Mick Hartley

Patriarchy in drag

Suzanne Moore at UnHerd - Why did Jacqueline Rose erase women?

What is a woman? Hoping he might be able to answer this vexatious question, the New Statesman turned to Richard Dawkins. In the resulting piece, the biologist expresses sympathy with those with gender dysphoria, but is unequivocal that a woman “is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes”. Sex, he writes, is “binary”.

In the interests of “balance”, an opposing view was deemed necessary. The counter-argument, published last week, was made by Jacqueline Rose, a professor at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. According to Dawkins, her response does not make any “coherent sense”, which he suggests may be a badge of honour among postmodernists.

I am a long-time admirer of Rose. Her insights on psychoanalysis have suffused my own writing and I loved her book Mothers, which, as it happens, I reviewed in the New Statesman. I described her as “one of our very best cultural critics”.

Yet even I was surprised at how poor her recent article was...

Unlike Moore I am not a long-time admirer of Jacqueline Rose, or her "insights" on psychoanalysis. One of these facile insights, laid out in her book The Question of Zion, is that the story of Israel should be understood in psychoanalytic terms as the revisiting of the abuse the child received from its parents (the Holocaust) onto its own children (the Palestinians).  

Howard Jacobson neatly disposed of this conceit here, in the context of an argument over Caryl Churchill's nasty little play Seven Jewish Children, which for Jacobson was clearly antisemitic:

Jacqueline Rose omits to mention in her defence of this indefensible work that she is in some way – actual or spiritual – affiliated to it. The castlist expresses gratitude to her, though it is not clear whether that’s for mothering the play intellectually, or for acting as Caryl Churchill’s Jewish midwife in its delivery – advising her in such arcane Jewish matters, say, as the pleasure we take in the murder of non-Jewish babies.

But the play owes her a debt all right, particular in its unquestioning espousal of her theory that the Holocaust traumatised the Jews into visiting back upon the Palestinians what the Nazis had visited on them – a theory of dazzling psychological simplicity that turns Zionism (and never mind that Zionism long predates the Holocaust) into a nervous breakdown, and all subsequent events into the playing out of the Jews’ psychic instability. By this reasoning, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab countries who have helped or hindered them are relevant. Jacqueline Rose spirits them away from the scene of the crime. They are redundant to the working of her theory, of no significance (whatever they have done), since the narrative of the Middle East is nothing but the narrative of the Jewish mind disintegrating.

See also Shalom Lappin at Normblog on Therapists to the Jews: Psychologizing the 'Jewish Question'.

But I digress. Back to Suzanne Moore:

She [Jacqueline Rose] begins by claiming that a “central goal of feminism is to repudiate the idea of womanhood”. Is it? What is womanhood if there is no such thing as a woman? Does she mean “femininity”?

On the threat of sexual violence, she suggests that it is “the category of women as much as the safety of women that needs protection”. That category, she thinks, should include women who were once men. Let’s take this idea for a walk, shall we? Out of the academy and to Iran and Afghanistan, to places where women die in menstrual huts or undergo FGM, where women-only spaces are compelled. She complains that “the idea of female” is “some kind of primordial condition… as if it were the bedrock of all the limitations to follow”. She’s actually right here: this is the unfortunate reality in many parts of the world.

Of course, she uses the de Beauvoir quote — “One is not a woman, one becomes one” — but, predictably, chooses to ignore the rest of it: “No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.” The second part of the quotation is key. The construction of gender is social and there is a difference between being female (sex) and femininity (gender) which is learnt.

Rose’s preference for referring to “females” as opposed to women, she says, is because Andrea Long Chu argues that “female” was developed in the 19th century as a way of referring to black slaves. As a result, it is “historically naive and racially blind” to assume it is a “neutral biological category”. Woah!

“Female” was in common usage long before the 19th century and I think Rose does Long Chu down here. Long Chu is a controversial, often witty, trans author who starts her book Females with: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” For Long Chu, a female identity is one of self-negation and fuckable porn-addled passivity, which is precisely why she transitioned. If the answer to “What is a woman?” is this person, then the majority of the population — women — are tragic failures. Perhaps we are, but at least I know that male babies are not born “with spermatozoa”, as Rose asserts.

[More on Andrea Long Chu here. "Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."]

