media bollocks – Page 11 – Another angry woman

Rape porn: a ban is not the answer

Content note: This post discusses rape

There have been a fair few debates about rape porn since campaigners have called for it to be banned. It is a thorny topic, and one where, unfortunately, a lot of people are saying some dodgy shit.

One of the biggest problems with this conversation is everyone seems to be talking at cross-purposes about what rape porn actually is. As far as I can unpick from the original statements, the campaigners have been talking about porn with simulated rape scenes, rather than filmed images of rape and abuse. The latter is already highly illegal, and I cannot in good conscience refer to what that is as “rape porn”, much as I wouldn’t refer to images and video of child abuse as “child porn”. To do otherwise completely elides the nature of what it really is: a cinematic trophy of a violation. There is nothing defensible about such double vi0lations: the rape, and then the publicising it.

Rape porn, the simulated stuff, is distinct from this, as it can be consensual. I am not saying it always is, as goodness knows there can be a terrible attitude towards workers’ rights in the porn industry which is something that needs tackling (and cannot be tackled with stigma towards the work that they do. When it is not consensual, it falls under the category above). However, it can be consensual. In private life, people explore rape fantasies fully consensually. In porn, this fantasy is also explored, and porn performers are perfectly capable of consenting to the work they do, about as much as anyone is capable of consenting to anything under capitalist patriarchy.

But what of the audience? As Emily Rose points out, it’s not just rapists who get off on rape porn. And does rape porn really contribute to a culture of normalising rape more than anything else? I am not so sure: part of the way rape porn is packaged is often with the hook that this is wrong, and this is taboo, and that is what is supposed to make it sexy. And yes, of course, our culture is steeped in rape, a background drone of violence and a dismissal that any of it is a problem. I am not sure why the focus of this campaign is on porn with simulated rape: why single this out when one cannot turn on the TV without seeing rape everywhere, when one cannot load up the internet without seeing jokes about rape, when one cannot walk through Bloomsbury without seeing posters advertising a conference organised by rape apologists? I do not see why there is more of an objection to people getting off on fantasies about rape rather than laughing about it, rather than trivialising it, rather than dismissing it as an entirely normal part of sex. Sexual violence is fundamentally about an expression of power rather than the sex itself.

I am not suggesting we should ban all of these things along with rape porn. Sadly, things will never be as easy as a simple demand to ban this or that. It changes nothing, it just pushes it out of sight. Furthermore, bans on specific types of porn do little to actually stop it from happening. The first porn I ever saw, when I was wee and the internet was a newfangled thing to have in one’s house, was of a man having sex with a cow. This is illegal in the UK, but it was quite literally the first thing I stumbled upon when I went looking for porn. The way that the bans are deployed to often as a weapon against people society doesn’t much like anyway. The queers and the kinksters and the porn performers themselves. For a fine example of this, look no further than the recent fisting trials. So I am highly dubious that a ban would do anything to solve the problem of cultural acceptance as rape, and, if anything, may exacerbate problems for those who society would rather look the other way from anyway.

So what might work instead? My ultimate solution is the same as ever, and the one which is unpopular among liberals: we need that fucking revolution. Capitalism, rape culture, patriarchy, they all need to go. I understand that this might take a while, so I also have a transitional demand.

When people play with power dynamics, negotiation is utterly crucial. A conversation beforehand about what everyone involved wants, what their boundaries are, a safeword when “no” and “stop” are to be ignored. These are measures which are vital for safety of everyone playing, but they are also pivotal in helping everyone involved enjoy the scene as such negotiation ensures that people are getting what they want. Often, BDSM porn features an interview with the participants before and after, talking about what they want and what they enjoyed about the scene. Sometimes, the process of negotiation is shown.

Showing this process of negotiation would go far to mitigate some of the problems within porn. And not just in the edgy BDSM porn, but to extend this practice to vanilla porn. To normalise the process of negotiation and enthusiastic consent by embedding it in the porn we watch. For the stuff wherein non-consent is the fantasy, this can go at the beginning. And in vanilla porn, wouldn’t it be nice to see the ongoing process of enthusiastic consent through communication during sex? The performers could decide what they would and would not like to do, and we would all be party to this dialogue and begin to use it ourselves.

And then we smash everything, because that revolution still needs to happen.

Further reading:

Rape Porn: Rapists by Proxy? (Musings of a Rose)
Is the rape porn cultural harm argument another rape myth? (Obscenity Lawyer)
Why I can’t support the “ban rape porn” campaign (TheSazzaJay)

“What are you doing, except snarking on Twitter?”: Ableism and activism

This has been pissing me off for a while, and it continues to piss me off. When receiving criticism, an altogether-too-popular retort is “Well what have you done lately? You’re just sitting there snarking on the internet.” From the dick-swinging manarchists deflecting from sexism, to the liberals upset that you criticised their precious petition, the war-cry is howled across digital space with alarming regularity. And there is not one thing about this silly little statement that is OK.

