The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
(I wasn't sure whether to post this here or in the Pub, but figured it safest here. If it needs to be moved, that's fine.)
I'm having a minor crisis of political identity right now, and to that end I'll start this off by requesting the input of those two people whose opinions I value the most in general, but especially as it pertains to what I'll be talking about here: @Chloe and @Green Arrow. I'd like the opinion of everyone on this subject, but especially that of you two, both because I consider you my friends here and also because you are the only two other people whom I am reliably confident are basically left-leaning.
As you may or probably don't know, I'm a regular reader/listener (as applicable) of the Canadian web site Feminist Current, which is run by self-described radical feminist Meghan Murphy. I have also made my opinion clear in the past about Twitter's policy of banning members of the UK-based gender-critical group Fair Play For Women for simple statements like "Women don't have penises". Well a week ago, Meghan Murphy was banned from Twitter as well for similarly posting "Men aren't women tho" in reply to several detractors. The tweet went viral shortly before she was banned for it, accumulating 20,000 likes (compared with Feminist Current's 15,000 Twitter followers) and amassing a crowd who echoed the sentiment with mass posts of a similar statement reading "Men are not women". Then her account was taken down for supposedly violating Twitter's rules against "promot[ing] violence against, threaten[ing] or harass[ing] other people."
Somewhat surprisingly, notable right wing media outlets such as The Daily Wire, owned by Ben Shapiro, and The Blaze, owned by Glenn Beck, came to her defense. (Here's the Daily Wire article on the subject I reference and here's the approximate copy/paste thereof on The Blaze.) Murphy claims that these two outlets have both reached out to talk to her in the wake of this development. Likewise, Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report tweeted in reply "Meghan, let's chat...". A conversation semi-formally began when Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire wrote in a separate piece that Murphy and other women's advocates must now "ally with conservatives, who support free speech and insist that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings,’ or persist with a Left that would annihilate feminism altogether." Murphy has replied, in part, with something I did not wholly expect:
In the comments, she committed to appearing on Dave Rubin's radio show after the New Year. The linked article supporting the opening of a dialogue with the right in response to manifest hostility from much of the left anymore has generated a torrent of mostly supportive and open-minded replies from people who are not regulars to the Feminist Current comment section and clearly were drawn from the base of the aforementioned right wing outlets, and that is what has truly caught me off-guard in all of this: that these conservatives, libertarians, and rightists genuinely appear to be more open-minded toward, of all things, a radical feminist social analysis than today's progressive movement is. I mean that seriously. It would easy to conclude from official statements in The Daily Wire and The Blaze and so forth that these invites were just pure political opportunism and the openness purely superficial and decorative. But after reading many, many of the replies of the ordinary people who follow these outlets, I am surprised to say that I find much of the openness to be genuine. (Though it may be worth qualifying that, to highlight cases like Dave Rubin and Glenn Beck and those aligned with them, these are also, broadly speaking, it would appear, specifically libertarian-minded rightists more often than say hardened Donald Trump supporters. So there's that to consider in the sense that maybe their openness isn't reflected on the right more broadly; perhaps especially not among more ardent social, anti-immigrant, and religious conservatives, for example. Just as a noteworthy qualification.)I no longer believe leftist positions are necessarily most right or most ethical. I no longer believe everyone on the right is wrong about everything. I do not believe all those on the right necessarily have ill intentions, and suspect that many, like those on the left, believe they are working towards a better world. I don’t believe that it’s productive to position everyone who disagrees with the left as “right wing,” and therefore an enemy. I regret refusing to engage with or trying to understand those who are called “right wing” or “free speechers,” flat out. I think this is the wrong approach. I think it is, in fact, very important that we engage with those we may disagree with on various issues, and don’t think it serves us to ignore, mock, or dismiss people because they don’t share our exact political ideology. I am genuinely interested in speaking with people I may disagree with on various issues and am open to the possibility that we may agree on some ideas and not others. I think we should, as leftists and feminists, challenge and question our own ideas and mantras, rather than become too comfortable in the echo chamber.
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But I don’t think I need to choose either [left wing or right wing]. I choose to think independently and critically. I choose to make strategic and thoughtful decisions about who to ally with. I choose to support free speech and also to reject right wing positions on things like abortion and the free market. I choose to continue to support universal healthcare, social housing, reproductive justice, and a viable welfare system. I choose to continue to oppose exploitative labour practices, privatization, and war. I choose to continue to advocate against male violence against women, sexual exploitation, porn culture, and legislation I consider to be harmful to women and girls. I choose to consider facts and take what I consider to be ethical positions based on those facts, even if those facts and positions don’t fit whatever is considered to be politically correct.
