The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Page 7 of 10

What not to do if you actually want people to support Palestinians

2023-11-14 / / 0 Comments

It’s spouting reductive, jargon-packed, essentialist bullshit (and, in the case of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, pogrom-inciting antisemitism) that will convince nobody outside your narrow academic circle of identitarian leftists. “Settler-colonial” (or just “settler”) is the identitarian-leftist equivalent of the Marxist “bourgeois”—or the right-wing “degenerates” or “groomers.” It’s a way to throw people into a bin and label them. I am sick to death of political movements that are predicated on just trying to wipe out the other guy. You keep doing that and we’re not going to have anyone left. Unless that’s what you want.

There is no one “Zionism” or “anti-Zionism”

2023-11-07 / / 1 Comment

Despite what the media and loudmouthed activists on both sides would have you think, there are multiple kinds of Zionism and anti-Zionism. Some are worse than others. This isn’t a scientific study; it’s based on my observations as an armchair (though not amateur—I went to grad school for public policy) analyst of the situation. I’ll order them from one extreme (eliminationist Zionism) to the other (eliminationist anti-Zionism).

Zionists

Some Zionists want to wipe out all Palestinian Arabs from Israeli territory and ensure that the entire Land of Israel is reserved for Israeli Jews. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition clearly fall into this category. This kind of genocidal Zionism is to be condemned. It is these Zionists who exemplify settler colonialism, since it is their goal to displace all Palestinians, who are merely an obstacle to their version of Manifest Destiny. They are typically Islamophobic and associate Muslims with terrorism, even though most Muslims are peace-loving, just like anybody else. They have forgotten, like their extremist anti-Zionist counterparts, that both Jews and Arabs are native to this part of the Middle East. Rightists with identitarian politics (those who treat certain races, genders, religions or nationalities as virtuous or damned, no in-between) often hold these views—well, except for neo-Nazis and other antisemites, unless they want to deport all diaspora Jews to their own Bantustan.

Other Zionists will allow Palestinians to live, but only in squalid apartheid conditions. This was the status quo in Gaza for several years, even after the Israeli government claimed it would disengage from Gaza in 2005. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned. These people typically want Judaism to be the state religion. Like the genocidal Zionists, segregationists are Islamophobes and think that keeping people in an open-air prison for 16 years is an acceptable way to fight terrorists—even though a large portion of the Gazan population is children and adolescents. They typically support the West Bank settlements.

And other Zionists are against the apartheid system and Netanyahu’s genocide, but they still prefer to maintain a single Jewish state in which Palestinians are not afforded the same rights. They may or may not support the West Bank settlements. This kind of Zionism is also to be condemned, since it is a mirror image of Middle Eastern Jews’ experiences as dhimmis (a protected but subordinate group) under Islamic rule. These Zionists are probably worth having a dialogue with, since they are opposed to the obvious crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli state.

Some Zionists support the existence of the state of Israel, but they are open to a two-state solution or something else based on the wishes of both Israelis and Palestinians. They generally want to end the occupation of the West Bank and the apartheid regime in Gaza. Like the single-state Zionists, two-state Zionists are worth having a dialogue with. Most western governments fall into this category. The problem arises is when two-state Zionists try to appease the more extreme factions, which some of them do.

Anti-Zionists

Some anti-Zionists want to end the West Bank occupation and apartheid system and want a single secular state that includes both Jews and Arabs. Zionists are often opposed to this solution because it would create a Palestinian majority and dilute the Jewishness of Israel—and possibly open its residents to the antisemitism they escaped in Europe and in the Arab states before the establishment of the Israeli state. (This can probably be circumvented with laws explicitly protecting Jews from antisemitism and honouring the history of the Israeli state, even if it is now secular, as well as quotas for Jewish and Arab representation.) This group of anti-Zionists is usually worth talking to. This flavour of anti-Zionism is common among some leftists, typically Marxists. A variant of this view is anarchists’ anti-Zionism, which opposes both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism—and the existence of any states, regardless of the ethnicity or religion associated with them. Some of these anti-Zionists may support the uprising in general (and show a disturbing lack of regard for Israeli civilian deaths), though they usually disapprove of Hamas’s theocratic beliefs and desire to wipe out all Jews in the area.

