Purity Politics Won't Help Women

Disgust Is Not a Moral Argument

(Audio version here)

For the last few days, I have been arguing again that men should be allowed to wear dresses or otherwise present themselves in ways that are culturally coded as ‘feminine.’ Specifically, I have been disagreeing with arguments for men not being allowed to do this that use feelings of disgust as moral justification. My argument has been that, while disgust is a useful intuition that evolutionary psychologists have plausibly argued evolved to protect us from doing things like eating spoiled meat and defecating where we sleep, we still need to interrogate the feeling using reason and ethical principles.

Feelings of disgust, alone, are not a sufficient moral basis for banning anything and people typically see this when it is applied to something that large numbers of people feel disgusted by, but which they themselves do not think is morally wrong. Almost nobody thinks all of the below are morally wrong, but they have all been opposed as morally wrong using disgust intuitions:

• Men presenting themselves in ways culturally coded as feminine

• Women presenting themselves in ways historically coded as masculine

• Adults having consensual sexual relationships with other adults of the same sex

• People, but particularly women, having sex outside marriage

• People eating meat or certain kinds of meat

• People having interracial relationships and children

• Menstruating women being out in public rather than secluding themselves in huts

• People, but particularly women, dancing in sexy ways - e.g., twerking - or at all

• Women showing their faces, hair, arms, legs, the outlines of their bodies in public

From my liberal perspective - which also constitutes a core philosophical underpinning for liberal democracies, is most explicitly enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence and constitution and is still broadly (if not always consistently) shared by the majority of people who live in them - the only justification for constraining any individual is when their actions cause material harm to others. This was most clearly expressed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Contrary to the accusations of some of my critics, I have no special commitment to the interests of this particular subset of individuals. For many whose activism is focused on the interests of a group, it seems obvious that anybody who objects to the ways they promote those interests must be committed to the interests of the opposing groups. To woke “anti-racists” I must be a white supremacist while to British ethnonationalists, I am anti-white. When I criticise a subset of gender critical feminists who are behaving in illiberal ways, I am frequently accused of being either a trans activist or a men’s rights activist (or bizarrely, both). To trans activists, I am definitely a “TERF” and to MRA’s, I am quite clearly a feminist.

This is a constant problem for liberals whose focus is not centred on the interests of any particular group but on universal principles and individual autonomy. Liberals, whose activism takes the form of opposition to authoritarianism, go where the authoritarianism is. Consequently, we find ourselves embroiled in all kinds of debates we would not necessarily have enough personal interest in to concern ourselves with if people engaging with it were not behaving in harmful ways and trying to curtail the freedoms of others. This is how so many of us ended up involved in opposing authoritarian trans activism and responding to the call to #LetWomenSpeak. We are now in a situation where, while continuing to support the principled gender critical feminists doing important work to protect women’s spaces and sports and children’s bodies, we have become alarmed by the authoritarianism of a vocal subset of people calling themselves ‘gender critical.’

I am currently dismayed by the increasing number of people who seem willing to curtail the freedoms of others based on their own feelings of disgust. The conversation began with this exchange.

My request for an ethical justification of visceral anger/hatred/bullying sparked a lot of responses, many of which were utterly fallacious. Some people accused me of shaming people for feeling disgust at all. This, of course, is not the issue. People’s feelings are their own affair. We only even know what they are if they express them and the context is expressing them at a person who identifies as trans or appears to be male but is wearing a dress. Others accused me of trying to gaslight women out of heeding self-protective instincts. This is false too. At least half of the people justifying their disgust to me were men and the two people questioning it as a moral justification were women. Also, I was clear that I believe disgust to be a useful emotion but also that it needs an ethical rationale if it is to be taken seriously as an ethical issue. Some people argued that someone who appears to be male wearing clothing culturally-coded as female is necessarily an autogynephile and that anyone who has to endure such an individual crossing their eyeline has been forced to participate in a sexual fetish and thus sexually assaulted. This is utterly ridiculous

There were also arguments that were less overwrought and emotion-based that I still do not believe work. Some people pointed out that at least some men who ‘dress as women’ are autogynephiles and that people with paraphilias are statistically more likely to commit sexual offences than average. This might provide some reason for being wary of such an individual, but it is still not ethical to abuse somebody for being statistically somewhat more likely to do something. It should also be clear that bullying someone into changing their clothes cannot possibly change what is going on in their minds and that making a sex offender wear trousers is not going to stop him from being a sex offender. If anything, people whose concern is that cross-dressing men are sex-offenders should be the last people to wish to make them hide that warning sign.

