Once Upon A Spectrum

Having an XX or XY sex chromosome is the biological norm and a foundational reality that is the basis of species reproduction. 

 

For those who inhabit the bubbles of technology, affluence and apparent choice, reproduction may not loom large in a world teeming with 7+ billion people, but for those outside the bubbles, it remains a more central and pressing reality. 

 

Numeric variations of the foundational chromosomal binary do occur; all are rare, some are extremely rare; some do not affect either reproductive fitness or wider health and well-being but most do affect reproductive fitness, and some have wider adverse outcomes for overall health and well-being, even causing death without the appropriate treatment.

 

The existence of a range of chromosomal and phenotypical variants on the XX: XY binary is used ideologically to claim that biological sex exists on a spectrum – taken by some to mean there are a number of different sexes. It is also used to justify the existence of a number of gender identities, some congruent with biological sex, some not. 

 

Although it is sometimes implied or overtly claimed they do, these numeric variants of the XX: XY norm do not constitute a range of sexes. 

 

The poor understanding of DSDs and the links between sex and gender can be illustrated by the claim made by the World Health Organisation, that it is possible for there to be people who have sex monosomy – i.e. only 1 X or one Y chromosome.

 

The truth is that, while a single X chromosome is compatible with life, (although known to be the cause of a large proportion of spontaneous abortions) – a single Y chromosome is incompatible with life. It would not make it past zygote stage, let alone to being a viable foetus.

 

Yet this claim has been repeated as fact in two major pieces here and here  on the transgender issue published by Stuff in the past year.

It may seem a bit nitpicky and a bit academic but it illustrates the way in which an ideology can harness science – in this case the existence of a growing list of numeric chromosomal disorders or variants – in order to influence a range of social policy decisions. 

 

In all of the above instances, the existence of DSDs is being used to strengthen the case for what is now seen as a "naturally occurring variation of human experience" – transgender identity. 

 

Gender identity is rather loosely defined as an individual's perceptions or subjective experience of being of a gender that may be 'cis' – congruent with their biological sex, or 'trans' – non-congruent, or neither. Given gender and sex are now used interchangeably, getting a grip on these increasingly slippery descriptors can be difficult.

 

There is an overlap between transgender and DSDs in that some people with a DSD may also be transgender but they are distinct phenomenon and it does no favours to either grouping for them to be lazily or opportunistically conflated in the way that the concepts of sex and gender have been to the point where they are so fused as to be politically and critically indistinguishable - which serves to undermine a key component of second wave feminist theory.

 

The change in the words that make up the acronym DSD illustrates this popularising and politicising of a scientific term. It used to be disorders of sexual differentiation and is now differences of sexual development. 

 

The descriptive umbrella term Intersex was coined to depathologise individuals born with a DSD, which is a valid strategy, but it may also serve to support a normalisation of a phenomenon for reasons that may not be benign or progressive.

 

For example, in a world saturated in endocrine disrupting (EDC) and DNA damaging chemicals, (DDC) if there is an increase in these conditions and others that are even subtler, it would not be surprising.

 

An increase in human genito-urinary disorders and a decrease in male sperm quality has been charted globally over the past 50 years, and we know there are profound effects of these chemicals on marine mammals.

 

We ought to be alert to the potential for snowballing effects on humans, given environmentally induced endocrine disruption is now widely accepted and evidence now shows that metabolic syndrome in horses is connected to the presence of EDCs in their food – most likely herbicide and pesticide residues.

 

The effects of any one of these chemicals on any given species or individual within that species, at any given point in the life cycle, are complex enough; the effects of thousands of chemicals in various amounts and combinations is a nightmarish unknown.

 

Mass chemical pollution is one of the three inter-related global catastrophes facing us. It would hardly be surprising if there were a variety of powerful entities with a vested interest in normalising chromosomal or autosomal disorders and other more subtle conditions, which may always have existed but the prevalence and severity of which are increasing. After all if these are all just naturally occurring variations in human genetics and physiology, then no-one needs to be held to account if they are increasing in incidence and severity.

 

Under significant pressure from the transgender lobby, which has a power and reach at complete variance with the claim of being the most marginalised and discriminated against of all minorities, the WHO has recently removed gender identity disorder  (GID) from its diagnostic manual, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) – following the American Psychiatric Association’s influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s  (DSM) 2012 replacement of GID with gender dysphoria (GD) – defined as the "emotional distress that results from a marked incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and the assigned gender."

