The formless lump of goodness

I remember welcoming the new millennium sitting on a beach watching the sun rise. I was optimistic. I felt that over the previous couple of decades we had made really good progress on some serious blights. We’d turned the corner on things like racism and sexism and, whilst there was still much progress to be made, it did seem to me there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Here I am in 2022 wondering what the fuck happened?

I’ve just watched a clip of Matt Walsh on Dr Phil’s show trying to pin things down on the gender/sex issue. He asked the people he was debating with to define the term “woman”. They could not.

Their answers were tantamount to the statement that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman”. Well that helps clear things up, doesn’t it? The UN Tweet above makes women out to be some kind of limitless and formless supra-dimensional entities rather like the spawn of Cthulhu.

I’m very confused. Presumably when someone transitions from being a man to a woman they have some idea in their heads about what it is they are transforming into? There is, one presumes, some end goal in mind. There has to be a set of characteristics, a set of properties, some definition, that allows the distinction between the category “man” and the category “woman” to be drawn.

But maybe it’s more of a case of feeling like you’re a woman whatever any outward characteristics may say otherwise. You’re not going from A to B - you’ve always been B, but biology has messed things up so you appear to be A. The same questions apply, though. What is it about the category “woman”, what properties are being used, that allow the distinction woman vs man to be drawn?

As Matt Walsh rather powerfully intimated : being a woman is not like some sort of costume you can put on at will. The gender-fluid thing, where you can pick and choose to be a man or a woman depending on what mood you’re in on any particular day is particularly baffling. Once again though, what are the properties that are being used to be able to make the distinction?

I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to discriminate against anyone struggling with these kinds of issues. I want every person who is trans, or some other identity, to be able to live their lives as fully and as happily as anyone else. I really do wish only the very best.

But there’s a conflict here. The overwhelming majority of women are biological women. They have rightly struggled for many years to be properly accepted as equals in all sorts of environments (with the proviso that there are some occupations requiring strength in which men do have a definite biological advantage, on average). They have struggled to be taken as seriously as men. I very much welcome that things have vastly improved on these fronts - they needed to. And maybe there’s still some way to go.

All of this struggle, and feminism itself, has been predicated on the notion that there is a meaningful category of “woman” - that being in this category has, because of societal structures and values, placed those in this category at some disadvantage.

The problem with the trans/gender issue is that if anyone can be placed in the category “woman” simply by identifying as such, then the categorization itself becomes meaningless. As many have said, it’s essentially an erasure of what it means to be a woman. It makes a nonsense of all of those who have stood up for the rights of women and womanhood over the years. If I can become a woman tomorrow, just by the act of self-identification as such, then what aspect of me were the feminists of the past fighting for?

But there’s a more serious issue lurking underneath here. We’re being asked, as a society, to completely redefine what things mean - all in the interests of sparing the feelings of a very small minority. I can’t help feeling there’s an element of narcissism involved here. After all, I don’t expect society to change to accommodate me - it would be rather self-centred of me to expect that.

We’re being asked to change our thoughts, language and definitions to accommodate the wishes of a very small minority of people who feel themselves to be different, outside of the norm. I don’t know how to square the circle here, because I definitely don’t want to see any discrimination at all. Yet the act of NOT making those changes is, itself, said to be discriminatory.

This notion that we’re all somehow responsible for the feelings of others is an insidious notion that has metastasized and caused no end of trouble everywhere. I was always brought up to believe that my feelings were my own responsibility and no one else’s. Sure, I could be hurt by what people said - but that was on me. Perhaps it’s because I was brought up by wonderful parents in an atmosphere of love and with appropriate freedoms and boundaries that I was able to grow and have the self-confidence to shrug off the slights of others.

We’ve seen this shift towards a collective responsibility very clearly with covid. Getting vaccinated has been seen as a duty, your responsibility to others. Wearing a mask is all about (allegedly) protecting others - I’ve even seen people argue that mask wearing helps to make other people feel safe.

For any society to function there has to be some notion of a collective good, a collective responsibility. Laws are a kind of official codification of that. But if you want your citizens to reach their full potential, emotionally and financially, I think this collective good has to be tempered with a significant amount of personal freedom. Like so many things in life, it’s all about getting the balance right.

Cost/benefit analysis anyone?

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