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| From the cover of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism |
“Bodies with vaginas” is an odd way to refer to half the human race. Yet it was the quote that The Lancet, a medical journal, chose to feature on the cover of its latest issue, telling readers that “historically, the anatomy and physiology” of such bodies had been neglected.
After complaints about dehumanising language, the Lancet apologised. But it is not alone. A growing number of officials and organisations are finding themselves tongue-tied when it comes to using the word “woman”.
Other instances it cites of the reulting outlandish language are these:
A British hospital has instructed staff on its maternity wards to offer to use the phrase “birthing people”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of America’s Congress, talks of “menstruating people”. On September 18th the American Civil Liberties Union republished a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Supreme Court judge, on the anniversary of her death. The quote was a defence of a woman’s right to have an abortion. But the ACLU’s version—for which it, too, later apologised—replaced every instance of “women” with “people”. In Britain, the opposition Labour Party is tying itself in very public knots over questions such as whether only women possess cervixes.
See here Labour's shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves struggle with the absurdity of the party's position.
Turmoil about whether we can use the word "woman" any more - while there is no such upheaval over "man" - arises for reasons the editorial column makes clear:
This linguistic shift is being driven by both compassion and fear. Compassion, because organisations are keen not to be seen to be excluding those whose sense of their gender does not match their sex, such as people who identify as trans or non-binary. And fear, because they are worried about attracting the wrath of online mobs should they be deemed to have violated a set of rapidly changing taboos about gender and sex that hardly existed five years ago—and which, outside a few rarefied circles, still don’t.
Activists tend to hold that men can be women. But the language used to state this can be "dehumanising":
As the Lancet discovered, many people—trans men as much as anyone else—dislike being described as collections of ambulatory body-parts and secretions. More than a whiff of misogyny is in the air. It is striking that there is no comparably zealous campaign to abandon the word “men” in favour of “prostate-havers”, “ejaculators” or “bodies with testicles”. It is almost always women who are being ordered to dispense with a useful word they have used all their lives.
Furthermore, understanding could suffer. Medical advice, for instance, has to be clear and intelligible by all. That is why Britain’s National Health Service often prefers words like “stomach ache” to “dyspepsia”, or “heart attack” to “myocardial infarction”. One survey conducted by a cervical-cancer charity suggested that around 40% of women are unsure about the details of what exactly a cervix is. This implies that asking “people with cervixes” to turn up for screening appointments may not be clear or intelligible, especially to women who have English as their second language.
Most broadly of all, the point of language is to communicate. Insisting on unfamiliar or alien-sounding terms will make it harder to discuss issues that affect only or disproportionately girls and women, such as female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage or the persistence of pay gaps.
The Economist concludes its assessment of society's sorry state of affairs because of the deliberate rejection of what is a factual matter with a warning on the use of social media in particular to propel among the elite the fashionable acceptance of a fictional reality:
Cowed by the insults and viciousness such discussions provoke, many people are fearful of taking part. If harshly policed, baffling and alien-sounding language is added to the price of joining the debate, even fewer will be willing to elevate their cephalic protuberance [their forehead] above the parapet.
The manner in which transgender activists do, indeed, promote a fictional reality is examined in a valuable review of the book Material Girls:Why Reality Matters for Feminism, written by Kathleen Stock, a professor of analytic philosophy at the UK's University of Sussex.
Trans identification is a form of immersion in fiction, she argues, which can enrich human life in many ways. It’s both real and not-real.
The review, by Mary Harrington, a writer whose articles are endowed with great clarity of thought, continues:
“Immersion” is also both real and not-real: a state of awareness halfway between full belief and full disbelief. Both these states matter in different ways. We may be absorbed by a film at the cinema, and find a particularly good one deeply satisfying and life-enhancing, but that wouldn’t stop us from leaving in a hurry if the fire alarm goes off and the room fills with smoke. But, [Stock] suggests, recent activism has sought legislative changes that in effect compel everyone to act as if we believe these fictions are in all ways identical to reality.
