Friday 17 December 2021

Kathleen Stock on LBC Iain Dale programme - amazing courage and self-control

Listen to the interview and audience Q&A with Kathleen Stock on this programme (17th December 2021).

I can’t image the pressure she must be under. Not only has she to live up to the normal pressure of expectation of women, to be kind and empathic, but she must also maintain self-control and calm and patience in conversation with opponents, conversations which are invariably already up to ‘10’ in emotion, stating again what is obviously true, that sex is real and binary (notwithstanding very few cases of difference of sexual development) and is important to how we socially organise.

Iain Dale and LBC have been brilliant in enabling this discussion to take place in public.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nix3ZB5ZBd8


https://t.co/FMBlg1pl8E

Sunday 24 October 2021

Sex-based protections in UK law - a dialogue with someone who would abolish them (FULL TEXT)

Re-posting blogpost on 24th October 2021

Below, I have reproduced my March 2020 blogpost, now as a continuous piece of text (whereas I previously had screenshots of a transcript of an on-line exchange of messages).


_______________________________________________________________

Between 3rd and 7th March 2020, I was in a long online exchange with someone in response to Suzanne Moore’s Guardian article ‘Women must have the right to organise’ (2nd March 2020)

I was (am) on side of upholding sex-based protections in UK Equality Act 2010.

‘Abi’ (name changed), a self-described ‘intersectional feminist’*, took the view that sex is thoroughly socially constructed, and that the business of classification of individuals by sex is patriarchy** (and patriarchy is misogyny).

Our exchange began when I quoted Suzanne Moore from her article: “The latest silencing of women is a warning. You either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all“, to which ‘Abi’ replied: ““Sex based rights” is silly.”

What developed was as in-depth a conversation I have had with someone of opposing views, extending over 200+ replies.

I am posting because some readers might find interesting.

It’s a 20-minute read.

(Acknowledgement: I quote below from writing by Dr Jane Clare Jones) 

*The link at ‘intersectional’ is to an academic paper by US social theorist Dr Kimberle Crenshaw from 1991. Crenshaw is credited with having introduced ‘intersectionality’ as a tool or technique of social analysis, in which attention is drawn to individuals’ circumstances and the ‘intersections’ of ‘axes’ of their social existence through which the individual can experience discrimination and oppression. The ‘axes’ are sex, race, class.

**For many, ‘Patriarchy’ is synonymous with Misogyny. If ‘Patriarchy’ is regarded as a ‘dominance hierarchy’, then this is already saying the same thing. I don’t see that it must be regarded this way.

Guardian 2nd March 2020 carries an article by Suzanne Moore, ‘Women must have the right to organise.We will not be silenced.’

DIALOGUE:

AverageProtestant: <Thumbs Up> “The latest silencing of women is a warning. You either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all.”

Abi: “Sex based rights” is silly. There are no sex-based rights beyond the right NOT to be limited from full participation in society on the basis of sex. There are no Mullerian Duct based rights. There are no gametic rights. No gene-based rights. You’re talking eugenics.

AP: Protections are already afforded on grounds of a person’s sex, yes. Full participation in society; no discrimination on grounds of a person’s sex. Quite right. Protections won’t survive elimination of ‘sex’ as a political category. Not silly.

Abi: How does this follow? Once you stop centring reproduction as the seat of identity, you stop motivating society to organize itself around reproductive roles. It’s be the single most destabilizing blow against patriarchy we could ever land.

AP: Sex is given and a condition of identity; if that is what you mean by ‘seat’, then I find the proposal that we ‘stop centring’ it (sex) unintelligible.

Abi: That “given” is precisely the bioessentialism that keeps us trapped in a patriarchal framework. We could choose to organize society where reproductive configuration was incidental to personhood, not definitional. Patriarchal society merely *appears* inevitable. It’s not.

AP: I do not reduce identity to biology (if that’s what you mean by ‘bioessentialism’), but I do say that sex is a condition of identity. Another condition is other people, e.g. one’s primary care-givers. Perhaps write a book to help us imagine the society you wish to bring about?

Abi: Or perhaps I can share my ideas here. (1) Yours, and 99.9% of the world’s problem, is the foundational patriarchal belief Sex MUST be a condition of identity. (2) Til you can fathom how this may NOT be so for all ppl, you will only ever perceive sex nonconformity as a threat.

[There followed an exchange with a third person, in which Abi drew a distinction between ‘sex nonconformity’ and ‘gender nonconformity’.]

Abi: Refusing to accept sex as the condition of identity IS sex nonconformity, regardless of masculinity or femininity. Insisting reproductive configuration dictates identity is not just sex conformity, it’s conformity to patriarchy itself.

AP: (Your first sentence) I see the distinction you draw, but again, ‘refusing to accept’ what *conditions* the refusing Agent I find un-intelligible.

AP (continuing): (Your second sentence) As my earlier tweet, I believe sex is a condition of identity but does not ‘dictate’ identity (what I think you mean by ‘bioessentialism’) and is not the only condition of identity (another being other people).

Abi: Do you accept there is a difference between knowing patriarchy centers around our reproductive function and believing that it is objectively correct and natural to do so? If so, there is hope for continued discussion.

AP: I accept there may be such a difference for someone who has this knowledge. However, I dispute any claim to such knowledge, not least because it is such a stupendous claim (it is mythic), but also, as above, I don't believe identity is reducible to sex, but is conditioned by sex.

AP (continuing): Even if someone did have this knowledge, if they then concluded that ‘It is natural and correct’ would be a value judgement, in favour of a certain vision or form of life. What other vision or form of life would show this judgement to be faulty?

Abi: “These body parts exist therefore the people who have them must constitute a specific class of person who is conditioned by having those parts in the universally predictable ways”. That is an extraordinary claim to knowledge.

AP: “These body parts”… group in stable combinations in individuals. That is not an extraordinary claim, but an empirical claim. As individuals how can it fail to affect us (even condition us) if the combination we have means we are capable of gestating young.

Abi: You think it is impossible to know that patriarchy centres our identities around sex?   

AP: I believe sex is a condition of human life, individually and societally, and not a construct of it. As above, I don't believe sex determines identity but is a condition of identity, another being other people. I believe identity is neither fixed no single, but changeable and plural.

Abi: And I believe we have all internalised deeply patriarchal ways of thinking about sex, especially its boundaries, its limits, and its universality and primacy on the formation of identity. That you believe identity is not fixed or singular gives you common cause with trans people. Good.

AP: ‘… ways of thinking’… . If Patriarchy is the Christian cultural inheritance, I agree, categories of thought are shaped by it. I can't dispense with them anymore than I can my culture. I am not atheist, where an atheist might feel themselves to have escaped these categories.

Abi: Nobody escapes learning cultural biases. It is all internalised on some level and must be actively unlearned before anyone can claim to have achieved any distance from it. US atheists may not be religious but will still have acquired a lot of cultural Christianity.  

AP: Indeed, though I would distinguish between ‘cultural bias’ and ‘categories of thought’. ‘… must be actively unlearned …’.  Yes, and to be replaced with what? (Did you mean ‘us’ or ‘US’ (United States)?)

Abi: United States, by way of example, sorry. The replacement is up to us. It behoves us first to look, in our own culture, and across known civilizations. We begin to see a lot of variation in embodied identification when we do.  

AP: ‘The replacement is up to us’. In the UK a concrete proposal to replace what has been ‘unlearned’ is to instantiate ‘gender identity’ in law, e.g. as a ‘protected characteristic’. Proponents of ‘gender self-identification’ pose gender identity as innate, such that it can be possible for this ‘identity’ to be in conflict with the person’s sex, thus ‘trans people’. I don't believe in innate gender identity. As my earlier tweet, I believe identity is changeable and plural.

AP: If you agree with my stance on identity as changeable and plural, then I expect you also agree there is no innate ‘gender identity’?

Abi: I think the innateness of gender identity, whether it exists or not, is irrelevant and I do not believe the laws will constitute that it must be so.

Abi: Do people have the right to claim ownership of their own bodies, lives and identities? Do people have a right to alter, reclaim or outright reject sex-based identities conferred at birth? Is defining other people’s bodies by their most private body parts, and enforcing their public identities accordingly, morally or ethically defensible? These I believe are the relevant areas of the law. Not people’s inner beliefs. Not people’s collective comfort with the idea of trans people. As for my own beliefs about gender identity, I have no strong opinion about its truth or fiction. The self-knowledge of others is not knowable. My ex-husband gave me no reason to believe his identity as a man was a fiction for himself, in spite of his female designation at birth. Neither did the material reality of our life together lead me to believe our life as husband and wife was illegitimate. We lived as man and wife because that's what we were. Your feelings about us claiming that are entirely your own to deal with.  

Abi: I don't think it is necessary to believe in gender identity or disbelieve in it. I define gender identity as basic self-awareness of one’s own body, how it is perceived by others, and how we feel about how it's perceived, tempered by what our bodies would read as if we had a choice. By that standard everybody has some sort of gender identity. And it's a standard that is far more common among transfolx than the ‘gendered soul’ stereotype you hold out as a core belief of trans politics (it’s not).

AP: Stonewall UK, for example, claim ‘gender identity’ to be ‘innate’. Construe that as a gendered soul if you wish. (Screenshot from Stonewall UK website, glossary of terms).



Abi: This is not a universal belief of trans people but Even so, I fail to see why it matters if some people believe in this. It is neither provable nor disprovable. Self-knowledge is only knowable to the South. It's not for you to intervene just because you disagree.

AP: If that is so, then I expect there are ramifications, for example in terms of medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Abi: Yes, there are standards of care and guidelines for treatment, if varying a lot within and across countries. They’ve evolved from a previous era of gatekeeping and enforced stereotypes. Trans people fought like hell for the informed consent model and fight to expand it.

AP: Per my earlier tweets, I don't believe there can be an ‘innate’ ‘gender identity’, but prominent UK advocates, for example Stonewall UK, seek to instantiate it in law as a protected characteristic. I don't understand how ‘identity’ or ‘gender identity’ can be a ‘characteristic’.

(Screenshot, Stonewall UK submission to UK Parliament Women and Equalities Select Commission on Transgender Equality)



AP: In UK law presently, provision is made to exclude transgender persons from single sex spaces in certain circumstances.

Abi: I think that's shitty and dangerous, but it sounds like you have what you already want. How does a law that makes it a little less awful administratively for trans people to get their documents in order affect you in anyway?

AP: I support the campaign to have that legal provision upheld, yes. Here you present this as a matter of administration, a minor change. But earlier you referred to this change as ‘the single most destabilising blow against patriarchy we could ever land’.

Abi: I referred to the abolition of enforcing sex-based identities in the long term, not one particular law that is limited in its scope. It's the enforcement of sex that is the work of patriarchy and the trap for all of us.

AP: Ending this provision, which recognises sex as a political category, in this particular law is entailed by the wider project to end what you call the ‘enforcement of sex’. I opposed the smaller project as I oppose the wider project because sex is given and a condition of human society.

Abi: If sex is a ‘given’, it is private health information at its most relevant and none of anybody's business at its least relevant, like in 99.9% of our daily public interactions.

AP: If ‘gender identity’ is irrelevant then what grounds can there be for framing a law around ‘gender self-identification’ or that names ‘gender identity’ a protected characteristic?

Abi: That people have a right to express, claim and live their beliefs and the non-belief of others is no reason to stop them from doing so?

AP: But the question is what others are to do in respect of a persons declared identity. It may be argued that there is an ethical obligation to recognise a person’s declared identity. I would argue, not if that recognition is coerced.

Abi: Do people have the right to claim ownership of their own bodies, lives and identities? Do people have a right to alter, reclaim and or outright reject sex-based identities as confirmed at birth?

AP: ‘Ownership’ implies something fixed, which is owned. Per my earlier tweets, I believe identity is not fixed but changeable and, in some sense, an ongoing negotiation with other people, i.e., relational.

Abi: So, your body is not your own to claim and inhabit as you see fit if you apply an identity to it? Huh?

AP: The issue is now being forced. If gender identity is written into law as a protected characteristic, as some UK advocacy groups seek, then it will be necessary to believe it or else risk breaking the law. I don't think people have a ‘right’ to ‘live their identities’. Per my earlier tweets, I believe identity is a negotiation between people, as seems to have been so, from your prior tweet, in your relationship with your ex-husband.

Abi: It was not a negotiation. It was a lived reality. He was my husband. Legally. Socially. Factually. In every possible way, well beyond what could ever be anybody else’s business to know about us. But there are people who would love to strike that off the books. They don't get to.

Abi: You don't need to believe in same-sex marriage to accept that gay people can marry and have legal rights as married people. You don't need to believe non-whites are equal to whites to accept that they have the same rights of citizenship.

