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’
‘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.