Other anti-Zionists want a single state whose official religion is Islam, though they will allow Israeli Jews to remain on the territory. This would be a return to the dhimmi status to which Jews were subjected before the creation of the Israeli state. These anti-Zionists are possibly worth talking to, though their desire for a theocracy means that they are less likely to be reasonable than supporters of a secular state.

And finally, there are anti-Zionists who want to dismantle the state of Israel and kill or deport all the Jewish residents to establish an Islamist Arab ethnostate. This is the view held by Hamas, Hezbollah and some other Islamist groups, as well as some “decolonial” supporters who (wrongly) liken Hamas’s terrorist acts to those by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and other resistance fighters. (The currently jailed Marwan Barghouti is a better analogue to Mandela.) Unfortunately, this group of anti-Zionists tends to dominate the conversation, and they really shouldn’t. Leftists with identitarian politics (the lefty version of right-wing fascism or religious fundamentalism) can fall into this category. I find this group the most offensive since they claim to speak in the name of social justice and fairness, but they’re advocating wanton violence and defending terrorists who slaughter civilians instead. I expect right-wing Zionists to be heartless, but not people who are supposedly on “my side.” The sad thing is some tankies—yes, the ones who stuff their articles with quotes from Stalin and praise North Kor—I mean, the “DPRK,” as many times as they can—have been more reasonable than the identitarians. Tankies at the very least usually reject Islamism, even if they frequently fail to condemn Hamas’s killing of civilians. Identitarians don’t give a shit about theocracy if it’s not Jewish or Christian. The idea that a religious or ethnic group can be an oppressed minority in the West and an oppressive majority in the Middle East has not occurred to them. They also tend to see Jews, regardless of race, as white settlers who have displaced native Arabs, even though a plurality of Israeli Jews have ancestors from the Mediterranean or Middle East. They outnumber Ashkenazi Jews, though in Western countries, Jews are typically associated with Ashkenazim because of 19th- and 20th-century immigration patterns. (I spend more time criticising this group than any other because I am surrounded by identitarian leftists who spout this antisemitic genocidal bullshit. I don’t know any Zionists who are calling for a genocide, just progressive Zionists who want equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the other ethnic groups living in Israel/Palestine.)

The Woke Contrarian’s Views

I lean toward the (preferable) two-state solution or (less ideal) a single secular state. Either is better than the current situation or anything else Jewish or Islamic theocratic nationalists are proposing. Unfortunately, the Israeli regime and Hamas are pushing the worst possible solutions—singular, monoethnic, theocratic states with no room for compromise or coexistence.

War is not a sports game.

2023-11-07 / / 0 Comments

War is not a sports game. And yet, and yet.

I’ve seen this with Ukraine and Russia, and now I’m seeing it with Israel and Hamas. In the past, I saw it with the Iraq War. It’s like being in Ancient Rome and watching gladiators go at it against each other—but worse.

I get this impression that people are thinking, “Three-nil to Russia!” “Touchdown! Israel clinched it in the nick of time! Look at that crowd over there! It’s unbelievable!” “Foul for Israel: goaltending!” “Kiev scored an own-goal—oops!” “Send them off the pitch! Russia—red card!” “Hamas scored a home run! And that’s a ball game!” “And that was a surprise save by Ukraine! If you look over there, Putin is fuming!” “Slam-dunk by Hamas!” “And Netanyahu’s been sent to the penalty box!” “Penalty kick to Ukraine!”

You want to watch sports? Watch Arsenal or Real Madrid or Dynamo Kiev. Watch the LA Lakers or Boston Celtics or Chicago Bulls. Watch the Dallas Cowboys, New England Patriots or Oakland Raiders. Or watch the Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants or New York Mets (boo!). Watch England and India play cricket. Hell, you can even watch Donald Trump make an idiot of himself on the golf course. But Israel and Ukraine are not playing fields. They are war zones. These are people’s lives we’re talking about, not just points on a scoreboard.