AP: Okay, I took the term believe from your preceding tweet. I will replace it with the word acccept I don't accept gender identity as a human characteristic as I do acccept sex.

Abi: I don't accept Jesus as my Lord and saviour. And?

AP: I think that’s the correct analogy: gender identity is in my view an object of faith, a matter of belief, and it could be protected as such. It is not, in my view, a characteristic.

Abi: Maybe not, but neither is Sex in society as it functions today. For sex to be as knowable and relevant and readily apparent as you claim it to be, we'd all have to be crowning in labour 24 /7.

AP: ‘Sex in society as it functions in society today’… How is it different to yesterday? (I’m not clear. Are you now referring to ‘sex’ as in the act?)

Abi: Sex as a public legal and social identity functions differently in the modern era relative to history. The entire idea of discrete biological sexes that must be segregated in all possible categorizations is the function of a particular societies, not a universal human condition.

Abi: What about sex is so much more knowable than gender identity in a practical sense? Genitals? That's only one aspect of sex. Who is my vagina any of your business? How do people know to call me a woman without confirming my sex first?

AP: ‘What about sex is so much more knowable than gender identity in a practical sense?’ I find the question unintelligible. I think only a person could pose it, who already regards sex as a kind of ‘writing on the body’, as ‘gender’ is linguistic. That is a disputable ontology.

Abi: Nah. When you see somebody you think to call a woman, it isn't because you saw her vagina or her ovaries or chromosomes. You got the idea from the way she looks and presents herself and when that presentation is ambiguous you aren't conducting medical interventions about it.

AP: ‘You get the idea from the way she looks and presents herself…’ – implies the presentation conforms to a gender norm (‘woman’).

Abi:  Explain how you come to the conclusion the people you meet and interact with are of a particular sex without relying on what they appear to your eye (gender presentation).

AP: I don't. Of course, I rely on appearances to reach such a conclusion.

Abi: That's all any of us ever use. The question is, how much is it our business to go around policing other people who don't match up to what we expect to see? My position is that's none of our business at all.

AP:  Equally, how much is it our business to oblige others to recognise or accept our view of ourselves, however earnestly we hold it? My position is it's not a right.

Abi: There are practical, legal and ethical limits to how much your personal opinion on somebody else’s anatomy can weigh on that person. And those limits are nowhere near “I should decide on what you call yourself, how you live, where you pee”. Bodily autonomy means just that. Sorry.

Abi: What your movement, however, is working towards, is a world where people whose sex is perceived by others as unambiguous or incongruent, can be compelled to disclose or outright reveal intimate details about their own bodies for the sake of the perceiver’s comfort. This would be a world that perforce constructs strict parameters for what is and is not acceptable for how women are allowed to look. A world where the perceivers of women's bodies hold all the leverage in respect to the access rights people classifiable to people are allowed [sic]. And that is just plain old patriarchy.

AP: ‘Perceived by others as ambiguous or incongruent…’ - Like your earlier tweet, implies a gender norm, in this case not-conformed-to. So taking you're two preceding tweets together, I find your approach wants both presentational norms for classification 'woman' and 'man' and that classification 'woman'/'man' is independent of presentation, namely according only to gender self-declaration. Which is it to be? If the latter, then woman or man is meaningless; if the former then there is policing of gender presentation.

Abi: I'm not convinced the categories are terribly meaningful, but as long as we, as a society, are forcing people to live in public and legal identities as either men or women, we ought to trust them to know which side they wish to do it on and what they need to do with themselves to get there.

AP: Evidently, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ have had meaning for you. But how can these terms retain meaning if ‘man’ and ‘woman’ don't have meaning? I find no consistency in valuing such culturally-inscribed categories (identities, even) as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, while seeking to abolish the concepts that comprise their meaning.

[At this point, and at others, I am aware of some criticisms of Judith Butler, along lines that JB theory - crudely, 'gender is product of power/discourse' - (a) gives no place for an Agent to intentionally disrupt gender norm and (b) provides no basis, once indeterminacy is established, for differentiating between what is subversion and what is conformity - every repetition is equally strange (or normal). Screenshot is extract from Wenjuan XIE (2014) Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing] Subversions: A Critique of Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity, Comparative Literature: East & West, 20:1, 18-39, DOI: 10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486 ]



Abi: They meant plenty to us. Doesn't mean they had to mean the exact same thing you mean when you use them. Why do you require lockstep consensus on the definitions for socially constructed terminologies?

AP: Even conventionally, there is no ‘exact same thing’, in terms of what we mean when we use these or any terms, and I don't require it. But you seem confident to allow that ‘man’ is not meaningful, yet ‘husband’ is (or will remain so even if ‘man’ does not).

Abi: I didn't say it wasn't meaningful to individuals. I don't think man woman or sex is all that usable as an organised in classes but since we have them, we may as well let people inhabit them in the ways they need rather than enforcing arbitrary, highly invasive parameters of biology.

AP: But how can anything have meaning, or lack of it, that is not meaningful to individuals? Individuals is what there are!

Abi: I said it was meaningful to individuals. I'm saying it's not terribly meaningful as a discrete principle for organising society by biology, At least not positively meaningful when enforced in that manner. In other words, it's great that there are men and women and it's great that people are able to live as such if they feel that's where they belong. It is not so great when you are forcing people to identify as such or are actively preventing them from doing so based on shit that's none of your business.

AP: ‘A discrete principle for organising society’ can have meaning only for an individual, or else it has no meaning.

Abi: *sigh* - This is reaching Stock levels of circular nonsense. Unenforceable criteria based on biology we will never normally access from each other cannot be a fair standard for organising society. This is too complicated, and need be belaboured. “Men and women exist”: that's reasonable and fair.

“I am the arbiter of who gets to be a man and who gets to be a woman”, not so much.

“I demand you prove you've met my criteria for womanhood, private citizen!”, even less so.

AP: I think you ran into a self-. contradiction that has made things complicated for you.

Abi: I'm just not articulating myself well at the moment. This isn't the best forum for discussion this complex. Are you ready to move on yet because life is waiting and I can either go live it or I can have this endless yet in direct conversation about other people’s biology.

AP: It is a very difficult topic to discuss. I think we can agree how central is the need of meaning.

Abi: Beliefs are not legislatable. Conduct is. You can believe all you like that non-Christians are going to Hell, but that doesn't give you the right to put to shout “terrorist” at Muslims. Nor address your  Wiccan co-worker as heathen in the office. Be civil to trans people and you'll be fine.

AP: Agreed. And I am. I am comfortable with gender identity as a belief. Beliefs are already a protected characteristic in the UK quality act trouble is, as per earlier tweets, GI advocates say it is innate and explicitly not a belief.

Abi: 1. how does this affect your life in any meaningful way? 2. What makes your situation so much more dire than everywhere else that has seen self ID already, for years? 3. if gender identity now exists as a political category, so what? If you didn't believe in homosexuality and think gays are merely confused, you could still do so. You just can't fire them or discriminate on that basis. How is this different with trans people and gender identity?

AP: For ‘How does this affect you’, I link you to the Womans Place UK wesbsite, which explains the potential consequences of GRA 2004 reform for women and women-only spaces, and other potential impacts. TLDR Because it impacts on ‘sex’ as a protected characteristic.   

Abi: Please provide a source that is not blatantly involved in distorting basic facts about trans people’s lives, bodies and challenges to render anti-trans sentiment more sympathetic.

AP: You ask, ‘If gender identity now exists as a political category, so what?’ I hope this answers your question. (Equality Act 2010, Protected characteristics, Sex)

Equ. Act 2010, PT. 16: INTERPRETATION, Section 212: General Interpretation.

(1)    In this Act

(2)    “man” means a male of any age

(3)    “woman” means a female of any age

(AP continuing): To change the definition of ‘man’ from ‘male of any age’ to ‘person who identifies as a man’ (or equivalent for the definition of woman) would impact on this legislation. It would detach the term ‘woman’ from ‘female’ and therefore also from ‘sex’; ‘sex’ would no longer refer to anything

Abi: Sounds good to me, though I don't see how this enables employers and what not to discriminate based on their perception of a subordinate’s sex. Can you explain the logistic changes to your own life?

AP: What sounds good you seem to be asking, ‘How does anyone an employer say know what another person’s sex is?’ Is that what you are asking?

AP: And yet we began with recognising that sex is a target for discrimination, which justifies a law to protect against such discrimination. Sex matters.

Abi: But it's the perception of sex that drives the discriminatory behaviour and what people are protected against. If sex became mere incidental history, like race, rather than a legally enforced caste, this would make it harder to justify sex-based discrimination.

AP: It would, I agree. If ‘sex’ is *not*, I can be neither discriminated against or selected on grounds of my sex. I don't believe ‘sex’ is ‘mere incidental history’. I can't conceive of human relations, which comprise history, that do not contend with sex- a condition of human life.

Abi: It doesn't really though, because sex-based discrimination is driven by perception of sex as much as, if not even more than, the “fact” of it.

AP: How can there be perception of sex without some background notion of sex so that we can say it is what we perceive? Why use quote marks around ‘fact’? Does not have to be either/or, as Jane Clare Jones points out in discussion of Judith Butler's account of sex as constructed.

(Screenshot from Jane Clare Jones online essay, ‘Judith Butler: How to disappear Patriarchy in Three Easy Steps’)

  

"As she [Judith Butler] argues in Bodies That Matter, the “moderate critic might concede that some part of ‘sex’ is constructed, but some other is certainly not, and then, of course, find… herself…under some obligation to draw the line between what is and is not constructed.” (11) This is the bit I dispute. There is no obligation to draw a line, either precisely around ‘sex’ or precisely around ‘woman,’ in order for these to be meaningful terms that do work in the world. Thinking that we have to draw lines around concepts for them to be meaningful is exactly the same old essentialist, spatializing, phallic rubbish that we should be critiquing. As Wittgenstein once usefully noted, we do not have to be able to point at the line on the floor where ‘here’ becomes ‘there’ in order to use these words with sense. Because essences and clear delineations and phallic oppositions are not the only – or most important – way that concepts work (if they are actually how they work at all)." (Jane Clare Jones, blog-post ‘Judith Butler: How to disappear Patriarchy in Three Easy Steps’)


Abi: How can there be perception of Race without some background notion of what Race is? And yet Race is a biological fiction imposed upon bodies with perceivable traits. Ending enforced race class is a step forward in anti-racism, not a step back. The same will be true for sex.

(And to get it out of the way before you even ask, Rachel Dolezal fails as a comparison to trans because race “transition” only works in one direction: white to non-white. Whereas half of all trans people are assigned female at birth so those gender transitions are also suppressed and surveilled.)

AP: Perhaps too, it is not necessary to be either/or about race?

Abi: Who is either-or-ing? I'm not the one suggesting we can only have sex or gender identity but not both.

AP: You are. You are saying ‘sex’ or ‘race’ is either fact or ‘biological fiction’/’mere incidental history’, and you come down on the latter. Why not ‘both/and’ (the point I think which is made by JC Jones)?

Abi: It really isn't that difficult a concept. Yes, biological differences exist. Yes, those differences often require different medical and practical accommodations. No, they should not be held against anybody. No way, should we enforce bio differences as mandated legal identities. In fact, I believe that very enforcement is what enshrines essential stereotypes against subordinated groups into law, the culture and all our institutions. Race, Sex, Dis/Ability have all been legislated and enforced in ways that reify those oppressions.

Abi: As for the quote, it's been a long time since I read Butler, so I have no way of knowing the context of the original quote being picked apart. So, pause. The biological fiction, to clarify, is the way we insist in Culture and in Law that because bio differences exist, we can infer a different class of person who is similar in character to others with the same bio traits, and fundamentally dissimilar to anyone else without them.   END


Wednesday 13 October 2021

“You’re erasing me” - hyperbole of gender ideologues

Opposition to introducing 'gender identity' in UK law is being mounted, which also challenges the philosophy supporting it, philosophical ‘deconstruction’.

Deconstruction, as it has manifested in gender ideology, not just poor philosophy but nihilism; the same kind of maligning of human life which led intelligent people to hold, a number of years ago (and which many people still hold), that consciousness is ‘in fact’ the brain operating which gives only an illusion of agency, so that 'I', 'my self', am an illusion

In academia, in ‘gender studies’, there is only language, and the subject (the self) is constituted by language. But in gender ideology, the ideas pushed by activists, ‘gender’ is also an innate quality (an essence) which is located in the body/brain, which can be mis-aligned with the sexed body. According to this ideology, a person can be ‘born in the wrong body’ and undergo ‘the wrong puberty’, which will bring about that person’s deep misery and risk of suicide. Everyone is pressurised to accept this story by that threat of suicide.

