Top 15 How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up Movie Quote 126 Most Correct Answers

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How many fingers am I holding up Winston four and if the party says that it is not four but five then how many?

‘ “Four.” “And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?” “Four.”

How many fingers am I holding up right now?

‘ ‘Four. ‘

How many fingers hold Winston?

‘Yes,’ said Winston. O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’ ‘Four.

How many fingers does O’Brien holding up when he is torturing Winston?

When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four!

What does holding up a 4 mean?

The sign can translate to “maximum effort” on the football field. Players will hold up four fingers to intone that the final, most crucial 15 minutes of the game are about to be played. The signal is a reminder to everyone to stay frosty and put forth the best game that they can.

What is Winston’s greatest fear?

Winston’s Greatest Fear In “1984” Crossword Clue

Rank	Word	Clue
94%	RATS	Winston’s greatest fear in “1984”
3%	BEST	Greatest
3%	OBRIEN	Winston’s tormenter in ‘1984’
3%	OCEANIA	Winston’s home in “1984”

How many fingers George Orwell have?

George Orwell – 1984. ‘How many fingers, Winston?’ ‘Four!

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

O’Brien teaches that there is no world outside of the human mind, so that the party can control reality in the same way that he can make Winston see five fingers when there are only 4. this is ” believing is seeing” rather than “seeing believing”, as we would normally say.

What is the room 101 in 1984?

Room 101, located in the Ministry of Love, is the room where prisoners are sent to be confronted by their deepest fear. Readers learn early in the novel that Winston is terrified of rats.

What is O’Brien saying that Winston has always known?

5. When O’Brien arrives, he says to Winston, “You knew this, Winston… Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it—you have always known it.” What is O’Brien saying that Winston has always known?

What is the last question that Winston asks O’Brien in chapter II What is O Brien’s answer?

What is the last question that Winston asks O’Brien in Chapter II? What is O’Brien’s answer? Winston asks, “What is Room 101.” O’Brien answers that Winston already knows what is in Room 101, as everyone knows.

What does O’Brien mean when he tells Winston in book 3 of 1984 they got me a long time ago?

O’Brien’s response that they got him long ago may be interpreted as meaning simply that he has served the Thought Police for a long time, or that he was once himself against the Party, but turned to its service. I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

How many fingers do you see quote?

‘How many fingers, Winston?’ ‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could.

Why does O’Brien say that he will have no martyrs?

“We make them true,” says O’Brien. The future will not make a martyr of Winston because the future will never hear of him. He will become an unperson.

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Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for How many fingers am I holding up? – An occasional blog Updating In a famous scene in George Orwell’s 1984, Inner Party member O’Brien tests protagonist Winston Smith’s allegiance to Party truth by demanding that Winston sees five fingers, instead of the four he is holding up. Winston’s refusal to see something other than what his eyes tell him is the cue for intense physical pain, courtesy…
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The power of slogans

Law

Ontology

Class

Enter the 2018 Consultation on reforms to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004

Thoughtcrime

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Published by Sian Sullivan

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How many fingers am I holding up?

In a famous scene in George Orwell’s 1984, Inner Party member O’Brien tests protagonist Winston Smith’s allegiance to Party truth by demanding that Winston sees five fingers, instead of the four he is holding up. Winston’s refusal to see something other than what his eyes tell him is the cue for intense physical pain, courtesy of the Ministry of Love.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

“Four.”

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever.[1]
Winston’s crime is to retain a sense of an outside to the reality being dictated to him. He experiences the Party as requiring him to ‘reject the evidence of [his] eyes and ears’ such that common sense itself is ‘[t]he heresy of heresies’.[2]
Winston is unable to fully capitulate to the slogans of the Party. He says the words, but they provoke such cognitive dissonance that he risks all for moments of intimacy and freedom beyond the nightmare reality disciplined by the Party’s thought police.

‘Repeat it, if you please’, says O’Brien to Winston.

The power of slogans

A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan, political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group.

Orwell’s Party slogans War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! are brilliantly dissonant. In asserting discordant causal linkings of familiar categories as ‘truths’, they act to convey something truthful about the deceptions on which modern society is built. Military intervention is indeed asserted as necessary to create and maintain peace, even though all around we see the destabilising effects of unnecessary wars. We might consider ourselves to be free, even though we are bound to states with the power to remove citizenship protections[3], tethered to jobs that may not be of our choosing, and subjected in multiple senses of the term[4]. And it is a commonplace that learning leads to a disorienting of certainties, encapsulated in Einstein’s phrase that ‘the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.’

I can only assume these Orwellian doublethink dimensions were intentional in a recent projection onto London’s Ministry of Justice demanding viewers to ‘Repeat After Us’ the slogan Trans Women Are Women!

For some people the assertion ‘trans women are women’ does something similar to the Party slogans devised by Orwell. It messes with categories in various ways traced below, at the same time as truthfully conveying a contested political reality towards which contemporary society is being pushed.

The present significance of the assertion in the UK revolves around a current public government consultation for reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) (deadline 19th October). Reform has been proposed so as to improve the rights of trans people who do not identify into adulthood with the sex recorded on their birth certificate. This is a laudable aim, although it remains unclear how such reforms might affect existing single-sex exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. A primary proposed mechanism of reform is to simplify existing administrative processes through which transgender people can legally change their recorded birth sex to the sex with which they identify.

Concerns are being expressed regarding potential implications of these reforms. Feminists caution that the concept ‘woman’ will be emptied of meaning if individuals with anatomy conventionally known as male are able to more easily assume the mantle of this category in its legal form. As trans woman Debbie Hayton affirms, ‘women would certainly be affected by a changed legal definition of what it means to be a woman.’

Part of the controversy is linked with the observation that we inhabit a patriarchal societal context in which the legal class of persons conventionally known as ‘women’ continues to be disadvantaged because they are women. To provide one example of the material manifestation of this societal situation, recent UK government statistics report that perpetrators of violent crime are more likely to be male, and women over the age of 16 are five times more likely to have experienced sexual assault than men. These contexts give rise to rational (i.e. not phobic) fears concerning the implications of allowing people with anatomy conventionally sexed as male to gain access to spaces in society that currently are conventionally and legally provided for girls and women; whilst simultaneously eroding legal and societal support for the provision of spaces set aside to protect girls and women.

The UK government’s public consultation states that the government is particularly interested in hearing from ‘Organisations working to support individuals of a particular gender – such as women’s groups providing support to victims of violence or sexual assault’. Indeed, the Minister for Women and Equalities opens the consultation by asserting,

I decided to learn more about the public online consultation on reform of the GRA in part because I wanted to understand why I experienced the assertion Trans Women are Women! to be dissonant in literal terms. I especially wanted to consider how my own ignorance might be contributing to this experience of dissonance, since it is different to my experience of the statement ‘trans women are trans women’, which I entirely agree with and respect. Mostly, however, I felt alienated by the Orwellian tactics deployed to force society to accept the statement Trans Women are Women as ‘The Truth’, as well as confused by hearing totalising discourses from activists I otherwise understood to embrace anti-authoritarian politics.