“‘Reality’ for feminism”, she argues, is something that has to be negotiated, and to dictate on this matter is patriarchal. Rose, you have to understand, is coming from a place where discourse always trumps objective reality. Postmodern theory depends on us seeing ourselves as formed only in and through language. Meaning is never settled; it is always contested. This is a fine and interesting philosophical argument, but as a politics it stinks. Postmodernism is patriarchy in drag.

What is a woman? “In the end,” we’re told, “it is a matter of generosity and freedom.” Well yes, that will go down well with the Taliban. Where is the generosity towards women who have lost jobs and reputations because of this “debate”? Where is the freedom for women to define themselves? If oppression is not rooted in biology, where does it come from exactly? ...

What is a woman? I suspect Rose knows. She just also knows which side her bread is buttered on: the side that holds the power in academia, publishing and literary circles. They have stopped dreaming big and kid themselves they are radical in their safe spaces. Yet most women don’t get to choose our safe spaces: we are too mean and unsophisticated. Unlike Rose, some of us remain thankfully unkind, unpersuaded, unbound.

That's surely the key. Whether or not Rose really believes all the postmodernist guff, she knows which side her bread is buttered on. She knows which is her tribe, and who the enemies are.

Sharing pronouns

Lucy Bannerman in the Times:

NHS staff should share their preferred pronouns every time they meet a new patient, according to the quango responsible for training in the health service.

A training guide by Health Education England advises medics to do so to create a “safe space” for the small fraction of the population who identify as transgender or non-binary.

How ridiculous..Is there an explanation, then, for this absurdity?

Well yes, there is. Nine letters, starts with "S"...

Health Education England has received a gold award from the LGBT charity Stonewall for its diversity policies. Last year it was ranked 110th out of 403 in the group’s annual ranking of employers, which awards points for adopting Stonewall recommendations on topics such as discrimination, gender identity and family leave.

Its online training module on LGBT awareness suggests that medics inform patients of their pronouns, such as she/her or they/them, regardless of whether or not anyone present is transgender. The guide, first reported by The Mail on Sunday, says this helps to create a “safe space” for transgender and non-binary people.

It says: “The easiest thing to do is to start by introducing yourself with your own pronoun. In doing so you are creating a safe space for trans, non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people who may not feel comfortable to go first in introducing themselves with pronouns.”...

An NHS spokesman said: “While the NHS is committed to tackling health inequalities and improving access and experience for LGBT communities, this online module is not NHS policy and it is optional for staff.”

“Inclusion” has become a tool of “exclusion”

Simon Fanshawe - a founder of Stonewall back when it was a gay rights organisation who's since become a strong critic of the new trans-driven organisation - on how the new "diversity and inclusion" industry in fact just serves to push us apart:

Since the Black Lives Matter movement was born in 2013 and #MeToo in 2017, the approach in businesses has become increasingly driven by younger employees — either those in the new “diversity and inclusion” roles at big companies, or through staff groups and networks that unite to get the ear of the chief executive.

Increasingly, they see themselves as activists, people with similar “progressive” agendas, rather than employees. What do I mean by that? Well you’d be hard pushed to find an active pro-Brexit group in a university, a group of lesbian and gay staff who advocated for the binary nature of sex and therefore for sex separation in company gym facilities or a group of black staff who don’t believe that the UK is “institutionally racist”.

As a result, the perfectly right-minded desire to pursue greater diversity by focusing on opening up opportunities and the removal of blocks to people’s talent, is instead distorted into corporations playing out particular political agendas.

The activists who now have the upper hand seem instead mostly concerned with policing language and striking campaign poses. Rather than making any material differences to staff by widening their prospects, they would rather just point and punish. The effect of this is that, under the cover of diversity, “inclusion” has, with breathtaking irony, become a tool of “exclusion”.

This permeates to the very top so that the now former chief executive of NatWest, Dame Alison Rose, can with no sense of paradox, run a bank that says Nigel Farage’s “views were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”.

Appalling as Farage’s opinions might be to many people, it is puzzling to the great majority how we’ve ended up in a Humpty Dumpty world, where “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. Where to be ‘inclusive’ now apparently is defined as ‘you have to speak like this, think like this and behave like this. Or we’ll exclude you’.

Rose, and her colleagues at Coutts, were using ‘diversity and inclusion’, along with so many leaders in D&I (to which it is inevitably abbreviated), to foster the very opposite. Their view of inclusion is, in the end, a form of coercion. While this panders to the activist employees, it alienates swathes of staff from the goal of increasing diversity by effectively telling them that their views are not welcome.