It’s important to not be intimidated by that threat, to accept this false and damaging ideology. Don’t allow the trans-perbole of ‘you’re killing trans people’ to intimidate you into accepting the ideology.

In the last two days a website has been online presenting an Open Letter in support of Sussex University’s stand for academic freedom.

https://openlettertosussexfromukphilosophers.wordpress.com/

The letter has signatories from many academics across the UK, many from senior positions in established and well-regarded universities.


I have seen Twitter reactions from people supporting and people against what is contained in the letter. Many statements I have seen in Twitter are of the kind: “This letter supports a university defending a person [Kathleen Stock] who is campaigning to erase trans women / is a fascist and therefore the signatories are also fascist”.

Here is a screenshot of an example of an exchange in one Twitter thread, responding to the open letter and signatories. The first tweet / reply is from someone who apparently fears that trans people are threatened with being ‘erased’.

(Another reaction, to the Sussex University / Kathleen Stock situation, considers the question of whether a document which Kathleen Stock has endorsed, the ‘Declaration of Women’s Sex-Based Rights’

[see https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/ ]

is - in respect of ‘transgender’ - “eliminationist” and “genocidal”. I refer to British-US academic Grace Lavery’s blog-post, https://grace.substack.com/p/the-uk-media-has-seriously-bungled?fbclid=IwAR2kYnVhneR2qjYUjadKZGW3gprtD0Dh_EjH-kPaBB6NcpqKIhwSM82SXsA)

(A BBC statement was given on Politics Live after a student claimed the DWSR “wants to eliminate trans people in law”. The BBC statement, read out on Politics Live, stated that it was Kathleen Stock’s view that the “declaration does not amount to the claim that trans people should be eliminated in law” - quotation from the BBC statement. The Grace Lavery article considers whether or not this “elimination” is implied. I want to discuss subjective erasure, or subjective ‘elimination’, - that’s why I am referring to this here).


It’s been remarked that many of the signatories to the letter above represent British “analytic philosophy”, and I understand that Professor Stock is someone who works in that tradition, that she is an 'analytic philosopher'.

In her paper presented to the UK Aristotelian Society in 2020, “What is Sexual Orientation?”, Professor Stock makes reference to the so-called ‘divide’ in modern western philosophy between so-called  ‘Analytical’ and so-called ‘Continental’ philosophy.


As highlighted in the screenshot from that paper, above, Stock makes clear that she cannot address, within the confines of that paper, the fundaments of that divide between philosophy traditions. The ‘divide’ is old (200+ years) and deep, although some philosophers see grounds for there to be a re-joining (Hans Johann Glock for example). (The topic has been discussed on BBC Radio 4 'In our time', which I recommend).

Anyway, the 'divide' in philosophy is, I think, a real divide and which is on display in this confrontation over claims for 'rights' of  people who identify as 'transgender' (and how they conflict with other rights and protections such as 'sex-based protections' already established in law) and the freedom to question the basis for these claims. It seems to me that the existential attitude of ‘Continental’ philosophy collides fully in this issue. Language as thought of in Continental philosophy, that is, as ‘constitutive’ of ‘self’, is running up against language as thought of in Analytic philosophy, that is, as a kind of ‘tool’, made up of ‘concepts’. 

The difference between these attitudes is profound, and to adopt one attitude and or the other can, I think, be experienced as a kind of nullification of self. (I have experienced that myself, more of which below). Maybe temperament decides for a person if they like the ‘Analytic’ approach or the ‘Continental’ approach.

Mary Midgley was a philosopher trained in the Analytic mode at Oxford University in the 1940s. I think her writing is a great resource for addressing this present issue. Her last book (2017) is called “Are you an illusion?”, which explores the massive sense of subjective erasure which arises when it is claimed - by people in academia, who command popular respect and exert powerful influence - that our very consciousness is reducible to the activity of 'matter'/brains, so that what we think of as our Agency, and our free will, is illusory. This was a line being persistently and loudly proclaimed - mostly in the US - by philosophers such as Patricia Churchland, whose school of thought even earned a name: ‘eliminative materialism’. (The ‘eliminative’ is instructive here, I think!) Indeed it is a doctrine which ‘eliminates’ something (i.e. Agency) which people hold very dear to themselves as who they are in this world. The parallel is clear, I hope, with the sense that people speak of, when they say that ‘Trans people are threatened with being erased’. The feeling of erasure is because (is it not?) the concept of ‘gender identity’ is being questioned, is being criticised.

Stemming from a tradition in philosophy (the ‘Continental’ tradition) in which the idea of ‘essences’ is challenged, such that all we take to be 'essential' is in fact ‘linguistic’, ‘gender’ is - on one hand - regarded as a matter of ‘performed’ ‘citations’ of previous ‘gender’ ‘presentations’, all understood, more or less, as kinds of language; and language is 'constitutive' of 'self' (or, of 'identity', possibly). There is no ‘essence’ of ‘gender’ in this approach. But this appears to be at complete loggerheads with, on the other hand, the notion of an innate  ‘gender identity’, free-floating from language. The ‘self’ is either ‘constituted’ by language or it is prior to, and grounded somewhere outside of, language: ‘extra-‘ or ‘pre-‘ ‘discursive’. It can’t be both. The ideas are incompatible and mutually exclusive.

But (bizarrely in contradiction to any post-structuralist writing I am aware of, where ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are discussed, and which theories are the origins of this rigid dogma) innate ‘gender identity’ is posited as the neurological condition for ‘gender dysphoria’ to occur, such that medical intervention is required - as a matter of expert medical opinion, repeated in many activist presentations - to ‘adjust’ the body to conform to the ‘identity’. (See, for example, YouTube conversation between Meghan Murphy and Julie Rei Goldstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yawM1CRWxE). If the concept of ‘innate’ ‘gender identity’ is questioned, so is the basis for Medicine to retain its claims to expert status and privileged position from which to pronounce on ‘gender-affirmative care’, such as is on display in WPATH’s statement in response to Abigail Shrier’s recent interview with WPATH member Marci Bowers MD.

https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/Public%20Policies/2021/Joint%20WPATH%20USPATH%20Letter%20Dated%20Oct%2012%202021.pdf

A very popular Marxist (‘Continental’) philosopher Slavoj Zizek has spoken about this 'gender essentialism'.

_________

It does not perturb the post-structuralist-inspired political disrupters of norms (‘enforced heterosexuality’ or whatever) that essentialisms like ‘neurologically-based’ or ‘biologically-based’ ‘gender’ are given, because they know these arguments are diverted down cul-de-sacs of ‘what the science says’, ‘what is objectively true’, ‘what science shows to be true’. The reason is that these political disrupters of norms can point to ‘intersectional’ feminism, and feminist theories such as Standpoint Epistemology, which regards itself as having rendered science an arbitrary framework, which is justifiably set aside or un-learned on grounds that it is Patriarchal, hetero-sexist, or whatever. (The self-described ‘recovering Logical Positivist’ Prof. Sandra Harding is one of the US academics behind Standpoint Theory. So far as I can tell, this theory - like so many others influencing institutions today- has emerged from a distinctly American-empiricist and instrumentalisibg uptake of French post-structuralism.

This instrumentalising attitude within US academia, seems to have been noticed and commented on by Jacques Derrida, a French post-structuralist philosopher, who taught in the US. In this YouTube clip he is questioned by an American journalist on comments he had made about this, and he is presented, in the very stance of the journalist, with an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j578jTBCY

What a pity Harding could not have opted - in her critique of Positivism - for the non-foundationalism of Karl Popper, as celebrated by Malachi Hacohen, instead of the radical subjectivism and idealism to which she seems to have turned). 

With a few exceptions, you will not hear a post-structuralist philosopher decry philosophical essentialism deployed in these political arguments, I suspect because they know on which side their bread is buttered. Philosophical Idealism suits them very much, because it serves tbe creation of an enclosed system within academia, where abstruse questions are turned over by cognoscenti who only have ears and eyes for each other, and while the population at large is subject to all manner of tyranny of their ideas, passed down by an indoctrinated bureaucracy, installed for the benefit of its own existence.

______________

One of Mary Midgley’s ideas - I recall it from one of the last interviews she gave before she died - is that our emotions can and should be controlled by our intellect. In the face of feeling ‘erased’ by an idea, what else is there to do except try to come to terms with the fact that it is an idea which is causing this pain? Letting go of an idea that has gripped us is painful, and we might prefer to continue to act in the world so the idea is upheld, is realised! Is it a good idea? 

I am reminded of a film: “Come and see!”, set in Poland (I think) during WW2. A young Polish man witnesses the worst atrocities of Fascism and Nazism in his country, and at the last moment - as he is about to kill and become a killer - he recognises the human being that is, and has been, in the grip of a pernicious and evil idea, and decides to (metaphorically) “Kill the Hitler” in himself. The idea dies. He succeeds to 'Kill the Hitler' in himself and spares himself and the world (the other person). 

If people reading don’t know about the ‘divide’ and what it entails in history, I recommend anything by UK philosopher Andrew Bowie; a short book ‘Continental Philosophy’ by UK philosopher Simon Critchley, and the (still, to my mind) amazing pair of essays by John Stuart Mill exploring the limits of Utilitarianism: ‘Bentham’ (1836) and ‘Coleridge’ (around the same date).

Criticisms of 'gender identity' are expressed from within academic discourse, which question an idea implied in a doctrine also generated within academia. 

Saturday 2 October 2021

Men talking abt women’s demand for end to VAWG

 I was listening just now to @Mara_Yamauchi ‘s contribution to BBC Radio 5 Live ‘Breakfast Show’ (1st October 2021, starting at 1hr 08mins), discussing what men can do to bring about a world in which women are, and women feel, more safe from male violence.


https://t.co/30V5Gc4WbS?amp=1


Nicky Campbell (Radio 5 host) asked of Mara: what can men do?, and he picked up on Mara’s comment, that she had chosen to drive rather than take the train and walk home at night, after going out, because that felt safer.

Nicky Campbell asked ‘So, for example, if I see you running [Mara is an athlete] towards me, do I cross the road?’

To which Mara replied (I am paraphrasing), ‘Yes, you could make space by stepping into the road’. 


Mara went on to make some reasonable connections with the impact of certain so-called ‘inclusive’ (i.e. ‘trans-inclusive’) language which means that the word ‘woman’ is being dropped out of discourse in favour of terms like ‘body with a vagina’. I think the point was that such language is de-humanising, it invites thinking of persons as somehow independent of their bodies, and that very deliberate divorcing of mind / person and body, so to speak, is relevant to this conversation about women’s experiences and male VAWG. I think this is a very reasonable point.


But what I am writing about here, is what the Radio 5 exchange reminded me of, as I listened.


After Sarah Everard was (as we now know fully, and to our horror) abducted and murdered, there was a vigil held on Clapham Common to memorialise Sarah.


I was living quite near Clapham at the time, tho I didn’t attend the vigil.


One evening quite soon after the vigil, I engaged in a conversation with a co-occupant of mine in the multi-occupancy house where I lived. We are both male, in later middle age - our childhoods were the 1970s and 1980s.


The conversation was about the reactions to Sarah Everard’s killing, and the vigil, on social media, which was, understandably, a huge protest against violence against women, and appeals (as there are now again, after Sarah’s killer’s sentencing) for men to participate, adjust, challenge behaviours which objectify women, to think and act differently.


This conversation followed many others we had had on socio-political issues driving the pandemic year 2020, with all the massive upheaval and reaction not only to the virus but also to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, and other events.


Well, my neighbour was unhappy about the social media reaction, which he regarded as having crossed over into being anti-men. There was apparently a grievance about the tone it had taken, which I understood (and put back to him, by way of a question, to check is this was right).


I sensed something like a #NAMALT reaction, which is a common reaction from a man, when he becomes defensive in the face of a *general charge being made towards or about men*, in general. 


“It is difficult”, I said - or tried to say, “to listen to statements of that sort” (meaning the general charges made about men, and demands for men to change) “and to not take them too personally, but to recognise the position of the women making them”.


It is a sensitive and difficult subject to talk about, but I tried to understand more of what he was getting at, by asking him what he thought had made the social media conversation go too far. 


We then began to consider hypothetical situations, like walking along a street, and being conscious of a lone woman approaching. What do we do?


As we talked, I became aware of what seemed to be his feeling of affront with the suggestion that he make space for a women on the pavement by stepping into the road (‘into the gutter’).


(This is what had been mentioned in the exchange I have just listened to, between Mara Yamauchi and Nicky Campbell, on Radio 5).


It was a consequence of my quite gentle (I thought) challenge, that the conversation then turned into something that was more about what was going on *between us two men*.


