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
Can you perceive the eerie parallel between the elite/proletarian split developing within the GC community, and the very same conflict in progressivism that gave birth to the GC community in the first place?
In both cases it is elite academic/corporate/media people who dominate the narrative telling the mass to suck it up and do what we're told. In both instances the greatest costs are borne by those on the bottom, and those at the top tell them its no big deal.
Indeed I can, Fredro; ‘twas ever thus. Middle class people, many of them women, telling working class women to ‘suck it up’ without knowing anything about our lives. I don’t suppose they are much impacted by a lack of safe toilets or prisons. In fact, I’ve noticed an awful lot of these young TRAs are very middle class; attention-seeking narcissists, if you ask me. I’m with KJK on this one: no compromise, no quarter given, no pronouns. Ever.
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.
I didn't make a comparison between those completely disparate things. I highlighted that the link between radical feminism and political lesbians reveals a social constructionist root. It's the social constructionist element that people are suspicious of because the nature of sexuality is linked to our political cause to sore up the category of sexual orientation as a protected characteristic for same sex attracted people, and not water it down to sexual practices that are choice based like autogynaphilia.
But the problem really is not "social constructionism", because human social life IS socially constructed to a large extent. It's important to notice and discuss this. Different social constructions have different consequences for men and for women.
Recourse to "just the biological facts" is not actually that helpful to gays and lesbians. The biological facts can tell us that sexual attraction between men and women is "natural". Homosexual attraction obviously *exists*, but it is genuinely sort of mysterious on evolutionary grounds and there is no widely accepted scientific explanation for it (the so called "gay gene", the studies of index length in lesbians, the "lots of older brothers in the uterine environment" hypotheses have all been attempts). There are also, very obviously, widely differing social attitudes towards it in history and very different levels of homosexual sexual *practice* in different historical societies (this is what we have access to; we don't know how medieval peasants felt, secretly, in their hearts).
Whether we accept or become very alarmed about homosexual attraction is *socially constructed*, and we don't have to wait for a definitive study to come in to decide whether to be cool about same sex sexual attraction.
The gender ideologues are not wrong when they say "natural facts" vs. "social construction" are not stark opposites. They like to have it both ways sometimes, when they slip in arguments about "trans people have always existed" and "my trans brain is an opposite sex brain" (relying on one terrible study with a tiny sample size, etc.)
Political lesbianism is actually much more intellectually consistent. It doesn't gin up an armature of fake studies and it actually has no truck with trying to measure which lesbians have ring fingers longer than index fingers or whatever and who are therefore the "real lesbians as proven by SCIENCE eleventy!!!!!"
Political lesbianism is far more intellectually honest and well-informed on the actual tenuousness of "born this way" arguments about homosexuality (it could well be the case that gays and lesbians are "born that way", but there is not a consensus scientific literature on this -- there is a just a social consensus, arrived at as a political strategy, which gender ideologues are now attempting to stretch to cover their own claims, too).
They accept that social construction is real, and ask: what kind of society should we try and construct? The ones that gender ideologues want to construct is an effing nightmare, and it's dangerous precisely *because* social construction is real and not something made up by Foucault.
The social outcomes of accepting same sex attraction seem pretty good. The social outcomes of political lesbianism would be mostly good for women, not so good for men. The social outcomes of gender ideology are delightful for AGP men, terrible for women and children, neutral to positive for men as a whole.
Obviously, these are consequentialist arguments. But you can't really argue from "first principles" about sexuality -- although clearly it would be a stronger argument if you could -- because the evidentiary base from which a very strong argument from first principles would be possible in fact is not there. The very strong *claims* about this -- claims about which political lesbianism has always, and quite rightly, been skeptical -- have been useful to gay and lesbian liberation, but as they are borrowed by gender ideologues their flaws (always clear to political lesbians) have become obvious.
it's not actually social constructionism that is the problem.
I did four years of cultural studies I’ve done the rounds of the theory. Ultimately social constructionist are usually unbearably authoritarian. It’s like Yertle the turtle, they are king of all they survey. Everything they determine socially constructed they can use government to fuck with. This is why we get these old middle class commies who have worked in government all their lives telling us how we can abandon all our beliefs and take on their fucked up nonsense for the good of society. They are drunk with power and we need to reality check them with our cultural boundaries.
