Four years ago I started up a blog called ‘100 years of trenches’,
partly as a response to the hyped up Anzac and WW1 centenary period (2014 –
2018). A big focus of the blog was to understand and also counter the
de-politicised version of ‘remembrance’ pushed on the public by state
authorities. The key themes of my analysis include:
- Remembrance media and ceremonies tend to
promote a ‘micro focus’ on dead soldiers and trenches. Military historians
tend to provide the framing, with the details of battles, and the image of
the ‘Fallen soldier’ being central. This image summons up emotive notions
of suffering, death, heroism and sacrifice.
- The idea of sacrifice which is embedded in
this image is very important, but the highly solemn and emotive framing
makes it almost impossible to question or even explore. There is a form of
romanticism involved here, in which the idea of sacrifice draws on both
religious and secular traditions. To suggest that these brave young men didn’t
die for a ‘greater and noble cause’ is to violate the moral imperative
which is hidden inside the Fallen Soldier image.
- The micro-focus also makes it harder to look
at and think about the years outside the period 1914 – 1918. Questions
about the political and economic factors which led to the war are
marginalised. Connections between the imperialist state system of 1914 and
the imperialist state system of the 21st
century are not part of the mainstream media narrative. It is no accident
that we place such huge emphasis on Gallipoli; the narrative here is
palatable and poses no challenge to the legitimacy of the current military
state apparatus.
- The micro-focus makes it harder to look at and
think about the impact of WW1 on other groups of people: the women who
lost fathers, sons and brothers, or had to deal with traumatised husbands
returning from the war; the people of the Middle East who are still
dealing with the consequences of the imperialist carve up of their
homelands.
- Alongside the ‘micro focus’ there are
historical meta - narratives. The older versions of these tended to cast
the Germans as the vicious aggressors, battling against a much more noble
and just British Empire. The more recent and powerful versions involve
appeals to the idea of ‘national identity’. Here the idea that New Zealand
truly ‘became a nation’ through the experiences of Gallipoli and the Somme
effectively frame the meaning of those deaths. The ‘sacrifice’ no
longer serves the interest of a greater imperial power we owe allegiance
to, but rather a nebulous and untouchable set of National Values:
mateship, egalitarianism, courage and honour. The grim and shameful
political truth that these deaths served the interests of a brutal
imperial state are swept under the carpet of red poppies, Anzac biscuits
and solemn ceremonies.
- The Really Big Things we should
remember if we want to truly live up to the demands of the ‘Lest We
Forget’ slogan are the structural features of our society which lead to
war: capitalism, militarism, imperialism.
- The micro-focus, alongside the falsifying
historical meta narratives, prevent this sort of critical remembrance, and
tend to effectively frame war as a sort of natural event, akin to things
like volcanoes and hurricanes. Military conflict is naturalised and
depoliticised.
Over the past year I have devoted a lot of my energy into understanding
and writing about a completely different topic, the theory and politics of
transgenderism. Yet I have repeatedly found myself pondering over some of the
strangely common rhetorical strategies employed by both fervent conservative
nationalists and transactivists. In the comments section under my first blog piece (where I examined the logic behind the vilification of radical feminists
who questioned the notion of gender identity) is this wee gem of insight and
wisdom:
In just about any exchange between transactivists and critics, you will
find people highlighting the central importance of the oppression of trans
people. The most frequently cited victims are trans identified males (always
referred to as transwomen), and particularly ‘transwomen of colour’. There are countless articles and stories about the murder of
transwomen, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance which is
held every year internationally on November 20th specifically
commemorates the deaths of trans people through violence or suicide. After
reading a few of these articles, I came away feeling quite dissatisfied. The
causes of the murders are invariably ascribed very simply to ‘transphobia’,
without much elaboration or insight. The most interesting thing I came upon was
this graph of murders by region in a Pink News article:
Why are there so many more murders of trans identifying people in
Central and South America? The article makes no attempt to answer this
question, so you are left wondering. In online debates I have frequently
observed radical feminists point to the fact that a very large number of these
deaths are caused by violent punters. The context of sexual violence within the
practice of prostitution probably has a large bearing on this issue, but these
sorts of interpretations do not seem to be popular. As Julie Bindel has highlighted recently, transactivists tend to side
with people who endorse a ‘sex work is work’ framing of prostitution.
Criticising prostitution in any way is off limits in the same way as
questioning gender identity is.
Rather than acquiring critical understanding of the causes and nature of
“transphobic” violence, the image of the murdered transwoman is typically
foregrounded as a rhetorical strategy to frame and influence debate about broader issues.