It’s saddest from people who support a particular side because they want to see justice in the world. But even in just wars, even after the American Civil War and World War II, it was changes made in peacetime that brought about justice, not just the wars themselves. (There are vanishingly few just wars. Rarely is your opponent going to be an Adolf Hitler.) You can win the war and lose the peace.

But these justice-seekers treat the wars in Israel and Ukraine in the same way the thrill-seekers do: like a sports game. All they want to do is score goals over the other guy. You can’t point out the problems with the other “team” because if you do, it means that their team loses. You can’t find a solution for both Israelis and Palestinians, or the different ethnic communities in Ukraine. Someone’s got to win and it has to be them. These people want to win the game, not heal the pain.

War is not a sports game.

Enough is enough. No more weapons to Kiev.

2023-11-06 / / 0 Comments

After nearly two years of supporting the Ukrainian effort (though there’s not much I can do as an armchair observer), I’ve changed my mind about supporting Kiev militarily. At this point, the war is unwinnable by either Ukraine or Russia. This is a war of attrition. It is a meat grinder. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has spluttered. Russia has barely gained any territory, and it didn’t “take Kiev in three days” as it planned to last year.

The world has been flooded with propaganda, both Russian and Ukrainian, claiming that each side will win handily. Anyone with a pulse who paid attention to the Western mainstream media knew about Russian propaganda, which was indeed full of shit. But Ukrainian propaganda, too, misled the Western public. Ukrainian propaganda doesn’t tell outright lies like its Russian counterpart, but it distorts, exaggerates, minimises, denies and obfuscates. “If you just give us enough weapons, we’ll win the war,” Zelensky said over and over again. For a while, it worked: Russia’s troops failed to take major cities like Kiev, Odessa, Lviv and Kharkov. Ukraine was able to recapture Kherson. But this year, Ukraine’s luck ran out. The Russians took Bakhmut, even though it was a hollowed-out shell with very few inhabitants. “Putin is the next Hitler,” they said. Russia can’t even manage to take over the entirety of Ukraine. There is little chance that it will try to take Poland, Georgia or any other nearby country. Putin’s goals have been as quixotic as Zelensky’s. If Russia resorts to using nuclear weapons, even China will stop dealing with it. It is likely that Russia’s only ally will be North Korea, a worldwide pariah state.

I really hate to admit this, since… the Ukrainians did not deserve what Russia did to them—the Bucha massacre, the daily bombings, the child abductions, the fake referenda, the crushing repression in all Russian-occupied areas. The injustice is palpable. As much as I have complained about Ukraine’s ultranationalist politics and its accommodation of the extreme right, ordinary Ukrainians are not synonymous with their leadership. Remember that Zelensky won his election handily because he ran on a peace platform. He ran to bring all Ukrainians together, whether they came from Lviv, Vinnytsia, Kiev, Odessa or Donetsk. Instead, he and the Rada passed Poroshenko-like laws that favoured Western Ukraine. But that’s not what Ukrainians voted for in 2019. They’d had enough of that after Poroshenko. These are ordinary people trapped in extraordinarily bad circumstances.

But at the same time, it’s time for some policy realism. Ukraine needs no-strings-attached humanitarian aid—and a change in government to flush out the ultranationalists, not more weapons from the US, NATO and the EU. It is time for Moscow and Kiev to go to the negotiation table. Enough is enough.

Yes, your tone matters.

2023-11-05 / / 0 Comments

I don’t think it’s necessary or required to be nice and polite all the time. There’s no such thing as a polite revolution, even if there should be. But the idea that tone does not, or should not, matter when you’re defending a cause is 100% bullshit. In rhetoric, tone matters. It’s not just what you say—it’s how you say it.

