Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

A final, remarkable aspect of this link between homophobia and transition is that organisations that purport to campaign for gay rights seem blind to it. Trans in America: Texas Strong was produced by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When Pakistan’s government decided recently to start funding sex-change surgery for gay males – a decision inspired by the mullahs’ belief that homosexual desire indicates that you have a brain of the opposite sex – Pink News, a British website founded to cover issues relevant to gay people, described Pakistan as ‘making history with this move for trans rights’. This is despite ample evidence that some gay men in Pakistan, and in Iran, which has similar policies, undergo such surgery unwillingly rather than risk the penalties for gay sex. These include beatings, imprisonment and even execution. A growing number of gay people are waking up to the link, however. I have heard gender affirmation described as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’.

Tavistock’s cavalier approach to its patients’ future fertility was shocking. The court heard that in 2019 it had prescribed puberty blockers to three ten-year-olds, all female.

In 1989, when the Tavistock clinic opened, there were two referrals, both young boys. By 2020, there were 2,378 referrals, almost three-quarters of them girls, and most of those teenagers.

The changing interpretation of Bulkley’s life highlights the malign consequences of the new ideology for the still-unfinished fight for equality for women. Within that ideology, women who aspire to agency and power no longer add weight to arguments for equal rights and freedoms, but instead become men.

Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, draws two broad points from the history of women who cross-dress, present as men or act in ‘mannish’ ways. The first is that their various motives – sexual and economic ones, as well as a desire for personal freedoms – often intermingle. The second is that even a woman who has all these motives for identifying as a man may choose not to do so – if the state of feminism in her time gives her good reason. If her era offers a convincing analysis of the sex-based oppression of women as a group, she is less likely to identify as a man, and more likely to stay and fight for more freedoms for all women.

I will merely observe that it is an indictment of both that the first generation of girls to be taught that womanhood can be identified out of are doing so in large numbers.

Among the traits common to young people with autistic-spectrum disorders is rigid thinking, which can lead to discomfort with nuance and anyone who seems not to fit into the usual categories. If such children prefer clothing or activities associated with the opposite sex, or are experiencing the early stirrings of same-sex attraction, they may conclude that they have been misclassified.

Also common in people with autistic traits is lack of insight into one’s feelings, in particular low self-esteem caused by perceived rejection by peers. Such children may latch onto a concrete explanation for their misery: that they were ‘born in the wrong body’.

‘All of this is happening on a backdrop of zero real-life relationships,’ says Ayad. ‘A kid is this and that identity – and they’ve never even held hands with another human being.’

She felt slightly better when she convinced herself she was bisexual – an entirely theoretical affair.

A school counsellor drew up a plan for her to save money for transition, gave her addresses of gender clinics and discussed coming out to her mother in a sensitive, low-key way.

‘I was supposed to be this cute Tumblr transboy living his truth,’ she says. ‘Instead I had transformed from a little girl with short hair into this testosterone-addled thing.’ When she finally admitted that she regretted transition, her therapist said she was making no sense; that the only cure for dysphoria was transition.

‘I feel like a cult survivor, a thousand percent. That cult robbed me of my adolescence.’

As a bisexual woman of colour, she already had some credibility; being trans gave her more. ‘Oppressed labels get you fawned over on Tumblr,’ she says. ‘You get more leeway to think and maybe have dissenting – not too dissenting – views. If you’re just a cis straight white girl you’re nobody, and nobody cares about you or your opinion.’

‘Mental-health syndromes are always a kind of fiction, shaped by culture and expectations,’ says Marchiano. ‘Our emotional lives, and the ways they can become disrupted, are protean.’

Girls are also often more empathetic than boys, and better at reading moods, which means emotions spread faster in a female peer group than in a male one. That is why self-harm and eating disorders can run through female friends, and why historical episodes of mass hysteria, such as fainting fits, uncontrollable laughter or crying, and outbreaks of paralysis or tremors, have so often occurred in convents and girls’ schools.

Judging by the historical record, when a psychic epidemic hits, doctors often feel moved to centre interventions on the female reproductive system.

Take the ‘reflex doctrine’ of the nineteenth century, which held that a disturbance in any part of the body could cause malfunction in any other, by a ‘reflex action’ of the nerves travelling via the spine. Doctors regarded the female sex organs as particularly prone to exerting these malign influences, and removed them to treat an astonishing array of conditions: paralysis, fits and ailments of the heart, thyroid, stomach, skin, ears and eyes. When Marchiano realised that girls who said they felt like boys were being given drugs and surgeries that would leave them steri...

Even the discourses are strikingly similar. Compare the catchphrases: ‘If you think you might be trans, you probably are,’ and ‘No one else can tell you your gender identity,’ with these quotations from The Courage to Heal, a self-help book about recovered-memory syndrome published in 1988: ‘If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,’ and ‘The patient sometimes knows more about the disorder than the therapist.’

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.

It is rare to read an account of a transkid that doesn’t mention clothing, hair and toys. ‘I didn’t like playing with dolls, or wearing dresses, and I hated having long hair,’ says transboy Kit in Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity?

These books never make the connection between homophobic bullying and identifying out of one’s sex.

I have never seen a story that explained a child’s alienation from their sex except in terms of discordant gender identity.

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.

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.

In 2018 a British teacher recorded a training session on gender by Mermaids, a British charity that campaigns for early paediatric transitioning. The group’s favoured teaching aid is a ‘gender spectrum’ with Barbie at one end and G.I. Joe at the other, and ‘jelly baby’ outline figures in between, morphing from pig-tailed and curvy to stocky and broad-shouldered.