 

This move from a disorder – an illness,  to dysphoria – a non-specific state of anxiety or dissatisfaction, to a natural variation of human experience, combined with the almost complete fusion of the concepts of sex and gender, has huge implications, which I will explore further in another post.

Uterus Transplantation

I’ve been having a think about uterus transplantation. The view currently is that uterus transplantation is about to move from the margins to the mainstream – ie from experiment to viable therapeutic option. Forty-two uterus transplantations have been performed globally, resulting in twelve live births.

The women’s rights advocate in me can't help but wonder how many women and neonates have died easily preventable deaths during the period of this grand experiment? How much suffering could have been prevented or eased if the funds committed to this had been used differently? If a live donor liver transplantation costs around NZ$450k all up, it seems likely that a uterus transplantation will cost a similar amount.

In a world in which 100,000 + women die every year from birth related complications – most of them preventable – and over 1 million neonates die every year, also mostly preventable deaths, how ethically defensible is uterus transplantation for adult human females who have functioning ovaries but no uterus, let alone the additional implications of uterus transplantation into someone who was born reproductively male?

Given solid organ transplantation is usually carried out to save life, and this is not a life saving procedure in the sense that liver, heart and lung, kidney transplantations are, there are complex triaging and funding implications for publicly funded health services – whoever the recipient is.

In the UK it is considered that the reproductive aspirations and desires of male to female (MtoF) transgender women have equal weight to those of natal women so if uterus transplantation is available to the latter, it must also be available to the former given transgender people who have undergone gender reassignment are protected under the Equality Act (2010). To deny transgender women equal right to a uterus transplantation could be unlawful discrimination.

It seems only a matter of time before we have the first uterus transplantation into a transgender person since Hirschfeld’s medically ill-judged and ethically dubious 1930s experiment. Further, given the recipients are reproductively male, there is no reason why, prior to gender reassignment treatment, they could not freeze their own sperm, use it to fertilise a donor egg in vitro, and gestate their own biological offspring.

Uterus transplantation surgery is risky and complex; it involves extensive and very expensive pre- and post-operative care, and there are the potential adverse effects of immuno-suppressants on the foetus and the person who is gestating it.

These issues apply to uterus transplantation into genetic females who were born without, or who have lost their womb to disease/injury, but in people who are genetically male, there are the added challenges of the different shape of the male pelvis; (1) the positioning and vascularisation of a uterus in a body not designed to hold it; getting the balance of the gestational hormones right, and there are dangers of infection that are a common reason for pregnancy failures in women with neovaginas. 

Immuno-suppression treatment obviously results in a greater susceptibility to recurrent infections. A natural vagina contains epithelium capable of producing a number of protective mechanisms and microflora that help prevent infections which might compromise pregnancy. These do not exist in the penile or intestinal lined neovaginas (2) surgically created for transwomen, XY women, and genetic women born with vaginal agenesis.

To deal with this, researchers propose that a utero-vaginal transplant should be performed, using as much donor vagina and other structures as possible – using a technique similar to a radical hysterectomy with preservation of the vaginal branches of the uterine vessels, as well as a radical retrieval of ligamentous material to compensate for the fact that genetic males don’t have uterosacral ligaments.

This would seem to preclude the use of live donors in light of the fact that, while women might be prepared to donate a uterus they no longer need, (3) they would be highly unlikely to want to undergo such extreme surgery and lose most of their vagina, so a dead donor would be the most likely source.

However, there is a far greater likelihood of graft success from a living donor.  And here’s where it gets really thought-provoking. As interested parties have noted, there is a growing pool of live donors who might be happy to oblige, or be persuaded to oblige: FtoM transgender people – transmen.

The best uterus for transplantation is from a healthy young woman who has vaginally delivered a child, and that demand may be met by the growing phenomenon of transmen deciding to have children before undergoing "bottom surgery".

It is claimed that the development of a modified dissection technique has reduced surgical risk, and a reduction in surgery time from 12+ hours to between 4 & 5 hours reduces the risk of venous thromboembolism. The promoters of this technique claim that it "favours minimally invasive retrieval techniques which should enhance recovery and reduce potential morbidity further.” (4) (My emphasis)

As a bonus, given transmen won’t need their ovaries, they can be removed at the same time and the ovarian vascular pedicles can be repurposed to further facilitate the implantation.

