tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62163874028502569082024-03-18T06:11:16.074-07:00Average ProtestantThe playwright Arthur Miller remarked that Protestantism was a large factor in preventing social revolution in the US during and after the 1930s Great Depression. The doctrine of Sola Fide had its hand in the origins of modern science, philosophy and psychopathology. "Average" because it's what Willy Loman could not say of himself, "Protestant" because it's the root of most of what I feel interested to write about, well or badly.Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.comBlogger80125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-33179755978065337742021-12-17T05:54:00.006-08:002021-12-18T22:42:37.226-08:00Kathleen Stock on LBC Iain Dale programme - amazing courage and self-control<p>Listen to the interview and audience Q&A with Kathleen Stock on this programme (17th December 2021).</p><p>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.</p><p>Iain Dale and LBC have been brilliant in enabling this discussion to take place in public.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nix3ZB5ZBd8">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nix3ZB5ZBd8</a></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://t.co/FMBlg1pl8E">https://t.co/FMBlg1pl8E</a></p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-44061274269713104282021-10-24T09:36:00.019-07:002021-11-27T12:37:10.330-08:00Sex-based protections in UK law - a dialogue with someone who would abolish them (FULL TEXT)<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u><span style="color: #2f5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #2F5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: lumm=75000; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent1; mso-themecolor: accent1; mso-themeshade: 191;">Re-posting blogpost on 24<sup>th</sup> October 2021<o:p></o:p></span></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #2f5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #2F5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: lumm=75000; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent1; mso-themecolor: accent1; mso-themeshade: 191;">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).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">_______________________________________________________________</p><p class="MsoNormal">Between 3rd and 7th March 2020, I was in a long online
exchange with someone in response to Suzanne Moore’s Guardian article ‘<a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced?CMP=share_btn_tw&__twitter_impression=true">Women
must have the right to organise</a>’ (2nd March 2020)</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I was (am) on side of upholding sex-based protections in UK
Equality Act 2010.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">‘Abi’ (name changed), a self-described ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039?seq=1">intersectional</a>
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).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What developed was as in-depth a conversation I have had
with someone of opposing views, extending over 200+ replies.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I am posting because some readers might find interesting.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s a 20-minute read.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">(Acknowledgement: I quote below from writing by Dr Jane Clare Jones) </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">*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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">**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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt;"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Guardian 2<sup>nd</sup> March 2020 carries an article by
Suzanne Moore, ‘Women must have the right to organise.We will not be silenced.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt;">DIALOGUE:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #2f5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #2F5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: lumm=75000; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent1; mso-themecolor: accent1; mso-themeshade: 191;">AverageProtestant: <<i>Thumbs Up</i>> “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.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #2f5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #2F5597; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: lumm=75000; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: accent1; mso-themecolor: accent1; mso-themeshade: 191;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[There followed an exchange with a third person, in which
Abi drew a distinction between ‘sex nonconformity’ and ‘gender nonconformity’.]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: (Your first sentence) I see the distinction you draw,
but again, ‘refusing to accept’ what *conditions* the refusing Agent I find
un-intelligible. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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”. <b>That</b> is an extraordinary claim to knowledge.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: You
think it is impossible to know that patriarchy centres our identities around
sex?</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: Indeed, though I would distinguish between ‘cultural
bias’ and ‘categories of thought’. ‘… must be actively unlearned …’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, and to be replaced with what? (Did you
mean ‘us’ or ‘US’ (United States)?)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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’?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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).</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-BusPT9U2Igo/YXWJfzCSccI/AAAAAAAAAMw/BVLk8laQOe4dNIMUXViPjQLybqM7YyvZwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="233" data-original-width="525" height="208" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-BusPT9U2Igo/YXWJfzCSccI/AAAAAAAAAMw/BVLk8laQOe4dNIMUXViPjQLybqM7YyvZwCLcBGAsYHQ/w469-h208/image.png" width="469" /></a></div><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: If that is so, then I expect there are ramifications,
for example in terms of medical treatments for gender dysphoria. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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’.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(Screenshot, <a href="https://www.stonewall.org.uk/women-and-equalities-select-committee-inquiry-transgender-equality">Stonewall
UK submission to UK Parliament Women and Equalities Select Commission on Transgender
Equality</a>)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GHDLcyebKy0/YXWJYhz7N4I/AAAAAAAAAMs/aamqhM5V1ZodvEitEud_4lWxmlFy6MtbQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="549" height="429" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GHDLcyebKy0/YXWJYhz7N4I/AAAAAAAAAMs/aamqhM5V1ZodvEitEud_4lWxmlFy6MtbQCLcBGAsYHQ/w533-h429/image.png" width="533" /></a></div><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: In UK law presently, provision is made to exclude transgender
persons from single sex spaces in certain circumstances. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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’. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: So,
your body is not your own to claim and inhabit as you see fit if you apply an
identity to it? Huh?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span>
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: I
don't accept Jesus as my Lord and saviour. And?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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?)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: ‘You get the idea from the way she looks and presents
herself…’ – implies the presentation conforms to a gender norm (‘woman’).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: I don't. Of course, I rely on appearances to reach such a
conclusion. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>independent</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[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 <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486">Wenjuan XIE (2014) Queer[ing] Performativity, Queer[ing] Subversions: A Critique of Judith Butler’s Theory of Performativity</a>, Comparative Literature: East & West, 20:1, 18-39, DOI: 10.1080/25723618.2014.12015486 ]</span></p></blockquote></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-38X3zZLRklA/YXwDAqbwwCI/AAAAAAAAANA/frHXC2owtY49AQx5nSq80-l07__KPrggACLcBGAsYHQ/s1074/EXtract%2Bfrom%2BXie.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="488" data-original-width="1074" height="181" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-38X3zZLRklA/YXwDAqbwwCI/AAAAAAAAANA/frHXC2owtY49AQx5nSq80-l07__KPrggACLcBGAsYHQ/w399-h181/EXtract%2Bfrom%2BXie.jpg" width="399" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: But how can anything have meaning, or lack of it, that
is not meaningful to individuals? Individuals is what there are! <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: I
said it <b>was</b> 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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: ‘A discrete principle for organising society’ can have
meaning only for an individual, or else it has no meaning.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">“I am
the arbiter of who gets to <b>be </b>a man and who gets to <b>be</b> a woman”,
not so much.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">“I
demand you prove you've met <b>my</b> criteria for womanhood, private citizen!”,
even less so.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: I think you ran into a self-. contradiction that has
made things complicated for you.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: It is a very difficult topic to discuss. I think we can
agree how central is the need of meaning.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wiccan co-worker
as heathen in the office. Be civil to trans people and you'll be fine.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: For ‘How does this affect you’, I link you to the <a href="https://womansplaceuk.org/briefing-for-cedaw-on-gra-reform/">Womans Place
UK wesbsite</a>, 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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt;">Equ. Act 2010, PT. 16: INTERPRETATION, Section
212: General Interpretation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 54pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(1)<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->In this Act<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 54pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(2)<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->“man” means a male of any age<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 54pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">(3)<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->“woman” means a female of any age<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(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 <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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?</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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?
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(Screenshot from Jane Clare Jones online essay, ‘<a href="https://janeclarejones.com/2019/01/24/judith-butler-how-to-disappear-patriarchy-in-three-easy-steps/">Judith
Butler: How to disappear Patriarchy in Three Easy Steps</a>’)</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-A8L98M0Lv-k/YXWJRIB0nhI/AAAAAAAAAMo/aBTCbPNcGAEeB4vF0QiC4TfHt4Sbgn3fACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="384" height="276" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-A8L98M0Lv-k/YXWJRIB0nhI/AAAAAAAAAMo/aBTCbPNcGAEeB4vF0QiC4TfHt4Sbgn3fACLcBGAsYHQ/w425-h276/image.png" width="425" /></a></div><div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">"As she [Judith Butler] argues in Bodies That Matter, the “<b>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.</b>” (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’)</div></blockquote></div><div><br /></div><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">(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.)</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: Perhaps too, it is not necessary to be either/or about race?
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">Abi: Who
is either-or-ing? I'm not the one suggesting we can only have sex or gender
identity but not both.</span> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">AP: You are. You are saying ‘sex’ or ‘race’ is <i>either </i>fact
<i>or</i> ‘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)?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: silver; background: silver; mso-highlight: silver;">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, <b>is</b> 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.</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>END<o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-76850802287275211352021-10-13T10:44:00.047-07:002023-10-07T05:51:54.589-07:00“You’re erasing me” - hyperbole of gender ideologues<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><u>Opposition to introducing 'gender identity' in UK law is being mounted, which also challenges the philosophy supporting it, philosophical ‘deconstruction’.</u></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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>'I', 'my self', am an illusion</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">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.</span></p><p>In the last two days a website has been online presenting an Open Letter in support of Sussex University’s stand for academic freedom.</p><p><a href="https://openlettertosussexfromukphilosophers.wordpress.com/">https://openlettertosussexfromukphilosophers.wordpress.com/</a></p><p>The letter has signatories from many academics across the UK, many from senior positions in established and well-regarded universities.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a4xKaIyApQU/YWcS4RdRgII/AAAAAAAAAMA/fSpmaRKuOIoR38SAsqrUR_J7twSp4PlkACLcBGAsYHQ/s640/solidarity%2Bletter.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="360" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a4xKaIyApQU/YWcS4RdRgII/AAAAAAAAAMA/fSpmaRKuOIoR38SAsqrUR_J7twSp4PlkACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/solidarity%2Bletter.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><p><br /></p>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: “<i>This letter supports a university defending a person [Kathleen Stock] who<b> is campaigning to erase trans women </b>/ <b>is a fascist</b> and therefore the signatories are also <b>fascist</b></i>”.<p></p><p>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’.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0Vyiw8KM680/YWcTs3s_0QI/AAAAAAAAAMI/-wizgCRfBi8Acn2-BxZkEMhq2t8SV3PGwCLcBGAsYHQ/s814/exchange%2Bpic.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="475" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0Vyiw8KM680/YWcTs3s_0QI/AAAAAAAAAMI/-wizgCRfBi8Acn2-BxZkEMhq2t8SV3PGwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/exchange%2Bpic.jpg" width="187" /></a></div><p>(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’</p><p>[see <a href="https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/">https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/ </a>]</p><p>is - in respect of ‘transgender’ - “eliminationist” and “genocidal”. I refer to British-US academic Grace Lavery’s blog-post, <a href="https://grace.substack.com/p/the-uk-media-has-seriously-bungled?fbclid=IwAR2kYnVhneR2qjYUjadKZGW3gprtD0Dh_EjH-kPaBB6NcpqKIhwSM82SXsA">https://grace.substack.com/p/the-uk-media-has-seriously-bungled?fbclid=IwAR2kYnVhneR2qjYUjadKZGW3gprtD0Dh_EjH-kPaBB6NcpqKIhwSM82SXsA</a>)</p><p>(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 “<em style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; caret-color: rgb(60, 36, 36); color: #3c2424; font-family: Spectral, serif, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 17px;">declaration does not amount to the claim that trans people should be eliminated in law” - </em>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).</p><p><br /></p><p>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'.</p><p>In her paper presented to the UK Aristotelian Society in 2020, “<i>What is Sexual Orientation?</i>”, Professor Stock makes reference to the so-called ‘divide’ in modern western philosophy between so-called ‘Analytical’ and so-called ‘Continental’ philosophy.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mzgD3dSwQTY/YWcT9hHGJrI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/k_ukSUVIHKAmbHV5PNOivDGcX7NAWcu-QCLcBGAsYHQ/s766/stock%2Bextract%2Bpic.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="766" data-original-width="746" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mzgD3dSwQTY/YWcT9hHGJrI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/k_ukSUVIHKAmbHV5PNOivDGcX7NAWcu-QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/stock%2Bextract%2Bpic.jpg" width="312" /></a></div><br /><p>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 '<i>In our time</i>', which I recommend).</p><p>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’. </p><p>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 <i>nullification of self</i>. (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.</p><p>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 “<b><i>Are you an illusion?</i></b>”, which explores the massive sense of <i>subjective erasure</i> 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 <i>think</i> 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: ‘<i>eliminative materialism</i>’. (The ‘eliminative’ is instructive here, I think!) Indeed it <i>is </i>a doctrine which ‘<i>eliminates</i>’ something (i.e. Agency) which people hold very dear to themselves as <i>who they are in this world</i>. 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.</p><p>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’, ‘<b>gender</b>’ 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 <i>innate</i> ‘gender identity’, free-floating <i>from</i> 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.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yawM1CRWxE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yawM1CRWxE</a>). 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.</p><p><a href="https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/Public%20Policies/2021/Joint%20WPATH%20USPATH%20Letter%20Dated%20Oct%2012%202021.pdf">https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/Public%20Policies/2021/Joint%20WPATH%20USPATH%20Letter%20Dated%20Oct%2012%202021.pdf</a></p><p>A very popular Marxist (‘Continental’) philosopher Slavoj Zizek has spoken about this 'gender essentialism'.</p><p>_________</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j578jTBCY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2j578jTBCY</a></p><p>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). </p><p>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.</p><p>______________</p><p>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 <i>idea</i> 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 <i>good </i>idea? </p><p>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 <i>kill </i>and<i> become a killer -</i> 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). </p><p>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).</p><p>Criticisms of 'gender identity' are expressed from within academic discourse, which question an idea implied in a doctrine also generated within academia. </p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-61567543131370827342021-10-02T03:18:00.010-07:002021-10-29T17:20:45.124-07:00Men talking abt women’s demand for end to VAWG <p> <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px;">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.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px;"><a href="https://t.co/30V5Gc4WbS?amp=1">https://t.co/30V5Gc4WbS?amp=1</a></span></p><p><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">Nicky Campbell asked ‘So, for example, if I see you running [Mara is an athlete] towards me, do I cross the road?’</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">To which Mara replied (I am paraphrasing), ‘Yes, you could make space by stepping into the road’. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">But what I am writing about here, is what the Radio 5 exchange reminded me of, as I listened.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">I was living quite near Clapham at the time, tho I didn’t attend the vigil.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">This conversation followed many others we had had</span> 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.</p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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).