What is a Woman? Response to Jacqueline Rose

The week after I published my article, ‘Trans Rights and the Order of Speech’ in Off-Guardian, The New Statesman published two articles by, respectively, the biologist, Richard Dawkins, ‘Why biological sex matters’ and the feminist, Jacqueline Rose, ‘The gender binary is false’. I don’t know Rose personally, but her 1986 book, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, had a considerable influence on me when I was studying for my MA in the History and Theory of Art at University College London back in the 1990s. I was disappointed, therefore, at her defence of ‘trans rights’, which she undertakes on the basis of her belief that declaring oneself to be another sex is an act of liberation from the norms of gender roles. The agreement of the rest of us — who, by implication are too oppressed by patriarchy to free ourselves from our biologically determined sex — to recognise this act of liberation is, she concludes, ‘a matter of generosity and freedom’.

Unfortunately, in arriving at this conclusion, Rose, who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute in London, says nothing about trans as an official ideology which — despite being formed by a marginal U.S. subculture around an identity disorder — is being written into U.K. legislation, enacted in policy, enforced in law and indoctrinated into our children, and the fact that, whether feeling generous or not, we are all being forced into compliance with its orthodoxies, not its freedoms. If Rose were speaking about the personal choices of what is still the fraction of the percentage (0.8% to be precise) of the U.K. population who identify as another sex then she may have a point about the rest of us being generous towards their fantasies; but she isn’t. Trans, as the recent month-long celebration of Pride across the West demonstrated, is part of the official ideology of the new paradigm of biosecurity by which we have been governed since March 2020.

Perhaps more concerning than this evidence of the customary blindness of academics to the world in which they appear not to live with the rest of us, Rose breezily dismisses the growing incidents of the violence of trans, in both its theoretical claims (lesbians who refuse to have sex with male transvestites are ‘transphobic’) and in the practices of its adherents (the now legalised call to ‘Kill the TERFS’), as a stereotype she compares to racism. This is the standard practice of woke ideology when its ideologues want to silence those with whom they disagree, and should be beneath a thinker of Rose’s stature.

And for someone who calls herself a feminist and who’s defense of transgenderism is founded on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that ‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one’, Rose’s dismissal of the misogyny of trans on the grounds that ‘woman’ is a construct is not only symptomatic of her safe, middle-class, academic perspective, but a betrayal of the women under attack by these violent men. Despite Rose’s characterisation of woman as ‘the mark of oppression, prejudice, low pay, the burden of domestic labour, violence in the home and on the street’, it is precisely the women who experience this violence — and who are overwhelmingly working class — that she is betraying.

Nor does Rose have anything to say about the death and rape threats, online abuse, cancellation, misogyny and physical attacks directed at public figures like J. K. Rowling and Kellie-Jay Keen (below) by trans activists and social-media trolls, and which the ideology of trans has authorised and even celebrates. Perhaps, to quote the time-honoured defence of equally violent and misogynist men who attack and abuse women, ‘they were looking for it’?

The only possible explanation for such a lack of concern for the safety of UK women and girls in the street, on the sportsfield, in the classroom, in women’s toilets, in trans-therapy clinics, on protests and in UK law is that Rose appears to have confused feminism’s critique of femininity and the inequality between the sexes — which unlike our biological sex is a construct of gender norms — with transgenderism’s denial of sexual difference and with it of women themselves. But that’s the sort of concession one would make to a first-year student straight out of the UK’s PSHE and RSE school curricula, not an internationally known academic. A far more likely and mundane explanation is that Rose has simply aligned herself with the class of the students she teaches at Birkbeck, whose students are charged £19,200 per year in tuition fees to be indoctrinated into the principles and practices of woke; the class of her colleagues and publishers, all of whom have subscribed to its orthodoxies as a condition of occupying their positions; and the class of the ideologues of trans in academia, the media and Parliament. In the UK, trans is overwhelmingly an ideology of the middle classes.