Legal, ontological[5] and class dimensions of the assertion have come more clearly into focus as I have gone through the government consultation, read the legislation around it, and engaged with different perspectives and concerns in the lively debate regarding the proposed reforms. In this post, I share what I have learned regarding the complex politics of experience infusing, fabricating and financing the trans gender movement and its intersections with feminism. I provide diverse resources at the end of the post to support others in the UK who may wish to participate in the public consultation on the GRA.

My overriding sense is that in the UK (as elsewhere) a political struggle is taking place over the category ‘woman’ and who is able to define and inhabit this category. Currently any disagreement with the statement ‘trans women are women’ is being policed by some as a form of Orwellian thoughtcrime requiring punishment. It feels increasingly uncomfortable to stay silent in this context, but it is with trepidation that I share my reflections.

Law

In the UK today there are two categories of persons legally considered to be women.

1) ‘Women’ are adult human beings who present anatomically as the female sex at birth, are recorded as female on their birth certificate on account of this presentation, and in ‘cisgender‘ terms continue into adulthood to understand that they are sexed anatomically as female. ‘Women’ defined legally as such does not foreclose the fact that such individuals also have diverse bodies, histories, experiences and political leanings.

The online legal dictionary states,

WOMEN, persons. In its most enlarged sense, this word signifies all the females of the human species; but in a more restricted sense, it means all such females who have arrived at the age of puberty.

Uncontroversially for a species whose reproductive possibilities rely on sexual dimorphism[6], ‘female’ is commonly defined in physiological terms,

female

adjective

1 of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

noun

1 a female person …

‘Woman’ in this legal sense is thus a category linked with the recording of anatomical sex at birth even if ‘[o]ne is not born woman: one becomes it [On ne naît pas femme: on le devient]’, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949.[7]
De Beauvoir’s statement is a core tenet of feminist theory. It draws attention to the fact that the gendered performances of those human beings who present anatomically as female at birth are shaped socially, rather than innately programmed. It should also be obvious, but is worth pointing out again, that saying a woman is an adult female human being is not the same as asserting homogeneity across the bodies, experiences or views of such persons.

2) In UK law today, it is possible for a person whose anatomical sex was recorded as male at birth to legally become a woman in adulthood, and vice versa. The UK’s 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) affords a person the protection of their reassigned sex through acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) following a formal review process by other members of society (the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ here is a reference ‘to a man or to a woman’, as per the legal definitions above).

The GRA, and its governance technology of a GRC, thus currently affirms de Beauvoir’s feminist insight that gender identity is both an individual and a societal affair. A GRC can be gained by anyone over 18 who has lived in their ‘acquired gender’ for two years and intends to do so until death.

Under the 2010 UK Equality Act gender reassignment is also a protected characteristic, although a person does not (currently) acquire the protected characteristic of the sex towards which they are transitioning without acquisition of a GRC. Gender reassignment refers to ‘changing physiological or other attributes of sex’ (as defined in the Equality Act 2010), thus,

A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

Without a GRC, a trans woman is thus legally a male human being with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and without the protected characteristic of their acquired sex, although facilities dedicated to women may be accessed where these do not invoke the single sex exemptions of the Equality Act.[8]
In summary, then, the legal category ‘women’ in the UK currently includes those adult female persons accepting of the anatomical sex recorded for them at birth, and also those adult persons uncomfortable with their recorded sex at birth who have gained a certificate of recognition of the legal reassignment of their sex in adulthood.

Given that those adult persons who have proceeded with formal recognition for their transition are already legally considered to be women, projecting Trans Women Are Women onto the Ministry of Justice presumably constitutes a demand for the legal inclusion as women of a legal class of persons outside the above legal definitions. The context makes clear that the persons in question are those who do not identify with the sex recorded on their birth certificate, have not proceeded with or gained a GRC that legally embraces them as women, but nonetheless self-define as women.

Ontology

noun: ontology; plural noun: ontologies

1. the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.

To state that trans women are women thus becomes an ontological demand to open up the legal category ‘women’ to encompass three groups of persons:

1) so-called ‘cisgender’ women, i.e. adult human beings who accept the anatomical sex recorded on their birth certificate;

2) adult male human beings who have acquired and committed to the protected sex characteristic of female, by being recognised by society to have changed physiological or other attributes and to have acquired a GRC;

and 3) male-anatomied people self-identifying as women.

Taken to its extreme, this third grouping affirms that adult male human beings may assume the category ‘woman’ simply by saying they are women. In doing so, identity/identification becomes unhooked from the combined anatomical-legal bases of the category ‘woman’ (as in the first two legal definitions above).

In the words of feminist scholar Silvia Federici, individual identity here has been acquired through a dissociation from the body:
[t]he product of this alienation from the body … was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as “otherness” from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it.[9]
It is this unmooring of the category ‘woman’ from the materiality of the body that provokes pronouncements dissonant to common sense, such as I am a woman, and I have a penis, or claims that lesbians (female homosexuals) should raise their cotton ceiling to permit entry by the penises of so-called trans women lesbians.

It may perhaps be the case that accepting the statement ‘trans women are women’ as ontologically true is the most liberating step humanity can take to dismantle restrictive gender constructions and binaries. It may also be the case that rising diagnoses of gender dysphoria and the sense of ‘being born in the wrong body’ and/or being recorded as the wrong sex, simply reflect an underlying prevalence of previously unrecognised trans gender people in society.

Yet the statement Trans Women Are Women! makes an assertion that is neither ontologically given nor socially settled, even if society is being demanded to ‘repeat after us’ its truth. The statement means knitting together two categories conventionally understood as relational polarities, even as diversity within these categories, as well as blurring across their boundaries, is part of how these categories are understood.

Arguably for many, then, demanding that the category ‘woman’ accommodate the adult bodies of any person presenting anatomically as male, requires an act of doublethink. Perhaps most significantly, it requires that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are emptied of anything unique to define them, thereby conceptually erasing the class of human beings conventionally described by the terms.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them …

‘Reality control’, they called it: … ‘doublethink’.[10]
Class

This demand is significant. Behind the legal and ontological dissonance generated by the conceptual insertion of people with male sex anatomy into the category woman, is also a class analysis observing that the category of persons conventionally known as ‘woman’ continues to be penalised in patriarchal society because they are female.

The gender pay gap appears to be intractable; male-violence towards girls and women is escalating both globally and in the UK, with violence against women and girls one of the most systematic and widespread human rights violations globally; and legally (in English law) the crime of rape can only be carried out by persons with a penis.

