The Matter Of “Material Girls”, Part 1
The Matter Of “Material Girls”
Conspiracy Theory In Anti-Trans Philosophy
Intro
Welcome to a series of articles examining “Material Girls” by Kathleen Stock, a book written from the heart of the modern anti-trans movement.¹
“Material Girls” puts forward that movement’s key arguments, and thereby helps to showcase why it repeatedly gets a bad name (whether that be “trans-exclusionary radical feminism”, “gender critical”, or “sex realism”)².
The Tenor Of The Book
Stock is here operating in the philosophical tradition of Alfred Rosenberg: the book consists of an overwrought mish mash of half-baked justifications for fearing an invented enemy called “gender identity theory” — which is simply a way of referring to (and abhorring) the existence of trans people at one level of indirection.
(This is somewhat of a detour from her academic specialization as a philosopher of fiction).
A constellation of Horrors clearly set Against Nature are invoked as enabling the ascendance and ubiquity of this phantasm. You name it, you’ve got it: the dadaist inclinations of postmodernist thought to annihilate meaning, the baleful malevolence of “LGBT activists”, the octopus-sinister academic writhings of queer theory, the wrong kind of feminism, the capitulation of the medical and legal establishments.
This tedious litany of degeneracy and conspiracy ought to set alarm bells ringing for anyone even mildly sceptical of the idea that the world is shaped by the sinister machinations of a tiny and highly marginalized minority group (one that is, as is traditional, mysteriously powerful and dangerous while simultaneously also being pathetic and absurd).
Those less sceptical have entered a pipeline into far-right radicalization.
The Structure Of The Series
The superficial plausibility — for anyone unfamiliar with the field of philosophy — of an academic philosopher presenting these notions invites careful dismantling. So here we are.
Reading the book is a glum experience for anyone not predisposed to its rancorous and discriminative worldview; it is an exemplar of fractal wrongness, enveloped throughout in a toxic cloud of malice, muddle, and misinterpretation.
These articles are intended to simply expose flaws in the actual core claims of the book — the ones it must stand or fall on — disentangling them from the rambling thicket of sidetracks that hedge them. (Despite their length, they still only object to a fraction of what is objectionable within the book; Brandolini’s Law applies).
Each article except the last centers on a single chapter, and has these sections:
- The Central Claim And How It Collapses — a concise statement of what the central claim of the chapter is and a brisk-as-possible discussion of how that claim fails
- The Bigger Picture — a more discursive examination of key ideas supporting or supported by the central claim
- Credo — notes on how the chapter ties into a broader pattern of transphobic beliefs and/or actions
Footnotes are extensively used so that repeated digressions into specifics don’t distract too much from the overall flow.
All quotes all come from “Material Girls”, except where noted otherwise; they are given with a page number from the 2021 UK Fleet hardback edition.
Links To The Articles
The articles can be read in any order, but my recommendation would be to tackle them in this sequence:
Fabricated Identity discusses the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of “gender identity” in the book, and explores the use of virulent transphobic rhetoric about “contagion” that directly recapitulates previous homophobic moral panic. It also demonstrates how anti-trans actions are framed as a way of eliminating that “contagion”.
If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another examines the intuitive notion of “binary sex”, and shows that it fails to provide the precise description of reality that Stock claims for it. It talks about the strategy of argumentation that is in play here — and wherever “sex-based” is used — and highlights examples of the hyperbolic strawmanning of opposing positions.
Mother’s Ruin tackles the central argument of the book — that trans women are not women — and the notion that describing them as such somehow “erases” our ability to talk about reality. It shows the extremes of absurdity to which motivated anti-trans reasoning leads.
Like A Broken Record quickly surveys chapters not covered by the other articles, and wraps up by discussing the overall mindset the book conveys and its connection to the beliefs and actions of the far right.
Footnotes
[1]
Stock is a trustee of the notoriously transphobic LGB Alliance group that has the aim of splitting the LGBTQ+ community, in line with an extremist playbook.
This is one of the most prominent of the UK’s multiplicity of anti-trans groups, part of a hydra-headed propaganda front for extremely regressive and evangelical religious viewpoints. These are astroturfed bully pulpits for a handful of obsessive individuals.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207659.2021.1939946
[2]
Yes, they really do use the term “sex realism” — it’s unclear whether this is signalling the obvious parallel deliberately or through pure cluelessness.
The various (and often specious) names that emerge for the anti-trans movement are the result of each fresh coinage rapidly becoming tainted with the connotation of bigotry.
