Faye’s argument for “transfeminism” as a daughter of the second wave, then, has merit. It continues this matrilineal dynamic in one further way: by embracing the “matricidal” dynamic described by Susan Faludi.
Mothers have only the most tenuous presence in The Transgender Issue. Only two get more than passing, warm mention: Faye’s own mother (in the dedication), and the supportive mother of a transgender-identified child.
Mothers as a political group are (in Faye’s characteristically tendentious style) airbrushed out. Reflecting on why British feminism in particular is resistant to the inclusion of trans women, Faye blames this on all manner of things, from a hostile press, to (somehow) the British Empire, while leaving out perhaps the most central rallying-point for “gender critical” activism: Mumsnet, or as it’s sometimes dubbed by those infuriated by its members’ stubborn wrongthink, “Prosecco 4chan”.
Mumsnet’s feminism pages have played a central role in gender critical activism politics for over a decade, a fact not unconnected to Mumsnetters’ (usually) shared experience of maternity. It is, after all, more difficult to take seriously the idea that “woman” is an identity, when you’ve experienced pregnancy, childbirth and the shift in outlook and social role that comes with motherhood. But for Faye, the possibility that mothers might have experiences in common, and views of their own, doesn’t merit airtime.
In The Transgender Issue, mothers appear as bit-part players. Some are kind blunderers who don’t understand their children’s identity needs; others are violently transphobic. Inasmuch we appear as a class at all in connection with the female reproductive role, we’re either gender-diverse “people with uteruses” (ie not mothers), or else women in need of abortion services so they can avoid becoming mothers.
Again, in keeping with second-wave feminism, Faye is keen to sever any connection between women and gestation. In one footnote, the notion that pregnancy is a women’s issue is dismissed as “conservative and regressive”. With that, a key locus of specifically female political interest is reframed as a set of fertility services, that can and should be detached from “woman” as a concept, and whose “postcode lottery” availability represents yet another injustice to the trans community.
Shon Faye’s “transgender liberation”, then, sits in intimately ambivalent mother/daughter relationship with the feminism that birthed it. It embraces the conceptual legacy of second-wave feminism; then, in accordance with that heritage, also rejects motherhood and maternity. And, at the same time rejecting its own second-wave heritage, which (we gather) wasn’t nearly radical enough but instead merely accepted a set of minor improvements to the conditions for bourgeois women under capitalism.
Nor is it enough, in Faye’s view, to replicate such marginal gains for well-off, white, transgender people. Such activism (which the book exemplifies in Stonewall’s corporate “diversity” activism) affords at best superficial improvements without addressing The System that claims the right to determine who is or isn’t “acceptably trans under capitalism”.
For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.
To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs. And it would be boundlessly giving with medical, housing and therapeutic resources – up to and including laser hair removal and gamete-freezing, resources certainly not universally available to other groups on the NHS.
It ought, Faye declares, “to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around”. Even as it rhetorically sidesteps literal mothers, then, true liberation, is a political regime that sets out liberate women from the need to be mothers, by itself embodying the once-archetypal maternal qualities of empathy, nurture and support.
Faye characterises as “frankly unhinged” Germaine Greer’s argument in The Whole Woman that transgender women are engaged in a form of symbolic matricide. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say Greer didn’t go far enough. That is, it’s not just transfeminism that’s engaged in symbolic matricide, it’s pretty much all of it, from the second wave onwards.
Other strands have, of course, emerged over many decades of sometimes rancorous feminist debate. But Shon Faye makes a convincing case for transgender activism as the matricidal inheritrix of a profoundly matricidal strand in that debate.
And perhaps the regime of therapeutic totalitarianism The Transgender Issue proposes, to replace our current social order, is the true inheritance of this matricidal liberation. For since the likes of Dworkin and Firestone were writing, those women who didn’t want to be like their martyred mothers have increasingly swapped caring for toddlers favour of entry into public and working life.
In tandem, the care of even very young children has since been increasingly outsourced to institutional providers. Many of these young people are now adults: generations for whom, increasingly commonly, the earliest infant experiences of nurture are fused with a more impersonal, institutional authority.
Perhaps it’s natural that such adults would dream of a political regime on the same template of nurturing authoritarianism. And perhaps, too, Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again is the true contemporary legacy of the second wave’s mummy issues.
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SubscribeShon Faye is a transwoman. She can use as much lipstick as she likes, but has never had a period, has never felt broody, and will never give birth. Why would I waste my time reading such a person’s musings on feminism? And what clearer evidence of patriarchy could there be than individuals with a Y chromosome in every cell of their body telling us what feminism is?
I agree.
Precisely. And who is Shon Faye to give lessons to women about womanhood? It feels rather misogynistic, frankly.
It’s mansplaining.
I will take this opportunity to wish Hungary every success against the “knee-takers” in the World Cup qualifiers. And I hope and trust that your fans will loudly boo this ridiculous gesture.
Bravo, Bronwen.
Agreed. He’s a surgically and hormonally mutilated man who superficially resembles a woman, in the same limited way that a shop window dummy resembles a woman. And he can’t help himself mansplaining feminism to women.
my thoughts exactly. as a man. born male. still male.
Exactly.
You don’t need to waste your time reading whatever Shon writes, because he is merely repeating what feminists say – there are no biological differences, any gaps are purely cultural and due to discrimination (except when inconvenient of course, such as school teachers, non-STEM university graduates, garbage cleaners or the military draft).
