Cisgender Tears, the Diversion of Sexual Violence, and Incel Sympathy

This blog is going to deal with some controversial topics, including experiences of trauma and sexual assault. Where possible I’ll do that as gently as I can.

For several years, trans women have been made the scapegoats for male sexual violence against women and I would like to discuss a variety of patterns in this behaviour, cisgender women’s role in weaponising cisgender tears against trans people (particularly trans women), and effectively colluding with the heterosexual cisgender regime through which sexual violence is a key form of discipline. I also go on to discuss a little how this is similar to wider problems of dominance games threatening society at large.

This blog post has been sparked a little bit by Natalee B’s “The Girl’s Spot” gym news and her use of her account of sexual assault in a gym to justify becoming trans exclusionary. But she is really just a drop in the ocean for this pattern of behaviour. Cisgender women, in general, when they need to defeat trans people (particularly trans women) in contests over rights, have a systematic pattern of raising into these conversations their experiences of violence generally at the hands of a cisgender man. The vastly more famous instance of this was several years ago when JK Rowling (who is now backing Natalee B’s efforts) wrote an essay detailing her experience of domestic abuse as justification for her increasingly anti-trans stance. It’s fair to say that it has become a meme that misogynist violence by men has become the fuel that launches of anti-trans public personalities runs on.

On the surface of it, it makes sense. I believe the logic behind it goes: “I’m going to say something about this minority group who are obviously well known to be widely victimised. So I need to demonstrate how I am the real victim so I can neutralise understanding of their victimhood. In doing this I have the advantage as a cisgender person in winning sympathy and people being willing to disregard concern for the suffering of trans people so this will be, and has been repeatedly proven to be effective in muddying the waters enough for me to win this social conflict.”

It might seem heartless to put it like that. And in 2020 when JK Rowling published TERF Wars many of us, myself included, spoke out to express our solidarity with her against her abuser ex, our outrage that The Sun platformed his misogynist abuse against her. To no avail. JK Rowling was not sharing her suffering as part of a common experience of gender based violence where our collective outrage against this might bind us all in a commitment to creating spaces where gender based violence may be eliminated. JK Rowling was facing opposition about her increasingly open transphobia, and needed a winning move, and raising her experience of unrelated violence from a cisgender man was that move. The same as it is from Natalee B right now.

As an more naive contributor in these discussions, from several years ago up until relatively recently, I used to disclose a lot about my own, many and varied, experiences of violent and sexual abuse. I failed to understand at the time, that disclosing these experiences would not engender sympathy for me the way it does for cisgender women. In fact what I’ve come to understand is that by disclosing my own experiences of violence specifically in these situations, because of their competitive nature results in people trying to just compete harder over who has had it worse. That’s the end result of having these sorts of vulnerable discussion with people who do not care about the fact that you have faced sexual violence. They are disrespectful to all involved, and the only possible outcome is one person winning at the cost of another.

Several years on I’ve been through some amount of counselling and personal growth and I realise, this competition is itself the problem. Not only can we not win it by showing our scars, nor can we win it by offering solidarity in a one sided relationship with cisgender women where they maintain our second-class status assiduously throughout, the real victory starts happening when I find other people who are committed instead of competing over who has it worst or naive solidarity, to the idea that safety for any of us is built on creating a world where none of us are at risk. Where all of our vulnerability can be held and valued. Where we love and care for each other. Where all of our suffering and loss can be grieved. This world is small. Like James Baldwin once said:

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be. “ — James Baldwin

We have this culture right now where the dominant media form for young people is these debate shows. Right Wing Guy Owns Libtards, Left Wing Gamer Owns 20 Magas. The spectacle and the competition is the point. It leaves very little room for those of us who care about a world where we’re not trying to be the last one standing in a contest landscape littered with the bodies of the owned and the cucked. People have long bemoaned the nihilistic way in which “everything is up for grabs” in these debates, even things which shouldn’t be up for debate, but it’s more than that. When everything is a contest all the time we tend to brutalise ourselves and send a handful of celebrity champion figures to high heights of celebrity and significance while the majority are just screwed whether left or right win.

