This has turned out to be a weird week in terms of gender, particularly in Scotland and in Spain. I’m writing this specially for my international MA class in the subject ‘Body and Gender in Narrative’ as they might miss either one of the two events I wish to discuss here: the complete withdrawal from politics of Spanish MP Íñigo Errejón after very serious accusations of sexual misconduct and the leaking of the gender guidance documentation issued by the Scottish Government headed by SNP’s new leader John Swinney, claiming that there are 24 genders.
Errejón, aged 40, the official spokesperson of the left-wing coalition Sumar (he still is the president of the Más País party, an offspring of Podemos), has been accused by a dozen women so far of subjecting his sexual partners to highly humiliating psychological and physical abuse. Typically, it turns out that his misconduct was known in Madrid’s left-wing political circles but nothing was done to stop him until journalist and feminist activist Cristina Fallarás welcomed in her Instagram account the anonymous testimonials of his victims. One of the women, actor Elisa Mouliaá, has been the first to report Errejón to the Police. This morning Loreto Arenillas, Errejón’s chief of staff and MP in the local Madrid Parliament, has resigned after disclosures indicating she had silenced other victims to protect her boss, something she strenuously denies.
This is not the first politician accused of misogynistic crimes following the 2017 #MeToo campaign, but the shock is nonetheless enormous because of Errejón’s seemingly solid feminist, left-wing credentials. Also, why not mention it?, because of his often mocked baby-face looks suggesting a caring, vulnerable masculinity far from toxic patriarchal models. The bizarre letter that Errejón published in his X account accompanying the announcement of his resignation as MP and his complete withdrawal from politics, however, suggests that he has been compensating for poorly understood deficiencies in his own patriarchal masculinity. He has been abusing the many women that he managed to attract thanks, precisely, to his sanitized public profile, women he forced into demeaning submission as soon as they learned who he really is: a monster, as one of his victims explained.
The letter, which you can read here, is no doubt a historical document in the history of gender and masculinity in Spain and an astonishing self-portrait of a man unable to show empathy for his victims. The heading of the article by the satirical newspaper El Mundo Today summarizes it very well: “Íñigo Errejón deja la política tras ser víctima de unos abusos sexuales cometidos por él” [Íñigo Errejón abandons politics after falling victim to sexual abuses he himself committed]. I’m indeed tempted to offer a close reading of this extremely hypocritical text, but I’ll just go through the main points.
Errejón shows that he has delayed his resignation for as long as possible, until mounting pressure has forced him to take a stand. The explanation he offers is that in the decade of his intense political career his celebrity and public exposure have negatively affected his physical and mental health and destroyed his “estuctura afectiva y emocional” [affective and emotional structure], as would happen to anyone. In the two central paragraphs he acknowledges, using extremely abstruse newspeak, that in order to cope with his demanding political activities he has excluded caring and empathy from his life, which has resulted in a “subjetividad tóxica que en el caso de los hombres el patriarcado multiplica” [a toxic subjectivity which in the case of men patriarchy multiplies] employed in his dealings with colleagues, romantic partners, and even himself.
Errejón, as it can be seen, presents his case as an inevitable consequence of his daily contact with patriarchal political power, a sort of unwanted contamination that has led to an unsolvable contradiction between “el personaje y la persona” [the character and the person], between neoliberalism and his political party’s ideology. In the end, he announces his resignation as a necessary step to take care of himself, never mentioning his victims, and expecting the letter and his resignation to be sufficient compensation for his misconduct. There is not any mention, either, of the immense disappointment that his private behaviour must cause among the women in his political circle and of the direct harm he has done to all left-wing political actions to further gender equality in Spain. Minister Yolanda Díaz, the Sumar leader and current second Vice-President of the Government and head of the Ministry for Work and Social Economy, must be raging (she forced Errejón’s resignation but has so far kept silent).