</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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. </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">“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”.</p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">We then began to consider hypothetical situations, like walking along a street, and being conscious of a lone woman approaching. What do we do?</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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’).</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">(This is what had been mentioned in the exchange I have just listened to, between Mara Yamauchi and Nicky Campbell, on Radio 5).</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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*.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">This is how the conversation went.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">It became a matter of pride, and being proud as a ‘manly attribute’ and therefore a desirable attribute to have *as a man*.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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*.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">He was, in fact, intimidating to me. And that was the point.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">And that was the point when I decided to break off the conversation. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 27.4px;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">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.</span></p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-150274686327099442021-07-01T02:10:00.021-07:002021-07-04T07:41:19.288-07:00Gender-identity ideology is trans-humanism is anti-humanism<p>Self-congratulatory theoretical constructions, inimical to human flourishing.</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://thepointmag.com/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool/">https://thepointmag.com/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool/</a></p><p>Meanwhile, here is a recent example of legal commentary inflected by this nihilistic anti-human intellectualism.</p><p>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).</p><p><a href="https://criticallegalthinking.com/">https://criticallegalthinking.com/</a></p><p>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): </p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1">‘“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.”’</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">To Prof Sharpe, this example of a belief that would *not* attain the status of protected philosophical belief, “<i>does not seem fundamentally different to the claimant’s </i>[Forstater’s]<i> belief ‘trans women are male</i>’”.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">That’s where Prof Sharpe feels justified in using the title “Not a Nazi ... But”.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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”.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Thus Prof Sharpe likens this belief to Nazism.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">This is idea-ism quite out of touch with human reality. </p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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’.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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?</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">It is the *ideas* and the *language* which are opposed and denied.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Freud and Marx (taken as representing bodies of thought) are fundamentally incompatible.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">But in the past, ideologically hidebound people, who were Marxists, did kill (and died) for their beliefs. </p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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 <i>idea</i> 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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">We avert actual Nazism by recognising theory to be - always - potentially wrong. </p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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”.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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. </p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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):</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">“[RW refers to ‘The History Manifesto’, 2014, by Cambridge university historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage, which posits that] <i>the thinning-out of historical knowledge in general ... [means] that we now have an impatience of understanding of how we got here.</i></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><i>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.</i>”</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">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).</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">“</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(53, 53, 53); color: #353535; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;"><i>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.</i>“</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(53, 53, 53); color: #353535; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: #353535; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(53, 53, 53);">Learning, and knowledge, is situated not in isolated brains, self-identifying, but in bodies. Persons and their bodies.</span></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="color: #353535; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(53, 53, 53);">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.</span></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">References:</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘Being human’: lectures by Dr Rowan Williams, former arch-bishop of Canterbury, includes</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘Tree of knowledge: Bodies, Minds, Thoughts’</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><a href="https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/videos/dr-rowan-williams-tree-knowledge-bodies-minds-and-thoughts">https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/videos/dr-rowan-williams-tree-knowledge-bodies-minds-and-thoughts</a></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘6 years in the gender wars’, Sarah Ditum</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><a href="https://sarahditum.com/2018/09/10/six-years-in-the-gender-wars/">https://sarahditum.com/2018/09/10/six-years-in-the-gender-wars/</a></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘The divorce between the sciences and the humanities’, Isaiah Berlin.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Anything by Stefan Collini.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Introductory lectures on the theory of literature, Paul Fry (Yale University).</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘Popper: the early years’, Malachi Hacohen.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘Fairy Tales’, the Grimm brothers.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ Melanie Klein.</p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 21px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-76547282525246044552020-12-22T01:12:00.009-08:002021-01-18T17:01:45.580-08:00Transcript: ‘Savage Minds’ interview with Heather Brunskell-Evans<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Transcript: ‘Gender identity’ ideology and transgenderism discussed by critics Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans.</p><p class="MsoNormal">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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">The following is a transcript of <a href="https://savageminds.substack.com/p/heather-brunskell-evans-s1e2"><b>podcast conversation
between Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans</b></a>, from the blog <b>‘<a href="https://savageminds.substack.com/archive?sort=new">Savage Minds</a>’</b>,
originally posted October 24<sup>th</sup> 2020.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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, <a href="https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Marilynne+Robinson+absence+of+Mind&&view=detail&mid=E9A67E5313A004EA04B0E9A67E5313A004EA04B0&&FORM=VRDGAR"><b>Marilynne Robinson called it 'cookie-cutter Foucault-ianism</b>'</a>. 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">(J Vigo intro text from Savage Minds website:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>‘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.’</i>)<i><o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal">[TRANSCRIPT STARTS:]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">JV: Welcome to Savage Minds. Heather How did you come to
approach gender body politics from the larger political and philosophical
landscape?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 18<sup>th</sup> century,
further developed in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, and keeps on evolving
actually, but I think I may return to John Stuart Mill, if that’s ok. …<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[…]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>isn’t</i> 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?’.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>not</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <i>just
different </i>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 <i>all</i> 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 <i>how</i> 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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>us tools with which to think, and in that
sense I think Foucault is one of the most important of 20<sup>th</sup> Century
philosophers, because he dares to say ‘I don’t have the answers’ and he dares
to say we collectively, <i>not</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>both</i> 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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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!<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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, <i>ad nauseam</i>! <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he talks about the way that men
and women in their physical body <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are
caught up in relations of power, which fix <i>on</i> to the body. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 19<sup>th</sup> 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 <i>policed</i> through them, and [according to Foucault’s
analysis] we end up <i>believing</i> 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 <i>imagine</i> ourselves to be free, and if we imagine ourselves
to be free, then we can lose track of the ways in which we are <i>not</i> 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 <i>not</i>,
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 21<sup>st</sup> 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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he’s <i>on our side</i>. 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 <i>give</i> him
responsibility without taking the time and effort to actually understand him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 20<sup>th</sup>
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?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, Foucault made an
argument that ‘adult-child’ sex, was not, or was not <i>necessarily</i>, 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 <i>oeuvre</i> 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 <i>does</i> 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 <i>developed</i> sexual
person, in her own right, and that she got paid for doing it. So, it’s a <i>dreadful</i>
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 <i>does </i>in his dialogues – there are a number
of them, which are published in English – with people who <i>do</i> advocate
for child-adult sex being <i>possibly</i> consensual. Nobody’s arguing that
children should be there as sexual objects for men – let’s face it, it is
largely men – but they <i>are</i> saying that children <i>can consent</i> to
having sex with men and in fact that their sexuality might lead them to <i>want</i>
to have sex with men. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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–<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 – <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[This discussion was recorded a short while before the
judgement was handed down, on 1<sup>st</sup> 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.]
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">- [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 <i>name people</i>, 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 <i>not</i> averse to bringing Foucault into that, but <i>not</i>
Foucault’s <i>theoretical</i> 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 <i>says</i> he says. Let’s
have a proper discussion about it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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’.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of rape, even textually.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>does</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>discussing</i> things is now becoming <i>forbidden</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>so</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>won’t</i> 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 <i>beingness</i> 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–<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">JV: What you’re saying right now reminds me of what happened
in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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>I completely agree with what you’re
saying. Keep at it</i>’; 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 20<sup>th</sup> 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 18<sup>th</sup> 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 <i>based</i> <i>on</i> 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 <i>inner soul</i>.
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?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>surveillance we do upon
ourselves</i>, 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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–. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>be</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 ‘<i>Trust
us, Believe us</i>’, if we do say that our <i>accusations</i> 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 <i>own</i> 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 <i>in</i> that, <i>that’s</i>
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 <i>only</i> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">HBE: Yes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">HBE: Yeah.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">[<a href="https://averageprotestant.blogspot.com/2018/11/transcript-of-prof.html"><b>Link
to my transcript of 2016 speech by Sheila Jeffries – ‘The Social and Political
Construction on of Transgenderism’</b></a>]<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">HBE: Yeah, I know. I know.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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
– <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-size: initial;">I don’t think there’s
anything nice about telling people that they need to surgically modify their
bodies</span>. 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?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>un-kind</i>. 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
<i>oppressed</i>, 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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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’.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Your book [<a href="https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950229">Brunskell-Evans, ‘Transgender
Body Politics’, Spinifex, 2020</a>] has been out, and can you speak about the pressure
you had, or your editors had, to stifle your book’s publication?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>he</i>
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 <i>me</i> to explain why
this is outrageous. The onus is not on <i>those people</i>, the Owen Joneses,
the intersectional feminists, to explain how <i>they</i> have arrived at <i>their</i>
moral position. Everything’s turned upside down.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>good</i> way that Twitter functions – is that it <i>does</i> 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 <i>can</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">{end] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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: <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-Left/dp/1472965213">'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left'</a> (2015). </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-75311846705624673042020-05-05T14:39:00.000-07:002020-05-05T14:39:21.950-07:00Comment on "I'm not transphobic but..."<div style="color: #e4af0a; font-family: ".SF UI Text"; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt; margin: 0px;">Lorna Finlayson</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt; margin: 0px;">17 October 2018, published online by Verso books.</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt; margin: 0px;">https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity</span></a><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.5pt; margin: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">This article was listed online in October 2018, and is a considered case in support of gender self-ID in law. (Considered insofar as it has a controlled tone and attempts to address points in depth, and thereby acknowledges the intelligence of the reader, unlike a great many examples of, in my view, terrible writing - particularly on this subject - put out by people claiming to be philosophers. Ah! We are all suffering from the effects if people ‘building careers’ in philosophy).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">Having said that, I find this short paper published by three intersectional feminists (is that a fair description?) extremely confusing and I have come away from it feeling depressed by its narrowness, foreshortened logic and what seem to me to be deliberately perplexing rhetorical devices.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">It doesn't seem to be a problem for these authors to allow that men who identify as women <i>are</i> women. I should not bother. (Nothing I say will persuade them, and nothing they say will persuade me. Patriarchy is their concern, as feminists, I think. So be it.) It seems to be axiomatic, and so they seem to accept gender self-ID as given, whatever may be said about it. Something very hard to pin down suggests to me that for these authors sex is not a meaningful category. But that's not what this article deals with.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">It deals with the statistical fact of male violence against women, and claims that men-who-identify-as-women (well, they won't have this, because, as above, they say that such a person already <i>is</i> a woman, however) - the article claims that because of their gender identification, and their experience negotiating life presenting as women, male-bodied-persons-who-identify-as-women (MBp-W) are statistically less given to violence against women than male-bodied-persons-who-identify-as-men (MBp-M)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">The authors acknowledge that there is no data to support this claim, and point to the difficulty of acquiring such data when studies into male violence on women do not distinguish between MBp-W and MBp-M. (Are the authors being ironic here? Wouldn't proposing such a study meet with resistance from people like them claiming that such a study would be "transphobic"). They then turn the case around and say that, given this lack of evidence, </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;"><i>"the risk allegedly posed to cis women by trans women seems purely theoretical" </i>(!)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">(To remind ourselves, the claim the authors oppose is that male-bodied-persons-who-identify-as-women (MBp-W) are males, and males perpetrate violence on females, therefore MBp-Ws are a risk to women, who are adult females, and the law should not enable gender self-identification, which would permit men to enter ... etc.).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;">Anyway, it is a considered article. But I feel it has a serious oversight. While the authors claim that there is no evidence to <i>deny</i> that MBp-Ws are less violent towards women (adult females) than MBP-Ms, they fail to mention or deal with the matter of the location of male on female violence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: ".sfuitext"; font-size: 17pt;"><span class="_5mdd _1n4g">Isn't it the case that most male-on-female violence is perpetrated in the home, in relationships, in domestic settings, and at those times when there has been a rejection of the man by the woman?<br />Therefore, surely the critical evidence wanted (and currently lacking), concerning the supposed lesser propensity to violence against women of male-bodied-persons-who-identify-as-women (MBp-W), requires there to be intimate relationships between women and MBp-Ws.<br /><br />Yet hasn’t there been, at the least, a violent emotional reaction on the part of many MBp-Ws because they are being rejected by lesbian women who don’t want relationships with male-bodied persons? (The name 'TERF' has been used by MBp-Ws for women who reject them, and clearly it is sometimes used to shame and hurt?) Doesn't this reaction of MBp-Ws conform to patterns of male violence against women?<br /><br />The authors seem to be asking women to accede and say to MBp-Ws “Yes, we’ll accept your promise to be less violent than average men, and we’ll have relationships with you”. But having seen MBp-Ws' violent reaction to lesbian women’s rejection of them, why should they?</span></span></div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-4041849064888316102020-03-10T13:26:00.005-07:002021-12-01T13:00:22.506-08:00Sex-based protections in UK law - dialogue with someone who would abolish them<div><b><u>Instead of screenshots, this post is reproduced in *full text* in another, more recent post on this website.</u></b></div><b><u><div><b><u><br /></u></b></div>Sex-based protections in UK law - a dialogue with someone who would abolish them on grounds that ‘sex’ (in the sense of ‘being sexed’, i.e. male or female, and with that ‘sex difference’) is an empty category and a tool of oppression under Patriarchy</u></b><div><b><u><br /></u></b></div><div><b><u><br /></u></b>
