Photo credit DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images
The trouble with Left-wing activists telling people to fuck off and join the Tories is that, eventually, someone might take them at their word. For the past five years, the British Left has felt like a hostile environment for feminism. And feminists who have long taken for granted that the Labour Party was their party, and The Guardian was their paper, have had to confront the possibility that maybe, after all, there might be a more welcoming place for them somewhere else on the political spectrum.
This is not to say that there aren’t many on the Left who consider themselves to be feminists and are happy with the party’s direction of the previous half-decade. It’s even true that in that time, Labour politicians have achieved a few feminist victories (although largely these have been accomplished by Stella Creasy in relation to abortion law, and without significant support from the front bench). But the kind of feminism permissible on the Left has been a narrow kind, with little room for discussion about its aims and underpinnings.
While Labour continued to offer its record in Government as proof that it was the natural home of women’s rights — the party of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), the Equality Act (2010) and all-women shortlists — it was simultaneously going to war on its own record by endorsing gender self-identification, which would render all those measures incoherent. And anyone who expressed doubts about gender identity as a solid basis for legislation would find out very fast that they had placed themselves firmly outside acceptable thought on the Left, despite the fact that self-identity was driven by the Conservative MP Maria Miller.
Obviously, plenty of people on the Left still held these unacceptable thoughts. When Dawn Butler, then the shadow minister for women and equalities, uttered the absurdity that “a child is born without sex”, she was hardly voicing majority opinion on the Left. When Suzanne Moore wrote a Guardian column against the harassment and no-platforming of the historian Selina Todd for her gender-critical views, many outside the immediate blast zone of the issue were surprised that this could even be up for debate: of course women should be able to speak, especially when it comes to matters directly affecting their rights.
Nonetheless, it was Moore, not Butler, who was subject to bitter criticism from the Left. Saying you don’t believe in sex had become a safer Left-wing position than saying you do believe in women’s civil liberties. It doesn’t matter how solid your commitment to redistribution is, how fervent your anti-racism, how deep-rooted your ties to LGBT liberation, how committed you are to the trade union movement, how adamantly you support public services. A narrative was established that any criticism of trans activism could only come from the Right, with journalism in the paranoid style drawing feverish connections between British socialists and American evangelicals.
The perverse consequence of this is that many feminists have ended up closer to the Right than they ever imagined. Certainly I would not have predicted that a nice social democrat girl like me would end up writing defences of women’s toilets for the Spectator, or condemning rape threats against JK Rowling in the Telegraph — or rather, if you’d told me a decade ago that I couldn’t write these things for a Left-wing outlet, I would have been very shocked indeed. (Then again, I’d have been surprised to learn there would ever be an occasion to write them.)
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SubscribeWell Sarah, if you do decide to get off the left wing train you’ll find the platform littered not with tories, but with former lefties, working class people, and a whole stack of others who have watched their own concerns gradually get overtaken and sidelined.
But the drivers of the train don’t really need to worry. The seats are filling up with young bourgeois, academics, capitalists, media moguls and the establishment in general. Second and Third class have been abolished. From now on this is a First Class only train!
Maybe best get off now rather than wait to get thrown off with the train going at full speed.
The problem, as I see it, is that Sarah wants to stop the ideology trumps evidence bandwagon where it suits her, while others want to push on.
She is presumably happy with the idea that gender is a social construct, but not with the idea that it is merely performative. Happy that a woman is made not born. But not that she can be made out of a man.
What we really need is a thoroughgoing critique of the whole ideological edifice, not a winding back to the point in the madness we were most happy with. But we need to be quick. STEM appears to be already under ideological attack, and it’s not clear how much longer such a critique will be possible.
I don’t understand what you mean by ‘happy that a woman is made not born’.
When you say gender is ‘merely performative’ do you mean gender identity/ personality?
What are your thoughts on gender roles/ stereotypes that are imposed onto women (and men) and dictate opportunities and limitations?