Shouting “Trans women are women” won’t convince people who aren’t familiar with how gender identity works—and it definitely won’t convince people who are right-leaning or centrist but are open to listening to either side. Yelling at them will send them into the arms of transphobes like TERFs and fundamentalist Christians, who reinforce their preconceived notions about gender and sexuality. Your average person is extremely unlikely to be trans, and they are also unlikely to know a trans person, so treating these arguments as truisms does not help this just cause.

Shrieking to a pacifist or soft Zionist, or even your average person who doesn’t know much about the relationship between Israel and Palestine, that Israel is a settler-colonialist imperialist project will merely shut them down. They don’t know what the hell settler colonialism is, and they may not even think that “colonial” is a bad thing—after all, brand names like “Colonial Window Company” and “Imperial Margarine” are common in the US. “Settler colonialism” is an academic talking point. If you say that you don’t care about Israeli civilian casualties or hostages, you’re not going to bring a single person to your side. You just look like a heartless supporter of terrorists (which you are—ironically, you sound a lot like the hard Zionists who will happily bomb the shit out of regular Palestinians to get Hamas). If you call Hamas a bunch of freedom fighters when the news says they’re terrorists over and over again, then they’re not going to listen to you. They’re going to look at you as though you’ve grown two heads. There is a reason why the mainstream media has no time or reason to listen to anti-Zionists: it’s because you keep undermining a good cause (ending the Israeli apartheid regime and stopping Netanyahu’s barbarous attacks on Gaza) by demonstrating a lack of empathy, consideration, patience or basic decency. I am furious at most of the anti-Zionists I’ve spoken to because they’re being heartless assholes. I despise Netanyahu. He’s a genocidal creep. I think Israel’s actions toward Palestinians have been abominable. But Hamas is not the answer. They’re slaughtering civilians. Through their indiscriminate violence they have undermined their own goddamn fucking cause.

I am against all sexisms, including transphobia. I am not a Zionist. If I didn’t already agree with these causes, either in whole or in part, I wouldn’t be convinced. In fact, I would probably double down because I was tired of being scolded over and over again. You cannot make your case by pouncing on people and yelling at them every time they fuck up, every time they merely repeat what the news has pelted them with for the past decade, every time that they ask questions and want to learn more. If you don’t have the energy to argue politely, find people who do. (There are some topics I can debate, like geopolitics, but I can’t debate LGBTQ+ rights, for example.) There is more than one way to organise. I can’t engage with homophobes and transphobes, so I refuse to debate them. There are other queer people who can do that. I used to in the past.

This is why you keep hearing right-wingers and centrists talking about “woke scolds,” even though these people are far from representative. (The worst scolds are on the right.) A jerk for a good cause is still a jerk—and most people will respond accordingly.

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

2023-11-01 / / 0 Comments

Inverse oppression is not liberation.

Calling to commit genocide against a dominant ethnic group is still wrong. It still implies that there are groups of people who don’t deserve to live, not because of what they have individually done, but because of the cruel actions of their government. Targeting your own citizens because they speak the “oppressor’s language” isn’t going to free you from domination; it’s merely going to tear your country apart because your blinkered nationalism has caused you to forget who is also on your side.

I don’t mean this to be a saccharine “why can’t we just get along” plea. I don’t mean that we have to suck up to people who don’t value our lives. Fuck them. But I won’t endorse essentialist claims about how, for example, Russians exist solely to oppress Ukrainians and must be destroyed. This is toxic garbage. Nobody exists solely to oppress anyone else. When you claim that someone’s very existence is oppressive, you sound like a fucking fascist.

Most social justice activists aren’t like this. Most want to find a place for themselves within a pluralist society. But they are drowned out by a loud minority that calls for blood at the earliest opportunity.

Turning misogyny around and claiming that men are all domineering brutes who want to subjugate women doesn’t lead to women’s liberation—it just causes misogynists to double down and act worse because “women hate us anyway.” And “reverse misogynists” are often the ones who end up becoming TERFs, since they believe in sexual determinism. If you’re born with this bodily configuration, you’re virtuous; if you’ve got the other kind, you’re damned.

