Exclusionary ideology as poison
When does it become an issue become toxic? Is it the moment critique is banned, when the first punch is thrown, or when the first bullet hits the first victim? As issue that becomes ideology, a cause, becomes toxic when it both cannot accept critiquing and then uses psychological and physical violence to achieve its ends. No concept or thought survives contact with the outside world intact. To develop and grow it must account for the world as is, not just the world it has constructed. Which is why when dealing with concepts like exclusionary feminism and anti-woke illiberalism it is not enough simply to throw punches back or use other forms of violence in return.
Free speech is the bed rock of any society, but so is the right to reply. You cannot simply state you are using free speech to state an idea and not expect others to critique that idea. Much of the right-wing hysteria over trans identities stems from their desire to be ‘right’ about sex and gender, yet as soon as you use facts, science, and logic to counter their ideas they accuse you of impinging their free speech. This is where ideology becomes poisonous, as without critique and reasonable conversation ideology becomes dogma.
Some of this can also be said about trans groups who have used verbal and physical abuse to further their ends. No, I am not pointing fingers and saying both sides are equal, the balance of power lies firmly in the cis-normative camp. Yet, throwing rape threats, death threats, and assaulting right-wing speakers only ever plays into their hands. Agitation and resistance are by their nature messy, but threatening and abusing someone does not equal messy, it simply makes you an arsehole. Fighting fire with fire leaves all sides burned.
The academic in me points to all the evidence in support of gendered identities, showing the history, science, and sociology that underpins gender as a social construct outside and beyond biology. I see the social construction of sex as a concept of power, and how radical feminist fundamentally misunderstand their own arguments. Yet, none of this matters for them. Evidence is never enough, for the emotive power of what you can see and the group think of an ideological position buttresses them from the world as is.
Exclusionary radical feminism excludes because it sees no other way through. It states that all men are potential rapists, and all trans men are girls who have been fooled by trans ideology. The phallus is the enemy, the power wielded by testosterone is the poison corroding everything it touches. They fail to see in that by reducing womanhood down to the womb and periods they reduce women down to the biological imperative. Why would you ever want to be a woman or conceive of yourself as a woman if behind a woman is to wear shackles? To them you can never become a woman because to be woman is to biologically suffer. To suffer is the cross all women bear, so if you so not suffer from the womb then you cannot be a woman. Ideology.
Is this reductive? Yes, maybe. However, exclusionary feminism assumes that all women follow similar life pattens, so to have a different life patten makes you something other than woman. Woman becomes a title they bestow, as if womanhood is something only they get to frame. It is toxic femininity because it states that womanhood is their privilege alone to shape and define. All other conceptions of womanhood are rejected because they do not weaponise the phallus and enshrine the womb.
Trans women are cast as the devils incarnate, the foe who must be stopped at the ramparts from storming sacred spaces. Yet, what about the women assigned at birth who never bled, do not have a womb, whose ambiguity was reconstructed by the surgeon’s knife, live working class lives divorced from middle class sensibilities? Are they welcome in this tent of womanhood? Exclusionary feminism creates this myth of womanhood designed to hold back a perceived horde of trans women, yet in doing so sets up this conception of woman that few women can fully adhere to. Assigned gender at birth is not destiny, yet exclusionary feminists treat it as gospel, as ideology.
This exclusionary ideology makes interesting points about sports and same sex spaces, but in doing so they seek to render those spaces immovable and inviolable, forgetting that sport and single sex spaces already exclude many women by dint of their rules, money, effort required to train/get there, amongst other things. Equity of opportunity is not the same as designing rules to police, and ideologues forget that it is those who police that hold the power, not those who live under the rules.
Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock represent exclusionary feminists given a platform outside their areas of expertise. Neither had a history of gender scholarship, nor are they biologists or doctors. They are white middle class university professors given book deals because they believe sex, whatever that is, is immutable based on what a doctor perceived at your moment of birth. They exclude because they are afraid, they are given a platform because it suits their backers to have middle aged white women reinforcing sex as a social construct. Neither has much evidence to back up their statements, just ‘common sense’, whatever that might be. Their ideology is toxic because they, and their kind, view any dissent as a threat to free speech. They do not want to debate in an honest and open manner, they simply want a platform to talk without pushback.
So yes, while there are certainly element within the trans community who should be called out for their ill behaviour, the exclusionary feminists are the ones further entrenching inequality and ideology within society. Their lack of evidence, their gut feelings, their pandering to the audience whips up hatred and inequality that is causing real time violence against trans people that is killing, maiming, and desolating many lives. Exclusionary feminism is poisonous because it seeps into perceptibly rational conversation without pushback, and in doing so becomes the ideology it purports to overthrow. There is nothing radical about it, it is as old as recorded history, and needs to be challenged at every step.a