Just don’t pretend though all this is somehow the fault of a handful of these people, or the “patriarchy.” Its all down to women and only women.
Did you think it would end with those juicy “diversity” pathways to senior roles, being paid equally for playing 3 sets at tennis, quotas for jobs in IT or banking? One fundamental truth is there is no free lunch, and this is just a small part of the bill.
I confess that when I first read Mary Harrington’s article, I didn’t realise that Faye (who I’d never heard of before) was a so-called “transwoman”. My first reaction to this was think that this should have been specified at the outset.
Then I re-read it, and noticed that Mary Harrington studiously avoids using a pronoun for Faye at any point in her article. I like that.
Sharon Faye is a trans identified man. There is no such thing as ‘transwoman’.
Absolutely l!
WOW, that is something to read (although I skimmed a lot, the parts where it got too crazy for me to even pretend it was some kind of rational discussion on the human condition)
But then Feminism is the longest suicide note written. The West is disappearing so fast, motherhood and married families being so discredited, and thus demographically self genociding.
I liked the beginning line,
“Susan Faludi argues that it is a central feature: matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward.”
But must add infanticide is a much larger central feature, with some boggling number, something like 40,000,000 + babies aborted in the West – a number which coupled with the shrinking demographic of Europeans – would be classed as genocide and a ‘Crime Against Humanity’ by any metric the UN uses elsewhere.
The thing is it is actually the duty of every decent person to have 2.2 children that they invest their main energies and efforts into. One has been raised, schooled, loved, given health care, protection by the military, Police, Fire Services, Food and Drug agency, government, Church, The safety net – A full society of museums, theater, arts, aesthetics, entertainments, safe parks, travel, holidays, foods and drink, comfort, love and affection – then in old age will be cared for, and spend years with income, protection, care, and dignified death.
To pay this we work 40 years, but that does not begin to cover the costs of childhood and post-work – rather we in turn should raise decent citizens as our own children to replace ourselves, whose taxes and works maintain us in old age, maintain society, and so on; And whose love and families give meaning to our, and their, lives. The great wheel of birth, life, child rearing, and decline, and death, ouroboros like, society keeps being the best as the best put their life into raising the best.
All Religions teach this sacred duty – and all the Secular-Humanists teach against it. They teach loneliness, pointlessness, empty pleasure, rights and no responsibilities, and finally a nihilistic death and then nothing…
Post-Modernism, it is a philosophy of death of spirit, and of us all as a people.
Please expand your comment into a book.
The answer to the West’s “genocide by abortion” is to tie the tubes of every man over 30. End of… Patriarchial society need to take some responsibility but don’t. It is always the woman’s “fault”. When I was taught biology, I was taught it takes a man and a woman to make a foetus. Therefore responsibility falls on both if they are to have sex. How many men won’t use a condom because it takes away some of the pleasure? Too often you hear “it’s the woman who gets pregnant so it is up to her to take precautions”… If every man who got a woman pregnant had to take financial responsibility for the foetus and/or baby, there would be so many less abortions because there would be less pregnancies.
And as for 2.2 children for families in the West, we cannot bang on about saving the planet and adding more people to it. Time for Western people to take the back seat and let those from other countries flourish?
The question is basic — does reality exist. The answer is simple — yes. The rest is self-pitying claptrap.
The problem is that the last time humans were able to deal with reality and the uncertainty it brings was when we were hunter gatherers. They would not have survived with the attitudes of today. Since the dawn of civilisation mass delusion has never been far away, starting with a belief in gods, now science has been perverted to become nonsense to make us believe we can control and predict everything. Hence the utter stupidity about carbon dioxide controlling the climate, and a pandemic that has a low increase in deaths and for the majority is a minor illness and a rush to an experimental treatment that seems to be causing more deaths and harm than the virus which we created and released. The only pandemic we have is mass stupidity.
Yes. The Science is our god. Like all religions, it has its interpreters who invoke its mysteries and then proscribe what we all must or may not do. To do otherwise is heresy, requiring punishment.
I am exhausted with the never ending demands that trans activists place on society – mainly women as the emphasis is more on changing what defines womanhood rather than manhood.
“For example, proposed legislation that would replace biological sex in law with self-identified “gender identity”, a change with far-reaching conceptual and political implications […]” – let’s not forget human rights and practical implications.
Am I the only one who is bored with what feminism is supposed to mean? To satisfy the purity test you have to have an in-depth understanding of Dworkin, Butler and many others. All essays read like they’re part of a doctoral thesis. Impenetrable, over long, and losing the will to live of anyone who would be a natural sympathiser. I don’t care about Dworkin. And the more recent feminists seem to have scored a spectacular own goal by insisting females are as physically strong as men, in addition to being as mentally able.
the discussion of who is allowed to call themselves a feminist is ridiculous. I was informed by Julie Bindel that I could not be a feminist unless I also considered myself left wing. There are some telling others they cannot be feminists if they’re not intersectional. This feels like academic debate, or a struggle within the left as to what they can confine within another set of narrow characteristics. What satisfies their latest purity test? One side looks at the other, aghast, the worst slur they can think of to say being that the other is secretly right wing. I find it utterly juvenile.