Certain “woke” academics and students think that antiracism means dehumanising white people, straight people, or cis people—and those white, straight, and cis people will turn around and escalate their racist, homophobic, and transphobic claims because they think that non-white and LGBTQ+ people are out to get them. They think they’re going to be oppressed, too. When they talk about being “decolonial,” they want to become the new colonisers instead, wiping out history and rewriting it to fit a new “liberated” agenda. (And some are perfectly fine with some colonisers like the Chinese.) They conflate cultural exchange—a near-universal in all human societies—with crude cultural appropriation, like white people wearing stupid fake Native American headdresses at Coachella.

Real liberation occurs when societies can reckon with historical inequities and find ways to live alongside each other. We must not tolerate racism, sexism or any other prejudice. But this demand must be separated from retributive, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth “morality.” There is a difference between fighting for one’s rights—even with violence—and wanting to eliminate the other side. For example, I don’t want white Americans to be wiped out. I want them to start seeing their non-white counterparts as full members of society.

I am tired of hearing that calling for reconciliation and kindness, rather than calling for blood, means “siding with the oppressor.” Unfortunately, a lot of oppressed people think that liberation means doing what the other guys did to them. The oppressed can become oppressors. One cursory look at a history book will show this to be true. The Russians were oppressed by the Mongols. Later, they turned around and oppressed Mongolic groups like the Buryats. Jews were and are oppressed in Western societies and the Arab world. But now the Israeli state (not Jews as a whole, just the Israeli state) is oppressing Palestinian Arabs, and those Arabs, as well as their Iranian allies, are now calling for the oppression of Jews as a whole. Both Jews and Muslims are marginalised religious and ethnic minorities in the West, and this complicates politics among Israel’s allies. Anti-Zionism is shot through with antisemitism, and Zionism is shot through with Islamophobia. And there are people who are both oppressor and oppressed—for example, non-white Americans may serve in the army and still struggle with racism at home. I side-eye anyone who talks about “The Oppressor” as though this is a permanent category, an indelible mark of evil.

I do not believe in tit-for-tat morality and I will never endorse it, even if it is masked as “liberation.” I’m not against the use of violence to send a message (though it should occur only after non-violent options have been exhausted), but it has to be targeted—and it should not be directed at civilians or private citizens. I’m sick of this Manichaean bullshit, and I hate that social justice movements have been infected with it.

If you are obsessed with eliminating groups of people, you aren’t freeing anyone from literal or figurative bondage. You just want to be the new master.

I am sick to death…

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

… of having support for Hamas or Israel shoved down my throat. Fuck them both. I care about Israeli and Palestinian civilians, but I don’t particularly care whether Israel or Hamas wins. Both sides want to commit genocide against each other. I value Israelis and Palestinians equally, as everyone should. (Zionists and anti-Zionists don’t seem to agree with me, though.) I’m not going to pick Far-Right Racist Group A over Far-Right Racist Group B just because Far-Right Racist Group A has less power right now. I’m not going to call an indigenous population “settler colonialists,” as though we were dealing with Christopher Columbus. Both Jews and Arabs have the right to live in Israel/Palestine, but Zionists and anti-Zionists cannot get that through their thick fucking skulls. Jews were EXPELLED from Palestine by antisemitic Christian and Muslim governments. Don’t fucking tell me that it’s the same as the British colonising India or something.