Because his opening to the conversation was something like, that a general charge was being made of men - unfairly, going too far, and he felt - so I understood - something like #NAMALT.


I think, looking back, that he had an expectation that I would agree with him, but I did not immediately agree. Knowing what I know of myself, and something of this person’s style of engagement and presentation, which was frequently with a sort of ‘typical’ male aggressiveness - e.g., things said with an expectation of the listener’s assent, speaking loudly, standing rather than sitting, etc. 


So in my challenging - which was really only a questioning, and a desire to *not simply give assent* - to look at and consider examples of what we do, how we do, in fact, react to encountering a lone woman - the conversation became about the relation *between us two men*, and something emerged about what he felt was proper, or appropriate, in principle, for us two men - and ‘therefore ALL men’ - in relating to women. 


The matter of ‘stepping into the gutter’ now took on a different meaning. It was not a simple, practical thing that could help to make a woman feel safer, as it perhaps was thought of in Nicky Campbell’s question to Mara.

Now the conversation between us two men had slipped into being *about* us two men, and how we behave, which might make us the same, or different. Now ‘stepping into the road’/‘stepping into the gutter’ was presented by my neighbour as a demeaning thing, and an injury to a his (therefore ‘all men’s’)  pride.


This is how the conversation went.


It became a matter of pride, and being proud as a ‘manly attribute’ and therefore a desirable attribute to have *as a man*.


In the conversation, as he became closer to his real feelings of manliness (sort of rising to his own emotion) my neighbour, a man in late middle age, was communicating that he liked to have *the capacity to be intimidating* (to signal a potential for being violent) to men and women. It was a source of good feeling in himself, that he he can present himself like that. In our conversation, as I asked him, if he took umbrage at the suggestion that he might step into the road, he switched from thinking about the woman’s safety (the hypothetical encounter) to how he wanted things to be between us, and how he wanted me to think about him, and he communicated, quite clearly, how being able to show this intimidating aspect was part of who he was, and this was intended to be intimidating *to me*.


I could see that talking things out further was not in my interests and would probably only serve to make his tone more defensive in relation to me, and to go nowhere with respect to thinking about the social media reaction, or to thinking about women and safety.


He was, in fact, intimidating to me. And that was the point.

And that was the point when I decided to break off the conversation. 


This is what it can be like between men, when seeking to challenge something in another man’s behaviour or speech that sounds ‘everyday’ sexist or #NAMALT.

Thursday 1 July 2021

Gender-identity ideology is trans-humanism is anti-humanism

Self-congratulatory theoretical constructions, inimical to human flourishing.

I find no positive vision of human life, in the doctrine of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender self-identification’. It takes for granted that things that lend meaning to our names ‘man’ ‘woman’, ‘boy’ ‘girl’, ‘mother’ ‘father’, will persist, even while it detached itself from what, I believe, are the material conditions of human life, which are the sources of that meaning: infancy; absolute need of infants for love and dependence on care-givers (parents) for it; sex; parenthood; death.

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool/

Meanwhile, here is a recent example of legal commentary inflected by this nihilistic anti-human intellectualism.

Alex Sharpe, a professor and legal scholar in UK, has posted an article entitled ‘“Not a Nazi...But”: Forstater vs. CGD’,  on the website ‘critical legal thinking.com’ (CLT).

https://criticallegalthinking.com/

The article considers an example of a philosophical belief offered by the judge in the appeal tribunal case above, which would *fail* ‘Grainger 5’ (one of the five tests for whether a belief qualifies as a ‘philosophical belief’ which would be protected under the Equality Act 2010). The example the judge gave, was (as quoted in Prof Sharpe’s article): 

‘“a belief that all non-white people should be forcibly deported for the good of the nation”, any manifestation of which would be “highly likely to espouse hatred and incitement to violence.”’


This belief would, says Judge Choudhury - the judge at the employment appeal tribunal (in Forstater’s appeal case), fail Grainger 5 and thereby be counted as *not* worthy of respect in a democratic society.


To Prof Sharpe, this example of a belief that would *not* attain the status of protected philosophical belief, “does not seem fundamentally different to the claimant’s [Forstater’s] belief ‘trans women are male’”.


That’s where Prof Sharpe feels justified in using the title “Not a Nazi ... But”.


Prof Sharpe presupposes, takes it as a basic premise, that the class of ‘women‘ comprises two groups: “cis” women and “trans” women, whose membership of this class, and of these groups, is according to the individual’s innate, psychological state called ‘gender identity’. In this theoretical view, ‘sex’, as a basis for membership of the class ‘women’ and ‘men’, whereby ‘men’ are adult human males and ‘women’ are adult human females, is *disappeared*. This account of the classes of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is simply assumed by Professor Sharpe, and not stated openly (at least in this article it is not) and not argued for. It is taken as given that ‘sex’, and ‘male’ and ‘female’, no longer have the meanings that they have had, if they have any meaning at all.


After which, Prof Sharpe wants us to believe that when ‘gender’ is recognised to be part of language and culture, and ‘sex’ (and the male/female sex difference) is recognised to be a fundamental condition of life, this threatens the “existence” of “trans people”.

Thus Prof Sharpe likens this belief to Nazism.


This is idea-ism quite out of touch with human reality. 


To recognise ‘sex’, and sex-difference, as a condition of life, and as the basis for membership of the classes ‘men’ and ‘women’, excludes the abstract-theoretical, imposed division of ‘cis’/‘trans’, and excludes membership of the class according to self-declared ‘gender identity’.

It excludes, i.e. it is fundamentally incompatible with, the ideological premises adopted by Prof Sharpe. But where, in this, does Prof Sharpe’s “existence” (as a trans person) occur, or become threatened?

It is the *ideas* and the *language* which are opposed and denied.


Freud and Marx (taken as representing bodies of thought) are fundamentally incompatible.

We don’t say that Psychoanalysis threatens the existence of socialists, because we are not ideologically hidebound. We are not committed to one, and only one, universal account of the world.


But in the past, ideologically hidebound people, who were Marxists, did kill (and died) for their beliefs. 


I would say, Prof Sharpe is bound to one view, a highly theoretical view, of the world, or at least the (very important) part that deals with the human body, and apparently tolerates no other, except in so far as social life demands. I suppose it has been integral to their personal journey, as someone who transitioned to live as a woman, to hold that view of the world - the ‘self’ as constituted by language - so that to relinquish it feels like the end of that self. But it is an idea continuing to be believed in, it is the existence of the idea, which is threatened. That is what is at stake. Incompatible world views occur in philosophy, and in life. But theory (philosophy) is not life.


We avert actual Nazism by recognising theory to be - always - potentially wrong. 


Prof Sharpe’s article goes on to refer to the (as Judge Choudhury ruled) protected belief “trans women are male” as “de-humanising” and serves to “undermine human rights”.


As far as I can tell, the de-humanising tendency is all on the side of the philosophy which supports ‘cis’/‘trans’ and which denies ‘sex’ as a condition of life. 


It seems to me that this philosophy supposes persons to be independent of their bodies, so that their bodies are mere adjuncts to life and experience, which can be set aside in consideration of persons and the law. That seems to me to be a philosophy much more readily turned to actual Nazism, actual obliteration of bodies.


The problem with this philosophy is precisely its trans-humanism, which is its anti-humanism. It purports to be for human rights, even while it is clearly of a piece with trans-humanism: the desire of some humans to dispense altogether with corporeality, and in that sense, escape being human altogether.


Consider this passage from a 2015 lecture given at Durham University by Dr Rowan Williams, a veteran of the ten-year-long (2006-16) rumpus over the so-called ‘New Atheism’ (of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris et al):


“[RW refers to ‘The History Manifesto’, 2014, by Cambridge university historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage, which posits that] the thinning-out of historical knowledge in general ... [means] that we now have an impatience of understanding of how we got here.

If we don’t know how we got here, we will tend to assume that where we are is obvious; if we assume that where we are is obvious, we are less likely to ask critical questions about it; the less likely we are to ask critical questions about it, the more resistant we will be to others challenges to it. In other words, not understanding how we learned to be the people we now are, has an immediate and highly dangerous effect on the kind of society we are and might seek to be, just as it would have a dangerous effect on any one of us, who wished to block out the memory of the experiences that, as a matter of fact, have made us the people we are.


That learning, Dr Williams goes on to remind us, inevitably and deeply involves the body. It is what enables empathic connection, and thereby compassion, into our relating, to ourselves and to others.


A mental willing is manifested in the theoretical notions of ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender self-declaration’, which separates mind and body. It enacts the kind of historical forgetting which Dr Williams talks about here, and which is, I think, active in the philosophy behind Professor Sharpe’s words.


Compare Dr Williams lecture to this, from Sarah Ditum in 2018. (I’m mindful that anything emanating from the Church, from Christianity or anyone associated with it is immediately cast as being, not only conservative, but ‘alt-right’ or ‘far-right’ and anathema, and feminism - whether it is liberal-‘intersectional’ or ‘radical’-materialist, is keen to distance itself from religion. But I see distinct sympathies of thinking between what some feminist critics of ‘gender identity’ ideology have to say, and what was frequently said, including by people of religion, including Dr Williams, in challenging the ‘New Atheism’ of 2006-16).


We are our bodies, our intelligence exists in every nerve, and the idea that a feeling of “being female” would mean anything in the absence of a female body was, I knew, intrinsically absurd.


Learning, and knowledge, is situated not in isolated brains, self-identifying, but in bodies. Persons and their bodies.

Any engaged reading of serious accounts of ‘gender identity’ will reveal the irreconcilable  contradictions: ‘it’s in the neutrons’; ‘it’s historical-linguistic, as are all human categories’. These both can’t be true.



References:

‘Being human’: lectures by Dr Rowan Williams, former arch-bishop of Canterbury, includes

‘Tree of knowledge: Bodies, Minds, Thoughts’

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/videos/dr-rowan-williams-tree-knowledge-bodies-minds-and-thoughts


‘6 years in the gender wars’, Sarah Ditum

https://sarahditum.com/2018/09/10/six-years-in-the-gender-wars/


‘The divorce between the sciences and the humanities’, Isaiah Berlin.

Anything by Stefan Collini.

Introductory lectures on the theory of literature, Paul Fry (Yale University).

‘Popper: the early years’, Malachi Hacohen.

‘Fairy Tales’, the Grimm brothers.

‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ Melanie Klein.













Tuesday 22 December 2020

Transcript: ‘Savage Minds’ interview with Heather Brunskell-Evans

 

Transcript: ‘Gender identity’ ideology and transgenderism discussed by critics Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans.

Liberal democracy and Foucault-inspired Identity Politics: Two Foucauldian Radical Feminist scholars discuss the mis-readings of Michel Foucault by contemporary Intersectional Feminism and some of its critics, and find Foucault to be a resource for the defence of liberal democratic values.

The following is a transcript of podcast conversation between Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans, from the blog Savage Minds, originally posted October 24th 2020.

French theorist Michel Foucault’s writing seems to have been taken up in a very one-dimensional way by, especially, the US academy, from where 'gender identity' ideology emerged, and by so-called ‘intersectional feminism’. (In Q&A following one of her great Yale 'Terry Lectures' from 2010, Marilynne Robinson called it 'cookie-cutter Foucault-ianism'. This was in the context of Dr Robinson's lectures on the philosophical over-reach of science - esp in its criticism of religion - which is relevant, because the use that is made of Foucault by contemporary identitarians smacks of extreme empiricism, in the form of mind-body splitting). This has been met with criticism, equally as one-dimensional, from people such as self-styled secular-liberal-humanist (most definitely of the Richard Dawkins stripe) Helen Pluckrose, who herself comes in for some criticism in this discussion for her misreading of Foucault.

There are a few omissions, and one or two parts of the conversation I have attempted to paraphrase, which are marked with square brackets. I have added some italics to show where speakers placed emphasis. Apologies to Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans for any errors.

(J Vigo intro text from Savage Minds website:

‘Heather Brunskell-Evans discusses John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault, identity politics, the current philosophical and legal discourses on sexual violence, and the politics of “kindness” with Julian Vigo. Focussing upon many of the misrepresentations of Foucault’s work in recent years, Brunskell-Evans offers ways in which we might better understand liberalism and how Foucault asks us to consider both the body and our presumed freedoms.’)

[TRANSCRIPT STARTS:]

JV: Welcome to Savage Minds. Heather How did you come to approach gender body politics from the larger political and philosophical landscape?

