Damn, lost my first reply to this...
Not so; simple numbers mean the dispute should be weighted towards women, who form 51% of the typical population, and away from the claims of a very small minority of transwomen, who won't be a majority of trans people very soon, given the surge in girls identifying as transboys and transmen.
51% does not matter. The majority of the country are white, but that doesn't mean that social justice will prioritise the interests of white people. Typically rights claims are not based on utilitarian calculus. They are inalianable claims that supposedly apply even if they apply to a single individual standing against a million. Either they are women and have a right to be treated as such, or they aren't. How many of them there are does not invalidate the rights claim. Think of the other places this 51% argument would go if it were granted...
It won't do to reduce this to gender critical feminism vs trans activism, I'm afraid. Western societies are ideologically and religiously pluralistic, so it's not just the TERFs who are relevant here. Gender critical feminists might have sounded the alarm earliest, but that has long changed. Mumsnetters in the UK have acute awareness of how their womanhood and experiences as mothers play out in society but don't necessarily identify themselves as feminists.
I wasn't intending to give an exaustive list. In any case, gender critical feminism is an ideological position, I imagine quite a bit of Mumsnet would agree with it. But again, ultimately their opinions don't matter very much.
Reducing how we might judge the dispute to 'our ideology' is also a cop-out. Multiple ideologies, including different religions, will have views on these matters.
Sure, multiple ideologies exist, but what do they reduce down to on this question. Many branches of Christianity have absorbed considerable amounts of progressive liberalism. From what I can see, you have to basic ideological positions. 1. Man is by nature good and should be freed from natural and social constraint where ever possible. 2. Man is by nature not good and freed from natural and social constraint will go wrong. The first postition is in favour of trans rights and effectively believes any implementation difficulties will sort themselves out in some way, and the second position sees all sorts of social problems coming from this. Is there another funamental position here? Neither position seems to depend on data.
The academy and the media are actually split on gender identity. The academy is decidedly left/liberal leaning so the split is more significant there, while the media is more politically polarised, but both left and right are finding common cause over the questions raised by gender identity ideology.
No, they are not split. The soft science has been teaching social constructivism, Critical X Studies and X Studies for 50 years. You might get some disagreement in medicine about whether giving hormone blockers to 12 years olds is a good idea, but that's hardly the academy being fundamentally divided on the core question. The faculty of medicine isn't the one who will influence the question of bathrooms. As to the media, again... the media read by the decision makers, the politicians, the educators, the producers of culture, is not significantly divided. How many people in Washington or Whitehall consume media that pushes the TERF position? Those are the people and media that matter. The social science departments of the academy are a progressive liberal monoculture.
Trans activist behaviour has been responsible for 'peaking' a very large number of people who might otherwise have been allies and sympathisers; the tendencies to enforcing an expansive interpretation of existing equality law (in the UK) and litany of abuse, death threats, efforts to get people sacked for even asking questions or booted off Twitter, the apparent refusal to listen to those with concerns: tactically, the 'no debate' strategy is likely backfiring. Opposition to gender identity ideology has grown because of the conduct of its advocates, over and above any intellectual disagreements.
Maybe, we will see... all the while they are educating the next generation. Any victory that might be won is decidedly temporary so long as that is going on. My daughter is 12 and has multiple trans and non-binary friends. I see her carefully stepping through the pronouns. Sure, many of them will grow out of it, but she has been taught the trans-activist theory of sex and gender as fact.
The striking thing is those who are opposed to gender identity ideology are not then criticising other liberal, progressive or 'woke' causes. The right would like to bundle them all together, and some might fantasise about reversing the now widespread social acceptance of gay marriage (as well as homosexuality in general), but this isn't happening.
Sure, but the basic ideological positions are the same in both cases. A bunch of feminists switched to making the conservative case once progressive deconstruction reached the things that they cared about. Maybe trans-activism can be turned back without questioning the ideology that gave it to us, and all the other things that that ideology has given to us, and maybe it can't. We will see.
One reason is arguably that trans identity is extremely artificial, both literally in terms of transgender people not actually passing or being able to change their actual sex, as well as because the identities arise in large part because of psychological disturbances. Destigmatising mental illness is part of the progressive package, but other psychological disorders are not being normalised.
Maybe they just haven't been gotten to yet? One can't do every single liberation struggle at the same time. In any case, the trans thing is really just a natural extension of the effort to deconstruct gender that has been going on since at least the 1940s. First you deconstruct what it means to be a woman, then you deconstruct who can be a woman. Then everybody is free because the word that bound us no longer has any meaning. I can claim to be a woman despite having a penis and I can express that by dressing like a 1960s playboy model, you can claim to be a woman while having a vagina and express that by shaving your head, getting tattoos and presenting like a member of a white supremacist prison gang. Liberation is turning "woman" into a commodified choice that we can consume.
