On 'Woman as Other'

Why Trans Ideology is Patriarchal

The three weeks that have elapsed since the Supreme Court delivered its judgement in the case of For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers, confirming, as we long maintained, that women do indeed exist as a sex class in UK equalities law, can only really be described as one long, eminently entitled, reality-distorting tantrum. Trans activists have protested, pissed on and defaced the statue of Millicent Fawcett, held up signs calling for recalcitrant women to be hung, claimed the Supreme Court are agents of ‘bigotry, prejudice and hatred,’ attempted to relitigate the entire gender war on warp speed, complete with the comical reappearance of that blasted bimodal graph, and have finally resorted to another round of disseminating misinformation about the law. While women are being threatened and accused of hate crimes for having the temerity to be pleased that the highest court in the land has confirmed our legal existence, much of the media response to the judgement has continued to reflect the gratuitously differential distribution of empathy—the absolutely reflexive himpathy—that allowed the rights grab by trans activism to proceed so far and so effectively in the first place.

Coverage has disproportionately centred the feelings of mostly male trans-identified people about the judgement, at the expense of clearly explaining to the public that the only reason the judgement was necessary is because the trans rights movement waged an over decade-long campaign to redefine women and undermine our rights to single-sex space by disseminating a misleading interpretation of the law, an aim that was first laid down in the International Bill of Gender Rights in the mid-90s. Almost no attention has been given to how women might feel about the fact that our political class and pretty much the whole of civil society conspired to redefine us in law without even consulting us, and that we then had to spend over ten years working our asses of, mostly for free, to try and stop it from happening, all while people called for us to be punched, hung, raped, curbstomped, fired from our jobs, and accused us of being genocide-planning fascists simply for asserting legal rights first given to us in the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.

The facts are that an enormous injustice has been perpetrated against women over the last decade, and thousands and thousands of women had to put their lives on hold and work tirelessly in the most hostile, and frankly triggering, circumstances in order to put it to rights. But you wouldn’t know that from much of what the media has had to say over recent weeks. We have been told that women popping champagne corks to celebrate a ten-year battle to affirm our existence in law are terrible extremists comparable to the men holding up signs proclaiming that ‘the only good TERF is a dead TERF.’ We have been treated to numerous incidents of women being expected to solve the issue of access to services that trans identified people are now confronted with because their political project went all in on accessing opposite sex services rather than lobbying for resources to meet their specific needs. And we have witnessed the repeated spectacle of women being shown mostly trans identified males exhibiting their unhappiness, and interviewers then demanding they perform sympathy for people who spent ten years trying to take their rights away and viciously bullying them into compliance.

What this has brought home to me, all over again, is how staggeringly patriarchal the trans rights project is, and how, for all its cant about smashing gender, none of it would have ever got remotely off the ground were it not for the bone-deep assumptions in our culture about whose needs, interests and feelings matter, and whose don’t. While trans ideological rhetoric has an entirely superficial account of what gender is, which seems to largely focus on the aesthetic performance of patriarchal notions of masculinity and femininity, gender, in old feminist money, is fundamentally a structure that prioritises male people’s needs and feelings, and positions women as a resource to serve male interests. In 2019 I gave a speech at Cambridge Radfems, which was reprinted in the Annals with the title ‘The Deep Structure of Gender.’ Given the display we’ve seen over the last few weeks, I want to return to that argument in some detail:

Beauvoir’s…analysis of a sovereigntist subjectivity that renders ‘Woman’ an objectified Other was a historic contribution to the thinking of patriarchal gender. What is so important about this analysis is that it established that ‘Woman,’ in Western culture, has never been thought in her own terms, but is, rather, fashioned by the negating projections of the male subject. Beauvoir was the first person to really grasp the thought of the universal—or default—male subject, and to understand how ‘Woman’ is produced by a mechanism of inversion of that male subject by that male subject. As she writes, “Humanity is male” while “Woman is the negative,” and man defines Woman, “not in herself, but in relation to himself”[1]…

[The construction of Woman as Other depends on a patriarchal understanding of the world which divides it into hierarchical] binary pairs, and the male subject apportions to himself mind, reason, culture, ideas, immateriality, identity, eternity, and changelessness—all qualities which would allow him to transcend the limiting confines of a vulnerable embodied existence. By projection, ‘Woman’ is then made the repository of body, emotion, nature, matter, difference, process, and change: all those embodied, animal attributes the invulnerable sovereign self wants nothing to do with…The sovereign male subject will instantiate the values of the properly human, while the female will be left with all the dirty, fleshy work—just as ‘nature’ has intended….