I hesitate to like this as a straight woman but this is what my gut tells me. Why not just say you’re bisexual but have decided to only have relationships with men for [reasons]? Either you are sexually attracted to women or not - it seems bizarre to claim to be a lesbian if you’re straight but choose to live a celibate life with a woman. In an anti LGB society, bisexual women at least have a possibility of having a fulfilling relationship.
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.
Yeah I think they need to get their politics sorted and how it relates to various aims they may have. They dismiss the more serious feminists at their peril.
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.
Yep I believe it. It is a dark ages question, but since expanding the legal definition of sexuality to gender identity we need to remind our lawmakers what laws that the authority of the people and a history of activism and what laws are just made up shit.
Yea, I don't really like defining one kind of sexual desire as an innate orientation, and another as a perverse paraphilia. How robust is the logic? Couldn't we argue that some sexual desire is harmless to the people involved and to society at large, and other sexual desires are destructive. That's a moral argument and we're not supposed to be moral anymore, sigh. But while heterosexuality is obviously not a choice, homosexuality *might* *sometimes* *for some people* be a choice. Destructive choices ought to be illegal; harmless choices should be no one's business. I know that Hayton's trying to argue that agp is an innate orientation, but the common sense answer would be a) that's ridiculous and b) it's destructive and so cannot be legalized. I'm just grumbling about the intellectual labour we're going through to construct logical arguments to refute shit that's just shit and doesn't deserve logical refutations.
There is a rationale that underpins the rights claims and how you feel is much less relevant than real world situations that need protecting. It doesn’t have to be considered innate in law but to justify a protection category it’s got to be more than a feel.
It doesn't mean that was the right way to go. The gay rights movement was a subset of the men's right movement, and its aim was always to elevate gay men to the same position of power and privilege as straight men. Not much of a goal, is it? It has been successful in the west and the laws of unintended consequences are now in full play. Kathleen Lowrey is making excellent points, as might be expected of a feminist anthropologist.
You see I would expect a feminist anthropologist to have goals so lofty that you would need massive governments, brimming first world coffers and huge cultural control departments to attempt to achieve. The problem is that the wealthy cultural control arms get ideologically corrupted by things that are most convenient for the most powerful men. The salaries of those departments also become attractive to ideological wankers who think they know better than the plebs and become the new church of state. Ohh yeah that’s what we already have. No wonder the humanities have become so useful to government and capital.
My take is that perversity is forcing others to participate/causing damage. An AGP once he or his images leave his bedroom, a voyeur, animal abuser, rapist, paedophile, sadomasochist, etc.
Hayton is clearly dissembling - he is latching onto whatever arguments he can find which would imply he should get what he wants - legal protection to practice his paraphilia. His argument that if something is innate it is implicitly entitled to protection is easily demonstrable to be bogus. Paedophilia is ostensibly innate too, and nobody would suggest that should be a protected minority. As for AGP - yes the evidence clearly shows it is learned, secondly it is participatory like peeping or exhibitionism, ie inherently incapable of practice with others' consent.
Unfortunately some of your statements are contradictory, and factually false. Homosexuality (and bisexuality, and heterosexuality) is a multifocal sexual stimulus and response system embodied in the brain, and measurable. One example among several is in the sexually dimorphic nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus which is different in homosexuals and bisexuals, and heterosexuals. Your statement that innate homosexuality is a political belief is no more true than saying innate facial recognition is a political belief. When you say homosexuality is political belief then contradict that with a statement about (sexual) arousal, I’m not sure the purpose of the statements.
I think there has been research showing that men are more likely to be bisexual than women are – I don’t know if these are good studies but it makes sense that with the higher male sex drive that they would be happy to get satisfaction anywhere!
Would you say that to Dr. Kathleen Stock? She was married for years and bore and raised two kids. Now she calls herself a lesbian and is acknowledged as a lesbian by everyone. Did she suddenly become a lesbian? Is she and has she always been bisexual? There are countless lesbians who were married and have kids.
