Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

Arduous pregnancies and babies’ long helpless period mean that women’s bodies evolved to store fat. At least ten percent of the bodyweight of an elite female athlete is fat; for an elite male, that share can fall as low as five percent. The extra fat is worse than useless for women’s sporting performance, since it has to be lugged around.

Adult men, too, are shaped by evolutionary pressures, in particular from humanity’s long prehistory of hunting and fighting (this is visible in the evolutionary record, though you will not hear about it in a gender-studies course). They are not only taller and larger than women, but have wider shoulders and narrower hips, bigger muscles that can contract more quickly and powerfully, bigger hearts and lungs, higher blood-oxygenation capacity and stronger bones.

The average adult man has 41 percent more non-fat body mass (blood, bones, muscles and so on) than the average woman, 50 percent more muscle mass in his legs and 75 percent more in his arms. His legs are 65 percent stronger, and his upper body is 90 percent stronger.

The level in blood serum differs widely between males and females, so it was easy to set a cut-off between the two. In a female, any level above 1.7 nanomoles per litre (nmol/L) suggests the presence of testicular material or a tumour, whereas 7.7 nmol/L is right at the bottom of normal for an elderly man. The authorities settled on 10 nmol/L, much lower than healthy males in their prime, to be maintained for a year before a transwoman could compete as a woman.

Male sporting advantage does not depend on hormone levels on a given day; it is mostly the result of having gone through male puberty.

‘With regard to transgender women athletes, we question whether current circulating testosterone level cut-off can be a meaningful decisive factor, when in fact not even suppression down to around 1 nmol/L removes the anthropometric and muscle mass/strength physical advantage in any significant way,’ Hilton and Lundberg write.

Alongside Davies, the other high-profile sportswoman who has said most is tennis legend Martina Navratilova. She was one of the first lesbian athletes ever to come out, and is obviously not transphobic in any meaningful sense: she is close to Renée Richards, who coached her for years. But even Navratilova is called a bigot for recognising male sporting advantage. She stumbled into the controversy in 2018, when she discovered that sporting federations were switching to self-ID. ‘You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women,’ she tweeted. ‘There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.’

Asked whether it was fair for Richards to play as a woman, she responds: ‘Renée was in her forties, not training particularly hard. I was number one in the world and I had my hands full to beat her. I think that says everything you need to know.’

As the Democrats and their fellow travellers in think-tanks, campaign groups and civil-rights organisations embraced gender self-identification, defenders of women’s sex-based rights – even secular feminists – found themselves with few allies other than Christian conservatives.

‘Gender dysphoria is real, and we empathise with those kids,’ she says. ‘If it had been my child, I would have wanted the school to make it comfortable for him. I’d have said: “let’s get you another place to change.” But never would I have said: “change with your sister and her friends and violate their privacy.” ’

On this occasion, the Departments of Education and Justice informed all schools, universities and colleges that the word ‘sex’ in Title IX – the law that bars educational institutions from committing sex discrimination – should be understood to refer to self-identification.

The words ‘sex’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are being used to mean two entirely different things: the immutable biology observed at birth and the identity later declared. The claim is that people born male who identify as girls or women thereby change sex itself (and vice versa for people born female who identify as boys or men). Transgirls are therefore literally female, and have the right under Title IX to use female single-sex spaces.

The words ‘male’ and ‘female’ cannot mean both biology and identity. And setting aside the thorny question of what it might mean to feel male or female, why would such a feeling matter, if being male or female does not? It is impossible to frame arguments against gender self-identification using such language, since the necessary words are lacking – which is presumably part of the point. The accusation of Orwellianism is often made too lightly, but this time it is justified. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak [the language of the totalitarian superstate Oceania] is to narrow the range of thought?’ Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it.’

‘Judges would agree that separation by sex is perfectly legal, and then say: “but a transgirl is a girl”,’ he says. ‘Our country was founded on a statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” But you cannot have a self-evident truth when everyone can declare their own reality.’

It has become close to impossible for left-leaning Americans to articulate arguments based on material differences between the sexes. For them, all ‘discrimination’ is patterned on white privilege and black oppression.

I am not American; I don’t know what it is like to have a psyche shaped by the legacy of slavery, lynching and the Jim Crow laws. All I can do is fall back on logic and science, and say once again why single-sex spaces are not analogous to racial segregation.

The differences between the sexes are material and significant, with consequences that go beyond matters of law or custom; those between people of different skin colours or ethnicities are not.