[For Irigaray this structure] is fundamentally impelled by the male subject’s inability to reckon with the vulnerability of material and maternal dependence. It is here that she innovatively critiques Lacanian psychoanalysis, and then re-reads Western philosophy as an idealist fantasy that rests on, and constantly repeats, the ‘murder of the mother.’[2]…According to Lacan, the mirror stage is an archetypal moment in the development of the sense of self, through which a [male] child comes to perceive himself as a coherent whole by identifying with his reflection in a mirror….The basis of Irigaray’s critique…was to notice that this mythical developmental moment doesn’t actually involve a mirror. Children are not formed in relation to an impassive reflecting object, but in relation to an active reflecting person. That is, this mirror-thing is actually a mother-person. And crucial things are concealed by turning mothers into mirrors. Firstly, the dependency of all human beings on the material and psychic labour of women. And secondly, that all human beings develop in an interactive dyad between two subjects, and not simply by narcissistically projecting ourselves onto mute reflecting surfaces. Mothers, it turns out, are actually people.

Irigaray took the insight that patriarchal subjectivity functions by eliding intersubjective and material dependence and turned it back on the history of philosophy, meticulously examining all the places where the male philosopher had, in Beauvoir’s words, made himself ‘Absolute,’ and uncovering the hidden traces of the mirror/mother. The reflecting surface of the mirror is an extremely powerful metaphor for conceptualizing the deep structure of patriarchal gender and understanding women’s gender role within that structure. It is not for nothing that Virginia Woolf noted, 90 years ago, that “[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”[3]

The first point I want to make here is that the patriarchal role of ‘woman- as-mirror’ is fundamentally about service. As Woolf indicates…a central part of that service is reflecting back to men their chosen image of themselves and responding to men as those men want to be responded to. To be a good mirror, women must not exhibit too much subjectivity, or introject too much personality, into this relation—because a surface that bears too much of its own image will do a bad job of reflecting what is demanded of it. It is here the patriarchal imagination posits the ideal ‘Woman’ as ‘passivity,’ and we encounter the many ways patriarchal femininity functions to constrain female subjectivity, restrict expressions of agency, and turn women into pliable, ever-smiling surfaces. This notion of ideal female passivity is evidently a patriarchal projection. Because the truth is that there’s nothing remotely passive about servicing the needs of men, and a woman who refused to perform the metric ton of work it requires would soon cease to seem ‘ideal.’ But this is labour the patriarchal mind refuses to see. When men think of women as ‘passivity,’ what they mean is that we should make good mirrors. That we should reflect back to them what they want and attend to their needs without introjecting our own. What they mean is that we should be pretty, pleasant, eager-to-please, and compliant.

This image of the narcissistic male subject, expecting reflective service from his female Other, captures the basic structure of relations between the sexes inside the matrix of patriarchal gender. As feminists have documented, female service to men involves not only attending to egos but many other forms of emotional and mental service, as well as domestic, reproductive, and sexual service…[A]ll these forms of service, including those of material reproductive labour, are performed as acts of one-way mirroring, and all serve the function of supporting the masculine ego’s narcissistic self-conception. The material-being, needs, subjectivity, and labour of woman never enter the relational equation on equal terms.

To summarise and elaborate: The structure of masculinity within the hierarchy of patriarchal gender is fundamentally narcissistic. It is narcissistic in that Woman is constructed as Other by projection from the position of the default masculine subject, and in accordance with his own ideas and interests. Women do not exist in this structure as subjects in their own right, with their own needs and interests. Rather, they are constructed as a resource, or as a compliant reflecting surface, whose function is to serve, and to support, the ego and interests of the male subject. Patriarchal narcissism, by this analysis, exists in denial of its dependence on both the material world that supports life and on other beings, and in particular, its dependence on the bodies and labour of women. It pretends that it is a sovereign godlike self, that it has the power to define both itself and others by fiat, and that is has the right to take what it needs from others, whose independent existence or interests it refuses even to recognise. When other beings, and especially women, challenge this narcissistic structure by refusing their role as pliant resources or reflecting surfaces and asserting their own existence and interests, they threaten its fragile narcissism, and the patriarchal sovereign subject is confronted with the reality that it is not, in fact, a god, and the meeting of its needs is dependent on others. Within the structure of gender, the response to this challenge is often narcissistic rage, which fuels the mechanisms of male violence against women and girls and serves to coerce women back into fulfilling their role as a resource for male interests.

