Interesting article, Rowan - I’m going to have to read it a few times because, to be honest, the culture war is so boringly inane that it does my head in. Not to sound TOO much like an academic snob but one of the great benefits of extensive intellectual training is that you learn to live pretty happily and dispassionately with nuance, contradiction and doubt as a near-ubiquitous and indeed WELCOME character of human thought processes. Genocidal thoughts do not deserve such categorisation or consideration - but pretty much everything else OUGHT to be on the table for discussion (rather than ‘debate’). I say that as someone who is, on the whole and purely personally, a solidly progressive, feminist, pro-immigration, pro-allowing-people-to-live-how-they-want kind of person. But I have my mental blind spots, contradictions and flaws, and I try to keep an open mind and keep learning.
Which brings me to my point: I can’t help feeling that all this culture war stuff is symptomatic of a population’s very… etiolated relationship with learning, thinking, and justice. A few years back on Twitter, there was a trend for people expressing outrage that they had never been taught at school about particular people, events and ideas from Black and indIgenous histories. Which, yes, that is sad and infuriating - but also, you do know that your own education never ends and you can just keep learning stuff forever and ever, until you die?! That school isn’t a one-and-done time for learning about the world, even if you never attend an educational institution again? That you can create your own curriculum, appoint your own changing roster of teachers, do your own homework - and keep at it for life?
This relationship with one’s own mental and intellectual development was considered to be absolutely fundamental to modern concepts of judgement and justice, and I can’t help thinking that the deterioration of the one has led to the decline and corruption of the other.
Anyway, thank you for such a thought-provoking article!
Ha! Thank you. I have no extensive academic training, but yes, I like being doubtful about things and observing which things are complicated (often to the point that I cannot grasp all the complexities). I guess it kind of is a style of intellectual egotism (confidence?) - to not mind saying that you don’t know or you aren’t sure. But I can’t help noticing that the most boring people are the ones who are sure about *everything*
Thanks, Rowan - doubt and complexity and question marks CAN be enjoyable, can’t they? The properly ‘good place’ to live, I think. And yes, there is an element of humble bragging whenever an academic says that (self-)doubt is the most intelligent position! I forget which philosopher it was (Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin perhaps?) who said simply “I don’t know“ when asked a question on British TV in the 60s, but it was definitely a bravura statement. Still a good response though!
I cannot imagine how hard it much be to be a trans woman in the world at this moment. It makes me very sad that what is fundamentally a very personal, life-changing decision is bandied about in the public eye to score political points. I view being trans as not dissimilar to being gay in the 80s. I am mercifully unfamiliar with this case but I would be interested to know whether it was the behaviour of the trans person that was an issue (it is possible to be very private and discreet even in public spaces) or merely the knowledge that she was there because honestly, the latter does feel like prejudice to me. I realise this is not the point you are making but it breaks my heart that we live in a world full of so much hate.
I think I disagree with you on the essential point, but I do think that some ‘gender-critical’ commentary is motivated by prejudice against the bare idea of trans people existing, and those of us on the gender critical side need to get much better at calling that out. I feel like this (changing rooms/toilets etc) all essentially comes down to a philosophical point - do you or do you not believe that there is some essential, non-mutable quality of ‘maleness’ that cis women are entitled to physically separate themselves from when they feel they need to. And like all philosophical/religious disagreements, people are going to have to find a way to get around it and live peaceably with the disagreement, which is going to mean making compromises and not insulting people for no concrete reason. (I don’t mean you!) On your point of whether or not the doctor did anything to provoke the situation, I think that’s contested (and probably part of what the tribunal judge probably wishes he didn’t have to hear hours of conflicting evidence on, because it’s not really the legal point at issue).
We are going to disagree fundamentally here because (and for full disclosure my son is trans so I have thought about this a lot) I think that not accepting or understanding that trans women are women is part of the problem. I likened it to being gay because I feel it is often viewed as a lifestyle choice but I cannot imagine why anyone would choose to experience such hatred and discrimination if they really felt they had a choice. Refusing to allow trans people into gender specific places is really to deny their existence and there will be no acceptance until they are seen as equal. My solution would be to make all spaces private and gender neutral much as we now have at public swimming pools but I can see many people having issue with that. I just don’t think anyone should be able to make someone feel inferior because of their own discomfort. I should say, I nearly didn’t comment on this at all because I don’t find on line conflict particularly desirable (and I am really not trying to have a row, I have a lot of respect for you and I really hope you don’t find this offensive) but I do feel the gender critical viewpoint comes largely from a point of knee jerk reaction to initial discomfort and it can’t be seen as anything other than discriminatory to trans people.
