negotiating the dialectical tensions of labour, commodity, libido, possession, and exchange under patriarchal capitalism. Instead the sex worker herself becomes the scapegoat and centre of gravity of the entire system. If only she can be done away with (and with no particular care for how she came to be selling sex), the whole system will apparently simplify itself. The whole thing is slightly bizarre – akin to blaming proletarians in a munitions factory for a society founded on perpetual war, rather than blaming the society based on perpetual war for the fact that certain proletarians find themselves having to produce munitions. This isn’t to say there aren’t important and nuanced debates to be had about sex work, safety of workers, the consequence of sex being sold on the most anarchic open market for all women, and so on. Although there is an irony that feminists whose political movement arose from hatred of the “it can wait until after the revolution” now take precisely the same attitude to sex workers merely defending their physical safety. This is all slightly by the by. But the same brutality of attitude, which leads to certain feminists putting the blame of sexual exploitation at the feet of sex workers, which leads them to attack their very existence as scapegoat, has been transferred wholesale to how some feminists are treating trans* people. This has now been going on for very many years.
3. In the discussions that have surrounded the Gender Recognition Act, those women who have for many years been aggressively transphobic have been trying to reposition themselves to win support from other women and feminists who might not really agree with the extremity and violence of their positions. They have started to talk about defending civil society institutions, and about having debates. To many trans* people in London it is clear that these aims are not true. Indeed last week’s shitshow of a “debate” mainly involved slinging insults and platforming people whose only point ever is to say that trans* women are men (indeed people who have somehow made careers out of this!) There are questions about civil society, and about womanhood, raised by the act. The trouble is that these particular feminists are not interested in them beyond a very specific, outmoded and divisive line.
4. There are genuinely some people who (mainly on the internet) take an “against nature” position in the trans* community, and who respond to anyone questioning trans* discourse – or even the primacy of discourse in trans* scenes – as an existential threat that can only be met with violence. There are certain individuals who send death threats, punch people, shout “kill all TERFs” etc. Apart from these people are the enormous majority of trans* people who are consistently in conversations, discussions, social movements, reflections with all sorts of people (and alone) about questions of sex, gender, sexuality, nature, history. The transmisogynist and transphobic feminists consistently attempt to play up the extent of this violent, silencing culture, because they know that ultimately plays out in their favour. This behaviour is analogous to Zionists who play up the anti-Semitism of small elements of the Arab population to justify the violence meted out by Israel against all Palestinians. They know that it is ultimately beneficial to their position to claim that they are being silenced and attacked, that all discussion is made impossible. Often their aim has been to provoke this situation (for example by holding meetings where the only speakers are those who routinely claim that all trans* women are men.) The events this week in London, when divisions were cynically sown in this way – people like Julia Long know that their position is ultimately stronger, that their hatred of trans* people and violence against them appears more legitimate and more reasonable when people are most divided. It is for this reason that these people have for so long practiced such a highly antagonistic politics. But none of this really helps women, trans* or otherwise. At the same time it is really a terrible shame for most trans* people that the time they need to defend themselves has collided with what can only be described as a crisis in the politics of oppression, where (turbo-charged by the internet) significant numbers of people advocate nihilist violence against their oppressors to shore up the community of the oppressed. But this trend seems thankfully to be waning. It is a strange irony too that an all-out-war has broken out only where these internet cultures have come into contact with those feminists who first tried to drag the movement into communitarianism.
5. One frequent line of argument that is common is the “gender” is all post-modern nonsense. But to think that the transformations in social relations that have taken place in the last 30 years can be done away with through the power of a demystifying gaze, which does away with the ideology of discourses only to rediscover nature, is to miss the point. We are without a doubt living through a sexual revolution – one as great as those that preceded it, that of the 20 years following the French Revolution, that of Weimar Germany (and Austria) in the wake of psychoanalysis, and that of the 1970s. And indeed it is the revolution of gender itself. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy. When I try to think about the early decades of psychoanalysis it is impossible to think about the great advances it offered people in thinking about their sexuality, about understanding the sexual lives of children, without at the same time thinking of its victims: of Dora, of the children subject to the prevalent paedophilia of Western Culture over whom psychoanalysis had thrown the darkest cloak (until Ferenczi’s late interventions). But to take up the position that just refuted it as pseudoscience – the position of someone like Karl Kraus – is to sort of miss the point. The great historical movement of psychoanalysis (which remains unfinished) was already transforming people’s lives, people’s self-understandings and self-misunderstandings, people’s relations and relationships. So too is the case with something like Butler’s view of gender, which has now entered the everyday. And whether you agree with it or not is no longer the issue, because questions of humanity are not staked either for or against it but within it and through it. When I was teaching classes of 18 year old humanities students a lot of them had read Butler while at school. Most of those who hadn’t were at least aware of the discourse, and were familiar with replicated or bowdlerised forms of it online. It was just part of their sexual growing up. And sometimes I think of the old arguments against the psychoanalytic revolution: that it left the continent of Europe deep in anxiety, packed full of people narcissistically introspecting, discovering uneasily, and obsessing over, their own neuroses. And perhaps if psychoanalysis left in its wake a generation of neurotics, then theories of gender leave a generation of gender disphorics. But it is unclear to me that they are any less well as a result. All of this isn’t to say that something like a fiendish Krausian rejection isn’t interesting, but it is nonetheless brutal, polarising, as Benjamin would say: destructive. But the Karl Krauses of today’s sexual revolution have none of his style; they are experts in the brutishness of brutality alone. They refuse even to accept the divisive effects of their own polemical skepticism, and refuse to notice the bodies trodden underfoot.