Some people used ‘slippery slope’ or ‘pyramid’ arguments in which they argued that men wearing ‘women’s clothes’ was a lower grade manifestation of the same problem of men entering women’s spaces and that by being complacent about the former, we make it hard to argue against the latter. We need to shame it out of existence or even legislate against it as part of the drive to protect women’s sex-based rights. As with all slippery slope arguments, this one depends on a premise about continuity that is far from accepted by all defenders of women’s sex-based rights - that if we let people transgress gender roles and stereotypes in one way that seems harmless, they will do so in ways that are harmful. This is a gender conservative argument and not a gender critical one. (More on this below). Liberals would argue that keeping a clear line on ‘harm’ is the best way to avoid this fallacy. We do not, for example, justify bullying people for expressing a belief in a god for fear that this will normalise the harmful imposition of religious beliefs on others. We are generally quite clear on the difference between accepting that someone may go to church and forcing everyone to go to church, and there is no reason to think we cannot similarly hold this line with other forms of belief or expression.

Others argued that the overlap between men who dress as women and men who wish to be legally and socially recognised as women is very large, and this is likely true. Therefore, by dressing as women, the argument goes, they are themselves making an antagonistic political statement that insults and mocks women and should not expect that women and men who care about women will not insult and mock them back. If a white person appeared in the street sporting ‘blackface’ and insulting and mocking black people, would I think it morally wrong if a black person told them they were disgusting racists and to fuck off? Would it not even be reasonable to arrest someone who did this for a hate crime? Well, no. Just because you yourself feel that women are being insulted and mocked by someone who is antagonistic to them if a man wears a dress, this does not mean that insult and mockery was the intention or that the individual does feel negatively about women or that women will invariably feel insulted or mocked. Nor do your own strong political views on a matter mean that anybody who acts in ways contrary to them is themselves making a political statement. Intention really does matter, not just impact and you do have some choice about how you feel impacted. You could make a parallel between men attempting a feminine appearance and the phenomenon known as ‘blackfishing’, but I am inclined to believe it is generally wrong to accuse people who engage in the latter of racism too, and that they should also not be subjected to abuse. If you can be absolutely certain that somebody is making a political statement because they have clearly said that is what they are doing, it would be appropriate to respond to their political statement with your own political statement. They should still not be arrested for a hate crime.

These last three arguments can be made in good faith and do have a grain of truth in them (as do many of the ‘woke’ arguments). However, they then massively overreach and require fallacious reasoning and authoritarianism to support themselves and consequently fail to offer a convincing justification for expressions of visceral anger, hatred or bullying.

Of most concern to me is how quickly we have come to a point where so many people want to be able to justify such attitudes and behaviour. Five years ago, the liberal attitude of “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms” defined the gender critical movement and opposition to the authoritarian overreach of the trans activist movement more broadly,

Today, liberals frequently find themselves under fire from people, including prominent figures, calling themselves ‘gender critical’ but advocating for sex-specific dress codes, diagnosing all men who contravene them as dangerous perverts and justifying expressions of visceral anger, hatred and bullying against them. Most worryingly of all is the sheer volume of people who seemingly regard this totalitarian attitude as both simple common sense and a longstanding consensus among those who have objected to authoritarian trans activism and/or the concept of gender identity. This is simply not the case. A few years ago, the children’s author, Rachel Rooney, received overwhelming support from the gender critical movement after her cancellation for gender critical views and the publication of her book My Body is Me. Today, she might well risk cancellation by people calling themselves ‘gender critical’ because that book features pictures of boys wearing a ballet skirt and ball-gown.