I’m making reference to two feminist thinkers Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. The latter strongly influenced by the former.
Gender performativity is a difficult concept, and I won’t try to explain it here. In very brief it claims that gender is constituted by its enactment. If you like, there is nothing solid behind it like dna, brain structure or even a relatively fixed personality.
Obviously there are aspects of gender that are “imposed”, and there is some pressure to conform to norms (both social norms and average norms). But it is also clear that there are significant average personality differences between men and women which do not appear to be socially determined.
Indeed, this is more generally true of personality differences. Genes clearly play a role, the non-shared environment plays a role, but oddly the influence of the shared environment is almost impossible to find.
The point I am making here is perhaps a simpler one. In the historical unfolding of gender theory there will have been a point at which Sarah was happy. Not because it was all true, but because it all suited her. But gender theory rolled on, and is now producing ideas that do not suit her.
I’m suggesting that it is gender theory as a whole, and the assumptions on which it is based, that needs to be critically examined.
I think most sensible people would agree that sex differences have a biological basis, but obviously the biological basis does not dictate all aspects of status, custom and rights or duties in any particular culture-society-historical period. Otherwise we would not be having these conversations because all aspects of the field would be fixed and invariant for all societies and times and would feel automatic and inevitable to all of us. Originally the modern use of the word “gender” in social thought was meant not to suggest that there was no biological “sex” – only cultural, infinitely variable “gender” but to point out that there was a difference between them.
Obviously the 64000 dollar question is what the relationship is between sex and “gender” – or whatever you’d prefer to call the cultural stuff that is clearly pretty variable. But as I say, most sensible person would regard the idea that only some idiotic “ideology” prevents people from seeing that everything about sex differences is always entirely biologically given as extreme and incoherent, as they would regard the idea that sexual difference has no biological reality whatsover and is purely performative.
Agree completely.
But the idea that non physical differences between men and women (gender) are entirely biological is almost unknown. No one really believes that. Not even the most extreme evolutionary psychologists.
While the idea that gender is entirely (or almost entirely) socially constructed is pretty mainstream amongst feminist academics.
Indeed, it is built into the very definition of gender, and without it the sex/gender distinction would make little sense.
Thoughtful comment. What is STEM and how is it under ideological attack?
For anybody who wants to test what Sarah says here, go to the Body Shop website and search for the word “women” => 0 results, 64 result for “men”. The Body Shop no longer refers to women, but to “people who menstruate”, “menstruators” as a result of pressure from the trans activist lobby advocating equality for trans women.
Not in the UK. And I quote:
“Explore the best women’s perfumes packed with sensational scents ….”
Nope. I just did the same search on the UK site and got exactly the same result as Vicki Robinson.
The site uses the word women freely.
The word “menstruate” gave 0 results.
I did just that and you are absolutely correct. It actually said the following, and I quote:
‘We found 0 results for “Women”, but we found 66 results for “men”‘.
Very worrying that the word ‘women’ is being edited out while ‘men’ remains in place. Thank you for pointing it out.
Leaving aside the fact that on the UK site I immediately found the word “women” – why on earth would that word be banned in this context. The argument is not over the word “women”, but whether its use should be expanded to include trans women.
I assume that trans men tend to use male beauty products.
Late to the party as usual, I’ve just gone in the website and there are no results for ‘women’ I can find his and ‘hers’ and men.
But if you look at the site, the word is used freely. If it’s such a problematic term why is it used on the site.
And to be honest, unless the products are for biological women only I don’t see why the word would be a problem anyway.
You’d think that a shop selling bodies would have some idea about which kind of body does what.
Jesus wept. (John 11.35).
The entire discussion of gender vs sex makes no sense unless it is constituted in the framework of evolutionary theory, which would predict that psychological differences between the sexes (ie: gender) are based on different mating strategies between the sexes, wiring the emotional centers of the brain differently before birth.
Of course evolutionary psychology is anathema to feminists, because if it is true, it would undermine the entire notion of the “patriarchy” as an explanation for male dominance. In fact, male dominance emerges from female mate selection over the last 250,000 years of human evolution.