Thank you for this. I totally get where you are coming from and appreciate your willingness to talk about it. And I have thought quite a lot recently about how frightening this must all be for trans people (eg the new EHRC guidance, which seems to just shrug its shoulders at the idea that trans people might be left without any usable facilities at all). For what it’s worth, that’s definitely not where I ever wanted us to end up and I think being furious/upset about how we got here is a totally legitimate response.
I should also add that whether or not this woman is racist has nothing to do with the issue at hand and I am constantly berating the lack of nuance in online spaces so the actual point you were making is not lost on me!
I agree with this comment, though would point out that it’s not just cis women who might require privacy from males in some circumstances, but female people in general (including female nb people and transmen).
Most of our historical legal protections are based on the disadvantages women have faced due to their reproductive function, related social role, and relative physical smallness/weakness compared to males rather than on how well they have fulfilled society’s feminine ideals.
I am a journalist, and for about a decade was one based in Washington, DC, covering all the things. I left DC and now run a small online news outlet in the hills of Kentucky. I find that I can do my job just fine without tuning in to all the nattering from DC, because so very little of that is news, but it is in the aggregate, the info streams that delineate the culture wars. Which is why I no longer read, listen, or watch any of it. No joke. None of it.
I have less opinions about most things anymore because I am not tainted with received "knowledge" sprayed on the back of my mind by Rupert Murdoch or the pin heads at MSNBC (that would be akin to your Guardian, where--wait for it, an opinion based on personal observation--I honestly think some people have lost their minds, including the shit going on with the Observer and the Tortoise fuck up).
Mostly, I rely on my own powers of observation and how my body responds to what's gong on around me.
And so, if I had walked into a changing area and found a human with male apparatus, I wouldn't care why they were there, but I would go somewhere else. That is because my own sense of what is right for me is all I need to know. Why the fuck is that a political statement? Because the media told me it was.
That’s a good point, about how unhealthy it is for all of this stuff to be constant chum-in-the-water for a billion ‘news’ sites and social media accounts. It’s driving us all mad. I think I know what you mean about the Guardian - I think there are lots of us (older) people mourning the loss of what it used to be. But it’s making decent revenue in its new form, as I understand it, so I guess they know what they’re doing even if I don’t.
So that’s the interesting thing about what’s happening in these employment tribunals - there is the one that’s concluding in Scotland, and there’s another starting in Darlington soon. Both concern male members of staff using the female changing facilities, though the second tribunal has been brought by a group of female nurses rather than just one. In both cases turning and leaving/using a different facility wasn’t an option, because the act of avoiding changing in front of the person they viewed as male was regarded as transphobic harassment by their employer, who also happens to be an extension of the UK government as well as the largest employer in the country.
This is no small part of the interest generated - not the “culture war,” but the pragmatic realisation that the rule (but not the actual law) of what “privacy” means in male/female public life has changed very suddenly in the past 10 years, and a lot of women are only just experiencing the outcomes of that change.
Also, that it's men who are encroaching on women's territory is fascinating, isn't it? There is a movement here in the US, led by feminists, who are raging pissed that it's that way. Check out Lisa Simeone's work here on Substack, for example.
Yes, re privacy: in my view, because of the militancy designed and encouraged by the corporate media, the common sense way to approach that is fraught with fears of offending someone instead of just doing what is the right thing in that situation.
I mean, if we were to look at this from the perspective of love and concern for our neighbors, which is what politicians lie about when they talk about their aims, it would be helpful to remember that love says no as often as it says yes. Sometimes you just have to say NO to something and if people have a problem with it, that's too bad. They will live. That we are encouraged to be so selfish by the media and many of our officials (I find this whole topic to be rooted in abject narcissism), is self-serving for them because controversy needs controllers to manager it.
Further, the aggressive attack on boundaries such as the one about who gets to use which dressing room based on gender, seems to me (and I have interrogated myself as to whether I am just paranoid, and I decided that no, I am not) part of the bigger plan to control and confuse the citizenry. We're much more easily controlled when we are focused on what divides us, rather than what makes us strong together. There is +99% of us, after all and only less than 1% of them.
Thank you - have been watching this play out with increasing despair. As a (now retired) lifelong trade unionist, I believe very strongly that workers' rights should apply to all workers, even the ones you don't agree with. There's potentially an interesting discussion to be had about ethics and workplace whatsapp chats: challenge a colleague's racism in the chat, or set up a separate chat excluding them to complain about them? But no, instead let's just continue to shout "handmaiden" (or "terf") a bit louder to establish that we are NOT the baddies.
Yes, you’re right, there is an important principle there - indeed, the tribunal was like a precision-engineered test question on that front! To be fair I did see that getting discussed sensibly by some people, but you had to wade through an awful lot of nonsense to find it.
Superb article this week.