Between 3rd and 7th March 2020, I was in a long online exchange with someone in response to Suzanne Moore’s Guardian article ‘<a href="https://amp.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced?CMP=share_btn_tw&__twitter_impression=true">Women must have the right to organise</a>’ (2nd March 2020)<br />
I was (am) on side of upholding sex-based rights in UK Equality Act 2010.<br />
‘Abi’ (name changed), a self-described ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039?seq=1">intersectional</a> feminist’*, took the view that sex is thoroughly socially constructed, and that the business of classification of individuals by sex <i>is</i> patriarchy** (and patriarchy <i>is</i> misogyny).<br />
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.”<br />
What developed was as in-depth a conversation I have had with someone of opposing views, extending over 200+ replies..<br />
I am posting because some readers might find interesting.<br />
It’s a 20 minute read.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*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.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**To some, ‘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, and I don’t.</span><br />
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<i><span style="color: #cc0000;">How can there be ‘perception of sex’ without some background notion of ‘sex’ so that we can say it is what we perceive?</span></i></h3>
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<span style="color: blue;"><i>How can there be perception of race without some background notion of what Race is? </i></span></h3>
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<span style="color: blue;"><i>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.</i></span></h3>
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<i><span style="color: red;">But *that it exists* and *that it is innate* is precisely what is stated by advocates and is advanced in policies and proposed law reform, now, in the UK.</span></i></h3>
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<span style="color: blue;"><i style="font-weight: normal;">I’m not convinced the categories [‘woman’ / ‘man’] are terribly meaningful</i></span></h3>
<h3>
<i style="color: red; font-weight: normal;">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</i></h3>
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<h3>
<i style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">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).</span></i></h3>
<h3>
<i style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;">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).</span></i></h3>
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<h4>
<span style="font-size: large;">Thank you to Dr Jane Clare Jones for her blog/essay </span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://janeclarejones.com/2019/01/24/judith-butler-how-to-disappear-patriarchy-in-three-easy-steps/">Judith Butler: How To Disappear Patriarchy In Three Easy Steps</a>, from which I quoted in this online exchange.</span></h4>
<br /></div>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-23739300643438384072018-11-30T12:53:00.000-08:002019-02-13T00:33:01.090-08:00"Maybe you should try reading Judith Butler?"I’m looking at this because questions of ‘identity’ have been important to me, and I am suspicious of stark and exclusive claims of identity, and identity-based politics in general.<br />
<br />
I'm glad to find Judith Butler's work (introduced very entertainingly by <a href="https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-23">Prof Paul Fry here</a>) has respet for Freudian ideas of personality development, in which pre-socialised, pre-theoretical innate impulses, biological expectations (of love, for example), the infant's phantasying and object choices, are present, and remain ready to break through.<br />
(I see, and like to reflect on, links here with Karl Popper, who pointed to human biological expectations to illustrate an origin for theorising <i>per se</i>. I may have written on that in past blogs.)<br />
I'm glad for the overview of Butler's writing, and its context, at the Stanford University encyclopaedia of philosophy website, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/">entry on feminist treatments of sex and gender</a>, which draws attention to Butler's use of Freud.<br />
<br />
I’m grateful to Jane Clare Jones for her pithy and forthright take on Judith Butler.<br />
<a href="https://janeclarejones.com/2018/07/18/post-structuralism-butler-and-bodies/">https://janeclarejones.com/2018/07/18/post-structuralism-butler-and-bodies/</a><br />
from which this quote, which I like:<br />
“<span style="background-color: #edf2f2; color: #3f424a; font-family: "lucida grande" , "lucida sans unicode" , "lucida sans" , "geneva" , "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">What we work on is what matters to us, and what matters to us, more often than not, is what hurts us. We work on our wounds – on the places where we have bashed into the world or the world has bashed into us and we came away bleeding and tried to stem the flow of blood by imagining how things could be otherwise.”</span><br />
... and from which she speculates:<br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: #edf2f2; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">“Butler’s solution for dealing with her particular wound of homosexual gender-non-conformity, is to try and trouble the distinction between ‘men’ and ‘woman’ at a fundamental ontological level. (And for those of us who think we need the difference between men and women to describe </span><em style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">how</em><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: #edf2f2; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> and </span><em style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">why</em><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: #edf2f2; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> men oppress women, that is, </span><em style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">seriously</em><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: #edf2f2; caret-color: rgb(63, 66, 74); color: #3f424a; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, trouble.)”</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #edf2f2; color: #3f424a; font-family: "lucida grande" , "lucida sans unicode" , "lucida sans" , "geneva" , "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(J Clare Jones, ‘..Butler and Bodies’, online essay)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #edf2f2; color: #3f424a; font-family: "lucida grande" , "lucida sans unicode" , "lucida sans" , "geneva" , "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span>
<br />
I'm also grateful for Martha Nussbaum's having read Butler thoroughly in around 1999, having given thoughtful comment on it, and having <a href="https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf">persuaded me to go no further with i</a>t for now.Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-47272060925820688802018-11-21T10:15:00.004-08:002018-12-01T02:23:12.047-08:00Politics of identity - some fragments from Prof Paul Fry and link to a piece on transgenderism by Prof Kathleen StockLink to an <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-self-identification-should-not-legally-make-you-a-woman-103372">article</a> by Dr Kathleen Stock of Sussex University discussing female-sex-based protections and related objections to gender-self-identification in law.<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<u><br /></u>
<u><br /></u>
<u>P</u><u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">olitics of identity - some fragments from Prof Paul Fry</span></u></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have revisited Prof. Paul Fry’s “Theory of Literature”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">which accompanies his series of Yale University lectures,
available to view free!</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Against the ‘death of the author’ idea emerging from Roland
Barthes and Michel Foucault in the late 1960s, Paul Fry quotes Samuel Johnson (from
his 1765 ‘Preface’ to the works of Shakespeare), to the effect that, we don’t
have to regard the “author” as something to be afraid of. Instead we can do homage
to the author:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[Quoting Johnson:] “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There
is always a silent reference in human works to human abilities</i>”, in other
words, we can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">esteem</i> humanity by its
works, we want (now quoting Paul Fry):</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that a “work”
(somebody’s work) is not just a set of functions – variables, as one might say,
in the lab [or, merely a manifestation of impersonal patriarchal power]. It’s
produced by genius. It’s something that allows us to rate human ability “high”.</i>”
</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But now returning to the theorising of post-structuralism,
and quoting Foucault:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The author is therefore
the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning.</i>”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And later (also quoting Foucault:) “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The author has no legal status</i>” – out goes bourgeois thinking, out
goes ownership, out goers the ‘author’ of ‘authority’.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And yet, as Paul Fry goes on to say, here is someone who is “proliferating
meaning” – <i>their</i> meaning – by claiming authorship!:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am a lesbian
Latina!</i></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I stand before you as
an author articulating an identity for the purpose of achieving freedom, not to
police you, not to deny you your freedom, but to define my own freedom; and I
stand before you precisely, and in pride, as an author. I don’t want to be
called an author function, I don’t wat to be called an instrument of something
larger than myself, because frankly that is what I have always been and I want
precisely as an authority through my authorship to remind you that I am not
anybody’s instrument, but that I am autonomous and free.</i>”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Paul Fry again:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px;">In other words the author,
the traditional idea of the author - so much under suspicion in the work of
Foucault and Barthes in the late sixties – can be turned on its ear. It can be
understood as a source of new-found authority, of the freedom of one who has
been characteristically not free, and can be received by a reading community in
those terms. It’s very difficult to think how a Foucault might respond to that
insistence, and it’s a problem that in a way dogs everything, or many of the things
we’re going to be reading during the course of these lectures – even within the
sorts of theorising that are characteristically called cultural studies and
concern questions of the politics of identity – even within those disciplines
there is a division of thought, between people who affirm the autonomous
integrity and individuality of the identity in question and those who say any
and all identities are only subject positions discernible and revealed through
the matrix of social practices.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px;">There is an intrinsic split
even within those forms of theory – and not to mention the kinds of theory that
don’t directly have to do with the politics of identity – between those for
whom what’s at stake is the discovery of autonomous individuality and those for
whom what’s at stake is the tendency to hold <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">at arm’s length</i> such discoveries over against the idea that the instability
of any and all subject positions is what actually contains within it – as Foucault
and Barthes thought, as they sat looking at the police standing over against
them – those for whom this alternative notion of the undermining of any sense
of that which is authoritative is in its turn a possible source, of freedom.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">”</span></div>
<br />
<ul style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="disc">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;">Paul
Fry, ‘Theory of Literature’ (2012), Yale University Press</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When it comes to assertions of gender identity, the division
is no less present.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">However, my impression is that certain strong voices claiming autonomous identity - self-identification - claim
both positions at once, and overlook the contradiction.</span><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-85591115914563026592018-11-20T09:18:00.005-08:002023-01-09T19:52:45.502-08:00<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPgmTVt5_Q"><b>TRANSCRIPT of Prof. Sheila Jeffreys talk,</b></a><br />
<br />
</span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘The social and political construction of transgenderism’</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">(some words/phrases inaudible, guessed-at and put in square brackets)</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Professor Sheila Jeffreys</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘The social and political construction of transgenderism’</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Delivered at Conway Hall, London, September 2016</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“This is a very historic occasion because it’s the first
conference of its kind. I don’t think there’s been anything like it, where
critical feminist [accounts?] of transgenderism have been publicly expressed
for a whole day in this way.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Some of you who read the Guardian will be aware that in the
middle of this last week there were three pages of the Guardian devoted
to the huge increase in the demand for transgender treatments at gender
identity clinics in the UK. For instance, several of the fourteen clinics have
had increases in recent years of several hundred percent. The Tavistock
Institute for Children has had referrals in the past year of 100% increase.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now quite apart from the strain that the creation of this
invented problem creates for the NHS – and I’m sure quite a lot of you in this
room will be very aware of the strains on the NHS at the moment – quite apart
from that difficulty, there is no criticism, really. Either that […?} the
Guardian articles had no critical commentary at all. There was no sociological
perspective, no political perspective, no mention that any feminists disagreed
with what was happening, absolutely nothing.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So that is not a responsible approach by the media, but it
is the general response by the media. There is absolutely no criticism out
there.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There’s no suggestion, for instance, that transgenderism
could be a social contagion, produced through the internet, through the sending
of educators into schools to teach transgenderism and to make children
transgender, and so on. There is no suggestion of any social influences on what
is happening here. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now I will suggest now, today, that transgenderism is indeed
an invention, that it is socially and politically constructed, and that there
is a contagion is a result of forces of power in hetero-patriarchal
society, rather than related in any way to an innate and trans-historical
condition. For instance, those who believe that there has always been
transgenders or transsexuals in history, or say there will always be transgender
children historically – actually, I don’t think so; there have not; but there
are supposedly now.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, as transgenderism grows as a social contagion, the many
social harms associated with it - from conflict with women’s rights to
conversion of young lesbian and gay men, to surgically constructed
hetero-sexuality, to serious health problems created by the treatment, and many
others - all of these increase, as we shall see, through the other
contributions at this conference.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, the ideology of transgenderism is, most importantly,
that persons who transgender are essentially endowed with mental and
behavioural characteristics more suitable to someone of the opposite sex; that
men are seen, for instance, as having ‘women’s brains’ in biologically male
bodies, and to possess a ‘feminine essence’; they don’t like the critical
analysis of where transgenderism comes from – the idea that it is constructed
and we can look at that – because it undermines the essentialism of their
condition; and the legislative and policy gains they have made – which endanger
women’s rights and threaten to dis-appear women as biological female persons –
they are all based upon this ideology of essentials, so it’s important {…?] the
things that people are going to say today cannot be heard. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In support of the ideology it’s argued that there have
always been transgenders [sic] in history, and definitely reject social
constuctivism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now the concept of transgenderism was, the anthropologist in
the US David Valentine says, institutionalised in the 1990s. Before that the
term was not really used, no-one was really aware of it, and the term of
course needs to be really out there in order for people to be able to identify
with it, if it doesn’t exist then it’s not really possible really to have transgenders.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Valentine is an anthropologist who did research on
communities in New York in the mid-1990s that were identified to him as
‘transgender’ by the eight outreach organisations he worked for, and he was
surprised to discover that none of those in these supposedly ‘transgender
communities’ identified themselves as transgender, or had any idea about
the term. So the social services and NGOs got it first, they {…} that ideology
and they were going onto the street and promote it and try to identify their clients;
that’s how things get institutionalised.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He found that the men on the strolls he was directed to, to
define the transgender communities, were gay men involved in prostitution; they
adopted attire more normally associated with women, but they were happy to
identify as men, and as gay, and they wanted to keep their penises and were
very fond of them, and so on; so they were unaware of the concept of
transgenderism. They wouldn’t be now. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">They’ve not caught up with the new language and they’ve not
caught up with the new categorisation; there’s a time lag between the voices of
authority that constructed transgenderism and its reaching its targets, right?
