Maybe you're just wrong
On how replacing "no debate" with argument won't work if your arguments are rubbish
A New York Times poll has revealed that many Democrat-voting Americans do not support every single trans activist demand. This has prompted much soul-searching on the part of activists and allies. Alas, said soul-searching has not taken the form of questioning whether the doubters are in fact right. It has been more a case of questioning whether the correct approach was taken in persuading the doubters. “You’re a genocidal fascist if you don’t agree with me” seems to have run its course.
It would, it seems, have been perfectly fine to keep insisting male rapists can go to women’s prisons, that male sports advantage is a myth and that left-leaning feminists are evil terfs who need to be burned at the stake if this stuff still worked. The issue here isn’t one of logic or morality, but of strategy. Turns out the “normies” are too thick to get with the programme, now that they know what the programme actually is. Therefore their betters need to explain it more clearly and patiently, perhaps with some bits emphasised, others edited out. Die in a grease fire, TERF scum was fun while it lasted but all good things must come to an end. Ditto No debate and #JustBeKind.
Obviously one could argue – and I, a stupid “normie”, would – that insisting that any leftist woman who expressed the slightest misgivings about being rebranded a cis privileged menstruator had to be a far-right Trump supporter wasn’t just a tactical error. It was dishonest, gaslighting behaviour. One could even argue that said woman is the one who’s remained loyal to truly leftist values, prioritising mutual dependency and relational identities over the Trump-esque tantrumming of “I am whoever I say I am, regardless of where I am situated in relation to anyone else”. One could consider whether the issue is not that said woman is an idiot who can’t comprehend the genius of Judith Butler and therefore needs to be spoon-fed some entry-level trans activism before everything gets too complex for her tiny TERF brain. One could do all of this, but I am guessing that nobody actually will.
Instead, there is a pretence that the left – the goodies – didn’t get things quite right on trans issues and the meanie, bastard right took advantage. There’s no consideration that maybe, those who branded every leftist who warned of this – for years – right-wing TERF scum aren’t the goodies either. I mean, seriously. You spent over a decade calling many a left-leaning lesbian feminist a far-right gender essentialist yet you still think it’s reasonable for you to self-ID as progressive? As the self-appointed goodies, you still presume to lecture others as though the issue isn’t that your arguments were flimsy and incoherent, but that others – dumb, immoral others, ripe for having their heads turned by baddies – were too stupid to grasp your beliefs in their rawest form. You’ll grudgingly considered you could have made your point better, but at heart the assumption remains that the stupid normies misunderstood you, not that they understood you perfectly well.
Maybe you’re just wrong.
In 2020, Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece that is a classic of the “I won’t engage with feminist arguments against trans activism but will pretend they’re stupid instead” genre. The too long, don’t read version is “women who have any issues with men declaring they’re women are unsophisticated Karens who haven’t spent enough time in San Francisco hanging out with drag queens,”. We’re all scared of male humans in a bit of lippy, you see. We dress it up as reasonable concerns but scratch the surface and you’ll find that, unlike Edgelord Rebecca, we’ve just had ridiculously sheltered lives:
“That I grew up and spent most of my life in San Francisco I consider one of my greatest strokes of luck, because it was in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around. Even as a straight girl, maybe especially as a straight girl, I benefited endlessly from that. I went to my first gay bar here when I was about 14, with a gay man who was the kindest person in my adolescence. The drag queens who were his friends were also kind, and fortysomething years later my life in and around the queer community has been largely an experience of kindness. Of kindness and liberation, because all these people made it clear to me that gender was what you made of it, and biology is not destiny, and that was really helpful.”
Guess you got me there. I grew up in Penrith, Cumbria (of ‘Withnail and I’ teashop fame, even though it wasn’t even filmed there and the fabled Penrith teashop doesn’t exist). What can I possibly know of kindness and liberation? What could the long-departed Toppers Nitespot and Southend Road car park’s Blues club (ladies’ night every Thursday!) teach me of gender non-conformity? (On the plus side, I might know more than Rebecca about Lake poets and sheep.)
