Caring About Sex

One of the sharper barbs of anxiety is the feeling that others around you do not care about the thing that is currently sending you wild with apprehension. You try to rally them; they respond dismissively (you are being foolish, oversensitive, overreacting and so on). It drives a wedge. From that point there are two ways things can ratchet: escalation and de-escalation. De-escalation happens when you calm down because others demonstrate concern, because they start taking you more seriously, because you’re calmer and more coherent, and so on, until ideally some level of agreement about the actual seriousness of the exigency can be reached. Why yes, that is a tiger. It’s only a little one, but still.

Escalation obviously ratchets in the opposite direction: “you never take me seriously!” – “well, you’re always acting crazy!” – “how dare you pathologise my emotional responses! It’s typical of people like you to minimise the concerns of people like me!”. This shifts the ground of disagreement away from the nature and seriousness of the exigency the anxious person is responding to, and towards larger and longer-standing positional investments and epistemic grievances. The point here isn’t that such grievances are purely emotionally-generated, and hence empty or unreal, but that discussion about them animated by an active anxiety spiral is unlikely to result in fair speaking or hearing. One of the more challenging emotional responsibilities of adulthood is knowing when the other person’s real background epistemic grievances make it incumbent upon you to try turn the spiral about; another is knowing how to quit the field gracefully when it’s obvious that you just can’t win.

The observation that the contemporary “Gender Critical” movement is to a large degree fuelled by anxiety – by pushing people’s buttons and then driving escalation so that they become increasingly isolated, aggrieved and invested in a demand for impossible redress – isn’t particularly helpful in itself. In the context of the ratchet I’ve just described, it’s just the move where one party says “but your feelings of apprehension here are emotionally driven and disproportionate” right before the other party says “it’s typical of people like you to minimise the concerns of people like me”. But I think it can shed some light on the workings of some typical GC talking-points, and perhaps suggest ways to counter them.

An important part of the GC narrative is that there is a cause for urgent concern that is both inescapably real – there really is a tiger, look, over there – and minimised by inattentive, uncaring or actively cynical parties who want to “erase” that reality. This covers a variety of accusations; for example, towards cis women who decline bids to validate transphobic anxieties, that they are unserious (blissfully unaware of the danger), unsisterly (uncaring about a danger to others about which they don’t feel themselves personally affected), or wilfully colluding with the agenda of the minimisers because their hearts are fundamentally in the wrong place. The minimisers themselves are accused of either actively trying to facilitate the predations of the tiger (this bottoms out in the tarpit of paedo/groomer accusations) or simply looking out for their own convenience, going with the flow or cultivating spurious moral credit.

What strikes me here is that the radical feminism of the 1970s took a very similar line with good reason: it stated that women were being harmed by systematic sexual violence and exploitation, and that these harms were being minimised because it was inconvenient to acknowledge them and frightening to confront them. Radical feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin energetically called out women and leftist men who were unserious about the problem, shirked solidarity, or preferred the payoffs of the sort of power-identified laissez faire attitude which led to smirking rape-aficionados like Larry Flynt being hailed as swashbuckling countercultural pioneers. Contemporary transphobia leverages a background epistemic grievance, which is that it is incredibly difficult to be serious about patriarchal violence in a culture which alternately glorifies and minimises it, treating it as amusing spectacle one minute and unmentionably outré private symptom the next. The GC demand – be serious about the threat posed to women by deviant men – is a corruption, a traduction and diminution, of the radical feminist demand to be serious about the normality (that is, the pervasive social normalisation) of patriarchal violence.

The GC line on “gender ideology”, a term about whose genealogy they remain diligently incurious, is that it derealises the inescapably real: turns bodies into ideas, material differences into differences of outlook, matters of fact into matters of feeling. And that this inevitably harms those whose inescapable reality becomes unspeakable as such under conditions of enforced mis-speaking. This part of the narrative provides the moral basis for the claim that transphobic fear-mongering is dissident speech which confronts compulsory mis-speaking, reinstates reality, and wards off the harm of erasure through constative utterance (that is, speech acts that “bluntly” report that things are thus and so, e.g. telling a trans woman to her face that as far as you’re concerned she’s a man). Again, setting aside the Orwell-protagonist-only-ultimately-triumphant fantasies it encourages, there is a background epistemic grievance which is engaged and activated by all this. Inconvenient reports of sexual violence, intimidation or effrontery are routinely discounted and penalised: suddenly everyone’s a cartoon relativist, unable to bring themselves to suppose that sometimes things definitely happen. Pointing out to someone impatiently asserting that “sex is real” that sex is really complicated, actually, might feel like the sort of weaponised sophistication that is often brought to bear on individuals who raise complaints that their communities would like not to have to treat as unequivocally consequential. It might be more perspicacious to ask what real thing that has affected them has been derealised by others, how it is related to sex, and what serious acknowledgement of that might look and feel like. (Of course that conversation is more often than not entirely foreclosed.)

Recall that the primary situation around which the ratchet of escalation spirals is someone expressing distress and apprehension who finds that others around them do not share or validate their fears (and, needless to say, nor should they, in the case of transphobic distress and apprehension generated by button-pushing around fears of somatic intrusion). I have a lot of sympathy for anyone in this type of situation, as I haul my unfashionable rucksack of autistic trauma into late middle-age; I know how much it feels like one is going mad, and how much of a relief it must be, at least initially, to find a community of shared concern which materialises one’s sense that there is something urgently wrong with the world. While I want to be clear that there are limits to how patient anyone should be expected to be with spiralling transphobes, I also think that strategies for prevention and pre-emption are possible and worth exploring. Ultimately these all come down to addressing and articulating the background epistemic grievances which provide the footholds for escalation. To the extent that it is not simply the astroturfed vehicle of crusading reaction, the GC movement (or the cluster of vulnerabilities on which it battens) is a symptom of the deferral of a wider project.