AGP-Gate (abridged)

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.

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. 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 Genspect should backpedal and apologise. Backpedal they did, apologise they did not.

Genspect 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 with twitter comments 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 been to the conference and met Mr Illy, where he had given her a copy of his book.  We found 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 was 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. 

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, seemingly minding his own business.

Boyce and Illy went on to mock women who raised concerns, and later held 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 sexualities.

Anti-woke trans identified man Julia Malott, come out in defence of Illy. Malott considered the behaviour of gender critical women at the Genspect conference “dehumanising”.  Malott then claimed that he was dehumanised by women when his picture was shared on the Genspect X account.

The statement from Malott, where he was dressed like a middle America housewife and sounded like a mockery of a California valley girl, dripped of male entitlement.

After seeing the Murphy livestream, Julia Malott went on X, inviting his followers to watch Heather Heying “bash” him (notice the violent language) 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. Pfahl seemed 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, but this along with Boyce’s line that women were being authoritarian, continued to gain disturbing traction from people who would say they are on “our side”.

You won’t see me use the word “woke” much, 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 framed Heying’s 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 that women “piling on” should be shamed for their behaviour. Piling on seems to be largely just commenting, from my observation the abusive comments were in the minority (although they are not to be excused).

Yet again none of the serious concerns about Phil Illy being a possible paedophile apologist were being addressed. When I asked Sarah Phillimore if women should be shamed for asserting boundaries, she said the boundaries women were asserting were based only on disgust, and so “you betcha”.  Phillimore unfollowed me and I returned the favour.

I responded to Pfahl explaining that radical feminism is not woke but a political framework and speculated if this line of thought is from James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.

The podcasting centre right are developing an alternative aesthetic of anti-woke, anti-feminist, neo liberal, middle class political taste, along with a nonsensical and dangerously fragile political structure.

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”, and especially to address the ”rigid oppressor / oppressed mindset with respect to male/women oppression”. It was a long bow, but Pluckrose gave it a shot.

Keep in mind that Pluckrose has recently stood by her statement she 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 as we are talking about oppression frameworks.

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 rationale for women to activate as a political sex class which is what feminism is.

In her thread Helen argued that because radical means “to the root”, the philosophical school of radical feminism interprets everything through the oppressive framework of men over women, and this causes a blindness to the fact that trans activists are actually very reasonable and against patriarchy.

The Pluckrose narrative goes, that this is 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 interests at play that are in conflict. Pluckrose’s pretence to hold a middle or liberal position here is transparently false.

Helen continued to describe called “radical feminists” as political extremists, while grouping with them with all gender critical activists who refused to normalise autogynephilia.

Not long after Helen posed her nonsensical thread, I received a notification that Stella O’Malley had liked and retweeted the thread, 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 I tagged Stella in an 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 and extremists. I write about the gender critical movement regularly and I have an interest in knowing if one of the gender critical organisations is embracing a more trans activist perspective.

I was 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”. I hadn’t been involved to this point apart from my defence of women speaking.

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.

In an ongoing to and fro, 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 we attempt to free the individual from the tyranny of government. 

According to the doctrine of classic liberalism, the state is prone to tyranny. According to almost all the gender critical feminists I know, they consider governments to be in overstep, and are engaging in class activism is a way to fight this in a pluralist liberal democracy. There is nothing illiberal about gender critical feminism.

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 class protections, or anti-discrimination legislation based on the characteristic that makes the individual vulnerable to social oppression.

When I mentioned class protections as way to protect from social tyranny, Helen pretended to be dazed and confused and blocked me again. With the Mill passage she had been trying to suggest the feminists objecting to the autogynaphile were engaging in social oppression towards dress wearing men. Phillimore’s use of the word “disgust” is just an iteration of the TRA word “transphobia”.

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

Placing a minority men’s rights movement above women’s speech rights is the exact problem that we are fighting in western states.

The Pluckrose and Lindsay framework 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. They are 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 just the inverted oppression framework the state use in Australia to deny women rights. I’d be curious to hear if this is something that Stella O’Malley is in favour of.

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.

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.

Lindsay went on to encourage his 500K followers to block Genevieve Gluck’s heavily censored magazine Reduxx and call feminists all manner of colourful things.

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.