Thank you x
Interesting article, Rowan - I’m going to have to read it a few times because, to be honest, the culture war is so boringly inane that it does my head in. Not to sound TOO much like an academic snob but one of the great benefits of extensive intellectual training is that you learn to live pretty happily and dispassionately with nuance, contradiction and doubt as a near-ubiquitous and indeed WELCOME character of human thought processes. Genocidal thoughts do not deserve such categorisation or consideration - but pretty much everything else OUGHT to be on the table for discussion (rather than ‘debate’). I say that as someone who is, on the whole and purely personally, a solidly progressive, feminist, pro-immigration, pro-allowing-people-to-live-how-they-want kind of person. But I have my mental blind spots, contradictions and flaws, and I try to keep an open mind and keep learning.
Which brings me to my point: I can’t help feeling that all this culture war stuff is symptomatic of a population’s very… etiolated relationship with learning, thinking, and justice. A few years back on Twitter, there was a trend for people expressing outrage that they had never been taught at school about particular people, events and ideas from Black and indIgenous histories. Which, yes, that is sad and infuriating - but also, you do know that your own education never ends and you can just keep learning stuff forever and ever, until you die?! That school isn’t a one-and-done time for learning about the world, even if you never attend an educational institution again? That you can create your own curriculum, appoint your own changing roster of teachers, do your own homework - and keep at it for life?
This relationship with one’s own mental and intellectual development was considered to be absolutely fundamental to modern concepts of judgement and justice, and I can’t help thinking that the deterioration of the one has led to the decline and corruption of the other.
Anyway, thank you for such a thought-provoking article!
Ha! Thank you. I have no extensive academic training, but yes, I like being doubtful about things and observing which things are complicated (often to the point that I cannot grasp all the complexities). I guess it kind of is a style of intellectual egotism (confidence?) - to not mind saying that you don’t know or you aren’t sure. But I can’t help noticing that the most boring people are the ones who are sure about *everything*
Thanks, Rowan - doubt and complexity and question marks CAN be enjoyable, can’t they? The properly ‘good place’ to live, I think. And yes, there is an element of humble bragging whenever an academic says that (self-)doubt is the most intelligent position! I forget which philosopher it was (Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin perhaps?) who said simply “I don’t know“ when asked a question on British TV in the 60s, but it was definitely a bravura statement. Still a good response though!
Indeed.
I cannot imagine how hard it much be to be a trans woman in the world at this moment. It makes me very sad that what is fundamentally a very personal, life-changing decision is bandied about in the public eye to score political points. I view being trans as not dissimilar to being gay in the 80s. I am mercifully unfamiliar with this case but I would be interested to know whether it was the behaviour of the trans person that was an issue (it is possible to be very private and discreet even in public spaces) or merely the knowledge that she was there because honestly, the latter does feel like prejudice to me. I realise this is not the point you are making but it breaks my heart that we live in a world full of so much hate.
I think I disagree with you on the essential point, but I do think that some ‘gender-critical’ commentary is motivated by prejudice against the bare idea of trans people existing, and those of us on the gender critical side need to get much better at calling that out. I feel like this (changing rooms/toilets etc) all essentially comes down to a philosophical point - do you or do you not believe that there is some essential, non-mutable quality of ‘maleness’ that cis women are entitled to physically separate themselves from when they feel they need to. And like all philosophical/religious disagreements, people are going to have to find a way to get around it and live peaceably with the disagreement, which is going to mean making compromises and not insulting people for no concrete reason. (I don’t mean you!) On your point of whether or not the doctor did anything to provoke the situation, I think that’s contested (and probably part of what the tribunal judge probably wishes he didn’t have to hear hours of conflicting evidence on, because it’s not really the legal point at issue).
We are going to disagree fundamentally here because (and for full disclosure my son is trans so I have thought about this a lot) I think that not accepting or understanding that trans women are women is part of the problem. I likened it to being gay because I feel it is often viewed as a lifestyle choice but I cannot imagine why anyone would choose to experience such hatred and discrimination if they really felt they had a choice. Refusing to allow trans people into gender specific places is really to deny their existence and there will be no acceptance until they are seen as equal. My solution would be to make all spaces private and gender neutral much as we now have at public swimming pools but I can see many people having issue with that. I just don’t think anyone should be able to make someone feel inferior because of their own discomfort. I should say, I nearly didn’t comment on this at all because I don’t find on line conflict particularly desirable (and I am really not trying to have a row, I have a lot of respect for you and I really hope you don’t find this offensive) but I do feel the gender critical viewpoint comes largely from a point of knee jerk reaction to initial discomfort and it can’t be seen as anything other than discriminatory to trans people.