which is really fascinating.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, I’ll just say this very briefly, of course, to make
sure you really know this, the difference between sex and gender; transgender
activists believe, or pretend to believe, for tactical purposes, that ‘gender’
exists as an essence in human beings, and they determinedly confuse gender with
biological sex, but actually biological sex is an inconvenient truth because it
can’t be altered.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Transgenders can only ‘trans’ the superficial behavioural
traits and norms that they identify as belonging to one biological sex or
another.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now the terms ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’ –</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The term ‘transsexual’ was coined in the 1950s to describe
those persons who wished to change their ‘sex’ as it was understood, really, at
the time, and the terms was popularised by the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin
in his book ‘The Transsexual Phenomenon’ (1966). It’s important he’s an
endocrinologist; many of those involved in the construction of transgenderism
are from the drugs industry because, of course, the persons identified as
transsexual or transgender have to take these drugs for the rest of their lives;
and I’m sure you are aware lots of women came off HRT when they discovered how
harmful it was; it was necessary to have replacements - big drug
companies have to have replacements as the dangers and the harms of the drugs
they are currently peddling become obvious, okay?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So putting huge numbers of children and adults on these
drugs for the rest of their lives is a very important source of profit and
indeed the drug industry companies fund the so-called transgender health
organisation, internationally ‘W-path’ – if you go onto that site you will see
the huge amounts of money coming from all the major drug companies into it –
it’s a massive source of profit for them.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So, at that time in the 1960s, there was this distinction
made between cross-dressers and </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">transvestites, who were men who were sexually excited by
wearing clothing they associated with women and engaging in masochistic
fantasies about themselves as the subordinate sex, and men who actually
impersonated the opposite sex and required social recognition of themselves as
women, so transvestites were seen as separate from transsexuals, and indeed the
Beaumont Society in Britain was for transvestites and they didn’t want
transsexuals in there, and so on. There was all sorts of boundary keeping; that’s
all fallen away now, of course.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The term ‘transgender’ was coined by hetero-sexual
cross-dresser called Virginia Prince in the 1960s, and he sought to distinguish
himself from transsexuals and thought men who wanted to cut their penises off
were sadly mistaken, so he lived as a woman all of his life and he never
actually thought he was one, and he didn’t have his penis removed – He lived
all his life as a woman after his two marriages.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He started a magazine in the US for cross-dressers in 1960
called ‘Trans-vestial’- so we have to remember the role of the social movement
of cross-dressers as one of the social and political forces that has
constructed transgenderism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He worked to create a more acceptable face for
cross-dressing, a practice previously understood as paraphilia, a form of
sexual fetishism, so Virginia Prince tried to normalise that through this
movement and his magazine and so on, and when you look at these magazines, and
I have, from the 1960s, it’s extremely similar to what you see, in terms of the
stories of cross-dressers and transgenders [sic] online now, there’s virtually
not a whisper of difference between the way that this is put across, it’s very
fascinating.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now his adoption of the term is part of what I will call
here the move to gender, in which both cross-dressing and transvestitism came
to be understood as an expression of an internal or essential gender, rather
than simply as being hobbies carried out for sexual excitement.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The term ‘transgender’ was then normalised to be a politics
of the 1990s, when it was adopted to convey a wide meaning covering all
those seen as engaging in behaviour that is usually allotted to the opposite
sex, so it came to include butch lesbians, cross-dressers, gay men, prostituted
men, and so on. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Presently the term ‘transgender’ is used in common parlance
to refer to those who have once been called ‘transsexual’ most commonly, but
the distinctions have really broken down.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now in history, transgenderism in history – because remember
the ideology is that there have always been transgenders in history because it
is an essential condition – what transgender activists seek to do is to
appropriate persons in history who might have worn the clothing of the opposite
sex and say that they were really transgenders. The problem with that is that
they are mostly lesbians and gay men who have an honoured part in lesbian and
gay history because a lot of lesbian and gay men have historically tended to
wear items of clothing of the opposite sex, so a bit of a turf war there, with
transgender activists seeking to appropriate lesbians and gays from lesbian and
gay history.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[16:39}</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In fact women cross-dressed historically because they didn’t
want to be made into a prostitute, they wanted to be able to be pirates, to
enter the military {…} they sometimes cross-dressed because they wanted
to be able to have relationships with women without social opprobrium, so there
were many reasons for cross-dressing which would not include thinking that they
were transgender, a concept which did not really exist.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So transgenderism does not have some essential process in
history, until, transgenderism – the main force in creating transgender as a
category - is sexology, the science of sex. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now in the late nineteenth century, faith in God as the
arbiter of all things sexual was declining, there were all these children in
London in the mid-nineteenth century who didn’t even know who Jesus was, which
of course was a concern to some ([laughter], and so therefore there needed to
be a new regulatory authority for sexual practice, and so people didn’t have to
be taken to the church courts or whatever, and the regulatory authority was
sexology or the scientists of sex. They were medical men who expanded their
remit to become pundits on correct sexual behaviour; they were traditional men
who believed that men should be men and women should be women, for instance
they sought to explain homosexuality through a notion that it was a biological
condition in which by some mysterious fashion the brain of a woman had
occupied the body of a man, and vice versa. This will be sounding familiar,
probably, in terms of transgenderism, and indeed this is the first
manifestation of this kind of ideology from an authoritative medical source, so
that’s in the late-nineteenth early-twentieth century. They didn’t clearly
distinguish homosexuality from what would be later understood as
transvestitism, transsexualism or transgenderism at that time; they did
understand these persons, these homosexual persons as biologically constructed,
they had congenital abnormality and so on, for instance the sexologist Havelock
Ellis did say that lesbians are able to whistle and gay [sic] men unable to
whistle because this is biological [laughter] and I think it was that lesbians
like the colour purple and gay men the colour green – biological, and also
handwriting – he was very keen on handwriting – you could tell from the
handwriting whether the person had a brain of the wrong sex, in the wrong body
and so on, and they described it as being about germs, sexual germs, and so on,
they didn’t know about hormones or chromosomes or genes, or of those things at
the time. But they thought that in the homosexual, something goes wrong with
the process and ends up with a person who is more fitted for the ‘inverted’
than for the normal sexual impulse.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now these sexologists had no way at that time of making the
sexual ‘inverts’ as they called them into members of the opposite sex at that
time, physically - they didn’t have the hormones, they didn’t have the surgeons
at that time – that wasn’t until the 1920s, they began to be developed, and you
will know the case of Imar Wegener [?], also known as ‘the Danish Girl’, there
was a movie about him, I think he was a cross-dresser who was then subjected to
these treatments, and he was killed by a uterus transplant in 1931, the
surgeries were a little bit primitive at that time, so he was one of the early
casualties. He has now been claimed as a hero of the transgender movement,
except he was the unfortunate victim of gruesome medical experiments to create
surgically constructed hetero-sexuality.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So I’m going to argue that the category of ‘transgender’ is
indeed constructed by forces of male power.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Let’s look more closely at medicine in the construction of
transgenderism, this only became thinkable, the idea of transgender as we
understand it, as a result of the development of medicine in the 20<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup>
century. Endocrinology was crucial, because it enabled the creation of
artificial hormones. It started off with things like planting goats testicles
into people, all sorts of experiments going on in the [19]20s, and then they
discovered the possibility of using artificial hormones; [Louise …?] had a
wonderful book on this looking at how public dissemination of scientific
knowledge of the human endocrine system in a certain human subject, to
‘understand themselves’ as members of the other sex- so they couldn’t
understand themselves as members of the other sex until the possibilities of
the category </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Had actually been created so they could then identify with
it and seek to enter into it – and so endocrinology created artificial hormones
and then another very important thing is plastic surgery, which enabled [them]
actually to do the operations, and anaesthesia, which made those operations […]
– so there are three medical specialisms which are crucial to the construction
of what we have now.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now the development of these medical specialisms was so important
to the construction of transgenderism that the historian of sexuality, Verne
Bullock [?] comments that he once presented a paper in 1973 suggesting that
trans-sexualism might be iatrogenic, that is, a health problem created by
medicine itself.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[…]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now the idea of trans-sexualism as a condition requiring
treatment by hormones and surgery was not well-accepted in the early years, in
fact when the first famous transsexual in the US Christine Jorgensen went
public with his experience in the 1950s there was a turf war in the medical
profession about the correct treatment, a turf war between those who dealt with
the mind – who considered that the fantasy of being a woman would be best
treated by psychotherapy which they [the subject] should pay for - and those
who were endocrinologists and surgeons who considered the best treatment
was physical, i.e. altering the body, even though the problem was actually in
the mind.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now the male demanders of transgender treatment had been
very important as a social and political force, once the category was there and
the possibilities were there, demand was developed and created a movement that
demanded this treatment, the men fell into two categories: homosexual men who
felt unable to love men while remaining in a male body, and then there were
overwhelmingly hetero-sexual for whom transgender would be a climax to
their interest in cross-dressing. Christine Jorgensen was in the first
category, was a gay man, but persuaded by his doctors in the 1950s he was
really a woman. Homosexual men are a minority of those who transgender, men who
transgender today, the other majority category of demanders derives from men,
ostensibly hetero-sexual cross-dressers, and though cross-dressing is a fairly
common pursuit of hetero-sexual men - probably quite a few of us in this room
have had boyfriends or men they knew who liked dressing up in bits of women’s
clothing – we will talk about that later [laughter] – so it’s actually quite
common – it’s from this constituency that the term ‘transgender’ arose for
cross-dressers.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The cross-dressers’ movement itself – as I mentioned
Virginia Price was involved in creating a movement – [cross-dressers’
movements] were created all over the States and in the UK, and [although] these
movements didn’t have access to the internet, they campaigned for acceptance
through newspapers and magazines. Now they have the internet it’s a whole
different scale of demand and social movement.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now I will move to gender.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The construction of the idea of gender was necessary in
order to justify and explain sex change treatment. Now some of you will
probably be very aware that feminists have used the term ‘gender – not me
– but socialist feminists in particular would, back in the late 1970s,
particularly in the women and self-development movement, have used the term
gender and said it meant it could represent the fact that there was inequality,
that there was a struggle between men and women, it was about political
struggle; unfortunately that understanding has fallen away and I would advise
you to drop the term ‘gender’, we need to eliminate it from our vocabulary as
feminists [applause] [25:20]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We need to talk about ‘sex caste’ or ‘sex class’, choose
your terms, but ‘gender’ is completely meaningless; it’s now understood to be
biological, and in the way it’s being used presently, against us, it’s a very
serious problem.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The sex-change surgery was predicated on the notion of
‘gender’ as created by the sexologists, for which it was a about the idea of an
identity prior to and within the body, that theoretically should dictate the
physical appearance of the subject, that’s how [Hausmann?] describes it</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So it was developed by John Runyon [?] and other sexologists
in the 1960s and 70s. Hausmann calls the doctors the ‘gender managers’,
and she says that opposition to homosexuality fuelled their work. So hatred of
homosexuality has been fundamental to the medical construction of
transgenderism from the 1960s onwards; I think it’s very strongly still there,
and many are prepared to call transgenderism a form of commercial therapy when
it is applied to children today. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Autogynephilia.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I need to say a bit more about what underlies the interest
of the majority of men who are heterosexual who become demanders of
trans-sexual treatment. There is a grouping of sexologists today who argue that
the majority should be understood as […] something called ‘autogynephilia’:
love of woman in yourself. They say it’s a sexual interest or paraphilia, as
transvestitism has always been understood to be; their characterisation of the
practice offers insight into the importance attached by some men who
transgender or cross-dress to appear in public, to women in toilets for
instance, and seeking a reaction from them [women?]. This is a common aspect of
autogynephilia, for instance the sexologists [B… and Trier?] argue, [27:15] and
they describe it as the erotic fantasy of being admired in the female persona
by another person, preferably by a woman in fact (if they are going into the
women’s toilets). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[…? Sexologist?] Blanchard explains that a signal difference
between autogynephiles and homosexuals, to whom they are often compared, is
that homosexuals do not seek a reaction from passers-by for their sexual
[gratification?] - in fact they [homosexuals] are probably going to do whatever
they want to do somewhere private; whereas in fact hetero-sexual men who
progress from cross-dressing to transgenderism act as if they are [in?] a
potential movie into which other persons, such as wives, are inducted – however
un-willingly – into playing the part of the audience; so that audience is
crucial to the practice and the sexual satisfactions of the practice. [There is
also?] a number of sexologists saying that cross-dressing and autogynephile
transsexualism are based on sexual orientation, i.e. paraphilia, rather than
mis-placed gender, they [don’t?] explain what the exactly what the sexual
excitement is based upon, but the sexologists – and, I would [also] – argue
that the sexual interest is a form of masochism; and there is one fascinating
statistic, they say, [that] of men who die practising the dangerous masochistic
activity of auto-erotic asphyxia, approximately twenty-four percent are
cross-dressed. Fascinating.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So why – what is the excitement? The excitement is that woman
are in the subordinate class and wearing the clothing of the subordinate class
has the sexual excitement of masochism. As we shall see this afternoon when I
am talking about the pornography of transgenderism, it’s that status-reduction
that is crucially an element of that sexual excitement.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, Branchild [sexologist?] and his supporters argue that
there is plenty of evidence for the existence of autogynephilia whereas there
is none for feminine essence; and it lies – the evidence lies – in the narratives
that Branchild [?] and the transgender psychologist Anne Lawrence [?] have
collected – Branchild offers some examples from Lawrence’s collection to show
how it manifests itself; one narrative describes the author’s sexual excitement
at being taken for a woman:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
[Quoting from the narrative, speaking with a slightly higher-pitched voice]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘<i>In the early days I would
become aroused whenever anyone – a sales clerk, a casual stranger – would
address me as ‘her’, or perform some courtesy such as holding a door open for
me.</i>”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Just like any other woman’s experience! [Laughter]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Another explains that both before and after sex-reassignment
surgery he liked to pretend to menstruate. [Laughter].</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[Again quoting the narrative, but
in her normal voice]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">‘<i>It was and still is sexually
exciting for me to have female bodily functions. Before my SRS I would pretend
to menstruate by urinating in sanitary pads. I particularly enjoyed wearing the
old-fashioned belted pad with long tabs.</i>’</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[Laughter]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, the motivations of ostensibly hetero-sexual men who
transgender are fairly well explained by these sexologists; as I say, it is
emerging from a form of masochism as sexual excitement. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now another force in the construction of transgenderism
today is the way in which the development of the internet has enabled groups of
mainly men to create online communities around their sexual proclivities, and
this happened in relation to cross-dressing and transgenderism [30:20], but
also in relation to another practice, which has some close connections with
transgenderism, trans-ableism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The example of trans-ableism shows how identity can be built
online, but it also shows the problems of this kind of identity politics, in
which categories of persons who suffer disadvantage, in the case of
trans-ableism persons with disabilities, can be the subject of
appropriation and imitation for sexual excitement using the justification that
an identity for the [?] should be respected.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In this practice, which was originally called apotemnophilia,
is now more usually called body integrity identity disorder, [affected
persons?] seek amputation of one or more limbs, but there are actually
varieties of this practice in which men seek to be completely disabled - some
of them have said they would like to have their backs broken, and so on - and
the [aspects of the?] online creating identities, the main sexologist who is
supporting all of this is Michael [Furst?], editor of the US Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, he has been advocating for this practice, ‘BIID’, to be
added to the DSM, the psychologist’s bible, so that those who seek the
amputation of legs can get treatment […?], he argues that [trans- ?] in general
be placed be placed in the Manual under the heading identity disorder, which
includes – there are only two categories: gender identity disorder and BIID; he
also points out, in his research, that very often there are men who have
expressed both of these things, and one of these is of course, Chloe
Jennings-White, there was a feature – he [sic] was featured in an episode [sic]
of National Geographic’s ‘Taboo’ series. Jennings-White is a man who has
transgendered and he chooses to live as a paraplegic in a wheelchair; he
doesn’t have a disability, but he does get respectful attention, and no-one is
rude to say that not only does he not have a disability, but he is also not a
woman but a man, nobody says that last bit, [they?] accept that he is a woman
with a disability.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There are also online communities which adhere to stranger
identities than these, including trans-species-ists, who identify as wild
animals, most particularly wolves, as wolves are seen as – you know [clenching
her fists] a bit butch I think [laughter] – they don’t want to be […?] because
they’re [sly?] [laughter].</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There are also trans-species-ists – er, trans-ethnicists –
who see themselves as different ethnicities, for example there’s a woman who
sees herself as a […?] cat, and that’s got both of those fantasies in there.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But these are not getting serious attention in the way that
transgenderism is, because gender is seen somehow as real and
significant, whereas the desire for fur or horns is not, right – that’s
something quite separate, although sometimes I think we should try and work out
why gender is seen as this thing you can just fantasise about and adopt, while
[…?] is not.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now I know I have to go fairly quickly so, another force in
the construction of transgenderism is queer politics in the 1990s. Queer
politics said that gender is something that you could transmute or cross-over,
or do anything you like with – you could play with gender and so on and so on –
very different to early feminism of the 1960s and 70s that did not say that,
for instance Robin Morgan in 1973 said:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
[quoting]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i>We know what’s at work when
whites wear black faces; the same thing is at work when men wear drag</i>.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So feminists like Robin Morgan were really clear.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In the 1990s, all of this became very vague. Queer politics
imposed […?] in queering [query-ing] the impossibility of even being a woman,
dis-appearing the importance of biology and so on, have a big part to play in
the construction of transgenderism.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Men who transgender are now seeking to actually construct
feminism in their image, men like Julia Serano, who wrote the book ‘Whipping
Girl’, he doesn’t say he was born transgender, he says at the age of eleven he
was attracted to curtains [laughter]. He says:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[quoting]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i>It wasn’t until the age of
eleven that I consciously recognised that sub-consciously there was an urge
inside to be female. I ound myself to be compelled to </i>[…?]<i> to remove a
set of curtains from the window and wrap them around my body like a dress</i>” </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Women here have probably had that sort of experience.
[Laughter]. My mother would have been furious with me if I’d done that!
