AGP-Gate

The emerging class politics of gender critical .

There has been a bit of a hoo ha in the gender critical world that I have become embroiled in, and I have some things to say. By becoming engaged in the political theory side of the most recent debate, that we are calling AGP-gate, I have been smacked by Stella O’Malley, Sarah Phillimore, Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce, and as far as I know I am the only one of us with a political theory degree so to give them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll outline my side and you can let me know what you think.

The issue started with this photo of Phil Illy, who has a strange range of paraphilias and ideas about paraphilias that I will only address briefly. We know the tweet was a misstep by Genspect, they took the photo down, they withdrew Illys book from their recommended reading list, and had they then address the concerns of women, the entire issue may have blown away in the wind. But that is not what happened.

Phil Illy identifies as having autogynephilia, an innate attraction to himself as a woman. I am not going to go through the different opinions people have about this, but from the perspective of many women, this man is a self-confessed fetishist, and he is performing his fetish of pretending to be a woman, and this was promoted and normalised by Genspect.  Genspect also had Phil’s book on their recommended reading at the time. So, from my perspective the concerns of women were justified. Did they express it in a dignified and ladylike manner? Maybe not everyone.

I took a line on the topic that same day on the podcast I do with Kit Kowalski “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, that Genspect could cry in their boots as much as they like about the pile on they received, ultimately they had done the wrong thing by women and especially vulnerable women, and they should backpedal and apologise. Backpedal they did, apologise they did not.

Genspect, as I emphasised on our podcast, is not a feminist organisation, but as they describe themselves on their twitter page an “international alliance of professionals, parent groups, trans people, detransition, and others promoting a healthy approach to sex and gender”. So, the conference that the picture was from, aimed at having an open conversation from different perspectives. But in these issues gender critical feminists and women’s rights activists, have a significant interest.

The next thing I saw was Stella O’Malley, one of the founders of Genspect, who has a book on building resilience in kids from bullying, claiming that she and the organisation were being bullied. The bullying she said “has always been present but is seldom called out.” “Shame on everyone” she said “who had hopped in on this pile on”

I had been on spaces talking to some of the women who were making their concerns known to Genspect, including sexual assault survivors, detransition and trans widows, and they were not just angry they were upset. I thought maybe Stella could try to hear what these women were saying past the noise. It wasn’t hard to hear that very sensible people were mounting very reasonable objections. Stella called the matter “one ill-judged tweet” but I had a visceral reaction to the shaming of women for exerting sexual boundaries, and she set the tone that I saw repeated.

On November 16^th Megan Murphy held a livestream with Mary Lou Singleton and Heather Heying entitled “why are women up in arms about a man wearing a dress?”. Heather Heying had the most interesting insights, as she had been to the conference and met Mr Illy, where he had given her a copy of his book.  We find that Phil is indeed into very strange sexual kinks and has a philosophy of pathologising a variety of “trans experience” under which he groups transage, bestiality and paedophilia. Phil proports to talk about such things, removed from moral judgements. Phil has not been so keen to remove his moral judgement from women that don’t affirm his fetish. 

As the days unfolded it was clear that Illy had a very disturbing philosophy that many women would consider harmful to children, women and society.  Given that the core business of the gender critical world is to remove harmful sexual ideologies from government, the strong objections of women would seem reasonable. But the response to them was extraordinary.

In the livestream Meghan Murphy mentioned her friend Benjamin Boyce had said that women’s anger was evidence of “radical feminists” needing to control people’s behaviour and speech. The line Boyce was running was that Illy was just a man in a dress. Boyce and Phil continued to mock women, and later went on to hold an interview with a gender critical gay man Rudy, who was told that his sexual orientation (homosexuality) was just a more vanilla version of a variety of fetish based innate sexualities.  The danger of this ideology is painfully obvious to any grown up.  

Murphy and Heying also addressed the response of trans identified man Julia Malott, who came out in defence of Illy. Malott considered that women were not showing sufficient respect for Phil Illy. Malott went on to say the behaviour of gender critical women at the Genspect conference was problematic, that a prominent gender critical woman had been guilty of “dehumanised” him with her speech.  Murphy guessed that person was Kellie Jay Keen. Malott then claimed that he was dehumanised by women when his picture was shared on the Genspect X account.

