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Trans activism has mummy issues A new primer on gender identity draws on second-wave feminism

Trans rights campaigners at Reclaim Pride. Credit: Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/ Getty

Trans rights campaigners at Reclaim Pride. Credit: Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/ Getty


September 1, 2021   6 mins

Though I’m a middle-aged mother myself now, I’ve had my share of tear-streaked, bitter arguments with my own mum. By turns loving and murderous, swinging wildly between enmeshed empathy and parental authority, mother/daughter relationships can trigger uniquely painful rows.

But it’s not just individual mothers and daughters who do this. It is also reproduced in the women’s movement. In American Electra, the feminist writer Susan Faludi argues that it is a central feature: matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward.

“The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”, wrote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976). Faludi quotes Betty Friedan, perhaps the quintessential rejecter of bourgeois domesticity as a desirable role for women, who said: “I didn’t want to be like my mother”.

And this dynamic, Faludi argues, has translated into “a persistent barrenness” within feminism: that is, a rejection not just of individual mothers but of the movement’s ability to create a heritage over time. 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. It’s a push-me-pull-you dynamic that both rejects whatever came before in the women’s movement, while also longing for an ongoing, motherly warmth and acceptance.

Nowhere is this battle over the nature (or, perhaps, the possibility) of a feminist legacy more evident than in contemporary arguments around trans identity. Shon Faye’s new book on “transgender liberation”, The Transgender Issue, argues this inheritance with energy and clarity. Meanwhile, in what it leaves half-said or unsaid, it also demonstrates it.

In general terms, the book delivers what you’d expect, given gushing blurbs written by Judith Butler, Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones: a bog-standard “intersectional” treatise. It abounds in the expected namechecks of standard “marginalised” groups, gestures in familiar ways at the evils of “capitalism” and evinces standard woke opinions on prostitution, prisons and immigration.

The Transgender Issue: an argument for justice is written with an op-ed journalist’s persuasive energy, in a style that (for anyone familiar with the so-called “Terf wars”) at times egregiously begs often hotly-contested questions. 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, is breezily characterised as “a more humane process for gender recognition”.

But Faye writes well. Anyone seeking a primer on “trans-inclusive” and “gender critical” arguments could do worse than read this book alongside Helen Joyce’s Trans. The book’s interest lies in its ambivalent relation to an older generation of feminism.

Faye draws on second-wave writers and radical feminist history, to argue that far from representing a repudiation of the second-wave legacy, trans-activism is its inheritrix. To this end, The Transgender Issue quotes Andrea Dworkin’s approving 1974 description, in Woman Hating, of how new research and fertility technology “challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes” and “threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity”. Elsewhere, Faye correctly points out that disagreements over the place of trans women in feminist groups go all the way back to the Seventies.

Shon Faye’s new book embraces Andrea Dworkin’s “matricidal” dynamic

And, indeed, this matriarchal lineage is difficult to dispute, when it was this generation of feminists who first argued that “sex” and “gender” are separable. Andrea Dworkin stated in Woman Hating that “man” and “woman” are […] cultural constructs […] reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming”. What Dworkin outlines here is, today, settled opinion among pronouns-in-bio online leftists.

Against what Dworkin called the “totalitarian” idea of “man” and “woman”, other second-wave radical feminists imagined all of us liberated from the givens of biology. 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.

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”?

Like the secondwavers, Faye rejects the “conservative” idea that women are “vessels for reproduction”. The Transgender Issue situates trans liberation as a logical extension of feminist call for bodily autonomy and particularly for safe and legal abortion. In Faye’s view, both abortion and gender medicine are forms of resistance to “[c]onservative ideological positions about gender roles and the degree to which an individual is entitled to autonomy over their body”.

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.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Bronwen Saunders
Bronwen Saunders
3 years ago

Shon 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?

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

I agree.

JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago

Precisely. And who is Shon Faye to give lessons to women about womanhood? It feels rather misogynistic, frankly.

Edit Szegedi
Edit Szegedi
3 years ago
Reply to  JP Martin

It’s mansplaining.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Edit Szegedi

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.

