This is simply the best piece I’ve ever read on the gender-critical divide, Edie; it’s really disheartening to witness the snooty attitudes of middle class people sneering at women like KJK and others who hold the line on pronouns, seemingly unable to see the harms of giving an inch.
I remember at my first feminist meeting in the 70s being told by political lesbians that if we couldn’t be lesbian we should be celibate. Seriously. The women’s movement was all about power and oppression; a mantra that’s reared its ugly head in Queer Theory.
All I could think of was, ‘what kind of message was that to take to the working class women, most of them mothers, in my neighbourhood?’ Needless to say, it was the last meeting I attended.
I could have written an essay about this but now I don’t have to; you’ve done it. Thank you so much, Edie. I’ll put this on X
The key difference between political lesbianism and gender ideology is that the first centers women and the second centers men. Political lesbianism says all decisions, all energies, all loves, all connections, all policies, should be for women. Gender ideology says all of those things should be for men.
If your snappy comeback is: "see! They are just isomers of one another and both very silly nonsense too", that only works if you pretend society and history don't exist as they actually do exist. Which is easy to do *on the internet*, but not elsewhere. To dismiss political lesbianism as "middle class" is itself an incredibly middle class internet based thing to do.
In the real and actual world produced by real and actual world history, political lesbianism asks for radical change where gender ideology asks for more of the same old shit, just gooder and harder. No surprises that political lesbianism is reviled everywhere and gender ideology is a ruling class darling.
It's possible to see this clearly while still believing that sexual orientation is innate-ish. Humans are sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing animals: it's not foolish to assume the biological primacy of opposite-sex attraction. We also know different societies have encouraged different kinds of sexual practice, the prescribed / proscribed has surely always been unevenly compatible with people's proclivities but has always shaped them, as well: lots of men who'd be repelled at the thought in our time enjoyed sex with boys in ancient Greece and so on.
However, where more sexual range has been socially available, it's been overwhelmingly available to men and not women. Where the right to refuse heterosexual sex has been socially available, it's very very very rarely been available to women.
Because the actual situations of women and men are different and have always been different, dismisssing "political lesbianism" and "gender ideology" as two versions of the same thing is in a way a meta-version of gender ideology itself.
It has also never, never, never been the case that political lesbianism has had any institutional authority. "I went to a feminist meeting at a coffee house once and a mean lesbian told me I should not fuck men" is not in any respect akin to "I lost my job because I said lesbians should not be pressured to fuck AGP fetishists".
What is *actually* similar about political lesbianism and gender ideology is that they are forms of social critique. Whether or not you personally live by either (and most people personally live by neither), being influenced by the first prepares you to change the world as it is. Being influenced by the second prepares you to get steamrolled by it.
Brilliant Edie, I'm so grateful you have the erudition, education and articulation to have put in a nutshell the disparate uneasy thoughts that have kept me holding the line in the last few months, while watching with incredulity the centrist progressives flouncing about in a tizzy frothing at the recalcitrants who refuse to be nice.
My stance on the genderborg has gotten me cancelled all over the place by the woke in the last 5 years and now the centrist left is also disparaging me...I have to admit to feeling more discouraged than ever because wishy washy centrists seldom understand the subtle difference between permissiveness and licentiousness.
I clocked off X in late December and haven't missed it at all.
I call myself a lesbian, for a whole bunch of reasons, some political. Actually I'm bisexual and so I can choose men or women as sexual/romantic partners. Back in the dark ages there was discussion about how many people might actually be bisexual if there weren't strong social pressures to only be heterosexual, and various commentators felt more women are bisexual than men because there's less social pressure on women to be 100% straight (because it just doesn't matter what women do, really). I think it's a fact that the body's arousal system is not within our conscious control. But can it be repressed through societal pressure? Sure. Back in those same dark ages people noted that the idea that sexuality was an innate part of identity is a very recent one. There's a difference between what you do and what you are. You can have sex with a person of your own sex and not *be* a lesbian. Plenty of men in history were married fathers but spent a lot of extracurricular time having sex with other men. But in the fight to protect men from discrimination during the sex rights movement of the sixties, it became politically expedient to argue that sexuality was not something you did, but something you were, and that it was innate. So the belief that homosexuality is innate is a political belief. What is innate (or at least beyond our control) is how and why our body's arousal system is triggered. If it's only triggered by people of the opposite sex then I don't think you can have a sexual/romantic relationship with someone of your own sex. I bring all this up because Bindel made those arguments way back in those dark ages when these things were up for questioning.
