steepholm

It's always hard to know whether a post fails to get views because of its intrinsic dullness or because of some algorithmic glitch. I recently wrote what I thought a nice little snarky Medium piece satirising the widely debunked yet somehow still widely cited ROGD theory that being trans is caused by "social contagion", and it's sunk without trace - perhaps because of the word "bollocks" in the title? Anyway, here it is, if you'd like to see it. (The signal-boosting power of Dreamwidth/Livejournal is awesome indeed!)

In other news, Hiroko's mission to See All the Things before she returns to Japan next month took us back to the M5 yesterday. Last week it was Devon and Agatha Christie; this time we travelled north to Birmingham, and more specifically Bournville, where we took a tour of the chocolate factory, now transformed to Cadbury World. It was an interesting experience: part theme park (albeit muted and punctuated with quizzes about cacao and the chocolate making process), part factory tour (there were plenty of people in hairnets demonstrating things), part historical exhibition (in which a hologrammatic conquistador, and then an equally insubstantial Mr Cadbury, took us through the history of chocolate and of the firm itself). Inevitably, we were also photographed surfing on a chocolate bar. A large shop with chocolate at melt-down prices, where I bought a bar of Dairy Milk larger than my keyboard for a fiver, rounded off the day. Overall verdict: weird but good, and at least nobody got juiced.

A week or so ago, on Transgender Day of Visibility, the Government celebrated by specifically excluding trans people from their long-promised ban on conversion therapy in the UK. This caused outrage, of course, and there was a heartening degree of unanimity from LGBT groups, but so far no sign that the Government will keep its word.

A couple of days later, the EHRC published guidance on interpreting the 2010 Equality Act. This was always a flawed piece of legislation, which spent much of the space it devoted to trans people detailing ways that - uniquely among the groups it set out to protect - it was actually okay to discriminate against us after all. But it did at least recognise that you shouldn't be able to discriminate on a whim, and that finding trans people a bit icky isn't enough of an excuse. The bar it set was that trans people should be excluded only when this was a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" - giving as an example the right of a rape crisis centre to turn away rape victims should they happen to be trans.

I thought, and think, that the exception sucked, but in practice it hasn't ever been used, because there isn't really a legitimate aim for which discriminating against trans people would be a proportionate means. Rape crisis centres, to use the Government's own example, haven't in practice shown themselves willing to sacrifice rape victims on the altar of transphobia.

This situation wasn't satisfactory for the phobes, however, and having effectively taken over the EHRC in the last couple of years they saw to it that the advice on the Act recently offered by that organisation set the bar at a subterranean level, saying that (for example) organisations are free to actively look for a service user to object to sharing a toilet with a trans person on the grounds of, say, 'privacy' or 'dignity', and thenceforth to exclude trans people tout court. The advice doesn't have the force of law, and indeed is almost certainly illegal, but until it's challenged in court - which seems to require an actual instance of this kind of ban happening - it will be circulated by the press and others as if it were the legal position, adding that extra element of fear and loathing to any toilet break.

(Oh, and of course, it's not just trans women who will be 'challenged' at the toilet door. Any butch lesbian or generally gender non-conforming woman will be too. The ironically self-declared "gender-critical" crew has willed it so.)

Then, a couple of days ago, along comes Boris Johnson and declares that trans women should not participate in sport. Now, part of me struggles to be interested in this because I can't understand why anyone would participate, but I do think it's significant that Johnson has said it. It's not, of course, because he cares about or is interested in women's sport, any more than Trump cared about the health of the avian population living near windmills. It's pretty clear that the Tories have decided that trans people are the perfect wedge issue for the next election and the two years leading up to it. It's something on which Labour is split, something that doesn't affect most people directly and about which they have only limited knowledge, something that can be reduced to "common sense" slogans and gotcha questions. From their point of view, it's ideal. So, Johnson's remark was a straw in the wind. And the wind is already blowing.

On the whole, I think I prefer trans invisibility.

I'm not normally an angry person, but I've been angry this week. The judgement of the High Court that trans children must be forced to go through a puberty contrary to their gender identity, despite the existence of a safe alternative in the form of puberty blockers, amounts not only to forced conversion therapy of the most brutal kind, but, in effect, child torture.

If that language sounds overblown, I suggest you ask how you'd feel if you (or your child) had been ordered by a court to go through permanent sexual changes contrary to your identity. With the kicker that, once you were marked out in that way - through growing breasts and wide hips, or a beard and low voice - you would then be stigmatised for those things by the very same people who forced you to go through the process. (See countless transphobic tropes about broad-shouldered trans women, etc.)

