Deflensing Women
Transphobia and Misogyny
In his book Freud and Philosophy, Paul Ricoeur identifies a strand in modern theory that has come to be known as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and which he identifies primarily with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud himself. Unlike those who wish to ‘restore meaning’ to the world’s objects by remaining open to ‘the revealing power of the primal word’ (p. 32), members of the ‘school of suspicion’ (p. 28) want to tear off masks. They see meaning hidden through guile (of Nietzsche’s will to power, Marx’s social reality, Freud’s unconscious) and requiring theoretical guile in response to reveal its true face (p. 34). Part of the appeal of such interpretative approaches is that they not only promise an expansion of human freedom once the structures of deception are exposed but they incorporate accounts of why rejections of such interpretations are themselves further evidence of their truth. Just as a worker refuses to see herself as fettered because her social reality gives rise to a false consciousness that leaves her blind to its oppressiveness, a patient resists the psychotherapist’s interpretation because her ‘ego’ insists on ‘clinging to its anti-cathexes’[1]. In Bettcher’s essay we saw this “suspicion” in operation. Women who think their identity as such is part of their “facticity” are self-deceivers. Pity, then, for those unwitting accomplices to the heterosexist and racist powers that have shaped not only their social reality but their very selves; but hatred and contumely (“Transphobes!”) directed towards those who reject publicly the “theory of suspicion” and deny to its advocates their self-appointment as disclosers of hidden truths, avant-gardists who can put the masses on the true path to enlightenment and freedom.
Of course, every school of suspicion begets its alter-ego. If transactivists denounce feminists as “TERFs”, the latter are apt to see the former as stooges of the Empire of the patriarchy Striking Back, claiming ownership of women’s bodies by denying the very relevance of those bodies in the historical and ongoing struggle against subjugation and injustice. Opposing to theories of suspicion the “openness” that Ricoeur advocates might therefore seem hyperbolic, fanciful or even plain deluded. But his talk of the revealing power of the “primal word” can be domesticated. That’s the approach I’ve adopted in preceding pieces when, for example, attempting to show that our existing linguistic practices disclose the extent to which gender concepts are parasitic on sex concepts—indeed, that the relationship of dependence is critical in challenging essentialising stereotypes. It allows us to say things like “just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean that she can’t dress in any way she sees fit, shouldn’t do any job or undertake any activity that she’s able to, ought not to love other women, …”. However, just because this can be presented as what appears to be a grammatical triviality doesn’t mean that it is in fact inconsequential. Revealing conceptual connections and dependencies like this is what it means to “restore” meaning to objects in the sense of “revealing” what we might otherwise be lured into overlooking with that promise of “hidden” truths. But the ethical and political significance in particular of these conceptions and dependencies are highlighted when we consider proposals for the radical reform of our existing linguistic practices. So, for example, by setting the advocate for transrights’ proposal that avowing “I am a woman” signifies the possession of a mental state the meaning or significance of which is scrutable to the avower alone alongside the way we presently view ourselves and the world we can start to evaluate the pragmatic benefits and/or disbenefits likely to ensue.
Consider, then, two examples. If a group of Afro-Caribbean women living in South London formed a group to discuss their (intersectional) life-experiences would they welcome the presence of a white woman from Hampstead? Why not?! One might hope that such a meeting might be fruitful if there was general agreement that it was an opportunity to learn about how differently lives are led, and how blind we can become to those differences (especially when it suits us). The temptation is to think that the Hampsteadite would perhaps have more to learn than the other group members, but who knows: so much depends on the personalities involved. But what if the woman from Hampstead insisted that she had a right to join the group because she self-identified as black? Wouldn’t we think that that was not just absurd but offensive, or even abhorrent? Now, one might think that the offence here is to make claim to a personal and historical experience to which one has no entitlement, which would indeed be the case if the intention was to deceive. But in pronouncing that one’s membership of an ethnic/racial group is a matter of self-identification one is not aiming to mislead: rather, the revisionary proposal is that the historical and cultural factors that might be invoked to determine the content and contours of the relevant “identity” are in point of fact irrelevant. Her self-identification personifies an attempt to nullify the very difference that, if recognised as such, ought to make moral and political demands on her.
For most progressives this bleaching out of difference is the very opposite of what is deemed desirable[2]. By simple parity of reasoning, then, even if being a girl/woman were no more or no less a “socially constructed” category than membership or one or other ethnicity/race one would seem to have overwhelming grounds for rejecting a shift towards “self-identification”. Indeed, what could be more misogynistic than this effacement of historical being. But of course this is not the “simple” displacement of one culturally constructed category by another[3]. The shift mooted is not from an historico-cultural determination to that of the autonomous subject flexing its own semantic authority—though it’s worth recalling just how reactionary the conceptions of femaleness in particular these self-identifications can be. Rather, it’s a proposal to change our understanding of what it is to be human: to flense humans, as if dematerialising them is essential to revealing the idealised and self-determining subject within. But the obvious question is: what gain is there to be made here? What would compensate for the inability to make sense of the myriad ways, historically and continuing into the present, that sexual difference is misunderstood, exploited and abused to diminish the lives and experiences of uncountable girls and women?