[Laughter]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now since he is turned on [?] by the accoutrements of
femininity, he’s very angry that feminists are critical of him. He says that
feminists mis-understand femininity; even many feminists buy-in to traditional
sexists notions about femininity, which is femininity is a problem, that it’s a
sexist notion, that it is artificially contrived and frivolous (yes!). He says
it is not true that femininity is [opposite to?] to masculine, it’s not
artificial, it’s not performance, so aspects of femininity, as well as
masculinity, are natural and precede socialisation, supersede biological sex,
and the job of feminism, according to him, is to empower femininity, right? He
does it, he’s got it, feminism is about empowering him to represent it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[Quoting – presume from Julia
Serano?] </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“<i>No form of gender equality
can ever truly be achieved unless we first work to empower femininity.</i>”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">and so on.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I can see there are a lot of women in this room who are not
involved in that! {Laughter]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Shame on you! [Laughter]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I think I do need to stop now.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Transgender activists such as Julia Serano have developed
[?] a new vocabulary, which you will all be very aware of, to advance their
political agenda, and turn feminism upside-down. One of these new terms is
‘cis-‘ which they apply to […?]</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It turns out to be that women, who feminists see as
oppressed by men, are now actually men’s oppressors, so it’s been completely
turned around, since women oppress men and the men represent feminism and they
are fighting for femininity; it’s the most extraordinary - as Mary Daly [?]
would say – patriarchal reversal; so women, probably […?], have ‘cis-privilege’
over, and engage in ‘cis-sexism’ towards, men who transgender; statements or
behaviours that offend men who transgender, such as political criticism or lack
of enthusiasm on the part of lesbians for relationships with [men who
transgender] are labelled ‘transphobia’ or ‘trans-misogyny’.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">A historical analysis is crucial to an understanding of
where transgenderism came from.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is not a trans-historical or unchanging [?] condition.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Though cross-dressing has existed historically amongst
lesbians and gay men, hetero-sexual men, cross-dressers and some women who
dressed as men so they could […] , go to sea, get in the military, the idea of
an essential condition in which a person could be possessed of the brain of one
sex in the body of another is a recent invention, historically.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">For me, the ideas of sexologists like Havelock Ellis, and
the development of medical specialisms which enabled the body to change, such
as endocrinology, plastic surgery and anaesthesia, transgenderism is
invention that supports male domination and maintains the rigid sex stereotypes
that provide the scaffolding of male power. It was constructed and it continues
to be supported by male-dominated medical advances for [an?] industry devoted
to maintaining the hetero-sexual and correctly-gendered status-quo against the
in-roads of feminism.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">[END -- 38:27]</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-19503140811667140202016-04-14T11:02:00.001-07:002016-04-14T11:02:08.674-07:00Reading David Pears' "Wittgenstein" (1971)<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">My general attitude to Wittgenstein's thought is that I prefer not to read it, because it means things are problematised which it is the work's aim to be able to see as not a problem. If Wittgenstein wanted to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle, then he himself is (or was) in the bottle and I don't want to get in it too, in order to understand the work (W's work) that shows the way out.</span><br />
<br />
________________________________<br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I recently bought and read David Pears' introduction to the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Fontana Modern Masters, 1971)<br />Well, in fact I have read, so far, only the portion of the book relating to early W's 'Tractatus Logico Philosophicus' (TLP).<br /><br />I came to Pears' account after having read Janik and Toulmin's "Wittgenstein's Vienna", and also Ray Monk's "Wittgenstein", and after having watched a documentary from Oxford in mid-1970s, in which Pears describes his first encounter with TLP, which seemed a transformative moment for him.<br />I am interested in reading the account of someone, such as David Pears, who really thinks TLP is worth attending to!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br />Well, anyway, there is Pears' account of the problem at which W was getting at in TLP. He describes TLP as a work of critical philosophy, similar to that of Kant. Kant aimed at a de-limitation of reason from within reasoning, and postulated certain a priori knowledge of the world, synthetic a priori 'truths'. Kant wrote in the belief that Newton's theories were true.<br /><br />W aims at a de-limitation of thought through a de-limitation of language in which language is in some direct contact with the world, or rather not a de-limitation of thought but a de-limitation of what thought can be put into language.<br /><br />But Pears' account stresses the language W has in mind is a kind of basic language, and the important thing is the logical relationship between words, propositions and complexes if propositions, which structure W believed (at that time) would be common to all language. So W is concerned with the world and people in the world, who are thinking, and language is the mode or medium of their thought.<br /><br />Well, I'm also remembering that W came into this from engineering mathematics. How does mathematics have a grip on the world? With Russell's and Frege's attempts to reduce Mathematics to Logic, the question becomes How does logic have a grip in the world? But it's not that Logic has a grip on the world. Logic is the operation that happens that relates propositions which claim or state certain states if affairs in the world. Logic alone has nothing to say of states of affairs in the world, but only of what relations there are between those propositions. So the question becomes How do propositions (language) have a grip on the world?, and from this, what logical structure is there which holds all those propositions together, which complete concatenation and complex of propositions (because language is the medium of thought) will be the limits of my (sayable) world?<br /><br />Pears wants to show the structure of a deduction that W makes in TLP, reminiscent of the deduction Kant makes in CPR (the transcendental deduction) and to do this, Pears describes W as having had three premises, which Pears calls X, Y and Z. I forget now which is what.<br />'Y' is that a proposition gains it's 'sense' (has a grip on the world) by picturing the world, or a 'fact'.<br />'X' is ...<br />'Z' is to do with complexes of propositions (maybe something about there being 'atomic' (most basic) propositions(?)<br /><br />Well, the upshot seems to be that to make the deduction W makes is to see that the whole thing hangs together only if there is a sort of synthetic a priori truth about the world, but which is denied within W's opening premises. This seems to be why W regards TLP as itself 'non-sense': it is an attempt to say the unsayable.<br /><br />So anyway, the account Pears gives of all this... I had the impression of it being very pleasing to Pears. But I also found it less tractable than the account given by Janik and Toulmin. After a couple of years I can still conjure up something of the flavour of the 'space' of 'facts' and what W intended by a 'fact' that distinguishes it from 'objects', from the account of TLP by Janik and Toulmin. Pears talks at one point, discussing the possible (logical space) of facts, about a physical model that occupies a space and turns the logical space of facts into 'p' and 'not p', for example, and this is picturing of facts that happens in language, etc.<br /><br />So anyway, I come at this, again, from having sought for (without knowing, because it was not my problem), and found, Popper's criticism of the linguistic focus of philosophy. I am still inclined to be very skeptical of claims of THE PRIMACY OF any philosophising that takes analysis of the meaning and application of words as the method, or the problem.<br /><br />So anyway, I then take up W's 'Philosophical Investigations' (PI) translated by Elizabeth Anscombe.<br />The first statements concern a theory, or description, of learning of, or acquisition of, language by the early Christian thinker Augustine.<br />This is W's starting point in PI.<br /><br />At this point, I am again wondering over this view of language that makes of philosophy the investigation if how language functions. Ok, so it's no longer (as it was in TLP) something that has a 'most basic' form (ur-script), to which all languages could be reduced, but that detachment is still there. Speech as an action comes into view, but it seems there is still an over-emphasis on function.<br /><br />What I'm more sympathetic to, is indicated in the 2014 Gifford Lecture by Rowan Williams, material language (?), where he draws attention to our bodies (voice, tongue, lips) put into some sort of configuration or position, that is our response to the world, when we speak. Dr Williams draws on Merleau-Ponty.<br /><br />Another thing, for me, is a connection between voicing, language, understanding, being acknowledged. I think this is also addressed in Dr Williams Gifford Lecture. I suppose all this could also be framed in terms of language's "function". But it really seems secondary.<br /><br />I think of the story 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', and a baby hearing the story told (for the baby there isn't 'listening', I think, but there is 'voice' and other sound, and there are images - the pictures in the book, the body and mouth of the parent or grandparent telling the story, and the baby's own inner life of responses, as well as noises - not quite yet under control in terms of speech - and movements - also not quite under control.<br />So the story is told and I think, what interests me, is that there is, to begin with, merely an association of images and movements and sounds. Repeated tellings repeat those associations. Ok, maybe this kind of thing is given sympathetic treatment in W's PI. I don't know. But here I think of a sort of humanising. Something shared, so the baby and the teller know they are in the same relation to the story, that "your [baby's] responses are like mine, and I [teller] understand you".<br /><br />I feel this sort of thing probably is addressed in PI.<br />I know that what is sometimes (mis-)called W's "Private Language Argument" (it is, I understand, no "argument") appears in PI.<br /><br />From what I understand, W explores the notion of a private, un-teachable language, and shows (?) that it can not occur, even if it is pre-supposed in certain modes of thinking. I associate it, for some reason, with Descartes, but can't remember why.<br />I associate the private language with the kind of thing that can happen in life, in which a child's (or even a baby's) responses are not acknowledged, and where the child might not be given to understand "my responses are like yours, I understand you", and the acquisition of language, alike with the acquisition of ranges of bodily response - emotions, self-imagining, fantasy, is given over to the child's accommodating itself to what he/she perceives to be the environment's needs, that is, given over to reasoning, even before there is speech.<br /><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;"></span>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-55354005944072169522015-10-17T16:18:00.002-07:002015-10-17T16:19:49.270-07:00Average Protestant is 3000 hits old!Today I was delighted to see that my blog, Average Protestant, passed 3000 page downloads.<br />
Thanks to Biff and Soren, Martin, Ludwig and Karl, thanks to Marilynne, Rowan and all my buddies at art school.<br />
Please leave a message, or a comment.<br />
Finally<br />
Thank you readers!Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-19236216292773635442015-05-28T14:45:00.002-07:002015-05-28T14:45:24.360-07:00I used to say. at a time of desolation,<i> art is the proper response to life.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
"<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">art which incorporates disenchantment into itself is the true means of responding to a world that tries to administer and control everything."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">From interview, Andrew Bowie & 3AM magazine</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/schelling-adorno-and-all-that-jazz/</span>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-54197617715139175692015-01-03T01:17:00.000-08:002015-04-09T04:15:20.750-07:00Psychoanalysis and philosophy (psychoanalysis is not science)<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
One way that psychoanalysis can (as Rudiger Safranski says, somewhere in his biographical study of Heidegger) un-do, or under-determine philosophy.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis?</span><br />
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These are bodies of thought and practice based on a ideas about the human organism and formation of the personality.</div>
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Think of the child who comes from a place of complete satiation (warmth, nutrition, containment) into the world of light, cold and hunger, utterly dependent on mother.</div>
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What of the personality?</div>
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What about the omniscience of the infant?</div>
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There is no sense of a boundary between the infant self and the world.<br />
What appears to the baby is it's world.</div>
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Urges are there. And I believe there are also fantasies,</div>
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Biological urges, yes. But not wholly determining for the organism. Fantasies too. Fantasy is in the realm of significance, and of meaning.</div>
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Karl Popper was called to investigate the status of science and claims to 'knowledge', and doubted the claim of psychoanalysis to be a 'science'.</div>
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Somewhere in his critique, he comes to a point about human theorising. The earliest kind of theorising, he says, resides in some kind of "biological expectation". There is no infinite regress in human theorising, because it starts with expectation in the organism, which can be either met or not met. This includes, Popper says, the expectation of parental love. Not exactly an 'urge', or, to use Freud's term, a 'drive'.</div>
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It's hard to stay in touch with the stresses and impulses that brought me to really need philosophical enquiry like that of Karl Popper. At some level I felt under attack, and in my view a quality running through Popper's work is that of defensiveness. To read him is to have the impression of someone under attack. His whole effort of thought is aimed against certain claims to true knowledge in the form of 'science'. He addressed his critique of those claims to the claimants, scientists, but in doing so, he did not want to be seen to be laying the grounds for the elimination of the prestige of science. He did not want to alienate his audience, scientist-philosophers, and on the contrary wanted to have their blessing. He wanted to be seen by that group, his target audience, to have a better philosophy of science than theirs, but his was a philosophy which asserts that there is no certain knowledge. (Although Marjorie Grene pointed out that Popper asserted certain knowledge of what we do NOT know - and I think - from the little I've read of her - she rightly questioned the obsession of philosophy with knowing, episteme). He was caught between wanting to anticipate and then demolish and then improve on every counter argument that could be thrown at him by the scientist-philosophers who upheld the notion of true knowledge ( = mathematical science), and then, to ensure continuation of the prestige of science, and in a rather grandiose sense to re-bestow this himself and therefore retain the feeling of being in its glow, work even harder trying to shore up the sanctity of science with his emphasis on a demarcation between science and 'non-science'. The result was an unfortunate lack of concern in Popper's work with showing or exploring what legitimates the claims to knowledge of 'non-science'.</div>
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When I was reaching for Popper's philosophy, I felt under attack. And there were, not equivalent, but parallel forces at work in myself: I wanted to demolish claims to knowledge of a powerful institution (my father) but also to be seen by that institution to be upholding a better theory of knowledge, and even more urgently, to not be seen to be irrational or 'irrationalist'! I pressed Popper on the institution, as it manifested in my own mind, as a way of saying "Your claim to knowledge, and hence your prestige, and your sense of justified de-valuation of non-science, is based on a false idea!", but was not able to leave it at that: I had to have the institution, <i>force</i> the institution, to acknowledge that its claim to knowledge is false, correct its views (so to speak) and therefore not have a breach with the institution. I needed to have the institution love and understand me.</div>
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Theorising goes on to which our knowledge, Popper claims, conforms. We are already theorising when we test or observe the world. His philosophy is Kantian. We are actively processing our perceptions. There is a mental component of all which we take to be knowledge of our world. That is how the idea of 'biological expectation' surfaces in Popper's work.</div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-57964182277872241202014-09-24T09:28:00.003-07:002021-10-25T02:45:40.525-07:00The Yeti view of religion in 'New Atheism'<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In his four Yale "Terry lectures" (2009), Terry Eagleton gives repeated reminders of the extremely narrow platform from which so-called 'New Atheists' so confidently pronounce on the falsity of religion. It is their frequently asserted, or implied, and automatically assumed concept of "Religion" (singular) as faith in the existence of a supernatural being. Daniel Dennett's definition of religion (from his book "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon") is often cited as typical:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"<i>social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought</i>".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Eagleton refers to this as the "Yeti view of religion".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The typical view of New Atheists, and, he stresses, many Christians, contained in this definition, is that God exists rather as the Yeti exists, or Ley Lines or the Loch Ness Monster. The enlightenment-rationalist Dawkinses then, having taken up this view of religion as <i>all that religion is</i>, find that all that is needed to demolish Religion is lack of evidence in the sense that we should be able to use the same techniques to prove the existence of God as we would use to prove the existence of necrophilia or Justin Bieber.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It is nigh-on pointless to try to persuade anyone (particularly of the Dawkins-stripe) who takes this "Yeti view of religion" that they might be missing something. This is because he will most probably insist that only what is rational to believe is scientific. The moment one attempts to engage with him from the starting point of science and empirical evidence (for example to question, as William James did, and so as did Karl Popper in a different way, that "evidence" may not be completely free of human interests) one has already given some tacit confirmation that his Yeti view of religion has some traction, that it presents a real challenge. But having begun to engage in that way, the onus will be very great indeed to bring the discussion, and the skeptic's attention, to consideration of philosophical aspects of science, and hence to metaphysics, which could show up religious thinking as containing any reason at all. (A great onus simply because philosophising is difficult and not everyone likes it or is prepared or motivated to enter into it). Put this kind of discussion on a stage, with a live audience, and the temptation to resort to rhetorical performances and knock-down arguments will often be too great, and the result will be "opponents" talking-past each-other with little or no communication.