The holes in the judgement's reasoning are astounding. Puberty blockers are totally reversible in their effect - if you stop taking them, puberty simply proceeds - but the judgement treats them as if they were an inevitable prelude to cross-sex hormones, rather than a chance for children to take a few years' breathing space to come to a considered decision.

Yes, most children on blockers go on to transition. The reason is that most children on blockers are trans - and have already shown their consistency, having waited 18 months or more for a first appointment. The court assumes, however, that it's a kind of conveyor belt, and insists that children must be in a position to consent to cross-sex hormones before starting blockers - a position so perverse that I'm surprised the High Court wasn't sucked into a time-space vortex.

Blockers are also described as an experimental and potentially dangerous drug - but only when given to trans people. When prescribed for cis children with precocious puberty - as they have been, safely, for 35 years - they're perfectly fine.

The wider implications of undoing so-called Gillick competence - the legal principle that allows children to make limited decisions about their own bodies - have been quickly seized on by anti-contraception and anti-abortion groups. Indeed, the case was brought by a lawyer with a long history in the anti-abortion world. But supposedly feminist groups such as WPUK applaud, because it hurts trans people - and that's always good. And supposedly liberal papers like The Observer parrot the same lies. And all of them think they're torturing children for their own good. Because, after all, wouldn't it be better if everyone could just be cis after all? Torturing trans children is a small price to pay if it means that one cis child is saved from making a mistake. Actually, it's not even a price - it's a good thing in itself! Let's make them go through permanent bodily changes so that they can realise that everybody should be cis. Let's take a tip from people who rape lesbians to make them straight! It's the same logic!

That's where liberal Britain is today. Fuck them all.

Meanwhile, I bought a picture of a tree.



When you have finished looking at my tree, please consider donating to the fund to appeal the High Court's blatantly discriminatory decision.

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.

Since when was Shinzo Abe's wife the "First Lady" of Japan?

I first saw this usage on the internet a few months ago, and dismissed it as the parochialism of an American reporter, transferring language appropriate to the United States to a context where it didn't fit - like the woman interviewing Nelson Mandela who asked him to comment on an issue "as an African American." (He was too polite to point out her error.) But then I saw it again, and again - and recently I even heard it from a Japanese friend, who confirmed that it was indeed a thing in Japan - even if, as in America, it's a courtesy title rather than a constitutional one.

But, while it makes a kind of sense in the States, where the President is also the head of state, surely it makes no sense in a monarchy? If Akie Abe is the First Lady of Japan, what number lady is Empress Masako?

I was about to write that if Boris Johnson tried to call Carrie Symonds the First Lady a couple of Beefeaters would be round to No. 10 sharpish to let him feel the business end of a pike - but I see that some newspapers have indeed started referring to her, albeit flippantly, as the "First Girlfriend". Will that take root?

I don't know why this even bothers me, since I'm not a royalist, but a) I do find the confusion of presidential and monarchical systems irritating, and b) I would be sorry to think that the whole First Lady meme was spreading, since it was always pretty irredeemably sexist.

One thing I meant to mentioned in my last post is that, driving through the New Forest naturally took me and Haruka to Lyndhurst, and that as we were waiting to turn at a junction she remarked on the White Rabbit Cafe over the road. "Why is it called that?" she asked, recognising the Lewis Carroll reference (because Alice is Big in Japan).

It took me a moment to remember that Lyndhurst is the place where Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell) is buried. It took a couple of minutes more to get this concept across, though. Language issues aside, that Alice might be dead - or ever have been alive, or, worse, an old woman, or somebody who lived well into the 1930s - was a difficult thing to accept mentally. I offered to show her Alice's grave - but the offer was declined, and I can't blame her.

Today's news that harmful gender stereotypes are being banned from advertising seems likely to throw up some interesting disputes in months to come. What is a stereotype, and among stereotypes which ones are harmful? Perhaps "gender-critical" feminists could concentrate on that for a bit and take a break from bullying trans people? Actually, one of my earliest posts on this blog was about that kind of advertising. So many no-longer-on-LJ friends' voices! But also a few who are still around.

