Most of the time, the trans movement isn’t very big on the reality principle. When I first saw this article in The Nation, my first thought was to wonder whether we’ve hit peak trans. It’s the first time I’ve seen a concession that TERFs are winning a debate, instead of just hysterically denouncing them.
Of course, it doesn’t come directly from the trans movement itself. It comes from Alexis Grenell, who runs a consulting business that works on political campaigns, banning flavored tobacco, lobbying for Lime scooters, that sort of thing. Not a far left ideologue like me at all, so I think it’s notable that the article is 100% about language policing, how to talk about things. It’s a guide to what’s current in political correctness, being woke, whatever you want to call it. This kind of stuff is often confused with leftist “identity politics”, but nothing could be more liberal than addressing problems with corporate/NGO style guides.
So this is her intervention, her attempt at saving the trans movement from itself on abortion issues. Everything is actually very simple if you listen to TERFs: trans men are women, because “women” refers to sex and not gender, and sex is immutable. Therefore, you don’t need to make the abortion issue all about trans men by ritually acknowledging them every time we talk about abortion. Deep down, everyone knows this is true, so her task is to obfuscate. That’s why the writing style is so difficult, from the first sentence:
The Republican assault on abortion and broader campaign against bodily autonomy has led to a rhetorical conflation of two major constituencies affected by both—cis women and trans men—into a singular “people with the capacity for pregnancy.”
Like all propaganda, it doesn’t justify its premises, but takes them for granted: trans men and women are two categories of people, and denying it is “rhetorical conflation.” In reality, the trans movement is asking for a novel distinction and forcing us to talk about that instead of, like, how Roe v Wade is overturned and what’s the plan for fixing that. We can’t advocate for abortion with non-inclusive language! Before the trans movement, everyone understood that abortion concerned women.
Most people who are trans understand the fundamental connection between their own struggle for self-determination and women’s lack of it. Likewise, plenty of pro-abortion-rights cis women support trans rights and appreciate the need to build solidarity around a shared humanity. This makes total sense. But there’s been an entirely unnecessary by-product of this rhetorical expansion: the subtraction of the word “women” from the abortion discourse. That’s unfortunate, since it gives fuel to the misplaced fear, recently (and infamously) voiced by New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, that women are being “erased,” while unnecessarily alienating those who correctly see themselves as the intended and primary targets of abortion bans.
In other words, the trans movement’s influence here is so ridiculous that Republicans are kicking its ass by saying true things! If they could just not insert themselves, that would be better, but here we are. Fixing shit like this is her job. Broker a compromise.
Does the trans movement understand the connection between itself and the oppression of women? I mean…if you understand that there’s patriarchy, then it follows that gender roles were made up to reinforce patriarchy, and the whole point of the trans movement is identifying with them. It’s a paradox, where if the trans movement thought deeply about itself it would stop.
TERFs have been saying that the trans movement is its own thing, whose interests don’t necessarily align with feminism or gay rights. “You can’t even say woman now when you’re talking about abortion because trans people” is a bad look.
The debate played out on a recent episode of WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show between Cornell University philosopher Kate Manne, the author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, and a caller.
Joan in Brooklyn: “These attacks are about furthering the subjugation of women, and it’s really important for people to understand that…. I think the same forces that are going after abortion rights—there’s a whole campaign against trans people that has to be fought. But at the same time the attacks on abortion rights are not aimed at trans men; they’re aimed at forcing women to be enslaved to patriarchal moral authority.”
Manne: “I agree with you that the abortion bans that we’re seeing are targeting women. But I think we can recognize that they also affect and victimize trans boys and men, intersex people, nonbinary people who can get pregnant, and of course cis-girls. So I see no conflict between recognizing that anti-abortion activism has always been about misogyny, has always been about policing and controlling women, but it affects a broader class of persons.”
The segment ended with Manne reiterating that she didn’t think it was that hard to use more inclusive language. Yet most evidence (and common sense) suggests that condescending to women of a certain age—who know from hard—about new language that removes any mention of them from their lifelong struggle isn’t working. It also risks shifting the conversation unproductively onto trans-exclusionary radical feminist terrain, hijacking an argument about patriarchal control and diverting it into a bad-faith referendum on who is “really” a woman. So why die on this hill? The obvious compromise would seem to be to simply say “women and anyone else who can get pregnant,” or to recite the full list of affected parties. Instead, a lot of very online activists, progressive organizations, and academics are insisting on awkward language that sounds like a convoluted work-around to avoid using the word “women.”
