Which Side Are You On, Boys?

Here's a great article by Suzanne Moore who was hounded out of the Guardian for insisting that biological sex is a line in the sand and that men can't simply, or suddenly, declare themselves to be women.

  

https://suzannemoore.substack.com/p/the-dumbstruck-men-of-the-left?

The Dumbstruck Men of the Left
 
By Suzanne Moore

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What do men think about the erasure of the word woman or the way that women must now be simply a collection of body parts to appease those who are now also to be called women?

They may be confused. Possibly. 

By men, I suppose I mean so-called progressive men who consider themselves to be vaguely on the side of equality for women. Their sexuality is irrelevant here. I simply want them to step up to the plate. 

There is a tendency now to divide people up generationally because it avoids the awkward questions about the fractures within the left in particular. Thus all young people think one way and are ‘out there’ : rad, happy with gender self- ID and basically cool. Anyone older is a horrible terf/bigot/feminist who just doesn’t understand that the current fight over trans rights is EXACTLY the same as the fight for gay rights was.  

We don’t understand that because it isn’t. Straight people gave up nothing to make life a bit more tolerable for homosexuals however much we/they may have congratulated ourselves on our open-mindedness. 

The current row becomes ever more ridiculous as there is now clearly a monstrous regiment saying no to a particular ideology : that sex is as much of a construct as gender and what is the response of lefty men to this? As far I can see they either pretend this is not happening or side line it as “a womens’ issue”. Worst of all, they dissemble like Richard Burgon did on Politics Live when asked about the change of language , for instance saying “pregnant people “instead of women. He could not or would not say the word women. As I said I don’t give a used tampon for what that man thinks.

Would saying women really have been so offensive? And who would have been offended? I don’t expect a lot from him to be honest. That part of the left has spiralled into a deeply conservative rabbit hole which now believes in all sorts of stuff that radical thinkers dispensed with a long time ago: essential gendered selves, souls, identity free of material reality. 

The current ideology espoused is deeply conservative and I can underpin this all philosophically if you want me to. But that’s for another time suffice to say I was so caught up in post-modern theory I even interviewed Jean Baudrillard in my rubbish French.

I have no issue with free floating gender identity, again it is the erasure of embodied female experience that concerns me. Who are these supposedly progressive men afraid of? And why? 

The other night I watched a fascinating discussion between Professor Selina Todd about her new book Snakes and Ladders on social mobility and John McDonell. McDonell had already been asked not to even speak to her by students at Oxford because Todd stands up for the legal protection of women’s sex- based rights. Clearly even a Zoom discussion is “problematic” for these pure lambs. Many women in the chat were asking McDonell about the Labour position on this and he is surely a clever man, a much bigger thinker than Corbyn ever was.

He avoided the question by saying there should be dialogue and I think his willingness to appear with Todd is a very good thing. Yet McDonell either knows or was being disingenuous because the Stonewall position adopted by many is that there can be no debate because debate itself is somehow transphobic. 

Actually the debate goes on anyway simply because women are refusing to be told we are a sub-set of men or that biological sex (or reality as lunatics like me call it) is a colonial project, yes certain white academics have appropriated blackness in a desperate quest to enhance their own reputations, lately. 

We are told time and time again that more women than men are supportive of trans rights and this is surely true. Therefore surely we can have a discussion about women and language without being hurtful in any way to trans people. 

So why aren’t men doing this? Some guys have written about this issue and I appreciate that they have and they freely admit they do not get anything like the levels of abuse someone like me gets . These men tend to be liberal/centrist/right wing. Where are the men of the left I want to know? Why can a male Labour MP dismiss the concerns of his constituents about single sex spaces? What is this refusal even to engage about?

I accept that many of them just fall in line with what they are told but that did not work so well for them on a number of issues before did it? If all of this is to woo the young voters but alienates many life- long supporters one hopes they have the numbers right but it is complacent. Remember when Brexit wasn’t going to happen because young people didn’t want it?

The harsh truth is that Labour are so far away from power that maybe it doesn’t matter. But I say any party that takes its voters for granted is making a huge mistake even at this stage of the game. 

This is not about whether you are OK with trans people or not, it is about the ongoing erasure of women. You can mangle your words Burgon style, you can refer to your loved ones as cervix havers, you can shut your eyes and ears and hopes this all goes away.

Or you can listen. As Audre Lorde said “Your silence will not protect you”. The silence of left- wing men on these issues is heard keenly by women. Your silence speaks to us but not perhaps in the way you think. You could walk beside us. Whose side are you on boys?

Clearly your own.