Ironically, it is women selectively choosing dominant men that created male psychology and male dominance hierarchies, a reality now rejected by feminists in favour of cultural- construct theories. This is why Jordan Peterson has been so vilified for offering alternative explanations for gendered behaviour, in contrast to feminist dogma.
Feminist theories depend on defining gender in only cultural terms in accordance with blank- slate theories of human nature. Thus they focus on “performativity” and sex-role stereotyping, both cultural artifacts, while ignoring any deeper analysis based on biology.
The consequence is exactly what we now witness: feminists like Ditum now grasping for a means of re-asserting the notion of gender essentialism to counter the transgender claims of gender fluidity, while rejecting the only explanation of gender that offers such essentialism as a consequence of evolutionary forces.
But accepting that gender is basic to human nature would undermine the feminist narrative that women are oppressed by the “patriarchy”, and instead offer a more scientifically coherent explanation, based on biology, for male dominance as a logical consequence of female sexual selection.
So now we have feminists scrambling to find a way to square the circle of their own ideological blindness, forced to both accept and reject the consequences of their own beliefs.
You have been justly hoist by your own petard, Ms Ditum. Enjoy the view.
As far as humans go, I don’t think that we know which male characteristics are mainly the result of male-male competition pressures and which are mainly the result of female-male selection pressures. It’s interesting to speculate, but the narrative that human male dominance hierarchies are mainly the result of female selection pressures seems like a “Just-so story”. The fact that we can even tell these kinds of stories complicates the matter enormously because it can insert teleology into the symbolic feedback loop…
“It’s interesting to speculate, but the narrative that human male dominance hierarchies are mainly the result of female selection pressures seems like a “Just-so story”.”
But not much more than the story of the peacocks tail. It’s quite difficult to develop testable hypotheses based on these theories, but it does provide a coherent narrative. And for me it has the advantage of not making of human kind some sort of special creation.
There are likely to be multiple forms of selection at work, and feeding off each other in a treadmill effect.
Actually, sociobiologists have been able to make many testable hypotheses based on evolutionary theory, most of which are confirmed. I suggest that both you and tjariz read The Triumph of Sociobiology, or Missing the Revolution to see how sociobiological theories are now at the cutting edge of explanation for much of human behaviour.
There is no known natural selection mechanism to explain male dominance hierarchies- why would men form them based on diet, predation patterns or climate? On the other hand, male dominance patterns are seen across multiple species as males combat to impregnate females. The notion of male competition leading to dominance hierarchies is seen throughout nature, and is an explanation that naturally emerges from sociobiological theory. Theories of human nature that don’t take basic biological mechanisms into account, factoring in evolutionary pressures, are the actual “just so stories”.
That male dominance is a logical consequence of female sexual selection does not sound too logical to me… If females were selecting dominant males, than male dominance existed prior to women selection. Also, this supposes that men would patiently wait for females to make their choice rather than males imposing themselves, with dominant males chasing away their weaker competitors. All this to say that the theory advanced appears lacking. We can dispute the basis for the establishment of patriarchy but there is no doubt that females have suffered from male dominance, hence feminism.
The left worldwide is an echo chamber and and anyone who doesn’t repeat the echo is ejected. They do the same on racism. If you look at how Labour are treating Patel you would think they think only Labour supports can be subject to racism!
Re: “post-gender future” – Remember, the original aim of the civil rights movement was for a “post-racial future”. This carried on well into the 90s and early 2000s where the rallying cry was for “colorblindness”.
For reasons I won’t go into on a comment board, we are now fed new dogmas that say “colorblindness is racist”, and we are required to see nothing but race, albeit not through a lens of prejudged inferiority, but for prejudged victimhood. Each individual is merely an avatar for their oppressed (or oppressor) class.
In other words, we are living in a POST-post-racial future.