I think my favourite radio programme from the last week was The Patch. An apparently lightweight format, in which a journalist picks a UK postcode at random and heads there to find human interest stories, gradually morphed into a really effective piece of investigative journalism that elegantly demonstrated just how government money gets wasted on vanity projects while basic needs remain unfunded. And there were human interest stories too!

One of the main problems with trans politics is that trans people seldom or never get to frame the public discourse, which is typically presented either as an explanation of trans people (benign version) or a debate around whether trans people are deluded and/or dangerous (malign version). The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that there's room for a debate, not about trans people, but about transphobes - one that puts them under the same kind of spotlight. It's not my academic field, so I'm not the ideal person to organise it, but I'd love to see a Call for Papers something like this....

The Politics and Pathology of Transphobia

It is a common refrain of transphobes that the issues need a free and open debate, but the phenomenon of transphobia itself has received little or no academic attention. This conference attempts to amend that situation. As the conference organisers we are open to suggestions for panel sessions, but possible topics include:

Transphobic History – a Twice-told Tale
Transphobia has risen to prominence on our television screens and in books over the last generation, especially with the rise of social media – but is it really a modern phenomenon? Arguably the discourse and ideology of transphobia, and the psychopathology underlying it, have a far longer history. In this session we explore the history and heritage of transphobia, including the striking parallels between the hostile framing of homosexuality some thirty years ago (notably as a threat to children), and that of trans identities today.

Transphobia and Feminism
One of the characteristics of transphobes who also self-identify as feminists is the compulsion to speak for feminism in general, and indeed for all women and girls; yet most women (including most feminists) repudiate transphobic beliefs and assumptions. This panel looks at the complex and conflicted relationship between feminism and transphobic discourse, especially in an age of social media and “echo chamber” platforms such as Mumsnet, which allow transphobes to live in a world of constant affirmation and unchallenged reinforcement of their views.

Transphobia and the Evangelical Movement
Many transphobes present themselves as politically left-leaning, while other base their transphobia in conservative religious dogma. The common purpose of these two apparently disparate groups has sometimes evolved into active collaboration, as in organisations such as “Hands Across the Aisle.” How do these different brands of transphobe reconcile themselves to being bedfellows? Is it a marriage of convenience, or does this alliance indicate a more fundamental convergence of political and moral outlook?

Transphobic Regret
No one knows how many transphobes eventually come to regret their involvement in transphobic ideology. Much more research is needed – although major academic institutions seem unwilling to fund it. This session will look at desistance from transphobic ideology, and the social and psychological repercussions for those who dare to leave a belief and value system that has contributed so much to their sense of identity and purpose.

Science, Junk Science, and Statistics
Transphobes frequently invoke science to support their worldview, but their use of science typically resorts to inaccurate or simplistic categories, and tendentious, selective use of statistics. This session is devoted to the discussion of transphobia’s unhealthy relationship with science in general, as well as their support for clinical practices such as conversion therapy.

Transphobia as Fetish
Transphobes have created many theories to “explain” the existence of trans people, such as autogynephilia, “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” among still more fanciful aetiologies. In this session we consider the extent to which such theories are born of projection and/or paraphilic interest in the lives and genitalia of trans people – a range of pathologies we propose to gather under the general title of “Blanchardism.”

Transphobia and the Rhetoric of Victimhood
Transphobic articles and viewpoints are extremely frequent in the press, on television and radio, and other public fora. Yet one of the commonest refrains of transphobic discourse is the complaint that transphobic views are being silenced, penalised or censored, and that this is both a threat to free speech and evidence of a powerful trans cabal. In this session we explore the intersection of paranoia and projection involved in positioning transphobic discourse as victimised and silenced.

The Media and the Exploitation of Transphobia
The media have often been willing partners in the transmission and amplification of transphobic viewpoints, whether for reasons of genuine transphobia or because of the “pulling power” of transphobic tropes and rhetoric. In this session we analyse the particular forms of transphobia employed by the media in facilitating moral panic about trans people.

When I walked to Tesco yesterday I found myself sauntering past a very long queue of traffic trying to get into the Eastgate Centre, perhaps to stock up on last-minute booze - whereas I was only after soured cream. Detecting feelings of smugness, I prepared to suppress them in my usual authoritarian manner, then made a conscious decision not to, but rather - as an experiment - to view them positively, for all the world as if I were President Trump.

"There's nothing wrong with feeling smug," I told myself. "You deserve it. In fact, I think it's very brave of you to so honest about your feelings. Also, smug is so very in right now."

