I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
Thank goodness, and good for her. Rowling has been under increasing fire and pressure over the past months to walk back her rather mildly-expressed views about the biological reality of the sexes. She has not backed down and has indeed come back with this thorough and well-reasoned essay.
I have written about this quite a bit, and I will link to those pieces in a minute, but first, a quote from a tweet from Maya Forstater, whose case prompted one of Rowling’s early comments on this issue.
Just so you understand the bottom line here – what is prompting the row in general is the possibility of laws being passed that make gender whatever you like. As Forstater tweeted today, succinctly:
There is a public debate that desperately needs to be had about whether the definition of woman in law and policy should really be changed from meaning female to meaning “anyone who says they are a woman”.
Also: in this moment in which our nation is engaging in a deep, deep conversation about race, consider how it would be if forces entered that conversation determined to detach race from biology and lived experience insisting that it’s perfectly sane and correct to assert, Sure, I’m Black. Why? Because I feel Black and I say so. Bigot. Do you want me to kill myself? Because if you don’t see me as Black, I probably will.
Because, you know, you can dye your skin – one way or the other. Or wear a lot of makeup. It’s probably easier to do that than to slice off your penis and testicles, reform them into an open wound that you must dilate daily for the rest of your life, along with taking hormones for the rest of your life as well.
And of course we wouldn’t go for that. Why wouldn’t we? Because it’s patent nonsense and it’s profoundly disrespectful of the experiences of actual Black people. It’s performative appropriation, it’s rejection of personal, social and cultural reality.
In so many ways, what we see, talking big picture, is the triumph of narrative and nominalism over Things As They Are. We throw off the chains of creation’s connection to the Creator and the transcendent, we can be whatever we want and name it whatever we want, and inevitably, we find ourselves lost in a fundamental way.
Anyway, my writings on this are linked on this page. I’m wordy and discursive and much of what I say is summarized in this article I wrote for Catholic World Report.
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Where I part with Rowling is in terms of evaluating the moment we’re in. The why and how did we get here. First, she is, understandably, not at the point of simply calling an extreme rejection of one’s embodied existence what it is: mental illness. I don’t think much progress can be made on this issue until that’s part of the conversation. Secondly, I have more of a tediously philosophical perspective on this. Which you can read about here.