And this, she argues, has negative effects, especially for women and same-sex attracted people, because underlying realities continue to be politically salient. [...] Consider the now-notorious case of “Karen White”. This individual, a convicted sex offender, is in all respects physiologically male but was moved to a women’s prison after claiming to identify as a woman. White then sexually assaulted several female inmates.
[...] The example of Karen White is a textbook instance of the warning sounded in On Miracles by one of [the Enlightenment’s] foremost thinkers, the humanist Voltaire: “Once your faith […] persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life […] Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The reviewer, Harrington, examines closely how reason is no longer the currency of social and political discourse:
The activism [Stock] seeks to challenge is the political wing of a contemporary cultural movement committed to dismantling the Enlightenment’s intellectual foundations. [...]
Stock wants us to see the world as it is. As she puts it: “Features of the world, and our collective human interests in them, are not arbitrary, and that’s what we should be trying to make concepts responsive to”.
But her antagonists dissent from this basic premise: as they see it, our ideas about the world do help to create “the world as it is”; and to make matters worse, it is arbitrary. What emerges in Material Girls is a tussle between these radically mutually incompatible understandings of the relation between knowledge and power.
[...] for Stock, knowledge is what matters, while power can and should be relegated to background enabling condition for the production of more and better knowledge. So, for example, the “main point” of universities is in her view “to produce and disseminate socially useful knowledge”.
However, Harrington highlights how it is power that is at the forefront of transgender activism:
[Stock] lists, for example, the use of institutional power to enforce “preferred pronouns”, and social taboos against “misgendering” in educational contexts. She further details what she characterises as “propaganda” employed by activists in pursuit of their political aims: statistical sleight of hand, emotive talk of suicide risks, and the growing institutional popularity of the startlingly pseudo-religious Transgender Day of Remembrance.
So it is power not reason that is valued in this post-truth age. As Harrington puts it:
And even as [Stock] expertly wields the discursive tools of the Age of Reason — its careful logic, efforts at good-faith representation of the opposing argument, and so on — to dissect this emerging paradigm [...] the same implicit acknowledgement of the limits to rational analysis emerges [...where] self-organised groups of activists “held meetings, made websites and wrote blog posts, marshalling their tiny resources highly effectively against well-embedded organisations like Stonewall, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance”.
The transformation of public discourse from reliance on reasoning to a fictional realm where power reigns supreme is almost complete. Harrington says:Somehow, by dint of determination, these groups pushed back against well-funded and politically connected lobbies to effect meaningful change. In other words: it wasn’t reasonable persuasion as such that moved the needle. It was leaning as hard as possible on every available lever of political power.
[W]e are now, as a culture, losing such faith as we ever collectively had in facts and reason. In its most grounded version, this manifests as a dizzying discourse of political claim and counter-claim, all supposedly backed by objective statistics. At its more baroque end it drives the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. The point is that it’s not just angry students with “woke” ideas who think reality is old hat: it’s everyone.
I’m unconvinced that this new paradigm can be effectively contested using the tools of the old one. Stock’s analysis is razor-sharp, in Enlightenment terms, and her prose is finely-honed. But it doesn’t matter how exquisitely crafted your knife is, if you’re bringing it to a gunfight you’re still going to lose.
Notice Harrington's call to action in the last sentence of the following paragraph:
For our emerging post-Enlightenment politics has abandoned even the pretence of persuasion when it comes to pursuing cultural and political change. Today’s modus operandi is a pincer approach characterised by policy capture backed by the threat of social sanction, whether enforced by HR departments or by punitive online mobs. And evidence so far – including that cited by Stock — suggests this works just as well in defence of “reality” as in undermining it.
Committed people, with a willingness to show strength of conviction, can follow the example of the trans activists and fight back by the use of shame and embarrassment, not in a vindictive manner, nor as a harsh means to achieve a good end, but by way of converting our treatise to a viral tweet. "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone" (Colossians 4:6).
[*] See the editorial here also.
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