Didn't I do it well? I don't think anyone in the history of the world has been smug more expertly. But it hasn't changed me.

Today I decided to take a stroll around the zoo, an impulse that seems to afflict me only on New Year's Day, although this time I was in Bristol rather than Borth. I'd not been to Bristol Zoo for several years, and it was a rather nostalgic trip, which gave me a chance to compare meerkats, assess hippos, and so on.



The strangest part was the overhead conversation while watching the otters. A small boy - maybe four years old? - was there with his father. Looking at the pair of otters, he remarked: "I don't like the female otter." (How he could tell the difference is beyond me.) Not getting any reaction, he added after a few seconds: "I don't like girls."

"You do like girls," replied his father. "Because you got a princess dress for Christmas. And" - with a heavy emphasis - "you like wearing it."

It seemed a strange argument: does it really follow that a boy who likes princess dresses will also like their traditional occupants? Then I wondered whether it might have been partly for my benefit. After all, a few minutes earlier, when we'd all been looking at the golden lion tamarins and the boy had said the word "Fart!" very loudly, the father had apologised to me - so he was clearly sensitive to the way he was seen by others. If so, I suppose the first part - "You got a princess dress for Christmas" - was an example of what is fashionably called virtue signalling ("I am not one to force my child to conform to gender stereotypes"). But the second part - "And you like wearing it" - was a pre-emptive clarification, just in case I was a Mail reader ("Nor am I one to force my son to wear dresses").

From the boy's point of view, however, it must have all sounded like non sequitur upon non sequitur, though he was too polite to say so.

I was kind of annoyed by a Film Programme discussion the other week with Stephen Woolley, the producer of The Crying Game. The thing that annoyed me was this discussion of the film's famous twist:

We started the campaign [not to reveal the ‘twist’] in the UK. I wrote a personal note to all the film critics when the film was released, and I think 99.9% of them kept it quiet. … That twist became part of the reason the Americans flocked to see the film. At the height of its popularity in New York I used to slip into the back of cinemas, just for the moment, just for the revealing moment, because the audience would go crazy. … Obviously, it did work as a sort of hook for the film.

Well, of course I've talked about that film here before, since (because I like it in other respects) it got me thinking a bit about twists in general, what they do and when and why they work, or not - and when they're plain objectifying. That discussion is here.

But Woolley said something else that was rather interesting, and tangential to the other discussion. They were talking about the positioning of the twist and its relation to genre. Many twists come at the end of the story - but in The Crying Game it comes somewhere round the halfway point. And the effect is to change the genre of the of film - in this case from a fairly hard-bitten thriller about the IRA into something quite different (what would you say the genre of The Crying Game is by the end?)

Woolley's comparison was with Pyscho - where the midway murder of the apparent main character signals the change from its being a crime thriller to a psycho-drama. Another example that springs to mind is, of course, Madoka Magica...

I feel there must be at least a few others - stories that that reveal that the audience (and possibly the characters) have been wrong-genre-savvy, and make them reevaluate everything that's happened through the prism of a different genre template, but that also give them the time to do so, rather than using the revelation as a final-scene pay-off. A twist in the tail is fine, but a twist in the torso is better. It's a model that appeals to me, anyway - but how common is it?

Examples, please!

The other day I listened to The Film Programme's discussion of Alice Guy's 1906 film, "Les Résultats du féminisme", in which we are shown a world where "feminism" has triumphed and men and women have effectively exchanged roles. You can see it here (it's only 7 minutes):



Apparently Guy (by then Alice Blaché) made another film with a similar theme but a future setting, In the Year 2000 (1912). Alas, that one is now lost.

The studio discussion assumed that Guy was making a feminist point herself, highlighting the treatment that women receive in the real world by showing it happening to men. That may well be right - but more than anything I was reminded of the anti-suffrage postcards produced around the same time, with very similar images of a world in which feminism has triumphed and men are reduced to domestic servitude while their wives carouse and put their feet up. Nothing very feminist about those - nor indeed about the Two Ronnies sketch series The Worm that Turned (1980), which is actually cited as a parallel by one of the studio guests. (This compilation I've linked here is 90 minutes long, but watch the first four minutes and you'll find you've had quite enough. I remember it all too well from 37 years ago.)

It's not that I don't believe Guy's film is feminist: without knowing something of her political opinions, I really couldn't say. But it's a striking instance of how the very same (or very similar) images can have opposite meanings, depending on the assumptions with which one approaches them.