Here are a couple of examples from ‘socialist’ (socialist identified?)
supporters of trans identity ideology:
In the early
hours of Tuesday 22 August Kiwi Herring, a 30 year old trans woman and mother
of three, was shot dead by police in St Louis, US. Police had been called after
Kiwi had allegedly stabbed her neighbour. After an altercation during which one
police officer received a “minor injury”, the police opened fire.
The following
day around 100 supporters held a vigil in her honour and marched into the road,
blocking a junction. A man drove into the protest, knocking over three people —
though none was seriously hurt. One witness reported that he was giving them
the finger as he accelerated through the crowd.
Kiwi is the 18th
known trans person killed this year. Like her, the majority are black women.
Kiwi’s family report that her neighbour was transphobic and had been harassing
her for some time.
I start here
because in any discussion about trans rights it is crucial to begin with a
recognition of the reality of trans oppression. The events described above tell
a story of structural racism and transphobia, experienced at the hands of the
state and of bigoted individuals.
The article goes on to argue women in the UK
have nothing at all to fear from the proposed legal changes of the Gender
Recognition Act, and concludes a series of shoddy arguments with the claim that
“there is no evidence that trans rights will harm women, and there is every
evidence that lack of trans rights does harm trans people”. There is plentiful evidence that gender
identity - based access laws such as the proposed GRA will harm women, but the
article does not engage with these arguments in good faith. By foregrounding
the image of the murdered transwomen, and suggesting (indirectly in this case,
but the implication is clear) that opponents to the proposed legislation are
somehow complicit with this violence, the author does not even need to try very
hard to make her case. The manipulative and emotive appeal to a uniquely
vulnerable and oppressed group does most of the work. Leftists are suckers for
that sort of jazz. Fighting oppression is what they (supposedly) do.
A second
example, unfortunately more typical in its heated and frenzied tone, is the
text of a petition for the removal of an article from the UK based site
Socialist Resistance. I don’t know that much about the site or the
organisation, but this article (Feminism and transgender
- why is there is a debate?) was considered so blasphemous
that even Marxist luminaries such as Richard Seymour signed the petition for
its removal. I also don’t know what it said, because it was in fact removed.
But we can glean some idea of how evil the article was by reading the petition text , which opens with the familiar
Image of the Oppressed Transwoman:
‘I’ve been to prison and I’ve been raped by men — straight men!’ In
these words at her speech to the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally,
Sylvia Rivera outlined the conditions still faced by trans women today. Trans
women suffer primarily at the hands of men, yet much of the feminist movement
passes over this patriarchal violence in silence. A fixated minority within the
movement is uncontent even with this, and actively contributes to the villainization
of their trans sisters.
The petition
concludes with the claim that although it is men who are responsible for
transphobic violence, women who question in any way the broader issues of
transgenderism are also complicit in the rape and murder of transwomen:
Trans women’s lives are not a matter to be deliberated. Their existence
is not an ‘issue’ that it is helpful for leftist sects to publicly discuss and
to take ‘positions’ on. Without support from those with more social weight, the
rape and murder of trans women simply trying to walk the streets, and subsist
by the limited means available to them, will continue.
Another
variant of the image is that of trans identified children, who commit suicide
because they are prevented from accessing ‘life saving’ puberty blockers and/or
synthetic hormones. Again the emotive and victim focused framing which acts as
a prohibition against critical perspectives, the sketchy.evidence for such suicides notwithstanding. In this case the threat of suicide is leveraged into debates precisely in order to smear opponents to the medicalisation of gender as 'bigots' or 'transphobes'. The untouchable image of a child experiencing unendurable suffering due to dysphoria works hand in glove with the essentialist notion of a fixed immutable gender essence trapped in the 'wrong' body. Of course the contexts are radically distinct, but the psychological and rhetorical functions of an heroic young member of the New Zealand Division, sacrificing himself for the good of his country and Democracy appear quite similar. An image of a suffering innocent on the one hand (the young soldier, the gender dysphoric child) alongside a falsifying ideology which insists on the necessity of 'sacrifice' or 'treatment'.
Going back
to consider and compare the trans issue with my analysis of remembrance
ideology, it is notable that my ‘100 years of trenches’ blog generated very
little debate within the leftist circles who read it. No one faulted me for not
placing the suffering and death of thousands of soldiers at the centre of my
account. No one had any problem distinguishing between the people caught up in
the cogs of imperialist aggression and the political and economic structures
governing that same aggression. No one pointed out that as somebody who has
never fought in a real battle and witnessed the terrible human cost of war, I
had no right to question or explore the idea of sacrifice.