no wonder people lose interest in women’s rights. Progress had been made. You could get to the point of having children before sexism in the workplace kicks in. But the sexual grooming of young women has taken on an astonishing turn in the last few years. The sex positivity movement, the right to sex. Where are the so called feminists? Oh yes, that’s right. They cheer this on.
feminisim is a busted flush, it long ago disappeared up its own fundament.
can we just focus on how to increase opportunities for women that also allow them to be mothers? And mothers in a way that doesn’t mean they need to outsource motherhood completely? I set up my own business to be able to do this. Fortunately, my profession allows this choice.
maybe females, if they don’t like the patriarchy, should start being the leaders they profess to be? Change the system, rather than complain? For work life balance, presenteeism has to go. So set up a cooperative, make it happen, one business at a time. Even men are bored of presenteeism now: I have a much nicer life than my husband. My obligations financially are fewer than his, because I am also the primary carer for our children. What about appealing to men on this basis? The time is ripe, many have enjoyed spending time with their children and away from the office.
and perhaps we could focus on what is happening with our young. Every change in society results in regressive attitudes to women and girls. Covid no different, gender identity also. I’d like my daughters to grow up being taught to be happy as they are, not feeling they need to be defined by femininity, and aware of consent so that when they do consent, they do so enthusiastically.
There are plenty of reasonable feminists – in fact I know quite a few who think that Trump is a far better bet than the Progressive Dems. I think we should start ignoring the divisive shouting of radical feminists who discredit the word feminism. I also particularly dislike this identity politics which now prevails across ‘woke’ society that insists on groupthink and labelling everyone.
Radical feminists are actually opposed to identity politics and ‘Transgenderism’. ‘Radical’ means ‘from the root’, not ‘extreme’.
Radical feminists are actually opposed to identity politics and ‘Transgenderism’ – yes I know, which is one of the reasons that so many preferred Trump and are anti-woke. In my eyes, a radical feminist always wants more, doesn’t fully acknowledge the role that men play in this march through life and are unnecessarily divisive and strident.
Well said.
You should take a glimpse at Bindel’s latest purblind rant over at Artillery Row. Does she generalise? Oh yes. Does she assert without evidence? Certainly, with a sprinkling of cherry-picked instances to cover her tracks. Does she extend blame to whole categories of person? You bet. That wretched figures of her persuasion are routinely to be found on allegedly Liberal or Conservative platforms is itself a testimony to the dominance of the hard left.
I am so bored with her stance. She would absolutely despise me and everything I stand for if ever we met. Yet she writes for UnHerd, the spectator etc, whom she would also disown at the first opportunity.
And yet she is feminist royalty. What does that say about feminism?
The relentless march of ideological purity in the time- worn tradition of Marxist Leninist doctrine.
It’s hard to know where to begin to tackle ideas of such monumental stupidity. Motherhood – like it or not- is the engine of society. The relationship of a child and mother is critical to the development of healthy, functional adults. Perhaps it is because of its frightening power that it is a target for all manner of distorted and disturbed thinking. ‘ Give me the child before he is 7 and I will give you the man’ – attributed to Jesuit thinking – is one of the truest statements I have read.
I must admit I’m very happy when I hear the people who knock motherhood and parenting, then declare that they will never have kids. I’m glad they choose not to. Whilst children are relatively easy to create, they are not quite so easy to raise and not everyone is cut out for the job so the more that recognise it in themselves the better in my opinion.
At least these ‘feminists’ are making what they feel is a moral position, and so likely would end up making good mothers. As they do not have children their nation brings in Developing World migrants to fill the demographic gap.
Displaced maternal instinct showing the way to cultural genocide.
Given many of these developing world migrants come with family respecting morals of their own, I would rather they were filling the demographic gap than selfish mothers who prioritise career and power and are happy for their children to be raised by institutions.
Actually it predates them
“Aristotle — ‘Give me a child child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.'”
I lost the will to try and follow this crazy doctrinal guff about halfway through the article and was left wondering, “Could a downtrodden working class, trans-exclusionary radical feminist be described as Serf-n-Terf?”
Brilliant!
Well, Mary, you never disappoint in digging out the latest expression of nonsense on stilts! Mind you, Shon Faye seems self-contradictory: denouncing the ‘patriarchy’ whilst embodying its most obvious manifestation – bright red lipstick, massive earrings and heavy makeup (they really have nothing to do with the ‘male gaze’?)
I thought this summed it all up “liberated from the givens of biology“. Or put another way, losing our humanity. This just seems another example of the growing heartlessness that ideology produces. I recently came across an 8 year old girl who is conflicted about gender roles in society. Whatever happened to her childhood? Do the idealogues really want to destroy the development of humanity which childhood involves and replace it with artificial constructs?
I was interested that Germaine Greer got a mention. I’ve found an increasing respect for her recently as one who appears to realise the connection between biology and how life works well. But she shows the future of a life view which despises the love, commitments and sacrifices of family life. No one takes much notice of her now; she is patronised rather than respected for her past endeavours; she is suffering from arthritic mobility problems and has no younger family members to support her. I fear she may be facing an old age of loneliness. This seems to be what anti-family ideologies are offering through their ideology; and that’s tragic.
bright red lipstick, massive earrings and heavy makeup – you forget half open mouth…
…and vaguely angry-about-everything expression.