But in addition to this demonstration — as if we needed it after two years of lockdown! — that allegiance to class one’s continues to trump feminist or any other kind of solidarity in the UK, Rose’s article is also littered with factual inaccuracies. Contrary to Rose’s assertion that ‘people over 65, especially women, are almost as gender-fluid as the young’, transgenderism, as I showed in Part Two of my article, is overwhelmingly an identity disorder of the young, and a product of their indoctrination into this ideology by our education and cultural industries. But it beggars belief that Rose, a female academic of international standing, when defining what the word ‘female’ means, cites a book by a transvestite man who calls himself Andrea Long Chu, and who in Females: A Concern (2019) wrote: ‘Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is’.

On the authority of this man — who also claims that the male anus is ‘a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed’ — Rose claims that the biological category of female — ‘as we understand it today’ — was developed in the 19th Century to describe black slaves. I’m not sure how that caveat is meant to qualify this absurd and fantastical assertion, but, historically, the word ‘female’, which has a different etymology to ‘male’, originated in the 14th Century and derives from 12th-century French femelle and Latin femella, the diminutive of femina, which means ‘she who suckles’. The contemporary spelling of ‘female’ was changed to correspond with ‘male’ in the late 14th Century; but rather than being a mere adjunct to the universal man, its Latin origin derives from the unique ability of a woman to breastfeed her child — to which transvestite men have recently extended their attempts to appropriate female biology through the new NHS orthodoxy of ‘chestfeeding’.

As for the word ‘woman’ — which Rose claims is an oppressive construct of patriarchy from which trans offers a means of liberation for men struggling to free themselves from what she calls ‘the straightjacket of masculinity’ — Old English used wer (cognate with Latin vir: adult human male) and wif (woman and also, but not especially, wife) to distinguish the sexes, before wer began to disappear in the late 13th Century and was replaced by man. ‘Woman’ comes from Old English wimman, a corruption of wifman, which is a compound of wif (a neuter noun) and man (a masculine noun denoting a male or female human) to form a word for an adult human female exclusively. This isn’t, however, a merely etymological correction of Chu’s fabricated history. The meaning of words is important because, as history repeatedly demonstrates — most forcefully in the erasure of races, religions and cultures — when you erase the meaning of a word you erase what it denotes.

It is significant that Chu, who this year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism — a further demonstration of the ideological promotion of trans — openly admits that he was drawn to become a transvestite through his addiction to pornography, which one might guess is at the origin of his violent and deeply misogynist opinions and statements about women, as well as his own masochistic identification with what he sees as woman’s essential victimhood. Of course, there’s nothing new about men acting out their fantasies of domination and submission in pornography; but what is significant is that this male violence and the object it wants to erase — the ‘fucked’ female of rape fantasies — is a product of one of the technologies of biopower, digital pornography, to which the libido of a generation of children and adults is being addicted and, through that addiction, indoctrinated into its values. If parents want to know the values the ideologues of trans are teaching their children in UK schools, look at the genre of pornography called ‘sissy porn’.

The fact that a woman, a feminist and an intellectual is collaborating and lending the considerable authority of her academic voice to such erasure is, unfortunately — and to speak in the language of psychoanalysis Rose herself has made a career of employing — a symptom of the times in which we live. And yet again, she appears to be almost entirely unaware of the past three-and-a-half years as anything other than a viral pandemic that, according to the latest estimates, killed nearly 7 million people, as if the sudden hegemony of trans has nothing to do with the dismantling of our rights, freedoms and democracy since March 2020, and their replacement with the regulations, programmes and technologies of global biosecurity.

But I don’t really believe that either. Like other UK intellectuals who have remained masked, injected, silent and obedient during the vast changes that have being imposed on our society over the last few years outside of any democratic process and on the basis of lie after exposed lie, Rose is not ‘confused’ — as I too generously suggested before. Like every other academic lining up at the altar of lockdown, mandatory gene therapy, environmental catastrophe, digital identity and trans ideology, Jacqueline Rose — to use the existential language of her heroine — is demonstrating the mauvaise foi of the intellectual who, as intellectuals have done throughout history, side with authority during periods of authoritarian rule and ideological hegemony.

As I wrote back in the dark days of October 2021 — when we were asked to be equally ‘generous’ in offering up our bodies and children to experimental gene therapies as a condition of the return of our freedoms — history demonstrates that, when Hitler’s in the Reichstag, every coward wears a swastika.

Simon Elmer is the author of The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State; Virtue and Terror: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 1; and The New Normal: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 2.