This utero-vaginal transplant reduces infection risk, allows for easy checking of the health of the graft and, once the graft is fully operational, the implantation of an embryo etc.

Once the transplant is no longer needed – i.e., after a foetus has been gestated to the point of viability and is removed via caesarian section – the graft has to be removed which means further surgery to reconstruct the neovagina could be needed.

So, between five and twelve hours of reasonably high risk surgery for the donor; several days in hospital and several weeks before they would be fully healed; use of painkillers and possibly antibiotics; long term implications for general and musculo-skeletal health given scale of disruption to blood vessels, nerves, loss of ligamentous structures etc.

For the recipient, major surgery, lengthy recovery, big doses of anti-rejection and other drugs, complex doses of HRT to kickstart the uterus, plus constant testing for organ rejection, metabolic organ and cardio-vascular health over a minimum of 6 to 12 months, and the implantation of single embryos at a time, from a donor eggs, fertilised in vitro – itself a lengthy and expensive process.

This is the riskiest and most expensive of high-risk, expensive obstetrics. It’s stating the obvious that all surgery involves risk. No one should undergo major surgery unnecessarily – I include in that, appearance enhancement.

Nor should doctors encourage it – or see themselves as purveyors of commercial services – al la the US cosmedico who offered transmen a rebate on a mastectomy during Pride month. (I didn’t see any similar offer for a cut-price penectomy and orchiectomy.)

That aside, what are the ethical and legal implications of seeing transmen as a source of spare parts for womb-less women with neovaginas? Like the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones in neurologically immature young people, there are numerous ethical and political quagmires to be negotiated.

Let's stop and think about the reproductive aspirations of the new cohort of young transgender people who have not gone through their genetically determined puberty and who have had a counter-puberty forced by means of cross sex hormones in order to develop the secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex.

FtoM transgender kids who have been given puberty blockers and cross sex hormones are out of the personal reproduction picture; they’ve given up their genetically determined female sex function, and the male sex function - the production and delivery of sperm – can't be simulated by surgery or drug regimes.

They won’t be a source of donor eggs or utero-vaginal transplants as their eggs won’t have matured and their uterus and vagina will be that of a pre-pubescent child. Even if FtoM trans kids go far enough into puberty to produce mature eggs, both the collection of eggs and the long-term storage of them are expensive and have high failure rates.

Similarly, the sperm of MtoF trans kids will never mature and their male genitalia will remain child size and in fact, both cohorts will need to have their developmentally stalled sex organs removed early on as they are at increased risk of cancer if they retain them. Both will undergo complex genital and possibly other surgeries with all the physical trauma and exposure to drugs that involves, and they will be reliant on exogenous hormones all their lives.

MtoF trans kids who have never gone through male puberty, may look more conventionally feminine but to simulate part of the female sex function, the gestation of a foetus, they would have to go through highly invasive and risky surgery; be on immuno-suppressant drugs for at least a year to ensure the graft has taken, then go through a very high risk pregnancy for at least seven months while remaining on anti-rejection drugs, plus increased doses of female hormones, before undergoing yet more invasive surgery to deliver the baby and remove the uterus and all other transplanted tissue and make good any damage to the neo-vagina.

It would be disturbing even if the world weren’t teetering on the edge of ecological and social disequilibrium – the most likely outcome of which is extreme authoritarianism accompanied by a wave of social conservatism. 

1. The female pelvis differs significantly from their male counterpart, to the extent that they can be used to determine sex at autopsy.
2. Formed from the inverted skin of the penis or from tissue harvested from the bowel or inside of the mouth.
3. There is evidence that removal of a uterus, especially via a radical hysterectomy, can have profound impacts on women’s health.
4. Uterine Transplantion into Transgender Women

The Money Go Round

I've been reading some interesting stuff about the history of banking and how it was that fractional reserve banking and paper money came to be a big thing in the Anglo world and enabled capitalism.

 

Okay, since you asked. 

 

Fractional reserve banking (FRB) is where a bank holds in reserve just a fraction of what it lends out by means of bits of paper – bank notes –  that have no intrinsic value other than a promise to pay the bearer, in coin, the amount specified on the note.

 

Coin used to be made of your actual precious metals or alloys containing precious metals.