In science, the persistent gender bias in journal editors, paper reviewers and published authors means that women scientists are under-represented and under-published. In popular culture, film and TV dramas continue to be dominated by ‘fridging’: ‘a persistent sexist trope’ named after a 1994 Green Lantern comic in which the hero returns home to find the corpse of his murdered girlfriend in a fridge – creating a foil for his superheroism whilst his female companion can’t enjoy any character progression because she’s dead. Even the contributions of women DJs to UK club culture have been ‘pretty obliterated’ out of clubbing history.

These dimensions signal that as a class women’s experiences are different to men’s, even whilst acknowledging the great diversity of bodies, histories and opportunities that also shape the experience of women (and men). Structural contexts continue to pattern both discrimination and violence towards the class and category of ‘woman’. They are amongst the reasons why ‘sex’ is a protected characteristic under UK equality law: as, for example, in the statement that ‘Men and women in full-time or part-time employment have a right to equal pay (Sex Equality).’ Conversely, men, as a class, ‘have never needed protection from women for their own safety, privacy and dignity.’

It is thus both problematic and alienating (if unsurprising) to find that insertions – assisted by self-identification – of male-anatomied people into spaces designated as ‘for women’ or ‘women-only’ do indeed seem to be exacerbating, rather than redressing, this class-based inequality. If the only thing required is for male-anatomied people to say they are female, and for society to acquiesce to this assertion, then past and present experience suggests that male-anatomied people will begin to appropriate spaces reserved by society for women and girls. This scenario is indeed playing out now.

For example, political parties in the UK are opening up all-women shortlists to self-identifying trans women, leading to suspensions of female members expressing concern with this policy. In 2016 and to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people some members of the UK’s Green Party promoted the idea of substituting the term ‘non-men’ for ‘women’. More recently, and under a cloud of concerns of the darkest nature, a prominent Green Party trans woman left the party, accusing it of transphobia before applying to join the Liberal Democrats for whom self-definition confirms candidacy for all-women shortlists. Those in the Green Party expressing concern regarding ‘hard-line pro-trans policies and associated bullying‘ are themselves being threatened with expulsion from the Party.

Meanwhile, in the business world an individual presenting as male on some days (e.g. in a grey suit) and as a woman on others (e.g. in a pink dress and blond wig) recently gained an accolade designated for women. In this case, gaining materially from self-identification as a woman required little commitment to the acquired gender. In sports, revisions to international sporting regulations are permitting transgender women to compete in female categories, which some analysts suggest confers unfair physical advantage due in particular to statistically higher levels of testosterone.

An inter-sectional analysis of sex, gender and racism might observe that trans women experience violence and trauma at the hands of male human beings that is patterned similarly to that experienced by women, and that might also be compounded by racism. To quote Silvia Federici once again, transphobia as well as racism intersects with misogyny: thus, in the US, between 2010 and 2016 ‘at least 111 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were murdered …, most of whom were black trans women.’ To put this in context, however, homicide statistics in the US for 2010 only, recorded 3,292 murders of women. In the UK in the last decade, and as the Chief Executive of the London-based sexual and domestic violence charity Nia has documented ,

there have been 8 homicides of trans people – all biologically male; on the other hand, trans people – all biologically male – have killed 11, 4 of their victims were women. And in the same period, men have killed at least 1,373 women.

At the same time, in recent years a number of empirically documented cases do also indicate that some males identifying as trans gender go on to commit crimes – especially sexual assault – against women and girls; crimes which with self-ID might more readily be reported as committed by a woman instead of by a man. If it is ‘transphobic’ to even observe the existence of these empirical cases, how can there be an open conversation about the safe-guarding required to protect the needs of any of the persons concerned?

Overall, it becomes hard not to see the statement Trans Women Are Women as providing an underhand logic for the further ceding of space by those disadvantaged by patriarchy to those who gain from this societal structure. In being based on a privately and publicly expensive version of identity consistent with the atomised individualism of neoliberal ideology, self-ID seems foundationally antagonistic to class politics. It appears to be particularly averse to feminism as a political movement critical of patriarchal capitalism.

Why is this antagonism not of serious concern to capitalism-critical activists?

Enter the 2018 Consultation on reforms to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004

As noted above, in the UK a public consultation is currently taking place regarding proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The aim is to improve the government service guiding the existing process of legally changing gender for those trans and non-binary people who wish to use it. The consultation is online and the deadline for submissions is 19th October (see resources below).

Public services clearly need to work as best they can in a manner that is as inclusive and respectful as possible, and particularly to do whatever is possible to prevent harms experienced by categories of citizens. Legal reforms also need to take account of the interests and experiences of different classes of persons in society, as well as being congruent with other areas of legislation. The GRA consultation, for example, commits to upholding the Equality Act 2010, including provision for same- or single-sex spaces, even where upholding these services might ‘otherwise be unlawful gender reassignment discrimination.’

Reform of the GRA focuses on several dimensions, including movement towards a self-declaratory model that will relax current rules around legal sex identification (i.e. identification as a man or woman). If passed, this dimension ‘will represent a fundamental change in English law as to who is classed as a “man” and a “woman”.’ In particular, it means accepting – in principle and in law – that a person whose anatomical sex is male at birth may legally become female purely because they decide that they are, without going through any gender reassignment processes or receiving much by way of societal review of this decision.

Given that people with female anatomy as a class disproportionately experience objectification, discrimination and violence at the hands of people with male anatomy, it seems both logical and important that concerns regarding these changes are taken seriously. The implied categorical changes to the concept of ‘woman’ also have significant philosophical implications, not least for feminist theory. More prosaically, the potential for men to use legal relaxations both to access spaces conventionally set aside for women, as well as to be favoured (as we have seen) with access to public platforms designated as ‘for women’, are legitimate concerns. It remains unclear what safeguards will be instituted to prevent unintended harms.[11]
Thoughtcrime

Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. … Your name was removed from registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.[12]
The 2014 Trans Manifesto to the main political parties in the UK states that ‘[t]he intention has never been that trans people should have more rights than anyone else, but instead have the same rights that others take for granted.'[13] This statement rings hollow, however, when women and others are harassed for simply meeting to discuss proposed policy changes that also affect them.

What has been astonishing to me, and indeed one reason for writing this post, is the level of abuse thrown at women for wishing to meet to discuss these changes. Women and trans women trying to have a respectful and open conversation about the implications of proposed amendments to the GRA are routinely spoken of as ‘bigots’ and labelled as ‘transphobes’.

I too am a woman who has experienced sexualised discrimination, harassment and violence at the hands of men in a context of patriarchy. It seems to me that the very fact that so many women are speaking critically about self-sex-ID is a red flag that something is wrong.

Resources

The UK government’s public consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 is here. The consultation is lengthy but can be filled in and saved as you go.

The deadline for submissions is 19th October.