How this structure relates to the gender war, and has all been pretty much recapitulated in the time since the Supreme Court judgement, should, I hope, be relatively apparent, but to enumerate:

1.Defining ‘Woman’ as a gendered projection: Women are actually existing female human beings. The patriarchal projection of ‘Woman’ is a construction produced by male power in the interests of male power. That is, its purpose it to make women perform a role whose main function is service to male needs and interests. When Beauvoir first laid out this structure, she was writing a critique not a ‘how to define women’ manual, and third wave feminism in general, and Butler in particular, should never be forgiven for getting so fucking confused and deciding that it was somehow liberatory to redefine women as a patriarchal projection. It’s not. Women, as we have often said, are not an idea in men’s heads, and women have every right to continue to resist such definitions, in culture in general, and especially in the law. They are fundamentally and deeply sexist and harmful to women’s humanity.

2.The ‘Male Power of Naming’: Closely intertwined with the redefinition of women as a patriarchal projection is the hierarchical structure of power which grants male people the authority to define both themselves in their own terms and to define others in terms that suit their interests, a historical echo of the moment in Genesis when God grants Adam ‘dominion’ over the natural world and the power to name the animals. What I particularly want to underline here is what it tells us about the embedded nature of this structure that the trans rights movement attempted to redefine women in law, and it didn’t occur to almost anyone in civil society overseeing this process that women, not men, were the primary stakeholders in our own legal definition, and they should probably ask us what we thought about it before just forging ahead like it was an obvious and uncontestable good.

3.Mind/body dualism and the derogation of femaleness: Within the hierarchal structure of gendered value mind/reason/immateriality/culture is attributed to ‘the masculine’ and body/emotion/materiality/nature to ‘the feminine.’ This is part of the structure that supports the male power of naming, because as rational mind man is taken to have authority to impose his understanding of the world on mute, passive, female nature (yes, this is entirely circular—man names himself as mind/reason and woman as body/nature, and this naming then supports his authority to name her). The hierarchization of mind and body is central to the structure of patriarchal gender and is core to the trans ideological belief that internal subjective gender identification should be taken as the indicator of our true being as men and women, over against the facts of our material bodies.

Indeed, this patriarchal structure is also core to the Butlerian belief that sex is produced by the gender binary, a move which is partly produced by the fact that Butler confuses theological appeals to the ‘natural order’ to justify hierarchy with the actual material world produced by evolution, and hence ends up thinking that subjugating body to mind, or nature to culture, is some kind of revolutionary move, as opposed to a recapitulation of the origins of Judeo-Christianity when the God-mind turns up and speaks the world into existence. Within this structure, Butler and third wave feminists also confuse the patriarchal derogation of femaleness with femaleness itself, and slip into the determinist conviction that somehow, it is femaleness which necessarily gives rise to patriarchy’s gendered derogations of it. It is true that patriarchy has justified its hierarchies by painting femaleness as a form of inferior, mute, passive, bodily animality lacking in the constituent features of the human. Feminism is not supposed to agree with it about that. And agreeing with it about that is a form of (internalised) misogyny. A form of internalised misogyny that has played a very considerable role in getting many women to agree with the patently absurd proposition that the way to liberate female people is to pretend that they don’t fucking exist.

4.The narcissistic structure of trans identification: Just as it is inherently narcissistic, and indeed, an operation of idealist domination, to believe that our subjective self-identification should take priority over, and be impressed upon, immutable aspects of our bodies or the material world (hello Green Party you blithering idiots!), it is also inherently narcissistic to believe that our subjective sense of self should take priority over, or be impressed upon, other people’s perceptions or experience of the world. There is a profound difference between understanding trans identification as an expression of some people’s desire to be taken as members of the opposite sex, and the insistence that it is literally a process of people becoming the other sex, and the demand that the whole of civil society be reorganised on that basis.

Once you have committed yourself to the second proposition, you have necessarily embarked on a process of imposing a belief that is not literally true on other people and attempting to force them to act as if they believed it to be literally true, because, as it turns out, our sense of self isn’t just a matter of sovereign self-determination and depends on reality and other people’s perception of that reality. I have in the past described this, in admittedly philosophy-wank terms, as ‘ontological totalitarianism.’ Given that what we are exploring here is the narcissistic structure of patriarchal masculinity, it is important to underline that this inherently narcissistic structure of trans identification is one of the principal reasons why the trans rights project so closely conforms to the core structures of patriarchal gender.

