The "struggle against reality"

The UCU strikes back...

In brief pieces I thought it might be interesting to look at “responses” to the Supreme Court ruling that have come out of Academia. The first is from my local branch of the UCU:

For trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, and indeed anyone opposed to biologically essentialist accounts of social categories, this is anything but a welcome clarification. While a fuller discussion on the implications of the judgement is likely to follow in the next couple of weeks, into this troubling space we send our unmitigated support to those who are impacted by it.

The first thing to note is that the judgement itself makes no mention whatsoever of “intersex” people and only one mention of “non-binary” people since these are not protected characteristics and have no role as such (as “intersex”; as “non-binary”) in anti-discrimination law. That is not the Supreme Court’s “fault” of course since their task is one of “statutory interpretation” of existing legislation.

The second thing to note here is that the branch appears to have decided not to send its “unmitigated” support to the overwhelming majority of people who’re impacted by this; namely, the women who don’t want to share same-sex spaces with men. This implicit sexism and heteronormativity has become the norm in the defence of so-called “trans” rights. As Sharron Davies observed in a recent BBC interview about “trans” participation in sports teams, the assumption is always that the rights of women are seen as the impediment and not the rights men. If men make “trans” people feel uncomfortable then why should it be the women—once again—who have to make the accommodation?

Following on from this, we get a bit of dodgy philosophy: ‘anyone opposed to biologically essentialist accounts of social categories’ will be troubled by the judgement. Now, I am absolutely opposed to “biologically essentialist accounts of social categories” so why am I not “troubled” by the judgement? Well, because the only grounds for maintaining that sex-terms are “social categories” is to assimilate them to “gender” terms. Firstly, then, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the function of gender terms as the projection of sexual difference into the “social” realm was to criticise “essentialist” accounts that view sexual stereotypes (or “gender-roles” if you prefer) as determined by biological function. So feminists can make the following sort of claim:

• XX may be a woman but that doesn’t mean that she has to [insert sexual-role stereotype]

Assimilating “sex” to sexual stereotype/gender roles makes it impossible to articulate this sort of criticism of biological essentialism that feminism seeks to make. Yet more evidence that the UCUs apparent progressivism serves to mask a tacit support of patriarchal structures!

By way of an addendum to the above, it’s worth noting that from a critique of the idea that sexual stereotypes are determined by biological sex one cannot draw the conclusion that sex is a “social category”. That’s like saying that because pain-behaviour differs between societies then pain is a “social” category. But rejecting the idea that one isn’t really in pain unless one runs around screaming and yelling (a “pain”-stereotype) does not mean the pain isn’t biological. Opposing one form of essentialism (biological) with another (social) is entirely unwarranted. Both forms of essentialism should be resisted.

The sight of a small group of women quaffing champagne to celebrate the erasure of the rights of trans people to be identified in line with their hard-won Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is horrifying.

Firstly, there never was such a right, and so it couldn’t be “erased”. If people thought there was such a right that’s largely down to Stonewall and their stooges like the UCU constantly telling folk that they have one. As to what people find “horrifying”, doubtless the UCU would not have objected to people celebrating if the decision had gone the other way despite the fact that those who supported the appellant would have seen that as erasing the rights of women. What is truly horrifying is that the UCU did nothing to support women who were no-platformed, hounded out of their jobs, forced to go to law to protect their spaces. Theirs have been the really “hard-won” achievements.

This verdict certainly feels like a regression, taking us back decades, undoing and contradicting previous (legal and otherwise) progressions, and we can only wonder which marginalised group will be attacked next.

As noted, the ruling doesn’t “undo” or “contradict” anything. Indeed, the whole point of a statutory interpretation is to look for coherence. And time and again the judgement points out anomalies that would arise from any right to be “identified in line with” one’s GRC, like the fact that a pregnant “trans man” (with a GRC) could not be discriminated against in relation to their sex on account of their pregnancy but a “trans woman” (with a GRC) would have their sex “protected” despite the fact that no trans woman will ever conceive. I hesitate to draw the parallel, but this is eerily reminiscent of the People’s Front of Judea:

LORETTA: I want to have babies.

REG: You want to have babies?!

LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.

REG: But... you can't have babies.

LORETTA: Don't you oppress me.

REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!

LORETTA: crying

JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies.

FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

REG: What's the point?

FRANCIS: What?

REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!

FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

At one point the UCU statement says:

Rights are not a zero sum game; we lose nothing worth having when we extend our rights and protections to other humans.

I’m sure that whoever typed this homily meant well, but what “right” is being extended to other people here? When I ask people this question I get answers like respect for “their reality” or acknowledgement of “their truth”. I think it’s hard to make much sense of these sorts of claims, and for good reasons: some people’s “realities” or “truths” are wholly unworthy of respect. Putting aside repellant beliefs around race, sex, and sexual-orientation, consider those people who think they’ve been abducted by aliens. I might acknowledge their belief but that it doesn’t make it real. Like Judith, some people find their realities “oppressive”, but that doesn’t mean that we are obliged to attempt to integrate them into our broader understanding of what’s real. And indeed, to do so might involve violating the rights of other people. The question of what is and is not “worth having” when we “extend our rights” is best not left to the UCU when their starting point is one in which the rights of women are effaced from the outset.