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.
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.
{end]
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).