Heying reacted to the hyperbole and contradiction of Malott’s statements, her key point was that when women don’t buy into men’s delusions, they are not stripping men of their humanity.  The statement from Malott dripped of male entitlement and the women were not having it. The statement from Julia Malott included a video where he was dressed like a middle America housewife and sounded like he was doing a Californian valley girl accent. 

After seeing the Murphy livestream, Julia Malott went on X, inviting his followers to watch Heather Heying “bash” him and complained he had been called a “groomer, a fetishizer, a pedophile etc” by women in the comments. Following the podcast Canadian anti-woke activist Chanel Pfahl came out in strong defence of Julia Malott and his defence of Phil Illy. Pfahl is a former high school teacher who seems to focus on the ideological infection of the Canadian school system by what she describes as “woke” materials. She was unconcerned that Malott was promoting Illy and by association a range of very harmful sexual practices and ideologies.

Chanel Pfahl made the comment that radical feminism is a “flavour of wokism”. Since radical feminism predates “woke” by many decades it seemed like a strange comment.

You won’t see me use the word “woke” much unless I am talking in the vernacular and wanting to be understood by a very specific audience, but I’ll clarify here what I think woke is.  I don’t think woke is a theory or a religion, woke is a middle-class political aesthetic. Trying to deconstruct woke as a political theory will send you insane, particularly if you don’t understand political theory.

Pfahl strongly criticised Heying, framing her comments on Murphy’s livestream as part of a targeted attack on Malott. A number of accounts were now claiming the feminists were targeting them with abuse. Sarah Phillimore joined Stella O’Mally in claiming the women should be shamed for their behaviour, but yet again none of the serious concerns about Phil Illy being a possible paedophile apologist were being addressed. When I asked Sarah if women should be shamed for asserting boundaries, she implied the boundaries women were asserting were based on disgust and so “you betcha”.  Phillimore unfollowed me and I returned the favour.

I responded to Pfahl asking if the mean ladies had sent tweets to hurt the man’s feelings and explaining that radical feminism is not woke but a political framework. When someone then asked what this nonsense was about, I replied that it must have come from James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set, I had read their book a few years ago and found their lack of understanding of basic political theory surprising.

I have since felt that the podcasting centre right are developing a kind of an alternative aesthetic of anti-woke, anti-feminist, neo liberal, middle class political taste, along with a nonsensical and dangerously fragile political structure. Centrists seem to be convinced that politics is downstream of culture, and they busily go about building their own cultural rules with bits and pieces of old western philosophy and newly revised men’s rights activism.

Keen to teach me a lesson for belittling his sensitive man feelings, Julia Malott asked Helen Pluckrose to weight in the conversation with her political rationale for calling radical feminists, “woke”.  It was a long bow, but Pluckrose gave it a shot.

In Pluckrose’s painfully long thread (which I will address momentarily) she mixed political philosophy with personal morality, and I began to understand why she had, just a days earlier, told me that she thought I was engaged in feminism because I wanted to bash men (notice again the language of violence). Beyond university based progressive feminism, she didn’t understand what feminism was, she was displaying a painful type of middle-class ignorance of class politics and pluralism in a liberal state.

When challenged Pluckrose said she stood by the statement she had made three years ago that women were not oppressed as a sex class. You will notice that Helen acknowledged “trans” is an oppressed class, please keep that in mind.

A few days before the big thread Pluckrose kindly wrote for me, my friend Kit Kowalski and I tried to educate Helen about feminism, telling her that gender critical feminists wasn’t necessary an ideology but a class based activism of a sex class against the state for the interests of women and girls.

Helen reiterated that she did recognise women as a sex but class was just a less accurate term for women as a sex. She seemed to completely deny that there was a point or a rationale for women to activate as a political sex class and indeed those that did were only doing so to “bash men and sipe at” her. To be fair I could do that without bothering to risk my own safety and that of my family by engaging in this.  

Helen then tried to engage us in a discussion on how to approach our aim of the protection of women and girls from her anti-woke perspective. She claimed that the answer was to ignore the protection of women and girls altogether and focus on how to stop men raping, it was sounding a lot like liberal feminism. She blocked Kit for being disinterested in reading her philosophy.

But back to the thread that Helen wrote to explain why radical feminism was woke.  Stay with me for a minute, because you won’t believe anyone who has this political philosophy will be taken seriously. Helen argues that because radical means “to the root”, the philosophical school of radical feminism interprets everything only through patriarchy, and this causes a political blindness where radical feminists just can’t see that trans activists are actually very reasonable and against patriarchy.