Yes. Their own heads are messed up, so like the fox that has lost its brush, they want to mess up everyone else’s sanity too.
Nobody listens respectfully to lunatics who think they’re Napoleon; they aren’t given palaces, armies or a retinue of marshals. I don’t know why this category of mental illness is treated with such deference. It does, I suppose, give you some idea of what whackjobs like Moses and Jesus were probably like in person.
That’s fine. All her own choices. She thought being a mater familias was a form of servitude, IIRC, so she gets to experience what she considers liberty, warts and all.
‘… an 8 year old girl who is conflicted about gender roles in society’. Poor little girl, she probably worries about climate change too – and they wonder why there is a massive increase in mental health problems amongst children and young people.
Needing to attract “the male gaze” indeed. Faye is perhaps really expressing her/their Daddy issues: perhaps having deeply felt the lack of male to male connection she/they uses the tools that appear to get the attention of the needed father figure – the tools of sex.
As an offshoot of Marxism feminism is inevitably anti-women, in their natural/biological form – mothers, because it is all about competing with men. To compete with men women must be like men, dress like them, behave like them, even treat the natural motherly ones like the worst of men do.
Feminism is not a rational philosophy, it is an aberration in response to a modern industrialised society. But in the 21st century the brick wall of transgenderism, which the feminists themselves built, has stopped them in their tracks. I have this vision of crowds of angry feminists uncomfortably pressed up against their own daft monolithic creation.
Well said Claire
Nonsense. Feminism is about women as women. Transgenderism is about men pretending to be women. A woman who sleeps with other women, has no desire to reproduce, and values professional achievement over ‘family’ is still a woman because she has a woman’s body. Feminism is about her having the right to live as she chooses.
There is a middle class myth that ‘feminism’ abolished the desired ‘housewife’ role for women and condemned children to institutional childcare. Working class women have always worked; as domestic servants, as factory workers, as pit brow lasses, in small family businesses and in the fields. Their children were looked after, if they were lucky, by grandparents and, if they were less so, by drunken slatterns in hovels or by slightly older children in the streets and fields. Often children were working themselves by ten.
Feminism has given women the right to properly paid and pensionable jobs, rather than being used as casual cheap labour. It has also given them the right to part time working with pension rights and time off for caring responsibilities. Working class women, who have a decent standard of education and a job in the public sector or a properly run company are far better off than their grandmothers and are able to spend more time with their children.
Another middle class myth is that children are better off with their mothers than in professional childcare. When mother is barely literate, they live in a high rise flat with no outdoor space, and they spend their days watching telly and eating Gregg’s pasties, they would be far better in a professionally run nursery, with healthy food and outdoor activities.
I agree with what you say about lesbians being women but that is beside the point, it has nothing to do with the article.
Women and mothers of all classes have always worked, from the poorest widow living in an attic spinning with her distaff, through servants and tradesman’s wives helping to run small businesses, to the merchants and gentry wives who ran households of servants and made sure their families and servants were fed, working and healthy, to the aristocrats who organised castles and manors involving hundreds of servants, obligations as well as being involved in resolving local disputes, administering justice in their husbands absence and diplomacy at the highest levels of politics. Oh and lets not forget the nuns who were also scholars and nurses as well as administrators.
It is Capitalism that has “given” women the right to “properly paid jobs” because their labour outside the home is more valuable to the market than that within the home. And it was Nancy Astor, a Tory, who first fought for women’s pensions out of humanity not feminism.
What you describe fully supports my argument that Capitalism brought about Marxism which led to feminism.
I always enjoy your posting as you use such reasoned arguments.
Thank you Claire,
the world wars allowed capitalism the chance to move mother out the home as it had done with males long ago. Capitalism hijacked Marxism to support feminism. Capitalists saw what feminism did to the family through the Soviet experiment (which the Soviet pulled back on) and liked what they saw. Fragmentation.
Thank you Karl and Claire. Following through with this train of thought, capitalism now supports mass immigration to the West, having exhausted the pull of both male and female indigenous workers into the machine.
It co-opts the language of the progressive left to justify this population replacement as It moves forward via a logic of it’s own, independent of human needs, which throughout the millennia, have been primarily tribal.
“Labour outside the home is more valuable to the market than inside the home.” And so the value placed upon things which the market produces are now more valued than the people once produced within the home.
Very well put!..
Add on :
My great grandmother was illiterate but she was a successful tenant farmer, and brought up three fine children who followed in her footsteps. It is social conditions like high rise flats that are the problem not illiteracy.
+ the majority of feminists are “middle class”, so it’s not much use trying to use that as an implied criticism, it won’t work.
By the later 1800s – 90% of English were Literate! Many think this is a great part of the success of the Nation in its meteoric rise.
You speak truth to power!
Is there a door out of this lunatic asylum?
It does feel like the end of days, sometimes, doesn’t it?
A man starts his new job at an asylumHe is given his orientation and at the very end asked if he has any questions.
“Yes, we are trying to make these patients well again, but how do we know if a patient is ready to leave the asylum?”
“Well, I can see you are a caring person” the director says. “We just ask them a simple question and based on their response determine if they need to stay longer.” The director then calls up three patients for a demonstration. He asks the first one, “what’s is 6 times 6?”
The patient nervously says “1000?”
The director shakes his head “ more therapy required,” then turns to the next patient.