Clara B
Clara B
3 years ago

Bravo, Bronwen.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

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.

Marco S
Marco S
3 years ago

my thoughts exactly. as a man. born male. still male.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago

Exactly.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
3 years ago

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. 

Last edited 3 years ago by Samir Iker
David Sharp
David Sharp
3 years ago

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.

Miriam Cotton
Miriam Cotton
3 years ago

Sharon Faye is a trans identified man. There is no such thing as ‘transwoman’.

Sally Owen
Sally Owen
3 years ago

Absolutely l!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

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.

Jim Cox
Jim Cox
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Please expand your comment into a book.

MJ Reid
MJ Reid
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

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?

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
3 years ago

The question is basic — does reality exist. The answer is simple — yes. The rest is self-pitying claptrap.

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

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.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

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.

Sue Julians
Sue Julians
3 years ago

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.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Sue Julians

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.

Caroline Watson
Caroline Watson
3 years ago

Radical feminists are actually opposed to identity politics and ‘Transgenderism’. ‘Radical’ means ‘from the root’, not ‘extreme’.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago

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.

Carol Moore
Carol Moore
3 years ago
Reply to  Sue Julians

Well said.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
3 years ago
Reply to  Sue Julians

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.

Sue Julians
Sue Julians
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

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?

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Sue Julians

The relentless march of ideological purity in the time- worn tradition of Marxist Leninist doctrine.

Carol Moore
Carol Moore
3 years ago

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.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
3 years ago
Reply to  Carol Moore

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.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Displaced maternal instinct showing the way to cultural genocide.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

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.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Carol Moore

Actually it predates them

“Aristotle — ‘Give me a child child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.'”

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
3 years ago

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?”

Clara B
Clara B
3 years ago
Reply to  Paddy Taylor

Brilliant!

Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Peter LR
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

bright red lipstick, massive earrings and heavy makeup – you forget half open mouth…

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
3 years ago

…and vaguely angry-about-everything expression.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

Do the idealogues really want to destroy the development of humanity which childhood involves

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.

I fear she may be facing an old age of loneliness. 

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Jon Redman
Fennie Strange
Fennie Strange
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

‘… 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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Peter LR

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.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Carol Moore
Carol Moore
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

Well said Claire

Caroline Watson
Caroline Watson
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

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.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

I always enjoy your posting as you use such reasoned arguments.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Karl Juhnke
Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Karl Juhnke

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

“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.

Sally Owen
Sally Owen
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

Very well put!..

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

You speak truth to power!

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
3 years ago

Is there a door out of this lunatic asylum?

Clara B
Clara B
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

It does feel like the end of days, sometimes, doesn’t it?

hugh bennett
hugh bennett
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

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.”…………………………

Hilary Easton
Hilary Easton
3 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

I’m terribly afraid there isn’t.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
3 years ago

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  Karl Juhnke

Thank you Karl for opening a possible door out of this “lunatic asylum.”

Clive Mitchell
Clive Mitchell
3 years ago

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?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Clive Mitchell

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.

Clive Mitchell
Clive Mitchell
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Ah but in our multi gendered brave new world, will we be able to call ourselves men?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Clive Mitchell

Oh yes. Men will always exist. There has to be someone whose fault everything is.

Sally Owen
Sally Owen
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Clive Mitchell

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.

Deborah B
Deborah B
3 years ago

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.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
3 years ago
Reply to  Deborah B

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.

Deborah B
Deborah B
3 years ago

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?

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Deborah B

“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.

Richard Riheed
Richard Riheed
3 years ago
Reply to  Deborah B

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…

JP Martin
JP Martin
3 years ago

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.

Miriam Cotton
Miriam Cotton
3 years ago

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.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago

“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?

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

It is not – they both are Post-Modernism as it would be in reality, that twisted, Nihilistic, evil philosophy.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago

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.

Deborah B
Deborah B
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

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!

Last edited 3 years ago by Deborah B
Andrew D
Andrew D
3 years ago
Reply to  Deborah B

As long as it wasn’t naked wrestling, I don’t think I could stomach that.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Deborah B

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!

