Criticisms of t-ideology/ thought policing

The Harry Potter author was joined by Professor Kathleen Stock, Respect My Sex co-founder, Maya Forstater and several other activists https://www.gbnews.uk/news/jk-rowling-has-lunch-with-respect-my-sex-feminists-as-they-unite-for-womens-rights/269340 Criticisms of t-ideology/ thought policing Dear Prof. Stock, I discovered a number of your essays on t-ideology after reading this article : https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/19/divide-over-scholarly-debate-over-gender-identity-rages In recent years , I have been astonished by the widespread acceptance of t-ideology including its seizing legal power in the US and Britain (!) , its authority on email lists and social media , its ability to censor and slander criticism of it. I’m astonished by it because t-ideology is fundamentally irrational. It is a violation of the most basic rules of human society , language and culture. It is ignorant of basic biology and evolution. It’s widespread acceptance exposes ignorance in much of the population, especially the academic population. Please let me share with you some of my criticisms of this nonsense . There is a sense in which t- ideologists are just trying to change the definitions of the words “woman” and “man” in order to abolish gender . An analogy would be if someone wanted to be allowed to call their right hand their left hand and their left hand their right hand . Just because those are their hands , doesn’t mean an individual has the authority to change the socially established, conventional definitions of right and left for other people . Similarly just because it is someone’s body doesn’t mean they have the authority to change the definition of woman and man with respect to their body for other people ( except in the UK, evidently ) . With respect to the goal of abolishing binary gender , I disagree that we should . We must abolish male supremacy, not binary gender. Binary gender was invented at human origins in the Stone Age, hundreds of thousands of years ago . Stone Age society had gender equity or equivalence , not male supremacy. So, it is possible to abolish male supremacy; it originates circa 6,000 years ago in complex with private property and the state ; the complex is not genetically based. Denial that a man who thinks he is a woman is a woman is not hate speech . It’s slander , a lie , to call it hate speech or bigotry . It is a statement of social scientific fact. Society defines what it is to be a woman or a man . Individuals do not have the authority to make up their own definitions and demand that other people use their definition . ( except in Britain where evidently the state power, on this issue , has been seized by the insane ; looks like advanced decay of bourgeois society) I repeat : society has named one hand a left hand and the other hand a right hand . An individual does not have the authority to demand that other people call that individual’s left hand their right hand and vice versa even though it is that individual’s hand. They may “ feel” that their left hand is their right hand ; they can call it that themselves, but cannot require it of others ; and it would be slander to call someone who adheres to society’s rules on words for hands a hater or invidious discriminator . Similarly an ( insane ) individual might decide that they are a cat or a cockroach or Napoleon. But it would be absurd to require other people to treat them as one of those . Also it’s racist to compare denial of t- ideology to racist discrimination. T’s are unilaterally trying to change and violating fundamental rules of human society by claiming they are the gender that doesn’t correspond to their sex. They are sociopaths and legitimately criticized and corrected. Black people are not changing or violating any human social rules by existing ; so they are not legitimately discriminated against , oppressed. Nor is it dehumanizing to call a male a man . Men are humans . Another symptom of insanity is to think one can declare no debate or criticism of these claims on a charge of “ hate “ speech or invidious discrimination. It’s not hate speech to follow conventional semantic nprinciples of what defines gender. It’s truly astonishing arrogance and ignorance to think an individual can redefine the meaning of such socially fundamental and ancient words . /// post to a Marxist email list Transgender Trouble: 40 Years of Gender Essentialism and Gatekeeping ❧ Current Affairs From: Charles Brown Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2020 21:19:40 EST Actually , gender essentialism has existed for 2.5 million years , and is pretty much the first organizing principle of human society; human species-being , in Marx and Feuerbach’s terminology . It is the “ direct and natural species relationship” . It is humanity’s fundamental cultural binary and dialectical opposition. An example is the famous yin/ yang of Chinese culture ; or French “ viva la difference ! “ Levi-Straussian structural anthropology has proven that all human culture and language are built out of symbolic binary oppositions; dialectical oppositions, Gender is a human invention 100,000’s of years old. Human society defines gender based on objective physical characteristics , not subjective, individual feelings . Whatever feelings are unique to a gender are the feelings one gets from one’s biological sex characteristics- like the feeling of a period for a woman , or the feeling of being pregnant . A male/man can’t have these feelings. Clearly the writer ( of Transgender Trouble ) is a subjective idealist / solipsist , an egomaniac; not a materialist, not a Marxist . We Marxists are gender essentialists ( contra post-modernists and post-structuralists , anti-essentialists) . Gender , a cultural category, is a reflection of biological sex following Marx’s lead here : “ In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the directand natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm cb at 1:57 PM Sent from my iPhone