HBE: “Thank you Julian for asking me that question. … It’s very difficult to talk about what motivated me to write [my book – ‘Transgender Body Politics’, Spinifex, 2020] outside of the larger context of political philosophy. Of course, most people aren’t actually interested in the larger context of political philosophy when they are questioning me about transgenderism, so you have given me an opportunity to actually to go to the source .. of how I got captivated by the issue of transgenderism and what I regard as a real threat to liberal democracy as well as to the rights of women and children, who of course make up a large part of liberal democracy. So … if I just return for the moment to some of the principles of liberalism that I think are threatened at the moment.

If we think of liberalism as being made up of a few issues, I will just enumerate them. We think of liberal democracy, limitations on the power of Government, universal human rights, legal equality for all citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the viewpoints of others and the diversity of viewpoints and honest debate, where engaging in debate and hearing the other point of view is a fundamental cornerstone of living in a democracy, respect of evidence and reason, and the separation of church and state and freedom of religion.

When we hold dear these principles, people often think of them as being practical aspects of liberal democracy but all of these [principles] are heavily dependent on ideas, which we forget about. Our liberal democracy is based on a shift in how we think from other political regimes and the shift was created, or began, let’s say, in the 18th century, further developed in the 19th century, and keeps on evolving actually, but I think I may return to John Stuart Mill, if that’s ok. …

[…]

Often people call upon JSM in order to valorise the role of the individual in a democracy in relation to previous regimes which were autocratic, so that could be theocracy, patriarchy, fascism and so on. So liberal democracy has been a counter to those regimes and the emphasis has been on the individual. But, of course, JSM’s approach to how to think about resisting previous regimes of power isn’t just based on the individual. So, I would like to go back to two of his basic principles, I will just read them out. (Not from ‘On Liberty’). [JSM] talks about not the individual will. Mill is not concerned about the liberty of the individual will. What he is concerned about is civil and social liberty, that is the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. So he makes very clear that there is a conundrum … How can individuals be most free when society needs to impose a certain level of social control and social order, and he relates that to various questions, such as, ‘What is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over him/herself?’; ‘Where does the authority of society begin?’; ‘How much of human life should be assigned to individuality and how much to society?’.

I want to return to those issues, which seem to me to be crucial when we are thinking about individual liberty. We always have to be thinking about individual liberty in relation to society as a whole. We are not free, as individuals, to identify in whichever way we want or to act in whichever way we want. Our personal identities or actions must always be regulated in relation to the larger society, given that we hope to maximise as much individual freedom as possible.

Now I talk about these things because I think they are very important to the kind of critique of Foucault which is happening at the moment because, I think you know, Foucault is one of the theorists who has been most influential in my life, my thinking and indeed in my analysis of transgenderism. What Foucault does, contrary to the way he is characterised – reductively assigned to … rejecting the idea that the individual is placed in society – actually what he does is he places himself in [the same] dilemma as JSM, and proceeds to analyse the relationship between the individual and society, and how we think about that: When does society transgress?, How does it transgress?, What are the limits of our freedom? Where is the power of society exercised? Is it through the law? is it through other means? and for Foucault it is through the body.

JV: [Explains Bentham’s idea of the ‘Panopticon’, Foucault’s metaphor for surveillance society, in ‘Discipline and Punish’. Foucault envisages power exercised not as top-down, but more complexly, as inter-individual. JV questions the recent critique of Foucault (a ‘hodge-podge’) in Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, in which they lay the ‘blame’ for identity politics at Foucault’s door.]

HBE: Foucault appears to be seen to be the author of ‘Queer Theory’ and is getting a good bashing for that. But Foucault clearly was not a queer theorist, never described himself as such, other people have labelled him that way.

But you brought up the central issue that Foucault talks about – how power works through self-surveillance, and he in doing so, he is critiquing a Marxist model of power. To say that is not to say that F is against Marx in any way, he didn’t reject Marx. He pointed out that where Marx is concerned to talk about the way that all our consciousnesses are… – we think of ourselves as being agents of our lives, but actually our consciousness is shaped by the economic conditions in which we live –  F agreed with that, but said that power worked through that mechanism but also through other mechanisms, such as the surveillance society you are talking about. But if we talk about his analysis of the prison, what he’s really talking about [using it as a metaphor] is the shift from one political regime to another. He’s warming us about the [same] issue that JSM was talking about – the limits of individual sovereignty and how society controls the individual. So Foucault is talking about a regime in which a prisoner previously [for example] might have been hanged, drawn and quartered, [or another brutal form of punishment]– but Foucault is not saying that , but he’s pointing out the significance of the difference in the ways that prisoners are punished, he’s connecting that up with the different regimes of power. He’s not saying– as [Helen] Pluckrose is saying, I think, in her article which is called ‘How French Intellectuals Have Ruined the West’ … in which she calls Foucault a “relativist”: he’s not a relativist he’s not saying that the regime of punishing prisoners brutally and the regime that punishes prisoners through putting them under surveillance in prisons are just different from one another and one is as good as the other– Foucault is clearly not saying that; all he’s doing is pointing out the differences in the regimes and the ways that, in the modern period, we might think of ourselves as being very humane now, ‘We don’t do those awful things to prisoners any more, what we do is we separate them off from society, we ask them to reflect upon themselves, we ask them to feel guilty about their behaviour’ and so-on; so Foucault is just pointing out that we need to reflect that some of the ways in which we laud ourselves for being much more humane, might actually bring with them other forms of inhumane practices, which, if we don’t understand the ideas which lie behind them, we may mistakenly imagine are about freedom, when in fact what we see as freedom now, might be caught up with other regimes of power, which are more subtle and more complex and all he’s doing is asking us to reflect. He’s not saying that ‘nothing matters’; on the contrary, he’s saying ‘Everything matters’ and because everything matters, it is incumbent upon us to think through how we have become the people we are now, in modernity. What we do with that, whether we want to become Queer Theorists, or whatever we want to do with it, is not his responsibility. [Foucault] never claims to know what we should do with it. He gives  us tools with which to think, and in that sense I think Foucault is one of the most important of 20th Century philosophers, because he dares to say ‘I don’t have the answers’ and he dares to say we collectively, not individually, need to unpick ideas, because even for JSM, the ideas of liberalism and of JSM, which Pluckrose wants to laud –liberalism is based on a whole set of ideas– Foucault wants us to understand those ideas and unpick them. He’s amazing in that.

JV: In all my readings of Foucault, the one thing I never came away with, was that he was advocating for the subject to go back to the institution to be ‘rubber-stamped’, and what we are seeing today in our society is a hyper-individualist social thread of people not only rubber-stamping themselves, but insisting that we mirror their identities. I often say, you’ll see social media threads of mine where I’ll say “I am not your mirror”, where I am paraphrasing quite purposefully Nan Goldin’s book of photography where she collects images of a lot of drag queens from the late 70s through  the 1980s and produces “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – that’s the tile of the series – is ironic in its deconstruction of men masquerading as women and it’s also dealing with a certain kind of repressed social culture during the height America’s conservatism, with Jessie Helms trying to outlaw Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andreas Serano – ‘Piss Christ – remember that!? – and we had the moral majority, in the 1980s, from the right […] slashing all forms of artistic production such that it has had a long lasting effect on how the national endowment for the arts in the US has functioned, to today – the most ironic and tragic part of this – is that the new moral majority, the new religion is from the Left and it is identitarianism in every way, and they are claiming, wrongfully, that it’s Foucault.

Pluckrose. I’ll read you two sentences from her essay, it’s from the essay you referred to earlier, ‘How French Intellectuals Ruined the West’, and she says: “We see in Foucault the most extreme expression of cultural relativism, read through structures of power in which shared humanity and individuality are almost entirely absent. Instead, people are constructed by their position in relation to dominant cultural ideas either as oppressors or oppressed”. Not at all what he said actually. Then she says: “Judith Butler drew on Foucault for ger foundational role in Queer Theory, focussing on the culturally constructed nature of gender”. She goes on to [cite] Said and Crenshaw, but I won’t go there.

Now, let’s look what Butler does with Foucault, because she leans on Foucault mostly from his work on “Herculine Barbin”, which is his text on what was called, at the time, this hermaphroditic figure, and Butler writes: “The notion that there might be a “truth” of sex, as Foucault ironically terms it, is produced precisely by the regulatory practices that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gender norms.” [Butler, ‘Gender Trouble’, 1990, p17] [continuing the quotation from Butler] “The hetero-sexualisation of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between “feminine” and “masculine”, where these are understood to as expressive attributes of male and female.” I’m going to stop there. Butler is very dense. But what’s interesting here – and this is where I think today’s reading of Queer Theory is completely divorced from what Butler herself wrote – she’s talking about ‘gender’ in terms of what we knew it to be in the 80s and 90s: ‘gender’ meant ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, it didn’t even mean ‘man’ or ‘woman’, but attributes of a cultural and social performance (feminine and masculine) as related to the somatic interfaces of a body, of male and female. She was drawing on Foucault’s notion of the “truth” of sex, which he examined in “Herculine Barbin”, in that text itself. And I’m thinking, people denigrate Foucault and they try to assume that everything Butler wrote was on the basis of his entire body of work or some kernel that he set out to assault feminist theory, which is non-existent. He didn’t. It’s become this myth that’s been spread by such readings as this by Pluckrose, where she says, “people are constructed by their position in relation to dominant cultural ideas either as oppressor or oppressed”. That’s the exact opposite of what Foucault wrote. He was looking at how people can be both oppressors and oppressed, for instance, and how being in the [central] tower of the panopticon, or being the one who’s looked upon, represents all of us simultaneously. This notion of the heterosexual subject is something that Butler’s work seeks to produce from this text; she’s looking at the way the heterosexual subject was, historically, the norm.  The notions of what ‘gender’ meant in the 1950s and 70s, is very different to the way that Queer Theorists, or people who claim to be Queer Theorists, are claiming gender is ‘today’. ‘Gender’ today represents nothing of the time that Butler wrote ‘Gender Trouble’. Today, ‘gender’ is this idea of an internal sense of identity, that either matches, or does not match, a body, which is paradoxically anathema to what Butler herself wrote back when she wrote ‘Gender Trouble’. She was not talking about ‘being in the wrong body’; she was not talking about an internal identity that had to be almost let go, almost exorcised like a mediaeval priest coming to one’s home to exorcise the diabolical forces from within. She was basically speaking about this incongruency between social; and political and medical readings of the body in disconnect to the cultural language at the time.

How in the heck has it come to understand Queer Theory– even Butler now in her latest interviews, seems to not understand what she herself had written!

HBS: [Laments Judith Butler’s evolution into “talking like a trans activist on the street”] But if we go back to what [Butler] originally wrote in ‘Gender Trouble’ and the analysis which you have made of it. I agree with your analysis, but I think she set the scene for what Identity Politics has become, or the critique of the heteronormative has become, because she does take Foucault .but she makes a crucial shift – and it’s this crucial shift which we need to go back to.

Foucault himself critiques the heteronormative. That is why his theories are seen as powerful for women, actually, powerful for feminist analysis. But he doesn’t reject the body. Foucault brings the body right in to central status of his analyses. What Queer Theory has become is a rejection of the body, and Foucault is blamed for this, which has a terrible irony to it, because Foucault talks about the body all the time, in fact, it could be claimed, ad nauseam!

Why I think you can have a feminist analysis of Foucault [a Foucauldian analysis which is feminist(?)], is that he actually talks about sexed bodies and the dimorphic reality of sexed bodies – he doesn’t reject that at all –  he talks about the way that men and women in their physical body  are caught up in relations of power, which fix on to the body.  In the 19th century, medicine, the law and so on had a good job of policing women, for example, on the basis that their bodies led them to alleged hysteria, which mean that terrible things were perpetrated on women on the basis that they had unstable bodies, so that a young girl or teenager who had suffered sexual abuse might themselves be incarcerated for life on the basis that, in some sense, her body, her pathologized femininity, caused the man to behave in the way that he had. So Foucault is wonderful, actually, at providing a historical analysis of how sexed bodies were taken up by the authorities, by discourses like medicine and the law, and policed through them, and [according to Foucault’s analysis] we end up believing that we have a deep sexuality– and by ‘sexuality’ he wasn’t talking about ‘desire’; he was almost talking about ‘gender’ but ‘gender’ hadn’t been invented at that time, so when he is talking about ‘sexuality’ he is talking about the relationship between the social construction of how we understand our sexed bodies, and he was asking us to unpack all of those things, not to throw away the body, but to understand the way that, as human beings, we are biological beings, as well as cognitive and social beings, and how does this materiality get shaped by liberal democratic societies in order that we are free! So, liberal democracies function on the basis that we imagine ourselves to be free, and if we imagine ourselves to be free, then we can lose track of the ways in which we are not free. So, Foucault is asking us – women and men – to look at the ways we conceive ourselves as having a very strong identity, of our gender and sexuality, to look at the very ways we are most policed– the very moment we think we are most free might just be the very time we are in fact most policed. Which brings me to why I can use Foucault as analysis of the policing of transgenderism, not to prove that gender identity is innate, but to actually demonstrate that it is not, that it is a socially-constructed phenomenon, which trans activists and trans ideology have consistently argued, for the past number of years, that it’s innate. That’s an anathema – a complete contradiction to anything that Foucault said. So, it is bizarre, it is absolutely bizarre. And one of the things that Pluckrose says, and I think she’s right, is that in order to understand the conditions of our own social existence now, in the 21st century, and the ridiculous ‘Social Justice Warrior’ movements that have become so irrational – and I completely agree with her – they have become almost a mirror image of far-right reactionary movements, they are both playing the same thing, that they are ‘the true interpreters of liberal democracy’ and that ‘we ought to get back to that’ (i.e. we ought to get back to liberal democracy but always as they interpret it), so what Pluckrose is asking is that we look at theory, we unpack it, she sets Foucault up in opposition to that, when  he’s on our side. If Pluckrose, yourself and myself are as one, in the sense that we want to unpack theory in order to understand how these authoritarian movements are taking hold, and actually threaten the liberal democracy that we have worked for, and the principles of liberal democracy, Foucault is with us. He’s not against us. So, the fact that other people use Foucault’s theory, he cannot be held responsible for that, and you cannot critique Foucault– you can’t give him responsibility without taking the time and effort to actually understand him.

