Desire and Fate
One of the paradoxes of the contemporary obsession with gender identity is its radical anti-sensuality. Because it is about ideology, it is fundamentally hostile to pleasure for its own sake. To use contemporary academic jargon, pleasure must be ‘interrogated.’ An emblem of this is the assertion by many queer ideologues that one should not feel morally entitled to reject someone sexually because of their genitalia. The highbrow iteration of this is summed up by the Oxford politics professor Amia Srinivasan’s claim that it is ethically important to “[confront] the way in which who and what is and isn't desired sexually can itself be a product of injustice.”* Srinivasan has race in mind here. If one thinks it wrong to say that one does not want to have black friends, she argues, why would it not be wrong to say that one does not want to have black sexual partners? Thus, the commonplace Woke college injunction, “Check your privilege,” morphs into a politicization of eros that enjoins us to “Check our preferences.”
The lowbrow version is epitomized by a serious of blog posts by the trans activist novelist and poet Roz Kaveney championing the idea that to categorically exclude having sex with someone on the basis of their genitalia - in the instance, a lesbian refusing to consider having sex with a trans woman who still has a penis - is transphobic because it is based on “an assumption that the person is the current status of their bits, and the history of their bits.” This “Cotton Ceiling,” as Kaveney and other trans activists have dubbed it, is meant to describe progressives who, “while theoretically accepting of trans people…when it comes to actually having sex with us, they vote with their ...um...feet.” **
The old joke about the traveling salesman who comes home to catch his wife in flagrante delicato with another man only to be met with her bland response, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” comes to mind here. How, Kaveney demands indignantly, can such progressives regard “[their] own ideas about what constitutes a female body as trumping the ideas of the person who is that body?” For a lesbian to have “perpetual hard guidelines” about who is and who isn’t sexually off limits on the basis of their genitalia, which Kaveney dismisses as “about as reductive a model of sexual attraction as I can imagine," is a form of bigotry little different from that of a “woman who said she would only sleep with women of her own race or religion,” or had preferences about body weight, class, level of able-bodiedness.”***
This idea of the Cotton Ceiling is no longer something restricted to obscure blogs and chatrooms. To the contrary, it has been a key issue in several recent discrimination cases in employment tribunals in the UK, and is now more mainstream than fringe (like trans activism itself).**** Above all, it has been championed by the British campaigning group Stonewall, which now no longer uses the term ‘same-sex attraction,’ having replaced it with ‘same-gender attraction’ in order to avoid excluding trans people. This means, in effect, is that trans men – biological females – who still retain their vaginas can be gay if they are attracted to men, while trans women – biological males – with penises can be lesbians.
This should come as no surprise. In the contemporary progressive imagination, what one says one is trumps everything else, up to and including one’s own desire - which has now been ‘problematized,’ to use the jargon of the Academe. Srinivasan argues that she is simply calling for “[allowing] my desire to go where it wants to go, instead of allowing my desire to be shaped by what I've been taught to think and feel is desirable.”***** But in reality, her argument, while more nuanced, is little different than Kaveney’s or that of another trans activist, Riley J. Dennis, who in a YouTube video, insisted flatly that “because we associate [sic] penises with men and vaginas with women, some people think they could never date a trans man with a vagina or a trans woman with a penis. But I think people are more than their genitals.”******
And of course they are. But not where eros is concerned, not least because the kind of suspension of disbelief that trans activists such as Kaveney and Dennis are calling for involve the policing of desire in the name of some utopian notion of sexual inclusion, if not in essential ways the repudiation of desire and the rejection of what one feels in the name of what one ought to feel. Sex, though, is not social work, not affirmative action, not a playing field for diversity, equity and inclusion, try as the trans movement is doing to claim the opposite. Foucault would have had a field day with a Kaveney or a Dennis, for they are the contemporary iteration of his ideas about the ways in which each age aligns or realigns discipline and desire. The trans movement superficially appears emancipatory; the reality, however, is that it is fundamentally regulatory.
*https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/is-there-a-right-to-sex-feminist-philosopher-confronts-the-politics-of-sexual-desire-1.6187514
**https://rozk.livejournal.com/445853.html
***https://rozk.livejournal.com/446951.html
****https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-7/
*****https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/is-there-a-right-to-sex-feminist-philosopher-confronts-the-politics-of-sexual-desire-1.6187514
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