There was a risk she “might misgender someone”

This, again from the Telegraph, is exactly the kind of case that gets Baroness Nicholson (previous post) so incensed:

A social worker with 25 years experience has been told she cannot apply for more work after she questioned whether transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was the right person to model sports bras for Nike.

Mother of two Louise Chivers, 52, has been told she cannot apply for social services jobs pending an investigation after a manager at Leicestershire County Council suggested there was a risk she “might misgender someone”.

It came after she described Mulvaney, who identifies as female, as “a skinny gay man with no t-ts” and accused the TikTok influencer of being a “misogynist who mocks women” during a recent training day.

She has now been referred to Social Work England, the body that regulates social workers, and the company that recruited her has launched an investigation.

Ms Chivers, a lesbian from Northamptonshire who works in adult social care, said: “On this particular occasion, we had been discussing gender-neutral toilets and I said I wasn’t comfortable using them because statistics show women are eight times more likely to be raped in one.

“The conversation then moved into the climate protests and whether it was hypocritical for protesters to be wearing clothes made of plastic and other environmentally unfriendly materials.

“I said I would struggle to buy Nike clothes any more because I didn’t agree with Dylan Mulvaney advertising sports bras because I thought it made a mockery of women.

“Afterwards, I was contacted by my managers who demanded to know what I had said. I was then told by the recruitment agencies that I use to apply for jobs that they would not find me work until conclusion of the investigation.

“I feel like I’ve been blacklisted. The inference that because I am gender-critical, I must be transphobic.

“I’ve been on the gay scene since I was 18. I’ve been socially active with transgender people for decades. If people have got gender dysmorphia, I’m hugely sympathetic but I don’t believe in gender identity – I believe there are two sexes and that’s it.

“I’ve got two children and a mortgage to pay and now I’m worried I won’t be able to find another job simply because the powers that be appear to have been brainwashed on this issue.”

Kate Barker of the LGB Alliance:

“It cannot be right that in workplaces around the country asserting that a woman is a female person is considered so offensive that it can lead to suspension or dismissal. Or that for lesbians, that ‘crime’ is compounded by their refusal to accept the absurd notion that a man can be a lesbian.

“It’s clear to us that the dystopian crackpottery of a small minority of ideologues continues to infect workplaces around the country. They’ve created a climate of fear that prevents sensible people from speaking out and punishes those, like Louise, who are brave enough to state an obvious truth.”

And Louise Chivers (the victim here) adds her own take, pointing out how damaging this cult-like belief in trans ideology can be when social workers are forced to toe the gender line:

Every week, social workers have to make decisions on whether people have “capacity” in a whole range of choices.

They then have to make “best interest decisions” if the person doesn’t, which requires critical thinking skills.

Social workers who do not think critically and follow the affirmation dogma will set vulnerable adults on false affirmation pathways.

I’ve heard of social workers in children’s services threaten child removal if parents don’t follow gender ideology and of kids sent straight to gender reassignment clinics after one trip to a doctor.

Social workers need to be aware of the social contagion phenomenon, particularly in teenage girls and the inherent homophobia in telling gender non-conforming youth they can achieve the impossible and “be” the other sex.

All social workers should have read the preliminary Cass Review into the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the full report, when published, should be compulsory reading for everyone in the profession.

Learning disability social workers need to be aware that clients with DSDs (differences in sex development), like Klinefelter syndrome, which is where a boy is born with an extra X chromosome, are at risk of being groomed into believing they are intersex and being brought to misogynist trans-rights activists rallies. I talked to one such person outside an LGB Alliance event in Newcastle last month. These males often have learning disabilities, low testosterone and behavioural problems. They are very vulnerable.

Forensic social workers and probation workers also need to be keeping a very close eye on the statistics of trans men identifying as women to gain access to female and child victims. These men’s fantasies should never predominate women’s spaces and safety, especially so with the most vulnerable and abused women who end up in prison.

And they all need to be able to voice their concerns without fear of recrimination.

Social workers are being indoctrinated into the homophobic and misogynistic mantras of Stonewall. Social work has always had a problem with being predominantly dominated by white liberal middle-class women. But this “do gooding” social work in an echo chamber of “be kind” has stopped critical thought and evidence-based practice.

Ultimately, if social workers are to be censored and, in my case, blacklisted for sticking up for women and children, then we are doing a huge disservice to the very people we are supposed to be helping.

