This isn't about the trans question.
It's about the use and misuse of liberal humanism.
As I said, this isn't about the trans question. It's about the use and misuse of liberal humanism. The above post is exemplary of what I see as a very common form of misrecognition in contemporary politics. It’s not about Corbyn or Bindel as individuals, nor about their mutual history. But it is about how their claims are received and understood by their respective supporters. I’ll explain.
I despair sometimes of the fact that any claim to humanity, universal improvement, etc. is seen as deluded or a sign of weakness.
But I also understand the suspicion with which claims spelled out in these terms can be met. It is seen as a cloaking of particular interests in universal ones; the claiming for oneself and one's cause the shared ideals of kindness, respect and dignity. I suspect that in the eyes of Bindel, Corbyn is being saintly and indeed sanctimonious: rather than making a political argument, he's hiding behind "common humanity". And she's not wholly wrong.
The pattern gets played out repeatedly, more or less in these terms, across a range of issues:
In the eyes of side A, B is cynical, intolerant and motivated by private interests (ressentiment, attention-seeking, and therefore possibly personal advancement);
in the eyes of side B, A is self-regarding, sanctimonious and indeed more cynical than oneself (because A claims high ideals in the name of specific interests, and thus is ideological in the way B is not).
A thinks they are doing politics in pursuit of higher ideals;
B thinks only they themselves are doing politics, while A is trying to dissolve differences in phoney consensus.
And both can be condemned in the terms of the other.
A is a post-political liberal who does terrible things in the name of higher values and so is guilty of tainting those very values.
B is a Schmittian populist who believes in nothing but the righteousness of their own ressentiment, and nothing beyond conflict itself.
In this specific instance, the debate is between a radical feminist and an 80s-style socialist cum left-populist. In fact, they’re both very 1980s – leftovers from that period’s culture wars/campus wars, which really played out on the terrain and in the terms of the radical left, and which were only latterly spilled out onto society as a whole. As an aside, this is why leftists who dismiss the left as irrelevant to wider society (and therefore that the left should not be the object of serious critique) are incorrect. Cases like these prove otherwise.
This debate also happens between other political groups. Most evidently between liberals and populists, or between post-political technocrats and populists. And though this is a battle that often play out as left versus right, it might be just as common when contained to one side of the spectrum or the other. It happens between post-political and populist tendencies on the left itself. And ditto on the right. And it probably happens on the further right as well, between, say, libertarians and national-populists, or post-liberals and post-fascists (though perhaps less frequently, because utopianism is the preserve of the left, not the right – and therefore political claims are less often made in idealistic and universalist terms over there).
In all these cases, I read it symptomatically – as a product of the return of politics at the end of the end of history; as a struggle between post-politics and politicisation; between a dying liberal cosmopolitanism, one whose values are frayed beyond recognition (and those who believe themselves to be redeeming it) and a stillborn politics whose energies can only disgorge into Schmittian culture war.
So, does this mean I have the answer, the proper formula?
I'm probably the worst of the lot. I carry a tacit belief that this is a problem of misrecognition, that if this debate where had out in good faith and properly mediated (possibly by me), they would come to understand the other's position, rather than playing up to the worst image each has of the other. (I guess this is the Habermasian position).
My more serious position is possibly also a delusion: that there's a correct synthesis for radical politics, which is humanist at its core rather than on the surface, that it is only in the victory of some particular that the universal interest is served and is able to flourish, that we can neither flee from politics nor reduce it to friend vs enemy. The hermeneutics of suspicion, but not too much. Morality, yes, but only in the final analysis. (This is the delusion of Marxism, and probably best expressed by Lenin and Trotsky in word and deed).
As the latter wrote:
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. …the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.
Yeah ok blah blah blah, but you have to tell us, are you an oppressor or an ally? Are you a TERF or a Good Person?
I think it was Foucault and his popularization that really killed the thing Trotsky is talking about there, and even the thing opposed to what Trotsky was talking about. "Power" became so ubiquitous and yet so thin that talking about taking it from one goal to give to the other became incoherent. No matter what you were doing, it was just power, and therefore oppression and domination. Thence to corporate Buddhism.
In many cases I suspect this type of discussion cannot possibly be held in good faith because a lot of these radical feminists, who I personally am more than willing to have calm and earnest conversations with, are what I can only refer to as "Fox News Facebook Mom Brainwashed". Of course, the types of people you mention are more specific to the UK, and I don't want to pretend this has no unique nuance (I am not from the US!), but it seems to be the same type of brainrot – which is to say I'm referring to a particularly hostile, delusional type of thinking that consistent, rational conversation can't really seem to get through to. My heart is open to exceptions, but the important thing is that they are very much exceptions, because these people find themselves in cult-like bubbles. So the suggestion that these are two parties who just need to get on each other's level and stop talking past each other, seems tragically incorrect.
Because anti-transness on this level, the level that you discusss in your post, among one of the parties you highlight to make the argument that this problem extends beyond transness – proud, self-identified "TERFs" – is such a specific phenomenon that I can only think to compare it to extremist thinking along the lines of Trumpian Fox News Republicans, or even Flat Earthers, (borderline) conspiracy theory groups that have similar effects and in many cases isolate people from friends and family and sanity.
You are likely correct regarding the average person, who is unaffected by these radical online circles and is unsure and even defensive or hostile about trans people and transness in general – or any other matter! When it comes to people outside of conspiracy theory-like, cult-like bubbles, the argument can be extended further, and people do often talk past each other where they could come to understand each other and even find some common ground!
As such, the "trans question" might be a bad name for the phenomenon, or almost too accurate – the fact that trans people and transness is up for discussion and persecution is undeniable and horrific, but I don't think we should accept that this is a question up for debate at all, even in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.