For a range of resources with diverse perspectives on the consultation and guidance on formulating responses see,

Women’s Place UK

Lost Lesbian blog

Stonewall Trans Equality

Fairplayforwomen

I worked through the consultation with tabs open for all of these resources and they all informed the responses that I eventually contributed.

I advise against using the simple guide created by the organisation Level Up because it has rewritten the questions used in the original question such that they lead to responses that are biased. For example,

‘Do you think there should be a requirement in the future for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria?’ (Q3)

has been rewritten as

‘Do you think that trans people should have to prove to medical professionals that they are trans enough?’ (Q3&4)

And ‘Do you agree that an applicant should have to provide evidence that they have lived in their acquired gender for a period of time before applying?’ (Q5)

has been rewritten as

‘Do you think the government should have the right to delay someone’s ability to correct their gender?’ (Q5)

I think this rewriting of the questions in the government consultation undermines the consultation and potentially dilutes the legitimacy of the outcome. It is also disrespectful to the thousands of people completing the consulation online in good faith. If you think this rewriting is cause for concern you can write to [email protected].

Notes
[1] Orwell, G. 2013[1949] 1984. London: Penguin, p. 286.
[2] Ibid. p. 92.
[3] As clarified in philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[4] As in ‘the immense labour to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce … men’s (sic) subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word’ (Foucault, M. 1998(1976) The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books, p. 60).
[5] ‘Ontology’ means literally the study of being, i.e. of what can be said to exist. It is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the ultimate nature of reality, that nonetheless is approached differently and concerned with different kinds of beings depending on “culture”. Ontological assumptions denote what entities can exist, into what categories they can be sorted, and by what practices and methods they can be known (i.e. epistemology), for participants in a social grouping sharing and negotiating these assumptions. I discuss ontological dimensions of environmental knowledge and policy in a recent paper in the Journal of Political Ecology.
[6] Statistics on disorders of sex development (DSD)s confirm that anatomical sex differentiation into male or female is unambiguous for the majority of births, even whilst affirming DSDs to clearly be significant for those thus diagnosed.
[7] De Beauvoir, S. 1955[1949] The Second Sex. London: Picador.
[8] I am grateful to lawyer Julian Norman and Alan Henness for clarifying aspects of the legal dimensions here (see also comments thread) – edits made 8 October 2018.
[9] Federici, S. 2004 Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation in Medieval Europe. New York: Autonomedia, p. 151, emphasis in original.
[10] Orwell op. cit., pp.40-41.
[11] Given the currently polarised public conversation about the GRA consultation, it might surprise readers that it is possible to engage with the consultation in a nuanced and ‘non-binary’ way. Here are a couple of examples from my own responses to the consultation:

‘Question 5: (A) Do you agree that an applicant should have to provide evidence that they have lived in their acquired gender for a period of time before applying?’

I answered ‘No’ to this question, because

Feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir onwards observes that gender is performed in relation to social values and expectations, as well as in relation to a person’s often creative sense of these expectations and their desires not to conform with them. Hence, “living in a gender” is not something the government should be requiring of its citizens, nor is it something that can be policed as such, since there are infinite ways to ‘be a woman’ or ‘a man’. I disagree with any attempts to enshrine sexist stereotypes into law. If a person has a need to change their legal sex because it will ease their sense of dysphoria, or as part of a course of medical treatment, or for some other reason which satisfies the GRA, then there is no need to investigate the way they live their life. Women can live in all kinds of ways and so can men.

My response is consistent with the guidance developed by Women’s Place UK who state that ‘WPUK is opposed to this’ because it ‘inscribes sexism and sexist stereotypes into law’ and ‘works against the rights of both the applicant and other individuals and groups with protected characteristics.’

For ‘Question 20: Do you think that there need to be changes to the Gender Recognition Act to accommodate individuals who identify as non-binary?’ I also responded ‘No’, but not perhaps for the reasons a trans ideologist might think. I wrote,

We are all ‘non-binary’ in terms of gender. We all experience and exhibit traits characterised by society to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and at a biophysical level all our bodies are infused by hormones characterised as ‘male’ and ‘female’, even whilst our primary sexual charcateristics are in most cases unambiguously male or female. The idea that some people are in a box named ‘non-binary’ whilst others are boxed as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ in gender terms simply produces another binary. This is devastatingly unhelpful in terms of engaging critically with the repressive gendered binaries that effect sex-based discimination and exclusions. The GRA should definitely *not* affirm a new binary of ‘non-binary’ and ‘others’.
[12] Orwell op. cit. p. 22.
[13] Trans people have the same human rights as any other person and should not be discriminated against for identifying as trans gender. The characteristic of gender reassignment ‘for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex’ is thereby protected under the Equality Act 2010 (as detailed above).

Part 3, Chapter 2

Part 3, Chapter 2

2

He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O’Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.

Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.

With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimes — espionage, sabotage, and the like — to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: ‘I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.’ Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again. There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep.

The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which lasted — he thought, he could not be sure — ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.

There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.

He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up.

He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards.

‘Room 101,’ said the officer.

The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.

He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O’Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.

He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had heard O’Brien’s voice. All through his interrogation, although he had never seen him, he had had the feeling that O’Brien was at his elbow, just out of sight. It was O’Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once — Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness — a voice murmured in his ear: ‘Don’t worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.’ He was not sure whether it was O’Brien’s voice; but it was the same voice that had said to him, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ in that other dream, seven years ago.

He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. O’Brien was looking down at him gravely and rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round the face.

‘I told you,’ said O’Brien, ‘that if we met again it would be here.’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

Without any warning except a slight movement of O’Brien’s hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.

‘You are afraid,’ said O’Brien, watching his face, ‘that in another moment something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking, is it not, Winston?’

Winston did not answer. O’Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.

‘That was forty,’ said O’Brien. ‘You can see that the numbers on this dial run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien’s manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.

‘I am taking trouble with you, Winston,’ he said, ‘because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?’

‘When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.’

‘With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?’

Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.

‘The truth, please, Winston. Your truth. Tell me what you think you remember.’

‘I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that –‘

O’Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.

‘Another example,’ he said. ‘Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three onetime Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’

An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.

‘It exists!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’

‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’

‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.

Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.

‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’

‘”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”‘ repeated Winston obediently.

‘”Who controls the present controls the past,”‘ said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’

Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O’Brien smiled faintly. ‘You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ‘Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’

‘No.’

‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’

‘In records. It is written down.’

‘In records. And –?’

‘In the mind. In human memories.’

‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’

‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’

O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.

‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘Four.’

‘And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?’

‘Four.’

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four.’

The needle went up to sixty.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Five! Five! Five!’

‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’

‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’

Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.

‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’

‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’

He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston’s eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O’Brien.

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’

‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’

‘Really to see them.’

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

Perhaps the needle was eighty — ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six — in all honesty I don’t know.’