But I’m not going to excuse the Jewish-supremacist, far-right Netanyahu government’s genocidal behaviour against the people of Gaza because of Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Jews are indigenous to Palestine. They aren’t just a bunch of random white settlers and I want to fucking strangle anyone who tries to push that narrative on me. But being indigenous doesn’t let you off for being shitty to your neighbours. Arabs have a right to live freely and have equal rights. No more apartheid, no more segregation. They have every right to rebel, but Hamas is not the flag to rally around. Jews have every fucking right to be afraid of pogroms led by an Islamist terrorist group, apartheid regime notwithstanding. (I’ve said this before, but Hamas isn’t Nelson Mandela. Stop trying to whitewash this national-chauvinist terrorist group just because they want to free themselves from Israeli occupation. Are you going to call Al-Qaeda freedom fighters for challenging American imperialism by flying a plane into the fucking Twin Towers next? Are ISIS now freedom fighters because they’re a thorn in the side for Western imperialist powers because they want to maintain hegemony over the Middle East—and everywhere else?) Being oppressed doesn’t get you a get-out-of-basic-human-decency card. Claiming otherwise is a recipe for disaster, as we are now witnessing every day in Gaza.

And Zionists and anti-Zionists tend to treat their sides like their favourite sports team. They don’t trivialise deaths on their own side, but they show a remarkable amount of callousness towards the deaths of the other side’s civilians. And if you challenge them, they double down and start shouting about how Palestinians are all a bunch of terrorists or all Israelis are Kosher Nazis. Come the fuck on. People are fucking killing each other, spouting nationalist slogans and swearing they’ll wipe the other side off the map.

As soon as the Middle East is involved, everyone becomes unhinged, I swear.

Fuck Netanyahu. Fuck Hamas. I hope both governments fail and are replaced by something better for everyone living in the area. It feels as the only sane voices about all this are from anarchists and certain communists, who rightly see through the pro-nationalist bullshit that is spewing from both Zionists and anti-Zionists.

(I am infinitely relieved to have this anonymous blog, because I think if I showed certain people, I think they’d shun me because I refuse to be on Team Israel or Palestine. It’s like asking me to choose between arsenic and strychnine.)

Kiev doubles down on linguistic nationalism

2023-10-30 / / 0 Comments

According to a new poll from the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 45% of Ukrainians think that linguistic discrimination is a problem—even more than discrimination based on sexuality, gender, or disability. But you wouldn’t guess that from the attitudes expressed by some Ukrainian officials and hyper-nationalist citizens. Yet again, Kiev has continued to score own-goals by discriminating against large swathes of its population instead of trying to bring its people together.

Keep in mind that KIIS’s poll probably doesn’t include the heavily Russian-speaking Donbass, currently occupied by the Kremlin. The people being polled are in places like Kiev, Lviv, and Vinnytsia, far away from the frontline.

The English-language press hasn’t picked up on this—they’re too busy focusing on the fanatical Israeli and Palestinian nationalists instead. All the links in this post will be in Russian and Ukrainian—Google Translate will help you out if you don’t read them fluently, which I don’t.

By treating the Russian language and its speakers as synonymous with Vladimir Putin, Ukraine is merely playing into the Kremlin’s narrative about oppressed Russian-speakers who need to be saved from Kiev. And yet they do it anyway:

  • Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s head of national security, said that the Russian language should disappear from Ukraine, equating its very use with Kremlin propaganda. Of those who continue to use Russian, he said, “We don’t need anything from them. Let them leave us behind; let them go to their swamps and croak in Russian.” He also said that the government would switch its “FreeДом” channel from Russian to English—even though English is not a native language of most Ukrainians. Russian, however, is. This lack of regard for his fellow Ukrainians is stunning in its callousness. Is it any wonder that there are so many Ukrainian citizens willing to work with the Russians? He’s giving talking points to Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Margarita Simonyan, Dmitry Kiselev and Vladimir Soloviev, not encouraging national unity.
  • The Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev will stop teaching Russian, Belarusian and Farsi courses. (I suspect that they’re cutting Farsi because Iran is anti-Israel—they’re mixing in Zionism with their own local ethnonationalism. I would also object if a university cut Hebrew because of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians.)
  • A taxi driver in Kiev was fired because he refused to give into his riders’ rude demands that he stop speaking Russian. He kicked his riders out for their behaviour, and from what I can pick up, they reported him to the government. Ukraine’s “language ombudsman,” Taras Kremin, promised to impose a fine on this driver.
  • Taras Kremin has called for Ukrainian TV stations to stop making bilingual programming.
  • The irony in all this is that, although just over half of bilingual parents in Kiev have started to speak Ukrainian more frequently to their children, 20% of Kiev preschoolers barely understand Ukrainian. Kids often pick up Ukrainian at school, but according to this survey, most of them continue to speak Russian during breaks and with their families, and the memes that teens share online are vastly more likely to be in Russian or English than they are Ukrainian.