5.Refusing women words to describe our oppression: The narcissistic structure of trans identification when undertaken in the form propagated by trans ideology leads then to the need to impose its own worldview on everyone else, who are then effectively converted into a reflecting surface to validate the trans individual’s identification (which is what a pronoun protocol is in essence). In this process, the demand is also made that feminist women subjugate the sex-based analysis of their own oppression to a worldview constructed entirely for the purpose of validating trans people’s identities. Feminist women, however, have a right to use language and concepts to describe the world in terms that make sense to us, in continuity with our own understanding of feminist history, and are not obliged to sacrifice our analysis of our own oppression in order to serve male interests or other people’s narcissistic demands.

The effort to erase sex, and sex-class analysis, from the intellectual tools available to women, and to recast such analysis as a thoughtcrime, is a profound attack on feminism, and on women’s ability to name, accurately describe, and resist sex-based oppression. (It’s all very convenient really, and it is a wonder that within ten years of entering the patriarchal academy, third wave feminism had destroyed the analysis of structural male power and was paid for its trouble in diamonds, rock-star academic status and total disciplinary hegemony.) In ‘An Oral History of the Gender War,’ published in the last issue of The Radical Notion, several feminist commentators described the profound discomfort they felt when first encountering trans ideology and the pressure to contort their writing about women’s oppression to its precepts, and Victoria Smith has written powerfully, and angrily, about this on numerous occasions elsewhere, including in this last righteous piece on her Substack. This refusal to erase the concepts needed for women to describe and challenge their oppression is also what has motivated efforts by gender critical women to resist the replacement of sex data with gender identity data in the census and other demographic instruments.

6.Female noncompliance, narcissistic rage, and male violence: When women refuse to comply with the gendered structure that positions them as a reflective resource for male interests, and instead assert their own needs and subjectivity, it punctures the masculine subject’s illusion of sovereign mastery, and exposes his relational dependence on others, on the material world, and on women. This is intolerable for a subject who refuses to recognise the existence of others and expects his needs to be mutely fulfilled by them in complete denial of what he is taking, as if he were, in fact, an entirely self-sufficient and godlike being. The response to women challenging this kind of entitlement is frequently narcissistic rage, or what Michael Kimmel has called ‘aggrieved entitlement,’ and it is the engine of male violence against women, the purpose of which is to get women back in line and make them comply with their service role to male needs.

How this has been playing out in trans activism’s point-blank refusal to ever admit that women have their own interests, that they are attempting to force women to relinquish those interests to serve other people, and their constant entitled fury when women won’t comply, should be evident. Back in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the traumatising torrent of violent threats that greeted JK Rowling’s decisive entry onto the gender critical stage, I sketched out the resonance between TRAs entitled fury when women say no to them, and the mechanisms of rape-logic. The last couple of weeks, and TRAs absolute refusal to accept that women are allowed to have boundaries, even when underwritten by the highest court in the land, have brought memories of that summer sharply back onto focus.

7.Himpathy: The cultural apparatus surrounding this gendered structure can be reliably called upon to position women who refuse to comply with male needs as evil meanies and monsters, and the men who are threatening them because they are sad as the victims of the whole affair. The entire possibility of demonising women for a decade for refusing to comply with their own legal and political erasure depended on this cultural apparatus. As does the witch-word applied to women to mark them out as legitimate targets of violence and coercion, a word that names women entirely on the basis of what they are refusing to give to men, you evil ‘exclusionary’ bitches.

It is only on this basis that it would be possible for anyone to believe that the law affirming that women do indeed exist and have rights given to them in 1975 is an act of egregious violence, that it is ‘punching down,’ or a ‘tirade’ against a minority, or something approaching an act of genocide. It is only on this basis that media coverage of a court judgement setting to rights an act of injustice committed by the whole of civil society against women would repeatedly focus on the fact that it makes men feel sad, and women would be repeatedly asked to answer for the fact that their very existence in law is distressing to some men. None of this would make any sense whatsoever were it not the case that we live in a world in which men are considered to be complete human beings with full inner lives, significant feelings, and things they want to achieve that are meaningful and important, and that women’s job is to do what men want, provide them with service, or, as David Tennant recently expressed with inadvertent accuracy, to ‘get out the way.’

