The “Erasure of Women" And Other Scary Stories

Converted from a Twitter thread with useful input while I was writing it from EunarthaBossamy on the ubiquity of white supremacy in these biological purity narratives.

I have recently been struggling to classify how I would describe the popular GC narrative around the "erasure of women". Yes, on the face of it, it is an analogue to claims of “white genocide", an improbable claim of victimisation made to stir panic over a peaceful process of social revolution.

But is it a conspiracy theory? A hate movement propaganda talking point?

I don’t really think that anyone believes women are going to be annihilated and yet some GC voices talk about women being culturally annihilated. They could potentially argue that it’s like Trump’s/Orban’s decrees that trans people shouldn’t be recognised maybe I guess but it’s not like those — they come with legal restrictions of rights attached including around things like identity paperwork necessary for travel.

There are people who very much talk about the "woman erasure" in cultural genocide terms which only really make sense in a cultural feminist sense of trying to establish women as a separate culture to the rest of humanity. This strays closer to conspiracy theory.

I’m reasonably convinced by the argument that some critics of have advanced that this is a form of civic nationalist ideology. I’ve said myself on Twitter how anti trans feminist ideology functions as a sort of cis woman-nationalist position where woman is a people with borders to defend the ethnic borders of.

Also it seems super weird that it’s one subaltern class ("women") accusing another (trans people) of erasing it. Is there a better precedent to compare it to than white genocide theory?

The main things that make white genocide theory a valid comparator for Woman Erasure to me are that it’s trying to sow outrage about the gradual and peaceful evolution of the national identity from an ethnonationalist one to a multicultural/multiethnic identity.

Noone is genociding white people. Similarly while the annihilation of individual women has been the de facto state of patriarchy for centuries, their exploitation for biological and socially reproductive labour is a far more dominant, and in any case trans people simply aren’t engaged on a wide scale in attacks on women as a class one way or another.

Society is simply evolving how it understands the category of "woman" from an understanding predating trans recognition to a post recognition phase. All the people who were previously identified as women and wanted people to recognise their status as women continue to be recognised as such. But the biological purity of that class is in the eyes of its defenders being diluted by trans INCLUSION. The problems for cisgender women aren’t direct annihilation so much as indirect devaluation of their abstract class coherency. In this model, trans people are bringing down the neighborhood of womanhood, devaluing it in the eyes of those who value woman as a domain of origin, anything other than registered female at birth and it’s just sparkling femininity.

The fantasy of TERFism is that one can disestablish all social construction connected to sex (which is to say, the thing we call "gender" if we’re not cautious enough to restrict the definition to those aspects involving coercion) starting with recognition of trans people who, in TERF ideology are the paragon example of gender — human beings asserting a sexual identity based on personal preference, feeling of class kinship, or sociobehavioural class rather than on which biological reproductive role they might have been more apt to take up if they hadn’t transitioned. Somehow in stepping outside of the almost obligatory sex-determined social role trans people become the prime example for such roles at work and a key target for cissexual gender abolitionist. Other behavioural norms linked to sex and our assumptions around them are, in TERF ideology, based on biology and not “gender” and come under less scrutiny. So the TERF seeks to return to an older, more glorious time when second wave feminism was at the vanguard and noone took trans people seriously.

Of course, in reality having social constructions which function around and help to structure our relationships with each other through material experiences is literally just having a society at all. It rapidly becomes anti-human to try to deny or destroy all social construction or culture.

There are for the Woman Erasure narrative, prior ties to far right narratives, connecting the evolving Erasure theory, anti trans panics more widely anti LGBT hostility and white supremacist "birth rate" anxieties. Linked before (2014) right wing commentator Stella Morabito talks about the Pro Trans Pro Choice campaign in horror.

In it Morabito seeds in the English language at least, some ideas which originated with German Catholic right winger Gabriele Kuby - that LGBT is a form of totalitarianism, like the Nazis or the USSR, destroying the meaning of marriage, sex, gender and the Western family itself.

For clarity it was Kuby that made the Nazi/Communism comparison, Morabito merely adopted a less cranky version of this theory, talking validly about “fascism" around the same time, and then a year later Pope Francis said something similar. There’s an interesting interview from the same period when she was touring her book.

One of my thoughts around the Woman Erasure theory is that woman is a class unlike any other, one where the project of defining it has been historically a white supremacist one, where literal women’s liberation efforts have combined with nationalism comfortably over and over in history. Maybe the reason for the erasure of women being so successful as a theory is to do with that capacity for bringing the patriarchal bargain and property defence rhetoric into play.

"Don't you know who gave birth to you? Protect OUR women"

Rhetorically it’s drawing on the valuable status as human resource to justify opposition to those nonproductive infertile transsexuals who either corrupt children they come into contact with into not believing in gender obligations, or don’t reproduce.

This has a precedent in the suffragettes joining the white feather movement and shaming draft dodgers and pacifists into serving their country. The normative gender role of women in white nationalism is after all to produce young capable of fighting for the nation.