Seriously, though – to pretend every man who claims to be a woman is some kindly drag queen teaching you how to do mascara in the ladies’ betrays a naivety on the part of Solnit, not anyone else. It shows a (deliberate?) refusal to acknowledge the darker reaches of male entitlement – at least when it’s politically inconvenient to do so. Women such as Dr Karen Ingala Smith, author of the brilliant Defending Women’s Spaces, cannot be browbeaten into thinking a change of pronouns and clothing makes a male person no more of a threat than a woman. On the contrary, one of the key feminist arguments against gender self-ID has been that while not all men are violent and predatory, we don’t know which ones are. Nonetheless, there are red flags one might look out for. These include, but are not limited to, demanding unlimited access to women’s spaces and resources, reducing female identities to porn stereotypes, threatening to kill others or yourself if women fail to comply. Women do not need educating out of noticing the this the minute a male person declares himself female.
It is trivially true that when someone like Donald Trump speaks of protecting women and girls, he is not speaking in favour of protecting women and girls from men like him. His argument is not the feminist one. But it is beyond stupid to decide that therefore, the feminist argument does not exist. That’s the argument you need to address, and you can’t.
There’s something almost sweet about declarations such as this:
Oh, so all you have to do is make your case properly, like other those groups did? Genius.
What this tends to miss is that yes, there was an era of “no debate”, which is a very sanitised way of saying there was a very long period during which people (many of them feminists) faced horrendous abuse and sanctions for trying to engage with trans activist arguments. This doesn’t mean that said people didn’t keep looking for the arguments and doing their best to make sense of them, even while having “genocidal fascists!” yelled in their faces. Believe it or not, we wanted to be wrong because the response towards us was so extreme, so threatening, so utterly bizarre, it would have made life a whole lot easier to accept it was our fault (in much the way, now I think of it, one tries to cope with an abusive relationship by attempting to work out why one brought it all on oneself). We really, really tried. Therefore, when it comes to many “normies”, you’re not dealing with people who don’t know your “real” arguments yet. We do, and many of us bent over backwards trying to tidy them up for you.
Here, in no particular order, are the kinds of arguments we’ve already ploughed through (and god, I’m so bored thinking about them. I’ll lose my mind if anyone tells me defining women as adult human females reduces them to baby-making machines one more time):
- Deliberately misunderstanding Simone de Beauvoir in order to try and make it sound as though defining women as a bunch of regressive stereotypes is one in the eye for biological essentialism (see: Laurie Penny, Amia Srinivasan)
- Admitting that none of it has any coherence, but claiming that really, living with incoherence and inconsistency is proof that you’re cleverer than everyone else and going on about things making sense is a bit basic and right-wing (see: Ruth Hunt, Maggie Nelson)
- Repackaging noughties neurosexism to make it sound like a moral cause and telling any woman who questions you that she’s not just a flat-earther, but a bigot to boot (see: Agustín Fuentes)
- Merging conservative gender essentialism with feminist gender abolition into one big, murky ‘anti-gender’ package, after which you somehow pretend people who think all female humans, as women, should be feminine tradwives are the same as people who don’t think female humans, as women, need to be feminine at all. Then chuck in some stuff where you conflate personal boundaries with geographical and racial ones in order to make anti-rape activists sound like Trump (see: Judith Butler, Sophie Lewis)
- Getting your (metaphorical or non-metaphorical) cock out and swinging it in women’s faces. I mean, what are they going to do about it? It’s, like, performance and totally not the same as some bog-standard bloke doing it! Or is it? No one knows! So deep! So edgy! So confusing! (see: Jordan Gray, Andrea Long Chu, Grace Lavery)
There are more, of course. But the fact is that none of them work. Moreover, we understand that “trans women are women” has to be supported with no exceptions. Them’s the rules, right? Otherwise they’re not women, just people whom we pretend are women some of the time in order to keep them happy. So suggesting that maybe, for instance, you make fewer demands about male participants in female sports isn’t going to pass muster.
The funny thing is, if you really do want a vaguely coherent-sounding defence of trans activism, I think the average terf could write a better one than the average trans activist. Because we’ve tried really, really hard to make your arguments make sense. Plus we understand our own arguments, so wouldn’t have to misrepresent the opposition. It still wouldn’t be a great defence – can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – but it would have some substance.
Of course, it would be bitterly hilarious if those who have spent years harassing gender critical women turned out to have some killer arguments up their sleeve which they just haven’t used because, well, die, TERF was doing the trick. If that’s the case, bring them on. It wouldn’t erase the bullying of the past decade but it would be fascinating to discover there’s something we’ve missed. In the meantime, though, don’t expect some non-threatening, toned-down bullshit to work where full-on, rage-filled bullshit didn’t. Other people just aren’t that stupid.