As a left-wing feminist who is constantly preaching the idea that progressive men have the capacity and the duty to fight patriarchy, I am indeed sorely disappointed. Neither Errejón nor his former Podemos buddy Pablo Iglesias are men I have ever liked, or trusted (Errejón was years ago the unlawful recipient of a grant for which he did no research), but, still, the details in the testimonials of the victims are appalling. This is not simply a case of sexual harassment but a man’s systematic strategy to degrade all the women he met, from unwanted touching in a punk feminist concert to forcing different lovers who knew nothing of each other to meet, passing through the physical aggression against a drunken woman asleep in his bed. I believe it is easy to see a pattern: this man felt inferior to all these women and he lashed out against them in search of personal patriarchal self-validation. This is not something he has learnt in his years as a public figure, but an example of how deeply rooted patriarchal ideology may bloom thanks to empowering celebrity. The wonder (and the horror) is that so many women fell for Errejón and that so many persons helped to conceal his creepy misogyny.
To finish this part of my post, I’d like to point out that I see no advantage in sending Errejón to prison, where sexual offenders meet other toxic patriarchal men and nothing much is solved. I don’t see that Harvey Weinstein’s sentence, to name a most famous case, is truly helping the victims or preventing other crimes from being committed against other women. I would turn Errejón into a public example, and start with him a much needed programme of public re-education. The trust between men and women is at a historical low, particularly if we add to this scandal others such as the sad case of Gisèle Pelicot’s multiple rapes by her husband and his accomplices along a decade. As we are seeing in her trial, there is no shaming mechanism that works sufficiently well as a deterrent and a source of true education for recalcitrant sexist men and we must find it.
I came across the other topic of my post after reading diverse articles reporting that J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk were mocking the guidance documents issued by the Scottish Government to the public bodies collecting data on sex and gender. The official documentation I have found online does not include any lists but the by now infamous list of 24 genders endorsed by the SNP’s Government has been leaked by many newspapers. Here it is: cisgender, trans man, trans woman, non-binary, trans (not otherwise specified), agender, trans masculine, trans feminine, genderfluid, genderqueer, questioning, intersex, assigned female at birth (not specified), assigned male at birth (not specified), pangender, bigender, autigender, androgynous, gender non-conforming, detransitioned, neutral, demigender (female), demigender (male) and demigender (not otherwise specified). You can see why the list is easy to mock, as it is a strange mixed bag of little consistency or coherence, with some categories describing processes or experiences.
The way I see it, the SNP Government is trying to be as progressive as one can be these days, but it is making in the process a series of mistakes. To begin with, wait until they find out that biological sex is far from being a binary system and apparently expands to about 40 variations if we take into account chromosomal diversity (check the four papers mentioned here). If you multiply the biological and the gender variations you get a much bigger list of personal identities beyond the classic binaries female/male or woman/man. What baffles me every time I fill in a public document is why Governments insist on asking their citizens questions that refer to their genitalia (what used to be called private parts for some good reason) or their gender identity. Why stop there and not ask us who we enjoy having sex with?? If the data collected helps disadvantaged collectives, I might agree that the Scottish list could have a point, but, still, I fail to see its immediate usefulness. We live, of course, in the era of big data and all information is potentially saleable, so perhaps the SNP’s apparently benevolent approach hides something else. I hope not! On the other hand, if the Scottish Government is so interested in the gender identity of their citizens, the solution is quite obvious: instead of a list of options, they could offer in official documentation a blank slot where citizens could declare, only if they wish so, their chosen identity.
I’m well aware that Errejón’s misconduct and the Scottish list are very different topics but they do have one thing in common: both are political issues. In one case, the fall of a prominent political figure of the left wing might have important consequences not only for Spanish feminism but also for other distant matters: Minister Díaz is now negotiating the reduction of the weekly working hour, if she resigns we might all lose that longed-for advantage. In Scotland the SNP has gone in recent years through very rocky times. Nobody needs their gender policies to reinforce the positions of persons as intolerant as J.K. Rowling (with residence in Scotland) or Elon Musk, now Trump’s main supporter. Errejón’s dishonesty and the SNP’s misguided wokeism are setting up big hurdles in the road to progress and helping the traditional positions of those who support old sex-role essentialism.
A weird week, as I said.