Women have an extra reason for wanting single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable or naked: as protection against male sexual violence and harassment. Their spaces do not constitute privilege, but revolt against the age-old oppression of females by males. And if you really must analogise race and sex, you should line up the two oppressed groups: women and black people. Feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye does so very tellingly in The Politics of Reality, her collection of essays published in 1983: ‘it is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave’s hut. The slave who decides to exclude her master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave.’

Moreover, even if the analogy between racial segregation and sex-separation held, it would not support gender self-ID. The solution to racial segregation was not to allow some whites to identify as black, and vice versa, but to integrate. Someone who truly believed that the physical differences between male and female people who declared the same gender identity were so trivial that only a bigot would notice them would logically have to support a unisex world. They would not argue that sex-separation should stand while sex became a matter of self-declaration.

The extent of the makeover is remarkable. In 2019, Michael Biggs of Oxford University analysed words relating to identities – ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘trans’, including plurals and variants – in the annual reports of the HRC and GLAAD. In 1999, ‘trans’ and ‘bisexual’ hardly appeared in the HRC’s reports; ‘gay’ accounted for nearly two-thirds and ‘lesbian’ for a third. But by 2018 ‘lesbian’ had been almost entirely squeezed out, ‘gay’ was down to a tenth – and ‘trans’ was over three-quarters. Biggs analysed GLAAD’s reports from 2007, at which point ‘trans’ accounted for fifteen percent. By 2018 the pattern was very much the same as for the HRC.

And as the Left has adopted their creed, it has descended to depths of science-denialism formerly associated with the climate-change and evolution deniers of the Right. Indeed, denying the materiality and immutability of human sex is not merely akin to denying evolution – it is denying evolution, since the two sexes are evolved categories, and immutable in all mammals.

Whatever the issue, the eventual law should be something that most politicians and voters think is at least bearable, and that is regarded as legitimate by even those who don’t like it – an important aspect of democracy known as ‘losers’ consent’.

And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans people’s subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws.

And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

other words, there is widespread support for people describing themselves as they wish, but not much for granting such self-descriptions legal status.

But mainstream transactivism does none of this. It works largely towards two ends: ensuring that male people can access female spaces; and removing barriers to cross-sex hormones and surgeries, even in childhood. These are not the needs of people on low incomes at risk of poor health. They are the desires of rich, powerful males who want to be classed as women. Everything I have written about – the harm to children’s bodies; the loss of women’s privacy; the destruction of women’s sports; and the perversion of language – is collateral damage.

Much of it is done by groups that were founded to fight against government overreach and for gay rights, and which adopted gender self-ID to keep donations coming in after gay marriage was won.

Guides by GLAAD and the UK’s journalism watchdog, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (produced with input from nine trans campaign groups and no one else), give the distinct impression that mentioning a trans person’s biological sex or pre-transition name is both bigoted and unnecessary.

And their articles on crime will mislead their readers: an axe-wielding woman laying waste to customers in a supermarket; police warning about a homicidal, sex-offending teenage girl; a woman punching and squeezing a one-year-old to death out of frustration; a female paedophile prosecuted for grooming children online and then meeting up with and raping them. (These are all real examples, and in every case the fact that the ‘female’ person was in fact male was left out of many reports.) Women almost never commit these sorts of crimes – and yet reports of women committing them are becoming commonplace.

In fact, most businesses are happy to play along. In an age of corporate social responsibility, it is convenient to have a tiny oppressed minority to focus on. Rainbow lanyards, pronoun badges and ‘all-gender’ toilets cost little or nothing. Opening a crèche, offering paid internships for working-class youngsters or adapting the workplace for disabled employees would do more for genuine diversity and inclusion. But these policies would be expensive and, without powerful lobbies promoting them, do less to burnish a company’s reputation.

Helping gender-dysphoric people feel comfortable in their bodies makes no one much money; turning them into lifelong patients is highly profitable.

metoidioplasty, which takes advantage of the clitoral growth caused by testosterone to create a small pseudo-phallus. Phalloplasty costs as much as $150,000.

Even though they started by talking about post-operative transsexuals, they now describe making surgery a condition of legal sex change as a human-rights violation, since that surgery causes sterilisation. In 2017, that argument persuaded the European Court of Human Rights, and it ordered all European countries to allow legal sex change without surgery.

