Blanking

On the distortion of feminist histories (and collecting some critiques of “gender critical” feminism in one post)

Over the past few months, I have written a number of critiques of “gender critical” or “sex realist” or “sex uncritical” feminism. I was compelled to write these critiques because of the situation we are in. The fragile hard-fought-for rights of trans people to live their lives safely, with dignity and on their own terms, are being dismantled. That this has come about in the UK in no large part because of the well-funded campaigning of groups that call themselves feminist is for many feminists not just enraging but a source of immense grief.

In this post, I bring these critiques together in one place. Here they are in order of publication: A Noisy Part, Oh Cruel World, Insistence on Relation, Hounded, Unthinking Freedom, Patriarchal Hammers, Meaningless Sex, Words Stripped of Meaning, and Stealing Sex. This one, Blanking, is number ten.

Some of these posts were written in response to developments in policy from Trump’s Executive Orders (A Noisy Part), to the Supreme Court decision and the EHRC’s interim guidance (Patriarchal Hammers, Meaningless Sex, Words Stripped of Meaning). In other posts, I offer a critical analysis of the broader ideological landscape, which is both anti-woke and anti-EDI, exploring how common sense and reality are used by commentators not just as if they are, well, commonsensical terms, but also forms of possession (Oh Cruel World, Unthinking Freedom). I also explore tactics used by “gender critical” feminists to create the impression they are being silenced at the very same time their voices and agendas dominate the media and political landscape (Insistence on Relation, Hounded). The flip-side of the “we are silenced” narrative is how the power of trans people or “trans activists” is inflated as if acquiring rights is policy capture (Stealing Sex).

I know from conversations with feminist academics that it is becoming harder to do feminist work, to organise our events and spaces, because of the hostile environment created by “gender critical” feminism. That they are policing the category of “women” has also meant, in practice, that feminists who are not part of the “gender critical” movement are increasingly being policed. The situation is likely to get worse. I have been told it is also getting harder to fund research on gender and women in part as funders want to avoid controversies, the very controversies “gender critical” feminists have helped to manufacture.

I doubt any of the harm to feminism will be recognised by anyone other than those of us still doing that feminist work of critiquing power, state power, institutional power; the power to decide who belongs and who does not.

I write this post not just to collect these critiques in one place but to represent them as an argument for feminist history. We need to challenge how so much feminist history is being erased by “gender critical” feminists and with it the possibility of a feminist public sphere that is critical, engaged, inclusive and open.

Let me turn to the Black British feminist classic Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, which was published in 1988 by Sheba. Sadly, this book is out of print. What an important archive, a history in a book.

In her contribution, sociologist Avtar Brah shares some feminist memories. Here is just one:

As a research student in Bristol in the 1970s when white women started organizing around women’s gender oppression, I remember going to some consciousness raising sessions. But there was no room in this ‘consciousness’ for dealing with an Asian woman’s experience in Britain. I attended the first national feminist conference organised by the white women’s movement. There were only two other Black women there. In the workshop, we, the Black women, argued that feminist demands must be anti-racist, but the women who reported back on the workshop, a feminist journalist, did not say a word about this at the plenary session. We felt angry but being in such a minority we remained silent. After this experience I drifted away from consciousness raising groups.

Avtar Brah is referring here to the 1973 Women’s Liberation Conference held in Bristol. We become a Black or brown feminist killjoy, making that point, that anti-racism must be a core feminist demand, and are blanked. And so, we had to keep making that same demands.

Blanking is how feminism became “white feminism.” The word blank comes from white. Feminism became white not because Black and brown women were not there, speaking, knowing, creating, as feminists, but because we were blanked, not recorded as being there.

In The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I called this a killjoy equation.

White feminism = Blanking

Contrast Brah’s description of white feminism with a well-known passage by bell hooks.

a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel they are bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of colour enters the room. The white women will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory.

A woman of colour just has to enter the room for the atmosphere to become tense. She comes to be felt as apart from the group, getting in the way of a presumably organic solidarity. There are many ways we can be removed from the conversation. That removal creates a feeling of unity.

That some feminist spaces are experienced as more unified is a measure of how many are missing from them.