‘Better,’ said O’Brien.

A needle slid into Winston’s arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful, healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien arm. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that it bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place where they could meet and talk. O’Brien was looking down at him with an expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind. When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.

‘Do you know where you are, Winston?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.’

‘Do you know how long you have been here?’

‘I don’t know. Days, weeks, months — I think it is months.’

‘And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’

‘To make them confess.’

‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’

‘To punish them.’

‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?’

He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston’s heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into the bed. He felt certain that O’Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O’Brien turned away. He took a pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:

‘The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.’

Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O’Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference — in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien smiled slightly. ‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “Thou art”. No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed — Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford — in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping — and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.’

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O’Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.

‘Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head. O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.

‘Three thousand,’ he said, speaking over Winston’s head to the man in the white coat.

Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain. O’Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.

‘This time it will not hurt,’ he said. ‘Keep your eyes fixed on mine.’

At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.

‘It will not last,’ said O’Brien. ‘Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?’

Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’

‘Yes.’

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O’Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one’s life when one was in effect a different person.

‘You see now,’ said O’Brien, ‘that it is at any rate possible.’

‘Yes,’ said Winston.

O’Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O’Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.

‘Do you remember writing in your diary,’ he said, ‘that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose.’

‘Any question I like?’

‘Anything.’ He saw that Winston’s eyes were upon the dial. ‘It is switched off. What is your first question?’

‘What have you done with Julia?’ said Winston.

O’Brien smiled again. ‘She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately — unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness — everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.’

‘You tortured her?’

O’Brien left this unanswered. ‘Next question,’ he said.

‘Does Big Brother exist?’

‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’

‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.

Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, ‘You do not exist’, contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O’Brien would demolish him.

‘I think I exist,’ he said wearily. ‘I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?’

‘It is of no importance. He exists.’

‘Will Big Brother ever die?’

‘Of course not. How could he die? Next question.’

‘Does the Brotherhood exist?’

‘That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.’

Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:

‘What is in Room 101?’

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:

‘You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.’

He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was at an end. A needle jerked into Winston’s arm. He sank almost instantly into deep sleep.

< Back Forward >

How many fingers am I holding up?

In a famous scene in George Orwell’s 1984, Inner Party member O’Brien tests protagonist Winston Smith’s allegiance to Party truth by demanding that Winston sees five fingers, instead of the four he is holding up. Winston’s refusal to see something other than what his eyes tell him is the cue for intense physical pain, courtesy of the Ministry of Love.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

“Four.”

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever.[1]
Winston’s crime is to retain a sense of an outside to the reality being dictated to him. He experiences the Party as requiring him to ‘reject the evidence of [his] eyes and ears’ such that common sense itself is ‘[t]he heresy of heresies’.[2]
Winston is unable to fully capitulate to the slogans of the Party. He says the words, but they provoke such cognitive dissonance that he risks all for moments of intimacy and freedom beyond the nightmare reality disciplined by the Party’s thought police.

‘Repeat it, if you please’, says O’Brien to Winston.

The power of slogans

A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan, political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group.

Orwell’s Party slogans War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! are brilliantly dissonant. In asserting discordant causal linkings of familiar categories as ‘truths’, they act to convey something truthful about the deceptions on which modern society is built. Military intervention is indeed asserted as necessary to create and maintain peace, even though all around we see the destabilising effects of unnecessary wars. We might consider ourselves to be free, even though we are bound to states with the power to remove citizenship protections[3], tethered to jobs that may not be of our choosing, and subjected in multiple senses of the term[4]. And it is a commonplace that learning leads to a disorienting of certainties, encapsulated in Einstein’s phrase that ‘the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.’

I can only assume these Orwellian doublethink dimensions were intentional in a recent projection onto London’s Ministry of Justice demanding viewers to ‘Repeat After Us’ the slogan Trans Women Are Women!

For some people the assertion ‘trans women are women’ does something similar to the Party slogans devised by Orwell. It messes with categories in various ways traced below, at the same time as truthfully conveying a contested political reality towards which contemporary society is being pushed.

The present significance of the assertion in the UK revolves around a current public government consultation for reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) (deadline 19th October). Reform has been proposed so as to improve the rights of trans people who do not identify into adulthood with the sex recorded on their birth certificate. This is a laudable aim, although it remains unclear how such reforms might affect existing single-sex exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. A primary proposed mechanism of reform is to simplify existing administrative processes through which transgender people can legally change their recorded birth sex to the sex with which they identify.

Concerns are being expressed regarding potential implications of these reforms. Feminists caution that the concept ‘woman’ will be emptied of meaning if individuals with anatomy conventionally known as male are able to more easily assume the mantle of this category in its legal form. As trans woman Debbie Hayton affirms, ‘women would certainly be affected by a changed legal definition of what it means to be a woman.’

Part of the controversy is linked with the observation that we inhabit a patriarchal societal context in which the legal class of persons conventionally known as ‘women’ continues to be disadvantaged because they are women. To provide one example of the material manifestation of this societal situation, recent UK government statistics report that perpetrators of violent crime are more likely to be male, and women over the age of 16 are five times more likely to have experienced sexual assault than men. These contexts give rise to rational (i.e. not phobic) fears concerning the implications of allowing people with anatomy conventionally sexed as male to gain access to spaces in society that currently are conventionally and legally provided for girls and women; whilst simultaneously eroding legal and societal support for the provision of spaces set aside to protect girls and women.

The UK government’s public consultation states that the government is particularly interested in hearing from ‘Organisations working to support individuals of a particular gender – such as women’s groups providing support to victims of violence or sexual assault’. Indeed, the Minister for Women and Equalities opens the consultation by asserting,

I decided to learn more about the public online consultation on reform of the GRA in part because I wanted to understand why I experienced the assertion Trans Women are Women! to be dissonant in literal terms. I especially wanted to consider how my own ignorance might be contributing to this experience of dissonance, since it is different to my experience of the statement ‘trans women are trans women’, which I entirely agree with and respect. Mostly, however, I felt alienated by the Orwellian tactics deployed to force society to accept the statement Trans Women are Women as ‘The Truth’, as well as confused by hearing totalising discourses from activists I otherwise understood to embrace anti-authoritarian politics.

Legal, ontological[5] and class dimensions of the assertion have come more clearly into focus as I have gone through the government consultation, read the legislation around it, and engaged with different perspectives and concerns in the lively debate regarding the proposed reforms. In this post, I share what I have learned regarding the complex politics of experience infusing, fabricating and financing the trans gender movement and its intersections with feminism. I provide diverse resources at the end of the post to support others in the UK who may wish to participate in the public consultation on the GRA.