The idea of a gold reserve acted as a sort of monetary sea anchor but it became stretched when the paper money supply outstripped gold reserves, and was abolished in the digital-era to enable the money supply to expand massively to create global corporate capitalism's vast cyber-fortunes.

 

But, back in the day, a lender was supposed to hold enough actual cash in reserve to pay the holder of a note the amount specified, in the coin of the realm.

 

King Charles II, when denied a huge loan, appropriated all the treasures the rich had stored for safekeeping in the Royal Mint, and demanded a ransom – in the form of a £40k loan – for its return. 

 

The rich folk of London obliged him but thought "sod that for a game of thrones" and were a bit loath to expose themselves to that risk again.   

 

English goldsmiths – operating mostly in London – spotted a market opportunity and provided safe storage for the treasures of the rich – for a fee. 

 

(Poor people, who had sod all money and lived hand to mouth had no need of banks – what changes?)

 

Now, if you take a fee for a safekeeping service, the money you are safeguarding belongs to the depositor. You don’t have the right to on-sell, invest, lend out that money – that would be theft.

 

A couple of things happened here. As we know, the money you deposit in a bank is not the actual money you get back – it’s just the same value – you hope.

 

The precious metal in coins back in the day was not always very accurately measured and some had a bit more gold or silver than others. The London goldsmiths exploited these discrepancies and made a lot of bullion.

 

They began to lend out their fortunes and charged interest on the loans – but they lent it out by means of  promissory notes made out to bearer and thus paper money was born.

 

But there were constraints on this – while they needed to lend to the value of their cash (coin) reserve, they were limited in how many notes they could issue. 

 

They could look to increase their reserves by acquiring more coin, but the more coin they held, the more safe storage they needed, and the more vulnerable they were to theft. Coin is cumbersome in more ways than one.

 

Or they could operate on a fractional reserve, that  is lend out more by promissory notes than they held in reserve – which increased their risk because, if all the people they owed coin to demanded it all at the same time, the bank would go bust. The lower the reserve, the greater the return, but also the greater the risk.

 

At this point the goldsmiths were creditors in that they were owed loads of dosh in the form of the principal of the loans they made and the interest owed on them.

 

Then something really sneaky happened – the really big shift in banking was in the goldsmiths'  ability to utilise depositors’ cash as if it belonged to them.  And they achieved this by paying interest on deposits, and thus became both creditors and debtors.

 

At the time in England, interest was paid by the Crown on government bonds – latterly known as gilts. You loaned the Crown your fortune by means of buying bonds and they paid you a guaranteed bi-annual interest at 3 – 5 % per annum. 

 

The lower interest rate fund was known as the Consul – a long-term consolidated fund; the higher rated, shorter term funds were known as the four- or five–percents and they provided the very rich with a low-risk, guaranteed annual income, plus protection of the principal and they gave the Crown the money it needed to maintain the state's infrastructure, wage wars, expand empires, spend up large on estates, palaces and such like.

 

Someone who bought 5% government bonds with a value of £200k would get an annual income of £10k – a Mr Darcy sized fortune and worth millions in today’s money.

 

The Crown – as a seller of the bonds, effectively borrowing from investors – used the money as it saw fit as long as it paid out the interest and could repay the principal when required, both of which were necessary to ensure investor confidence and avoid being overthrown or beheaded.

 

When the London goldsmiths began to offer interest on deposits, they became borrowers and, as borrowers, rather than providers of a safe keeping service, they could claim a right to use the money deposited with them in any way they saw fit – such as lending it to third parties at a higher rate of interest.

 

They could not exceed the interest rate on a loan of 5% or so set by the anti-usury laws  (except to the Crown which might pay up to 10%) so they offered deposit interest of 2- 3% and a loan interest of 5% – making a profit from the difference and enabling them to put even more notes into circulation. 

 

They also got together and decided that, if they all accepted each others’ promissory notes at face value – they could reduce the risk they all faced of a run on their bank,  and they could safely keep many more notes in circulation.

 

These innovations of the City of London's goldsmith-bankers greatly increased the liquidity that enabled the growth of capitalism, created a mutuality of interests between the British Crown and other governments, and laid the foundations of the emergence in the early 19th century of powerful banking complexes that had and still have massive global reach and influence.

 

Ching ching.