Now, the problem with this is, nobody wants to take the time and effort, intellectually, any more, I don’t think. We are living in, I think, an anti-intellectual era, which is why these authoritarian movements can get a hold. No longer are we asked to provide some sort of evidence – and that can be theoretical analysis – for why we take the positions that we have. We’ve now bastardised what Foucault said, turned it around and said that, whatever we feel– heteronormativity is now ‘the baddie’, and if, in some sense, we are placed outside of that heteronormativity we are therefore, essentially, ‘a goodie’. So it’s become so simplified, so that anybody who feels that they are excluded by heteronormative discourses, automatically takes up the position of being the valiant warrior, on the side of social good, who wants to– who can over-turn everybody else, and social structures, and we’ll eventually arrive at Nirvana, where these people will rule, and everybody will be free to be exactly who they are. This is such a misreading of Foucault as to beggar belief.

 

JV: Well my worry is that – and I have had this discussion with other people on the Left, where Foucault is now being trashed – as also, you know I’m sure you have read those who claim he approved paedophilia, he has advocated for paedophilia – there is a huge misreading of a very widespread French movement, on the Left, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were two things going on in France: one was the fight for the rights of prisoners and [the other was] to lower the age of consent. Now, alongside Foucault were other people, and this was Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre. We can’t negate that fact that there were women involved in the same fight, including one of the most important feminists of the 20th century; I mean you cannot just negate that fact that Simone de Beauvoir was also part of the same movement of Foucault, and yet Foucault has been thrown to the lions. Again, the claims that he has written approvingly of rape: can you speak to this?

HBE: I can speak to it. Please remind me to bring the rape issue back in. I’m going to deal with the adult-child issue first. By using the term ‘adult-child issue’ rather than paedophilia, I suppose I am doing that deliberately, I hate the term ‘paedophilia’ because, of course it means ‘the love of children’.  So, Foucault made an argument that ‘adult-child’ sex, was not, or was not necessarily, the abuse of the child. I agree that he does it. I don’t want to escape his moral culpability for that. My argument is [that] his mode of analysis, the tools gives us, which, by the way, are called ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ – methods of tracing back the basis of our knowledge and politics – I don’t think that his analyses lead to this position, because he was clearly a man of his time, and when he writes theoretically, he can’t possibly justify that it’s perfectly ok for children to have sex with adults and that somehow we can remove adult-child sex from power, because his whole oeuvre is about power operating everywhere and power operating on and through hierarchies, and on the body. So, he is very un-Foucauldian when he participates in these discussions. For anybody who is interested in these – I don’t want to be a pedant here, but there is one little extract of a book, ‘The History of Sexuality: Vol 1’, which is a fascinating little book about sexuality, where he does claim – and it’s called ‘the […] Incident’; interestingly, I did a PhD using the […] incident as the – access around which, I made a comparison between Foucauldian theory and Radical Feminist theory, and how he had a different interpretation of how a little incident that happened between an adult and a child, and how radical feminists, including myself, would make sense of that incident. But anyway, he kind of ‘lapsed’, I think, when he talked about that, because I think he says that that incident was “innocent”, so it happened between a peasant, he talks about this incident happening between a peasant who could only gain what Foucault calls “caresses” from a girl, because no adult woman would have him, and he describes the little girl as being culpable, that she’s a [fraud?], almost as if she is a sexual person, a developed sexual person, in her own right, and that she got paid for doing it. So, it’s a dreadful passage in ‘The History of Sexuality’. I defy anybody to find anywhere else in Foucault’s theoretical work where he talks about sex in that way, between adults and children. But he does in his dialogues – there are a number of them, which are published in English – with people who do advocate for child-adult sex being possibly consensual. Nobody’s arguing that children should be there as sexual objects for men – let’s face it, it is largely men – but they are saying that children can consent to having sex with men and in fact that their sexuality might lead them to want to have sex with men.  Now, this is a proposition that was going round at the time, and in this country, and it was the– Harriet Harman, actually, and other people from the Labour Government, were going along with this argument, just as the Labour Government [sic] now is going along with the argument that children can consent at the age of ten to become sterile, through medical intervention. So, it absolutely needs to be unpacked. It does arise, and I am not escaping from this, it does arise from something that Foucault had partially initiated – other theorists were doing it – with a critique of the norms that adhere around heterosexuality. So, what actually happened was, since he critiqued those norms, anything that fell outside of that, all the forbidden areas that fell outside of it [those norms] – same sex relationships, relationships between adults and children, queer sex – is obviously ‘good’ because it’s resisting heteronormativity. This is where children come into it and this idea that, if adult-child sex is frowned-upon, or not socially acceptable, this must be because power is being exercised upon children, rather than that there may actually be good reasons why we protect children from adult-child sex–  having sex with adults, sorry, and that the good reasons may be based on biology, psychological stages of development and emotional stages of development, the actual power that adults exercise over children, and quite rightly, in some senses, exercise over children, because children need to be safeguarded and protected until they are an adult, so we’ve thrown out lots of issues, in terms of child protection, with this idea that we are actually freeing them. Foucault was wrong in that. He was un-Foucauldian in that. And those discourses which were prevalent in the 1970s, which quite, you know, conventional people, as I say, took up – because the ‘paedophile information exchange’, which was set up in the 1970s in this country, was almost given a free pass sometimes, in our media, and lots of figures now – I don’t want to name them because I don’t want another law suit at the moment, I am pretty pressed with various other things in relation to the Tavistock –

[This discussion was recorded a short while before the judgement was handed down, on 1st December 2020, on the ‘Keira Bell & Mrs A vs Tavistock GIDS’ judicial review, that children under 16 could not consent to treatment for ‘gender dysphoria’ with hormonal puberty blockers.]

- [lots of figures now] would want to disavow that, and I think as ‘Dr Em’, as she is known [Twitter tag], writes, quite rightly wants to go back to that history and name people, because they [those people] want to slink off and disavow that they had any part in that. They did have a part in it, and we need to bring it out in the open and expose it, and I am absolutely not averse to bringing Foucault into that, but not Foucault’s theoretical work. It’s his theoretical work which is really powerful, for an analysis of transgenderism, and it’s his theoretical work that [Judith] Butler bangs on about all the time, and so we need to go to that, and distinguish [between] what he says and what Butler says he says. Let’s have a proper discussion about it.

JV: There is also a will that– and this speaks to our current era of cancel culture, purging, harassment, to outright pulling of pieces from publications, hounding editors, such that now we are living in an age where– it’s not cancel– I mean ‘cancel culture’ is such a silly word in a way because – we are living in a wider sphere of, um, if someone runs a piece, in that magazine, or that editor or writer, will face any number of repercussions, to include, just, you know, utter censorship, and that’s what’s happening, we are getting a lot of censorship that’s happening even before the piece is run, so you know, editors are saying ‘No’ to pitches, because they know what’s going to happen to them. I’ve had this happen. But what I find interesting is that feminists – many, not all – have reacted to Foucault’s work, I find, without, sometimes, having read him, they’ve said “Well I heard such and such a person speak about Foucault’, and I say ‘Well have you read Foucault?’; ‘No’.

But then I go back to someone like Ann Cahill, who suggested that Foucault was basically guilty of seeking to define rape as solely a violent crime. Now this is interesting because Germaine Greer, last year, spoke about this [see G. Greer, ‘On Rape’] and she said – and I am paraphrasing here – but she spoke about how women need to accept that rape happens and that maybe, two things: [(a)] we don’t have a way of dealing with it through jurisprudence in a way that will see every single rape convicted, so she asks women: ‘What can we do next? What can we do to assure ourselves that crimes such as rape and sexual assault might be handled with the full knowledge that we can’t send innocent men to prison, because of the lack of proof?’ – this is a huge problem today; then we have [(b)] someone like Foucault who was accused of approving  of rape, even textually.

How do we deal with all these mis-readings of Foucault, when the bottom line seems to be [that] he’s not agreeing with the way that we are conceiving of this act?

HBE: Well- I noticed something in myself, as you were talking, Julian, that I really want to reply to you, and I had a fear inside myself, I just noticed it physically, I had a fearful sensation, or a tightening in my stomach, because, I thought, if I enter into this discussion I am going to be so misunderstood now. But. I am going to do it, because I am dedicated to trying to explore truths and power relations through discourse, through our conversation with each other, and my conversation with other people, so here goes.

Can I just slightly back track and go back to the ways in which feminists are now very anti-Foucault. I do understand that. They are told that Foucault is- Foucault is demonised, and they believe he is demonised for a reason and then the reason is justified because he says (in their mind) the demonisation is justified because he does say dreadful things in his conversations with people, about child sexual abuse, and he does talk about rape. I am going to come back to the rape thing, I am not trying to avoid it.

But I have to tell you that I realised That I should shut up about Foucault– I was once at a conference where I tried to explain why Foucault was so influential on me, and I have to tell you, the conference imploded, in the same way, that when I talk about Feminism and my critique of Transgenderism, there will be trans-activists who force a situation where the conference has to come to an end, they stand on their desks they push me around, whatever they do. And in this radical feminist conference, in which I was trying to explain – just explain – why Foucault was important to me, not that the other people there had to make Foucault important to them, very much the same dynamics occurred within the conference, as people accused me of erasing their truths, almost erasing them, that what I was saying was so dangerous, and so on. And I felt like I was– the two sides were being mirrored, they were almost identical, just from different positions. It was very, very disturbing. Very disturbing. So which ever way, I am caught in a vice grip, accused of erasing one set of people, and then, the very same person, me, is accused of erasing the other set of people who– they violently disagree with each other, but the main emotional response they have, is that whatever it is that I say is actually erasing them.

So, this can be seen as a very serious thing, actually, as a metaphor for what we have already discussed going on in our culture, where actually discussing things is now becoming forbidden. It’s risen to such an emotional pitch that the other person, whichever side you are coming from, hears you as doing nothing else but annihilating them. But we could talk for hours about that issue. Let’s get back to the rape thing.

I think Foucault is very much positioned as a man, and I don’t think that he understood, or was thinking about, rape in relation to the position of women and men in a sexist society, in which there is a prevalence of sexual violence. He wasn’t dismissing that, but he was asking us to look at rape from a different viewpoint. And I value, dare I say it, the ways in which he was trying to get us to think about it differently. So, let me try to phrase this as a Feminist, who believes absolutely that sexual violence is prevalent, it’s in many ways utterly extreme, it’s global, and it is a way in which women are socially controlled. So, I want that to be my first premise here. I also think, if we go to the other end of the continuum from extreme sexual violence to the kind of ways that a woman might feel violated, for example, in court at this moment, in the UK at this moment in time, there is a slightly high-profile legal case going on where a one-time, kind of, relatively insignificant media person, on children’s television actually, a children’s programme, in the 1980s, a programme called ‘Blue Peter’, and his name is Joh Leslie, and he is accused of, in a nightclub, touching a woman’s breast on the top of her jumper, in public view, on top of her clothes, and it lasted for a few seconds, and the woman’s case is that she has been sexually traumatised by this event for so many years, and it’s only now that she’s able to bring this to legal retribution, as it were, because of the #MeToo movement, which has emboldened her to do it. And, of all the backlog of cases that are going on – because of the Covid pandemic in this country – the one case that’s being dealt with at the moment is this John Leslie case, which is unjust in itself, in my view, and I think it is being brought because it has a sensational quality to it, it’s about sexuality, and so on, and there are people languishing in prison – who haven’t – because the court has been sitting – for very serious offences, which they may not have committed, who are still languishing on prison, waiting for a trial. I hope that makes sense. Anyway, John Leslie is now– this trial is going ahead, and the media is sensationalising it, you know, they are calling him a predator and so on and so forth. So, what I am trying to point out is that, the idea that a woman can be so traumatised by, in public, having somebody place his hand – which he certainly shouldn’t have done, if it is true that he did it – but, the idea that this can be so traumatic, that her life has been blighted for the past however many years ago, twelve years ago or something, seems to me to be something that we need to reflect upon, that somehow sexual predation has become – is viewed and framed conceptually as – so dreadful for women that what we are in danger of doing is minimising, or numbing ourselves to, the actual sexual predation that happens, so that if women can– I’m really– I hope this is making sense to you, Julian? We have to get this into some kind of proportion.