Thank you for this. I totally get where you are coming from and appreciate your willingness to talk about it. And I have thought quite a lot recently about how frightening this must all be for trans people (eg the new EHRC guidance, which seems to just shrug its shoulders at the idea that trans people might be left without any usable facilities at all). For what it’s worth, that’s definitely not where I ever wanted us to end up and I think being furious/upset about how we got here is a totally legitimate response.
I should also add that whether or not this woman is racist has nothing to do with the issue at hand and I am constantly berating the lack of nuance in online spaces so the actual point you were making is not lost on me!
I agree with this comment, though would point out that it’s not just cis women who might require privacy from males in some circumstances, but female people in general (including female nb people and transmen).
Most of our historical legal protections are based on the disadvantages women have faced due to their reproductive function, related social role, and relative physical smallness/weakness compared to males rather than on how well they have fulfilled society’s feminine ideals.
PS: That clip was funny. Thanks for sharing it.
I am a journalist, and for about a decade was one based in Washington, DC, covering all the things. I left DC and now run a small online news outlet in the hills of Kentucky. I find that I can do my job just fine without tuning in to all the nattering from DC, because so very little of that is news, but it is in the aggregate, the info streams that delineate the culture wars. Which is why I no longer read, listen, or watch any of it. No joke. None of it.
I have less opinions about most things anymore because I am not tainted with received "knowledge" sprayed on the back of my mind by Rupert Murdoch or the pin heads at MSNBC (that would be akin to your Guardian, where--wait for it, an opinion based on personal observation--I honestly think some people have lost their minds, including the shit going on with the Observer and the Tortoise fuck up).
Mostly, I rely on my own powers of observation and how my body responds to what's gong on around me.
And so, if I had walked into a changing area and found a human with male apparatus, I wouldn't care why they were there, but I would go somewhere else. That is because my own sense of what is right for me is all I need to know. Why the fuck is that a political statement? Because the media told me it was.
That’s a good point, about how unhealthy it is for all of this stuff to be constant chum-in-the-water for a billion ‘news’ sites and social media accounts. It’s driving us all mad. I think I know what you mean about the Guardian - I think there are lots of us (older) people mourning the loss of what it used to be. But it’s making decent revenue in its new form, as I understand it, so I guess they know what they’re doing even if I don’t.
Sorry for the f-bombs. It's so dang hot here in the US and it makes me cranky.
So that’s the interesting thing about what’s happening in these employment tribunals - there is the one that’s concluding in Scotland, and there’s another starting in Darlington soon. Both concern male members of staff using the female changing facilities, though the second tribunal has been brought by a group of female nurses rather than just one. In both cases turning and leaving/using a different facility wasn’t an option, because the act of avoiding changing in front of the person they viewed as male was regarded as transphobic harassment by their employer, who also happens to be an extension of the UK government as well as the largest employer in the country.
This is no small part of the interest generated - not the “culture war,” but the pragmatic realisation that the rule (but not the actual law) of what “privacy” means in male/female public life has changed very suddenly in the past 10 years, and a lot of women are only just experiencing the outcomes of that change.
Also, that it's men who are encroaching on women's territory is fascinating, isn't it? There is a movement here in the US, led by feminists, who are raging pissed that it's that way. Check out Lisa Simeone's work here on Substack, for example.
Yes, re privacy: in my view, because of the militancy designed and encouraged by the corporate media, the common sense way to approach that is fraught with fears of offending someone instead of just doing what is the right thing in that situation.
I mean, if we were to look at this from the perspective of love and concern for our neighbors, which is what politicians lie about when they talk about their aims, it would be helpful to remember that love says no as often as it says yes. Sometimes you just have to say NO to something and if people have a problem with it, that's too bad. They will live. That we are encouraged to be so selfish by the media and many of our officials (I find this whole topic to be rooted in abject narcissism), is self-serving for them because controversy needs controllers to manager it.
Further, the aggressive attack on boundaries such as the one about who gets to use which dressing room based on gender, seems to me (and I have interrogated myself as to whether I am just paranoid, and I decided that no, I am not) part of the bigger plan to control and confuse the citizenry. We're much more easily controlled when we are focused on what divides us, rather than what makes us strong together. There is +99% of us, after all and only less than 1% of them.
Thank you - have been watching this play out with increasing despair. As a (now retired) lifelong trade unionist, I believe very strongly that workers' rights should apply to all workers, even the ones you don't agree with. There's potentially an interesting discussion to be had about ethics and workplace whatsapp chats: challenge a colleague's racism in the chat, or set up a separate chat excluding them to complain about them? But no, instead let's just continue to shout "handmaiden" (or "terf") a bit louder to establish that we are NOT the baddies.
Yes, you’re right, there is an important principle there - indeed, the tribunal was like a precision-engineered test question on that front! To be fair I did see that getting discussed sensibly by some people, but you had to wade through an awful lot of nonsense to find it.