Book club: Reclaiming the Mainstream
Which fights are worth having?
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I just attended the first meeting of the Feminists for Liberty book club! We’re reading Joan Kennedy Taylor’s Reclaiming the Mainstream.
Back when people were first telling me I did not, in fact, invent libertarian feminism, JKT was among the names I would hear as a foremother of this line of thinking. So it’s exciting to read this book finally.
But as I think more about it, it’s really an inspired choice.
It’s a book about, among other things, the fights and schisms in feminism starting from the 1800s.
It’s got me thinking about something my mom used to tell me. “You don’t have to attend every fight you’re invited to.”
The book is an inspired choice because movement builders, like Kat and Liz who lead FFL, are tasked with deciding where libertarian feminists come down on the issues feminists disagree over. But they are at least equally tasked with deciding which fights are worth having in the first place.
When deciding what’s worth fighting over, I think it’s worth asking: What will winning achieve?
For instance, I think the fight over whether feminism is pro-woman or anti-sexism is worth having. Because winning that fight means a world with less sexism, and losing it means a world with more. Sexism isn’t better just because you get women at the top of the gender-based hierarchy.
The fight over whether feminism stigmatizes sex is worth having because societies that more heavily stigmatize sex are more violent and oppressive on average, because stigmatizing sex leads to more sexual assault, unintended pregnancies, and STIs, and because stigmatizing benign consensual adult conduct just fucking sucks.
In the book club discussion, one person brought up the issue of transgender athletes competing with cisgender athletes. This is a perfect example of a fight that I don’t think is worth having for feminists. Now, I’ll admit out of the gate that I am no athlete. I am actually stunningly unathletic. Sure, I walk and do yoga most days. But when it comes to competitive, team sports I have always been last picked, and for good reason. I actually deeply dislike sportsball, owing in no small part to having coaches teach me subjects in K-12 they were in no way qualified to teach, watching teachers give preferential treatment to athletes, watching athletes get new uniforms while my textbook was missing its first 50 pages, and just generally the whole Deep South obsession with watching young boys give each other irreversible brain damage.
So that’s my bias. I’m also a gender abolitionist. So not only do I actively avoid knowing anything about sports, but I also sure don’t care who is the best sportsballer of any particular gender. I don’t care who the fastest runner in the world is. I certainly don’t care who the fastest runner who has a vagina is.
I do have to give it to women’s sports from a PR angle. The trans issue is a more effective and creative way to get conservatives to at least pretend to care about women’s sports (for the first time that I can remember) than I could have ever come up with. And I’ve done PR for a living.
My biases aside, objectively, what do feminists win if we win the fight over trans athletes in women’s sports? The only way to avoid reifying gender is to abolish gender as a category. Which honestly seems ideal to me. Why not compete on height or weight or body mass index? I mean arm length seems to be the most important factor for swimming success. Why not have classes of arm length for swimming like weight classes in wrestling?
I’m sure I’m missing something, but the stakes seem really low to me when it comes to this question. So I don’t think it’s worth fighting about. And if it is worth fighting about, athletes should fight about it. Not feminists. As far as I can tell, the larger movement for gender equality, and certainly society at large, has very little to gain no matter what happens here. Again, we can only lose by reinforcing gender as the most important category by which to classify people.
Anyway, it’s really nice to be talking synchronously about ideas with smart, interesting people again. I’m so grateful to FFL for hosting this series. I highly recommend joining FFL to support this work and get involved if you have time.
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I only watch one sport, but I’m kind of obsessed with it. It’s rugby sevens which is the faster more action packed version of rugby that is now in the Olympics. One of the things I really enjoy about it is that there’s a lot of equality between the men’s and women’s teams. Rugby in general is a very inclusive sport.
In the USA there is now a professional league for sevens. One of the big PR pushes when they were starting this league a few years ago was that they were ensuring that men and women athletes would be paid exactly the same, which was nice not only to do but to call out as a virtue.
Anyhow, this new professional league also features the first time I’ve seen a transgender woman playing in a women’s league for a physical sport like this. I of course didn’t even realize the first few times I saw her play that she was transgender, and while she’s pretty good, she doesn’t particularly stand out. It’s interesting to see the thing that conservatives fear in action and not particularly remarkable. Here’s a short video intro on her: https://youtu.be/KnAzFyWNXSY
I think sex is real, gender ephemeral. But there is overlap in behavior. In many ways the debate is between the evolutionary psychologists and the social constructionists. Using our old, tired, but still incredibly useful Euro-American standards of science, transgender seems more a fad, less a reality. We can be fairly sure of this because of the incredible numbers of supposed trans people who are coming forward, mainly as teens and preteens, who did not exist in the past, even 20 years ago. The cause for this is social transmission. ROGD research has been poo-pooed by trans-advocates but is still pretty real. Another indicator of the ephemerality of trans is the extremely defensive way this movement reacts against any attempt to study the phenomenon objectively. If you look at boy small children and girl small children, you can see that sex-constraints on behavior are more or less real, international, and trans-temporal.
It's not fair for girls and women, some of whom make careers based on sports, to force them to compete with male bodies in most sports. The departure from common sense and from a sense of basic fairness here is worrisome.