What others think one’s body signifies should not determine one’s self-conception, but to resist those individualizing forces by regarding one’s body as somehow exterior to that self-conception is a retreat into solipsism and abstraction. From that perspective it indeed appears to make sense to say of oneself “I am not one of those women who has a womb but one who has a penis”[4] as if observing one does or does not find between one’s legs is a matter of recording mere “genital information”. But notwithstanding the vacuity of the claim, that retreat also fails to acknowledge the all-important positive side of being the embodied creatures we are: the joys and pleasures, the triumphs and accommodations as well as the pains and suffering. To be reminded of the “primal” meaning of “woman” (etc.) is not some mystical conceit, then; rather, it’s to recall the
individual and collective history of menstruation, menopause, maternity, of sexual violence and discrimination and marginalisation, of struggle and empowerment. That is why those who deny this are misogynistic even if they think they are championing women’s freedoms by changing what women are.
This consideration leads to a second example. Two years ago my then 10-year-old daughter arrived home to announce triumphantly that she’d been told at school that she could choose her own gender and so wouldn’t have to have periods. When I pointed out to her that having a period related to her biological sex and had nothing to do with choice in the customary sense she was crestfallen at first, though within a few days had quite forgotten about the whole episode. This raises many issues, and presumably some people might think that I erred in offering the explanation that I did. But if to be a prepubescent girl is to be destined, ceteris paribus, to undergo certain developmental changes, the most consequential of which are menstruation and menopause, then being a girl is not reducible or otherwise assimilable to identity, where that falls within the domain of the will alone. Indeed, without those and other changes being seen as part of what it is to be a girl or woman what resources would one have to explain that they had in the past led men for the most part to believe all sorts of things about what woman were and were not capable of? Would I have had to say that if only the girls in Afghanistan identified as boys they’d be able to go to school and avoid being married-off at the age of ten to (self-identifying) men four times their age? An understanding of gender that detaches it from biology is like an understanding of planet that is “one hundred percent cultural”: useless for any progressive purposes.
If it is often male transactivists like Bettcher that are at the forefront of the demand to supplant sex terms with gender identity terms it is girls in particular that are experiencing the fragmentation of their identities. It’s a commonplace that “growing up” and finding out who one “really is” is particularly complex for girls coming to term with their changing bodies and emotions. Promoting the idea that one’s “real” self is to be found in some “interior” state that is distinct from one’s body; indeed, that one’s body mis-states or misrepresents that authentic self; may for many just issue in a passing interest in changing their pronouns. But for some—and for their concerned parents—the question of “choice” is seen in a more dangerous light. Consider this from an interview with Paul B. Preciado in The Guardian. Taking the claim that the pill was devised to control the black population[5] but was later used to emancipate women as a model, Preciado asserts:
Well, it’s similar for trans and non-binary people, who reallocate technologies – such as operations and hormones, which were invented to normalise the bodies of intersex babies at birth – to emancipate themselves and construct all their genders. The body is not an anatomical object. It is a historical archive.
The history of birth control in the USA is of course considerably more complicated than this facile analogy supposes, and there’s a great deal of controversy surrounding the extent of Margaret Sanger’s commitment to eugenics. But the main point here is that to view the body as either an anatomic object (“genital information”) or an “historical archive” is to make the same error; namely, to treat it as exterior. Before Paul became Beatrix she wrote of her experimentation on herself with testosterone: “I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me” (Emphasis added. p. 16). It’s clear why many girls might (like Beatriz Preciado) feel that alienating themselves from their bodies in this way is the only escape from the images and conceptions of them that their societies confront them with. And in this they’re helped once again by the blurring of the sex/gender distinction, which appears to authenticate a self-contained state (gender identity), “existentially” free from the influence of what society wants to make of you because that society “sees” only the (exterior) body. Given that structure, one might want to consolidate that interior freedom by bringing one’s body—what society “sees”—into retrospective alignment. But as we’ve noted (1, 2, 3), the discordance here is between conceptions of sex (gender, if you will) not between a self-authenticating state (gender) and one subject to classificatory regime of an external authority (sex). To medicalise it is to make a category mistake[1], but it also deprives feminists of the Archimedean point from which to level the accusation that it’s what societies want to make of women that requires resistance. That men have historically conspired to make girls and women like Beatrix Preciado reject their own bodies in the struggle for freedom and equality is the most egregious of our many sins.
[1] This is not to say that there isn’t a medically identifiable condition in the vicinity as it were. But psychiatry’s failure to clarify what medical status one’s gender or “gender identity” has deprives their theorising in this area of authority.
[1] Freud, S. 1936. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, p. 147. Trans. A. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press.
[2] To take just one example, finding out about how black artists were excluded from histories of the musical developments that they initiated is a gift to all those for whom music is an important part of their lives.
[3] As we determined in Are Transwomen women? 2, even if one adheres to the otiose claim that all facts are constructed, one still has to accept that some are “constructed” differently from others.
[4] And politicians finds themselves using tortured phrases like “woman with a cervix”.
[5]In Testo Junkie Preciado claims: ‘In the context of an emerging politicization of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities in the United States, the contraceptive molecule was thought of as an urban eugenic device and as a method of controlling nonwhite population growth, as well as the population growth of nations that had not yet entered postwar liberal capitalist economies’ (pp. 174—5).
[6] This is not to say that there isn’t a medically identifiable condition in the vicinity as it were. But psychiatry’s failure to clarify what medical status one’s gender or “gender identity” has deprives their theorising in this area of authority.