To the extent that leftism follows any line of coherency or logic, I would have to assume that the only thing that follows a “post-gender” stage is a post-post-gender future, where treating everyone equally is seen as a “denial of the oppressed gender’s experience”.
In my opinion feminism has totally lost it’s way, it was about having choices in life but now women are giving birth and being asked as the cord is being cut ‘when are you going back to work’. The sad fact is that parents rarely have the choice for one of them to remain at home, families used to require one income to live reasonably, now two is barely enough. If you talk to a lot of feminists about abortion they will tell you there should not be a limit, it should be available right up until birth. Others will say 34 weeks, 32, 28 but very few will say 24, yet many babies are born from 23 weeks and live healthy fulfilling lives. Just because you are a feminist, an LGBT supporter or in favour of abortion does not mean that other feminists will have a different opinion than you. However, it appears that you are not allowed an opinion at all if it differs from the set mantra.
it looks like safe spaces for bio-women in US workplaces are now doomed. The neoliberal US supreme court has made a ruling on gender-ID discrimination which will make them almost impossible.
There are two related issues here, a theoretical one and a practical one.
On the theoretical one, I think it makes little sense to say trans women are women unless we simply change the definition of women to include them. This makes their inclusion merely a social convention. Some trans people might be satisfied with this position, others will not.
The practical one is related to women only spaces. Interestingly a (cis) Thai woman interviewed on this subject said that women felt more threatened by butch lesbians than they did by trans women. And this set me thinking.
I assume that the original reason for having segregated changing rooms, showers etc was not to create safe spaces but to avoid women being naked alongside people for whom they were an object of sexual desire. In heteronormative times, this would mean men.
But the Thai woman has a point. For a butch lesbian women are an object of sexual desire in a similar way to which they are for men.
This leads to the conclusion that it is not so much gender we should be concerned about, but sexual orientation.
You may be right about segregated changing spaces as being safe places for women, but it is also true that both genders desire privacy from the gaze of the other, given that both men and women are sexually aroused at the view of each other’s bodies. Ever seen females watching men strippers?
But feminists lost the right to complain about men in women’s changing rooms when female journalists were allowed into the changing rooms of men athletes.
If the privacy of men athletes is disposable in pursuit of equality, it follows that women’s changing rooms cannot remain sacrosanct.
The left were betraying women long ago. Look at how they threw Aayan Hirsi Ali under the bus because she was critical of Islam and its practices regarding women. Now trans are the latest victim group.
Labour is in love with women just not working class women. Just examine the identities of the over 6,500 victims of Labour Jihadist buddies. Perhaps its Labour’s Policy to provide careers for girls in the sex industry an industry run by Muslims.
Presumably if I self identify as a woman pre sentencing I’d get a lesser punishment? Community service rather than a custodial sentence. Even more so if I was a parent.
Two words. Jordan Peterson.
“Left-wing activists telling people to f**k off and join the Tories”
The new version of this has been seen in the furious response to JKR by aggressive trans women telling her to “suck my ladydick”. This is a new frontier in queer politics – the public and aggressive use of male pattern abuse to silence biological females is the ultimate reflection of the decoupling of biological sex from radical non-binary gender politics – something which feminists have been warning about for years.
If Labour doesn’t unqueer its approach to trans issues, the party’s demise will accelerate rapidly.
I wonder what the balance of opinion is amongst feminists on this? One of the problems that GC or GA feminists have it seems to me is that they are simply outnumbered in every political party, even the tiny Women’s Equality Party. I find there is an odd sense of entitlement where they appear to think they represent all feminists.
What’s a feminist?
I just popped over to the WEP website to be told:
Which makes me ask the question that occured to me when I first heard of it: Why isn’t it called “The Equality Party”? I think I can guess.
With the US Supreme Court ruling one can now comfortably say that social progressivism has become the name of the the reigning totalitarian order that has erased in its wake social conservatism on the right and and economic progressivism on the left. Its success reveals that the former is too weak to respond and the latter too cowardly to respond. And here we are doomed