This patient shouts, “February!”
“Oh god no!” Says the director. “We must review your meds i am afraid!”
Finally, he turns to the third patient who looks at him calmly and says “well, the answer is obviously 36.”
“Yes!” Exclaims the director. “How did you know that?!”
“Easy, I just divided 1000 by February.”…………………………
I’m terribly afraid there isn’t.
I couldn’t/can no longer read about Feminism’s latest self imposed drama.
For me Feminism has become the Archetype of the never satisfied mother who spends her life and in fact wastes her life wrapped in imagined chains she placed there herself.
Her lack of accountability keeps her positioned as an imposing and interventionistic martyr demanding emotional and psychological obedience from those she seeks a never ending list of apologies, sacrifices and submissions. She is Authority. Cold and hard; following faulty software.
Thank you Karl for opening a possible door out of this “lunatic asylum.”
I’ve frequently been told, by feminist women (and some men) that as a man, I have no right to have an opinion on abortion.
It’s a woman only issue. No men allowed.
Well as we are replacing sex with gender and the idea of sexes being binary is now seen as outdated (by some), does that mean I will regain my right to comment on the mass killing of human life that has taken place in the last 50 years?
Or will an excuse be found to continue the attempt to exclude men from one of the biggest moral issues of our time?
No, no, no! Men should stay out of it because if we do not we will be blamed. 200,000 babies are aborted every year in the UK solely on the mother’s say so. Fathers can neither insist on an abortion nor prevent one. If men had any input into these killings, we would instantly be assigned all the blame for them.
Women, left to themselves, are infanticidal on a frankly breathtaking scale.
Ah but in our multi gendered brave new world, will we be able to call ourselves men?
Oh yes. Men will always exist. There has to be someone whose fault everything is.
This has come to pass because so many men have done their business and then cut and run. I’m fairly sure there is only a small minority of men who have resisted abortion where women have insisted it. These instances should be arbitrated on.
Yawn. Tired of reading pointless arguments and counter arguments about this subject. The world has real problems. And all this drivel is a massive distraction from what the human race – all of it – needs to be doing to make a dent in our mismanagement of the planet, our violence towards each other and our inability to govern nations so that even the basic needs of humankind are met.
Unfortunately, articles such as this are feeding the beast. Deny the nutters airtime. Because that’s all they want.
Let’s talk on this platform about subjects that actually matter.
And while I’m having my rant, I get fed up with the overintellectualising (maybe not a word but I’m past caring) of topics. I admire writing that is interesting, accessible and tells me something I don’t know or gives a great new perspective on a subject.
Now I’m going for a lie down.
Unfortunately the cult has taken over universities and is working its way through corporates, big business, governments and organisations – so we have to take notice.
Cult. Yes, good word. But … I repeat. Without that lifeblood of publicity, without which such numpties cannot function, obsessively checking their likes, their followers, their mentions in MSM, their book sales blah, blah …they wither and perish. Or go out and get a proper job.
Anyways, yes maybe I live in a bubble, unperturbed by these nutters.
Let’s agree to collectively mock them. Not take them seriously.
Unherd should become a safe haven from this tripe.
Nurse …is it time for my medication?
“Without that lifeblood of publicity, without which such numpties cannot function,”
These insane and destructive policies did not spring out of air.
Hidden behind the view of everyone the Post Modernists ‘Captured’ the Teaching industry, and so trained up their followers, and now those brainwashed fools fill the government, industry, ans Political leadership – and so the trap is SPRUNG – because no MSM coverage on this insidious evil was given.
It is by Lack of coverage of the reality, of the pathology of this thinking, that they are taking society. You are 100% wrong.
Well said Deborah! This is seriously tedious stuff. I like Mary’s writing, mostly, but can’t she just cut it short and get to the point: this is nonsense. I pray that transactivism is a fad and will eventually fade away…
Like all so-called progressives. feminists are locked in a permanent and petulant adolescence. It’s an oppositional and subversive worldview with no real vision beyond the destruction of any source of authority. They never change; they never grow up.
This is what you get when you try to come up with an intellectual rationale for mainfest bu**sh**. When in God’s name are people going to come to their senses about this. Born a man, always a man. Born a woman, always a woman. In every circumstance, always – sport, dressing rooms, rape crisis shelters. Dress how you like, nobody cares.
“Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), for example, dreamed of a future in which women had been wholly liberated from reproduction by a mix of extra-uterine gestation and collectivised childcare.”
How is this different from the nightmare depicted in Brave New World?
It is not – they both are Post-Modernism as it would be in reality, that twisted, Nihilistic, evil philosophy.
Let them argue with each other out of existence. Meanwhile normal people continue to breed happily. The Darwin award goes to feminism and trans ideology.
No, arguing is too good for them because they are cowards hiding behind social media and leftie suck ups.
I propose something more … physical, such as wrestling. This could be a new sporting sensation. It might attract higher viewing figures than Love Island!
As long as it wasn’t naked wrestling, I don’t think I could stomach that.
Didn’t the Late Andy Kauffman explore this as a comedy performance? Seem to recall that it shocked and delighted in equal measure. I’d happily pay for a subscription!
