Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

Those documented by anthropologists include pa-leng, an obsessive fear of becoming too cold found in some parts of Asia, and koro, a Malay word for a man’s belief that his genitals are shrinking and vanishing. Naturally, such syndromes are easier to spot when the culture is not yours.

The role played by fashion in social contagions suggests that their numbers will not rise forever, and indeed may soon start to fall – especially if lawsuits start coming, as they did with recovered-memory syndrome and multiple-personality disorder. But already this new psychogenic illness has broken the bounds of American culture, and gone global.

The stereotypes they promote teach children ideas about what is proper for boys and girls that feminists had thought consigned to the dustbin of history. This is just one of the ways in which gender-identity ideology harms all children, not merely those who end up identifying out of their sex.

All express the same contradiction. Gender identity is an innate, ineffable sense, unrelated to body type, behaviour and presentation. But that inner truth is manifested by stereotypes.

These books never make the connection between homophobic bullying and identifying out of one’s sex. A generation ago, progressives campaigned for schools to crack down on taunts about gay boys being girls; now, the bullies are presented as right.

adults stopped fussing about the ‘right’ clothes and activities for boys and girls, then how, in practical terms, could a child express a trans identity? If no behaviours or norms were off-limits to one sex or the other, how could a child feel, or indicate to the world, that they were not actually members of their sex?

And another question: why have teachers, authors and publishers accepted this repackaging of tired sex stereotypes? The answer lies in the contradiction at the heart of gender-identity ideology. For all that gender is supposedly revealed by stereotyped appearances and actions, it is defined as an inner knowing. This helps conceal how regressive it is.

Gender-as-stereotypes is generally called ‘gender expression’, and gender-as-feeling, ‘gender identity’. But the latter i...

define your gender, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand the options for gender to be’.

You long to hear that girls (or boys) are people with female (or male) bodies who behave however they damn well please; instead you hear that girls (or boys) are people who behave in feminine (or masculine) ways. You hear, in other words, that the way people perform stereotypes makes them who they are – and that bodies that don’t match those stereotypes need to be changed.

Bish, a British sex-education website for teenagers, says that ‘you get to choose your gender identity, whether you are a he/she/they or zie and you get to choose how you want to do your own gender.’ It recommends placing yourself on several ‘gender scales’. Listed under ‘looks masculine’ are rational, tough, takes charge, independent, headstrong, active and outgoing; under ‘looks feminine’ are emotional, soft, takes part, sharer, sensitive, passive and shy. It notes that these are what men and women are ‘supposed to be like’. Indeed, and if it endorsed smashing those stereotypes to your heart’s content, I would applaud. Instead, it invites you to work out where you are on each scale, and from that decide whether you are a boy or girl, or something in between.

Most children will survive this stuff without becoming alienated from their physical reality. Even so, it does all children harm. It confuses them about their bodies, and suggests that gender non-conformity marks people as not genuine members of their sex. Boys learn that they shouldn’t cry or share; girls, that they should be vain airheads. Slip up, and others may conclude that you are not a ‘real’ boy or girl.

Since gender identity is supposedly innate and unknowable to anyone else, however, parents are now displaced from their role as guardians of their children’s safety and future well-being.

It is female bodies that bear almost all the burden of reproduction, and ignoring that fact doesn’t change it;

‘The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit,’ wrote Adrienne Rich in 1976 in Of Woman Born, her book about motherhood.

Jane Clare Jones is a British feminist philosopher and editor of The Radical Notion, a quarterly magazine (the title references a famous definition of feminism as ‘the radical notion that women are people’).

Mainstream feminism’s shift towards concerning itself with self-defined women, rather than females, was only possible because of other changes in the movement. The so-called second wave, which started in the early 1960s and ran for about a quarter-century, had extended women’s demands for equality beyond voting and property rights to other systemic injustices, such as unequal pay, and to structural issues that affected women more than men, such as the lack of maternity leave and childcare. This was also when women created the first domestic-violence and rape-crisis services for women and children victimised by men.