Let’s deal with the fact that it is an obvious deflection first. Rather than an attempt to address any criticism of tactics or ideology, asking “well, what have you done?” is a clumsy sidestep, an admission of having no actual answer or will to engage, and about as strong an answer as “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?”

Secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, it makes you sound like an undercover cop. If you ask someone to list their activist credentials, I find it very difficult to believe that you are not attempting to gather intelligence and will add any answers to a dossier. In its own clumsy way, it is a fairly decent tactic for the undercover cop to employ, the request to produce an inventory of personal involvement in activism being such a ubiquitous demand. It can goad people into divulging information that it is not necessarily safe to divulge in a climate of surveillance and a hard line against anyone who dares to oppose the murky forces of the state.

And, to further the comparisons with the police, saying “what are you doing, except snarking on Twitter” is ableist as all fuck. The advent of social media was a boon for a lot of people, finally broadening the possibility of involvement to people who had been excluded from many more traditional channels of engagement. The fact of the matter is that for some, it is only possible or safe to get involved through social media. And is that a problem? No, not at all. As this case study from Zedkat shows, Twitter feminism has real, tangible results.

And the intangibles are just as important too. What is dismissed as snark is something which too many privileged people fear: criticism. Social media allows for instant accountability, which is one of its strengths. Unfortunately, a lot of privileged people don’t really like this instant accountability, which leads them to be so dismissive in such an ableist way. Yet it is criticism which makes us stronger, and criticism which means that we can get our theory and our tactics in order. We absolutely should discuss the problems with what we are doing, and criticisms which come from those whose voices have been silenced are perhaps the most important. The voices of the people who are “only on Twitter” are ones which have seldom been heeded throughout history, and now is the time to listen.

We are facing a seemingly insurmountable enemy, a hydra with many heads, and ultimately our struggles all intersect. The class struggle is bound to other oppressions, and every liberation struggle is connected. As such, we need a diversity of tactics. But this does not mean we should be uncritical of tactics used: far from it. We need to be open to criticism, rather than dismissive. What is thrown away as an irrelevance is crucial. It is essential our revolution is done without pissing on those already pissed on by this vile state of affairs. And for that, once again, we need to listen to this criticism. If your response to criticism is this flavour of ableism, you’re probably a bit of a bellend, and you should try not being a bit of a bellend.

And so, let’s stop hearing this risible demand, this feeble deflection bound up in ableism. We should be better than that.

Do women not want to be friends with sluts? A review of a study.

Is there a word for studies which confirm existing prejudices so are trumpeted everywhere as there now being scientific backing for such prejudices? If not, there should be.

The latest that has come to my attention is a study which is being reported as showing that women don’t want to be friends with women who have had a lot of sexual partners, while men don’t mind as much if their male friends are getting a lot of sex. Entitled “Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness“, the study claims to provide some support for a sexual double standard and suggests these findings might have an evolutionary basis. Male and female participants were provided with a profile of a fictional person, and asked questions pertaining to friendship with them. The only difference between the profiles was how many sexual partners the fictional person had had: two, or twenty.

As with most of these prejudice-confirming studies, though, there are a few problems with how the authors reached their conclusions. As with so many studies of this ilk, there is a huge issue with sampling, and the generalisability of this study. Participants were US college students, the overwhelming majority of whom were economically privileged–only 11% rated themselves as working class or lower middle class. But most importantly of all, gay and bisexual participants were excluded from the study to ensure that none of the results reflected any sort of sexual attraction (because, apparently, queer folk are unable to just be friends with heterosexuals). The findings, therefore, can only ever be generalised to heterosexuals and be applied to heterosexual culture. This is something which has not been reported in any media discussions of the study, probably due to a combination of the fact that journalists tend to regurgitate press releases rather than read studies, and a hefty dose of good old-fashioned heterosexism.

There is also a major problem with the stats used in this study. When conducting statistical tests, we use a probability that the finding was down to chance. The conventionally-accepted figure for a statistically significant finding is that there is only a 5% possibility that this finding is due to chance, and it’s important to report the values of this probability as a p-value, where we convert the percentage into a decimal. For example, p=.04 is statistically significant, meaning the result is unlikely to be due to chance. Meanwhile, p=.09 is not significant as it’s more likely that the findings were just chance. In this study, several findings were reported as being “marginally significant”. The threshold for this was p<.08. “Marginal significance” is a phrase which pisses me the fuck off, as it means it actually isn’t significant by any conventions which are used, it’s just kind of close and the authors wanted something else to talk about.