"Like one of those particularly terrible religious sects"

An interview in the Telegraph with the redoubtable Baroness Emma Nicholson on her involvement in the trans debate:

“It first started when a couple of nurses came to see me and they said that they had been sacked from their jobs for refusing to agree to work in a way which was against their training,” the former MP recalls over a cup of tea. “They objected to saying that sex was assigned at birth and that objection got them the sack. I found it almost unbelievable.

“They were followed by two teachers who had refused to say that sex can be changed between man and woman, which had also got them the sack.

“They were all at the beginning of their careers, and they told me they were now unemployable in the NHS or schools. Four young women who were all intelligent, committed, and passionate about their work who were forbidden from working.”

The 81-year-old, seen as something of a trailblazer, has never shied away from a fight. Her opponents have included the Taliban, members of which she chided for their treatment of women when she became one of the first Western politicians to visit their refugee camps in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, and Saddam Hussein, who she challenged over the systematic persecution and extermination of the Marsh Arabs and launched a parliamentary campaign.

She has taken on child-trafficking gangs in Eastern Europe and even went up against the Iron Lady – her own boss – over the poll tax. But her latest fight, for the protection of sex-based rights and against the over-medicalisation of children, has somehow been different.

“I wrote letters to ministers and officials and I got ignored. Proper, House of Lords, well-constructed letters, and I got nothing. And I wondered what was going on,” she says....

She says that at the extreme end of trans activism “they are managing to persuade a lot of people to live their lives in a certain way but it is like one of those particularly terrible religious sects where they found their own belief system.

“They are the Pied Piper of Hamelin in a much nastier way, and what’s astonishing is how much of the world has picked it up.”

She has sympathy for people who have genuine gender dysphoria, having in the past helped to campaign for the rights of trans individuals, and believes that they too have been harmed by extremist activists.

“This movement isn’t actually for trans people, it is for liars who don’t need science and truth, who threaten children and young people with dire consequences if they don’t get themselves mutated.”

This needs to stop

"Puberty is a rite of passage to adulthood, not a disease to be mitigated.". Powerful testimony before a House subcommittee from Chloe Cole:

A truly bizarre experience

Shay Woulahan, in Reduxx, on a Channel Island "trans femme":

A 19-year-old trans-identified male broke down in tears after a Guernsey Royal Court jury unanimously found him guilty of rape on July 28. Despite the serious crime, Freddie Christian Trenchard, also known as Alyssa Christine Trenchard, was released on bail pending sentencing.

Trenchard, who was born male but identifies as a “trans femme,” was first reported to police in February of last year, though the crime occurred in the summer of 2021.

The assault is said to have been committed after Trenchard invited the victim to his home in the small island community.

Despite testimony from the victim in which she details crying throughout the attack and screaming “no,” Trenchard’s defense argued that no intercourse occurred and even accused the victim of being motivated by transphobia.

Trenchard was released into the community until sentencing, which will take place at a yet-unspecified date later this year.

A representative for Guernsey Women’s Rights Network (WRN) who attended the court proceedings told Reduxx that the sexual attack was described by legal professionals as having been committed by a “transgender female” with “her penis.”

ane Roper explained how Trenchard was referred to with feminine pronouns and the honorific term “miss,” even on occasions where the crime was being referenced. Roper said it was “bizarre” to hear statements such as, “Miss Trenchard then penetrated [the complainant] with her penis,” and, “Miss Trenchard then ejaculated on [the complainant’s] back.”

“Trenchard hasn’t so much as legally changed his name – let alone undergone any surgery,” Roper said. Initially the presiding judge had described Trenchard as a “transgender male,” but would later apologize to the rapist for doing so.

“The judge was sent a message asking the defendant what he would like to be described as, and then actually apologized to him and told the court that Trenchard would like to be described as a ‘transgender female’. In her opening statements the judge said the alleged crime occurred ‘when the defendant was biologically male,'”...

A confused judge. Not the first, and, undoubtedly, not the last. Just by calling himself a "trans femme", the defendant didn't magically change sex.

“It was a truly bizarre experience to witness the court jumping through hoops for this man. As a woman, that felt really shocking, especially as we had all sat through the complainant’s harrowing oral evidence detailing the rape,” Roper remarked....

Trenchard has posted several videos on TikTok, using hashtags such as #trans and #transisbeautiful. In one of his most recent videos, Trenchard confesses to becoming sexually aroused when someone calls him “miss,” the same term he requested to be addressed by during the trial.

