Must we choose the least worst option?

The Tickle v Giggle case has finally been decided in the Federal Court of Australia. The gist of the case is that a TERF feminist, Sall Grover, founded a women's only networking app called Giggle. Transsexuals were excluded from the app via facial recognition. One of these transsexuals, Roxanne Tickle, challenged the ban in the courts and won. 

One interesting feature of all this is that because TERF feminists are no longer very welcome on the left, they are increasingly orienting to the right. People on the right are generally supportive of the idea that biological sex is real and that women should be allowed to have their own spaces. 

The Giggle app

But there's a catch. TERF feminists are the modern version of the most radical feminists of the 1970s. Is it really the case that social conservatives should embrace the politics of these women? 

Some undoubtedly will. They will look at aspects of what these women are saying and find reason to agree. This, for instance, is how Sall Grover began her presentation of her TERF feminist beliefs after losing her court case:

Most people on the right will be sympathetic to this. If this were it, then it would be very easy to form an alliance with TERF feminists. But consider what Sall Grover listed straight after this:

This is a very radical doctrine, with radical implications. The first thing I'd note is this. The TERF feminists often claim that to call a biological man a woman is a suppression of truth and reality. But is this not what Sall Grover is doing in making these claims? She is asking us to believe that there is no connection between the fact of biological sex and sex based character traits. 

This isn't credible. It is not credible that men and women would be so biologically dimorphous, with the female body clearly adapted for the bearing of children, whilst the male body is clearly more adapted for warfare and hunting, and for all of this to not be expressed in any way in our character traits. It's like someone asserting that genetics has no role in who we are. It is ignoring all the science of sex based hormones and of differences in the wiring of the brain. It ignores what parents observe time and again in their children. It ignores what we all observe in relationships with the opposite sex. It is a type of ideological suppression of reality - of thinking something is true because it serves our political values. It is an example of living within a hyperreality, in which the conditions of truth are not that something conforms to reality, but that it conforms to what people think is proper to believe in order to get ahead in society, or in order to advance the interests of a particular group or movement.  

There's a second problem. TERF feminists often talk about transsexualism being an erasure of women and girls. However, the logic of TERFism is in its own way an erasure of womanhood. It empties the category of meaning. All that is left is a difference in body shape and reproductive organs. Apart from that, men and women are considered to be the same. For TERFS there is nothing distinctly feminine about women - they consider the feminine to be merely "socially constructed and imposed". In fact, TERFs often have very little understanding of what the feminine might even mean. They usually talk about it as if it only referred to external physical adornment, like wearing lipstick. But, if this is so, if men and women are exactly the same except for our physical shape, then "womanhood" as a category is mostly meaningless. It doesn't signify much about a person. So why are TERFs so keen to uphold the category? Because it has become associated with what they call "sex based rights". They treat it as a political category in which you compete for special rights against other groups. But, as they have found, other groups can do the same thing even better, with transsexuals generally being thought to occupy higher ground in the intersectional hierarchy.

Finally, the TERF position is not so much a bulwark against transsexualism as it is a preparation for it. The ground for transsexualism was prepared when feminists decoupled sex and gender, so that it was thought that men and women could not only swap natures, but that it was progressive and liberating to do so. When Sall Grover declares that men and boys can be feminine and women and girls can be masculine, she is being semi-trans - strictly speaking, she is advocating for transgenderism rather than transsexualism. She wants it to be the case that we can declare ourselves to be the opposite "gender" (masculine or feminine) but not the opposite sex (biologically male or female). She wants to go 90% of the way toward transsexualism, but to stop just before we get to the point at which we might declare ourselves to be the opposite sex.

And this position has done damage. One of the problems with it is that it often rests on an assumption that the feminine is inferior and therefore women should try to be more masculine, as criticised in the following social media post:

I've known a lot of Gen X feminists. Some of them strove to present themselves as masculine. They adopted a masculine personal presentation and masculine hobbies (boxing, motorbikes etc.). But underneath it all they were heterosexual women and could never really pass as men. They occupied a no-man's land (excuse the pun), in which they were neither attractively feminine, nor believably masculine, just confused about what they should be. As they aged, they gradually dropped the pretence and mostly returned to a more feminine persona, which always made me wonder what the point of it was. I just don't think they ever gave themselves permission to be women.

In the 1970s, TERFism was recognised to be a radically left-wing politics. Today, there is something of a push for it to be accepted by social conservatives. If this happens, it will be because it is thought of as a better option than transsexualism. Faced with Tickle v Giggle, social conservatives will choose Giggle. 

But there is no need to do this. We should not allow ourselves to be pressed into choosing the least worst option. The TERFs need us a lot more than we need them. If they wish to garner support from us, then we should do so carefully and strategically, until that time that they are willing to abandon the more harmful aspects of their politics.