Then we run into another problem. When multiple tests are run, the possibility of a false positive increases. At a significance threshold of p=.05, if a researcher were to run 100 statistical tests, five would come up as significant just by chance. So it’s important, when you’re doing a lot of statistical tests, to adjust for this. The authors of this paper didn’t. The good news is, there’s enough data there for me to undertake a quick and dirty* adjustment called a Bonferroni Correction. As I said above, the generally-accepted significance threshold if p<.05. A Bonferroni Correction takes this significance threshold and divides it by the number tests run. Charitably discounting the 64 descriptive stats tests run, I count 160 tests undertaken (though I may have missed a few). p<.05 divided by 160 gives us the significance threshold of p<.0003, and from the data tables, it looks like there isn’t much that’s significant by this measure. Some findings are reported as p=<.001, although we cannot conclude from the information available whether they manage to reach the revised threshold.

For those of you whose eyes glazed over during that dry statistical excursion, take the findings of this study with a hefty pinch of salt.

If you did read the stats paragraph, you’ll notice I’m feeling charitable today, so now it’s time to talk about something I found really interesting in this paper, and I’m a little sad the authors didn’t examine more. Along with filling in questionnaires which largely formed the basis of the analysis, participants were also invited to write down things they liked and disliked about the fictional person. Almost everyone, men and women, had something negative to say about sexuality, even when it was the fictional person who had only had two sexual partners. These negative things included negative statements about extramarital sex and stigmatising phrases like “whore-like tendencies”.

Conclusions

We cannot draw the conclusions the authors and overexcited journalists have drawn–that women don’t want to be friends with slutty women. What we can see, though, is that among heterosexual US college students, there is still a pretty dodgy attitude towards sexuality, with people holding views which are generally quite negative even when a fictional person has had relatively few sexual partners. This is something we need to work on as a society: sex is a thing a lot of people do, and it’s much nicer to do it without judgment from peers. We need to support others in having safe sex rather than think unpleasant things about them, accepting people. We’ve all internalised a lot of shit, living as we do in a society with a decidedly wack view of sexuality. And that needs to change.

*Why do I find Bonferroni Corrections quick and dirty? Because I’m a Monte Carlo Simulation gal. Far more fun, you just get to leave a computer running while you go out for lunch and it feels like you’re working. Also, it’s more robust, or something, but mostly it’s the fact you get to pop out for lunch.

Why I don’t want a woman Doctor right now

The guessing game cycle of working out who the next lead in Doctor Who is upon us again. You know, the one where we shout out names of actors we like and then when the character is finally cast look baffled and go, “Who? Who even is he? My show is RUINED FOREVER!”

I use he/him pronouns here, because despite much of the wishlist of dream castings being women, the role will almost certainly go to a man. Which, at the moment, is probably a good thing.

Now, I fervently disagree with the Daily Mails and Louise Mensches of the world, adding their voices to the cavalcade of squawking from the misogynistic fanboys that the Doctor has to be played by a man. These whines about a potential threat to male supremacy, dressed up as false concerns about political correctness and the integrity of canon are nonsense. They’re completely fucking nonsense. A woman Doctor could be really, really fucking cool. Or, indeed, a genderqueer Doctor, a non-binary identified Doctor, or anywhere across the beautiful rainbow of gender. There are so many actors I would love to see in the role: Tilda Swinton as a circumspect Doctor; Sue Perkins as an exuberant Doctor; Judi Dench completely schooling the children in how to get shit done.

However, this all depends on the writer and who’s in charge of deciding the Doctor’s destiny.

And unfortunately that person right now is Stephen fucking Moffat.

As you might gather, I am hardly the Moff’s biggest fan, thinking him something of a colossal sexist. I can see, nightmarishly clearly, just how badly he would fuck up a woman Doctor. She would regenerate, and upon realising she is a woman, announce proudly “I’ve got boobs! Marvellous, exciting boobs!” She would take up with a male companion, because I cannot see Moff allowing women to travel space and time without some male supervision. And she’d fall in love with this male companion, because that’s how women work on Planet Moff. The fact she had regenerated as a woman would become a great, plot-driving mystery, as women are mysterious on Planet Moff.

I cannot see any way that a woman Doctor handled by the Moff would be written and characterised well. All I can see is car crashes.

So not yet, I don’t want a woman Doctor just yet. Not under Moff. He’s got to go before a woman Doctor would stand a chance at being anything other than simultaneously the butt of a joke and the Greatest Mystery In The Universe.

Louise Mensch’s “reality based feminism”: whose reality?