Now, if we go back to Foucault’s theory, what he talks about [is] the way we have come to understand sexuality – and by that he means our biological, sexed bodies – in conjunction with the idea of gender, in conjunction with what we will take seriously and what we won’t take seriously (where medicine gets involved and so on) – that has led to this idea that somewhere deep inside us there is something so truthful, its almost like a holy grail, it’s like our sexuality has become our soul. Given that we are no longer religious, we have found a soul somewhere else, we have found it in the true beingness of ourselves, in the truth of an inner sexual identity. What [Foucault]’s trying to do, when he problematizes the issue of rape, he’s not saying that rape is insignificant, he’s not saying that rape isn’t about sexual violence, he’s attempting to say that if we have this idea that our soul, our very inner true selves, revolves around the preciousness of a sexual and gendered identity, we will, then, see someone putting their hands on the top of our clothes, briefly, for a few seconds, as a sexual assault of such magnitude. Because, what is happening is that, our inner self is being threatened, so I would like to take Foucault’s ideas, in relation to the sexual soul, and apply it to rape, and I do it as a Radical Feminist who is horrified by the amount of sexual violence there is, horrified by the way that nobody seems to care very much about it, actually, in the way that, just to take the example of Rotherham in the UK, where young working class girls who needed protection, were actually being routinely sexually abused, we couldn’t talk about it, and one of the reasons we couldn’t talk about it was to do with ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ and fears of being called ‘Islamophobic’ because the perpetrators in Rotherham at the time – I’m going to be pilloried for saying that, even now–

JV: What you’re saying right now reminds me of what happened in  a FaceBook group where Posie Parker [Kellie Jay Keen-Minshull] was speaking exactly about this, she highlighted the fact that, in the UK, what are called ‘grooming gangs’, of largely south-Asian men, were sexually assaulting, raping also, women and girls, who were largely not south-Asian; this became known over many years to include very harsh words from the then police chief who investigated these crimes and people have now come out saying that they were fearful of making investigations and speaking out because of their being perceived as ‘racist’ – that was one of the comments that was echoed over and over again, and we’re seeing that same kind of self-reflection and super-self-consciousness coming out of the gender arguments today, where even people– I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people, including some well-known, who say ‘I completely agree with what you’re saying. Keep at it’; and I write them back invariably to say ‘Why aren’t you adding your name to this? Why aren’t you speaking out?’, because as much as the woke transgender groups of people, and there’s many supporters who by far out-number them, would like to think that they are on – to paraphrase Owen Jones – ‘the right side of history’, we’ve already seen more than ample evidence to show that they are not. The many examples that we have, historically, to what’s going on today, so many just within the 20th century, from the way that mental illness was treated, with many long stays in hospitals because the subject was deemed homosexual, you have the famous case of American actor Frances Farmer, who was put into an insane asylum and raped, and she became a life-long medical patient because she did not square with their rendering of a functional human, and going back – this all goes back to what we were speaking about earlier, and the fact that Foucault, not the author of Queer Theory – he has nothing to do with post-modernism – but he was the author of what he calls ‘bio-power’, and he talks about ‘bio-power’ as a series of strategies and mechanisms through which basic biological features of the human species have become an object of political strategy, and he takes us back to the 18th Century. Now, how on earth has anyone […] read Foucault – [Helen] Pluckrose, [James] Lindsay, others – without having realised that the entire centri-focal force of his work is based on the body – it’s not the rejection of the body and here we are, being afraid to say things, in many different political theatres, but they are all echoing over each other today, right? I mean we are seeing this, what we have just discussed, with Foucault and gender, ah, Feminist issues with Foucault, ah, mis-readings of his work in terms of gender identity, or just identity politics; meanwhile, a lot of these same critics of Foucault, Pluckrose included, are those who actually believe there is an inner soul. Now the ‘inner soul’ is something that Foucault combatted throughout his career: there is no soul to match the body, end of! You can’t read [Foucault’s] ‘Discipline and Punish’ without coming away with his vituperation of this very belief, right?

HBE: And his purpose in doing this was not to annihilate the individual. His purpose in doing this – which is what I think Helen Pluckrose might say – his purpose in doing this was to think around how we can maximise as much as possible the kinds of freedoms which, in modernity, will benefit us. I think the surveillance which we’ve just been talking about, whether it was with the abuse of girls and teen– um, young women in Rotherham, demonstrates, um, sorry– the Panopticon that Foucault talked about, which was really a metaphor for how we are socially controlled, through the surveillance we do upon ourselves, is actually exemplified by the issue of Rotherham, and by the issue of being afraid to talk about transgenderism, and Owen [Jones] is an example of somebody who, rather than being somebody who is progressive, is setting himself up as the police officer who will guilt-trip us all into being even more surveille-ing of ourselves, according to the ‘right-think’ purveyed by him, from the Left.

I’d like, Julian, to get back to the issue of sexual violence, because I think it’s really important. What I want to say about this is that, whilst we’re concerned about relatively minor things, what actually happens is we tolerate sexual violence because sexual violence in our society coheres around class […] class issues, as well as women– sexist issues. I don’t think I’m explaining this very well, actually, but–.

So, what Foucault is attempting to do, was separate out the actual violence, which takes place in rape, and the violence which - sometimes rape is not violent in the sense that there is no physical harm at the end of it, there just literally isn’t, but the violence happens somewhere else, the violence is[(?)] with the violation of the body, the violation of the woman’s boundaries, the violation of her integrity, and none of this can be understood outside of looking at the social structures of our society. I guess if we wanted to be rebellious, as I wonder if Germaine Greer was attempting to be, one would say, ‘Let’s not go along with feeling so violated about it’. Clearly there’s violation there, but to deal with it, to actually be– to reclaim our integrity, to reclaim women’s right not to be sexually assaulted it might be better to get angry about this, in relation to the violation of our autonomy, rather than to feel that, in some sense, we’ve been deeply violated at the ‘soul’-level. It’s something around that, that I’m trying to tease out.

JV: Well, it’s interesting, in that when Germaine Greer made these comments in 2018, she wrote – here’s a quote – “If we’re going to say ‘Trust us, Believe us’, if we do say that our accusations should stand as evidence, then we do have to reduce the tariff for rape. It’s in moments like this”, she says, “I can hear Feminists screaming at me, ‘You are trivialising rape’”, and she goes on: “You might want to believe that the penis is a lethal weapon, and that all women live in fear of that lethal weapon. We don’t live in terror of the penis.” And she’s doing just this. She’s trying to take power over, even, her own rape, when she was eighteen, which she describes in great detail, and in a way she’s saying we need to move on from that, we need to stand by our word that this is a wrong and this happened, but we also need to be able to move beyond that moment and create a new space of growth. And I think that is where a lot of feminists are missing out. When Douglas Murray [journalist] speaks about identity politics, and he includes Feminism in that, that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about feminists who don’t want to move, or refuse to move, beyond what Germain Greer has patently critiqued, um, we can’t identify around only a tragedy; a tragedy can be part of who we are, but there are loads of tragedies, that men, too, experience. You know, a lot of people, in the West – I’m very shocked, constantly, by how little experience people have in the West of what most people in the world actually experience. And you see this. You know, I’ve lived all over the developing world, and what people would say is child slavery, or child violence, is a fact of life, so that when I’m going through the streets of [M_(place name?)] and I see a six-year-old beggar, who is also helping her mother do the dishes, because they live in a tent by the side of the road, that’s interpretable as many things. It’s also, largely, a repercussion of, entirely a repercussion, of capitalism. Now, we’re from, let’s just say – and I’m not just trying to pick on just Feminists – there are many Leftist Feminists who agree with us – that where we cannot contain capitalism, we must therefore critique it, and we must see our own subjectivity within that larger framework. So that, if we’re going to create our subjectivity uniquely around the penis, we have a problem there, because our identities, uh, whatever we want to call ourselves, will never match up with our ability for– well, just look at what we’re living on, who can afford to leave [Covid-19] lock-down, or not. Will all the people saying ‘Oh, let’s continue lock-down’, we’re finding out that a lot of those folks are the most economically advantaged, and the people that they rely upon to keep lock-down for them – because my argument has been, for months now – the people enjoying lock-down are living in lovely, large homes and relying on delivery drivers who, even in the UK, Germany, wherever, they’re often immigrants who are barely getting by on their salaries, and the exploitation of labour is coming out through what is a new form of bio-politics, you know, we’re seeing- where Foucault gave birth to the notion of bio-politics, this was taken on by people like Giorgio Agamben [Italian philosopher], who looked at this quite ferociously after 9-11, and he critiqued the ‘state of exception’, that he has written several books on, where he says that we can’t actually concede that our Governments shut down our human freedoms and rights while expecting this to be a temporary measure; he says that, in the realm of political itself, that by making an exception of the very people in whose very name this exception is created, we are actually allowing ‘the sovereign’ to have power over life and death, meaning our own lives and deaths, and that they can designated which will life is worth saving, which life is worth killing; and Agamben was one of the biggest critics of the global war on terror, and it’s in large part, not just – you know I was reading Chomsky, I was reading Cockburn [(?)], I was reading, very much, you know, Agamben’s work on this figure, because what happened in my country [United States(?)] is we had fourteen thousand Muslim men who disappeared. I’ve written about it, and every time I write another aspect of this massive disappearance of Muslim men, I get emails saying ‘I’m American. I didn’t even know about this.’ Well of course not. The way the media has functioned, even independently, they have stayed away from this, because there is a fear of being – you know after 9-11 – there was a fear of being called ‘Anti-American’, that was one of the big slurs used, just like today it’s ‘Transphobia’, then it was ‘Anti-American’, if you recall, in the United States they were re-naming French Fries ‘Freedom Fries’ and we saw that there was this regard for human life that allowed for certain kinds of extermination politics, when it came to the many black sites [sic] that the US had around the planet, even floating sites, where men were kept in secret detention, men were – I spoke to a man in Queens [New York], who was an American, his parents were Pakistani, he was on an aeroplane when the call came through, thanks to a politician, that got him off the ‘plane, otherwise he would have been sent to a country where he had never spent a second of his life, all because he was perceived as being a terrorist, because of bad information. So, where we have bio-security, that came about post-9-11, we are now seeing, re-imbibed today, with contagion, and I find it really disturbing on so many levels that, after all the reading we have of Foucault, all the knowledge of the dangers of these kinds of containments, that we’ve learned absolutely nothing, and that the language of separation is continuing.

HBE: I think the thing I found most disturbing is the irrationality of it, and I think the irrationality […] focuses on one thing, it focuses on – the priority is given to – the biological body, keep the biological body alive, as it were, so the rationale is, it’s the very old and it’s the people with underlying health conditions that we’re all attempting to protect – such people. Of course, this is absolutely great. I’m all for protecting people’s lives, but given that there is a way in which the whole social political and ethical focus is on just keeping the bodies of these people alive, and so the rest of all the ways in which our bodies are in society, are then neglected, so in looking after the biological body, we’ve let go of all sense that there are other aspects to being physically alive, which need to be attended to. So, I could give long lists, you could give lists, you know, of the consequences of this for children, for people who are incarcerated in prison, who can never go to trial, to find out if they are innocent, to the dangers to the economy, and so on, and the manifest ramifications of this, and the people who will die because they haven’t been able to go to hospital for other issues – it’s huge, it’s absolutely huge, and it becomes difficult to talk about this, because people will accuse One of not caring for the biological lives of people. So, for example, I’m suggesting that people who are in nursing homes, who are very, very old, should be left to the dogs, to die of Coronavirus. So, of course, that isn’t what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that, the reality of life is that people get old and they die, and sometimes their lives will be slightly shortened by Coronavirus and I honestly – I’m a very kind person, I assure you – I honestly don’t think that this is the biggest tragedy of all. I do think we should protect old people, but, um, it’s as if we’re afraid of death itself, it’s as if we imagine that we can control life and death, that that has become the sole purpose of existence.