In sum: “feminism” has become a war against nature; against the highest calling of nature, motherhood, and against humanity itself. “Feminists” are therefore among the most toxic, despicable, bigoted and destructive extremists there have ever been. And it is they who have laid the foundations for the latest wave of cruel “theory” embodied in the fallacies and sophistries of “trans”. Human beings are, among other things, a species of ape, with natural callings and instincts which the neo-mystics of the hard left are determined, with their usual grim stupidity, to pervert or erase. Let us hope that these latest efflorescences of Marxist bilge are no more than the red giant phase of a dying star; and that a massive return to natural kindness and good sense will soon set in.
Trans-ideology is fast becoming the Awful Horror of the modern world. A people that believe in absurdities will go on to commit atrocities.
Psychobabble.
“Instead, each generation rejects the one that went before, endlessly reproducing this second-wave feminist scorn for endlessly victimised, unfree, martyred and unsatisfied mothers – both literal and also political.”
There’s a better explanation for the endless discontents and re-inventions of feminism than that of a primal engagement with the archetypal Mother. Simply put, the essential dynamic of Leftism is that all which exists is fundamentally flawed and must be torn down. Disrupted, deconstructed, and dismantled. Leftism is the ever-devouring and ever-ravenous maw tearing away at the edges of society.
That’s why they are NEVER happy. That’s why the progress over the past 20+ years of almost complete societal and governmental acceptance of those who are gay and lesbian was not met with joy and a new, relaxed fellowship. Instead, the Left pulled society immediately into this Forever Trans nightmare-world where simple acceptance of adult trans-persons and protection of basic civil rights was not even close to sufficient to quell their rage.
Witness this quote from the article: “For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.”
I agree with you.
I thought this article was very good and relatively readable compared to some on this topic. Over my lifetime I’ve been a uni indoctrinated militant feminist raging against the patriarchy so I get it. But the older I get I’ve realised that feminism doesn’t just hate men, it hates women too and mothers are the epitome of femaleness. It’s a form of self loathing at our weakness because it all in the end comes back to power and who has it. Feminists see particularly feminine power as still dominated by male authority and in service of men. The seductress, the mother, the nurturer, the sex worker etc. The differentials in physical strength that lead to a feeling of powerlessness and subservience are real, the rage against the unfairness of biology. That no matter what a woman achieves, what she says or does, a man can take it away by brute force and you can do nothing about it…… It’s a real unfairness. *But wishing it away doesn’t make it less real* and that’s what I think feminists need to grapple with. Transwomen are biological men telling women what they are and what to do, trying to access women’s spaces, effectively rendering the concept of woman meaningless. There’s no real equivalent push by transmen I notice. If Germane Greer is right then trans as a form of matricide makes more sense and the TERFs are the 2nd wave feminists who have realised this. Biology is real.
Wow! We first learn of the Oedipal Complex where the father is murdered so that the son can have Mum. Now a new mythology where the daughter murders Mum, not so she can have Father but so she can become Father or whatever inbetween!
NO – in this world of Ideal feminism she murders both parents, has several abortions, identifies as gender non-specific, and dies alone surrounded by a sea of empty gin bottles.
Guess I like mythology better than French noir movies. Cheers!
As well as the war being declared on “motherhood”, as described in this article, war has also been declared on the digital historical record. For instance, “The Guardian” once ran a piece on somebody called Seán Faye, which can be found here:
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/dec/06/my-life-in-makeup
Yet in 2019, this archived piece was “amended”. The original piece can still be found online, e.g. here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160627083904/https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/dec/06/my-life-in-makeup
is the personal information the photo graph showing a Sean Faye? the body of the text appears unaltered.
why would guardianland memory hole a photograph of a man 5 years after an article was published?
Right out of 1984 Ministry of Truth book editing department.
Thank you so much for sharing this s
Guardian archive material. It contextualises beautifully the make believe world some trans people inhabit.
You really start to wonder how someone that stupid manages to use the toilet
Good article.
Adding addendum with tongue-firmly-in-cheek: Never fear, Big Tech transhumanism is here! Elon Musk’s new ‘humanoid’ uni-sex robots will replace all pain, suffering & drudgery until the final generation of the ever-fearful and biologically-inert humans have nothing left to do but stay in their rooms to eat, watch their screens, sleep and poop. O’joy! Rejoice! ~ Such Liberty!
“To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs.” –
– And Jesus wept. Do we all then ride unicorns into the rainbow sunset that heralds this brave tomorrow? Those of us with actual jobs to go to are going to be working overtime till we die to pay for all this, I suppose… Oh no, that’s right, we’re going to ditch capitalism and revert to organic systems of barter whilst the money tree in the garden allows us to continue the self indulgent pattern of our lives as before.
I’m happy to nail my colours to the mast and say that any book drooled over by Ash Sarkar and wee Owen really isn’t worth the column inches; in other news, that swivel eyed misanthrope La Dworkin is the product of a society on its uppers by anyone’s definition. If we can’t agree that somebody that damaged must be a bun short of a picnic, we really are s c r * w e d as a culture: I honestly lose patience with pieces referencing this person. (And yes, unfortunately, I did put myself through the experience of reading “Woman Hating”.) Greer may have had some distinctly wobbly moments in recent years, but I respect her intellectually and consider her contributions worthy of note. Of course, she’s now been cast into the outer darkness as the Movement’s children cannibalize its elder members… which I guess was the point of this piece, yet we still end up discussing intersectionality more than we do the core issue. Oh dear.
