Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

How much harder it would have been to argue for the vote for women, or for paid maternity leave, or to end the exemption that allowed men to rape their wives at will, if the only way to refer to the beneficiaries of such changes had been to list bodily secretions and sexual organs.

At an academic level, the differing treatment of sex, gender and sexuality categories on the one hand, and racial categories on the other, is because they have been theorised in different fields.

The women most harmed are a highly marginalised subgroup: lesbians. Without a meaningful definition of sex, there can be no meaningful definition of sexual orientation. And so, according to activists, the words gay, straight and so on now refer to attractions towards gender identities, not sexes. 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.

This sort of thing has little impact on straight people, because they are the great majority. Nor does it much affect gay males, since females, however they identify, are not normally in a position to harass males into accepting them as sexual partners. Overwhelmingly, it is lesbians whose sexual boundaries come under pressure. 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). In 2019 the Washington Post removed mention of Jennie Hodgers, who cross-dressed in order to fight in the American Civil War, from a podcast entitled ‘Women who won wars’. In an apology, it said Hodgers’s inclusion had not been ‘in keeping with Washington Post style, which states that people should be referred to by their current identity’.

Lesbian icons are now routinely described as transmen, among them Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, a tragic story of Sapphic love, and Stormé DeLarverie, a professional drag king who was in the thick of the Stonewall riots that launched the modern gay-rights movement. Even fictional characters are not safe. George of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, a girl who hates dresses and long hair, and loves sailing and climbing; Jo of Little Women, who whistles, walks with her hands behind her back and promises her father to be the ‘man of the house’ while he is away at war; and Yentl, who cross-dresses to be allowed to study the Talmud: all are now often ‘reinterpreted’ as transmen.

In a paper entitled ‘How bathrooms really became separated by sex’, W. Burlette Carter, a professor emerita of law at George Washington University, demolishes these alternative histories. She demonstrates that sex separation in communal toilets, baths and the like has been common since antiquity, and that a key purpose has always been to protect girls and women from sexual assault and harassment. These dangers were endemic, not a figment of genteel women’s and patriarchal men’s imaginations. The United Nations, and charities such as ActionAid and Save the Children, campaign for single-sex toilets in schools in developing countries, recognising that without them girls are at risk of assault and more likely to drop out.

Excluding all males from places where 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.

The usual response is to say that statistics about men do not apply to transwomen, and that transwomen are at risk if they are forced to use men’s spaces. But under gender self-identification, transwomen are not objectively distinct from other male people, so there is no way to calculate robust statistics about them. The little evidence that exists shows that at least some of the males who identify as women are very dangerous indeed. 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.

Women do not run the world, and their changing rooms are not where they plot to keep men down. Nor is their desire to undress away from the male gaze caused by anti-male prejudice.

The prefix ‘cis’ is used to obscure this. By positioning everyone else as privileged in comparison with trans people, it enables a linguistic inversion of the power differential between males and females: cis women supposedly oppress transwomen. The absurdity becomes obvious when you switch from gender identity to sex. Males who identify as women may be vulnerable in male spaces; in female spaces they are anything but.

The logical impossibility of giving female people privacy in single-sex spaces at the same time as allowing males to enter on demand may mean service providers give up and make all facilities formally mixed-sex. That would be to women’s detriment. 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.

She also found that Tara (Patrick) Pearsall, a serial rapist who posed as a paramedic in order to sexually assault young women, had been transferred to a provincial women’s prison two years earlier. Pearsall had told fellow inmates in a men’s prison that the point of identifying as trans was to do easier time.

And Halley found press coverage about two post-operative transwomen held in women’s jails. One, classified by the CSC as female, is Tara Desousa (Adam Laboucan), whose crimes included a rape of a three-month-old baby so brutal that the victim required reconstructive surgery, and who has admitted to killing a three-year-old when aged eleven. Desousa is now held in a prison with a mother-and-baby unit. Another is Madilyn (Matthew) Harks, who committed at least two hundred sexual crimes against at least sixty victims, including girls of four and five. After being released from a women’s prison Harks, who has been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having an ‘all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls’, was admitted to a women’s half-way house, again with a mother-and-child unit.