The
conclusion from these observations is that ‘trans oppression’ functions the same
way that the concept of ‘sacrifice’ does in sanitising war narratives: both
tactics foreground pain, suffering and death and insist upon a very particular
type of compassion. This is a compassion that must not doubt or question, a
compassion which dare not examine the holy necessity of the Cause served by the
victim.
 |
| San Francisco City Hall lit up with pink and blue, TDOR 2017 |
Trans murder
is a case in point: it is not at all clear that ‘transphobia’ is a helpful way
of framing our understanding of the phenomenon, and there is clear and
compelling empirical evidence that trans people are no more likely to be
murdered than other people in the general population. I make this point not
to dismiss or understate the real oppression suffered by trans
identified people, but rather to highlight how a very particular sort of
‘victim framing’ can distort and falsify our perception of reality. It is not
that hard to identify a parallel distortion in our Gallipoli remembrance
narratives: the 2700 odd New Zealanders who died are vastly outnumbered by the
80,000 Ottoman soldiers killed by an invading imperial force.
If we accept
that the violence endemic to prostitution has a lot to do with the murder of a
particular subset of the trans population, then the case becomes even more
compelling. In a video documenting the Transgender Day or Remembrance in Amsterdam 2017, the
opening scene pans across a crowd holding red umbrellas chanting ‘sex work is
work! Sex work is work!’:
One of the speakers pays a tribute to “fallen trans
warriors” who are “at war with people and systems that put people in little
boxes”. The framing of the deaths as caused by a nebulous and loosely defined
societal prejudice, rather than a very specific form of male
violence, acts as a falsifying meta
narrative. It is very hard to challenge this because of the emotive focus on
death and suffering: questioning the victim framing is tantamount to complicity
with the prejudice targeted by the performative rituals of the ceremony. Just
as ‘fighting for democracy’ acts as a falsifying meta narrative justifying the
deaths of soldiers, the ‘sex work is work’ slogan falsifies and distorts the
true nature of the very deaths the Transgender Day or Remembrance is designed
to honour.
If we accept
the socialist idea that imperialist war serves the interests of the ruling
classes, and that remembrance ceremonies such as Anzac day tend to reinforce
and propagate a patriotic nationalism which serves state interests rather than
those of human liberation, then the parallels I have sketched also help to
explain the way feminist concerns are marginalised, distorted and opposed by
trans ideology. In focusing on the suffering experienced by trans people,
remembrance practices like the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and the
associated rhetorical strategies identified above) reinforce and propagate a
set of notions around sex and gender which serve patriarchal interests.
In New
Zealand during the first world war people with German surnames were persecuted:
they lost their jobs, had their houses set on fire and were openly
discriminated against. This discrimination was carried out with a fervent sense
of righteousness: God and Right was on the side of the British Empire. Irish
nationalists, Maori who followed the lead of Te Puea Herangi, anarchists,
socialists and pacifists all faced massive state sanctioned censure and
persecution for their ‘disloyal’ anti war stance. In New Zealand today, and
throughout the first world western nations, it is not hard to identify social
groups facing censure, marginalisation and abuse because of tensions felt
between them and the dictates of trans ideology. The middle aged women who have their lives
up-ended by their trans identifying husbands, the parents of teenagers with gender
dysphoria, the lesbian women who
experience pressure to form relationships with men and feminist women who fight
to preserve female only spaces are some of the
notable examples. The thoughtless righteousness and moralistic fervour with
which these acts of censure and abuse are carried out appear largely driven by
the ideological framework I have attempted to sketch here: a sentimental and
quasi romantic image of trans oppression, together with a set of dogmas (‘transwomen
are women’, ‘sex work is work’) which legitimate these acts. Although the
differences in context, scale and setting are very considerable, the silencing and
stifling of dissent during WW1 era New Zealand society has very
real resonances and similarities with current day gender politics.
What are the
structural realities we should attend to if we wish to understand and address
the different types of harm and suffering connected with gender identity? If we
reject the focus on trans oppression as a framing tactic, and the associated
dogmas, then we avoid the cost of the moral blackmail and are able to
critically examine things like:
If we don’t
reject the trans oppression focus with its silencing dogmas, then the notion of
‘gender identity’ becomes something like the idea of war as an inevitable
feature of human destiny. Gender becomes, rather than an oppressive and
profitable result of patriarchal injustice, another essential, naturalised
inevitability. If we can’t connect the dots between things like big
pharmaceutical companies, cultural misogyny and neoliberal identity politics
the consequence is a ‘naturalisation’ of gender. Gender, and in particular the
mysterious notion of ‘gender identity’, becomes a sacrosanct topic out of the
reach of critical discussion.
The acceptance of war and gender as necessary features of society is a conservative stance: being radical means taking seriously the Marxist commitment to the ruthless critique of all existing social structures.
The acceptance of war and gender as necessary features of society is a conservative stance: being radical means taking seriously the Marxist commitment to the ruthless critique of all existing social structures.