Oh dear. Louise Mensch has been at it again with the Tory feminism. This time, she’s upset about people telling her to check her privilege, displaying a profound lack of understanding of intersectional feminism and the notion of what privilege is and cissexism, all of which she has somehow managed to conflate together because she understands it so little. Also, I think she’s watched The Life of Brian recently. Anyway, for the most part it is the same tedious anti-intersectional twaddle which tends to come from high-profile people who have had their fingers burned by being challenged on some dingleberries they’ve been spouting and lack the basic level of self-reflection to learn from the experience.

However, Louise Mensch has a solution to the problem! She calls for a reality-based feminism, which is basically this:

American feminism gets organised. It sees where power lies, and it mobilises to achieve it. It gets its candidates elected. Feminism here is about running for office, founding a company, becoming COO of Facebook or Yahoo. It is power feminism that realises that actual empowerment for women means getting more money, since money and liberty often equate, and being able to legislate or influence. Hillary Clinton shifted from First Lady to Senator. Before that she was a powerful lawyer.

…

And by the way, reality-based feminism – where you achieve, try to earn lots of money, run for office, campaign for measurable goals like defeating Sen. Todd Akin – is not a province of Conservative feminism alone. When I think of a true feminist of the left that I admire I think of Stella Creasy MP and her campaign against payday loans. She’s doing something. She ran for office. She got involved in the Labour party. She matters immensely. She will change things.

This is apparently what feminism should be fighting for according to Louise Mensch. The tiny number of high-paid positions which are near-impossible to attain due to material and social circumstances. Forget fighting for not having to live in fucking fear every day, forget fighting to be recognised as a human being, forget fighting for survival. In Louise Mensch’s reality, feminism is about getting a well-paid job, and fighting only battles on the lowest difficulty setting with an easy win guaranteed.

And I suppose it’s good for her that this is the only thing that she needs. Good for her that most of her problem is that people say she’s privileged on the internet, because if that’s her problem, then she really is staggeringly privileged. This privilege has bestowed upon her a staggering lack of empathy and imagination, a lack of any ability to see how impossible her vision is for the vast amount of women.

Louise Mensch thinks that everything she did was entirely her own doing, a shocking degree of egocentrism which most people grow out of by the age of three. There is absolutely no consideration that perhaps she lucked out at the life lottery in order to get where she is. She believes it to be possible to anyone, concluding with a somewhat frightening peek at her ideal future.

The picture at the top is of me at school aged 14. Big glasses, nerdy, feminist, ambitious, idolising Thatcher, and determined to be famous, to be an author, and to be rich. I was at private school my parents couldn’t really afford because I bust my ass and won a 100% academic scholarship. I always believed in myself and I had and have no intention of checking my privilege for anyone. I earned it. I hope the next generation of young women feel the same.

Imagine this future, where women squabble like a flock of pigeons, pecking at the scraps patriarchy chooses to throw us. A future utterly devoid of any solidarity, just women kicking down our sisters, piling their limp forms into a ladder to get that executive position. Imagine a future where we no longer dream of better and hope for better, hope for a change to a society which is inherently oppressive, crying out for an end to capitalism and kyriarchy. We would compete to be the chosen ones and turn a blind eye to continuing violence and horrors, never looking back just ruthlessly making sure that it is never us who are victims. Better someone else. It would be Mad Max in shoulder pads.

And if we won, we would mistakenly believe that somehow we earned it all, which is far better than the truth: we got lucky. If we lost, we would be blamed for our misfortune, our inability to play the game correctly.

It would be quaint, Louise Mensch’s belief that there is a pure meritocracy and that circumstances do not affect it, were it not just the stick that is used to beat us again and again and again.

The current state of affairs has benefited Louise Mensch, and so she does not want to rock the boat and enact any sort of change to the system. This is why she wants to maintain her reality, stubbornly attempting to swat away anyone who reminds her that it a hefty heap of luck supplemented her hard work to get her where she is today. She decries those who are not rooted in her reality.

And yet, by insistent focus on how things cannot change, all she betrays is that she is stagnant, and set in her ways. She is disgusted by dreamers, those of us who see that the system is broken and should not survive, those of us who hope for better. We flow like a small mountain stream, clearer and brighter, while Mensch and her ilk are a set of foetid puddles, unmoving and separate. Will we one day roar into a river, we dreamers? I like to hope so, because I have something Louise Mensch does not: hope and a vision that things can be different.

Lose the lad mags: a round-up and something that’s bugging me

UK Feminista and Object unveiled their latest project earlier this week: telling shops to get rid of lad mags, or it might break equality law, constituting sexual harassment. Now, I’m not particularly convinced by the legal argument, with even the lawyers couching their analysis in “may” rather than “does” constitute sexual harassment or discrimination.

I’m also not particularly convinced by the arguments surrounding objectification of women underpinning it, and have similar reservations to those surrounding the No More Page 3 campaign.

