A Dyke A Broad #97 Gender Guerres
It's August. I’m at odds with myself, a little bored. I miss my friends who have disappeared. Either down political rabbit holes too claustrophobic for me to descend. Or on vacation to Brittany.
Hello from Paris!
In August, Paris is a city on methadone, drowsy and irritable. The buses are slower than ever. All the work in our building is at a dead halt, including the nearly finished elevator which I glare at resentfully every time I drag myself up to the fifth floor past empty apartments.
The only noise comes from the distant construction site I watch from our windows. Every morning at eight a parade of workmen arrive with their neon vests. Covid and its supply chain problems put them way behind schedule. I hope they’re getting time and a half, banging and grinding, maneuvering beams, smearing concrete while their brethren are off somewhere enjoying the heat instead of lamenting it.
I have mosquito bites everywhere. On my forehead, just under my left eye. Or maybe I have the mumps.
In even bigger news, there’s a new cashier at the Franprix grocery store down the block. His French is worse than mine. The other day I realized he was actually speaking Spanish with a few French words thrown in, so I switched to that. He was happy. I was happy. It made me homesick for New York. It transpires he’s from Colombia. “I have a friend from there,” I said, “Back in New York.” “Good people, Colombians, right?” he said. “Absolutely,” I said.
I’m at odds with myself, a little bored. I miss my friends who have also disappeared. Either down political rabbit holes too claustrophobic for me to descend. Or on vacation to Brittany. I think about how time, even when you’re a kid, moves too slowly and too fast. I waste too much of it on social media and TV, like I’m waiting for something more significant than September to arrive. Why not the Apocalypse?
Saturday, I went on Twitter (my god, I can’t quit you) and saw a tweet by a French transwoman I used to admire declaring J.K. Rowling as monstrous as the racist, anti-Semitic Céline. And that anybody who disagreed was clearly transphobic.
I wanted to push back and ask for an actual example in which Rowling implied trans people were less than human, but I didn’t. Instead, I re-read the actual tweet that turned Rowling into a target.
Is it snarky and irreverent? Yes. Even angry? Uh huh. But transphobic? No. Neither is Maya Forstater, the researcher Rowling stands with who had to fight a huge battle in court to express beliefs that include what most biologists (and trans people) take as fact, "that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.” For the record, Forstater has also said, “people should be free to express their identity and trans people should never be badly treated simply for being trans.”
Meanwhile, Rowling’s comment, “Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you,” was clearly in defense of the embattled barrister and black British lesbian, Allison Bailey, also being discriminated against by her workplace as transphobic, not only because she believes biological sex cannot change, but for pushing back against those activists who harass lesbians as transphobic if they refuse to sleep with women-identified males. She also dared denounce those transwomen who hold rapey seminars teaching other women-identified males how to overcome the “cotton ceiling” of our underpants, break down sexual barriers.
Like in the case of Forstater, the courts eventually upheld Bailey’s claims of discrimination against her employers, even awarding her damages, though she lost her case against the UK organization Stonewall.
For that simple tweet of solidarity with women fighting discrimination and for the right to free speech, Rowling’s been denounced as a transphobe, and as a TERF who should be punched, raped, mutilated, killed.
TERF, in case you’ve just emerged from cold storage on an interstellar flight, was once the acronym for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Now TERF is an all-purpose slur for women who don’t know when to shut up and sit down. I’ve written before how I’ve gotten called TERF just for using the word lesbian, have been called a transphobe for calling out the misogyny of trans activists who threaten to torture and kill their female critics.
That was Saturday. On Sunday, Twitter informed me that the promo for Manchester Pride in England was proudly featuring the sign, 'God Hates TERFS’ aptly using the same design and color scheme as the Westboro Baptist Church pioneered in their ever popular God Hates Fags poster.
I wasted something like six hours writing a lengthy rant about it, lining up facts, and history and arguments, but without saying anything new or useful. So I’ll spare you most of it. I increasingly think blab is useless, and the only effective way to push back against gender ideology—whose primary goal is to replace sex with gender in discrimination laws, ostensibly to give rights to trans people, but in effect removing the most basic tools women have to fight sexism and discrimination—is on the floors of parliaments as it’s debated as policy, or through litigation once it becomes law.
Ideally you’d mobilize the vast masses of people who don’t know and don’t care—until it’s too late. But as we saw in Britain it’s hard to get a fair hearing in the press until a bunch of lawsuits have been safely won.
And as for convincing those already converted by the ideology (like most of the activists I know)? That’s nearly impossible because most tenets of gender ideology just aren’t logical, aren’t science-based, like the idea that there is no sex, only gender, and so you can’t respond with reason. You either believe or you don’t. Like religious doctrine.
In fact, most people who attack TERFs, or attack Rowlings, remind me of antivaxxers. Putting aside those activists up for grants from global queer funders, they often have the best of intentions. It’s just that they’ve been taught to mistrust science, and embrace relativism (thanks to Butler, Foucault et al). Add in a mystical belief in the power of inclusion and kindness, there’s no way to communicate the legal consequences of these ideas, or that conflict is normal and rights very often have to be balanced between groups. Every dispute is not a battle between good and evil with winner take all. The law has the obligation—ideally—to protect everyone equally.