I would argue that “gender critical” feminism also operates through blanking. I am not analogising race and sex/gender but suggesting that sex is treated as that organic thing (“bonded on the basis”), as what would or should unite women unless it is taken away by those pesky others who have entered the room later or too late. In “gender critical” feminism, trans people and queer theory are the most commonly referenced sources of anticipated loss. Blanking can be crucial to that achievement. So, it is not that trans and queer folk were not already there in feminist spaces or in women’s spaces, whether in toilets or shelters or bars or festivals; they were. It was that they were not recorded as being there. They were already there in feminist books also, helping to create concepts, filed away in over-full archives, in dusty references to Stoller or Money.

We might have to pull some of our lives out of those bars and books. Dust ourselves off. We have done so.

So much and so many are removed to create an illusion of a unity. Hence the precision of Sarah Franklin’s description of “gender critical” feminists as “feminism’s Brexiteers”. “Gender critical” feminism operates how whiteness operates in fear of a threat that isn’t and in nostalgia for a past that wasn’t.

Yes, I know there are Black feminists and feminists of colour involved in the “gender critical” movement (just as there are Black women and women of colour pushing the project of state racism). But I still think some women are recruited into “gender critical” feminism because of how whiteness operates, as a defence against change, framed as loss and not just of unity. An older Black feminist told me about receiving a communication from a “gender critical” feminist that took the form of an attempt to recruit her into the movement. She told me she replied forcefully that she did not want to be part of a “hate movement.” That some of us know first-hand the history of white feminism might be why we can see more clearly how “gender critical” feminism operates.

Some “gender critical” feminists treat “sex” itself as if it is independent of human action as if saying sex is real is like saying the earth is round. It is an important way they can and do justify having the same arguments about sex as Trump or other fascists and patriarchs (we wouldn’t disagree with him if he said the earth was round!). Conduct a thought experiment: if there were no humans would the earth still be round? Yes. If there were no humans, would there still be sex? No. Of course, sex is not separate from human beings and the worlds we make from materials to hand. Sex is praxis, both activity and attribute. And so, when sex is turned into a sign on a door, it is not only biological but social and architectural; material and made.

That sex is given the status of an independent reality is because of its ideological function within “gender critical” feminism. It is how a bond is externalised. That’s how the sex/gender distinction can be quickly mapped onto other distinctions such as between “out there” and “in here.” I rather suspect that the “gender critical” story of sex as “out there” being threatened by those with an idea of gender as “in here” is one of the most successful recruiting devices, perhaps especially for feminists with materialist commitments. It is a fantasy “out,” but also a fantasy “in.” Emotions and feelings are also materials. Bodies are shaped by norms, which is not to say they might not kick back with impulses of their own. Social worlds are organised around some bodies, which is how they are given room. Categories are also rooms. Those who are not given room tend to know all about materiality, limits and constraints: if you cannot open that door, you feel its weight. A body for some can be like a shut door.

That “gender critical” feminism offers a narrow and distorted view of feminist history is because of what as well as who is blanked. Critique as such can be blanked. When “gender critical” feminists argue that sex is common sense, they push aside the substantive critiques of common sense made within feminism itself. They forget that feminism was often judged as alienation from common sense as well as the common world. When they argue that to claim sex is socially constructed means there is no reality, they push aside how or even that feminists have questioned simplistic ideas of “reality” or the use of “reality” to justify simplistic ideas (I think of Marilyn Frye’s important text, The Politics of Reality).

Though “gender critical” feminists present themselves as recovering a feminist history (for example, by using the language of sex-based rights), that recovery is itself a distortion. So no, the suffragettes did not use the language of sex-based rights: if anything, claiming rights for women, to vote, to have access to education, was about not being barred because of one’s sex. If rights are not to be restricted by sex, they are not based on sex.