There are people on the right who are bad and who are good, who are smart and who are stupid, who are wrong and who are right, and then there are a million combinations in between. The same can be said of the left. And to pretend things are any more simple than that is, in my opinion, a mistake. While we may not agree on much else, the right and I both agree that transgenderism is nonsense, which may be awkward, but is better than being wrong or dishonest. Speaking of which, I reserve the right to be wrong about all of this, and change my mind accordingly, though I suspect I am not.
I'm struck by her declaration of non-alignment in the left-right political spectrum even though nearly all the ideas and positions she supports are clearly left wing. But it concentrates the extent to which the question of gender identity politics has become a dividing-line issue between the progressive left and the radical section of the women's movement. I feel that liberals, progressives, leftists are overplaying their hand on these matters as well. If I can point to only the latest example illustrating my point, the voters of Massachusetts voted in this month's midterm elections to reject a proposal similar to the new version of the Gender Recognition Act that is being debated in the UK: a proposal that would ban single-sex public spaces altogether in order to accommodate the way trans-identifying people feel about themselves and allow choice of everything from public bathrooms to locker rooms to prisons to sports teams and everything else in-between to be based purely on self-identification alone (which makes it ripe for exploitation by those who do not consider themselves to be transgender and have ulterior motives). Again, that ballot initiative went to defeat not in a conservative state like Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee, but in urban, well-educated, liberal-minded Massachusetts. It was, in the words, the same voters who also voted to give Elizabeth Warren another term in the Senate with more than 60% of the popular vote. It is mathematically impossible for there not to be overlap between those two things. I feel that that is something that proponents of the transgender movement should stop and fully absorb the implications of for a moment. The partisan divide on this matter seems pretty superficial to me; something that exists more at an institutional level among party leaders and activists than it does among everyday people.
Obviously I have traditionally considered myself to be aligned in the left-right spectrum: to be clearly a leftist. I regard myself as a socialist, an anarchist, an anti-imperialist, an environmentalist, and a radical feminist, and that has always struck me as a left-leaning combination of views. I also can definitely understand why Murphy has taken this new position. The systematic de-platforming of radical feminists over matters like these, specifically by the progressive movement, is not a new thing. But Meghan Murphy's is not a small voice among feminist radicals. I find it pathetic that she, and we, are now having to turn to right wing outlets for a platform because of disagreements with some particularly enthusiastic progressive activists over issues like gender identity politics and the sex industry and beauty culture. There's a lot of frustration about the growing tendency of progressive proponents of a multiculturalist ethic to enforce that ethic in rather illiberal ways that involve censoring opposing voices. I'm not sure whether that frustration merits, for me, a declaration of political non-alignment in the left-right spectrum, but I am definitely interested in seeing how this course plays out for Meghan Murphy and for Feminist Current and their other readers and listeners.
I do have some reservations about this course though. The aforementioned flood of comments (mostly supportive, some not) that Murphy's statement of openness attracted from the right has drawn in a lot of people who don't seem to have been reading, or interested in, Feminist Current before, but the vast majority of the screen names sound male and it causes me some worry that the basic female-centeredness that has always defined and distinguished the politics of Feminist Current from more conventional outlets could be lost in the process. A sustained flood of male voices overrunning the place could potentially transform Feminist Current into something else entirely that I wouldn't like. Some of the more loyal and longstanding female supporters of the site are voicing concerns about and objections to this new move for precisely these reasons. I'm supportive of it at this time, but I also want Feminist Current to remain a radical web site that remains dedicated, above all, to the advancement of women and girls in the uncompromised, unapologetic way that the women there have always made it. I don't want the integrity of that to be lost in the quest for replacement platforms with primarily male audiences. Let's give threading that needle a try, but maybe not actually commit to this stance as a matter of permanence at this early stage. Let's just test the waters first and see how it works out. That's my current, tentative position on this anyway. I am persuadable though!
Anyway, what do you (anyone, but especially my friends) think? Is a productive alliance with the right possible in this area? And does any such possibility imply that we (I'm speaking of radical feminists here) should regard ourselves as politically non-aligned in the left-right spectrum going forward instead of as progressive leftists?
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