And indeed, the only research into long-term outcomes for post-operative transsexuals, in Sweden, concluded that transwomen ‘retained a male pattern regarding criminality’. One of the women locked up with Harks has lodged a complaint with the CSC, alleging that Harks sexually harassed her. Any inmate who complained about Harks was branded transphobic, she says, so most stayed silent rather than risk loss of privileges and delayed parole. The woman, who is indigenous, suffered abuse in childhood and says that Harks’s behaviour gave her flashbacks. ‘The CSC was really dismissive,’ says Halley, who has seen the complaint and the CSC’s initial response. ‘They suggested she speak to a tribal elder about her trauma.’

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. Holding these dangerous criminals is bound to change the way women’s prisons are run to the detriment of women. Security will have to be tighter and prisoners’ movements more restricted. Some guards will have to be armed, which is not standard in the women’s estate in Canada. Rehabilitation programmes will be affected, too. Male and female offending patterns differ, and women’s programmes focus on self-esteem and setting boundaries. They are inappropriate for violent, predatory males. ‘These murderers, rapists and child-abusers are being taught to assert themselves,’ says Mason, rolling her eyes.

Once politicians order a prison service to accommodate males as if they were females, they put it in an impossible position. It may be told to assess risk – but rape and domestic violence are so wildly under-reported that any risk assessment is necessarily incomplete.

Then Andrew Burns (Tiffany Scott) sought transfer to Cornton Vale. He is one of only one hundred or so prisoners in Scotland classified as so dangerous that his sentence is indefinite. He has held dirty protests, assaulted prison officers, slashed a cellmate’s face with a razor and bitten open his own veins to spray staff with blood. Three officers guard him when he is outside his cell, and when he was brought from prison to court for sentencing, it was locked down and prison staff wore full protective gear. In the end the transfer was denied because Scott was deemed too dangerous to be moved anywhere – but under gender self-identification, which the Scottish government has promised to introduce with no exceptions, it would have gone ahead.

One woman who had beaten addiction and turned her life around was found with drugs in her cell. ‘She said she had got into an argument with one of the trans prisoners, who had lost control and punched the wall,’ says Hotchkiss. ‘ “All I saw was a violent man intimidating me,” she said. “I went straight off and found someone who could supply me with drugs.” ’

‘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?’

The far greater number of male prisoners, and their far greater propensity for violent and sexual crimes, mean that not very many males will need to seek tran...

Of all the sex offenders behind bars (in men’s or women’s prisons) who identify as women, well over two-thirds are male.

From 1994 an activist group, Camp Trans, protested near Michfest every year. It pressed performers to boycott the festival, and was supported by civil-rights groups such as the ACLU and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (now simply GLAAD). ‘We are pretty over spending a lot of our time and energy having an event of seven thousand womyn be focused on three or four guys,’ Lisa Vogel, one of Michfest’s founders, told a reporter. ‘Men feel like they get to be whatever they want, even if it’s a lesbian.’ But by 2015 the pressure had become too much and Michfest closed.

‘What we are doing here is based not just on our biology, but on how we are treated in the world because we are born female,’ she says. She regards attacks by transactivists as just another form of misogyny. ‘There’s always backlash when women set boundaries and stand their ground.’

Morgan, who plays for Port Harlequin Ladies Club in Wales, had broken the coach’s ankle during a game of touch rugby – though he seemed remarkably sanguine about it, quipping that Morgan would be a ‘good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training’.

‘Ballroom dancing is a contact sport; rugby is a collision sport.’ Those collisions can lead to brain injuries and, occasionally, broken necks – and courts have held referees and administrators liable. 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.

Laurel Hubbard, a forty-two-year-old New Zealander who competed in men’s weightlifting when younger with modest success. In 2019 Hubbard won gold in the women’s division at the Pacific Games, defeating two teenage Samoans. ‘This fa’afafine, or male, should never have been allowed by the Pacific Games Council President to lift with the women,’ said the Samoan prime minister (who can hardly be accused of prejudice against gender non-conforming people: he is patron of the Samoan Fa’afafine Association).