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The best of these live discussions, in my view, was that between Richard Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, moderated by (Agnostic) philosopher Anthony Kenny, which took place in 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bow4nnh1Wv0">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bow4nnh1Wv0</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In this discussion, in my view, Dawkins' limited view of religion shows up in what he does not say, and (together with this, and just as importantly) the <i>way</i> he does not say it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">One good thing about this discussion is that, at around 18m30 (in answering Dr Williams's query that Darwin's theory and science in general does not do well in addressing the phenomenon of consciousness) Dawkins asserts his commitment to philosophical materialism. This is a great help for anyone who wants to try this engagement via philosophy, because materialism has certain consequences and counter-arguments that can be addressed. And note Dawkins's prior statements to the effect that he has faith in the idea that all complex things can be explained as the result of the interaction of their simpler parts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At around 29m, Anthony Kenny queries Dawkins' belief that there is no free will and asks him to comment on the "gene determinism" that his readers often attribute to him. As Kenny acknowledges, Dawkins rejects "gene determinism" (that not just all our development but all our actions are genetically determined), but he queries how Dawkins' squares his rejection of gene-determinism with his belief that there is no free will. As Kenny puts it "Usually, being a determinist means not believing in free will".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins responds that he rejects "gene" determinism, but maintains determinism in general. He says (in that characteristic tone of authority, which seems so out of place, especially given that he's talking to a philosopher) "You can be a determinist without being a genetic determinist." (!?)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It seems to me that this begs the question that genes are part of the universe: if determinism holds in the universe, then <i>are genes not determined along with the humans in whose cells they are found?</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams comes in here, and asks of Dawkins "Does it [determinism] mean that in principle every decision is predictable?" (If the universe - including human subjects - is wholly determined, and one has confidence in knowing how all the matter in the universe interacts, as strong scientist-materialist-determinists claim, then one might well be led to take on the belief that all decisions are predictable. So this seems a fair question).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins replies that he is hesitant over decision-predictability "because of quantum indeterminacy", but he quickly adds (as if this is the alternative) "but I don't believe you can get away from determinism by postulating that there is a ghost inside that takes decisions which are somehow independent if physical reality".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">(This is an example of Dawkins' Cartesian view: there is material, physical reality and then there is immaterial spirit. He takes over this philosophical dualism without question.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams responds: "I don't think that believing in free will commits you to a ghost taking decisions independent of physical reality".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Seeing an opportunity to bring Dawkins to philosophise, Dr Williams poses to Dawkins the possibility that the distinction between mind and absolutely inert stuff is not where it is thought to lie; that the constituents of the universe do not resolve into, on the one hand, inert matter, and on the other hand, mind or spirit. If that is so then, he says: "a decision is not something that an independent homunculus inside me makes never mind what happens [but] it is something that emerges from a set of physical conditions not wholly determined but innovating".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams offers the notion of "stuff" as active and not inert, and he puts this as a question and a challenge to Dr Dawkins' received Cartesian view.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins replies, consistent with his materist-determinism: "They [the set of physical conditions] could be wholly determined, but you would have the illusion of freedom."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams comes back immediately with the question: "How would you tell the difference?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At this point Dawkins recalls certain neurological experiments which revealed that actions we take over bodily movement (like picking up a glass) are decided in the brain before we become conscious of deciding them, and this is, for him, evidence that we have the illusion of free will. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams returns that this "less than clinching" because it desks with rather uninteresting decisions. The clinching evidence would concern the kinds if decision over who to marry, who to vote for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Now Dawkins comes back (as if Dr Williams, or for that matter anyone who has a reasonable grasp if the significance if these issues, has not already reached this conclusion) "It's quite difficult to do experiments on that kind of..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Exactly, Dr Dawkins, exactly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I think these exchanges show up Dr Dawkins lack of awareness of the philosophical problems thrown up by his assumed philosophical position, and his, well, inability to philosophise.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins concedes: "Well I'm not a philosopher, that would be obvious. Perhaps you should have invited a philosopher instead" (!!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">In this way, Dawkins simply brushes of and absolves himself of responsibility for holding the beliefs he does hold. He simply gives to "philosophers" that responsibility, and carries on as if his views have met no challenge whatsoever.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">This is an example, I think, of the kind if difficulty faced in trying to philosophise with the Dawkinses who hold the Yet view of religion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">There, I have said enough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Please listen to the discussion, and tell me that you think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">No there is more here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">At about 53 m, there is a question that is being clarified by a member of the audience. The question is:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"<i>Human beings are immensely imperfect, with so many of our potentialities unrealised. Are these failures of evolution or failures if design.</i>"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Here is a very good and insightful question. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins' immediate response is to think of "imperfections" in terms of physiological "design", and calls up the laryngeal nerve which originates in the mammalian brain but passes around the heart before arriving at the larynx. He explains this feature in evolutionary terms, but he would not regard this (though he does not say this) as an "imperfection", because he denies any notion of "perfection" in nature. Every physical form in nature, every state of inert matter, is just as accidental and arbitrary as any other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins acknowledges that this says nothing about "unrealised potentialities", and wonders if the questioner is thinking of this in terms of the doctrine of original sin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Clarification is sought from the questioner. What does she mean by "imperfection" and "unrealised potentialities"?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The questioner clarifies that by "imperfections" and "unrealised potentialities" she means the occasions of tragedy in human life, such as babies born but soon dying, people not being able to achieve what they could have achieved in different circumstances, and so on. "Do we need an explanation", she asks, for these occasions of un-fulfilment?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Firstly, it is a good question, because it acknowledges the fact (and it surely is a fact) that humans require meaning in order to survive. A meaningless world is unendurable, because suffering is everywhere with us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Secondly, It is a good question because it calls up the idea of perfectibility. There is nothing that can be thought of as imperfect unless there is something more perfect against which it is compared.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Thirdly, it is a good question because it refers directly to the competing world views offered by the protagonists: Atheism and Christianity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On the one hand, we are offered by the materialist-determinist-atheist the prospect of blind evolution and inert matter unfolding in lawful ways throughout the universe until the end of time, in which case do I <i>understand</i> the <i>meaning</i> of the occasion of imperfection in human life and tragic things through this story and hope that evolution will move to a state where there is less imperfection?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Dawkins' answer is: "No! Stuff happens!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But notice that he adds that "Death before reproduction is what natural selection is all about, and it's tragic" (at 55m). But "tragic" is a human sympathy, a meaning, and his use of the word here is, I'm sure, genuine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">With that "No" Dr Dawkins' intolerance shows through (also seen in the 2006 BBC film "The Trouble with Atheism"). He finds the need for meaning to be an in-eliminable human weakness - a defect which he does not regard himself as having. His "No!" carries that force. He really wants the questioner to not seek meaning for tragedy. And yet - which suggests he's not super-human after all - he doesn't stop at calling suffering in nature "tragic". (Even my perception that things are "tragic", rather than simply indifferent, presupposes my investing things with meaning - but why should we assign any meaning at all to the pure accident of forms around us, whatever they are, especially if we are also purely accidental agglomerations of inert matter?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Why then should we want to live?) The whole new-atheist-aligned talk of "illusory" self-consciousness implies, indeed their matter-spirit dualism leads us to conclude, that our reality is "really" this complete meaninglessness. Dawkins, like his fellow 'New Atheists, doesn't take God's absence seriously.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">On the other hand, we have the notion of a God-designed world, in which case, why doesn't God act to make the world more perfect?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dr Williams response is to caution against the notion of God as a designer, because all we have to understand "design" by is what it is like for us to design. He emphasises the intelligibility of the universe (and we humans the ones finding it intelligible) as part of what he means by God as an ultimately unknowable creative intelligence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">One final thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Towards the close, around 1hr19m, Dr Dawkins, in some exasperation, wants to know, given the very beautiful and inspiring theories of origins developed in physics and biology, why the priest wants to "clutter up your world view with something so messy as a God". Why, he asks, resort to ancient scripture for <i>anything </i>when we have 21st century science.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Once again, we meet Dawkins' lack of awareness of, and more importantly, lack of respect for, the dimension of meaning in life and of Christianity. As Dr Williams responds, the account in Genesis offers a different kind of account, that can and has and does (for many people) satisfy the question of the meaning of my place in time and the universe</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Williams: "I don't see God as this extra thing shoe-horned in..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins: "Well that's exactly how I see it".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">No movement whatsoever. It's depressing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I like Dawkins' accounts of evolution. He just can't philosophise. He knows he can't but he persists, hectoringly, demandingly, in challenging others, including philosophers and Theologians, to justify themselves to him, in terms, of course, satisfactory to himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I'll stop now.</span></div>
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Just to return to the part of the discussion in which Dawkins claims that there is no free will. A very great deal depends on his having assumed mind-body (Cartesian) dualism. But it requires philosophical work, which he is either not prepared or not capable of doing, to understand its influence.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Dawkins points to the experiment of the person lifting the glass and on the basis of the results of that experiment he says "You see the decision to lift the glass was taken long before the person was conscious of having taken the decision, therefore free will does not exist, it's an illusion."</span><br />
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Anthony Kenny: Most philosophers don't like the naive picture of free will that that experiment presupposes ... that there is a soul inside in which mental events occur that are the causes of bodily events. ... It's surprising that you [Dawkins] should accept it [i.e. accept the experiment and what it 'shows'] because it's very much the 'ghost in the machine' picture [Dawkins tacitly accepts the mind-body duality picture but denies there is a ghost]. You say, "Ah! The 'machine' works before the 'ghost' does", but I think most philosophers today believe that the whole idea of constructing mind and body like that is quite wrong."</span><br />
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RD: "But why doesn't it destroy the idea of free will?"</span><br />
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AK: "Because it only shows the order of events in an act that is undetermined may not be what you would have expected if you had the false philosophical idea."</span><br />
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The experiment presupposes, and 'tests for', the mind-body duality - the false philosophical idea. The experimenter anticipates mental activity giving rise to physical activity, and looks closely at the brain (where it is supposed the immaterial mind must be seated), then finding that the physical activity precedes the brain activity concludes there is no mind.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Only someone who holds the mind-body duality to be true would attempt to find evidence for mind with this kind of experiment - as if 'chopping up' the brain will somehow show "Aha! You see, there's nothing extra there!" It is very odd that one should look to demonstrate the non-existence of something immaterial by examining material as minutely as possible in order not to find it.</span><br />
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I find brief and sensitive - and humane - reflections on the incoherence of Cartesian dualism (and the un-knowing perpetuation of it in para-science writing) in Marilynne Robinson's "Absence if Mind - the dispelling if inwardness from the modern myth of the self". See the chapter "Thinking Again".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">See essay by Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, here: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1211/analysing-atheism-unbelief-and-the-world-of-faiths</span><br />
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-71688648819239792072014-09-22T06:06:00.002-07:002014-09-24T02:37:01.533-07:00(Not quite) Richard Rorty vs Jerry Coyne, on "The Compatibility of Science & Religion" <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">Richard Rorty's talk on "The Compatability of Science & Religion" is available on YouTube here: </span><span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EjhVk-0Vhmk.</span></span><br />
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Rorty (1931-2007) espoused philosophical pragmatism and a pragmatist view of language.<br />
My understanding is that he came to this position via analytic philosophy, in which the main concern is the analysis of language (and therefore of thought).<br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">In this talk, Rorty rehearses and develops pragmatist (James & Dewey) notions of different descriptions of things - such as scientific and theological descriptions - as serving different needs (towards human happiness), there being no one description that is closer to "reality" than any other, and this being a kind of utilitarian concept of language. 'True' is 'belief that works'. This Pragmatist approach towards language gives up on attempts to search for "truth", in the sense of descriptions of the intrinsic nature of things, or what things really are in themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">He says, at about 17 minutes:</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">"These philosophers [Pragmatists] all deny that truth is a matter of correspondence to the way things are independent of our needs, for, they argue, there is no way we could ever test for such correspondence: any proposed test would have to compare the way we talk about things with the way things are apart from being talked about; and we have no idea what such a comparison would look like."</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">He goes on to discuss William James' essay "The will to believe", which is James' reply to the charge made by scientist-positivist W K Clifford that religious belief is intellectually irresponsible and "sinful" because it is belief on "insufficient evidence". </span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">In reply James questions the assumption that evidence "floats free of human interests". </span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">On the egalitarianism which runs through Mill's (utilitarian) and James' (pragmatism) work, Rorty says: "[it] is a moral attitude which ... could only flourish in a culture which had been told, century after century, that God's will was for human beings love one another."</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">The conclusion of the talk is something along the following lines (I'm paraphrasing). </span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">Lives that have been "smooth" (Rorty's term) may not contain moments of agony where religion or religious kinds of experience arise. A person asserting that religion is not any kind of knowledge or source of knowledge, or not serving any kind of dimension of human life, may well have known only that kind of "smoothness". (There is a temptation to deny feelings in others that are unknown to oneself, maybe accompanied by feelings of indignation that others should claim to have had those unknown feelings). Meeting such a person, and wanting to challenge his assertion, it is pointless to urge them to agonise or wax philosophical.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">Now, having listened to Richard Rorty (philosopher) it might be interesting, or a challenge, or curious, to hear Jerry Coyne (evolutionary biologist) lecture on "Why science and religion should not cohabit" (the in-compatibility between science and religion), here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5jF3vc8P9FM</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">In the opening few minutes, the premise of Coyne's lecture emerges: that there is a conflict because religion and science - he claims - compete as accounts of 'what there is'. I don't accept this characterisation of religion. (Compare the passage in Rorty's talk in which he mentions the period in which, on the whole, religious institutions - at least the Christian religion - stopped attempting predictions of events in nature when science was seen to do this better). But Coyne, lecturing in Edinburgh University, UK, may be describing a particular section of the religious community, in the US especially, that is opposed to certain scientific claims or theories and offers alternative revelatory claims or speculations as preferred accounts of 'what there is'. It strikes me that Coyne takes this form of religion to be what religion is, opposes it, and builds his presentation on this narrow platform. In my view it is a too-limited view.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">Philosophical reflection on the metaphysical aspects of science, the philosophy of science, or epistemology - how and what we can know - bring one into contact with the issues Rorty raised about "truth" (e.g. the passage in his talk quoted above, about truth as correspondence). Through this effort of reflection it may be possible at least to see where Rorty is coming from, so that whether one agrees or disagrees with his philosophical pragmatism, one will at least have developed appreciation of the different philosophical positions and, with that, the humility to acknowledge that these are open questions, and demanding of the best intellectual efforts to address adequately. Only when one's assumptions and myths are challenged - when life is not "smooth" - will study of these things appear as important or necessary. Only an unchallenged mind is going to dismiss them as nothing at all to bother me about.</span></span><br />