JV: Well, I would say that, my thought on this, coming from Foucault and Agamben, is that we – and even gender theory and what have you – we are living in an era where all kinds of pronouncements about the social are being mediated and that’s of a great concern to me. We are living in a perennial condition of emergency.

HBE: Yes.

JV: For me it recalls everything we have gone through post 9-11, when we were told – in New York there were signs put everywhere: ‘If you see something, say something’ – and they would show a picture of a backpack under a seat so you would wonder if it’s a bomb. If someone left a box in a brown-paper wrapping, you had to tell the police, and so everything was about fear, and we’re seeing that. This does have something part and parcel with the transgender movement, because a lot of these ideas are about having the ‘right’ idea, but science - we should accept that it’s science because it was proven and tested through many bad ideas as well.

HBE: Yeah.

HBE: I think you originally asked me, or I have been asked constantly, why did I write the book [‘Transgender Body Politics’, Spinifex, 2020] and I think that one of the motivators of it was, as I said at the beginning of our talk with each other today, is that what is actually happening with the issue of transgenderism signifies so much else that’s going on in our society at the moment, so it’s not just a thing in and of itself, which is serious, really serious enough, but that I’s an example, it’s an effect of larger social forces that are going on, of which transgenderism then becomes an example. It seems to me that, it’s ideas and the policing of ideas that has got us into this, it’s one of the reasons why we’ve got into this mess that we’re in at the moment, where we’re afraid to have discussion in public, where we surveille ourselves over a whole range of issues, which is not freeing us, which is very dangerous, this is the beginnings of autocracy and regimes – you know, totalitarian regimes. I know that sounds extreme, but this is what happens. You look back at Nazi Germany, and you see that it didn’t begin with people being hauled off to the gulag [sic] somewhere. Nazism took hold through people’s fears of speaking out, through social ostracism, or losing their job, or not getting promoted, and book burning, then it extends to ‘Don’t let your neighbours know, Don’t let even your family know what you are thinking’. These – I’m not saying that we are creating Nazism, obviously, I’m talking about the component parts of the way that human beings behave when they are being controlled by singular ideas, and how people police themselves in relation to that, and in the end it will become quite explosive. One of the explosive things is that, of course, transgender ism is a men’s rights movement.

[Link to my transcript of 2016 speech by Sheila Jeffries – ‘The Social and Political Construction on of Transgenderism’]

Absolutely, it is. And it is the old, Patriarchal social structure, where women were told what to think, what they could say, what they couldn’t say, how they perceive their own bodies, and the power of their own bodies, there is an assault on that, clearly an assault on that, and I hope the book itself demonstrates the various ways in which it is an assault, which sounds extreme as I’m talking about it, it sounds extreme, but it’s actually happening, in practice. And the amount of money, actually, that goes into the promotion of this ideology, largely from American men, who think that they are women, um. So we are at a very serious pass in relation to this, and I think you are quite right to bring in the fear that we have over the Covid-19 virus. Yes, I think they are connected.     

JV: One thing that’s striking to me about the trans rights agenda, that we’re seeing an enormous number of women get on board and, something that I didn’t think I would see, not just because many are younger women, but there’s this alliance to support these people. Now, someone would say ‘You are dis-counting trans-male lives’ or what-not, but the movement, the transgender movement, was started by males who identified as transgender and women were an after-thought. It was part of a larger, political strategy, which I witnessed first-hand in New York, transgender studies took hold of academic departments, by attaching itself as an inter-disciplinary module, as part of Cultural Studies, as part of, even, Literature. A lot of the participants in the mobbing that goes on, around the transgender issue, are women. SO I often wonder why are they participating in what is a men’s rights movement?  

HBE: Yeah, I know. I know.

JV: And many are not aware it’s a men’s rights movement because they ally themselves with the weakness of the subject, or the perceived weakness of the subject, that these poor men are being garrotted, these poor men are being forced to kill themselves, these poor young men and women. And I think this desire to be kind has its place, but I don’t think the desire to be kind, or kindness itself, should have any place on the political stage. I think we need to be careful about mistaking kindness for complicity in something much more maniacal. In different ways, I think a lot of the people, and I include some of the nice feminists who are making arguments for– ‘true trans’ arguments – I don’t think there’s anything nice about telling people that they need to surgically modify their bodies. I know some people will disagree with me on this, but I think there is something very nefarious afoot there. How can we tell someone that we accept them as the trans subject that they are, and let me throw money to your surgery, or let me help you have a means to making you a medical subject for life, where you face increased risk of heart-disease, liver failure, kidney failure and cancers; how is that nice?

HBE: I could just put it another way too. I can understand the desire to be kind and so on, and I probably took this attitude myself, three or four years ago, I had a friend who identified– a man who – identified as a woman, and I did perceive him as in need of my kindness. So, I understand that position. But, of course, the reality is that, supporting a man to believe that he is a woman, or can identify as a woman, take his place in society as a woman, is really un-kind. It’s un-kind to women and to children. So, the reality is, that the kindness to the individual ends up being deep, deep un-kindness to – un-kindness isn’t even the correct terminology for it. Women and children are oppressed, their rights are being stripped from them as we speak, as it were, on the basis of the trans ideology and trans-activism. And so, kindness is, in a sense, is something that doesn’t even enter my, um –. We need to be un-kind. If we get to the point where  we, er – this is my own view – I’m not suggesting – I’m not talking about any individual person, any other individual other than myself. My own view is that I need to be ruthless, actually, in relation to the trans ideology and trans-activism. We’ve gone so far along this road now, that the only way it can be turned, the only way it can be halted, this movement, is by determination and ruthlessness. Not cruelty, actually. Just ruthlessness, to speak out against it, in the way that we would resist any totalitarian movement.

JV: I keep wanting to – it’s one of my least favourite topics – if I can be frank. I’m asked sometimes to write about it, and I say ‘No, not now’, because we’re talking about something that’s so obvious, and I feel that in my articles I’m repeating something that I’ve already written, because it’s so bloody obvious what’s going on here. We’re in a mediaeval quagmire, we’re literally [reproducing(?)] the inquisition here, where it’s exactly – we’re back to Foucault here, where he’s talking – there’s no soul to be foisted from the body, there’s no ‘gender’, and that’s why there – people running around saying ‘cis’, they don’t get it when I say ‘Nobody is ‘cis’ but trans people themselves’, that’s the paradox. If you’re going to claim that your body is mis-matched but you’re correcting it, guess what: trans people are simultaneously ‘cis’. I don’t intend to have a gender, I never will have a gender, I’ve never had a gender. I have had to combat, like you and like every other man and woman on this planet, gender stereotypes - and men have to combat them too. And I think the danger here is that we’re not really attacking what’s feeding this, and what’s feeding this are these people who’ve created a very firm lobby, it’s not just the men funding it, the media’s been paid handsomely to cover this, The Guardian takes a quarter of a million dollars to cover this, other newspapers are taking money, we can’t even trace it all. I have done my best to trace it, from the American Human Rights Commission, and they have roughly four million dollars a year, they throw at media to run what Trump would call ‘fake news’, what most of us would call fake news, quite honestly. These are info-mercials. The Guardian does it, CNN does it, Forbes does it, and they are all – this content is paid for. And they have to put that little mention of – somewhere at the beginning or the end of the article – it’s paid content, it’s how most of these independent media are running today. There’s zero science on this. There is zero social-science on this. What we do have, thanks to Lisa Littman’s wonderful work [author of ‘Galileo’s Finger’] is strong correlation between social contagion and medical mismanagement and medical mal-practice, as your work, and current law-suits, are showing.

Now, we are not able to address that, because all these people who are clamouring for the rights of these trans-identified people want to feel good about themselves, this is what no-one’s discussing. Why are we not discussing the fact that we are living in a culture where people’s only means of feeling worthy, respected, and true subjects in their own right, as they perceive the true subject to be, is by having this mantle they’ve taken on, as being a trans-rights advocate, as saying ‘Trans women are women’, or Owen Jones reminding us what side of history we are on. We really need to take a much more critical approach to understanding these social subjects who have, in a very perverse way, regurgitated religion through this narrative. It’s no longer the Pope, it’s no longer ‘Will the church be headed in Constantinople or in Rome?’, it’s ‘Trans women are women, or you are out of there’.

And, it’s not just Maya Forstater’s job at stake. There are many other people who have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. There are people – I have had people write me, they have lost their right to visit their child over this issue. So, there’s divorce, and an ex-spouse, who’s used their public position on transgender ideology, to have their visitation rights taken away. So, we’re talking about a human rights topic – aside from the scientific flat-earthery that we’ve been handed on the Left, on the Right we are given an entire political platform that’s [passing] itself off as progressive – it’s not – as being righteous, as being future-orientated and that we are the ones who are being politically regressive. It’s actually frightening on so many levels, because our human rights are being eroded. At the bottom of it all is our right to free consciousness and free speech and it’s being eroded so quickly.

Your book [Brunskell-Evans, ‘Transgender Body Politics’, Spinifex, 2020] has been out, and can you speak about the pressure you had, or your editors had, to stifle your book’s publication?

HBE: If your talking about my last book, I’ve had a wonderful experience with my editors, because it’s Spinifex press, and they have encouraged me to write this book. So, I’ve had a different experience with other editors, and I write about it in the book. So, if anybody wants to know about the different experiences in trying to write about transgenderism, please buy the book. It’s quite inexpensive. I think that, what I do write about in the book, is that this is a men’s rights movement, but what I do say, also, is that women facilitate it; women, on the ground, facilitate this movement as the handmaidens of it. So, I’m not opposed– when I say it’s a men’s rights movement – and I talk about this in the book – I’m not posing men as ‘all bad’ and women as ‘all good’ at all. I’m trying to point out the way that, I’m going to use the word ‘Patriarchy’ as a social structure, which Foucault, by the way, agreed existed. He didn’t reject the idea that there was a Patriarchy, he talked about the way it expresses itself through the way that we turn ourselves into subjects of Patriarchy. So, my analysis of it, although I don’t talk about Foucault in the book, is that women participate in a Patriarchy as much as men. And women’s position is that they will facilitate the norms of Patriarchy, which is to prioritise men. So, there are women who call themselves Feminists, who will argue vociferously and passionately against the feminist argument, such as mine, that it is outrageous to put men who’ve been convicted of rape into women’s prison because they identify as women; that it’s totally and absolutely objectionable at every level. There are people who call themselves ‘Intersectional Feminists’, who will only analyse that from the point of view of the poor man, who identifies as a woman, who would be physically assaulted if he went into a men’s prison. So, how have we got to the point, where people who identify with Feminism, will look at this from the point of view– [of] the man’s feelings – and he must be protected from the men who would beat him up of physically assault him, if he was put into a man’s prison, because he now identifies as a woman? It’s almost as if, um – I’m exhausted with talking about it, actually. And one of the reasons why I’m exhausted with talking about it, is because, there is an attempt– I’m constantly trying to explain something which actually beggars belief. It’s almost as if, the onus then becomes on me to explain why this is outrageous. The onus is not on those people, the Owen Joneses, the intersectional feminists, to explain how they have arrived at their moral position. Everything’s turned upside down.

Everything’s upside down in our world at the moment, and this is one example of it. You asked me about publishers. The publishers of the previous books I did with Michelle Moore [e.g. ‘The inventing of the Transgender Child’] about medicalising children, there was an attempt by the Tavistock (Institute, NHS Trust] to prevent the publication of the last book, the second of those two books. And I think, the fact that that– that they attempted to do that – became known on Twitter, for example, was a way of me gaining some security from the illegitimate exercise of top-down authority, as it were. So, one way that Twitter functions, which is basically what I’m trying to say, is – a good way that Twitter functions – is that it does provide a public space in which we can tell others what is actually going on, and if there is sufficient people who reject it, authority can be challenged. It’s just one way, but I think it is a way, so, I see Twitter as being quite powerful, from the point of view of increasing freedom rather than decreasing freedom. But as I’ve said this, I’m aware of the way that Twitter accounts are shut down, one can only say one thing, not another, thankfully, for some reason, I haven’t been shut down. So, there are all kinds of different elements to it. I’m very aware of that. And we are struggling, aren’t we, all of us, as societies, with how to make sense of any of it, especially as I am talking about something which should be something that I don’t have to talk about. I mean, I’m actually trying to convey a madness.

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For criticisms of Foucault from Marxist materialist perspective, readers might consider 'Against Post-Modernism' (1989), by Alex Callinicos, and from a conservative position, Roger Scruton: 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left' (2015).