My overriding sense is that in the UK (as elsewhere) a political struggle is taking place over the category ‘woman’ and who is able to define and inhabit this category. Currently any disagreement with the statement ‘trans women are women’ is being policed by some as a form of Orwellian thoughtcrime requiring punishment. It feels increasingly uncomfortable to stay silent in this context, but it is with trepidation that I share my reflections.

Law

In the UK today there are two categories of persons legally considered to be women.

1) ‘Women’ are adult human beings who present anatomically as the female sex at birth, are recorded as female on their birth certificate on account of this presentation, and in ‘cisgender‘ terms continue into adulthood to understand that they are sexed anatomically as female. ‘Women’ defined legally as such does not foreclose the fact that such individuals also have diverse bodies, histories, experiences and political leanings.

The online legal dictionary states,

WOMEN, persons. In its most enlarged sense, this word signifies all the females of the human species; but in a more restricted sense, it means all such females who have arrived at the age of puberty.

Uncontroversially for a species whose reproductive possibilities rely on sexual dimorphism[6], ‘female’ is commonly defined in physiological terms,

female

adjective

1 of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

noun

1 a female person …

‘Woman’ in this legal sense is thus a category linked with the recording of anatomical sex at birth even if ‘[o]ne is not born woman: one becomes it [On ne naît pas femme: on le devient]’, as feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949.[7]
De Beauvoir’s statement is a core tenet of feminist theory. It draws attention to the fact that the gendered performances of those human beings who present anatomically as female at birth are shaped socially, rather than innately programmed. It should also be obvious, but is worth pointing out again, that saying a woman is an adult female human being is not the same as asserting homogeneity across the bodies, experiences or views of such persons.

2) In UK law today, it is possible for a person whose anatomical sex was recorded as male at birth to legally become a woman in adulthood, and vice versa. The UK’s 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) affords a person the protection of their reassigned sex through acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) following a formal review process by other members of society (the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ here is a reference ‘to a man or to a woman’, as per the legal definitions above).

The GRA, and its governance technology of a GRC, thus currently affirms de Beauvoir’s feminist insight that gender identity is both an individual and a societal affair. A GRC can be gained by anyone over 18 who has lived in their ‘acquired gender’ for two years and intends to do so until death.

Under the 2010 UK Equality Act gender reassignment is also a protected characteristic, although a person does not (currently) acquire the protected characteristic of the sex towards which they are transitioning without acquisition of a GRC. Gender reassignment refers to ‘changing physiological or other attributes of sex’ (as defined in the Equality Act 2010), thus,

A person has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment if the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.

Without a GRC, a trans woman is thus legally a male human being with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment and without the protected characteristic of their acquired sex, although facilities dedicated to women may be accessed where these do not invoke the single sex exemptions of the Equality Act.[8]
In summary, then, the legal category ‘women’ in the UK currently includes those adult female persons accepting of the anatomical sex recorded for them at birth, and also those adult persons uncomfortable with their recorded sex at birth who have gained a certificate of recognition of the legal reassignment of their sex in adulthood.

Given that those adult persons who have proceeded with formal recognition for their transition are already legally considered to be women, projecting Trans Women Are Women onto the Ministry of Justice presumably constitutes a demand for the legal inclusion as women of a legal class of persons outside the above legal definitions. The context makes clear that the persons in question are those who do not identify with the sex recorded on their birth certificate, have not proceeded with or gained a GRC that legally embraces them as women, but nonetheless self-define as women.

Ontology

noun: ontology; plural noun: ontologies

1. the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.

To state that trans women are women thus becomes an ontological demand to open up the legal category ‘women’ to encompass three groups of persons:

1) so-called ‘cisgender’ women, i.e. adult human beings who accept the anatomical sex recorded on their birth certificate;

2) adult male human beings who have acquired and committed to the protected sex characteristic of female, by being recognised by society to have changed physiological or other attributes and to have acquired a GRC;

and 3) male-anatomied people self-identifying as women.

Taken to its extreme, this third grouping affirms that adult male human beings may assume the category ‘woman’ simply by saying they are women. In doing so, identity/identification becomes unhooked from the combined anatomical-legal bases of the category ‘woman’ (as in the first two legal definitions above).

In the words of feminist scholar Silvia Federici, individual identity here has been acquired through a dissociation from the body:
[t]he product of this alienation from the body … was the development of individual identity, conceived precisely as “otherness” from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it.[9]
It is this unmooring of the category ‘woman’ from the materiality of the body that provokes pronouncements dissonant to common sense, such as I am a woman, and I have a penis, or claims that lesbians (female homosexuals) should raise their cotton ceiling to permit entry by the penises of so-called trans women lesbians.

It may perhaps be the case that accepting the statement ‘trans women are women’ as ontologically true is the most liberating step humanity can take to dismantle restrictive gender constructions and binaries. It may also be the case that rising diagnoses of gender dysphoria and the sense of ‘being born in the wrong body’ and/or being recorded as the wrong sex, simply reflect an underlying prevalence of previously unrecognised trans gender people in society.

Yet the statement Trans Women Are Women! makes an assertion that is neither ontologically given nor socially settled, even if society is being demanded to ‘repeat after us’ its truth. The statement means knitting together two categories conventionally understood as relational polarities, even as diversity within these categories, as well as blurring across their boundaries, is part of how these categories are understood.

Arguably for many, then, demanding that the category ‘woman’ accommodate the adult bodies of any person presenting anatomically as male, requires an act of doublethink. Perhaps most significantly, it requires that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are emptied of anything unique to define them, thereby conceptually erasing the class of human beings conventionally described by the terms.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them …

‘Reality control’, they called it: … ‘doublethink’.[10]
Class

This demand is significant. Behind the legal and ontological dissonance generated by the conceptual insertion of people with male sex anatomy into the category woman, is also a class analysis observing that the category of persons conventionally known as ‘woman’ continues to be penalised in patriarchal society because they are female.

The gender pay gap appears to be intractable; male-violence towards girls and women is escalating both globally and in the UK, with violence against women and girls one of the most systematic and widespread human rights violations globally; and legally (in English law) the crime of rape can only be carried out by persons with a penis.

In science, the persistent gender bias in journal editors, paper reviewers and published authors means that women scientists are under-represented and under-published. In popular culture, film and TV dramas continue to be dominated by ‘fridging’: ‘a persistent sexist trope’ named after a 1994 Green Lantern comic in which the hero returns home to find the corpse of his murdered girlfriend in a fridge – creating a foil for his superheroism whilst his female companion can’t enjoy any character progression because she’s dead. Even the contributions of women DJs to UK club culture have been ‘pretty obliterated’ out of clubbing history.

These dimensions signal that as a class women’s experiences are different to men’s, even whilst acknowledging the great diversity of bodies, histories and opportunities that also shape the experience of women (and men). Structural contexts continue to pattern both discrimination and violence towards the class and category of ‘woman’. They are amongst the reasons why ‘sex’ is a protected characteristic under UK equality law: as, for example, in the statement that ‘Men and women in full-time or part-time employment have a right to equal pay (Sex Equality).’ Conversely, men, as a class, ‘have never needed protection from women for their own safety, privacy and dignity.’