However, I’m late to the party in critiquing Lose the Lad Mags. It looks like others have got there first and made some very good points, so I am going to link to a few things which are worth reading.

Dangerous Dolls: ‘Object’ and Lose the Lads’ Mags (plasticdollheads)
Is it cold outside Kat? (itsjustahobby)
Lose the magging sexism (Squeamish Bikini)

All of these cover many of the problems fairly well: that sexism in magazines are not a problem limited to Nuts and Loaded; that objectification arguments are missing the point by focusing solely on image; that lad mags are a symptom of the problem rather than a cause; that banning something isn’t necessarily the best way forward.

I have another quibble to add. The campaigners have made a statement, as have lawyers involved, but there are voices missing: the voices of women who work in shops where lads’ mags are stocked and feel harassed and discriminated against by being forced to handle them. It is their voices which should be front and central in the Lose the Lad Mags campaigns, not those of spokespeople drafting official press releases.

It is their voices, their needs and wants, that matter.

And I suspect my feelings about this campaign would be very different if it weren’t led by lawyers and professional activists. A group of women who work in retail, gathering together to organise against an employment practice that harms them is a different thing entirely to a top-down campaign organised by groups who exist largely to get rid of lad mags. What it feels like here is instrumentalising some possible concerns that workers may have about an employment rights issue, in order to push an agenda. I say “possibly” here because in all the noise, we haven’t heard the voices of workers who may feel harassed here.

There is a world of difference between people who are most troubled by an issue leading on finding a solution, and an edict about how to solve a problem coming from above. Such top-down organisation is inherently paternalistic, smacking of a perception of knowing what is best for those poor little women. Is this really a pressing employment rights issue for women who work in shops? Maybe. We don’t know, because we’re only hearing from activists and lawyers telling us what they think and how they imagine women working in shops should feel.

What this campaign should look like, if it is indeed a major problem affecting workers, is support. These big organisations should not be leading, but quietly providing resources and a microphone, as it is not their battle. This battle belongs to the women workers who feel harassed and discriminated against, who find themselves in already-precarious retail work with little to do. These issues of workers’ rights are all part of the class struggle. Unfortunately, Lose the Lad Mags has not connected these dots, nor has it provided any solutions: I do not see any offers from Lose the Lad Mags to help with legal fees, no guidance in organising in the workplace in different ways which might work better–after all, with the cuts to Legal Aid a lawsuit is something potentially-affected women cannot afford.

And it is sad, because these may be women who need help, yet are being treated as little more than pawns, potential mouthpieces to legitimise the campaign.

Shitbrained bollocks of the day: fanny edition

Leave it out Stavvers, it’s not worth it, my inner monologue screams.

But no. No irritation too small for me. No tripe too trivial to miss the opportunity to open dialogues which are missed by the mainstream. Today is some utter bollocks in the Guardian (as it so often is). It’s title is mercifully reflective of its content: “Shame on those who practise intimate cosmetic surgery“.

It’s not often that a piece of shaming is so helpfully labelled, as make no mistake, this is what the entire article is about. And no, it’s not about shaming cosmetic surgeons who practise it, which would be, while still problematic, a little better. It is by someone who thinks she’s being funny, shaming women for wanting to have cosmetic surgery on their genitals. Cis women. It’s abundantly clear by “women” she means “cis women”, as these sorts are wont to do.

Now, there is a conversation to be had about cosmetic surgery on cis women’s genitals, the kind of thing which is done entirely for aesthetic reasons. Most of the surgeons who do it are men who have never had a cunt, and most of them thing that what they’re doing will have no effect on sexual pleasure, which is something a lot of people with cunts disagree with. They’re also doing it for money, profiting off of a beauty ideal which they themselves helped create by performing similar procedures on porn performers, which is, a lot of the time, the only cunts that heterosexual cis women get to look at. They’re creating a need for a product they provide, and it’s a vicious circle and it’s fucked up and let’s not even begin to unpick all of the intersecting bollocks: why is that ideal cunt image we’re sold a white woman’s cunt? Why don’t we talk about how much the medical establishment fails trans women? To have these conversations, we cannot shame people for taking the bargain of undergoing these procedures. It’s fucking complicated, it’s fucking structural, and nothing’s going to change with shame.

Alas, this is not the conversation the Guardian wants to have. The Guardian’s conclusion?

That it would be nice if more boyfriends said they liked their partner’s cunt.

I despair, I really do.

RadFem2013 vs the MRAs: what really happened and who’s the baddie?

For the second year running, the RadFem conference has lost its venue. It’s been difficult finding out the long and short of it, as the conference organisers are claiming that men’s rights activists (MRAs) are responsible, and the MRAs are also claiming victory, and there’s little from the London Irish Centre itself. The RadFem2013 line is that they were subjected to harassment from MRAs, while the MRAs claim that they spearheaded a campaign. I’m not going to link to any statements from either, as both are, in my view, hate groups.