These navel gazing little spats aren’t new, I agree, but the pressure cooker of rolling lockdown has really amped up the b u ll s h* t to level 11, hasn’t it? The West faces genuine existential threats (my best wishes to those on the southeastern seaboard of the continental US right now), but we obsess about issues raised by people who, let’s be fair, have an interest in nothing so much as their own notoriety and political/pecuniary advancement.
And now I’m off for a lie down.
I would have loved to have contributed something to the discussion, the articles heading caught my attention, however I was bored rigid at the end of the 4th paragraph.
Then post on those 4 paragraphs if you really wish to contribute, rather than merely ‘Post’.
Second wave feminists rallied round the call that biology is not destiny but they never denied biology as do the adherents of the new gender ideology. The aspiration was to free women from the obligation to take on motherhood and the attendant (unpaid) labour of child care and housework. In 1980 the French historian Elisabeth Badinter published a book L’Amour en Plus (unfortunately translated The myth of Motherhood) which created a minor scandal in (bourgeois Catholic) France simply because she argued that from the historical evidence (mainly 18th century France) the maternal instinct is not a universal. Today the nurturing role of the mother has been essentialised again, this time as the defining character of the ‘female’ gender without reference to biological sex.
Meanwhile there have been significant changes which are ignored: such as a generation of biological males who have found their ‘maternal’ or female side and who have thrown themselves into child care. Couples have found ways of sharing this – for instance by working less hours out of the home. It is changes such as these that are enriching as well as realistic, not the destruction of the mythc beast of patriarchy.
Tax all unmarried and childless adults at 90% of their incomes, no deductions or exemptions. Call it the Grasshopper Rate.
Let those without futures subsidize those with futures.
Problem solved.
This already happens. Check out the birth rate of those women on universal credit vs those who work.
So you don’t tax the married but childless? How come?
I would say the childless are doing the world a favour. We just need more of them everywhere else.
On a more prosaic level, some years ago I noticed that virtually all the feuds within families are among the females. Very occasionally, males get drawn into them, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to one of the females, but they always arise among the women. Actual male-male feuds are almost unknown.
The savagery among feuding women is often breathtaking, too.
Jon, I can assure you male-male feuds exist too. Maybe men are better at not drawing attention to them, but yes they exist.
There’s also the point that if it does kick off you might seriously hurt each other. As such, you work it out, shake hands and move on; a few beers often help.
i sort of agree with you Al. I am generalising, but in my experience men are able to forgive and forget and carry on more easily. It may have a evolutionary basis.
Oh yawn.
Brilliant. I am a feminist but my feminism was born from a bitter realisation at age 12 of my lack of worth in a traditional Asian home and culture. I simply fought for my space and those of my sisters though they weren’t particularly grateful. I never studied feminism nor read its foundational texts but also never repudiated other feminists no matter my private opinion that some of them were batshit crazy. What some gender critical feminists still refuse to acknowledge is that the current trans activism which has gone crazy is their illegitimate child, born from their own fervent embrace of gender politics. All the mainstream women’s NGOs are firm supporters of self-id because it pains them to admit that they got some things very wrong.
…the main take-away for me is that trans”women” do not need surgery so much as therapy to help them resolve their issues with their Mum…and indeed that no amount of lippy makes one of them look like anything but a bloke in a frock…often a rather fat bloke, although in fairness not in the case of Shon Faye…
Enough now of men in tights.
Billions of women are happy to be women and mothers and billions of men are happy to be fathers and bread winners. Division of labour rather than its duplication. It has quite successfully been that way for tens of thousands of years. In pursuing that paradigm humanity has survived the existential battle. It might be imperfect – most things are – but it has generally served us quite well.
Why is it that in less than a century it all become so terribly wrong? If it had been, humanity would long been extinct. As it is, we are now on that path.
Discuss.
I’ll take you at your word.
My theory is it’s because of overcrowding. The more overcrowded we become the more infighting there is, of one kind or another. In Columbia and Mexico say it’s predominantly gang warfare, in North America and Europe (more intellectual?) it’s widespread identity politics, as well as gang warfare.
Perhaps it’s natures way of reducing the population.
Needless to say the more committed a father and mother are to bringing up their children well the greater likelihood those children will be successful and will reproduce successfully themselves.
Thus a better evolutionary outcome.
This idea of internecine warfare was born out from experimentation with rats IIRC.
I am not wholly convinced though that in this case it can be put down to ‘overcrowding’, although it is an interesting hypothesis nonetheless and should yield predictions capable of being tested.
But that division of labour almost universally favours men.
Hard to fathom the damage done to Faye’s generation by the outsourcing of parental nurturing to ‘institutions’ from infancy. Lack of maternal nurture in particular in the early years has left them alienated from their own maternal identity as women.
That says to me that something was severely lacking in some mothers and/or in the role of mother and many women didn’t want to be constricted by it as their mothers sometimes were (domestic abuse, financial dependence, frustrated ambitions, lack of maternal feeling etc). The physical efforts aside, having children sounds overwhelmingly tedious and thankless a lot of the time for women (the self sacrificers) while the men got the money and to have careers and time outside the home. And even now working women are expected to do the lions share of childcare and housework. For an ambitious high IQ woman surely they are better off letting others do what comes naturally so they can make the best of their other talents than having a womb? If women who WANT babies and are very maternal were supported more that’s one thing but expecting all women to enjoy that role is naive. And bad for the kids as we know some mothers are terrible people and shouldn’t be mothers!!