Perhaps second-wave feminists had spent too little time thinking about the ways in which women differ, and too much thinking about women as victims rather than agents. And the central observation of intersectionality is certainly correct and important: people are members of many identity groups that are salient in modern societies, and those often interact in ways that unidimensional analyses miss. But these developments also paved the way for feminism to lose its focus on females.

And when women were discussed as a single, biologically delineated group, the incoherence of including males – or transwomen – had been glaring. Now, with every mention of a woman preceded by a list of adjectives establishing her intersectional position, ‘trans’ could be added without sticking out like a sore thumb.

‘Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women . . . Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly.’

But defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting.

They define womanhood as stereotypes enacted by people of different body types; rather than a body type that need not in any way limit the behaviour of the people who possess it.

As the class of women is rendered vacuous, feminism is, too. The language gives it away: how could you possibly target a policy on ‘multifaceted, intergenerational, international’ beings?

When women are limitless and formless, they can have no political demands.

The result is that the very people who berate opponents of gender-identity ideology for ‘reducing people to their genitals’ insist that females are referred to as body parts and reproductive functions.

Governments, companies, charities and media outlets now talk of ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘abortion seekers’ and ‘birthing parents’, where they would once simply have said ‘women’.

Here are a few indicative examples. The UK’s National Health Service explains that ‘the concept of virginity for people with vaginas has a complicated history’. Teen Vogue offers a ‘no-nonsense, 101 guide to masturbation for vagina owners’. Information campaigns from cancer charities tell ‘anyone with a cervix’ to get regular Pap smear tests. An ad for Tampax enjoins the world to ‘celebrate the diversity of all people who bleed’. La Leche League USA says it ‘supports all breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and ...

This is not just dehumanising: it also obscures the fact that these body parts and functions come as a package. The same type of person ovulates, menstruates, gestates, gives birth and requires abortions, and possesses the physical features that heterosexual men desire to look at, touch and penetrate. It is the type of person who has been oppressed throughout history, precisely because men want to dominate and control the possessors of this type of body.

If the stated reasons for such language, namely to be inclusive of transmen when talking about female issues, were sincere, then we would see similar linguistic manoeuvres in order not to exclude transwomen when talking about males. There would be guides to masturbation for ‘penis owners’, and articles and advertising campaigns aimed at testicle havers, semen producers and the like. ‘Anyone with a prostate’ would be told to get it checked. But no such language is used. Factsheets about prostate cancer start by saying: ‘Only men have a prostate.’ When I googled ‘testicle havers’, I was asked if I meant ‘testicle shavers’.

The first group comes under queer theory, where liberation means category-busting. A male person who identifies as a woman is striking a blow against ‘cisheteronormativity’ – the assumption that being non-trans and straight is the norm. In critical race theory, however, all white people are taken to hold privileged positions in a societal network of power, and whiteness is inherently racist. People cannot be permitted to identify out of their racial groups, since that would enable white people to identify out of acknowledging their racism and atoning for it with anti-racist work.

The Canadian transwoman Veronica Ivy has said that the only morally acceptable orientation is pansexual (capable of attraction to people of any sex or gender identity), and that having a ‘genital preference’ (that is, being attracted only to people of one sex or the other) is transphobic.

If a woman says her dating pool is female-only, she is understood as denying that transwomen are women. Even if she reframes her sexual orientation as a ‘preference’ and tries to argue that she gets to choose whom to sleep with according to whichever criteria work for her, this is still not good enough. ‘Your dating preferences are discriminatory,’ says Riley J. Dennis, the transwoman YouTuber. ‘Because these dating preferences are ultimately harmful to people who don’t fit into your box of what a conventionally attractive person looks like, it makes people feel isolated, alone, and unwanted to hear that they are universally unattractive to people.’