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Compare Rorty's closing statement on the "smooth" life, free of agony (as one in which religion and faith can appear as alarming, irrational or barmy) with the more acerbic but (I believe) similarly intended words from Terry Eagleton's 2009 lecture "Christianity: fair or foul" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdt0GBQu6SY):</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">"The trouble with the Dawkinses of this world ... is that they don't find themselves in a frightful situation at all. ... [For them] things are just not that desperate enough and in their view it's simply self-indulgent leftist rhetoric to imagine that they are. Your average liberal rationalist doesn't need to believe that despite the tormented condition of humanity there might still, implausibly enough, be hope, since he doesn't believe in such torment in the first place."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">I borrow from the same lecture by Terry Eagleton* the following analogy to help convey the flavour of Jerry Coyne's lecture at Edinburgh University: Listening to Jerry Coyne lecture on religion and theology is like listening to someone talk about a novel as if it is a piece of botched sociology.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">That says it all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px;">*</span></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">(Eagleton's lecture is one of four presented in his "Reason, Faith and Revolution", 2009)</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;"></span>Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-70918158662398286792014-09-16T16:37:00.001-07:002015-01-16T14:50:46.225-08:00The violence of surfacelessness in conceptual visual art<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
I am thinking of what Duchamp called "non-retinal" visual art, and of its violence.</div>
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Such "conceptual" visual art, of which I take Duchamp's ready-mades to be the type, such as his "bottle rack", is art that by-passes the body. This is because it lacks surface, which is the same as lacking touch.</div>
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I mean that when we contemplate, say, "bottle rack", in the art-space-gallery, there is no call to consider the object other than in its signifying or symbolic potential. I suppose we can, if we want, consider the aesthetic (by which I mean sensory-perceptible) qualities of the ready-made, and certainly a bottle-rack (like many other things) has a strangeness, and perhaps a strange beauty, when seen out of its normal context. Its "look", though, is as it is. And the artist is presumably not selecting the ready-made for its surface-visual seductiveness except at a relatively superficial level. It's "look" is what it already is. The placing of it in the space of art, and its naming as art, is what sets the thoughts going towards meanings, such as "Is this art?", "What was 'retinal' art, if this is 'non-retinal' art?"</div>
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When I look at a painting I see a surface that has been touched (or from which touch has been withheld - but in which case touch is still implied, by its absence).</div>
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A photograph has no surface.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 27px;">I saw the John Stezaker show at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2012(?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 27px;">I feel (I nearly wrote "fear") that the work is substantial. The choice of photographs (1930-1950s period, am I remembering rightly?) makes me think of things just beyond memory, now looking too distant to have influence. Then the splicing and slicing interruptions of the visage are very powerful. The synapses are severed as one looks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 27px;">From Charles Baudelaire "The Desire To Paint"</span></div>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">"She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 27px;">I found myself feeling quite nauseous. Again, it was something about the work by-passing the eye and going straight into the mind, straight into meaning. I'm not sure what I mean by this. I think of Duchamp's term, "brain-facts".</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 27px;">The photograph has no surface.</span><br />
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In by-passing the body, conceptual visual art, deploying objects (including humans) and resolving things to their meaning in a system of objects, in particular arrangements, does a kind of violence. I think it acts to separate the intellect from the senses. One ends up being, not an eye, but a camera.</div>
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Painting is also "conceptual", or can be, but it has a surface.<br />
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Link to Abandon.nl blog, where is an article on the non-retinal</div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-55686702798227467632014-09-01T04:33:00.000-07:002014-09-11T05:42:23.163-07:00Scientism - a commitment to a scientific view of total reality<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">From Bryan Magee, "Confessions of a Philosopher" (1997), p.401-403, in the discussion of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer:</span><br />
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"In recent centuries, there have been quite a lot of people in the West who believed, often as a matter of principle, that we should do everything we could to construct our total conception of the way things are out of what can be inter-subjectively observed. Such a programme constitutes a commitment to a scientific view of total reality.</div>
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Schopenhauer sees this as an almost absurd error, not because he has anything against science, but because of it's obvious limitations. ....</div>
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The growth of scientific knowledge seemed to him among the few glories of mankind's history, one of not many things that human beings could be proud of. .....</div>
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Nevertheless, its explanations, though of prodigious richness, value and fascination, can never be exhaustive, because it is characteristic of science that it explains things in terms [e.g. Laws involving entities and concepts such as mass, energy, light, gravity, distance, time] that are themselves left unexplained. .....</div>
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Ultimate explanations, then, are not to be looked for in science. The insistent belief that they are is not a scientific belief but a belief in science, a metaphysical belief, an act of faith....</div>
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At its crudest it takes the form of materialism, which Schopenhauer once described as 'the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself'. Unfortunately it seems to be characteristic of many people who have committed themselves to an act of faith in the ultimate ability of science to explain everything that they construe any denial of this as hostility to science [if not also as 'irrationalism', AvProtestant]"<br />
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Some readers will be familiar with the criticisms made by Mary Midgley of certain claims emerging in evolutionary biology and neuroscience to give a scientific accounts of morality and consciousness.<br />
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I think of a discussion on BBC radio 4, first broadcast 5th November 1998 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005457h)<br />
between the physicist and popular-science author John Gribbin and MM.</div>
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In this discussion Dr Gribbin confidently asserts that the human-social activity "football" (Mary Midgley's example) can be fully and meaningfully explained through a complete <i>physical</i> account of all that is happening in a football match, which would include the account of the interaction of particles forming the brains of the players, referee and spectators.</div>
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"Money" is another example Midgley offers of a real thing, something we see in our universe, which - again she challenges Dr Gribbin - cannot be understood from an account of the physical world. Such a physical account could never enable understanding of what money is.</div>
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Dr Gribbin disagrees.</div>
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What MM is up against, and Dr Gribbin exhibits, is a mind-set which starts from an assumption that all that happens in minds, including self-awareness and free-will and the grasping of what money and football are, experiences of fantasy, love, despair, trust, is ultimately interactions of sub-atomic particles in the brain, and that the scientific account of these interactions is, first, within grasp, and, second, the fundamental explanation; fundamental to all explanations.</div>
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Therefore, any, say, "anthropology" of money, or of football, or any other account of any event, that claims itself to be "knowledge", must be further translatable and reducible to this fundamental physical-atomistic-naturalistic account.</div>
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As Professor Colin Blakemore asks, insistently, of his audience in the IAI.tv debate "Mazes of the Mind": "<i>What is the explanatory alternative?" </i>His answer is<i>: there is none.</i></div>
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Professor Blakemore, and Dr Gribbin in his way, means to assert that there can be no "knowledge" (and no understanding, and no explanation, without such knowledge) that is not the "knowledge" of things that we attain through science.</div>
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It is a mindset that starts out regarding such things as novels (works of art) as shoddy sociology, and religion as poor science. </div>
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It is a mindset that ultimately eliminates meaning (nihilistic).</div>
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Myth, as Popper (and Freud) wrote, is the character of science and that out of which it emerged: imaginative accounts of events as seen from our human perspective, and never attaining true objective knowledge.</div>
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I recommend listening to the discussion to get a proper flavour of the absence of self-reflection that prevents Dr Gribbin from seeing the grounds for the criticisms that are put to him by MM.<br />
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Here a quote from the auto-biography of Bryan Magee (p.426/7), again from the chapter on Schopenhauer, that echoes MM's approach.<br />
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"The metaphysical visions of philosophers are not empirically verifiable, and this us as true of those of the empiricists as of any if the others. When Locke, like Descartes, presents us with a vision of the universe as a vast cosmic machine made up of lesser machines, all of them subject to the same scientific laws, this is not a scientific theory that observers can investigate and test, it is a vision of how things are; yet it will have a thousand practical influences on whoever accepts it. And when, by contrast, Schelling comes along and says that reality us not so much like a machine as like a single great big living organism, and is therefore better understood as a quasi-organic developmental process rather than as something mechanical, and that in the highest products of the human mind this process achieves an understanding of itself, there are no crucial experiments by means of which scientific-minded observers can adjudicate between this view and Locke's to decide which of the two, if either, is 'true'. However, to conclude from this that such world outlooks are nothing but words, and therefore fanciful, a lot of nonsense - a load, really, of meaningless metaphysics - is a profound mistake. It is those metaphysical visions that give rise to our research programmes, as they did in the case of both Plato and, two thousand years later, empirical scientists."</div>
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Here is another quote, this time from Rudiger Safranski's biography of Martin Heidegger (1999), which I think chimes very closely with the criticism Mary Midgley makes (futilely) of Dr Gribbin's views, drawing on the same two examples of phenomena offered by MM: money and football.</div>
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"If, says Heidegger, we approach a "subject" in order to discover what it is; if we wish to comprehend its "Being-meaning" (<i>Seinsinn</i>), we must first get into the "implementation meaning" (<i>Vollzugsinn</i>), from which alone its Being-meaning can be derived. Anyone entering our economic life from a strange culture, and still unable to grasp its implementation meaning, will be unable to comprehend the Being-meaning of money, even though he may touch it, or weigh it in his hand; ...... This applies to the different areas of Being - art, literature, religion, calculation with imaginary numbers, or football. These considerations, moreover, also - by argument <i>e contrario</i> - reveal the blinkered aspect of the reductionist method. If we say: thinking is a function of brain physiology, ..., then we are making a statement about the Being of thinking ... without having placed ourselves in their implementation. Viewed from a non-implementation angle, all this is not present at all - the game, the music, the picture, religion."</div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-52021838648764138202014-08-22T01:24:00.003-07:002021-10-25T02:54:19.346-07:00The idea of a fixed scale of valuesListen to the claims made (<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ScMJEVoj-s">"The Great Debate: Can science tell us right from wrong"</a>, Nov 6th 2010, Arizona State University, USA) by a prominent "new atheist" that values must, ultimately, be grounded in "the way the universe is". Sounds ok. But the notion is that there is a determinable constellation of "matter" or stuff in the universe which we can identify with (that corresponds to) value. In this way, he asserts, values are facts, and such facts are means to state, "objectively", that X way of life is of greater worth than Y way of life.<br />
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I won't mention this man's name, because every mention of it provides him with a bit more oxygen of publicity. He is Dr H.<br />
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This idea of a constellation of stuff in the universe corresponding to a value, so that we can say that such and such constellation represents greater "well-being" than that other constellation, this is to be preferred over that, is not new.<br />
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I reproduce here a comment I made on this video.</div>
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It is to remind me that once I experienced the profound pull of this idea, in the form that all artistic expression must be judged according to some or other fixed scale (pointing to its moral value).</div>
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It's also to remind me that great thinkers have dealt with it, whose writing has helped me, for example Isaiah Berlin's "The Divorce between the sciences and the humanities", in which he deals at length with the idea of "one true answer to all proper questions".<br />
It's also to remind me of the urge, which comes from a kind of fear of (complex) feeling, to render things in unambiguous terms, somehow finding poetic forms a deliberate mis-representation of the truth. Think of Bentham's method of "paraphrasis".</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">"Take the part of his address 10.06 to about 11.10.</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">Here he re-asserts the existence of a fixed scale of moral worth, being a scientifically-determinable fact of the world, by which one would be able to say that "this way of life is morally superior to that way of life" or "this way of life is of greater value than that".</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">In my view this concept pre-supposes that every expression of "how things should be", or of "how to be human" (and we do see cultural difference in the world) is translatable into any other such expression so that, however different they may be, they can be compared to this notional scale. This in turn pre-supposes some sort of common "basic elements" or terms to which all expressions can be reduced - i.e. be re-stated </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">unambiguously - </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">so that they can be so compared. In my view there are no such "basic elements". (Dr H proposes that these "basic elements" are to be found in brains, or some observable constellation of matter that corresponds to optimum "well-being". And what criteria would he use to assert that "this and not that" constellation of matter corresponds to the greater "well-being"? Again, this calls on the concept of a fixed scale, now of "well-being", which somehow exists as a fact of the world. Ad infinitum. It is an ideal, and for that reason, not a fact. And also, for that reason, it is an aspect of thinking and philosophy is the discipline to address it, not science.)</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">This is the "fixed scale"-concept which Dr Blackburn refers to in his reply.</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">I believe it is more than likely that it is an idea (supporting a philosophical standpoint) that comes to the aid of someone for whom difference - the co-existence of incompatible values - is uncomfortable.</span><br />
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">That, on its own, wouldn't be a problem. But as a philosophy claiming general assent, I think it is a very bad idea, and to be opposed, for the above reasons, but also because it lends to the culture that wields it a basis for asserting its own moral worth above that of all others."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">Bentham was the originator of modern utilitarianism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">And there is a fair argument for saying that this man exhibited characteristics which are associated with the term "Asperger's Syndrome". Indeed this possibility has been explored by psychologists Philip Lucas (US) and Anne Sheeran (UK) in a paper which can be found on-line. The psychologist community likes to call Apserger's part of the "Autism Spectrum", and describes individuals who are "on the spectrum" as "mind-blind". </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; text-size-adjust: auto;">I'm not altogether comfortable with naming these things and talking about brains, rather than persons, because it is clear, I think, that brains develop in tandem with mind. I believe brains are affected by thought and feeling, and these are things which are to do with socialisation and culture. "ASD" maybe. But I would direct readers to the very interesting talk (part of a series of lectures) given by former Archbishop Rowan Williams "Material Words, Language as Physicality" : </span></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t8F__cac1g">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t8F__cac1g</a><br />
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I also direct readers to a critical <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102760/righteous-mind-haidt-morality-politics-scientism">review by John Gray</a> ('The Knowns and the Unknowns', New Republic, 20th April 2012) of another effort (by Jonathan Haidt) to ground morality in science, this time in evolutionary psychology. I mention this here because the review calls up utilitarianism.</div>
Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-9676471051257030732014-08-09T08:39:00.003-07:002014-08-09T09:37:53.120-07:00"the worshipper of 'our enlightened age'"In JS Mill's essay 'Coleridge' (1840) we find that description of types who have been at each other in the now-faded "God debate": the worshipper a of 'our enlightened age' or Civilsation (scientific materialists) and worshippers of Independence (their reluctant opponents - it was an unpleasant job but someone had to do it).<br />
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See pages 105-106 of the 1959 Chatto &Windus edition of 'Mill on Bentham & Coleridge' (with introduction by F R Leavis)<br />
