I have just spent an exhilarating day with comrades in Thanet campaigning against Nigel Farage and for his Labour opponent. When one has been exposed to real politics, to racism and its interaction with other issues in the lives of real women and men, it is always a little dispiriting to return to the bosom of that most self-hating of beasts, the British left. But despise it though I sometimes do, it is home, and so I dutifully logged in to my computer this evening to find - would you believe it? - said left fighting itself.
The issue is that Socialist Resistance, a fourth internationalist outfit, has hosted a debate between feminists who take differing views on transgenderism. In response a petition has been set up, signed by some quite prominent leftists, and not a few men (there's, as you might imagine, an overlap between these two groups) criticising SR for hosting 'transphobes'.
As will rapidly become clear I do not think my views on this issue matter very much. Questions around transphobia are current on the left. For what its worth, I get the impression that people talk past each other quite a lot on this subject (for example, around the question of who qualifies as a woman, differing positions on which seem often to turn on differing prior definitions of the word) - this is exactly the kind of situation I would expect to be helped by open debate. There does also seem to me to be an almost perverse desire taken by some on the left, and I'm thinking here of cis-gendered straight people, to take delight in 'calling out' people as transphobes. I'm not talking here about Julie Bindel and her odious ilk, no - it seems quite easy to be a transphobe. Believing, for instance, that people suffer oppression on the grounds of sex, as distinguished from gender, seems sufficient. There's an uncomfortable whiff of thoughtcrime here, as well as hints towards more general issues on the left: an individualistic moralism and a hyper-identification with victims that seems to me to say more about those doing the identifying than it does about oppression.
I might, however, be wrong about all of this. It's not an area I've thought a great deal about. But even if I had the surprising certainty other male leftists seem to have about matters close to the heart of others' identity (this, if anywhere, is surely somewhere we should tread gently, for we step on dreams, and much else besides) I would not sign the petition. Nor would I sign a counter-petition. And the clue here is in the adjective 'male'.
I am a man in a patriarchal society. Let's, to reappropriate a phrase from John Major, get back to basics. Men, as a group and as individuals, benefit from women's oppression. Yes, it ultimately impoverishes us, much as the wage-relation ultimately alienates the bourgeoisie. But we, like them, do well in penultimate terms. We get more chances in life, we tend to get privileges in relationships - because patriarchy runs deep; like original sin, it inscribes itself into our very being, a being much of which is hidden from us at any given time. We cannot take ourselves out of this situation by a sheer act of will; one no more becomes a 'new man' by a virtue of a momentary decision than the flirtatious born again Christian is miraculously delivered from libido. I think that we have all, pretty much certainly, not only benefited from, but contributed to, women's oppression at some time or other, even whilst declaring ourselves feminists. This stuff is structural; that is not to say there is nothing we can do as individuals. It is to say that the fight against patriarchy must be a political affair.
And as a political affair, it ought to be guided by a principle that - one might naively have hoped - is part of the (non-Stalinist) socialist's ABC. The liberation of oppressed people must be the act of the oppressed themselves.
Which is to say, amongst other things, that men could usefully shut the fuck up about a debate within feminism, all sides of which are already well-represented among women. There is, to my mind, something particularly distasteful about men appearing to want to silence, or at least deny, a platform to a woman (with whom, it should be noted, another woman taking an opposing view was happy to debate). Just stop it.
Sort out the way we as individuals relate to women, in our relationships, in our workplaces - there is plenty of work to be done here. Offer support and solidarity where appropriate - of course. But acting as referees or censors to feminism? That is not our task.
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