Unfortunately, the only statement I could find from the venue itself was unhelpfully in the Times, hidden behind a paywall, which means that both RadFem2013 and the MRAs can continue to push their own narratives. Luckily, I can get behind that paywall, so here’s what the venue had to say (ETA: Screenshot of the Times article part 1 and part 2, courtesy of @WeekWoman):

“Quite a few of the complaints were from the transgender community and then a men’s group came along the other day to hand out leaflets about why the event should not be held here.

“While our commercial bookings subcontractor [an events firm called Off to Work] has a certain amount of freedom to use the centre when we are not using it for cultural events, if it comes to the charity’s attention that an event goes against our policy, then we will point it out to them.

“We did some research into RadFem and discovered certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.

“We have discussed with our subcontractor Off to Work how to avoid such confusion in future and have strengthened our internal communications as a result.”

Well, that clears matters up nicely, and thank you, London Irish Centre, for clarifying what actually happens. A pity I couldn’t find this important information anywhere else except behind a fucking paywall.

So, it appears that for the second year running, the venue pulled out because of RadFem2013’s transphobic stance, where, once again, trans women will be excluded from attending. Speakers at the conference include academic transphobes like Sheila Jeffreys, and more dangerous transphobes like someone whose name I am actually scared to mention because she has a history of endangering trans and queer folk because the hate runs so strong in her. This is not an exaggeration. That person has a habit of doxxing anyone she suspects of being trans, calling employers, and sometimes even schools of trans and queer folk. If anything, London Irish Centre are understating matters when they say that the RadFem2013 conference goes against their equalities and diversities policy. To some women, the RadFem2013 conference organisers and speakers are a persistent and dangerous threat.

But does this make the MRAs the good guys here? Fuck no. Their beef with RadFem2013 went as far as “waaah we hate feminism”. They merely opportunistically used the trans exclusionary nature of the conference as an excuse to push their own agenda. They’ve made their own problem clear in their correspondence with London Irish Centre–at least, the information they’ve provided online. And much of it is tedious concerns about misandry, and the Waahmbulance Service must be pretty stretched about this.

Of course, that MRAs might be driven to picket feminist events is a cause for concern. This is something that trans activists and feminist allies never did, mostly because we’d all planned to do something nice that day, something that didn’t involve sitting indoors listening to bigotry (last year, I sat in the sun and ate ice lollies and read a good book). We shouldn’t not object to MRAs showing up and picketing a feminist event just because this particular feminist event was direly oppressive. Now they think it works, they might just do it again, and that’s the last thing we fucking need.

From their own words, it looks like the MRAs consider trans women to be their allies for exactly the reason RadFem2013 organisers think trans women their enemies: both sides fall prey to the fictitious narrative that trans women are really men. In another life, these two bands of bigots could be friends, and were they to put their resources together they would become even more terrifying. I hope RadFem2013 giving MRAs the credit for something they didn’t do isn’t the beginning of an alliance forming.

In amid the hubbub of claims of responsibility, though, once again the work of trans activists is erased. It was trans activists, after all, who did the bulk of the dialogue with London Irish Centre, for it is trans activists who would be harmed by this conference going ahead. No platform for fascists, the activists said, and eventually, the venue listened. It was not the MRAs with all their spite and noise who won this. It is people who have been–or fear they will be–affected by the hate spouted by RadFem2013.

The narratives presented by both RadFem2013 and MRAs serve only to obfuscate the truth: that feminism is moving on from bigotry and gaining strength by the day, and the bigots are running scared as they feel their dominance slipping away from them.

Further reading:
UnCommon Sense: TERFs, MRAs and lies about trans people.

UPDATE: The booking agency have also given the MRAs credit. Read more here.

Note: Comment thread is, of course, moderated as best I can. I might have had a few slips, but I’m going to be careful right now. Stay on topic, and if you’re from either of the hate groups discussed in this post, your comment isn’t getting through, because no platform for hate. This is my space, not your personal place for airing grievances.

Transgender: not a challenge to feminist politics–unpicking transphobic tropes

So, today an article came to my attention that is almost like a bingo card for microaggressive transphobia. Entitled Transgender: the challenge to feminist politics, it is the sort of bollocks I’d usually let my trans sisters take down, but talking to some of them on Twitter about this, there was an air of fatigue, that it was nothing new. And it’s true. It’s tedious and reads like a checklist of tropes of people being wrong about trans women. I’d honestly recommend people bothered educating themselves by reading blogs by trans women, or actually talking to fucking trans women.