This is simply the best piece I’ve ever read on the gender-critical divide, Edie; it’s really disheartening to witness the snooty attitudes of middle class people sneering at women like KJK and others who hold the line on pronouns, seemingly unable to see the harms of giving an inch.
I remember at my first feminist meeting in the 70s being told by political lesbians that if we couldn’t be lesbian we should be celibate. Seriously. The women’s movement was all about power and oppression; a mantra that’s reared its ugly head in Queer Theory.
All I could think of was, ‘what kind of message was that to take to the working class women, most of them mothers, in my neighbourhood?’ Needless to say, it was the last meeting I attended.
I could have written an essay about this but now I don’t have to; you’ve done it. Thank you so much, Edie. I’ll put this on X
The key difference between political lesbianism and gender ideology is that the first centers women and the second centers men. Political lesbianism says all decisions, all energies, all loves, all connections, all policies, should be for women. Gender ideology says all of those things should be for men.
If your snappy comeback is: "see! They are just isomers of one another and both very silly nonsense too", that only works if you pretend society and history don't exist as they actually do exist. Which is easy to do *on the internet*, but not elsewhere. To dismiss political lesbianism as "middle class" is itself an incredibly middle class internet based thing to do.
In the real and actual world produced by real and actual world history, political lesbianism asks for radical change where gender ideology asks for more of the same old shit, just gooder and harder. No surprises that political lesbianism is reviled everywhere and gender ideology is a ruling class darling.
It's possible to see this clearly while still believing that sexual orientation is innate-ish. Humans are sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing animals: it's not foolish to assume the biological primacy of opposite-sex attraction. We also know different societies have encouraged different kinds of sexual practice, the prescribed / proscribed has surely always been unevenly compatible with people's proclivities but has always shaped them, as well: lots of men who'd be repelled at the thought in our time enjoyed sex with boys in ancient Greece and so on.
However, where more sexual range has been socially available, it's been overwhelmingly available to men and not women. Where the right to refuse heterosexual sex has been socially available, it's very very very rarely been available to women.
Because the actual situations of women and men are different and have always been different, dismisssing "political lesbianism" and "gender ideology" as two versions of the same thing is in a way a meta-version of gender ideology itself.
It has also never, never, never been the case that political lesbianism has had any institutional authority. "I went to a feminist meeting at a coffee house once and a mean lesbian told me I should not fuck men" is not in any respect akin to "I lost my job because I said lesbians should not be pressured to fuck AGP fetishists".
What is *actually* similar about political lesbianism and gender ideology is that they are forms of social critique. Whether or not you personally live by either (and most people personally live by neither), being influenced by the first prepares you to change the world as it is. Being influenced by the second prepares you to get steamrolled by it.
Brilliant Edie, I'm so grateful you have the erudition, education and articulation to have put in a nutshell the disparate uneasy thoughts that have kept me holding the line in the last few months, while watching with incredulity the centrist progressives flouncing about in a tizzy frothing at the recalcitrants who refuse to be nice.
My stance on the genderborg has gotten me cancelled all over the place by the woke in the last 5 years and now the centrist left is also disparaging me...I have to admit to feeling more discouraged than ever because wishy washy centrists seldom understand the subtle difference between permissiveness and licentiousness.
I clocked off X in late December and haven't missed it at all.
Thank you....for all you do.
I call myself a lesbian, for a whole bunch of reasons, some political. Actually I'm bisexual and so I can choose men or women as sexual/romantic partners. Back in the dark ages there was discussion about how many people might actually be bisexual if there weren't strong social pressures to only be heterosexual, and various commentators felt more women are bisexual than men because there's less social pressure on women to be 100% straight (because it just doesn't matter what women do, really). I think it's a fact that the body's arousal system is not within our conscious control. But can it be repressed through societal pressure? Sure. Back in those same dark ages people noted that the idea that sexuality was an innate part of identity is a very recent one. There's a difference between what you do and what you are. You can have sex with a person of your own sex and not *be* a lesbian. Plenty of men in history were married fathers but spent a lot of extracurricular time having sex with other men. But in the fight to protect men from discrimination during the sex rights movement of the sixties, it became politically expedient to argue that sexuality was not something you did, but something you were, and that it was innate. So the belief that homosexuality is innate is a political belief. What is innate (or at least beyond our control) is how and why our body's arousal system is triggered. If it's only triggered by people of the opposite sex then I don't think you can have a sexual/romantic relationship with someone of your own sex. I bring all this up because Bindel made those arguments way back in those dark ages when these things were up for questioning.