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
Can you perceive the eerie parallel between the elite/proletarian split developing within the GC community, and the very same conflict in progressivism that gave birth to the GC community in the first place?
In both cases it is elite academic/corporate/media people who dominate the narrative telling the mass to suck it up and do what we're told. In both instances the greatest costs are borne by those on the bottom, and those at the top tell them its no big deal.
Indeed I can, Fredro; ‘twas ever thus. Middle class people, many of them women, telling working class women to ‘suck it up’ without knowing anything about our lives. I don’t suppose they are much impacted by a lack of safe toilets or prisons. In fact, I’ve noticed an awful lot of these young TRAs are very middle class; attention-seeking narcissists, if you ask me. I’m with KJK on this one: no compromise, no quarter given, no pronouns. Ever.
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.
I didn't make a comparison between those completely disparate things. I highlighted that the link between radical feminism and political lesbians reveals a social constructionist root. It's the social constructionist element that people are suspicious of because the nature of sexuality is linked to our political cause to sore up the category of sexual orientation as a protected characteristic for same sex attracted people, and not water it down to sexual practices that are choice based like autogynaphilia.
But the problem really is not "social constructionism", because human social life IS socially constructed to a large extent. It's important to notice and discuss this. Different social constructions have different consequences for men and for women.
Recourse to "just the biological facts" is not actually that helpful to gays and lesbians. The biological facts can tell us that sexual attraction between men and women is "natural". Homosexual attraction obviously *exists*, but it is genuinely sort of mysterious on evolutionary grounds and there is no widely accepted scientific explanation for it (the so called "gay gene", the studies of index length in lesbians, the "lots of older brothers in the uterine environment" hypotheses have all been attempts). There are also, very obviously, widely differing social attitudes towards it in history and very different levels of homosexual sexual *practice* in different historical societies (this is what we have access to; we don't know how medieval peasants felt, secretly, in their hearts).
Whether we accept or become very alarmed about homosexual attraction is *socially constructed*, and we don't have to wait for a definitive study to come in to decide whether to be cool about same sex sexual attraction.
The gender ideologues are not wrong when they say "natural facts" vs. "social construction" are not stark opposites. They like to have it both ways sometimes, when they slip in arguments about "trans people have always existed" and "my trans brain is an opposite sex brain" (relying on one terrible study with a tiny sample size, etc.)
Political lesbianism is actually much more intellectually consistent. It doesn't gin up an armature of fake studies and it actually has no truck with trying to measure which lesbians have ring fingers longer than index fingers or whatever and who are therefore the "real lesbians as proven by SCIENCE eleventy!!!!!"
Political lesbianism is far more intellectually honest and well-informed on the actual tenuousness of "born this way" arguments about homosexuality (it could well be the case that gays and lesbians are "born that way", but there is not a consensus scientific literature on this -- there is a just a social consensus, arrived at as a political strategy, which gender ideologues are now attempting to stretch to cover their own claims, too).
They accept that social construction is real, and ask: what kind of society should we try and construct? The ones that gender ideologues want to construct is an effing nightmare, and it's dangerous precisely *because* social construction is real and not something made up by Foucault.
The social outcomes of accepting same sex attraction seem pretty good. The social outcomes of political lesbianism would be mostly good for women, not so good for men. The social outcomes of gender ideology are delightful for AGP men, terrible for women and children, neutral to positive for men as a whole.
Obviously, these are consequentialist arguments. But you can't really argue from "first principles" about sexuality -- although clearly it would be a stronger argument if you could -- because the evidentiary base from which a very strong argument from first principles would be possible in fact is not there. The very strong *claims* about this -- claims about which political lesbianism has always, and quite rightly, been skeptical -- have been useful to gay and lesbian liberation, but as they are borrowed by gender ideologues their flaws (always clear to political lesbians) have become obvious.
it's not actually social constructionism that is the problem.
I did four years of cultural studies I’ve done the rounds of the theory. Ultimately social constructionist are usually unbearably authoritarian. It’s like Yertle the turtle, they are king of all they survey. Everything they determine socially constructed they can use government to fuck with. This is why we get these old middle class commies who have worked in government all their lives telling us how we can abandon all our beliefs and take on their fucked up nonsense for the good of society. They are drunk with power and we need to reality check them with our cultural boundaries.