 

 

On Abortion

In 1972, when I realised I was pregnant, I panicked. I tried home remedies, then I was told about a GP in Ponsonby who would refer you to a psychiatrist in Remuera, who would write a letter confirming the need for a therapeutic abortion on mental health grounds, and refer you to a consultant gynaecologist with rooms in Queen Street, who would book you into a private hospital where you would pay the hospital and the anaesthetist, and have the termination. 

 

The consultant examined me and said I was more than 12 weeks pregnant; I was adamant that I wasn't. He said I was and as such I would have to have a hysterotomy abortion. 

 

He did not tell me what that was; that it is major abdominal surgery, the riskiest of abortion procedures and normally would be reserved for rare situations where less invasive procedures were not possible or appropriate. He never explained recovery times, implications for future pregnancies, or the medical risks.

 

I was so frightened and overwhelmed I didn't ask any questions. I went into the hospital on a Thursday evening and I told my boss I'd be back at work Monday. The first I knew that a hysterotomy abortion was major abdominal surgery was when a nurse asked if I wanted to shave my pubic hair or should she do it. I asked why I needed to be shaved and she said they made a horizontal incision below the pubic hairline so it wouldn’t be visible. I wanted to get up and leave but I was just too overwhelmed.

 

I woke up after the operation with what I now know is my usual reaction to general anaethesia, low blood pressure and intense nausea. Retching was incredibly painful. 

Later that morning, the doctors came in, stood at the end of the beds of the three young women who were in for same procedure, and the surgeon asked which one had the cyst? 

 

It was me. He did not explain what type of cyst, just that it was very large and that he'd removed it and sent it off for a biopsy, but he was "pretty sure it wasn't malignant". 

 

I thought he meant they’d removed the cyst. I never knew if the entire ovary had been removed until I went in for a tubal ligation in the UK many years later. I was never informed of the results of the biopsy.

 

I got an infection and I was still in severe pain and bleeding heavily so they wanted me to stay in the hospital longer than the other two women, but I couldn't afford it so they sent me home in a taxi with a bottle of penicillin tablets. 

 

I was still in a lot of pain when the consultant removed the stitches, told me I should have an IUD and that fitting it after an abortion was the best time. It was so painful I almost threw up.

 

I bled constantly afterwards. Some months later I was going to Australia so, when I went home to Christchurch to see my family, I went to a gynaecologist to have the IUD checked.

 

He was an older man whose manner indicated both contempt and a degree of hostility. I thought about leaving; I should have followed my gut instinct. He examined me and said the IUD had fallen out, and he would insert a new one there and then. 

 

If I thought the first one was painful, that one floored me. I think I was in shock as I couldn’t stand up, or stop shaking and crying. They carried me to a room, left me there for half an hour and then called a taxi and sent me home, doubled over in pain and sobbing uncontrollably. 

 

When my mother found out who I'd gone to, she was furious; he was the same man who years earlier had refused to refer her for a hysterectomy. She had five kids, a sick husband and was in constant pain from massive fibroids. He told her she should learn to live with it as it was not a life threatening condition.

 

In Melbourne, I kept bleeding and then I developed a heavy, smelly discharge. I went to a hospital and when I told them my history, at first they were sceptical until they saw the scar. When they removed the IUD under light anaethesia, they could not believe that a gynaecologist had fitted that type, mid-cycle, without anaesthesia or pain relief. 

 

I was sent home with antibiotics and advised to avoid IUDs and to find a pill that suited me. I never could, and I had to use alternative methods until I decided I did not want children and had what I found was my remaining tube, tied.

 

I continued to suffer on-going pelvic pain for which I had various investigative procedures including an endoscopy, until I was referred for a D&C in the Whittington Hospital in London and doctors found a metal object that was embedded deeply in the lining of my womb. 

 

I asked if it could have been the IUD that had been thought to have fallen out – but the surgeon said it was unlike any IUD she had ever seen. I asked if I could see it but they had thrown it away with the endometrial material they’d removed. 

That was a shame as I’d have liked to have seen what had been inserted into or left in my womb all those years earlier. It’s entirely possible, given the unidentified metal object and the infections, that I would have struggled to get pregnant had I decided to have kids.  

 

I write about this now only because it's a reminder of how dreadful things used to be here in NZ; how dreadful they are for many women elsewhere in the world, and how dreadful they are about to become for many more women in parts of the USA.