Sometimes I think stories about what it’s like to live in female bodies might get through where logic doesn’t. I wrote a whole unpublished book based on that premise. Mostly, I think trans activism 2.0 on the left just has to run its course, like any virus, whose fever in this case is propelled largely by misogyny against pesky loudmouthed women, many of whom are in the fight because they learned early that the femaleness of their bodies had a huge importance in the world.
Still, it’s painful to watch. Not just because women are getting attacked, including lesbians like me, but because the backlash will hit ordinary trans people already getting screwed by a movement whose priorities are not ending discrimination in jobs or housing, or health care, but playing ideological games, actively inciting conflict, like agent provocateurs tossing bottles at cops in an otherwise peaceful march, so that when the batons come down they can proudly show their bloody heads.
That’s the only reason for the advert published a few days ago by France’s humongous and storied Planning Familial, which declared that “men can get pregnant, too.”
If they’d added an asterix, or said transmen can get pregnant, too, maybe I’d have believed in their desire for inclusiveness. But they didn’t. They wanted the outrage. That, or to force us to accept and repeat what we know isn’t true, that there is no difference—at all— between the bodies and lives of transmen and adult human males known as men, or between transwomen and women.
So of course there was a backlash. According to an article in feminist site 4W, it came from radical feminists first before it started getting shared among the general public and the extreme right. Once it exploded there, trans activists and their favor-currying allies on the left could scream, “Gotcha you fucking TERFs and transphobes. You fascists, you.”
Probably some of their critics are. But like I said—not all. Not most. Meanwhile, politicians from both the center and center right have both been silent, like the current government, probably wondering which way the political wind will blow. In Britain, the center right Tories were happy to embrace the most extreme trans policies on offer. “See how progressive we really are?”
As far as I’m concerned, the advert was a stunt, a prank. A scam. A waste of money in service of a purely ideological point. After all, I saw the stats somewhere about how many transmen actually become pregnant and the figure’s a minuscule percentage of an already small group of people. First, most transmen don’t want to become pregnant, and be reminded of their femaleness. Second, cross-sex hormone treatment often leaves you sterile, though the gender docs mostly don’t tell you that. So, even if you want to bear a kid, good luck.
More and more it seems that organization’s gone off the deep-end, not only de-centering the group of women it was meant to serve, but with their shiny new relativist logic supporting anti-women islamists, even characterizing female genital mutilation as a choice like any other, wearing make-up, for instance. This, despite groups of desperate women activists from Africa begging them to reconsider.
In this, I find myself agreeing with the far right politician Helene Laporte. Planning Familial has lost their way. While many local groups are doing fine work, the leadership is pathetic. Corrupt. Disgusting. Like all the so-called feminists who score political points by turning a blind eye as other women are threatened and harassed for defending the most fundamental ideas in feminism: that sex matters. (And exists). And women—females—have the right to describe their own experience. And act on their own behalf.
Later, on Facebook, I ran across a “friend” posting about how much he liked Dorothea Lange's photographs, including her portrait, Son of cotton picker.
I stared at his beautiful bashful smile and remembered how much I liked old school documentary photography where the aim wasn’t to shape anybody’s image purely for public consumption, or to sell anything, even ideas, unless it was the one in which we are all human, which is what Lange’s images always sought to reveal.
And I wondered how long we’ll have to wait for this reality- and flesh-denying trans movement to dump the queer evangelists of the post-modern academy and return to their Stonewallian roots, where trans activists and their allies—including me—recognized that we are more than our bodies, but we are still our bodies. And our bodies have consequences, have histories. Which shine out of our faces. And the differences we read there are nothing to be ashamed of— or proud of, either. They just are.
Speaking of photos
There are some beautiful ones as part of this oral history project, Outliers and Outlaws about lesbians in Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s. Scroll down and click on the slideshow of “then and now” portraits.
They’re fab.
Notes on Geopolitics
Against an international backdrop where democracies are fighting within themselves in an often-existential way, and where in the context of the invasion of Ukraine and tensions around Taiwan, the democratic and autocratic worlds are facing off in an increasingly hostile way, the key event will be the meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in late October, early November…
Escaping Murder
Such a good article, asking Why did I risk my life for a pizza?
inside myself the undeniable truth: make me uncomfortable enough and not only will I do what you tell me, I’ll act grateful for it besides.
Last But Not Least
A dense piece on the roots of Wokeness and Antiwokeness, which is useful if like me you’re navigating the rocky and unwelcoming shoals between the two.
Make sure you have a whole pot of coffee and a lot of time before sitting down to read this.
Another materialist account, the “woke labor” thesis, promises to explain such cases. In short, a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security. In City Journal, Malcom Kyeyune writes that America’s culture wars can be understood by examining the class interests of mid-level managers who don’t own capital but retain control over how it is deployed. What seem like earnest arguments for a company allegedly dogged by a toxic culture to submit to an audit or scale up its diversity-training initiatives actually constitute calls for a “massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes.” These managers simply want to create more work for themselves (and other members of their guild). Cancellations of dissenters therefore function as labor market discipline, forcing the unwoke to exit the sector.
But how can economic incentives explain the great many cancellations that have little to do with material gain, as in hobbyist communities like knitting?
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntedly yours,