I would describe “gender critical” feminists relation to feminist history as instrumental; they sift through all the messy materials created by feminist labour to find the concepts that can best be used to justify the exclusion of trans people, especially trans women, from feminism (sometimes explained as a critique of “gender identity” or “genderism” or just plain old “gender,” all of these terms have become sticky, associated with the group they are seeking to exclude). This instrumental use of feminist concepts explains why some “gender critical” feminists have latched onto the concept of women as a “sex class.” The work of “gender critical” philosopher Jane Clare Jones momentarily comes to mind. The concept of “sex class” is mostly associated with the work of Shulamith Firestone who shows that Marxist concern with production does not account for the politics of reproduction; the body, sexuality, biology, and yes, sex.

Firestone’s task was not to naturalise “sex,” but to politicise it.

Power goes all the way down or gets all the way in.

Firestone’s emphasis was not on biology as a static thing, but on how technology can free us from biological constraints. There is much to disagree with, of course. But her argument was not for the stability of the sex distinction but almost the opposite: that feminism should not just be about the elimination “of male privilege” but “the sex distinction itself."

When the concept of “sex class” is used to imply that “female” and “male” are just natural and biological entities that feminists need to protect or preserve the work of that concept is blanked.

Behind so many concepts so much work.

So many blanks. So much blanked.

In earlier posts, I have shown how feminists from many different intellectual traditions have offered strong critiques of biology (focusing on the work of Ruth Hubbard), as well as of the very idea of two distinct sexes (focusing on the work of Andrea Dworkin). I showed how the work of Simone de Beauvoir helps to push against some of the core claims of “gender critical” feminism because she shows that as soon as sex differences are made meaningful, the biological becomes part of our historical situation. To talk about women’s bodies as weaker, let alone to segregate social spaces or institutions in accordance with that judgement, is to make sex mean something, in other words, to create a sex-gender system.

Feminism has come out of the activism of those who have refused to go along with the sex-gender system. Those who deviate and who rebel, we should know, because feminist history teaches us this, are often made monstrous. Those who say no to becoming who they are told that are (because of nature or law) are often treated as being selfish or as imposing their will or wishes or whims upon others. In every accusation made by “gender critical” feminists that trans people are selfish, and fanciful, fleeing reality, uncivil (as if feminists got rights by asking nicely); that they are even bullies for fighting back rather than just accepting the “clarity” of law, I hear an echo of feminist history.

How we were judged.

Judgments have material consequences.

We had to create our own support systems.

Giving support to those who are not accommodated by the sex-gender system, who will not or cannot comply with the insistence that there are two sexes and that the one you were given at birth is the path you must follow, has been of vital importance to feminist ethics and feminist politics.

Know our history: feminism was a resource not just for knowing otherwise but living otherwise.

For crafting different worlds, together.

Or for sheltering from the violence of this one.

Or feminism should be. That’s the point. Or the hope.

To craft different worlds takes work. I think of Women and Gender Studies: all of that feminist work. I became a lecturer in Women’s Studies in 1994 and learnt a great deal from feminists who were involved in setting up programmes in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of us involved in the development of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies are dismayed and disturbed by the impact of “gender critical” feminists who routinely target our programmes not just with hostile commentary but complaints and FOI requests (see Hounded). Many “gender critical” feminists claim that Gender Studies programmes offer a narrow view because they don’t tend to teach “gender critical” feminism or because they don’t teach it uncritically. They sometimes also assert that Gender Studies courses don’t teach about sex or bodies or biology; but, of course, they do. In fact, we have so much more to say and to think about sex and biology and bodies because or when we de-naturalise them.

Our bodies, ourselves.

Think body, think history.

It is “gender critical” feminists who are producing a very narrow and distorted view of feminism. And it is gender studies students and academics who have the resources to challenge these distortions. Thank Lorde. And so many others.

We need these feminist resources. I have written these posts about “gender critical” feminism because I am fighting for feminism.

For our resources.

Well that’s one reason.

I will be taking a break from writing in the next few weeks. I will be doing the audio recording for No is Not a Lonely Utterance, and then I will have some time away. When I come back, I will be returning to my project on common sense (I have a very rough draft of a book currently titled, Common Sense and its Others). And yes, one of the best ways of learning more about what common sense is doing is by interrogating the claim that biological sex is common sense. Hence so much of this new work is inspired by trans feminists.

Solidarity with all who are living otherwise. Who are surviving, despite the world, or fighting for freedom, so that others can survive.