It is thus both problematic and alienating (if unsurprising) to find that insertions – assisted by self-identification – of male-anatomied people into spaces designated as ‘for women’ or ‘women-only’ do indeed seem to be exacerbating, rather than redressing, this class-based inequality. If the only thing required is for male-anatomied people to say they are female, and for society to acquiesce to this assertion, then past and present experience suggests that male-anatomied people will begin to appropriate spaces reserved by society for women and girls. This scenario is indeed playing out now.

For example, political parties in the UK are opening up all-women shortlists to self-identifying trans women, leading to suspensions of female members expressing concern with this policy. In 2016 and to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary people some members of the UK’s Green Party promoted the idea of substituting the term ‘non-men’ for ‘women’. More recently, and under a cloud of concerns of the darkest nature, a prominent Green Party trans woman left the party, accusing it of transphobia before applying to join the Liberal Democrats for whom self-definition confirms candidacy for all-women shortlists. Those in the Green Party expressing concern regarding ‘hard-line pro-trans policies and associated bullying‘ are themselves being threatened with expulsion from the Party.

Meanwhile, in the business world an individual presenting as male on some days (e.g. in a grey suit) and as a woman on others (e.g. in a pink dress and blond wig) recently gained an accolade designated for women. In this case, gaining materially from self-identification as a woman required little commitment to the acquired gender. In sports, revisions to international sporting regulations are permitting transgender women to compete in female categories, which some analysts suggest confers unfair physical advantage due in particular to statistically higher levels of testosterone.

An inter-sectional analysis of sex, gender and racism might observe that trans women experience violence and trauma at the hands of male human beings that is patterned similarly to that experienced by women, and that might also be compounded by racism. To quote Silvia Federici once again, transphobia as well as racism intersects with misogyny: thus, in the US, between 2010 and 2016 ‘at least 111 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were murdered …, most of whom were black trans women.’ To put this in context, however, homicide statistics in the US for 2010 only, recorded 3,292 murders of women. In the UK in the last decade, and as the Chief Executive of the London-based sexual and domestic violence charity Nia has documented ,

there have been 8 homicides of trans people – all biologically male; on the other hand, trans people – all biologically male – have killed 11, 4 of their victims were women. And in the same period, men have killed at least 1,373 women.

At the same time, in recent years a number of empirically documented cases do also indicate that some males identifying as trans gender go on to commit crimes – especially sexual assault – against women and girls; crimes which with self-ID might more readily be reported as committed by a woman instead of by a man. If it is ‘transphobic’ to even observe the existence of these empirical cases, how can there be an open conversation about the safe-guarding required to protect the needs of any of the persons concerned?

Overall, it becomes hard not to see the statement Trans Women Are Women as providing an underhand logic for the further ceding of space by those disadvantaged by patriarchy to those who gain from this societal structure. In being based on a privately and publicly expensive version of identity consistent with the atomised individualism of neoliberal ideology, self-ID seems foundationally antagonistic to class politics. It appears to be particularly averse to feminism as a political movement critical of patriarchal capitalism.

Why is this antagonism not of serious concern to capitalism-critical activists?

Enter the 2018 Consultation on reforms to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004

As noted above, in the UK a public consultation is currently taking place regarding proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The aim is to improve the government service guiding the existing process of legally changing gender for those trans and non-binary people who wish to use it. The consultation is online and the deadline for submissions is 19th October (see resources below).

Public services clearly need to work as best they can in a manner that is as inclusive and respectful as possible, and particularly to do whatever is possible to prevent harms experienced by categories of citizens. Legal reforms also need to take account of the interests and experiences of different classes of persons in society, as well as being congruent with other areas of legislation. The GRA consultation, for example, commits to upholding the Equality Act 2010, including provision for same- or single-sex spaces, even where upholding these services might ‘otherwise be unlawful gender reassignment discrimination.’

Reform of the GRA focuses on several dimensions, including movement towards a self-declaratory model that will relax current rules around legal sex identification (i.e. identification as a man or woman). If passed, this dimension ‘will represent a fundamental change in English law as to who is classed as a “man” and a “woman”.’ In particular, it means accepting – in principle and in law – that a person whose anatomical sex is male at birth may legally become female purely because they decide that they are, without going through any gender reassignment processes or receiving much by way of societal review of this decision.

Given that people with female anatomy as a class disproportionately experience objectification, discrimination and violence at the hands of people with male anatomy, it seems both logical and important that concerns regarding these changes are taken seriously. The implied categorical changes to the concept of ‘woman’ also have significant philosophical implications, not least for feminist theory. More prosaically, the potential for men to use legal relaxations both to access spaces conventionally set aside for women, as well as to be favoured (as we have seen) with access to public platforms designated as ‘for women’, are legitimate concerns. It remains unclear what safeguards will be instituted to prevent unintended harms.[11]
Thoughtcrime

Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. … Your name was removed from registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.[12]
The 2014 Trans Manifesto to the main political parties in the UK states that ‘[t]he intention has never been that trans people should have more rights than anyone else, but instead have the same rights that others take for granted.'[13] This statement rings hollow, however, when women and others are harassed for simply meeting to discuss proposed policy changes that also affect them.

What has been astonishing to me, and indeed one reason for writing this post, is the level of abuse thrown at women for wishing to meet to discuss these changes. Women and trans women trying to have a respectful and open conversation about the implications of proposed amendments to the GRA are routinely spoken of as ‘bigots’ and labelled as ‘transphobes’.

I too am a woman who has experienced sexualised discrimination, harassment and violence at the hands of men in a context of patriarchy. It seems to me that the very fact that so many women are speaking critically about self-sex-ID is a red flag that something is wrong.

Resources

The UK government’s public consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 is here. The consultation is lengthy but can be filled in and saved as you go.

The deadline for submissions is 19th October.

For a range of resources with diverse perspectives on the consultation and guidance on formulating responses see,

Women’s Place UK

Lost Lesbian blog

Stonewall Trans Equality

Fairplayforwomen

I worked through the consultation with tabs open for all of these resources and they all informed the responses that I eventually contributed.

I advise against using the simple guide created by the organisation Level Up because it has rewritten the questions used in the original question such that they lead to responses that are biased. For example,

‘Do you think there should be a requirement in the future for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria?’ (Q3)

has been rewritten as

‘Do you think that trans people should have to prove to medical professionals that they are trans enough?’ (Q3&4)

And ‘Do you agree that an applicant should have to provide evidence that they have lived in their acquired gender for a period of time before applying?’ (Q5)

has been rewritten as

‘Do you think the government should have the right to delay someone’s ability to correct their gender?’ (Q5)

I think this rewriting of the questions in the government consultation undermines the consultation and potentially dilutes the legitimacy of the outcome. It is also disrespectful to the thousands of people completing the consulation online in good faith. If you think this rewriting is cause for concern you can write to [email protected].