Of course, I understand the anger and the normalisation of extreme, absolutist stances on a psychological level. Much of this will be a reaction to the visceral anger/hatred/bullying that has been expressed by authoritarian trans activists along with heavy social and even legal penalties for refusing to affirm their worldview. There have been visits from the police to ‘check people’s thinking’, no-platforming, disciplinary action in workplaces, social cancellation, physical intimidation and threats of violence. Feeling the utmost disgust for such hateful authoritarianism and resisting it in the strongest possible terms is fully justified! But this can be done by opposing the hatefulness and authoritarianism. How did we come to a place where the original gender critical feminist aim to defend the reality of biological sex and the importance of this for protecting the rights of women has been so subverted as to be hateful and authoritarian and advocate for the Taliban-style Morality Policing of sex-specific dress codes?

(I have now had to log myself out of my X account again because the degree of rage felt at my objections to this has now devolved into alleged feminists making sickening claims about my motivations that malign my dead father while sneaking in jibes about my weight and my account has become unusable under the weight of it)

Anyway…….

It cannot be emphasised strongly enough: Advocating for sex-specific dress codes is contrary to the gender critical feminist position. Nor have feminists ever argued that disgust is a good basis for moral reasoning. Because so many common moralistic disgust intuitions have constrained women in particular, feminists have typically focused very critically on them. Further, gender critical feminists originally come from the left-wing Radical tradition and have typically also opposed disgust-based arguments that justify racism and homophobia. The radical gender critical feminist,

Jane Clare Jones

has been consistently excellent on this issue on social media and also produced this long-form analysis which describes “robust correlations between increased disgust sensitivity and political and social conservatism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, hostile sexism, and right-wing authoritarianism.” Jones’ voice on this issue is a particularly valuable one. As a gender critical feminist, she is strongly opposed to the legal and social acceptance of the concept of gender identity. It removes the category of ‘woman’ from its biological moorings rooted in reproductive function, the acceptance of which radical feminists hold to be central to understanding the historical and continued oppression of women via the formation of gender roles and stereotypes that constrain them. Jones also argues that feminism is, on principle, anti-authoritarian. (For this, she has now been falsely and bizarrely accused of sexual predation, rape apologism and being sexually attracted to autogynephiles.) While gender critical feminists of the radical tradition are typically critical of liberal feminists, believing our focus on individual autonomy as a source of empowerment for women to neglect the sex-class analysis feminist organisation relies upon, we are aligned on this anti-authoritarian principle.

Gender critical feminists have always argued very strongly against sex-specific dress codes. If we understand ‘gender’ to be the socially constructed rules, expectations, roles and stereotypes tied to biological sex and used to constrain women, sex-specific clothing is unambiguously a manifestation of ‘gender’ and gender critical feminists are consequently critical of it. They hold that there is no “right way” to be a man or a woman and that men who are drawn to presentations culturally-coded as feminine and women drawn to those culturally-coded as masculine for any reason should be encouraged to present themselves in that way without believing this means they have a gender identity contrary to their biological sex. That belief relies on gender stereotypes and therefore, it is not gender critical. It is gender conservative.

Why then is it currently so prominent in the gender critical movement? This is, I would argue (and gender critical feminists have long been arguing), because it has been hijacked by authoritarian gender conservatives (of the old-fashioned, right-wing kind). Gender conservatives are not simply conservatives who are critical of the concept of gender identity. They are people who want to conserve gender roles and stereotypes. This can, of course, be argued for in a non-authoritarian way, by holding a stance that much of what is called ‘gender’ is, in fact, hard-wired cognitive, psychological and behavioural sex differences (so, not clothing) that exist on average and that people are happier and society functions better when people conform to them. Provided that they simply try to persuade people of this and accept that some people will not be persuaded they’d be happier conforming to any gender roles and must have the right not to without being prosecuted, cancelled, threatened or harassed, they are not authoritarian.

Those who wish to enact sex-specific dress codes for men, at least, and penalise those who do not conform with legal consequences or by designating them all fetishistic sex-offenders and abusing them in public are undeniably authoritarian. They are not gender critical. They believe that gender is essential and one’s sex dictates the right way to perform masculinity or femininity. A failure to comply indicates degeneracy and deviance and all right-thinking people must be disgusted by it. Consequently, they declare a moral duty to police this out of visibility. They raise the spectre of danger and invoke the safety of women to do this. This enables them to accuse anybody who does not want sex-specific dress codes of not caring about women, including women. This cannot protect women. Calling someone an autogynephile and abusing him will not stop him from being one if he is and fantasies held in somebody’s head do not harm anyone. Even if this is related to higher levels of sexual offending, making a sex offender wear trousers will not stop him from being a sex offender. What we do have strong evidence of is that trans women have similar levels of sexual offending to men who identify as men and that, in the prison system, it is significantly higher. This gives solid grounds to protect women’s spaces, not to control men’s clothing.