The Pluckrose narrative goes, that this blindness to the higher motives of trans activists has infected the entire gender critical movement, by forcing “players” to take a side and not find a resolution between “women and trans people”.  Here, contradictorily Helen seems to acknowledge there are two classes at play that are in conflict, but we already know which class Helen thinks is oppressed. I remind you that gender critical feminists deny trans can be a class (there is no consistent characteristic). Pluckrose’s pretence to hold a middle or liberal position here is transparently false.

Helen continued to describe what she called “radical feminists”, while smearing the entire group of gender critical activists on twitter who refused to normalise autogynephilia, as extremists.

Still, none of the concerns of the women had been addressed, even though many gender critical women denied the claim that they were engaging in radical politics, and I will remind you that it is everyone’s liberal right to engage in radical politics.

Not long after Helen posed her nonsensical thread, I received a notification that Stella O’Malley had liked and retweeted the thread. I reiterate, the thread was written by invitation of a trans identified man to reply to my concerns that feminists were being called extremists for asserting sexual boundaries. I also noticed that O’Malley had unfollowed me. This thread was buried in layers of a conversation, so I am assuming Stella had been notified of the thread by private message.

I was so shocked that Stella O'Malley would endorse this dangerous and stupid political analysis, I retweeted one of the more deranged claims Pluckrose made about the radical politics of feminists that O'Malley had liked and tagged Stella to attempt to find out if she really held this quite extreme political position that feminists who objected to AGPs were as bad as trans activists.   

I reminded my followers that a woman in Melbourne was left permanently disabled after having been assaulted by trans activists, that women were regularly assaulted by trans activists and that my friend had died after an online campaign by trans activists and a harrowing workplace investigation. Calling feminists, the same as trans activists, was no joke to me.

I was very shocked to see Kathleen Stock reply to my tweet, reprimanding me for calling Stella O’Malley to account and saying I had a “relentless focus on the supposed missteps of one individual”. Calling my one question “relentless” was obviously not correct, so Stock had assumed I was part of a gang.  

I have had no interaction with Kathleen Stock, I don’t know her from Adam, why she would presume to come into my timeline and reprimand me, as if I was some kind of schoolyard scraper who had fallen into the wrong crowd, I have no idea.  She didn’t respond to my defence so she was playing the top girl.  I, in no way, recognise Kathleen Stock has authority over me in any way. Helen Joyce then “liked” the second comment Stock made in defence of Stella. Neither of them inboxed me or engaged with me when I replied.

I live in a state with self ID so I’ve lost my human rights to the kind of ideology Helen Pluckrose spouts, if Stella agrees with it, then I will be taking that into account when approaching Genspect in my writing or other engagement. Radical feminists have been very important to our movement in Australia and I have had my scraps with them, but this attack on them is false and dangerous. They are women, trans activists are mostly men for a start, so there is a problematic framing of women’s violence against men here.

That unfortunately wasn’t the end of my discussion with Pluckrose about liberalism.  I surprised Pluckrose with the information that I was not a radical feminist but a Christian and a classic liberal and I was an ally to radfems in a range of issues. She seemed to lose her mind.

I told Pluckrose that liberalism wasn’t the idea that we should “live and let live” as she claimed but a doctrine of government where the individual should be free from the tyranny of government.  Government, under the doctrine of liberalism, is prone to tyranny, this was the tyranny women were experiencing in government overstep, and we were resisting with class politics in a pluralist society. There is nothing illiberal about gender critical feminism.

Pluckrose made a surprising move in our argument to checkmate herself. Pluckrose said that my claim about the individual being protected from the state was in fact not a true representation of liberalism but liberalism was primarily the protection of the individual from “prevailing opinion” and she quoted a very important passage of ‘On Liberty’.

Of course Mill doesn’t give what we call “social tyranny” or “oppression” priority, but says society needs to “be on its guard”.  ‘On Liberty’ was written in 1859 and since then and by this very principle of social oppression of the one from the many, liberal states have developed a governmental technology to deal with social tyranny, we call them class protections, or anti-discrimination law.  

Social tyranny is difficult to deal with, without giving the government the kind of power that makes it tyrannous, as we can see, so we group population vulnerabilities in classes and give group protections through anti-discrimination legislation based on a characteristic that makes the individual vulnerable to oppression.  This has been very successful for women and has led to unprecedented freedom for women following the class action of feminists.