I hesitate to like this as a straight woman but this is what my gut tells me. Why not just say you’re bisexual but have decided to only have relationships with men for [reasons]? Either you are sexually attracted to women or not - it seems bizarre to claim to be a lesbian if you’re straight but choose to live a celibate life with a woman. In an anti LGB society, bisexual women at least have a possibility of having a fulfilling relationship.
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.
Yeah I think they need to get their politics sorted and how it relates to various aims they may have. They dismiss the more serious feminists at their peril.
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.
Yep I believe it. It is a dark ages question, but since expanding the legal definition of sexuality to gender identity we need to remind our lawmakers what laws that the authority of the people and a history of activism and what laws are just made up shit.
Yea, I don't really like defining one kind of sexual desire as an innate orientation, and another as a perverse paraphilia. How robust is the logic? Couldn't we argue that some sexual desire is harmless to the people involved and to society at large, and other sexual desires are destructive. That's a moral argument and we're not supposed to be moral anymore, sigh. But while heterosexuality is obviously not a choice, homosexuality *might* *sometimes* *for some people* be a choice. Destructive choices ought to be illegal; harmless choices should be no one's business. I know that Hayton's trying to argue that agp is an innate orientation, but the common sense answer would be a) that's ridiculous and b) it's destructive and so cannot be legalized. I'm just grumbling about the intellectual labour we're going through to construct logical arguments to refute shit that's just shit and doesn't deserve logical refutations.
There is a rationale that underpins the rights claims and how you feel is much less relevant than real world situations that need protecting. It doesn’t have to be considered innate in law but to justify a protection category it’s got to be more than a feel.
It doesn't mean that was the right way to go. The gay rights movement was a subset of the men's right movement, and its aim was always to elevate gay men to the same position of power and privilege as straight men. Not much of a goal, is it? It has been successful in the west and the laws of unintended consequences are now in full play. Kathleen Lowrey is making excellent points, as might be expected of a feminist anthropologist.
You see I would expect a feminist anthropologist to have goals so lofty that you would need massive governments, brimming first world coffers and huge cultural control departments to attempt to achieve. The problem is that the wealthy cultural control arms get ideologically corrupted by things that are most convenient for the most powerful men. The salaries of those departments also become attractive to ideological wankers who think they know better than the plebs and become the new church of state. Ohh yeah that’s what we already have. No wonder the humanities have become so useful to government and capital.
My take is that perversity is forcing others to participate/causing damage. An AGP once he or his images leave his bedroom, a voyeur, animal abuser, rapist, paedophile, sadomasochist, etc.
Hayton is clearly dissembling - he is latching onto whatever arguments he can find which would imply he should get what he wants - legal protection to practice his paraphilia. His argument that if something is innate it is implicitly entitled to protection is easily demonstrable to be bogus. Paedophilia is ostensibly innate too, and nobody would suggest that should be a protected minority. As for AGP - yes the evidence clearly shows it is learned, secondly it is participatory like peeping or exhibitionism, ie inherently incapable of practice with others' consent.
Unfortunately some of your statements are contradictory, and factually false. Homosexuality (and bisexuality, and heterosexuality) is a multifocal sexual stimulus and response system embodied in the brain, and measurable. One example among several is in the sexually dimorphic nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus which is different in homosexuals and bisexuals, and heterosexuals. Your statement that innate homosexuality is a political belief is no more true than saying innate facial recognition is a political belief. When you say homosexuality is political belief then contradict that with a statement about (sexual) arousal, I’m not sure the purpose of the statements.
I think there has been research showing that men are more likely to be bisexual than women are – I don’t know if these are good studies but it makes sense that with the higher male sex drive that they would be happy to get satisfaction anywhere!
Would you say that to Dr. Kathleen Stock? She was married for years and bore and raised two kids. Now she calls herself a lesbian and is acknowledged as a lesbian by everyone. Did she suddenly become a lesbian? Is she and has she always been bisexual? There are countless lesbians who were married and have kids.