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Simon Denis
Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

Trans-ideology is fast becoming the Awful Horror of the modern world. A people that believe in absurdities will go on to commit atrocities.

Malcolm Knott
Malcolm Knott
3 years ago

Psychobabble.

Sheryl Rhodes
Sheryl Rhodes
3 years ago

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.”

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago
Reply to  Sheryl Rhodes

I agree with you.

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
3 years ago

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.

Marian Baldwin
Marian Baldwin
3 years ago

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!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  Marian Baldwin

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.

Marian Baldwin
Marian Baldwin
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Guess I like mythology better than French noir movies. Cheers!

Lennon Ó Náraigh
Lennon Ó Náraigh
3 years ago

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

George Glashan
George Glashan
3 years ago
  • This article was amended on 21 March 2019 to remove some personal information.

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?

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  George Glashan

Right out of 1984 Ministry of Truth book editing department.

Margaret Bluman
Margaret Bluman
3 years ago

Thank you so much for sharing this s
Guardian archive material. It contextualises beautifully the make believe world some trans people inhabit.

Jim Richards
Jim Richards
3 years ago

You really start to wonder how someone that stupid manages to use the toilet

ml holton
ml holton
3 years ago

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!

Richard Parker
Richard Parker
3 years ago

“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.

Richard Carpenter
Richard Carpenter
3 years ago

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.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

Then post on those 4 paragraphs if you really wish to contribute, rather than merely ‘Post’.

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
William Hickey
William Hickey
3 years ago

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.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago
Reply to  William Hickey

This already happens. Check out the birth rate of those women on universal credit vs those who work.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  William Hickey

So you don’t tax the married but childless? How come?

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
3 years ago
Reply to  William Hickey

I would say the childless are doing the world a favour. We just need more of them everywhere else.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward

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.

Charles Lawton
Charles Lawton
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Jon, I can assure you male-male feuds exist too. Maybe men are better at not drawing attention to them, but yes they exist.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Charles Lawton

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Al M
hugh bennett
hugh bennett
3 years ago
Reply to  Al M

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.

Gill Holway
Gill Holway
3 years ago

Oh yawn.

Mirax Path
Mirax Path
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Mirax Path
R S Foster
R S Foster
3 years ago

…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…

adm.peters
adm.peters
3 years ago

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.

Claire D
Claire D
3 years ago
Reply to  adm.peters

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by Claire D
michael stanwick
michael stanwick
3 years ago
Reply to  Claire D

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by michael stanwick
Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
3 years ago
Reply to  adm.peters

But that division of labour almost universally favours men.

Margaret Hickey
Margaret Hickey
3 years ago

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.

Cheryl Jones
Cheryl Jones
3 years ago

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!!

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago

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.

H Owen
H Owen
2 years ago

The discursive, symbolic register isn’t male or female.

Douglas McNeish
Douglas McNeish
3 years ago

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?

H Owen
H Owen
2 years ago

Yes, pre – discursive and totalitarian. Hence the TRA “no debate” slogan.

Jon Hawksley
Jon Hawksley
3 years ago

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?

Last edited 3 years ago by Jon Hawksley
Dan Gleeballs
Dan Gleeballs
3 years ago

Really interesting article.

Last edited 3 years ago by Dan Gleeballs
Jim Cox
Jim Cox
3 years ago

Good, solid analysis of Shon Faye’s latest work, pointing out that in it motherhood is denigrated and relegated to second-class status.

Alex Tickell
Alex Tickell
3 years ago

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”?

michael stanwick
michael stanwick
3 years ago

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.

Last edited 3 years ago by michael stanwick
Alex Tickell
Alex Tickell
3 years ago

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.

michael stanwick
michael stanwick
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Tickell

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.

Melanie Mabey
Melanie Mabey
2 years ago

Last edited 2 years ago by Melanie Mabey
H Owen
H Owen
2 years ago
Reply to  Melanie Mabey

“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.

Nick Child
Nick Child
1 year ago
Reply to  H Owen

“no one can ever speak again”
Except of course those Big Mother visionaries running it all?!

Nick Child
Nick Child
1 year ago

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.

Last edited 1 year ago by Nick Child