Getting off the fence

Has Labour really changed its tune on gender? Janice Turner in the Times:

"Firstly,” said Sir Keir Starmer, “a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.” And in uttering this dictionary definition on LBC he revealed a monumental policy shift. For years women have been vilified, silenced, branded bigots, suffered internal party investigations and death threats for holding this very view. Now the Labour leader was not just declaring that the witch-hunts, most notably of JK Rowling, were over, but the witches were right all along.

Why did this cautious, conflict-averse man finally get off the fence? Mainly to neutralise a rare Tory attack line, that Labour can’t define a woman. Starmer, who’d squirmed on TV muttering about cervixes and what percentage of women have penises, knew that until Labour had a coherent answer, this question would blight every election debate.

Labour’s position on gender risked few potential votes in a cost of living crisis but it made its politicians look weak, silly and extreme. So at last Sunday’s National Policy Forum a promise to change the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to a process of self-ID was removed from Labour’s manifesto. Every poll shows that self-ID is unpopular, while even Nicola Sturgeon struggled to justify why the male rapist Adam/Isla Bryson should be housed in a women’s prison and could, on release, use female changing rooms.

Labour presented this new policy as a genius compromise, transcending two puerile opposing factions — gender-critical feminists and trans activists — when in fact it was (subject to small print) what women’s groups wanted all along. The opposition leader’s inner circle might have known that if they’d deigned to meet them, rather than dismissing concerns about legal erasure of biological sex and hard-won female protections as piffling, hysterical and right wing.

Given that this decision was driven by electoral self-interest, can Labour be trusted not to backtrack once in power? Yes, as long as Starmer remains leader. The Labour elite keeps its gender views quiet, but key figures — Bridget Phillipson at education, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, Steve Reid at justice and Shabana Mahmood, national campaign co-ordinator — are quietly gender-critical.

Hmm. Maybe. On the other hand a large and vocal Labour contingent - from deputy leader Angela Rayner down to hotheads like Lloyd Russell-Moyle - are still very much on the trans self-ID wagon. And Starmer holds no firm belief here: it's all electoral calculation and taking whatever opinion suits for the moment. "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others". 

This, though, is encouraging:

A senior member of the Labour frontbench has offered an apology to a fellow MP, Rosie Duffield, who has said she felt ostracised by the party because of her views on gender reforms.

Duffield had also accused male party colleagues of trying to shout her down in the Commons earlier this year when she spoke to back the government’s move to block gender reforms proposed in Scotland.

The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said in an interview on Times Radio on Friday: “I’m really sorry about the way Rosie’s been treated.”

Intermission

Off for a week. Back next weekend - 29th/30th.

Queer Theory and prisons

Here's the transcript of a podcast Wesley Yang did with Oxford professor of sociology Michael Biggs. It's worth reading in full, but this is interesting: 

One strand of my research is on the medical stuff, puberty blockers. Another strand I've written more sociologically about is the important impact of Queer Theory on prison policy in Britain. I think it's such a nice case, because you never think of Queer Theory, Judith Butler. I read Judith Butler in the 1990s. Obviously, it was important at that point as academic theory, but really, to put it crudely, it’s kind of intellectual masturbation. I didn't think much of it, but if people in English literature find it useful, that’s fine. Whatever. Performativity, gender… That’s great.

But it's literally informing prison policy in Britain. That was really a shock to me. Or in England and Wales, where they’re actually quoting Butler. Or key transgender activists who say that their primary influence was Judith Butler are now advising the prison service to change the rules to eliminate sex and replace it with gender identity.

I have an article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which is probably the only journal that would publish it, that’s just a straight sociological case study of policy change and how Queer Theory, human rights policy or human rights ideas also, was behind this fundamental shift in prison policy.

At the high point of that policy, what was important was the feelings of the rapist. If the rapist felt like a woman, then you needed to make sure that his feelings are respected. And that was driven by activists. Not all of them are trans, but part of this is inspired by Queer Theory.

And what was also interesting in the case of Britain, is that it happened under a Conservative government. This is not Joe Biden or New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. That's not really surprising, right? These are left wing parties. Why shouldn't they implement left wing policies? But these crazy queer policies were being enacted under a Conservative government, which shows us the power of these ideas.

Also the Foucaultian way in which power is not necessarily the sovereign at the top. It's all these bureaucrats and administrators. These are professional activists and activist professionals, who are making these fundamental changes, when the government is either asleep at the wheel or it's not really interested.

But there's lots more...