People who wish to ban men from wearing dresses or other clothing coded as feminine are not engaging in any kind of productive activism that can protect women. Rather, they are weaponising their feelings of disgust to advocate for a kind of social hygiene that seeks to eradicate any signs of what they see as degeneracy and deviance. This is a mentality that should alarm us. Even if you believe that everyone who appears to be male and wears a dress must therefore believe in gender identity and identify as a woman - and even if your ultimate goal is that nobody should believe in gender identity or identify with a sex they are not - please think in terms of eradicating bad ideas with evidence and argument. So much of the current discourse speaks about people as though they are social contaminants that must be purified for the health of society. This is a very dangerous mindset. We have already seen the emergence of this kind of rhetoric in the gender critical movement in relation to immigrants, race and gay men.

There will be some who will be motivated now to accuse me of making trite and easily refutable comparisons between objections to the concept of gender identity (framed as ‘transphobia’) and racism and homophobia or suggesting that such objections are somehow fascist. Authoritarian trans activists have made such claims in order to shut down dissent and dismiss gender critical activists as far-right bigots. That is nonsense and not my argument. The reality is that one can very easily identify harm being done by trans activists when women’s sex-based rights are denied and gender distressed children are affirmed and medicalised. We can also point to clear denials of freedom of belief and speech when people are required to pretend to believe in gender identity, use language in ways that affirm it and when gender critical feminists and others are no-platformed, threatened and abused. There is a very strong case to be made for protecting women’s spaces and sports, closing down ideologically-captured gender clinics and ensuring that freedom of speech is protected, and it is already well on the way to being won.

When people diverge from these vitally important goals and begin referencing their feelings of disgust and dehumanising trans-identified people as ‘troons’ and expressing visceral hatred and hurling abuse at individuals due to their clothing or the beliefs, politics or sexual fantasies they imagine them to have, they not only behave in abhorrent ways to fellow human beings, they also undermine the strong ethical basis of the gender critical movement and the fight to protect women’s spaces and children’s bodies. Yes, disgust can be a very useful emotion and one should heed such intuitions. But ethical analysis cannot stop at this point. There is a need to make a reasoned ethical argument using principles and with reference to harm and denials of freedom. If the basis for your moral argument is disgust and concepts of purity and societal hygiene, you have no grounds for claiming your own stance to be more credible than arguments using the same disgust basis to justify making women cover their faces, outlawing homosexuality and interracial marriage or sequestering menstruating women in solitary huts.

If you are now thinking “But my disgust is justified and these other examples are not,” good. Please follow that line of thinking. That is what I am asking you to do. Justify your ethical stance using reasoned moral arguments. Then we can consider them and see whether there really is any good reason that men should not be allowed to wear dresses. We cannot reasonably decide this based on who can squeal “ICK!” the loudest. I do not believe most of the people claiming that this is a good way to settle any moral issue - and that it is a specifically female way - intend to speak into misogynistic tropes that assign reason to men and emotions to women, but that is the effect and it is certainly not feminist.

We must hold fast to liberal principles: let people believe, speak, present as they see fit, provided this does no material harm to others nor denies them the same freedoms. We should reject authoritarian gender identity ideology and authoritarian gender conservatism for the same reason: they promote regressive gender stereotypes in ways that are authoritarian. This cannot possibly help women. The fight for women’s sex-based rights, for children’s safeguarding, and for individual autonomy is too important to be derailed by the same hateful, authoritarian logic we rightly oppose elsewhere. We do not need to purify the public square of ‘degeneracy’; we need to defend it against real, demonstrable harms and denials of freedom and that can only be done with evidence, reason, and ethical consistency. Feminists, of all people, should remember that moral disgust, left unexamined, has too often been used to constrain women in the name of purity.

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