6. Perhaps one of the arguments used by transphobic feminists that I find myself most sympathetic to is the idea that we need to return to a conversation of nature. The claim stands against the idea that questions of gender and sexual identity are entirely matters of society and consciousness, in a world that has apparently (at least in these spheres) overcome the forces of natural necessity, the expressions of nature, and natural divisions. But where I absolutely disagree is with the sort of nature that is invoked by these people: it is nature viewed with the taxonomic gaze of Linnaeus. The point of this thinking is to show, just as Linnaeus tried to do with animal species, that sexual divisions are eternal and unchangeable, and thus can be given names. It is to invoke precisely those figures like Goethe’s “eternal feminine” that feminism initially set out to undermine. Absolutely no regard is given to questions of sexual development, transformations in sexuality in childhood, puberty, maturity or old age. No discussion of how socialisation and historical catastrophe might affect this. Instead all of this is ignored in favour of the sovereignty of the persistence of the genital, in its purely fleshly form. After the arguments I had this week I went back and read Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex and Mitchell’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis – two of the brightest stars in the constellations of the second wave. What I love about these books is their views of nature (and in Firestone’s case, where she is most indebted to late Engels, quite polemically) as something utterly dynamic, as a world of constant change, modification, and dialectical force, utterly unrecognisable to Linnaean fixation. This thinking shows up the will to fixate nature – the brutal domination of nature – as that which bourgeois thinking has mistaken for the mastery of nature by an enlightened nature that would lead it to reconciliation. This fixated and fixating view of sexual difference ultimately disregards all questions of sexual development (and decline), and in questions of consciousness it willingly swaps out the sensitivity and nuances of developmental psychology for the stark fruitlessness of evolutionary biology.
7. Amongst responses to the Gender Recognition Act are a set of arguments that have been virally circulating on the internet about how it is set to roll back the victories of the second wave. Most of these arguments are patent nonsense, relying on convincing readers (with no evidence) that legal gender reassignment isn’t already possible (the Act would just streamline these processes, and would not require the sign-off of doctors.) But more than this, these arguments often rely on a total revisionism about the gains of the feminist movement. Reading them one might quickly believe that women in the 1970s spent their time arguing for single sex toilets and women’s prisons. Meanwhile these arguments have a habit of eliding the work done by many trans* people continuing the best of the struggles of the second wave, in organisations like Sisters Uncut, fighting for better domestic violence services. Similarly on questions of sexual violence these viral internet ventures seem to take a step back. Far from the perspective of the second wave that so often saw press sensationalism around street rapists and unknown attackers as often used as a mask for not dealing with the prevalence of sexual violence in the home and amongst known men, the sensationalist figures have been reinvented as the spectre of a sexually violent man who becomes trans* only to gain access to women. This is not to say that street rapists and the like are not real consequences of patriarchal society that need a feminist response. But it is to say that the rolling back of the perspective that finally after decades won out against the marital exemption for rape into a sort of tabloid sensationalism is a step backwards. And more than this, it is terrifying that this sort of sensationalism is used to justify punishing all trans* people, not least when there is absolutely no evidence that this behaviour is any more prominent in the trans* community.
8. Perhaps what has been most grotesque in the last week is the willingness of people to talk explicitly and aggressively about trans* people’s bodies – about bodies they don’t know in any sense other than seeing a clothed photograph, and about which they have no real right to speak. This is matched with the cruelty that wants to point to every moment when those bodies might be most uncomfortable, when they might not “pass”, when they betray a difficult history or an unfulfilled wish, when they express a neurosis that they try to compensate against or disguise. I have been so upset by how friends’ bodies have been spoken about – and all just to try to elicit an angry reaction from them at best and to destroy them at worst.
All of this isn’t to say that no conversation should be had. Nor is it to say that that gender is some easy solution (and I challenge you to find a single trans* person who thinks it is.) The point, however, is that at their best theories of gender – in their natural-historical, dialectical elaboration – are capable of saying “well sex isn’t that easy or simple either.” But the point is really to give some background and hopefully some understanding about what is going on. I know lots of people feel uneasy too and want to have conversations, and that they feel silenced. The best suggestion I have – other than joining in existing discussions, forming reading groups, or getting involved in struggles together – is not to line up behind people like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Miranda Yardley, Jen Izaakson, and the rest. Strangely their politics of hate wants you to be silenced too – they want to leave the field divided so that their hatred can win out (as it did in London this week.) Similarly, quite a few people in the last week have responded to me by simply denying the violence and effects of transphobic feminisms. I would encourage everyone who says this to go and talk to some trans* people about their effects it has on their lives. Why not just ask them about it? And find out how a discussion with them can happen humanely without all of this shit. This is quite the opposite of organising meetings where the one thing the platform speakers have in common are repeated press claims that trans* women are men – never mind acting all naive afterwards when it causes shit to kick off. It will require some savviness to work out who is involved in what position and why – but what is needed now is to be savvy, and to not think that Julia Long presents the only option for “opening debate” while she in fact closes it down. It is also true that the Gender Rights Act has the potential to affect more people than just trans* people. This really ought not be responded to by publishing outright lies, provocations, and viral content, only to conclude “let’s have a comradely debate,” by which point the “debate” is already utterly uncomradely.