Feminism is not a stupid movement and feminists are not stupid. If I believed otherwise, I wouldn’t be a feminist. There are times, nonetheless, when even I have to admit it’s been made to look pretty ridiculous. Take, for instance, Laurie Penny’s recent clash with Piers Morgan on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Ostensibly there to discuss the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan for trans-critical tweets, Penny interrupted Morgan — in the process of asking trans woman Blaire White for comment — by declaring that she was “also transgender”. When invited to clarify this, Penny stated that she was non-binary, meaning she used they/them pronouns. But what, pushed Morgan, did that actually mean?
Answer came there none. Or rather, there was a mix of “do we really want to discuss this?” and “if you don’t know what non-binary means, I’m not sure you’re in a position to lead this debate” (plus a bonus “I don’t think I’m here to discuss the contents of my underpants”).
Clearly, Morgan was enjoying this. After all, he had a point: “you raised it, not me”. Why use an identity to claim authority over a topic if it’s an identity even you can’t explain? Many feminists who have clashed with Penny over her facile support for the sex trade or her smearing of “terfs” also found the exchange satisfying. I found it sad too, though.
There are many areas in which I’m in agreement with Penny, such as anti-rape messaging and abortion rights. It’s dismaying to see someone who has a coherent theory of patriarchy within her grasp choose to trash it, preferring to cling to some misunderstanding of intersectionality straight out of 2014. Or rather, it’s dismaying if you care about feminism. Left-wing misogynists love Penny’s stance because she positions boring, old-style feminism — with its comprehensible arguments and clear, if boner-killing, demands — as past it; right-wing misogynists love it because it makes feminism look utterly incoherent.
Of course, Penny can think whatever she likes about herself. Nonetheless, if you decide your pronoun preferences make you a better judge of whether someone should be arrested for tweeting then it’s a bit late to claim they have nothing to do with anyone else. The closest Penny comes to an explanation is “my gender identity is something other than man or woman” — that is, it’s relational, based on something she is not, but which other people are. This presupposes an idea of “woman” bound to qualities which go beyond mere biological sex. Gender stereotypes, one might call them.
For feminists … the frustration lies precisely in the fact that there is nothing binary-smashing about this identity
One of the most irritating things about the Morgan debacle is that one can imagine Penny going away from it telling herself that Morgan was too conservative to take in her binary-smashing, gender non-conforming ways (aka having short hair while being female). I imagine he just found the whole thing funny, if a bit annoying, proof that “the woke” talk nonsense. For feminists, though, the frustration lies precisely in the fact that there is nothing binary-smashing about this identity — quite the opposite. It reinforces gender norms by default, then, to add insult to injury, claims to be socking it to the patriarchy.
Penny is far from the only female writer in recent years to separate herself from the very “cis woman” category she insists is perfectly acceptable and in no way insulting to anyone else. Being charitable, I think what has happened is that these women — not really having — conflated “men rejecting masculine norms and challenging gender as a social hierarchy” (a good thing, feminism-wise) with “men fetishising femininity and demanding access to female-only words and resources” (which is kind of the opposite). In Withnail and I meme terms, they’ve recategorised “woman” as blank-eyed, subjugation-enjoying, femininity-obsessed porn object by mistake. Non-binary is the gender identity you end up claiming if you’re a feminist who’s made the category “woman” uninhabitable for any female human with an ounce of self-respect.
Judith Butler now lays claim to they/them pronouns, and advocates for what she calls “gender freedom”, suggesting that if anyone doesn’t like the “woman” box, they’re welcome to jump right out of it. That doing so might impose intolerable costs — for instance, in terms of the resources, legacies, research, spaces, boundaries to which one may lay claim — is ignored, presumably because they’re not the kind of cost which have much impact on someone of Butler’s status.
A point many gender critical feminists have made over the years is that if we agreed with the regressive, stereotype-laden definitions of gender ideologues — if we, too, saw gender as a spectrum between Barbie and GI Joe — then we’d be non-binary as well. It’s not as if gender critical feminism is awash with women doing their best to embody feminine gender norms. A meaningful feminism seeks to disentangle femininity from femaleness in order to set women — female humans — free.
“For a woman to accomplish her femininity,” wrote Beauvoir, “she is required to be object and prey; that is, she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject.” It is profoundly depressing that — thanks to a tiny minority of males who think being “object and prey” sounds pretty cool — some feminists decided this is what a woman is, not a status that feminism, as a political movement, wholly rejects. If I truly saw women that way, I would feel affronted at people telling me I wasn’t some special non-binary exception. The problem, however, wouldn’t be other people’s intolerance, but my own misogyny and refusal to recognise the broader implications of smashing up a shared category then walking away. Your identity isn’t just about you.
On some level, I think Penny knows all this. Much has been made of her extra-incoherent claim to be both non-binary and a woman. She has also complained of there not being “a shorter non-essentialist way to refer to “people who have a uterus and all that stuff”. “My identity,” she writes, “is more complex than simply female or male, but as long as women’s reproductive freedom is under assault, sex is also a political category, and politically, I’m still on the girls’ team.”
All of this seems to me a very convoluted way of saying that essentially, terfs are right — there is a need for the category “adult human female” — but that Penny herself is not a terf. Rather she’s a woman, but without the feminine stereotype-y bits that get added when trans activists insist we call ourselves “cis women”. You may have noticed that this leads us back to the exact same thing as “adult human female”, only it’s a more exclusive category, since it’s assumed most other adult human females do embody all the extra stereotypes (otherwise this would ruin the “woman” category for the adult human males).
I suppose, as a workaround, it has a degree of cleverness. At the same time, as Piers Morgan showed, it doesn’t take much to make it look bloody stupid. As Martha Nussbaum wrote of Butler in 1999, “feminism demands more and women deserve better”.
