Amnesty irrational

You have to feel sorry for Chiara Capraro, Gender Justice Director at Amnesty International UK and author of its ill-fated report, “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK”. How could she have known this would be the point at which a well-worn tactic — indeed, the only tactic available to gender identity ideologues — would cease to work? After more than a decade of being able to distort what your opponents believe, smear them as hate-filled bigots and claim the moral high ground for doing so, why would you expect it to end? I’m not saying it’s a justification, but if Capraro says “everyone else was at it” — a kind of woke careerism version of the Lance Amstrong  excuse for doping — well, she’d be right. It’s not as though a Gender Justice Director has any other arguments up her sleeve. 

Capraro’s report, which has been pulled from Amnesty’s website, follows the familiar path of claiming that everyone who thinks sex is immutable and politically salient believes the exact same consequences should derive from this rather banal observation. These might be consequences which stand in direct opposition to the stated beliefs of many of the groups Capraro defines as “anti-rights” —–what radical feminist is seeking “a society in which women and men have fixed and distinct roles, based on what they view as ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’”? — but honestly, who cares? Isn’t lumping together ultra-conservative anti-abortion groups, grass-roots domestic violence support networks and gay men’s charities standard practice these days? One can hardly blame Capraro for believing that one waffly line about understanding these entities as “an ecosystem sharing values, goals, strategy and tactics and, for some of them, formal collaboration” would be sufficiently arse-covering, thereby granting her a free pass to condemn absolutely any group who seems a bit too reality-aware as “anti-rights” and demand that such groups are isolated and ostracised by donors and decision-makers. 

It is not as though this approach has not worked for Amnesty in the past. A previous hit job — “Like a snowball: the growth and impact of the gender critical movement in the UK” — did not provoke the same levels of outrage and threats of legal consequences that have followed “A growing threat”. Capraro now has the status of that one person who spoiled the party by taking things that little bit too far. Then again, you’ve got to hand it to the gender identitarians — what a party it has been! 

The sex and gender “debate” has been a debate like no other because it has relied on one side completely ignoring the other and inventing what they’re “really” saying. Proponents of sex denialism have not just got away with being disingenuous, but benefited from it, casting accuracy and coherence as the embarrassing fixations of a bigot. True, people make bad faith arguments in regard to other topics, but with gender identity ideology, the entire case relies on it. There’s nothing else there. Within feminism, there are plenty of subjects — surrogacy, prostitution, pornography, abortion — about which one can disagree with others while still perceiving the outlines of their arguments, even using them to test one’s own. Not so with trans activist ones. For a while, I think people found this exciting. The normal rules did not apply! Now it is getting old.

Despite their frequently pompous styling, the arguments of gender identity ideologues have always been profoundly immature, a strange mixture of some first-year undergrad realising that how we choose to define things collectively shapes our experience of the world (while forgetting the “collectively” bit) and a teenage incel trying to own the feminists by asking them how they really know he’s a member of the dominant class (do they, like, want to see his dick?). The conflation of “redefining women” in the sense of re-evaluating the intellectual capacities, bodily integrity and political status of adult human females, and “redefining women” as “a group that can include men”, is frankly idiotic, yet this is the logic upon which Capraro’s assertion about “fixed and distinct roles” relies, not to mention similar assertions in texts such as Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex. The trouble is, it’s so stupid it can make you believe you must have missed something. The high status of those pushing this nonsense has made too many people believe their misgivings are misplaced, proof of their own — and not the speaker’s — moral and intellectual inferiority. 

For far too long, those building careers upon these obfuscations have been accountable to no one. Their critics have always been on the back foot, going to great pains to evidence their arguments (only to be accused of being obsessed) and sound kind and empathetic (whereupon they will be accused of using dogwhistles to hide their hate). It is maddening because in many ways, “this is bollocks, though” should be a perfectly adequate, discussion-ending response to anyone claiming that people can be born in the bring body, or that no one can tell what sex anyone else is. One could be forgiven for thinking one might as well have kept the argument concise, given that any dissent whatsoever would lead to a place on the list of the “anti-rights” collective. 

When Butler published Who’s Afraid of Gender? in 2024, I think there was hope on the part of some that all would be explained. Finally, there would be a coherent, serious response to feminist understandings of gender as a social hierarchy and adult human females as a sex class. Butler would temper her use of lofty language and reveal all to the awaiting masses. Alas, all she had to offer was the exact same lumping together of widely disparate groups in which Capraro engages:

Like Trump, Orbán, Meloni, the Vatican, and all others on the Right who refuse self-determination as the basis for sex reassignment, trans-exclusionary feminists argue that gender mutability is an illegitimate exercise of freedom, an overreach, an appropriation, and so they support bureaucratic, psychiatric, and medical barriers to exercising that right. The Vatican thought it was God’s creative powers that were being stolen by gender advocates; the trans-exclusionary feminists think that their own sexed bodies are being appropriated by nefarious actors.

Needless to say, this is not what “trans-exclusionary feminists think”. I suspect some part of Butler must know this, which would explain why none of the feminists who apparently believe this are quoted expressing said belief. If I were Chiara Capraro, I’d be thinking “how come Butler gets away with this and I don’t”? (But then I’d think, “it’s probably because she doesn’t name names and put together an actual hate list including women’s refuges because even she’s not that drunk on her own power”.)

I suspect it is far too early to declare the arrival of a time in which gender identity ideologues are actually obliged to justify their positions. The response to the “growing threat” report certainly showed there are limits to how utterly without principle one can be. It is one thing to use incoherent assertions and smears to push a political agenda, quite another to have a political agenda that can only sustain itself via incoherent assertions and smears. When nobody believes you, you’ll only have yourself to blame.