When I got married in
1978 both my partner and I were under parental pressure to do so. We did it in the
most minimal available form: with a special licence you could marry in a civil
ceremony with just two witnesses, no guests, and no rings. The bride and the
two female witnesses wore black. No photographs were taken. Had the option of a civil partnership been
available, we would have taken it. Marriage was a reactionary institution to
the reproduction of which neither of us really wished to contribute. We had
read our Germaine Greer and much else besides.
When the campaign for
the legalisation of gay marriage got under way it was not something about which
I could get enthusiastic. Civil partnerships, yes. But marriage? Are you really
sure? And you want it in church too? There we must part company: churches are
not on the right side of history, whatever their denomination. In other words,
here was a supposedly progressive cause to which any right-thinking Guardian reader was supposed to sign up
but which left me cold. I will leave you to fight it out with the C of E -
they’re pretty desperate anyway so you will win - and I will continue to believe that
the C of E should be disestablished and its assets confiscated by the state,
Henry the Eighth Mark Two. The National Secular Society makes a better progressive
cause than yours but one which - partly thanks to modern identity politics - makes
progress at a snail’s pace.
Transgender activists
now pose me a similar problem. Their cause does not seem either particularly
progressive or otherwise well-founded. Worse, in this case, the cause is clearly being
advanced by bullying and intimidation. It feels more like a right-wing movement
than a progressive one.
I’ve just read a 2021 statement
on the official LSE website signed by
“The LSE Department of Gender Studies” taking issue with those who believe that
“Sex Matters” and who have formed a Gender Critical
Research Network based at the Open University. The LSE -
in an official-looking statement - wants to see it disestablished. The text
bears close reading; I will pick out just this:
in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender
critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship…
The easy one here
is “binary”. In my reading, gender critical theorists who believe that sex
matters take more interest in non-binary intersex people than their opponents.
Indeed, biological intersex is a problem for them and they try to marginalise
its reality, as for example in Zoe Playdon’s recent book The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes (2021). The reality, recognised by
the reactionary "sex matters" people, is that intersex people have life very hard because most
societies and cultures have not found ways of accommodating them, starting from
the insistence of the state’s birth registrars that for social purposes Sex be declared as binary. Michel
Foucault’s edition of the life of Herculine Barbin fits well on a gender
critical reading list precisely because it is all about a culture failing to
find space for a nature, and a nature reduced to despair.
“Essentialist” is
almost as easy. Second wave feminists who sharply distinguished Sex from Gender
did not do so with a view to privileging Sex but at least partly as a way into
exploring the complex, dynamic relationship between the two which allowed for
the realities of tomboys and cissies, for active resistance to role
stereotypes, but also for some biological realities hard to shift:
child-bearing, breast-feeding most obviously. They were clear that though many,
maybe most, sex-related roles and expectations were socially constructed a few
weren’t - and that was important. In the same way, when Foucault studied the
medico-legal discourses constructed around the parricide case of Pierre
Riviere, he did not claim as a social construction the dead bodies numbering
three. (I attended the seminars and can vouch for that).The three dead bodies
were what we (and philosophers too) call “brute facts”.
Worse is to come
for the LSE’s claim. The progressive test question is frequently posed, “Are transgender women women?” (what
Kathleen Stock and others call “the
Witch Question”). That is an essentialist question intended to allow for only
two possible answers, Yes or No. There is not even any space to reply that it
depends on whether the person in question has had surgery or other treatment. The rhetoric currently mobilised in both
theory and sloganising is that people are who they say they are, a foolish
claim which expresses nothing more than an overweening sense of entitlement and
privilege. An undergraduate might try to
give it some grounding in “scholarship” by using the words “performativity” and
“Judith Butler” but that is not the same as having read and understood
anything.
“Immutability”? No
one can predict what science will do next, for good or ill. But actually
existing people and those billions who have preceded them have been pretty much
alike, biologically, so much so that if God had really wanted to pull off an
indisputable miracle, Jesus would have been born to Joseph.
*
The LSE statement
several times stresses that it is on the side of “research” and “scholarship”,
unlike the gender critical people who don’t engage in either. At the LSE they claim the mantle of academic respectability. That’s just bullshit. The treadmills of contemporary university departments
of humanities and social sciences produce very little research
or scholarship. Their faculties and students are mainly engaged in making
claims which illustrate conclusions of a political-cum-theoretical nature which
have already been reached. The so-called “academic journals” are full of such
stuff and Ph Ds are awarded for it.
No one expects to be surprised by the results of their “research” or the
findings of their “scholarship”. This is true for both gender "theorists", gender
critical "theorists", and many other kinds of "theorist" - though who is the most
tedious I don’t really know. The big question is whether they belong in
universities at all. At the moment, they are going out of their way to prove
that they don’t.
There is a
difference between research which has fairly obvious political implications
which may be uncomfortable, the kind of research of which climate change
research might be taken as exemplary, and ancillary writing designed to illustrate and
defend positions (scientific/political/theoretical) already arrived at. It’s true that
when the state employs thousands of people to teach gender studies to many more
thousands of moderately qualified students it’s unreasonable to expect that
they will come up with genuine, startling, new conclusions on a regular basis. It
doesn’t happen in the physical sciences, so why expect it in the humanities and
social sciences?
Early (1970s - 1990s)
exploratory writing in the fields of
feminism, gender studies, and queer studies was refreshing and exciting; now it’s
been routinized into conservative academic curricula of depressing uniformity, where
courses are taught by people who - when it comes down to it -are principally
agitated by the Pensions Question. The rhetoric of the LSE statement uses the kind
of exhausted tropes which one expects in the leaflets of sectarian political
groups; but it also, very obviously, seeks to be inclusive of each interest
group around the sectarian table. Everyone has to have their course to teach; ‘twas
ever thus and students will be told that all those courses are important
because if they weren’t someone would be out of a job.
Conclusion? I doubt the position in Gender Studies or its Critical twin is retrievable. The antagonisms and hostilities are clearly at a toxic level. I would advise students to vote with their feet. Take an interest in the issues and campaign with a group, by all means. Read the books in your own time. But study something else.
