A nightmarish farce (and four other stories)
Five reads about gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
This week’s newsletter comes to you from an island in the North Sea that has place names straight out of a fantasy novel. There are no cars here on Spiekeroog, where rosehip bushes line the streets and sand dunes undulate under grass and shrub as you head to the shore. Anyway, that’s enough of this paradise isle (but a shout-out to my dear friend — and a subscriber to this newsletter! — who I am visiting).
And now to the reads….
1) Gender is a nightmarish farce
In last week’s email, I linked to a piece in the New Left Review about the problems with contemporary feminist thinking. Not long after I hit send I saw that
had written a response. I recommend reading both. Here’s a snippet from the latter:Perhaps more centrally, though I agree with Doherty that much of today’s feminist thinking is uninspired, I do not accept her diagnosis of what ails it. She writes that ‘a focus on the negative experiences of womanhood – however broadly and ecumenically defined – will yield a negative feminism: participation credentialled on the basis of suffering’. But isn’t an articulation of collective suffering the basis for any successful mass movement? There is a reason that we have abandoned some of the more maudlin products of the 70s, namely the mushy hippies claiming that our wombs put us in touch with the earth, and retained the more pessimistic Dworkin. What is femininity, at its core, but institutionalized disadvantage? And what is feminism, at its core, but the attempt to expose gender as a nightmarish farce?
2) “We, women chess players”
Professional chess is having its #MeToo moment. Earlier this month, 14 French women chess players published an open letter denouncing harassment and misogyny. They wrote:
We, women chess players, coaches, arbiters, and managers, have experienced sexist or sexual violence perpetrated by chess players, coaches, arbiters, or managers.
We are convinced that this harassment and these assaults are still one of the main reasons why women and young girls, especially in their teens, stop playing chess.
Last week, the now-retired Women’s International Master Sabrina L Chevannes told Times Radio that this was precisely the reason she is retired at 37:
"It's the reason I stopped playing chess. It's completely prevalent, it's something that has been sat on and suppressed on for many years. I guess they don't want to ruin the image that chess is a gentleman's game."
If you want more on what women chess players have to put up with, in March the Wall Street Journal ran an expose about years of assault allegations against Grand Master Alejandro Ramirez.
3) The All-China Women’s Federation
University of Sydney lecturer Junyi Cai has written about Women’s Federations (WF) within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These, Cai says, play a dual role of “representing the interests of women and assisting with the implementation of the party-state’s policies relating to women”, and have been critical to passing legislation such as an anti-domestic violence law. But given the CCP’s focus on family values and traditional gender roles, Cai writes, the WFs are not really a tool for achieving gender equality. As per the piece:
The [All-China Women’s Federation]’s recent initiatives, such as the 2021 Family Happiness and Well-being Project, heavily emphasise the domestic role of women in relation to building a civilised family and strong family virtues. This only serves to reinforce rigid gender roles within a patriarchal family structure.
The WF has been a contradictory agent. It attempts to carry out feminist practice within the state by pushing for women’s representation in the policymaking process, while simultaneously representing the party-state’s discursive closure in defining matters relating to women. On the one hand, the WF strategically frames women’s issues to appeal to the support of the party-state. On the other hand, a feminist signification of women’s issues has not been achieved in the WF’s discursive construction. Such discursive failure reveals the limited capacity of the WF as a feminist force within the state.
4) Gender violence and “anti-genderism” in Bulgaria
Just this month, protests against state inaction on domestic violence took place across 40 cities in Bulgaria. In this in-depth piece, Madlen Nikolova describes widespread misogynist violence enabled by a victim-blaming culture. Nikolova also explains how a distrust of “gender ideology” has been weaponised by political parties trying to shore up their positions, both on the left and on the right. She writes:
Despite the name, “gender” ideology (the English word is used in transliteration) does not refer to the dominant assumptions about gender. Rather, it is a conspiracy theory, widespread across Europe, which alleges that liberal forces are working to subvert traditional gender roles in order to convert children to homosexuality. In 2021, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court ruled that the notion that gender is a set of socially constructed gender norms itself contradicts the Bulgarian constitution, citing a number of dubious references to Christianity and so-called traditional values.
5) The UK clamps down on gender-neutral toilets
On Monday this week (a.k.a tomorrow), the British government is publishing draft rules against gender-neutral toilets. The guidelines will stipulate that, for new non-residential and public buildings, “separate single-sex toilet facilities would need to be provided for men and women ‘and/or’ a self-contained private toilet installed.” According to the government’s press release:
The change comes amid dignity and privacy concerns from women and elderly people who feel they are being unfairly disadvantaged as publicly accessible toilets are increasingly being converted into gender neutral facilities. Concerns over the rise of neutral gender facilities has meant that public have been forced to share cubicle and hand-washing facilities, leading to increasing waiting in shared queues, decreased choice and a limitation on privacy and dignity for all.
New regulations and guidance will mean women, who may need to use facilities more often because of pregnancy or sanitary needs, will now be guaranteed appropriate facilities either through a separate single-sex space or through a self-contained, private toilet.
The action taken today builds upon the Government’s commitment and wider approach to the protection of single sex spaces.
In an op-ed for the Telegraph, anti-woke Tory rising star Kemi Badenoch, who is both Business and Trade Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities, clarified that unisex toilets would still be allowed — and insisted that the Conservative government is not “fighting culture wars”. A reminder here that UK PM Rishi Sunak is reportedly planning to use wedge issues like transgender rights and the gender vs. sex wars as part of his election strategy.
Thank you for reading. See you next week.