The Matter Of “Material Girls”, Part 5
Like A Broken Record
Manifesting The Ghost In The Regime
Orientation
This is one of a series of articles, beginning here, that discusses Kathleen Stock’s “Material Girls”.
This is the final article of the series. As I said at the offset, it’s impossible to cover everything, so the focus has been on core claims of the book as expressed in Chapters 2–5.
The bulk of the remainder, Chapters 6–8, amounts to an extended longeur in which Stock:
- pushes absurd pseudoscientific notions such as the discredited idea of autogynephilia and the ridiculous “Pronouns Are Rohypnol”, which was previously discussed
- claims that anyone she disagrees with is “immersed in a fiction”, because otherwise they would believe things that Stock does not; anyone that professes to is clearly a victim of transgender “social contagion”, previously discussed
- informs us that trans activism should be carried out in a manner sympathetic to the needs of transphobes — on the grounds that not being inclusive of bigotry is a betrayal of intersectionality
- gaslights the experiences of trans people, e.g. taking uncertainty about statistical reliability to completely dismiss the marginalization of trans people (note: high levels of mortality experienced by the UK trans population are affirmed by recent research)
In other words, more of the same.
So to wrap up I’m not going to recapitulate what’s already been said. I’m simply going to comment on something that’s pervasive throughout the book — the stifling “Englishness” that suffuses it.
A Notion Of Englishness
The subtext of “Material Girls” is pretty much “God is an Englishman”.
Literally, in the sense that it advocates for the idea that English words precisely correspond to “material reality” if only one interprets them in a straightforwardly “common sense” way.
Metaphorically, in that “common sense” here amounts to slumberous acquiescence to a narrow set of pre-modern values — colonial, patriarchal, cisheteronormative — the presence of which is reflected in the deeply conservative worldview that permeates the book:
- traditional “western” social structures reflect an obvious and desireable natural/normal state of affairs
- life’s purpose is reproduction (the book could equally well have been called “Maternal Girls”)
- gender differences are deeply rooted in biology and therefore can’t be gainsaid; they should define and confine how we live
- all exceptions to these “common sense” expectations are curiosa, against nature, and may safely be disregarded
This reflects the fusty orthodoxy of “roast beef” Englishness: Victorian values.
Whitewashing
Queerness of all forms has long been whitewashed out of western historical accounts; an ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge the presence in the past of “unnatural” goings-on appears comical in some respects today, but that mindset is still very much alive in “Material Girls”.
We see it in Stock’s framing of “gender identity theory” as catastrophic disruption: a discontinuity in history, an irruption of insanity, a sudden seismic change that outrages the universally accepted status quo of Englishness. But gender variance has always been with us.
Early on, she makes a foundational (and subsequently often repeated) claim that both society and science have always corresponded in recognizing the binary sex model as capturing the only possible modes of being:
“For centuries the assumption was that there were only two possible states for human beings, male and female…” [p18]
This is complete hogwash.
A multiplicity of different states of being that were seen to combine or transcend “male and female” have existed throughout history.
Even the earliest written records indicate that gender/sex has always been seen as potentially malleable: many forms of “gender otherness” are attested in Mesopotamian civilizations. See, for example, “Masculinities and Third Gender: The Origins and Nature of an Institutionalized Gender Otherness in the Ancient Near East” by Ilan Peled.
We’ve seen other counter-examples in the course of the earlier articles. There are a multiplicity of others, even within classical European history:
Intersex has naturally always disrupted notions of a “binary” mode of being.
A broad set of societal attitudes towards people existing outside of simple categories of “male and female” are reflected cross-culturally:
The diversity of societies, historical and present-day, stands against Stock’s assertion; likewise, there is not a univocal “science” that supports her views.
The invocation of “biological fact” in regard to trans people is an ideological tool, just as it is when deployed in the arguments of eugenicsts, racists, or sexists. It provides a veneer of scientific respectability to attempts to enforce ideas of what the “natural order” of things should be.
It’s not that Stock is unaware of any of this; in fact, she repeatedly dismisses information that undermines her claims in the most brusque and incurious manner possible.
For example, she waves away non-western and historical gender systems in a couple of sentences as being part of a (catastrophized) “explosion of identities” (p35). But it requires buying into the whitewash of “Englishness” to suggest that the existence of traditional social roles that are “beyond the binary” indicate discontinuity.
Maintaining the view that we are in a “world turned upside down” requires a continuous flow of special pleading, misdirection, misinterpretation, self-contradiction, and fabulation — which “Material Girls” delivers deadpan.
After all, how can you promote xenophobic tropes of infiltration, destablilization, contamination, contagion, and inherent peril if trans and intersex people are painted not as an alien invaders or frankenstein monsters, but as unexceptional representatives of a recurrent pattern of human variation?
A Vision Of Albion
Far from putting a set of balanced arguments, Stock repeatedly advocates for the effective banishment of trans people from society — she is for conversion therapy, against trans healthcare, against legal recognition of trans identity, supportive of misgendering (spinning outing as being a free speech matter), against inclusive language, against the reporting of hate crime, happy to endorse vigilante patrolling of (suspected) trans presence (pp107–108), and so on.
Intervening to make trans existence untenable is here an imagined means of preserving that phony, fusty Englishness against intolerable disruption (as defined by the intolerant).
The mirage of a glorious heritage being defiled by terrifying “invaders” is classic fascist rhetoric.
The process of trans eliminationism — following the philosophy of “morally mandating” trans people out of existence — isn’t an abstraction we have to imagine; we can see exactly what it looks like when it is translated into concrete reality.
It looks like the wave of legislation in the US (and beyond) that removes trans healthcare and criminalizes gender non-conformity in a multiplicity of ways:
It looks like being propelled backwards in time, into a pre-Stonewall era in which being queer is treated as criminal:
It looks like mandating ignorance:
It looks like the forcible removal of children from their parents:
It looks like swastika waving mobs baying at drag queens:
It looks eerily familiar:
All of which indicates that it’s not unreasonable to call “Material Girls” an apologia for fascism. A book whose purpose is to provide a palatable intellectual gloss, a coating of “Englishness” that makes vile ideas and actions easier to swallow for incipient blackshirts who don’t like to feel unpleasant about themselves.
Shame on anyone who has fallen for it’s “don’t be stupid / be a smartie” refrain.
