Posted by A Twitter thread by @janeclarejones
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This is an excellent analysis of the case against trans ideology on the basis of materialist class analysis.
All the way through this conflict, many of us have repeatedly tried to make the point that the mess we’re in is the result of politics being overrun by identity politics,
This is an excellent analysis of the case against trans ideology on the basis of materialist class analysis.
All the way through this conflict, many of us have repeatedly tried to make the point that the mess we’re in is the result of politics being overrun by identity politics,
at the expense of material class analysis.
The phenomenon we call ‘wokeism’ pretends to be about class – and has co-opted the language of structural oppression – but it’s not. It’s about identity.
Such identities are not actually to do with where you are really positioned
either in the socio-economic, racial, or sex based class systems, they are about performance, and the performance of your beliefs.
And so, middle class white women running gender studies departments become the voice of the dispossessed because they perform the correct beliefs,
while working class women, or lesbians, or black women, become the emissaries of ‘the status quo’ because they know that women are female.
The argument many of us have made about why trans ideology is wrong hinges on understanding that women are oppressed *as a material sex
class with certain material interests* and that the claim that trans ideology has no impact on those material interests is utter bollocks.
The argument we have made, recognises, as Deirdre does in this piece, that power currently has a *massive interest* in looking like it is
addressing injustice while actually doing fuck all about the material conditions of oppression. Identity politics which looks like it is about oppression, but is actually just about immaterial individual identities helps in this task. Given the current open contempt for the
material conditions of people’s lives showed by our rulers, the importance of this point cannot be underlined enough.
This all, also, relates to the current conflicts inside ‘the gender critical’ movement.
Women are a material class with material class interests.
We are not now and have never been ‘an identity.’
I have consistently rejected transactivist claims that woman is an identity and defended female people’s interests *as a material class.*
And that’s what I will carry on doing.
– I’m going to add, as an illustration, with respect to how this issue is playing out inside the GC movement.
I have taken considerable flak from some sections of the movement for using the phrase ‘female people’ when arguing with TRAs.
Apparently, that indicates a lack of
courage, and forthright defence, of the concept of ‘woman.’
I started doing it a long while ago, because when you are dealing with people who think woman is an identity, and you are trying to make an argument based on the idea that woman is not an identity, and to defend the
material interests of female people as a class, it makes things a lot clearer, and doesn’t give TRAs the room to trip you up by deliberately misinterpreting you.
The bottom line to me, is that if this is about material interests, and not identity, it doesn’t make any difference
whether we say ‘female people’ or ‘woman’ because it is *the same concept* that denotes the *same class of people* with the *same interests.*
I understand that given the attack on our language, we want to defend our words.
But I worry that if we get too fixed on defending our
word, and lose sight of the fact that the point of that word is *to denote a material class of people with material interests,* then we are also in danger of slipping into identitarianism. With all the problems that inevitably brings.