Earlier in 2015, a referendum on same-sex marriage passed with a high turnout and sixty-two percent in favour. In 2018, another referendum legalised abortion with an even larger majority. Both made me proud to be Irish, though as a non-resident I could not vote. The public discourse was exemplary. The government published model laws, and the independent Referendum Commission set out the issues in clear language. Many journalists, celebrities and ordinary people were moved to come out – about their sexuality, or about having travelled to England for an abortion. Both campaigns united the country, and taught us more about ourselves and our fellow citizens.

Neither Argentina nor Malta, which introduced gender self-identification just before Ireland, has Ireland’s friendly, wholesome image. Now transactivists had their poster child. Mention gender self-ID anywhere else, and you will probably hear that Ireland introduced it ‘with no problems’.

It never seemed likely that legally recognising males as female ‘for all purposes’ would cause no problems. But it took time before any came to light. At first limited public awareness helped, since only people engaged with transactivist groups availed themselves of the new law. But if you create a loophole, soon enough someone undesirable will use it – and it will be the most vulnerable who suffer.

Until 2019, not a single woman had ever been imprisoned for a sex crime against an adult. Since then, Irish prisons have experienced a sudden influx of ‘female’ sex offenders – according to official records. As you will have guessed, the perpetrators are in fact male. The first, whose name is not public, was convicted in July 2019 on ten counts of sexual assault, and one of cruelty to a child. This person has changed legal sex but undergone no surgical or hormonal transition – in other words, is a physiologically normal male. The sentence is being served in a women’s prison, where the prisoner is accompanied by two guards whenever in communal areas.

most obvious culprits. If they had stood up for women’s right to single-sex spaces and services, gender self-ID could never have made such inroads. Instead, as they adopted a postmodern, ‘woke’ style of feminism, they abandoned the women who needed them most.

Poor women and girls of colour, who are more likely to attend state schools, to need homeless and rape-crisis shelters, or to fall victim to the war on drugs and end up in prison, depended on feminists to stand up for single-sex spaces. It is a perfect example of when intersectional thinking is needed – and a travesty that gender self-identification is so often described as intersectional.

The Women’s Human Rights Campaign, a global group of volunteer women aligned with second-wave feminism, has written a Women’s Declaration on Sex-Based Rights, which women everywhere are invited to sign.

The idea that what makes someone a man or woman is performance of, or identification with, gender is incompatible with the foundational feminist belief that women, like men, are fully human and should not be restricted by stereotypes.

Same-sex orientation cannot be defended if people are self-defined identities, rather than fleshly mortals whose sex can easily be perceived by others. Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality. Feminist and gay-rights groups that adopt gender-identity ideology therefore end up promoting policies that harm women and gay people. Children’s charities tear up safeguarding procedures. Scientific societies repeat cultish mantras. Anti-censorship campaigners whip up witch-hunts.

Established gay-rights groups have stood by as people who assert same-sex orientation are told that they have a ‘genital fetish’ and lesbians are told to accept penises as female sex organs. Indeed, those groups have joined in the bullying. Stonewall was founded to fight homophobia. Yet, at a Pride March in 2019, when lesbians waving banners that read ‘Lesbians don’t have penises’ and ‘Pro women not anti-trans’ were threatened, the chair of Stonewall’s board praised the bullies, tweeting: ‘Thank you! The right instinct’.

They call their core readership ‘vagina-havers’ and the like, and run articles on subjects such as how to pleasure bepenised transwomen (top tip from Autostraddle: avoid saying ‘blow job’ so as not to trigger dysphoria).

The ACLU’s support for free speech was once so absolute that in 1978 it defended neo-Nazis’ right to march through a Chicago suburb where Holocaust survivors lived.

Liberal arguments in favour of free speech, for example that robust debate exposes you to arguments you hadn’t thought of and helps you hone your reasoning, are dismissed as irrelevant.

Control the discourse, and you control reality.

And they bring to mind the famous remark of the American writer Upton Sinclair, that ‘it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

But when people who claimed to speak for the next minority came knocking, they were ready listeners. They had been hired explicitly to increase ‘diversity and inclusion’, after all, and the wider the net is cast, the more important their jobs are. They were neither paid nor qualified to consider safety and fairness.

Why didn’t female athletes kick up a fuss? The answer has three parts: the difficulty of co-ordinating; the fact that young women are gender-identity ideology’s foot-soldiers; and, finally, the third element of policy capture – threats.