I have the luxury of not being directly harmed by this article, or anything else to this effect. This is how I find the energy to fight it. However, I’ve likely missed a few things, and I’d love if my trans sisters have any resources, links or additions to make, to let me know, and I’ll signal-boost you. Also, this is a very short, point-by-point rapid response, intended to make sure that some of the worst of this is quickly dealt with. Each point is worthy of its own post, as each of these tropes come up so often.

Now on to the demolition.

There are so many battles yet to be won by feminists that we must not be distracted by internal schisms. If we can identify a shared political goal with trans women, says Rahila Gupta, we should be able to end this polarisation.

Trans women are women. There are therefore a lot of shared political goals. Any polarisation comes from some cis women being bigoted.

After decades of debating what it means to be a feminist, who would have thought that even the category ‘woman’ would be up for discussion, and would need to be qualified with the prefix ‘born’ (i.e. born- woman)?

The correct prefix is not “born”, but “cis”. “Born” implies some sort of biologically essential characteristic.

until new technology came along to allow those who suffer from gender dysphoria to choose the body in which they feel most comfortable.

Trans people aren’t just a new invention with new technology. Trans people have always existed.

The suicide of Lucy Meadows, a teacher in the process of transitioning, in response to her persecution by the press exemplifies the wide-spread prejudice against trans people.

Sadly, transphobia is not just limited to this very salient example.

Against this history, it becomes very difficult to have a reasoned debate about what transgender means for sex binaries, gender politics and feminism without touching a raw nerve in members of the trans community.

The use of “reasoned” and “touched a raw nerve” places trans people as “unreasonable”. This is a classic example of dogwhistle prejudice, and “the crazy trans lady” is a common trope used against trans women. Immediately after this, the author lists two examples of things that she thinks are not transphobia. Both of them are instances of transphobia. Great silencing work!

The fact that those who claim that theirs is a liberatory new movement are adopting body shapes that have historically oppressed women is worth debating and no different to the debates we may have with the fashion industry or even amongst women.

Just as cis women have lots of different body shapes, so, too, do trans women. Ignoring this fact is either ignorant or disingenous. I genuinely can’t work out which.

Central to feminist thinking is that gender is a social construct rather than a biological construct and that spurious arguments about the biological inferiority of women have been used to justify the existence of patriarchy. The imperative felt by transsexuals to undergo surgery and hormone therapy in order to identify as the sex to which they aspire thus undercuts a major plank of feminist politics.

Well, maybe your feminist politics need to move on from the 1970s, then. My feminist politics accommodate trans people perfectly well.

ETA: Furthermore, surgery is not a crucial aspect of a transition: some women choose not to have hormones or surgery for their own reasons. It’s their choice, and it doesn’t make them any less women. (thanks @JessWardman for suggesting I clarify this point!)

Men who transition to women

WHAT? No. Trans women are women. Stop calling them men.

ETA: This is as good a times as any to draw attention to another false narrative around trans people, as observed by an anonymous friend of mine: there is a narrative that trans women “want to become” women rather than are women.

Men who transition to women often adopt a hyper feminine style of dress and appearance, thus yoking femininity and women very much as patriarchy does, a link that feminists have been trying hard to break.

Not all feminists. Again, move on from the 1970s. Also, there is absolutely no critique of the role of the medical establishment in this. Doctors often force trans women to behave in a certain way in order to get treatment.

ETA: From an anonymous friend: “not all trans women are feminine by a long shot, even with the medical pressure.”

Additionally, genderqueer politics holds that the rigid imposition of gender identities is the main problem and that the binary system affects men and women equally whereas feminists like myself would see the oppression of one sex (women) by another (men) as the central issue

No. Binaries are unhelpful.

It is also interesting that the most noise in public debates is made by men transitioning to women, another example of male privilege

JESUS CHRIST STOP WITH CALLING TRANS WOMEN MEN. Trans women do not have male privilege. They are women, with the intersecting oppression of being trans and thus facing this sort of shit.

According to a study carried out in 2009, of a community of 10,000 people in the UK, 6000 have transitioned, 80 per cent of whom are now trans women (MTF).

I don’t know what she means by “transitioned” here, but I think I can guess that she means surgery (more on this later)

Whilst it may be understandable that women might wish to live as men in order to escape their ‘inferior’ sex, it is harder to understand why such large numbers of men should opt to transition to women and thereby, give up their male privilege, plus face the additional discrimination of adopting transgender identities. Nevertheless, the fact that more men than women have transitioned is itself an indication that patriarchy gives men a disproportionate power and freedom to choose how they live.

Perhaps because they’re not doing it to swap privileges around? And if she had ever even bothered to speak to a trans woman, maybe, just maybe, she would know that trans women are not men, and that it’s hardly a “disproportionate power and freedom”, being trans.