 

I don’t take abortion lightly. It’s not something anyone should take lightly if only because, like any medical procedure, it involves risk. It’s the responsibility of everyone involved to minimise that risk by maximising the conditions in which there is fully informed consent, and in which girls and women have meaningful choices and real control over their fertility. That means such things as easily accessed, safe contraception; sex education that is aimed at empowering girls and sensitising boys; and timely, supportive, easily accessed, low risk, abortion services.

Neurological Immaturity

Age	Sentence in years
12	7
15	Life + 5 + 3 + 2.5
16	Life + 6 + 4
16	12 + 7 + 4
15	9 + 6
15	8.5 + 6

These were the ages at time of offence, and the sentences, of a group of working class Māori kids who killed a man in the course of a robbery. 

The defence that the kids did not fully understand the seriousness of their actions, given the prevalence of violent video games and films that show people being hit on the head without consequences, was rejected. They were tried and sentenced as adults, even the 12-year-old.

In the USA, there are people serving life without possibility of parole for capital crimes committed before they were neurologically mature, and there is a movement to have them released. Some have been released and some, usually because of the input of the victim’s family, remain incarcerated. 

If we accept current scientific evidence that the decision making centre of the brain is the last to mature and may not be fully mature until early 20s, and that kids aged 12 -16 are definitely neurologically immature – then the trial and sentencing as adults of these young people in NZ was in line with the sort of harshly retributive sentencing often seen the USA. 

To argue these kids genuinely may not have understood the gravity of their actions is not to diminish the awfulness of the outcome. They planned a robbery and caused the tragic death of a man who was simply doing his job – but were they capable of understanding the consequences – for him and for them – of those actions?

If the argument is valid that they could not because the prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed, then the sentencing of these kids was all about retribution, not justice or rehabilitation. 

Neurologically immature brains do not have fully developed impulse control, and they have a reduced ability to assess risk. When this is combined with the known greater sensitivity to peer pressure and a tendency to rush into uncertain situations to test out possible rewards – it seems obvious that adolescents, and especially young adolescents, should not be tried or sentenced as adults.

There were of course other factors at play here, the most important being the social class and ethnicity of those kids.  

When a 17-year-old middle class, white kid drove his powerful car at speeds in excess of 180kph in a 50kph zone in Christchurch and killed a young Chinese student who was crossing the street, his lawyers argued that the defendant was too young to control his reckless impulse to drive at what the judge described as "insane speeds". 

So unconfident were the police of getting a conviction for murder, they prosecuted for manslaughter for which a guilty plea was entered and the driver got a 5 year sentence, of which he served 2 years.

Further evidence of the disparity in treatment of young offenders can be found when searching the names of these young people on the SST website. The latter’s name does not appear even though he compounded the severity of his offence by fleeing the scene, conspiring to pervert the course of justice, and expressing racist attitudes towards his 19 year-old victim.

These two scenarios – and there are many, many other examples of gross disparities in the CJS in NZ – came back to mind because of the current debate around other life-altering decisions that kids may rush or be pushed into before they are neurologically mature, and at a point in life when they are peculiarly sensitive to peer pressure.

If we hope to ensure appropriate forms of justice for young offenders – something all right-minded people must surely want to do  - shouldn’t we also be alert to the life-altering consequences of all decisions that are made before people are neurologically mature?

Identity Theft

"I couldn’t escape Rachel Dolezal because I can’t escape white supremacy. And it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes - even this interview.

 

“And with that, the anger I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but centre herself in all that she does – including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice does not center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting and discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort.” 

 This quote is from an article by Ijeoma Oluo about Rachel Dolezal, the woman in the US who "identified" as African-American, until being outed as white. Dolezal has renamed herself since – with an African name.

I was reminded of this by the story in the news currently about Anthony Lennon, a white man with white parents who has lived and worked as a black man and black actor and director.

 

Some feminists have used the Dolezal scenario as a counterpoint to the issue of people, who are born genetically male but who identify as women and lay claim to be literally as much a woman as a person who is genetically female, categorised as such at birth and has always lived as a female. 

 

People ask, if being a woman or a man or female or male can be simply a matter of self-identification, why can't a white person self identify as a person of colour? If the latter is wrong, how can the former be right?

