Covid deniers and those who deny biological sex? What's the difference?
Those people who won’t have a vaccine or don’t believe Covid is real they so are dumb right? Some of them will die because of their beliefs, some of them will infect others because of them. Science, ‘big pharma’, ‘jews,’ the government is lying to them. These people with little understanding of virology or epidemiology know better than those who have devoted their lives to studying these subjects..
But should any of us be surprised that when Covid is happening before our eyes, some people choose to close theirs ?
Other kinds of anti-science arguments are now part of our culture and are now considered not only acceptable but “radical”. The current row about The Feminist Library stems from it’s new mission statement. It certainly won’t be having certain books in it and it certainly won’t be welcoming to all women.
In a wordy statement they declare that they now understand “gender and sex as constructed categories”. Sex is a constructed category . Rightio! “We whole heartedly reject any feminist framework that seeks to define womanhood solely using biological essentialism or any feminism that seeks to re-inscribe rigid idea of sex”.
So if biological reality does not exist (biological essentialism), or indeed science which sees us as mammals (we are mammals not slugs or fish or is this now controversial to say so ?) then we are to understand that sex is not binary and that we are not a sexually dimorphic species. If women don't exist really what is feminism for? Apparently it’s for everyone . Except obviously woman like me. Whoopi da doo da day. I will have to get my own library I guess.
Lola Olufemi who is the organiser of The Feminist Library is an interesting thinker and I don’t need to agree with someone to want to read their books. Mad I know!! She tweeted that “Sex categories are something we created to make us intelligible to each other . Because of that they *feel* real and innate, but pretending like ‘male and female’ predate the human beings who invented these categories to make us us legible is a bit weird isn’t it (!!)”
It is a bit weird indeed. I don’t suppose gravity existed until someone had a name for it. I don’t really understand how other mammals manage to reproduce at all without being told what category they are.
Science and medicine has indeed benefitted trans people who I presume this gobbledegook is meant to help with better surgeries and hormones though health care could be vastly improved . Science has at times also damaged gay people and women and trans people and black people at times using our bodies to experiment. It’s still happening.
But to see a profoundly ant-science argument right now is galling. Everything is socially constructed? Really? Look at FGM, rape, domestic abuse which do not arise out of linguistic categories.
The virus is not a social construction either. It is all too real ,
Just as new vaccines come on line, we are living in a profoundly anti -science moment and these arguments around biological sex are part of it .
They come from people who should know better but sadly refuse to see what is actually going on all around them. The anti-vaxx brigade do not have the monopoly of cult thinking.
I remember so many times in job interviews..in the 90's where I was asked .( always by men ) .how will you do this job and look after you kids ?? Well they have got a dad I'd say ...what do you do with your kids when you work I'd say , that was deemed as aggressive though..you know just a bit too lippy I remember trying to get paid the same wage as a bloke on equal level and being blacklisted and told to fuck off for asking!!
I feel my experiences are so linked to being female .( sounds stupid to say it I know ..what else would they be ? )..any predudices specifically because Im female and wouldnt play the game or would but played it in a really grumpy fucked off manner ...always fighting to be on the same equal footing is exhausting and always being told..no sod off. I don't bother now..I've given in and feel beaten with it all.
Maybe men and women are more equal nowadays in their working lives ..I dont know
And so I suppose that the female experience may not be that different to the male experience but for anyone over 50 it certainly bloody well was .
I actually feel that I have no rights even to be angry...that everything you can have ever gone through as a women might not actually have been real or that maybe you imagined it was bad but it wasnt really...and if only you'd smiled and laughed and seen the funny side of it all and brushed your hair more often ...
My 22 year old son was shouting me down the other day saying saying that there is no way men get paid more than women just because they are men .maybe in your day Mum , but not anymore ...I hope hes right..ofcourse hes a young man so hes very sure of himself which he probably wouldnt be if he was young woman .
This is far too ranty .and badly written durr!
I may have drunk too much . Delete it .
X
Thank you, Suzanne - yet again, you say out loud what so many of us are thinking.
In case people haven’t made the connection, Lola Olufemi is the woman who staged the bizarre stunt that hijacked the '50 years of Women's Liberation' conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, last year - the sorry event from which Professor Selina Todd was cancelled.
Olufemi’s boycott of the conference at the last minute was apparently designed to make the organisers drop Prof Todd. (Why they gave in to this emotional blackmail is another story.) Not content with this result, Olufemi arranged for her surrogate in the room, a woman called Laura Schwartz, to declaim Olufemi’s fire-and-brimstone queer theory sermon from her mobile phone, as though staging some weird postmodern hostage-taking on behalf of her Supreme Leader.
The sermon, which I watched live over YouTube, was as ludicrous in its falsehoods as it was bombastic. In perfect DARVO style, via her spokeswoman, Olufemi accused A Woman’s Place and other feminist organisations that recognise sex as the basis of women’s oppression of “hijacking” feminism and having a mission to “disrupt” proceedings: “The reason I am withdrawing from this panel is because it’s clear the organizers have not done enough to investigate links to Woman’s Place UK - a clearly transphobic organization - or to ensure that members of this group would not be in attendance/disrupt proceedings which I have seen happen time and time again.” [sic - her words as read out and tweeted afterwards.] The sheer absurdity of thrusting an incandescent denunciation of the “abhorrence” of second wave feminism into a peaceful meeting of second wave feminists, mostly in their 60s, 70s and 80s, who were celebrating half a century of women’s political achievements, might have been funny - except that it was met not with the searing ridicule it deserved but stunned, flummoxed, sad silence.
I got the feeling Olufemi fancied herself as some kind of in-absentia guerrilla leader, an antifa holy roller, maybe imaging her virtual intervention destroying an army of her evil ‘Terf’ enemies rather than what it actually did - pissed on the very modest parade of a group of decent and heroic women who changed laws for the benefit of millions of women and girls. That she planned, and was able, to denounce the politics of almost everyone in the room without resistance, using a proxy to do it, says something about where the new director of the Feminist Library is coming from.
Women, just like men, can develop a taste taste for revolutionary rhetoric and get hooked on self-righteousness. As a survivor of coercive control who lived under the thumb of a very eloquent narcissist for years, I recognise something in her behaviour that I find deeply disturbing.