Tell Me Why

I posted this blog post on my FB page because I was struck by the expression of frustration and anger from a highly intelligent, articulate and principled person who adds enormously to feminist discourse – always in a balanced, well-informed and logical way. One of the responses was from another intelligent and principled woman who I know would agree with the author on most issues – except this one.

I don’t feel threatened by genuine trans people and I know that most trans people just want to get on with their lives, the same as most other people. Nor do I think all the extremists hurling misogynistic abuse at women on social media are genuine trans people; some might be but I strongly suspect a lot are trolls or MRA/INCELs taking the proverbial. (More on that in a later post)

 

I don’t argue that all women are equally oppressed, any more than I would argue all men are equally oppressive. I don’t think that all men are a threat to women but I know that a lot of women have good reason to feel that men are potentially a threat and it is a fact that we live in what is still a phallocratic world, made so by the continued existence of a host of social structures and arrangements which cement male authority over females. 

 

It’s great if some women don’t feel their sex is being erased or feelings invalidated or safety threatened by the conflation of gender and sex and the privileging of gender identity over biology, which is at the heart of transgenderism as a political movement, but a lot of women do. And a lot of them are being told if they feel like that, they are bigots, or stupid or brainwashed – and bizarrely, they’re mostly being told that by people who claim to be on the Left.

 

We need to be able to examine why this has become such an acrimonious and divisive issue, when it’s obvious that women have co-existed with transgender people quite happily in the past.

 

In my opinion, four main things, which gained rapid momentum popularly, commercially and politically, tipped the unremarkable issue of trans rights into the most acrimonious, polarised and divisive issue of any I’ve witnessed, in over half a century of being a left-wing feminist.

 

1. The emergence, on social media, of the phenomenon of “transgender lesbians” – that is transwomen (TW) who are sexually attracted to women, and the outgrowth from that, of:

a) claims that male genitalia are female if the person identifies as a woman; and,

b) lesbians are being transphobic bigots if they are not open to having a sexual relationship with a TW who retains male genitalia.

 

2. The insistence, by transgender radicals, that TW, even without any type or degree of physical transition, are literally women, and as such are a subset of the sex category woman, and cis women are another, albeit vastly larger, sub set. (1)

 

3.  The issue of gender self-identification and change of sex on official documents by statutory declaration, which has been introduced more by a process of procedural creep here in NZ but which became the subject of heated dispute in the UK with a review of the Gender Recognition Act and accompanying potential for changes to the Equality Act, not because the country is a hotbed of transphobia but because:

a) the review was a dead cat thrown into a fraught political arena by the Tories, which people in the Labour, Greens and Liberal Parties immediately ran with and declared any opposition to it to be equivalent to fascism; and, 

b) because there is a very strong feminist tradition in the UK, and a wide range of women fought back. 

 

4. The explosion in, and response to, sudden onset gender dysphoria among gender non-conforming girls in the anglophone world in particular (2) and the adoption of variations on the Dutch protocol for the treatment of pre-pubescent kids who believe they are trans. (3) 

 

For women's liberationists, the debate is not about trans rights per se– it is certainly not about removing trans rights, or the ludicrously hyperbolic claim that trans people’s very existence is being denied.

 

Most of the women who are demonised as TERFs did not ever and do not oppose trans rights; most would fight to protect existing formal rights and would like to see services and outcomes for trans people improved – along with services and outcomes for all vulnerable groups.

 

What will never gain wide support is the extension of trans rights into the unrestricted right for any male-bodied person to be able to self-identify and gain full legal status as a woman; and, as a consequence of that, have full and unfettered access to women-only spaces and services that are currently protected in law and – more importantly – are widely accepted socially, i.e., have become part of the informal social contract such that most men respect them, and most women feel they have a right to them, and a right to a say in who uses them.

 

Those sex-based rights only exist because women fought for them and they needed to fight for them because women and girls were, and – in what is still a phallocratic world – remain, a vulnerable class of people.

 

Trans radicals demand we accept the premise that a self-declared, subjective, possibly shifting, unverifiable (because medical and bureaucratic gate-keeping is deemed to be a breach of trans rights) sense of individual gender identity must be privileged over the biological fact which is a foundational reality for the overwhelming majority of people. 

 

Gender as a concept only hangs together because of the concrete reality of sexually dimorphic reproduction. Without the reality of dimorphic biological sex there would be no such thing as gender or gender identity – there would just be individual and collective identity. 

 

That may very well be a good thing to strive for but we live in a stratified, dangerous and largely phallocratic world, and if we are not permitted to define ourselves as women, how do we formulate a resistance to being oppressed and hyper-exploited as women?  

 

That oppression and hyper-exploitation may not be as much of an issue for older, white, educated, affluent, geographically and socially mobile inhabitants of the imperial bubble like me – but it certainly still is for the majority of women and girls globally and it is not going to magically go "pouf" and disappear because a few people inside the imperial bubble declare individual gender identity trumps biological sex.

Notes:

(1) In the oppression hierarchy, so beloved of the politically infantile, misère is the winning hand and being in a majority is deemed to be automatically oppressive of minorities. By this stunningly stupid numerical measure, the poor must oppress the rich.

(2) Largely because of pressure from trans radicals and allies, too little attention has been paid to the effects, on girls especially, of appearance obsessed youth culture and exposure to porn, 

 

(3) We now know that the decision-making centre of the human brain is the last to mature (a fact of huge importance to people who argue against things like trying and sentencing kids as adults), and the approach advocated by trans radicals and widely adopted as a result, is in stark contrast to the “no medical gate-keeping please, we’re trans” approach for themselves. The Dutch protocol is almost always irreversible, relies on automatic affirmation, use of cancer drugs to delay puberty with no evidence of their long term effects, leads to major surgery with attendant exposure to anaesthesia, analgesics etc etc, and a life time of synthetic hormones and of constant medical surveillance. The rationale is to give kids time to find out if they are really trans - in reality it's delaying secondary sexual development until the current legal age at which cross sex hormones can be prescribed, and it is not known if delaying puberty also affects neurological and decision making development or has effects on wider physiological development.