When I mentioned class protections as way to protect from social tyranny, Helen pretended to be dazed and confused and blocked me again, maybe the logical consequences of her argument were taxing her.

The underlying argument that Pluckrose mounting, was that the women “attacking” men with their tweets were enacting a kind of social tyranny, by oppressing the trans identified men because they had a kind of disgust toward them (transphobia).

In other words, the women, under the influence of radical feminist leaders, were oppressing trans identified men.  We know Helen believes trans is a class subject to social oppression and qualify for class protections, female on the other hand is merely a sex and only entitled to individual protections.  Helen is weighing the oppression categories in a very “woke” manner here. If you would watch a few episodes of Magdalene Burns on YouTube, you will understand that this is a common TRA tactic.

Pluckrose claims that feminists are obsessed with patriarchy, while she is blinded to the concept that females can ever be oppressed by men, contrary to overwhelming historical, international and domestic evidence.  By doing so she completely denies the right of women and girls to be protected by the mechanisms that the liberal state has developed to deal with structural oppression between men and women. This, needless to say, is dangerous ideology. She is not coming against radical feminism, but grass roots class politics and women’s rights.

From her special slant on liberalism, it appears that Helen Pluckrose does not believe women are a political class but trans people are, so the consequence here is that women have to operate as individuals while trans people operate with the benefit of class protections.  This is the situation we already have in Australia, so I’d be very curious to hear if this is something that Stella O’Malley is in favour of.

What Pluckrose has, is not a political framework but a reactionary aesthetic to the woke.  The anti-woke aesthetic has echoes of German philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805) and his focus on the balance between nature and beauty, the sublime state of nuance.

Women are asking really important questions about Genspect but Genspect don’t have to listen. In dismissing the feminist voice, they risk losing part of their base and undermining their mission.  Genspect would be wise to get a political advisor, who is not Helen Pluckrose, otherwise they will find themselves in constant trouble with the feminists who are asking for a clear position on the rights of women and girls.

As the abuse of the men’s rights activists increased, I had the joy of the extra trolls that Stock (with 150K followers) and Pluckrose had attracted to me. This was looking like another kind of class struggle between grass roots women and women with more delicate middle-class sensibilities.

In addition to my general annoyance, I received an inbox message asking me why I was “laying into Stella”.  I began to notice that all the language about women’s critique was being framed as actual violence, while none of the abuse gender critical people were receiving was a concern to the ladies of the gender critical elite except for a notable few.  I’ve had mean radfems pile on me, it didn’t kill me, it wasn’t actual violence, I blocked dozens of them and I don’t hear from them anymore.

One of the most interesting aspects of AGP-gate was when James Lindsay decided to white knight in defence of Genspect, he rode in on his dodgy stupid horse repeating the lie that gender critical women are under the influence of the radical feminists who started transgenderism. So women started to address this lie from all the little scrotie incels that litter the periphery of an account like James Lindsay’s. It become quite the scrap up between feminists and men’s rights activists. Women’s rights activist Kellie Jay Keen and Genevieve Gluck, showed their affiliation with the grass roots by getting in the thick of it.  

The abuse that women received from James Lindsay and his merry band of anti-woksters was extensive. He went on to encourage his 500K followers to block Genevieve Gluck’s heavily censored magazine Reduxx. “Stars” of the gender critical movement had already let women know they were on their own, the workers had questioned one of the elites, so they withdrew their protection from the base very quickly.  This was an open invite of abuse from the men of the centre, and they didn’t miss accusing women of starting transgenderism, being misandrist and engaging in authoritarianism

I’d like to ask Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Sarah Phillimore why they feel they can smack women who are in the trenches of political debate? Do you think its equivalent that some men were teased and many, many women were called, authoritarians, bitches, hags and sluts but more importantly, theoretically denied their right to organise as a sex class by people who are on “our side”?  It is clear that the centrists are not on our side, what we need to know is, are they on your side?

I am happy to believe that Genspect may not have a political advisor and don’t understand the underlying theory behind what is being pushed as “centrism” currently, and how influenced it is by market forces that could undermine the work they are aiming to do. But the theory the centrist are leaning to, disarms women of the tools they need to fight for themselves and their daughters, its not just stupid, its dangerous.