Notes
[1] Orwell, G. 2013[1949] 1984. London: Penguin, p. 286.
[2] Ibid. p. 92.
[3] As clarified in philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[4] As in ‘the immense labour to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce … men’s (sic) subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word’ (Foucault, M. 1998(1976) The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books, p. 60).
[5] ‘Ontology’ means literally the study of being, i.e. of what can be said to exist. It is the branch of metaphysics dealing with the ultimate nature of reality, that nonetheless is approached differently and concerned with different kinds of beings depending on “culture”. Ontological assumptions denote what entities can exist, into what categories they can be sorted, and by what practices and methods they can be known (i.e. epistemology), for participants in a social grouping sharing and negotiating these assumptions. I discuss ontological dimensions of environmental knowledge and policy in a recent paper in the Journal of Political Ecology.
[6] Statistics on disorders of sex development (DSD)s confirm that anatomical sex differentiation into male or female is unambiguous for the majority of births, even whilst affirming DSDs to clearly be significant for those thus diagnosed.
[7] De Beauvoir, S. 1955[1949] The Second Sex. London: Picador.
[8] I am grateful to lawyer Julian Norman and Alan Henness for clarifying aspects of the legal dimensions here (see also comments thread) – edits made 8 October 2018.
[9] Federici, S. 2004 Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation in Medieval Europe. New York: Autonomedia, p. 151, emphasis in original.
[10] Orwell op. cit., pp.40-41.
[11] Given the currently polarised public conversation about the GRA consultation, it might surprise readers that it is possible to engage with the consultation in a nuanced and ‘non-binary’ way. Here are a couple of examples from my own responses to the consultation:

‘Question 5: (A) Do you agree that an applicant should have to provide evidence that they have lived in their acquired gender for a period of time before applying?’

I answered ‘No’ to this question, because

Feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir onwards observes that gender is performed in relation to social values and expectations, as well as in relation to a person’s often creative sense of these expectations and their desires not to conform with them. Hence, “living in a gender” is not something the government should be requiring of its citizens, nor is it something that can be policed as such, since there are infinite ways to ‘be a woman’ or ‘a man’. I disagree with any attempts to enshrine sexist stereotypes into law. If a person has a need to change their legal sex because it will ease their sense of dysphoria, or as part of a course of medical treatment, or for some other reason which satisfies the GRA, then there is no need to investigate the way they live their life. Women can live in all kinds of ways and so can men.

My response is consistent with the guidance developed by Women’s Place UK who state that ‘WPUK is opposed to this’ because it ‘inscribes sexism and sexist stereotypes into law’ and ‘works against the rights of both the applicant and other individuals and groups with protected characteristics.’

For ‘Question 20: Do you think that there need to be changes to the Gender Recognition Act to accommodate individuals who identify as non-binary?’ I also responded ‘No’, but not perhaps for the reasons a trans ideologist might think. I wrote,

We are all ‘non-binary’ in terms of gender. We all experience and exhibit traits characterised by society to be ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and at a biophysical level all our bodies are infused by hormones characterised as ‘male’ and ‘female’, even whilst our primary sexual charcateristics are in most cases unambiguously male or female. The idea that some people are in a box named ‘non-binary’ whilst others are boxed as either ‘male’ or ‘female’ in gender terms simply produces another binary. This is devastatingly unhelpful in terms of engaging critically with the repressive gendered binaries that effect sex-based discimination and exclusions. The GRA should definitely *not* affirm a new binary of ‘non-binary’ and ‘others’.
[12] Orwell op. cit. p. 22.
[13] Trans people have the same human rights as any other person and should not be discriminated against for identifying as trans gender. The characteristic of gender reassignment ‘for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex’ is thereby protected under the Equality Act 2010 (as detailed above).

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Top 15 How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up Movie Quote 126 Most Correct Answers

How many fingers am I holding up Winston four and if the party says that it is not four but five then how many?

How many fingers am I holding up right now?

How many fingers hold Winston?

How many fingers does O’Brien holding up when he is torturing Winston?

What does holding up a 4 mean?

What is Winston’s greatest fear?

How many fingers George Orwell have?

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

What is the room 101 in 1984?

What is O’Brien saying that Winston has always known?

What is the last question that Winston asks O’Brien in chapter II What is O Brien’s answer?

What does O’Brien mean when he tells Winston in book 3 of 1984 they got me a long time ago?

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

How many fingers do you see quote?

Why does O’Brien say that he will have no martyrs?

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Fo…”

How many fingers am I holding up? – An occasional blog

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Fo…”

George Orwell – 1984 – Part 3, Chapter 2

how many fingers am i holding up movie quote

How many fingers am I holding up? – An occasional blog

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” — 1984 in 2021

“Marv, how many fingers am I holding up? Uh, hmmmmmm, eight?” – Home Alone 2: Lost in New York quote

How Many Fingers? – TV Tropes

Shadowhawk: How many fingers am I holding up? [Holds up two fingers]Marsha: Two.Shadowhawk: [Puts down hand] See? I was holding up one.

How many fingers am I holding up?

Part 3, Chapter 2

How many fingers am I holding up?

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

How many fingers am I holding up Winston four and if the party says that it is not four but five then how many?

How many fingers am I holding up right now?

How many fingers hold Winston?

How many fingers does O’Brien holding up when he is torturing Winston?

What does holding up a 4 mean?

What is Winston’s greatest fear?

How many fingers George Orwell have?

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

What is the room 101 in 1984?

What is O’Brien saying that Winston has always known?

What is the last question that Winston asks O’Brien in chapter II What is O Brien’s answer?

What does O’Brien mean when he tells Winston in book 3 of 1984 they got me a long time ago?

When Winston sees five fingers on O Brien’s hand it means that?

How many fingers do you see quote?

Why does O’Brien say that he will have no martyrs?

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’ ‘Fo…”

How many fingers am I holding up? – An occasional blog

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’ ‘Fo…”

George Orwell – 1984 – Part 3, Chapter 2

how many fingers am i holding up movie quote

How many fingers am I holding up? – An occasional blog

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” — 1984 in 2021

“Marv, how many fingers am I holding up? Uh, hmmmmmm, eight?” – Home Alone 2: Lost in New York quote

How Many Fingers? – TV Tropes

Shadowhawk: How many fingers am I holding up? [Holds up two fingers]Marsha: Two.Shadowhawk: [Puts down hand] See? I was holding up one.

How many fingers am I holding up?

Part 3, Chapter 2

How many fingers am I holding up?

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Fo…”

Quote by George Orwell: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Fo…”