 

What matters in the Dolezal case is that she used her relative privilege as a white woman to insert herself into the black community, thus displaying a distinctly white arrogance and lack of sensitivity to issues of race in, what remains, an extremely racist country, and she materially benefitted from her claim of being black – and took opportunities away from black women.

 

It is argued that ethnicity is a matter of self identification in some areas but in relation to such things as positive discrimination measures aimed at redressing historical disadvantage, there is an obvious need for a person to be able to demonstrate the validity of their claim by more than just a simple assertion of identity. 

 

Here, in Aotearoa-New Zealand, to qualify for Māori scholarships for example, a person must be able to demonstrate their whakapapa – it is not enough to just declare oneself as tangata whenua on the basis of self identity.

 

But in relation to gender identity, one of the main aims of transgenderism as a political movement, is that nothing more must be required other than a personal declaration, i.e. there should be the removal of all medical inputs and most bureaucratic inputs to the process of changing one's legal sex. Going further, there is a growing demand to remove sex markers from birth certificates, not as a push back against intrusive state surveillance, but because it is claimed that having sex categorised on a birth certificate makes life difficult for trans and intersex people. 

The demand that gender identity – an individual sense of oneself as a sexed being – must be embedded as a fully protected status in equality and human rights legislation, means a genetically male person, even one who has lived as a man for sixty or so years and fathered children, who self identifies as a woman must be accepted as a woman and have exactly the same legal and social status as a woman who was born and has always lived as female. This applies even to people who, like Philip/Pippa Bunce, choose to be men on some days and women on others.

A transwoman, even someone with a completely unaltered male body, as a result of a simple declaration of a sense of identity – is literally a woman, with the same legal status and social authority as the other categories of women – cis women and intersex women. 

The same is true for female to male transgender people but they simply do not intrude upon cis men's rights in the same way, nor do they attract the same amount of public or media attention – except when they give birth or try to uncover their female genitalia in a gay sauna.

This means that, where there is any sort of single sex provision, or positive action measures for girls and women – eg the UK Labour Party's women-only shortlists and women's development programmes – anyone born male, who has self identified as a woman, cannot be excluded from them without a legal challenge for unfair discrimination. 

A lot of radical feminists and a rising groundswell of others are concerned about the implications for safeguarding women – not from transsexuals who have always co-existed happily with women in the past – but from some on the fringes of the vastly widened trans umbrella, men who will opportunistically seek shelter under it in order to pursue, not a valid expression of gender identity, but a highly transgressive sexual agenda. 

David Challenor was not drawn to the UK Green Party for valid political reasons. It was a combination of a narcissistic power trip and a means of advancing a political agenda that was about granting people like him, sexual license. In his case it was a sexual fetish that involved dressing as a little girl while holding an actual little girl in bondage, torturing her and sexually abusing her.

 

The current furore over Guiding in the UK is whipping up a lot of anger – and as often happens, a lot of it is directed at the wrong people. The issue of girls needing same sex spaces is a valid one, especially in the hyper-sexualised, body-obsessed world in which  they are growing up.  It needs to be acknowledged that there are girls who, for personal and religious/cultural reasons, do not want to share intimate spaces with male bodied persons – but the main threat to girls is not from the tiny number of boys who identify as girls, the big threat in my view is from predatory and manipulative adult men who may abuse the far greater ease of self ID as a means to get access to young people.

Given the sort of tactics now widely used by the trans lobby to silence dissent and its power and reach (which is completely at odds with its actual numbers and its claims to the most extreme social marginalisation), it will take a brave person to challenge anyone thought to have predatory motives.

 

The other scenario of course is that it will fuel right wing and fundamentalist extremists of the sort who have formed vigilante "paedo-hunter" groups – with the potential for a lot of innocent people to get hurt. 

 

Finally, my apologies to Ijeoma Oluo, but the paraphrase begged to be done:

“I can't escape transgenderism because I can't escape male supremacy. And it is male supremacy that tells an unhappy or narcissistic man that woman’s identity is his for the taking. It is male supremacy that tells him that any women who question him are obviously uneducated, and unmotivated to rise to his level of wokeness. It is male supremacy that then elevates this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on female identity globally. It is male supremacy that decides that it is worth international news coverage.

"(Insert name) is simply a man who cannot help but centre himself in all that he does—including his fight for what he sees as sexual justice. And if sexual justice doesn't centre him, he will redefine sex itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for men to take what they want from womanhood in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of womanhood for their comfort."