Sunday 24 October 2021

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

Re-posting blogpost on 24th October 2021

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


_______________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

I am posting because some readers might find interesting.

It’s a 20-minute read.

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

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

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

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

DIALOGUE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1)    In this Act

(2)    “man” means a male of any age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


4 comments:

  1. I read this with interest coming from a link you sent in a commentry to a Jane Clare Jones blog. I was tempted to toy with the idea that Abi might be a man and even after reading of their marriage in which the husband was a woman. Thus much a disguised lesbian relationship you'd have to say but the possibilty that the wife might have been a man remains nonetheless. Abi would of course indignantly reply - quite correctly - that that is none of our business and truly I don't care if they are/were such a pair; I just wondered whether from Abi's discursive style I could discern faintly a background of being raised as a male.
    To get to the nitty gritty; Abi as an intersectionalist inevitably brings race parallels into the argument albeit at a fairly late stage in the discussion. And there we have it in all its floppy disingenuous glory - race is a biological fiction and therefore sex must also be.
    First question: is race truly a biological fiction? Well the answer must be both yes and no. Of course it's a fact that the human genome contains all the information needed to evolutionarily restore all the races currently in the world in the space of a quarter of a million years, should it ever occur that the whole of humanity bar one little isolated mountain village community was annihilated. However is that the same as saying race is a biological fiction? Yes race is a biological fiction if to be a true biological entity there has to be a cut and dried definitional boundary between one race and the next which cannot be overstepped and it is a commonplace observation that races can intermingle and produce children that are neither one race nor the other. If mixing of races became mandatory such that everyone was forbidden to pair off with one of their own race then in time racial boundaries would no longer exist as immediately observable phenotypical phenomena. But knowing that even under these circumstances phenotypes could theoretically again become manifest such that discernible racial characteristcs would be observable amongst populations according to geographic location we have to admit some evolutionarily biological genotypical influence contributes to the observable variations of race amongst the human family.
    By saying in such an unnuanced blanket statement that race is a biological fiction and then attempting to pre-empt the inevitable question "What about Rachel Dolezal?" by the spurious claim that race transition can only work in one direction Abi sleep walks into a self contradictory tautology of her (I plump for 'her' against my better instincts in the absence of any real evidence) own making. For if race is not biologically conditioned then what might be the meaning of any campaign towards racial equality, to which of course the only answer can be - as indeed Abi obliges with - "Race is a biological fiction imposed upon bodies with perceivable traits". The word 'imposed' here seves to emphasize that race is then, in other words, a socially constructed identity. (In spite of the fact apparently that "the perceivable traits" can only with great difficulty be attained in a white person through I don't know what kinds of medical and surgical tinkering.) But Ooops!! Then we really can't fault Rachel Dolezal for her pretence because her self chosen identity must be her private affair which we have no business confronting her with. If she feels black then she is black - we have no business challenging her on that account.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comment. 'Abi' (I am 99% sure) is female, identifies as a woman, and was wife to a transgender man.

      Delete
  2. So either race is a biological fiction or it isn't depending on which biological criteria we set up to be able to accept or reject the description of race as biologically founded, but then at least the criteria we choose need to be the same criteria we would choose to take any position on the biologicality of sex. But here again the parallel fails in any case because whereas the mingling of races will result in offspring of mixed race no such parallel exists with mingling of sexes. Indeed the mingling of sexes is partout a prerequisite for the factum of reproduction at all, and in 99.9% (or was it 99.8% - who cares?) the sex of the resulting offspring is a non ambiguous biological fact depending in no way upon any tortuously proclaimed social construction, and never a biological sex status lying in some independantly sexed place between male and female. 'Intersex' conditions do indeed exist but not as independently definable sexes, nor as true mixtures where potentially fertile gametes of both kinds can be produced in the same body.
    But further than this if there is such a thing as the patriarchy and that thing is defined in large part in its misogynistic attitude to women how on earth will we be able to point to the victims of this misogyny if woman is no more than a socially constructed identity which moreover, theoretically can change from day to day. When a man like Philip aka Pippa Bunce changes his identity from one day to the next is he then a victim of misogyny on Wednesdays and Thursdays and a perpetrator of it on Mondays Tuesdays and Fridays? (takes a break from misogyny at the weekends I guess). Such behaviour belies the existence of any 'gender identity' as some solid innate characteristic of a human being. It almost seems just a silly game where winning is rewarded by the rush of power which comes from being able politically to coerce sceptics into submission to the bogus ideology. Have we really got that bored?
    If only that was the case and we could just ignore all the TG nonsense and just get on with our lives as if it had no consequence. Unfortunately we could only do so at our own peril, so pervasive and capricious it has become in society that no-one can with certainty count themselves free from possible persecution from the ideology's self appointed witch hunters. Worse than that it's an evil and really sinister danger to the normal development of children. If not for any other then for that reason alone this terrible movement has to be opposed with all resources at our disposal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks again for your comment. 'Abi' pre-empted me bringing up race tho I didn't intend to go there. I saw this as part of her rhetorical repertoire. I think you are correct about populations with distinct characteristics emerging, which we would identify as 'race', IF there was ever again (and I don't suppose there will be) a very small number of humans in one place, as we know there once was, in Africa, hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. I think you agree, it is not 'all or nothing' (biology or social construction) and I don't think it is controversial to hold that view unless you are living in the US.

      Delete