Left-wing feminist describes being called a 'nazi' for her views on Trans identity

[Music] in an interview for the guardian this week prominent gender theorist judith butler was quoted as saying that gender critical feminism is quote one of the most dominant strains of fascism of our time in this she is following a new trend originating from social media of course presuming that anyone who disagrees with you is a nazi and this is particularly common now among those who support the highly contested notion of gender identity ideology stonewall for instance now routinely smears anyone who raises concerns about this new way of thinking as hateful or transphobic debate and discussion it seems amounts to a kind of violence which is a shame for any of us who still care about basic liberal values so here to discuss judith butler's comments is dr jane claire jones a feminist philosopher feminist writer feminist activist as she points out on her website you may notice a theme dr jones thank you very much for joining me today uh good evening i wanted to ask you first about uh judy butler's comments because i know they were published in the guardian and then they were removed from the guardian and i think a lot of people will be confused about precisely what it was she was criticizing can you just in a brief way outline uh what is meant by gender identity ideology and what judith butler's view about that is uh well judith butler's view about this is quite complicated because there's what judith butler has written in her books which according to what she's written in her book she really shouldn't be supporting gender identity ideology because she's not supposed to believe in essential identities but actually it turns out that uh she's very very happy to go along with this political project and gender identity ideology has two aspects two main aspects to it one is the belief that people have an innate gender identity and the other is the belief that sex is not really a real phenomenon and so the ideological movement that is pushing this is basically wanting for us to reorganize public space or services and the law around the idea that whether people are man or women is to do with their gender identity and not to do with sex so it's a kind of gender identity trump sex idea is the basic idea and i've seen you talking about this notion that a lot of people will accuse those particularly uh feminists who are what we call gender critical people in other words believe that gender is a social construct as in this idea that boys innately wear blue girls wear pink and they enjoy uh princesses and that kind of that kind of thing yeah and and they were but a lot of people say that for some reason you're siding with conservatives on this and what do you make of that accusation um what i would say is that there's actually three so it's it's it's getting confused because there are three separate positions okay and the gender identity activists want to collapse it into two positions so they want to say there are people who agree with us and everyone who disagrees with us is conservative and what there's actually three what are they the three positions of what so the conservatives generally believe that sex is real and then they believe that sex determines gender or gender identity so boys like blue and trains and trucks and fighting and girls like pink and princesses and sparkles and that's biologically german the conservatives would say and that's yes and then they tend to argue that all of the power structures and the allocation of social roles and the allocation of labor and everything that follows from that kind of follows naturally yeah from these biological bases so that's more or less the conservative position right the feminist position is that humans are sexed and that is a biological reality and that sex is a reproductive function so female people get pregnant and male people insomnia female people and then there are some aspects of our social uh labor like the fact that you know women breastfeed infants that might have something to do with our biology but then pretty much everything else you know what kind of personalities you're allowed to you know what kind of characteristics you're allowed to express how you're supposed to dress whether you're allowed to be assertive or kind or gentle or emotional or any of these things that that should not be determined by sex and that actually if you look at humans it's fairly obvious that most human beings have a mixture of these traits and then we tend to try and force male humans into one of these boxes and female humans into another of these boxes and we think that's not good okay that's the feminist position the gender identity position is that whether you're a man or a woman is determined by this innate thing called gender identity and your sex is irrelevant so in a certain sense both conservatives and gender identity activists believe that gender is innate and conservatives and feminists agree that sex exists but we do but there are three different positions because we are because we're rejecting the idea that sexism gender critical feminism consists of two views one sex wheel two gender is mostly socially constructed yes right but because we won't accept that gender identity should trump sex and we won't accept that sex is like a made-up you know was invented by colonialism or whatever they say they are trying to say that we're allied yes i mean basically it's like it's like everyone that thinks the sky is blue is an art everyone that thinks sex exists has the same political belief which is crazy a typical kind of guilt by association thing you know it's like when some uh reactionary bigot defends free speech that doesn't make free speech wrong as a principle it it just because that person has some other horrendous views and this is this is sounds like a similar kind of thing that's going on here but the word is so extreme i mean for someone in the public eye like judith butler to to call people i mean isn't that that is raising the temperature in quite an irresponsible way isn't it i mean that temperature has been raised by gender identity activists or trans activists progressively over the last five or six years so the accusation itself is not uncommon right i mean i'm frequently i'm i'm a left-wing radical feminist but i'm frequently accused of being a nazi because i believe humans are sexed um that was hitler's big thing wasn't it clearly well that i mean that's that's that's i mean but it is like the level of like you know hitler was a vegetarian so therefore vegetarians are nazis i mean we're at that kind of level of tender you know tenuousness at this stage um but for the thing about judith butler's role i mean and this has happened this is not the first time over the course of the last like two or three years judith butler basically gets dispatched to the british media to tell off gender critical feminists and this has happened to the new statesman a couple of times over the last year a couple of years and and it is to do with the fact that