Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
It seems that anno now only extreme positions receive attention and attempts to seek a compromise or middle ground are often ignored by the media. Do they sometimes see it as a sign of strength to propagate their own positions with great energy and visibility and pay no attention at all to what the opponents of those positions have to say?
A textbook example of disinterest and contempt for the position of others is encountered in the pejorative use of the term anti-trans, a term regularly declared to apply without hesitation and reserve to positions that as recently as 20 years ago would have been seen as innovative and pro-trans. Surely respect and interest in other positions is far away in this regard.
Of course, intermediate positions can be found in debates. As an example of an intermediate position, we cite a recent text by German philosopher Gesa Lindemann on Israel vs. Hamas. She points in that text to the UN’s problematic role on the refugee status of many Palestinians. One may agree or disagree with Gesa Lindemann, but in any case it is a relevant and not so common intermediate position that deserves attention.
Regarding climate, we in the Netherlands hardly see the intermediate position represented in the debate. What does it mean for us in the Netherlands that without China, India, Brazil, Russia and the U.S. little can be achieved in terms of climate management? Is it really true that bringing down CO2 emissions at a forced pace is the best step for the Netherlands to save the climate? Is it perhaps that the constant demonstrations and actions “to raise awareness” contribute, on reflection, to the very fact that people do not believe that by taking step after step in a smart way, something good can be achieved (when perhaps it can)?
We see a similar polarization when discussing robotic weapons. Opponents oppose robotic weapons, period, and hope to be as successful with them as they were before with opposition to chemical and biological weapons, and then also with the campaign against land mines. One loses sight of the fact that the rise of robotic weapons can hardly be convincingly compared to chemical weapons or land mines. Robots and AI are impossible to keep out of military technology in a world where all automobility is expected to be robotized in the not too distant future. Simplistic schemes like “no abuse of AI” accomplish nothing, just as the slogan “no abuse of steel” could not have prevented the rise of conventional mechanized warfare.
Back to “anti-trans”. There, the situation can be described as bizarre. There is a heterogeneous but also sizable movement that does not actually recognize gender transition. We capture that movement under the heading of gender essentialism. Within this are types and flavors, but that does not negate the common essentialist background of the adherents of this variety of visions of gender. Gender essentialists identify gender (or more formally gender) with biological sex. This is often, not to say usually, done without giving a clear description of it, and without admitting that such a description cannot be given without making clear and possibly controversial choices. There is visible (essentialist) anti-trans activism in the anti-trans world (see, for example, AGTRT-BF23 and AGTRT-BF24).
At the other end of the spectrum, we see gender co-essentialism, in which one:
- does not recognize biological sex as a socially relevant concept or criterion, at least not as one that should play a role in the formal classification of persons, and where one
- instead adopts a notion of gender with at least three options: male, female and neutral, with the salient feature that
- each person is expected to freely determine their own gender and revise it on a regular basis.
Co-essentialism is also a form of essentialism, but that form of it in which the FPA(first person authority) is seen as the most (and in fact exclusively) determinant of gender.
Opposed to essentialist anti-transactivism is co-essentialist transactivism. In between there are also all kinds of views but they are lived out less activistically. There is a middle ground between essentialism and co-essentialism of views that are certainly not anti-trans but neither are they transactivist.
We seek to develop a MotR(middle of the road) version of gender theory: a workable compromise between essentialism and co-essentialism. But if you seek a compromise between two parties who do not recognize the legitimacy of each other’s existence then you will have opponents on both sides of the debate, and very few supporters.
Read more about the two-front war we found ourselves in:
Our search for a middle-of-the-road gender theory has led us into a curious two-front war
As an intermediate step, we propose a phase in which proponents of co-essentialist transactivism and proponents of essentialist anti-transactivism spend time and energy discussing and (preferably arguing against) each other’s views. To the best of our ability, we have reviewed the gender theory literature across the spectrum. Our diagnosis is as follows:
- On the side of co-essentialism, people preach too much to their own parish and pay too little attention to refuting supposedly outdated positions.
- On the side of essentialism, one pretends that one does not need to know and understand the difference between biological sex and (formal) gender, thereby making a mallotic caricature of the views of opponents in the debate.
- Both sides pretend to be blind to the disadvantages and objections that pushing one’s own views may bring to others.
- One then conveniently pretends that those objections would not be there.
After all, what would be wrong with simply engaging each other in debate and looking at the other’s arguments with some interest and precision?
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