In its erasure of sex categories, gender-identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who, by force, luck or guile, succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is now at risk of being retroactively transitioned. Boudicca and Joan of Arc are both often described as transmen. So is the Pharaoh Hatshepsut (who ‘was assigned female at birth but intermittently dressed and ruled as a King’, according to Amnesty UK).

‘That’s a tactic often employed by manipulators: give me what I want or I’ll kill myself.’

When used as a riposte like this, ‘transwomen are women’ is not an argument, but a statement of political positioning that functions like a profession of religious faith. It signals that the speaker is au fait with social-justice ideology, and is therefore both up to date and progressive. And by putting a full stop to any further discussion, it functions as what Robert Jay Lifton, author of the 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in Communist China, called a ‘thought-terminating cliché’. In totalitarian regimes, he wrote, these ‘brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases . . . become the start and finish of any ideological analysis’.

In the past decade influential academics have claimed that single-sex spaces were unknown in the Western world before a ball in Paris in 1739, and did not become widespread until the Industrial Revolution, when the sexes mingled in factories.

women are at heightened risk of assault is a broad-brush measure. Justifying it does not require that all males are violent, merely that almost everyone who assaults women is male, and it is impossible for women to tell which males pose a risk. Nor is it paternalistic to acknowledge that women are more vulnerable to sexual and violent assault, and that men are overwhelmingly likely to be the perpetrators.

Putting it all together, women are around five times more likely than men to be the victim of a sexual crime, and men are one hundred times more likely to be the perpetrator of one.

Of the 125 transgender prisoners known to be in English prisons in late 2017, sixty were transwomen who had committed sexual offences, a share far higher than in the general male prison population, let alone in the female one.

So either transwomen are more likely than other males to be sexual predators, or – more probable in my view – gender self-identification provides sexual predators with a marvellous loophole.

As for the danger to transwomen from using male spaces, raising this is a backhanded acknowledgement of the purpose of female spaces. Arguing that vulnerable males must be allowed to identify out of male spaces because males are so dangerous undermines an...

Those who continue to use such facilities will be less safe. In 2018 the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, published data showing that ninety percent of cases of sexual assaults and harassment in public swimming pools occurred in the minority of changing rooms that were designated unisex.

Transfers really picked up after 2017, when the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, committed to housing all prisoners according to how they identified.

And indeed, the only research into long-term outcomes for post-operative transsexuals, in Sweden, concluded that transwomen ‘retained a male pattern regarding criminality’.

The transfer policy is hopelessly naive about the motives of males who identify as women, Mason says. Those who committed child-abuse or rape are often shunned and mistreated in men’s prisons. Some see identifying as a woman as their way out. Transfers to women’s prisons are therefore skewed towards precisely those males who are most dangerous to women and children – the latter being particularly concerning because several women’s prisons in Canada have low-security, homelike sections where mothers can care for young children.

Overall, it is hard to say how vulnerable transwomen are in men’s prisons. Those whose presentation is notably feminine are probably at elevated risk of sexual assault – but they are hardly the only males for whom that is true. Men who are young, gay or known to have abused children are also frequently targeted, and no one suggests moving them to women’s prisons, although it would undoubtedly make them safer.

‘If people have genuine dysphoria, if they have transitioned, then create another unit for them,’ she says. ‘Women are not human shields. You don’t make transwomen safer by making women less safe – and there’s a growing body of evidence that women are not safe when you put males inside with them. Most women in prison have been victims of male violence, some from childhood. Why are we re-traumatising them?’

She laughingly recalled Morgan folding a player on an opposing team ‘like a deckchair’.

As Heyneke Meyer, a former coach of the South African team, once said: ‘Ballroom dancing is a contact sport; rugby is a collision sport.’

If the consequences of trans inclusion went beyond female players being folded like deckchairs and on to neck-snapping, pleading that everyone else was doing it too would hardly cut it in court.