Blue is a Colour, Chelsea is a Name

[steepholm]

Longterm readers of this journal (and, let's face it, I don't have many recent ones) may remember that Suzanne Moore - author of some trenchant feminist articles that I unreservedly applaud - is, nevertheless, pretty TERFy.

Her recent article in The Guardian deploring so-called 'cancel culture' is typical of its kind. If I had infinite time I could spend a fair bit of it dissecting Moore's article. Why does she cite the recent Rowling, row, for example, without making any reference at all to JKR's views about trans women, which is what made her essay controversial? Anyone reading Moore would think that she was called out for daring to speak about her physical abuse by a cis man, rather than for her transphobia.

Again, if she really wanted to argue against cancel culture, why didn't she mention the most topical example of that phenomenon - i.e. the sacking of David Starkey from various posts (rightly in my view) for his views on slavery and his reference to 'damn blacks'? It's easy to inveigh against cancel culture when those being cancelled are advancing views you agree with. The real test of principle comes when you are forced to do a Voltaire-face, as it were, and defend the expression of views you personally find offensive. That Moore chose not to do so is telling. (Of course, there are right-wingers who are defending Starkey on the internet, using arguments very much like Moore's; however, they are groups with whom Moore would probably hate to recognise her affinity.)

I seem to have spent some time on those matters despite my best intentions. Oh well. What I really wanted to talk about was a certain phrase that Moore used:

I write this as someone who I know some would like cancelled because I continue to think biological sex exists.

You may be puzzled by this phrase, because - well, hardly anybody denies that biological sex exists, do they? Of course, some of us might say that sex is neither binary nor simple, and that chromosonal, hormonal and phenotypical varations make for a complex biological picture; but that's not to say that it doesn't exist - on the contrary. "Biological sex exists" is such a "Duh" statement that it passes almost unnoticed.

Nevertheless, it's become quite a catchphrase. When J. K. Rowling defended Maya Forstater, for example, she wrote incredulously: "Force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? @ istandwithmaya."

The reality was, of course, nothing so fatuous. This NBC News article summarises the situation, as described by the judge in the case:

[Forstater's] contract expired in December and was not renewed; she sued in March and waited for a ruling — while continuing to make transphobic statements, including (but not limited to) a link to a piece comparing the use of proper pronouns to the date rape drug rohypnol and her commentary in defense of not using people's preferred pronouns, a defense of using transgender people's prior names in public settings, another series of statements misgendering another gender nonbinary person and another defense of her right to refuse to use the correct pronouns and to openly misgender people.

I think it's clear at this point that "biological sex is real" has become a kind of shorthand for "I'm a TERF." Although crude, it is quite powerful, inasmuch as anyone coming across it without much knowledge of or interest in the subject will find it commonsensical. For example, I encountered Moore's article via a Facebook post by a friend (whom I respect) who had commented, simply, "Excellent article". Anyone objecting will, unless they can persuade people to commit the time and emotional energy to following the arguments, sound pretty unreasonable and/or pettifogging.

I suppose the racists got there first, as ever. "I'm proud of my country" sounds pretty unobjectionable, shorn of the intolerance that often attends it.

Still, I wonder whether a leaf might not be usefully taken from this book? Is there some similarly "Duh" phrase that might stand for the other side of the debate?

I believe there is, and I propose: "Blue is a colour." From now on, I intend to insert sentences such as, "People want to silence me just because I assert that blue is a colour," into everything I write on this subject. It makes at least as much sense as "biological sex is real," after all. Nobody actually denies either statement, but beyond that, while "biological sex is real" makes an appeal to "objective fact", "blue is a colour" makes an appeal to the power of culture. Blueness is deeply cultural: one language's blue doesn't match another (the "blue" of Japanese includes much that English speakers might call "green", for example). In that sense, we might say that blueness is "nothing but a cultural construct", much as TERFs say about gender. On the other hand, blueness has a real connection to physics, and can be defined in terms of certain light frequencies. More importantly, who is going to argue seriously against the proposition that "Blue is a colour?" Anyone who did so would look at least as silly as someone accused of arguing that biological sex isn't real.

To proclaim, loud and proud, that "Blue is a colour" is to highlight the ambiguous nature of the truth-claim being advanced; it is to testify to the authenticity of lived personal experience; and it is, most importantly, to state the bleeding obvious.

"Blue is a colour." It ticks all the boxes.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

These days, hearing "blue is a color!" shouted in that tone of trying to pick a fight would imply something to do with the "blue lives matter" movement. (Maybe it doesn't work with "blue is a colour!" because so much of the conflict between Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter is an American thing)

[colorwheel]

yeah. i think, if this were to go anywhere, another color would have to be used instead of blue. blue means cops, at least here in the u.s. right now when it's part of a political assertion; and defending cops means defending cops specifically to the detriment and endangerment of Black people.

[steepholm]

Other colours are available, but of course this makes the point about cultural constructedness all the more clearly. What I actually had in mind, although this is likely to be illegible outside British culture, is the old Chelsea anthem from the 1970s...

[shewhomust]

Blue is a colour? Next you'll be saying that football is a game!

I scarcely ever read Suzanne Moore's column: she says some good things, and she expresses them well, but then she trips you up with - well, in the sentence you quote (and so neatly demolish), I didn't get beyond "I write this as someone who I know some would like cancelled..." Yes, Suzanne, it's all about you. (And if anyone wants to silence me by giving me a weekly column in the Guardian, I'm prepared to consider it!)

[steepholm]

Football is just a cultural construct!

(Moore is a frustrating writer. Sometimes she does very good work, and then... not so much.)

[adrian_turtle]

And there was a time (possibly now, in some places) when wearing blue can mark a person as a member of a gang. Whether they know it or not, the color could identify them enough to get them attacked or arrested.

The point I was clumsily trying to make was that a lot of statements take their meaning from context. I just washed a t-shirt with a list of political statements on it. I mean, statements that used to look stupidly self-evident, but have become highly-charged slogans. Some dryers have wormholes that can transport a sock through time and/or space. If a dryer took this shirt into the past, they might see "science is real" and think "duh, of course." There's no way they could tell if the statement refers to global warming, vaccination, eugenics, or gender essentialism.

[calimac]

Actually, biological sex has some of the same fuzziness as blue. People who say "Biological sex is real" seem to think that it's a binary switch: female on one side, male on the other, always clear-cut.

Lordy, I took university-level genetics nearly half a century ago, and we already knew better than that, and that was even without considering transsexuality or even homosexuality. Genes and chromosomes are messy things, and there's numerous common ways they can exist without fitting into the two neat little boxes, which are entirely artificial constructs whose illusory existence is fostered by the fact that a large number of cases do happen to fall there. But many more don't.

[steepholm]

Absolutely - biological sex is very strongly culturally mediated, and by no means a brute fact. That's not of course to say that it isn't real, because after all culture is real, and indeed our lived reality is in large part a social construction. The colour blue is real in the same way.

[lilliburlero]

I'm just here to applaud the coinage "Voltaire-face".

[steepholm]

I thank you!