We don’t have a commons, a sharing of experiences, difficulties, common resources and problems that we can build a plan for a future worth living in in that landscape. We have, at best, a bunch of increasingly arcane theory about why “men suffer from patriarchy too” or jargon around “being pushed down the right wing pipeline”.

Everyone these days seems to be a victim of this system competitively with everyone else, the privileged cisgender able bodied white young man at risk of falling into inceldom is a bigger victim, more at risk than anyone else if you believe the media. This explanation of the world is built through competition. It’s built through ignoring what suffering others beneath us experience that we can get away with ignoring so we can win at being the best victim. It’s built through teaching our young people that the only way to get their needs met is by defeating others in the sphere of debate. It’s not produced through common consciousness building or rational exploration of material reality or a grounded understanding of economics and class.

I say get their needs met and I mean that including the young white middle class man at risk of falling into inceldom as much as anyone. We’ve faced successive economic crashes, every new generation is less able to acquire secure housing and less likely to be able to bank on a pension in the future. Men have been crying for years about the fact that the cost of maintaining a sexist hierarchy which they sit at the top of is making them miserable. Men openly resent women for the dubious “freedom” of being the subjects of patriarchal domination rather than the agents of it. And yet they’re fed a diet of Andrew Tate telling them how to climb that tower all the same. The hierarchy of manhood that has emerged, no longer just based in class, but now in a series of “Alphas” “Betas” and so on they are taught to compete between, 79 genders of man battling it out for who’s going to be on top. I have no doubt that men are miserable with the costs of manhood and exercising their domination over women making themselves beasts in the process.

Where I draw the line obviously, is the idea that their suffering somehow puts them ahead of those (women and gender minorities) whose subjugation this ridiculous baroque court of internal male hierachy is supposed to maintain. They’re able to lay claim to that higher priority victimhood, in this offensive and inhumane competition we have established for human rights discussions, because of the latent sympathies for men that exist in a male-dominated society. Their suffering that is the product of a set of social games that has no purpose other than keeping men on top over women. In fact if we look at the problem of sexual violence against women, while somehow looking so important when it is pressed against trans women, it is starkly dismissed when we’re talking about these poor impressionable boys struggling with becoming men in the world. The seriousness of the violence done to the young women they grow up alongside becomes an afterthought to those young men’s “radicalisation” as a key point of interest, because they are able to outcompete women as a centre of sympathy through their gender status even at the same time as Incels are constructed in the media to be pathetic and silly. Some more extreme contributors to this discourse have even attempted to suggest that TERFism is driving a wider problem of too much man-hating and by some roundabout means, cisgender men are the real victims of transphobia. Most of these conversations about gender wars wipe trans people off the map before the first word is spoken in reality. In the topsy turvy world of debate driven authoritarian grievance politics, sympathy for the dominant group is king and actually looking at harm is rarely bothered with.

The answer to the question of incels, like the answer to the question of TERFs, is simple. Stop trying to compete with marginalised people for victimhood. Stop engaging in this race to the bottom, stop yearning to be kings or queens of a mountain of bodies. We have enough space, enough resources, between all of us, to create a world where our safety is all upheld, our suffering is all grieved, our needs are all met. It is the competition for dominance that is itself the problem. Trans women aren’t a threat, Black people aren’t a threat, women aren’t a threat, Muslims aren’t a threat, Jews aren’t a threat, migrants and refugees aren’t a threat, people who need to rely on welfare payments aren’t a threat. Marginalised groups do not need to be competed with to secure your place in a hierarchy, and by engaging in that competition you are sabotaging your chances at creating the humane society that would alleviate the misery of the inhumane conditions you keep going to maintain your dominance.

Freedom is a choice albeit an unpopular one.