Indeed, the trans movement defies common sense, and the lecturing about inclusivity does feel condescending.
As a political consultant, it probably physically hurts having to explain what a political loser “Latinx” is. It’s like there’s a general problem of inserting themselves into issues and making things worse:
Additive language for the sake of inclusivity is generally more successful than umbrella language, which is inherently reductive. The LGBTQIA+ community figured this out a long time ago, adding distinct identities to an acronym and ending it fittingly with a plus sign. Umbrella language often fails. The gender-neutral term “Latinx” is rejected by the vast majority of people in America who identify as either Latino or Hispanic, with three-quarters reporting that they haven’t even heard of the term, and only 4 percent at most listing it as a preferred label. It’s provided effective messaging for Republicans, though, who’ve weaponized it to paint Democrats as patronizing, out-of-touch elites. In a 2021 Newsweek op-ed, the writer Angel Eduardo explained that “Latinx” is not an expansion of the demographic category but rather “almost exclusively a way to indicate a particular ideological leaning.” Words then become the site of conflict, driven by an urgency to correct people rather than to reach them.
She’s like…OMFG Republicans are making in-roads with this shit we’re going to be so fucked.
As a TERF, you’d be called a mega-fascist for admitting that Republicans are winning this debate:
It was never going to be possible for UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges to reach Missouri Senator Josh Hawley when he called her out in a hearing for using the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” And although she managed to win a particular corner of the Internet by taking the author of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs to task, Hawley notched his own victory by getting to look like a women’s rights advocate, rather than the protofascist ghoul he is. Bridges was right, of course, that it’s possible to “recognize that this [abortion ban] impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive.” Indeed, that’s the whole point. So why not specifically mention the other groups?
This is sort of a good point, but it still feels like bad faith to me:
Umbrella terms by definition sacrifice specificity for a broader and technically accurate generalization. But there’s a real loss of imagery and experience that’s not being factored into the equation. For instance, when we use “people with the capacity for pregnancy” so as not to exclude children who’ve been raped (children falling outside the category of “women”), we obscure the particular horror of their experience for a dull, impersonal one. So too when we remove the unique experiences of “women” from a discourse that Manne and others agree they’re at the center of.
Like…one of the first things in the news after Roe was overturned was a story about a little girl who was raped having to travel out of state for an abortion.
She’s trying to do political consulting here. But in that context, simple messages are good. It’s not obviously better increasing the cognitive complexity of everything by evoking the specific horror of half a dozen micro-groups, when it’s like…Republicans hate women. This whole issue is totally inward-facing, about trans men “feeling excluded” from the movement. There’s no indication the trans movement is even really focused on outcomes for women, with all this drama. The movement is basically narcissistic.
Meera Deo, a professor at Southwestern Law School, argued something similar in her Virginia Law Review article “Why BIPOC Fails,” about the foregrounding and privileging of the Black and Indigenous experience within the spectrum of people of color: “While concentrating on these two groups may make sense in particular contexts, it cannot be true that every example of race and racism should center Black and Indigenous voices or experiences.” Deo goes on to push for more specificity in the name of accuracy: e.g., “Black” when talking about police brutality; “Asian” for Covid-related hate crimes; “anti-Arab” or “anti-Muslim” in reference to post-9/11 profiling, etc. As she says, “This will mean aggregating groups at times and naming them separately at others; whether finding community through unity or standing separately to highlight distinctions, either of these options is better than BIPOC.” The whole point is to add granularity to be more inclusive of different identities.
All language is limited. There is no perfect phrasing, and it always involves compromises. In this case, it’s just an ampersand.
Yeah, what was wrong with “people of color” before? I can’t believe it takes a whole law review article to figure that out.
I thought the first reader comment was pretty telling:
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have protested to the Brian Lara show on Twitter, left a comment on one of Elie Mystal’s writings for the Nation, and written to women’s rights organizations about the erasure of women by using the phrase “pregnant people,” all to no avail. I support transgender people and their desire to live as full a life as possible, but statistics show that among trans men, only about .05% who want to get pregnant are able to get pregnant. This is in contrast to millions of women and girls who are directly affected by these draconian antiabortion laws. This is a war on women and girls— like Joan of Brooklyn says, it is about the subjugation of women.