A bit like Napoleon, radical transactivism is moving swiftly and imperviously across Europe. Blithe to the consequences for women, lesbians, and gay men, pan-European LGBT organisations such as ILGA Europe are lobbying hard for governments to introduce self-ID, and also to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” — in other words, talking therapies — for dysphoric people planning to cut off their body parts.
So far, it seems to be working. ILGA is well-funded and has great influence, both with national governments and in the EU. Belgium brought in self-ID in 2018. Spain did so in February this year, as did Finland. Undeterred by the fiasco of Nicola Sturgeon putting male rapists in female prisons in the name of inclusivity, Germany and the Netherlands are teetering on the brink.
In France, meanwhile, a very French version of this culture war is playing out. On the side of those insisting that biological differences matter socially and politically is feminist Dora Moutot, who is facing a lawsuit from transactivists for accurately describing a transwoman as a “trans-identified male” on TV last year. In the past few months, Moutot has launched the “Femelliste” website with fellow feminist Marguerite Stern, aimed at explaining to a mostly uncomprehending French public some of the main problems caused by transactivism, as they see it.
Also on Moutot’s side is Catholic commentator Eugénie Bastié, signatory to a public letter in support of Moutot, and author of a recently published book-length essay entitled Sauver La Différence Des Sexes (Save Sex Differences). Moutot is a social media influencer and a former writer for Vice magazine. She also runs a website dedicated to increasing the number of female orgasms in the world. On the face of it, then, she is a strange bedfellow with a conservative like Bastié. Such is the extremity of transactivism, however, almost everyone who isn’t chronically underinformed or under 25 ends up on the other side of it eventually.
According to The Times, Bastié argues in her new book that — thanks to a legacy of biology-denial, whether under the guise of feminism or transactivism — “women struggle to combine a career and childcare, and men, shorn of role models and their ancestral identity, become sad porn addicts”. Sticking to a well-established script, her opponents on the progressive Left have fought back this week with an equally broad brush. Writing in Libération, philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie insists that Bastié is wrong: allowing that men can become women is a laudable extension of the project of changing patriarchal social norms.
Although what we have here is a dynamic simultaneously playing out across a number of Western stages — that is, a provisional and uneasy alliance among those who think there are limits to human bodily plasticity, against those who think there are none — there are also some unmistakably French elements in the mix. One is the unfeasible glamour of everyone involved. Another is the sheer aggression with which Parisian transactivists are currently pursuing Moutot and Stern, throwing ugly death threats all over the place in classically hyperemotional Gallic style.
The final national giveaway is the desire to blame the Anglosphere for all of it. Bastié, according to The Times, thinks she knows the culprit for the parlous social predicament of the sexes: “the arrival in France of British and American theories involving a ‘totalitarian’ cancel culture and the negation of biological realities”.
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