In other words, what makes children girls or boys is where they fall on a scale from Barbie to G.I. Joe. It is extraordinary that, nowadays, this counts as progressive.

‘All Of Us’, an Australian course for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, has a module in which children list behaviours typical of boys and girls. For boys, the lesson plan gives examples such as building things, liking action films and playing with toy cars. For girls, it lists cooking, dancing, shopping, wearing make-up and gossiping.

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.

As embodied creatures, we are connected by ties that have deep evolutionary significance. The categories of man and woman underpin those of father and mother, and the relationship of each to their children. If such categories are to become a matter of self-declaration, then those ties must be dissolved. Families become meaningless and individuals create themselves.

All this happens in a suffocating silence. Mainstream media outlets focus on the heart-warming narrative of children discovering their true identities, and supportive parents who accept that revelation. Parents who do not feel this way mostly do not want to go public, even if they can find a forum, in case it harms their relationship with their child.

A woman who has undergone hysterectomy is more likely to suffer a range of health problems, from heart disease to urinary incontinence. One without ovaries will have to take artificial oestrogen to stave off menopause.

Wallace Wong, a child psychologist, can be heard saying that his paediatric gender clinic sees around five hundred children who are in public care. His caseload is around one thousand, he says, and his youngest client not yet three. He advises parents to accelerate children’s transition by exaggerating their gender dysphoria, and claiming that if transition is prevented, they will kill themselves. ‘Pull a stunt,’ he says. ‘Suicide, every time – they will give you what you need.’

Guidelines written by trans lobby groups and adopted by schools, sporting federations, social clubs and so on mean that toilets, changing rooms and dormitories are now segregated according to the sex that children – and adults – say they are. Parents are left in the dark.

In 2018, Helen Watts was expelled from the UK Girl Guides for objecting to the organisation deciding to allow males to become members and group leaders, provided they identified as girls or women. The new rules say there is no need to inform girls or parents if males will be sharing sleeping accommodation or washing facilities.

Girl Guides is potentially putting teenage girls and boys in the same accommodation and not telling parents.

The history of institutional child-abuse has shown how predators can ‘groom’ people and organisations to accept behaviour that should have raised red flags. The only defence against such grooming is to apply child-safeguarding rules to everyone, always, with no exceptions, and to regard child safeguarding as an obligation of every adult.

My point is that transactivism can be exploited by those who would harm children – not that trans people, or transactivists, want to harm children, or do not care if others do.

In the 1990s, Fairweather won press awards for her work uncovering paedophile rings in British children’s homes and schools. She became an acknowledged expert on how paedophiles exploit ‘institutional weaknesses and political correctness’. It is therefore concerning that gender-identity ideology raises red flags for her, in particular the advice to teachers to keep secrets from parents and discourage children from speaking up about concerns regarding sharing their private spaces with children of the opposite sex.

The body-denialism at the heart of gender-identity ideology is harmful for all humans, since we are in fact embodied creatures. But it is especially harmful for women, since female bodies impose costs and make demands in ways that male ones don’t. It is female bodies that bear almost all the burden of reproduction, and ignoring that fact doesn’t change it; it merely muddles thinking about how to arrange society to accommodate reproduction while ensuring that women can live full, self-actualised lives. And it is also especially tempting for women, because throughout history women have been objectified and reduced to their bodies, with men as subject, occupying the realms of mind and intellect. ‘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.

The embrace of gender-identity ideology was part of mainstream feminism’s shift away from seeking to improve the lives of ordinary women and towards a self-congratulatory, performative, postmodernist style with its origins on campus.

To quote ‘The professor of parody’, a celebrated essay eviscerating Judith Butler by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, published in 1999: ‘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 . . .

Consider the consequences for the feminist movement of accepting the activist mantra that ‘transwomen are women’ – or the logically equivalent proposition that ‘a woman is anyone who says they’re one’. I have seen these restated in many ways, sometimes quite poetically. To give just a couple of examples: women are ‘an imagined community that honours the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society’ (American transwoman Susan Stryker, writing in Time magazine); and women are ‘multifaceted, intergenerational, international . . . limitless, formless . . . women are the world’ (UN Women, quoting another transwoman, American-Antiguan model Aaron Philip). At drive-by speed, this sort of stuff may seem flattering, even liberating. After all, who wants to be nothing more than a sex object or walking uterus? But defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting. These redefinitions are the antithesis of the ‘radical notion that women are people’. 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.

Try ‘a squawm is anyone who identifies as a squawm,’ or ‘every lazap is a lazap.’ Now, can you say what a squawm or a lazap is?

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? Certainly not anything as down-to-earth as cheap contraception, paid maternity leave, longer sentences for rapists or tougher rules on bias in hiring. When women are limitless and formless, they can have no political demands.

Even as the class of ‘women’ becomes ‘some males and some females, with no objective traits in common’, female bodies continue to exist. But when they need to be mentioned, there is no word for them. 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’.

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 human milk feeding families’. An American charity bemoans the frequency with which ‘black birthing bodies’ die in the delivery room. This language carves women up into pieces to be used for sexual and reproductive services. It is reminiscent of porn sites, where visitors are invited to search according to body part and activity of interest, or the surrogacy industry, where children are bought in bits – eggs from an ovary-haver, gestational services from a uterus owner and nutrition from a human milk feeder. Women become orifices, providers of genetic material, vessels for growing offspring and milch cows.

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 h...