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<br />Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-54662495874990077892014-08-09T07:51:00.001-07:002014-08-09T10:18:17.610-07:00What is "Personality Disorder"?Find intelligent and insightful accounts of "personality disorder" in "Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self" by Stephen Frosh (Palgrave 1991), and at <a href="http://www.hannapickard.com/">www.hannapickard.com</a> (the website of psychotherapist and analytical philosopher Hanna Pickard).<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Such terms as "Borderline Personality Disorder" or "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" are used as a shorthand by people concerned with mental health to stand for sorts of more-or-less stable patterns of inter-personal and intra-psychic (that is self-reflecting) relating, which in one way or another are extremely distressing and damaging to lives.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In my view, it is sensible to think of such disorders not as "things" that people "have" but what comprises that person's experience (and indeed others' experience of them) in the broad sense of states of feeling and perception, understanding and expression. In my view what might be identified as "narcissistic personality disorder" or "borderline personality disorder" are people who are trying - in ways that survived infancy - still to achieve <i>self</i>, in which effort their early family environment could not give support. In that respect then "self" can be lacking, and I think it makes sense to link this lack with envy, and the composition of self is to do with range and depth of feeling.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In this sense <i>self</i> can be lacking:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"[A feature disqualifying him as a philosopher] was the incompleteness of his [Bentham’s] own mind as a representative of universal human nature. In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination." </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Here I read "mind" as something like "self" or "person".</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The quote is from John Stuart Mill's essay "Bentham" (1838).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Recently I found this passage from Mill's essay quoted in a paper by two clinical psychologists on Asperger's syndrome.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1322989/1/008_Lucas_and_Sheeran__2006_.pdf">http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/<wbr></wbr>1322989/1/008_Lucas_and_<wbr></wbr>Sheeran__2006_.pdf</a></span></div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-43726525211040403822014-08-03T05:02:00.001-07:002014-08-03T05:02:45.283-07:00Andrew Bowie "Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy"<div>
In his book "Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy", Andrew Bowie explores the significance of art for contemporary philosophy. Along the way he also provides, as he has in previous books like his Introduction to German Philosophy, many pithy and lucid asides. At one stage he is extolling Adorno's Lectures on Aesthetics (compared with the Aesthetic Theory), and reminds us:</div>
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"The reason that aesthetics is so significant in questioning the ends of modern philosophy is that an area of philosophy concerned with <i>subjective</i> responses to the natural and cultural worlds necessarily involves a kind of objectivity which differs from that present in warranted scientific knowledge.</div>
If culture were supposedly about what gives subjective pleasure to individual human organisms, and what gave pleasure to each organism was radically particular to that organism, there would be no such thing as culture anyway." (p.140)<div>
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-31219065000254475832014-07-28T18:31:00.000-07:002014-07-30T00:47:44.367-07:00A few responses to N personality disorder blogsI have written elsewhere of my view that much popular writing on narcissistic (N) psychopathology and N personality disorder satisfies itself with making of disordered individuals demons and evil-doers.<br />
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Typically writers employ language of ownership of personality disorder which conveys the idea that what is, for N-disordered individuals, a pervasive, wall-to-wall psychological defence (against narcissistic injury), is consciously deployed by a thinking and fully aware self somewhere "behind the scenes"; a homunculus operating a mask known as the "false self".<br />
Adopting this language gives writers (and readers) the satisfaction of seeming objective and simultaneously presenting the N as outright wicked.<br />
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This kind of language is, in my view, inappropriate and inadequate to conveying the nature of disorder. My main reason for objecting to it is that I believe Donald Winnicott was right to identify a "false self" as emerging (in adverse conditions of infancy) where the true self ought to be. So, for a N to become aware of themselves as N-disorder, that is, become aware of their own psychopathology, is for them to become aware that the true self is lost, and was lost at some time in (early) childhood. Experiencing this loss and being able to feel sadness over it could be the beginnings of someone recovering from N-disorder.<br />
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I do not wish to excuse N-disordered individuals, or N-abuse. Personality disorder is a social phenomenon, and creates massive suffering for individuals and those with whom they are close. I say: don't put up with N abuse! Seek professional help! But after the rage and hurt and anger we may feel, compassion is called for.<br />
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Since 2012, when I first encountered it, I have been mindful of the work on personality disorder by Dr Hanna Pickard of Oxfird University. In a nutshell, her work encourages a clinical and general stance towards personality disorder (or what, significantly, she calls "disorder of agency") that stresses an individual's responsibility for harmful behaviours but without blame. For example, in her paper "Responsibility without blame: philosophical reflections on clinical practice" (Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry and Philosophy, OUP), Dr Pickard points to disordered individuals' awareness of their harmful behaviours. They have "conscious knowledge" of these behaviours and it is therefore right to assert that they have choice to desist from them. But Dr Pickard also makes it clear that by "conscious knowledge" she does not intend that disordered individuals necessarily know "why" they might behave in those harmful ways, or what those behaviours might be achieving in terms of protecting them against (for example) narcissistic injury.<br />
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[Dr Pickard is an analytic philosopher and clinician (psychotherapist). I seem to remember some of her writing addressing a problem that may be a characteristic pre-occupation of that school of philosophy, i.e. the question whether or not minds exist. It's never occurred to me to doubt that other minds exist. My view is informed by the practice of psychotherapy, in which "self-objects" (aspects of one's mind, one's personality) may be acquired through a therapeutic relationship that enable psychological growth. This points to some sort of merged infant-mother mind in early life. How can any mind be without other minds to act as it's container?]<br />
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So here are some responses I have given on the culprit blogs I have stumbled over. The comments I made appear out of context (I won't identify the blogs themselves), so it may be tricky to understand what I have been responding to. But the gist of my comments has been towards denying the idea that there is, in the N-disordered individual, someone else present behind the mask who, therefore, must be evil-doing.<br />
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In response to a blog on what James F Masterson called "Closet" Narcissistic Personality Disorder:<br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The word "malign" accurately describes the effect of personality disorder on lives. Unfortunately, it also encourages the idea that PD sufferers are also "malign", that they are self-conscious, that behind the narcissistic "false self" there is another, conscious self, manipulating things. I appeal to readers of this blog, which has attracted thoughtful comments, to consider that there is no self-consciousness in NPD sufferers (whether of the "closet" or "overt" kind). The damaging thought-feeling-behaviour patterns are sub-consciously driven. In total they are geared towards maintaining self-esteem, getting external validation/love/admiration of a false-self-image. The false self emerges in response to unempathic parenting (usually a mum who has her own un-met narcissistic needs). Disordered individuals lack real self-esteem, lack self-love, which is the same thing as lacking authentic "self" - something virtually unimaginable if not directly experienced. Personal setbacks, contradicting the false-self-image of the NPD sufferer, may drive the individual to seek psychotherapy. It's only in the therapeutic environment that the individual can achieve (with great pain) self-awareness, i.e. awareness of the disorder.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The blog author maintained that CN's "are aware of their traits but choose to repress them out of denial which is one of the main characteristics of the disorder".</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I responded with the following comment.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>You are right to say that cheating on one's partner and maintaining a double life could not appear to an individual as anything other than wrong, whether they have a narcissistic personality disorder or not. (I would encourage anybody whose partner cheats to not tolerate the behaviour in any way. The same goes for any kind of "narcissistic" abuse - "passive-aggressive" or anything else - in a relationship. Don't put up with it!).</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The denial and stress and tears and overall defensiveness, when challenged, reflects the anxiety induced when the N's false self-image is threatened.</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(I would say that in "overt Ns, this image is typically of superiority or "greatness", in "covert" Ns, it is typically of perfection or saintliness. See V. Tonay at </span></i></span><span style="color: #0000ee; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>http://ic.ucsc.edu/~vktonay/psyc165/objectchart.html )</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The intense anxiety is because there is nothing "behind" that self. If it goes, then there is nothing. For such a person, the false self has been a way of surviving childhood that has continued into adulthood. That self cannot be simply discarded, because no other (empathic) ways of relating are known.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You are right that CNs (and ONs) are aware of their traits. But the manner of speaking suggests the kind of awareness of a person who knows he is vain, or a perfectionist, or big-headed.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thus, I would say, such a person, if he or she is an N, is aware of the traits of the false self.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But that, I would say, is very different to awareness that the self is a disordered or false self.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To put it another way, I am precisely saying that the N is unaware of the behaviours as narcissistic in the special sense of their being pathological.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such self-awareness can only come through breakdown and psychotherapy.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I realise this sounds like I'm splitting hairs and I acknowledge that to highlight the lack of self-consciousness in Ns appears to "give them an excuse" to carry on or even encourages them to keep up their bad behaviour. I certainly don't intend this. But neither do i think it makes much sense to speak in those terms.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I see a mum constantly using her children like objects to win admiration for herself, I might say to myself "Hm. Narcissistic abuse of the children". But I would be pretty sure that the mum feels, and would say, she is loving the children, and is precisely unconscious of the underlying compensation going on (i.e. her lack of self-love that compels her to derive others' admiration from things around her that she can say are "hers"). With that kind of lack of self awareness, the individual would not perceive some anonymous writing in a blog about narcissists' lack of self-consciousness as an "excuse" to continue the abusive behaviour. The N mum simply continues to "love" (pathologically). My point is that there is no conscious abuser there, but a person who thinks and believes her behaviour to be "normal".</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My aim, in contributing to this blog, is to empower people in narcissistic or co-dependent relationships to not put up with abuse. Little children who are treated unempathically by parents can't not put up with it, they have to adapt to it in order to survive. The people who tolerate narcissistic abuse in a relationship, but stay in the relationship, must be getting some sort of compensation to make it worth while. Both partners, in this way, collaborate to maintain the status quo. (I'm saying that that's what goes on in co-dependency and other forms of damaging love relations. It might be asked here: to what extent would the abused partner of an N accept that he or she was self-consciously enabling the abuse?). If the abused partner has the strength to leave, or to challenge the abuse, that is a very powerful and potentially empowering act. (It might even bring about a change in the N). It is predictable, and understandable, that those who have been abused should demonise the abusers. But we should recognise that this reaction may itself be a form of denial of the part we have had to play in enabling (or, if you like, "excusing") the abuse.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I do not wish to excuse abuse, or let Ns off the hook. My aim is to shift the tone of discussion away from "good" and "bad" polarisation, towards a point of view that sees pathological narcissism as something that occurs in a thousand small ways (not just in violence and infidelity, though these are the extreme and horrible manifestations of abuse), and as a function of socialisation, in which we are all, to some degree, involved.</span></i></span></div>
Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6216387402850256908.post-44298655797458987432014-07-23T09:47:00.001-07:002014-07-23T13:13:15.376-07:00Popular writing on NPD<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
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Popular writing on "covert", or "overt", "narcissistic personality disorder" is intended to provide information to people so they can recognise behaviours and traits of individuals in whom the disorder manifests (call them ONs and CNs) and possibly help them, if they are in close personal relationship with ONs or CNs, to understand what may be giving rise to hurt and damage in the relationship.<br />
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This is all to the good.<br />
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Of course the one who is in a relationship with a N is attracted to something, and it may often be the case that there is a great pay-off for that person in staying in the relationship, even if it means tolerating a lot of abuse.<br />
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This is difficult territory, because N disorder is a social phenomenon insofar as the self-image of the N requires constant mirroring and buttressing from others in the world. It may often be the case that the one who provides such constant mirroring (in a relationship) to a N is someone of low self-esteem and who derives esteem through his or her attachment to the N.<br />
In this way maintenance of a defensive (special or inflated) self image - i.e. that of the N - may become the purpose of ways of relating in the relationship, and it may become "co-dependency", with an "enabler" tied to the N.<br />
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But popular writing doesn't often get this far. Authors seeking attention and web-hits know it is more attractive to general readers, who know little about NPD or other personality disorders, but who may have hurts deriving from relationship with a N, to harp on the outright "wickedness" of Ns.<br />
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This satisfies what is legitimate anger and desire for retribution when we have suffered abuse, but does nothing to promote understanding of N disorder or develop awareness of the parts we have had to play in sustaining disorder in our midst. It excuses is from thinking more deeply about the roots of personality disorder in our social and cultural life.<br />
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Indeed, in my view, much popular writing - even, or perhaps especially, from persons psychoanalytically trained - actively mis-represents N disorder by using language that coneys the notion that disordered individuals (Ns) <i>choose</i> to be N, for example, 'in order to' 'conceal' their 'true self'.<br />
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Beth K MacDonald examines an example of this psychologically loaded language in her MA thesis "Out of The Mirror: A Workbook of Healing for Children of Covert Narcissistis" (Adler Graduate School, October 2013).<br />
The example is taken from "Trapped in the Mirror": Adult Children of Narcissists" by E. Golumb (1997), a work evidently concerned primarily with the "overt" N.<br />
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"They turn themselves into glittering figures of immense grandeur, surrounded by psychologically impenetrable wall. The goal of this self-deception is to be impervious to greatly feared external criticism and to their own rolling sea of self-doubts."<br />
(E. Golumb, Trapped in the Mirror)<br />
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Here, for example, the use of the term "self-deception" implies a self that is lied to. But the character of the disorder is precisely that any such lied-to self is not present. There is what Winnicott called the "false self". Only breakdown and psychotherapy, I believe, is capable of revealing the disorder (the false self) to the individual in whom it manifests.<br />
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MacDonald writes:<br />
"A reader who is not familiar with the complex nature and psychology of NPD might conclude that narcissists choose this personality disorder, and thus could choose a different way of living if they truly wanted to."<br />
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I follow Dr Hanna Pickard's view that there is indeed choice for the N. But I don't believe that this choice can be perceived without a co-incident breakdown of the false self.</div>
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In my view it is a mis-representation of disorder - a pervasive psychopathology - to suppose that it is a mask consciously worn by the N. The moment of realisation that there is choice is accompanied by the realisation that N disorder is where the true self, the "I", should be.<br />
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In other words, any individual who becomes conscious of themselves as manifesting N disorder must also become conscious of the loss of self they have sustained. There is no "real self" underneath or behind the disorder, no homunculus operating the mask from behind the scenes. At best there are fragments if self, around which some new self-image might form.</div>
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The individual in whom N disorder manifests is maintaining the self-image that arose for them in their childhood, winning the love of his or her mother which was otherwise withheld.</div>
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In these circumstances, what is called for is, yes, refusal and condemnation of narcissistic abuse in whatever form, but also sustained compassion for the individual for whom N disorder has been the route to psychic survival.</div>
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Among online resources on narcissistic psychopathology that I regard as compassionate and insightful, and would recommend to anyone interested, are academic papers such as:</div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 9pt;">McWilliams and Lependorf “narcissistic pathology of everyday life”: </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12px;">https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/narcissisticabuse/conversations/topics/1091</span></div>
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Here is an extract from the McWilliams/Lependorf paper which indicates the care they take to avoid demonisation of disordered individuals, even while showing how abuse looks.</div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"[We] are departing somewhat from the tone of much of the<br />current literature on narcissism, which, because it is about<br />treating patients with pathological self-structures, observes<br />narcissistic processes from a position of sympathetic identification<br />with the person who manifests them. Our exploration of the nuances<br />of narcissistic operations will be conducted primarily from a<br />position of identification with the objects of these subtle and<br />often malignant processes. In explicating what might be considered<br />the typical dilemmas of "victims" of narcissistic operations, we do<br />not want to be misunderstood as minimizing the suffering of<br />the "perpetrators" of narcissistically motivated acts."</span><br />
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Averageprotestant@gmail.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04149522055231551719noreply@blogger.com0