The most disturbing aspect of Ukraine’s anti-Russian-language drive is that the authorities simply don’t care about at least one-fifth of their population, if not more. They’re throwaways, or “superfluous Ukrainians,” as the leftist activist Anatoly Ulyanov put it.

I am actually afraid of the consequences if Kiev wins. A Russian victory would be worse—everything Ukraine is doing, Russia does at least fivefold—but if Zelensky pulls out a win against the odds, it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Hollowed-out cities, a lowered standard of life even for the poorest country in Europe, unbearable national debts, privatisation and neoliberal policies in a country whose president has sold out its people to the highest bidder, and a class of second-class citizens based on their native language. I cannot enthusiastically support Ukraine. I have not quite reached the point where I can’t support it at all—I think Kiev can eventually be held accountable, unlike Israel and Hamas—but it is extremely difficult to do so.

Why is it so difficult? Because nationalism is heartbreaking, gutting, life-destroying poison. Unlike patriotism, it relies on a desire to eliminate anything that does not match its narratives. It is chauvinistic, narrow-minded, bigoted and short-sighted. And when there is nationalism, there is no real peace.

 

“Sex-based rights” is a misnomer hiding a reactionary agenda

2023-10-25 / / 1 Comment

Instead of using a trans-inclusive definition of gender discrimination, conservatives and TERFs want to base claims of discrimination on assigned sex at birth, rather than gender identity or presentation. They call this “sex-based rights.”1

The problem with this argument is that transphobia is a form of sex discrimination. By telling members of one assigned sex that they may not be referred to by pronouns that align with their gender identity, wear the clothing that suits their gender presentation, or that they cannot get treatment or surgeries that help alleviate gender dysphoria, they are practising sex-based discrimination. I’m not the only one to use this argument—the United States Supreme Court, not known for its progressivism, ruled in Bostock that homophobic and transphobic discrimination in the workplace were unconstitutional, since they targeted people for discrimination based on sex assigned at birth.

It is more accurate to call “sex-based rights” sex-based restrictions. Just as digital rights management is designed to restrict how people use and distribute computer files, the principle of sex-based rights is designed to restrict the range of gender expressions and identities based on one’s assigned sex. Supporters of DRM say they want to protect and empower copyright holders (typically large corporations). And supporters of sex-based restrictions say they want to protect and empower women.

But sex-based restrictions don’t empower or protect women. Instead, they are sumptuary laws harking back to the Victorian era. Or in contemporary society, the laws in theocratic Middle Eastern states like Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. These restrictions also reinforce the anti-feminist idea that one’s assigned sex at birth defines one’s moral character. That if you were assigned male, you are automatically a rapist and pervert, and if you were assigned female, you are a delicate flower in need of protecting. These are patriarchal stereotypes that merely reinforce the idea that men and women will never be equal.

Some feminists—the ones who believe in inculcating gender equity in future generations—focus on cultivating gentleness and compassion in men, and assertiveness and strength in women. Supporters of sex-based restrictions do not do that. Instead, they reinforce the idea men are strong, dominating and predatory, and women are delicate, weak and nurturing. This isn’t feminism. In fact, it’s quite the opposite—it is merely the inverse of patriarchal “values.”

Homophobia and transphobia are sexism. Neither should be welcome in a tolerant society.

  1. (Come to think about it, the constant use of “sex” feels very old-fashioned, too—feminist activists started shifting towards “gender” fifty years ago. I prefer this not just for political reasons—“sex” is too easily confused with sexual intercourse.) ↩

 

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