Today the Cass Report was published and I spent some of my precious time distracted by having a go at a certain Professor on ‘X’.
Why?
The Cass Review evidenced what many of us have known - the corrosive effects of certain ways of thinking on our public institutions and how this has bleed through to what practitioners can and do say.
It is my firmly held (and academic) view that one of the contributing social conditions that led to the woeful findings in the Cass Review was the abuse of a rather simple sociological observation about human meaning-making about sex and gender (please note: not the material realities of biological sex). As a notable sociologist (Ken Plummer) once said: "We are symbolic world makers." It is a fundamental human feature that we try to make sense of the world around us. It is a fundamental feature of living in social groups that we create shared meanings through the use of symbols (words). There could be no communication without shared meanings. Shared meanings does not mean that everyone agrees. It means is that there is enough common understanding of the words we use that we can make ourselves understood and understand others. Think about how much time we spend asking questions like “but what to you mean when you say ….”. To analyse sense-making however (and all its various changes) does not mean that there is no material reality ‘out there’. Something many gender studies scholar have rather forgotten or chose to ignore or claim matters less than The Meanings.
And it is important to unpick how we (at any one point in time or place) come to have the ideas that we have. It is critical when we are trying to analyse policies and practices. How we (or professional regulators, policy makers, law makers) make sense of things around us shapes our policies and practices. Take the reforms of the 1990’s and early 2000’s to youth prostitution policy. When the framework for laws on prostitution were established in the Wolfenden Report in the 1950s, there was no real distinction made between girls and women. In the 1980s girls under the age of sexual consent but above the age of criminal responsibility (i.e. 14 and 15 years old) were seen as offenders. Not a special sub category. If they were soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution, they could become ‘a common prostitute’ (a legal term that no longer exists, thankfully). But, as our understanding changed about prostitution, so did our policies. At the turn of the millennium, the Department of Health and Home Office issued a guidance that boiled down to this: young prostitutes are no longer criminals, they are victims. The realities did not change. Our understanding of them did. And then our understanding changed again. There is no such thing as children abused through prostitution anymore. There is child sexual exploitation. Meanings are important.
Is sex socially constructed?
Of course it is. Everything in the social world is socially constructed. Within the Galenic system of medicine they thought at female biology was just a defective form of male biology. Didn’t change that there are two biological states of human beings - females and males. To say something is socially constructed does not mean there is not no objective external reality.
But A level sociological observation that sex is socially constructed - first made long before queer theory and yes, it is so simple that A level sociology students are taught this - has been wrongly used and, I argue, actively abused by academics.
Because as academics of any merit, we should know the limits of our own arguments and ensure we communicate them. Saying 'sex' is socially constructed does not mean males can be females. This is the limit of social constructionism. There are meanings and there are the realities to which the meanings / symbols / word refer. Some realities don’t change. Like biological sex.
But instead of acknowledging this simple limit, some academics have used it to pull apart feminist collective endeavour and feminist politics to claim that anyone can be a woman. Anyone can indeed call themselves a woman, but if they are male it does not change the fact that they are not women. Feminist politics and theory is based on - you may be intrigued to know - another social constructionist observation. ‘Gender’ is socially constructed and in societies structured by sexual inequalities, gender is a system of meaning making that oppresses women.
So, why did I have a go?
Because I am so tired of seeing these hackneyed sociological observations about sex being used in the service of a political dogma that has harmed so many. But, hey, as it turned out, my efforts were entirely wasted as all my questions ended in the same place they often do. Never answered. Just deflection. And I know why. Because to admit that there is a reality *out there* to ‘sex’ is the ‘unsayable’ within that political dogma.
If it's that easy to misrepresent something so common-sense obvious using professional jargon, then there's something wrong with the profession.
Let's be honest, social science relies too much on professional purple prose, co-opting of common sense, bullshit and perpetually low-quality evidence.
I have never doubted we Arabs were Right, since 2004/05 and the planning and inception of the GRA . I and a few RFs sent protest letters to the Labour Party heading this legal fiction into law! It was only a matter of time before the Late 90’s Post Modernist /Queer gender theory would be let loose and despite RF resistance it became mainstream orthodoxy that we have been battling over the past 15yrs. It has been a struggle for those of us be it in public domain or from the isolation of RF shadows. It seems when they ‘come for women’ that’s ok but we stopped them now, we pray, to save ruined children’s lives. Sad it took 4yrs for Cass to finalise, what we women in the long struggle for womens sex based rights knew and protested at risk to our own sanity safety and well being.💪🏼💜🥰💚