Unless one buys into the 'no debate' declare-victory line, then since there are clashes of rights, who is right will in part be decided by experience, and only time will tell exactly how that unfolds.
No it won't. It will be decided by who has political power. One group will be able to leverage their grievance better than the other and will win. These things are almost never decided by how they turn out in some scientific experiment sense. Which was the last liberation movement that government backed to the extent that trans-rights has been backed, and then government decided it was a horrible idea and rolled back?
Western societies contain substantial minorities, overwhelmingly of men, who identify as 'minor attracted persons', who are therefore considered paedophiles. Paedophile rights were pushed very heavily in the 1970s within and piggybacking alongside the emerging gay rights movement, but there was a dramatic break during the 1980s between lesbian and gay activism and culture and paedophiles, while paedophilia was policed vigorously into the 1990s, and beyond. There are therefore examples of causes that were once seen as progressive which stopped being seen as such, the political and social costs of endorsing them were simply too high.
MAPs/paedophiles are still with us, and some are infiltrating trans activism, or encouraging certain forms of trans identities, for their own reasons. The Mermaids scandal here in the UK is an illustration of this. The lesson of the 1970s is that activists for one cause cannot allow their cause to be infiltrated - the equation between gays and paedophiles was widespread and arguably slowed social acceptance.
The overlap might be much less this time around, and history doesn't repeat itself perfectly, but you'll have surely noticed how public disquiet over transgender identities seems greatest around 'trans kids'.
Sure, and I was thinking of that. That isn't really a discussion that can be had.
The sheer novelty of
widespread trans identification among children and teenagers means that this is not guaranteed to last, all by itself: some of this is irrefutably a social contagion and trend. Moreover, the caution now being adopted by various countries towards medical transition will inevitably change the parameters through the rest of this decade and beyond. Societies are unlikely to tolerate or encourage entire generations seeking drugs and surgery based on their feelings as teenagers in ever larger numbers. The trans generation of the past decade will grow older and be visible exhibits of whether medical transition is a good or a bad thing. Yes, medicine might also advance to introduce better drugs, cope with the side effects, or carry out more effective surgery, but that would create intergenerational resentments as well as cautionary tales.[/QUOET]
We shall see. If it falls, it will be interesting to see if it causes any change in ideology, of if the social science departments carry on and wait for their control of education to win the day.
Societies may also decide after a while that affirming autogynephilia among late-transitioning men who become transwomen is dubious. AGP is a fetish, and it is not identical with a desire to fully transition. Those who identified as transvestites now identify more frequently as transwomen (this very much includes Eddie Izzard and his girl mode/boy mode arguments of late). AGP and related addictions is also encouraged by a culture and business model that are anything other than progressive: the porn industry, which caters to every kink, fetish and quirk imaginable, including 'sissy porn' and other WTF genres. Quite a few feminists have pointed out the irony of ostensible left-wingers giving a pass to an immensely destructive branch of capitalism.
When you liberate people from physical and social constraint as progressivism does, why wouldn't they fall in to porn and so forth? You then have sex positive progressives saying porn is empowering. The traditionalist argument for 300 years is that this is exactly what progressivism leads to. Just because it doesn't produce results you like doesn't make it not progressive, otherwise we are in no true scotsman territory.
here may be future changes in social attitudes towards sexual violence especially violence against women and girls, and accompanying patterns of men's behaviour, which by extension affect men who wish to identify as transwomen. Some of those could be trans-inclusive, some not. Dick pics, revenge porn, pressures to participate in pornified sex - eventually something might give. Or it might not, and maybe trans activism really does turn out to reinforce men's rights activism and misogyny, as some gender critical feminists suggest. Or acceptance of gender nonconformity is so widespread among teenagers that teenage heterosexual boys stop sending dick pics and stop forcing their girlfriends/hook-ups to contort themselves like pornstars.
Changing attitudes can already be seen in parallel cases. I noted how in the past 10-15 years, ordinary ******* men started resorting to the 'sex games gone wrong' defense when BDSM started becoming more mainstream or widely known about, to cover up or diminish their responsibility for strangling women. Few seem to have been practicing BDSM Dominants.
Sure, but thanks to progressivism, such things are no longer limited to BDSM communities and they are a much more normalised part of culture. Traditionalists tried to hold back the normalisation of pornography, but they were laughed out of town. We are now living in a world were 50 shades of grey is a publishing hit and WAP is on the radio. It is not obscure BDSM fetishists who are buying this stuff.