gender critical feminism is being is mounting a relatively successful defense against the imposition of gender identity ideology on british and not on um the institutions of british feminism are completely captured but there's a very successful kind of grassroots resistance to the imposition of gender identity ideology which is largely an american thing so basically judith butler gets dispatched to kind of tell us that we are bad and evil and wrong and what was interesting is that in this particular instance with the with the guardian article they you know they there was a big mess because the comments about us being fascists were attached to this issue about what happened at the wii spa yes and what happened at the wii spa it had transpired was that someone with multiple you know background convictions for sexual offenses had gone and exposed themselves to a to a woman and a young a young girl yes and it had turned out that that person actually is a serial sexual predator so the section of the interview because it was on dodgy ground legally in terms of what she said about that particular incident but that well yeah i mean it didn't it didn't exactly say that we were fascists what it said was is that people who oppose gender identity ideology are fascists or gender critical feminists are she called us terps actually are allied with this and therefore so she's actually we're fascists he said they're kind of making alliances with fascists right i see and against being against gender identity is like one of the big you know major threads of fascism and so then it was it was more kind of like your fascist adjacent fascist allied and you're not going but effectively the reason why i think the guardian messed up right the guardian should have left it in there yeah i think what happened is that it was edited and produced by us the u.s guardian and there is some gender identity ideology is an american phenomenon which is being um exported around the world which is ironic because they keep talking about you know how they're against colonialism except they're taking this american ideology and imposing it on various countries around the world um so it was basically the u.s guardian had produced this piece and they hadn't bothered to check it properly so when it became clear that the wii spa they had not put in a clarification about the wii spa instant what they should have done is add a note saying it has the the individual at the center of the whisper uh incident has now been arrested and also has form for indecent exposure and then they should have let judith butler stand there in public calling feminist women fascists adjacent for objecting to a serial sexual predator exposing himself right i mean i think letting her speak is the best way in these situations right i think cutting it out is a mistake but what do you make of the continual accusation that uh feminists like yourself what they call turfs trans-exclusionary radical feminists want to erase trans people's existence don't believe in equal rights for trans people this is the accusation i'm hearing an awful lot what would you how would you respond to that right i mean firstly we do not want to erase trans people's existence trans people exist the issue is what is the legal status of trans people and specifically what is the legal status of trans women vis-a-vis women because what is under the bracket of trans rights i mean and it's being framed in terms of equality but the claim that's actually being made is that male people people who were born male and then transition to being women or socially performing a role or wanting to be recognized as women should have exactly the same rights as female people and that female people are not allowed any spaces or political organizing or uh services that are dedicated entirely for female people so what is it's not just a request for equal rights it's a request for the rights of female people and that is a that's a new thing in in civil rights history most rights movements have asked to be recognized as themselves not to be recognized as another group of people who already exist it does it does sound to me that with such a difficult and sensitive and tendacious um topic it does require a lot of conversation and it does require people to get down together not call each other fascists and have a conversation uh about how best to move forward with with this obviously that isn't going away what just one final question dr jones do you think in the current climate with the with the temperature raised to the extent that it has been do you think those kind of discussions will ever happen i mean it is our hope and we have said since the beginning that we want to sit down and we're like there is a rights conflict we need to sit down and we need to work out how to negotiate this so that we can come to some kind of accommodation which tries to meet everyone's needs but yeah there are some trans people who are willing to do that but gender identity ideology is very insistent that gender identity must trump sex so there's no space within that ideology for women to say no actually under these set of circumstances we need this to be organized according to sex so we need female people to have a right to ask for a female counselor in the rape crisis center or we need female people to ask to have a cervical a healthcare practitioner doing a cervical smear to be female and that's not an unreasonable thing that it can't be accommodated inside the ideology because the ideology is entirely about gender identity must trump sex and if you don't agree you're a white supremacist or a nazi or some kind of bigot so there's no space from the goat the structure of the ideology doesn't allow there to be a space to recognize that women have any legitimate concerns or that any of our claims are reasonable and you know negotiation can only start when both sides will recognize something in the other's position and you could say i can see i ca i understand what is motivating trans people right i understand you want to be validated that you feel discriminated against that you feel unrecognized that you need certain services i see that the problem is is that some of the things you're demanding are in conflict with what but unless you recognize that we also have some legitimate needs and legitimate concerns we can't move forward because there's nowhere to negotiate from and that's kind of where we start well thank you for outlining that problem uh so eloquently for us dr jones and thank you for joining us today well

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Keywords: GB news, gbnews, Colin Brazier, Gloria De Piero, Michelle Dewberry, Andrew Doyle, Inaya Folarin Iman, Kirsty Gallacher, Liam Halligan, Tom Harwood, Rebecca Hutson, Darren McCaffrey, Simon McCoy, Nana Akua, Mercy Muroki, Andrew Neil, Neil Oliver, Alastair Stewart, Dan Wootton, Rosie Wright, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Alex Phillips, news, breaking news, Mark Dolan

Id: EGEe75BPrV8

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021