The broader instruction embedded in Faye’s doctrine is the rejection of all that is masculine in her/their utopian vision of society. It is totalitarian in its exclusion of all those qualities which we know instinctively as male, to be replaced by the Great Mother. Transfeminism then has clear Daddy issues. Deal with them.
The discursive, symbolic register isn’t male or female.
Reason, in the constraints that it places upon our ability to imagine an alternative reality, is clearly a tool of patriarchal oppression in Faye’s view. To impose the Great Mother of totalitarian sharing and caring for each individual’s alternative reality, reason must be deconstructed and replaced with feeling. Only feeling.
Have I got it right?
Yes, pre – discursive and totalitarian. Hence the TRA “no debate” slogan.
The biological differences between males and females have evolved over millions of years to produce descendents that ensure the survival of humans. A by-product of that evolution is the biology that gives an enormous pleasure to humans in sex. It would seem odd for language to evolve in a way that no longer had words that describe those differences so the terms biologically male and female seem quite useful. On the other hand I see no need for words that describe how a particular group of people dress, alter their appearance, adopt mannerisms, contribute to household tasks of anything else that non-biologically differentiates men from women so why do we need the terms man and women?
Really interesting article.
Good, solid analysis of Shon Faye’s latest work, pointing out that in it motherhood is denigrated and relegated to second-class status.
There is a tendency to play “Devil’s advocate” whilst reviewing these incendiary works, and I feel that this path has been taken by Mary Harrington.
We should never lose sight of the fact that we are playing fast and loose with the future of humanity; the wrecking crew were not prompted on their destructive road by the political emancipation of women, but with the attack on biology , nature and the acceptance of an insidious madness which is much more serious for the welfare of coming generations than is currently realised.
Just take a look at the sort of people who run politics, the media, education and health authorities and contrast their beliefs with those of us who have experienced the pain and joy of procreation and family life. Are we the new “Silent majority”?
From this perspective, if we admit of any relationship whatsoever between biology and wider social norms or structures, women are at risk of being subordinated again: relegated once more to (as Rich puts it) “the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”. And if there’s no relationship between biology and identity, why shouldn’t a trans woman be — as Faye argues — also “female”?
Curiously, I have just finished commenting in another BTL on this topic. The point there was the taboo of the acceptance of difference.
Accordingly, the admittance of any relationship between biology and wider social norms – of a difference – was seen as a distinction with a difference.
As such difference was read, by those with a particular ideological worldview, as inferiority. – hence … the risk of being subordinated again: relegated… and, I would say, inferior. Helen Joyce author of Trans made a similar point in a recent podcast interview and IIRC, predicated this notion of inferiority to an erroneous assumption – that the default human was men.
The only people who considered women “inferior” in my experience have been politicians or the religious folks who took biblical teaching as gospel truth.
Even the poorest and uneducated knew that family life was a partnership and each fitted for their biological role.
Equality is now the most misused word in the dictionary, with the possible exception of gay.
Well possibly. I think Helen Joyce’s proposition was that it is an emotional predilection or emotional/cognitive distortion borne out of an ideological perspective whereby it is an internal frame of reference.
She didn’t elaborate on it, but I think it is a useful hypothesis for some of the the expressions of female autonomy that complexity ignore the anatomical differences between men and women.
…
“Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again”. Rather than “motherly”, I think this vision is pre – discursive and totalitarian i.e., so noone can ever speak again.
“no one can ever speak again”
Except of course those Big Mother visionaries running it all?!
Trans activist family member gave me the book. Belatedly reading it now. Belated because I’m lazy and busy and hope others will do the careful reasoning for me. Appreciated Faye’s rational style (relative to much of the angry polarised trans stuff on social media). Particularly liked the feeling that I might not be instantly vilified as transphobe, fascist etc were I to ask questions or disagree.
And I liked that on every page of the book, Faye lays out – and misses out – facts, views, assumptions, assertions, reasoning so that (for the less lazy critic) it seemed possible to build a thorough critique based on Faye’s well written manifesto.
OK. So I Google for such critiques and found almost entirely glowing reviews. And I’ve enjoyed the two more critical critics’ reviews in Spiked and Unherd (plus comments) spearing Faye’s world-liberating fantasy from specific angles.
A favour please: I would like to know if anyone has done more of a line by line rational unpacking of all the poor or missing thinking in Faye’s book. Any suggestions please? It would help to answer each and every point constructively – yes, including due care of trans and non-trans folks. Thanks.
Examples of ?
> Faye always implicitly assumes that all cases are going to be authentic life-determined trans children or adults. If trans were easy to be sure of right away, then things would be as easily managed as the measles!
> Faye implicitly values (twice page 29 of pb) – the diagnostic feature of a trans child’s persistent early insisting on their preferred gender. But then argues throughout for a future that has unrestricted affirmation medicine surgery etc. A totally different system needs careful continuing fresh collection of stats.
> Faye refers to stats gathered in a less affirming past as if they apply to a very different visionary future culture and system.
> The stats quoted are often from sources with known vested interests eg Stonewall. And they would not be published by any normal peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Etc etc.