8.#BeKind: As Victoria Smith’s recent book has explored, the injunction that women must exhibit empathy and care for men, and the lack of social expectation that this empathy and care should be returned, is a core feature of patriarchal socialisation that functions to ‘entrench sexism’ and uphold the structure of prioritising male needs over female ones. Underlining this model of socialisation would be the feminist response to the often-made claim that trans ideology is singularly the product of feminism, and that it is a political movement that is significantly supported by women. As I have repeated ad infinitum, feminism is a form of material class politics, not a form of identity politics, and you don’t get a coherent analysis of women’s political interests by just adding up what one bunch of women say and subtracting what another bunch of women say, or pretending that the maintenance of structures of oppression don’t centrally depend on conditioning the oppressed by handing out carrots and waving large sticks (or pink and blue baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire).

It’s worth noting here, moreover, that those involved in the populist anti-woke pushback, have, over the last couple of years, made much of how wokeism in general, and trans ideology in particular, are the fault of women, feminism and the alleged feminisation of our society. As I discuss here and here, lots of mud has been thrown at this wall, much of it centring on evopsych narratives about why women are more naturally empathetic than men, which apparently leads to us feeling sorry for all manner of misfits, deviants and foreigners we shouldn’t feel sorry for and imperilling the whole of Western civilisation in the process.

I have expressed my scepticism about evolutionary psychology’s ‘just-so’ stories on a number of occasions, and I do not believe we can extrapolate backwards from the present to the evolutionary past, and then draw a hypothetical line from that past back to the present and claim our current social and historical circumstances are some kind of determinist outcome of psychological propensities that were laid down ‘on the savanna,’ which is not, to underline, to say that I am a blank slatist either. However, in the context of a discussion like this, in which we are documenting the social mechanisms that prop up the priority of male needs, undermine women’s interests, and punish them for expressing them, I always want to ask the cultural conservatives who are so confident that patriarchal gender is just an expression of the inherent nature of the sexes, if women are naturally such good little complaint empaths who always put other people first, why does our society need to go to such elaborate lengths to make sure we don’t step out of line?

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So lastly, to place this discussion back in the wider project of this blog, I want to emphasise that the narcissistic, patriarchal structure of trans ideology is just one side of that mechanism as it is playing out in the wider culture war, and that patriarchal narcissism is also, fundamentally, the structure of tribal identitarianism that is generating the mirror image mechanism of the war at large. The populist right / MAGA form of right-wing identitarianism might be happy to recognise that women are female, but it will use that knowledge to push us back into our role as a reproductive and domestic resource, while the ‘progressive’ / trans ideological form of identitarianism will redefine us as a patriarchal projection, and demand that we erase our material reality to serve as a resource for that projection, irrespective of any harms we incur in the process, and with no regard for our own rights to self-definition or expression of our own political interests.

Neither side will be prepared to acknowledge the reality, or interests, of anyone who challenges its political objectives, both projects will be equally happy to dismiss the rule of law as woke leftist / bigoted conservative propaganda when it fails to serve its ends, and neither have any qualms about trying to bully or coerce opponents into compliance, and to giving over whatever it chooses to demand. I recently had a conversation about these similarities in the narcissistic structure of the MAGA and TRA projects with Esmée Streachailt, who I worked with at The Radical Notion, over at her new project Medusa Rising. Viewed through the lens of patriarchal narcissism, what Donald Trump is up to, and what TRAs have tried to perpetrate against women over the last decade, is basically a shake down, a form of extortion which tries to illegitimately help itself to resources it is not entitled to, at the expense of others, and to do so through the rigorous application of coercion, lying, reality distortion, and mass gaslighting. It is our duty as feminists, and as people committed to the defence of liberal democratic equality, to steadfastly refuse to comply with either side.

My discussion with Esmee is here:

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[1] It’s worth noting here that the definition of ‘being female’ given in Andrea Long Chu’s Females (London: Verso, 2019) is a frankly staggering demonstration of the patriarchal tendency to define ‘Woman’ by negation, viz. “femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation,” or “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another” (p. 11). There’s a lot to say about the wrongness here, but it’s usefully illustrative, and I have an almost grudging respect for the explicitness of Chu’s misogyny. Chu might claim this passage constitutes a “wildly tendentious definition” (p. 12), but this is not remotely true. It is a simple articulation of the core of the patriarchal construction of ‘Woman.’

[2] Jane Clare Jones, ‘Luce Irigaray: The Murder of the Mother,’ New Statesman, 14 May 2014.

[3] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Grafton, 1977), p. 41. 97