ETA: From my anonymous friend: “one reason for trans women being more visible than trans men despite evidence suggesting numbers are roughly equally is that trans men are not questioned as much by the media (because of male privilege – being a man ‘makes sense’)

Jenny Roberts, a transsexual, explains why their response to rejection by born-women is so noisy: the transsexual ‘often responds in the only way she knows – with male aggression and anger… the inescapable fact is that we’ve grown up with gender privilege. We’ve been taught to compete, take power and demand what should be ours.’

Wow, a cherry-picked quote. One. The only indication that the author has bothered seeking out anything, and it’s something which backs up her beliefs entirely.

It is this history of lived experience as a different sex and gender that makes many women, particularly radical feminists and lesbians, wary of transsexuals.

Well, they should stop being wrong, then. I know I grew out of it.

How do we balance our equalities duties with the need for a women-only space especially when employing transsexuals who have not finished the transition? The Sex Discrimination Act takes this into account partly when it stipulates that discrimination may be lawful when a particular job requires a worker of a particular sex and the transgender applicant is still in the process of transitioning… But the paradox is that the possession of male genitalia would make their presence in women only environments much more problematic

They’re still women. Having a penis doesn’t make someone not a woman. Having a vagina doesn’t make someone a woman.

ETA: My anonymous friend pointed out I didn’t say more on surgery, and I was going to say it here: it’s patently obvious that what the author means by transition is surgery. As @JessWardman pointed out, some trans people opt not to have surgery, and that’s OK.

This brings us back to the knotty issue of biology versus gender – if conditioning is what makes men violent, then surely unhappiness with ‘maleness’ indicates that that the conditioning is unravelling and therefore makes a trans woman no more or less likely than born- women to be prone to violence.

Note the distinct lack of any citatations or statistics, because there are none, because this belief is rooted in, once again, the very unpleasant notion that trans women are somehow male.

When many of the younger feminists are actively bringing supportive men into the movement and into the conference halls and debating the roles they should adopt

How is the presence of men pertinent to trans women? Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

At the end of the day, it is about a shared politics, rather than identities per se, of working with trans people who share and support feminist goals.

Which a lot of trans women do because they’re women.

The respect shown by a trans woman like Jenny Roberts who says, ‘We should accept that there are groups where our presence is not appropriate and groups where it is. And we should stop acting like we still have the privileges that we grew up with’ would go a long way to end this polarisation.

Yes. That is literally the conclusion of the article. Shut up, trans women, and step in line. A classic cis silencing tactic, which I’m all too aware of because I once used it myself.

Anyway. Fuck that shit. I’m off for a fag. What an awful article.

“Call-out culture” isn’t a thing (but it should be)

The words are everywhere these days, presented as a threat, a menace. The spectre of “call-out culture” lurks under the bed, in the back of the wardrobe, down the U-Bend, ready to sic the Online Wimmin Mob on poor innocent feminists to silence them.

As I argued earlier this week, it is patent nonsense to believe that calling out equals silencing. It is also patent nonsense to believe–as some seem to–that there is some sort of coordinated gang doing the calling out, ready at a moment’s notice to cry transphobia and let slip the dogs of war.

That’s just not how it works. In fact, it’s a kind of anarchy in action. There’s no coordination. It’s just that a few people notice that the same thing is problematic and therefore call it out. There’s no premeditation, and it’s seldom meant as a pile-on, it’s just that some people are a little more alert to problematic behaviour and language than others, and these people may call it out.

There is no call-out culture. Frankly, those of us who do call people out are in a bit of a minority. Frankly, there’s so much bullshit in so many feminisms that is going unaddressed because too many people think this shit flies. Often, only the highest-profile instances are called out, if at all.

It would actually be quite nice if there really was a call-out culture. It would be nice for feminism, because we could get better and address our failings of far too many women. We could all learn something.

And it would also be better for people being called out. Yes, really. At present, too many people mistake calling out and drawing attention to problematic language and behaviours which inadvertently oppress others as bullying, when in fact it is quite the opposite. It’s an opposition to the cultural hegemony of the white, cis, abled, economically-secure privileged few, and an opening up of feminism to those who need it. It opposes oppression.

Yet because it happens so infrequently, many of those called out think they are being unfairly picked on.

So let us develop a culture wherein calling out is the norm rather than an exception. Let us develop a culture wherein calling out is seen for what it is: a favour. Let us develop a culture wherein we understand the function of why calling out happens, and that it is not some sort of slight on the person, but, rather, a move towards those of us fighting for social justice to stop oppressing our sisters. Let us develop a culture wherein calling out does not feel like a thankless, frustrating task and rather than crying out in anger, we exist in an environment where it is no big deal.

Let us do this, and eventually, the call-out culture will die, because it will no longer be needed at all.

Call-out week: a semi-coherent series of things on my mind