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.

As it is, women’s hips are less stable than men’s, and their gait is less efficient. Power is transmitted less effectively through the hip, knee and ankle. Wider hips also compromise carrying and throwing. Women’s greater flexibility means less energy can be stored in tendons.

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 overwhelming upper-body advantage is nowhere near accounted for by differences in size – as can be seen in weightlifting competitions, where competitors are banded by weight, and the male world champion in each category lifts around 30 percent more than the female one.

different. Females cannot make themselves as fast and strong as males by trying harder – any more than males can become pregnant by effort of will.

Some adults are weaker than some teenagers, and yet no one argues that adults should be allowed to compete as under-eighteens. Some heavy people are slow and flabby, but no one argues that heavyweights should be allowed to box against flyweights. The point of age- or weight-restricted competition is to reward the best young or light contestants, not to give ordinary adults or heavyweights an easy ride.

Once again, the conception of womanhood had changed. No longer was a woman someone who lacked testicles; now all that had to be lacking was testosterone. Since this can be suppressed with drugs, anyone who wanted could become a woman in sports officials’ eyes. Womanhood had become a provisional status.

testosterone suppression has barely any impact on the sporting performance of people who have been through male puberty.

Under British law, failing to exclude males from women’s sports is arguably indirect discrimination.

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. A ‘transgender male is someone who identifies as male but was assigned the sex of female at birth’, the departments declared, and vice versa for a transgender female. When a person transitions, they ‘begin asserting the sex that corresponds to their gender identity instead of the sex they were assigned at birth’. This is so confusing that I will spell it out. 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 order to introduce gender self-identification never came into force. Two dozen states brought lawsuits; court orders stayed its implementation; and a few months later Donald Trump was elected president. It seems surpassingly unlikely that the new president, a man demonstrably unconcerned with women’s rights or boundaries, cared about the threats gender self-identification posed to both. Nonetheless, the policy was a left-wing creation and had gained no traction with Republicans, and so, after he took office, his administration let the nation’s schools and universities know that ‘sex’ no longer meant ‘gender identity’, but should be understood to refer to biology once more.

in New York City in 2019 defines sex as ‘a combination of chromosomes, hormones, internal and external reproductive organs, facial hair, vocal pitch, development of breasts, gender identity, and other characteristics’. When these do not align, it says, ‘gender identity is the primary determinant of a person’s sex.’

The contradictory rulings show how impossible it is to form a coherent body of law when core terms have been destabilised.

class. ‘In sports it’s your body that’s competing, not your mind,’ says Soule.

‘I saw it as a women’s rights issue and still do. The media try to make it an LGBT issue, and it really isn’t.’

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. Feelings of modesty and privacy related to the presence of the opposite sex appear to be common to all cultures, and have an obvious origin in the facts of reproduction. Women have an extra reason for wanting single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable or naked: as protection against male sexual violence and harassment.

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.’

In an interview in 2017 Sarah McBride, a transwoman who is now a Democratic senator for Delaware and was the HRC’s press secretary at the time, explained that it had blocked any LGB activism that did nothing for the T ‘forcefully and aggressively’.

An example is the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. It concluded that abortion was a privacy right, as conferred by the Fourteenth Amendment. Privacy was not something that seemed at all relevant to legislatures elsewhere as they considered abortion, and the ruling failed to manufacture losers’ consent since it sidestepped the central question, namely whether the foetus has any rights.

Every now and then, the logjam in Washington shifts. On the rare occasions that one party holds both houses and the presidency, it tends to be maximalist, since another chance may not come for ages. And that is the approach Joe Biden is taking to gender self-identification, even though the issue is highly polarising and he has only a bare majority in the Senate. On his first day in office in January 2021 he issued an executive order to all federal agencies, instructing them to examine their rules and regulations in light of the Bostock judgment. They have been given a pretty firm steer as to what they should conclude. On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to allow male prisoners to serve their sentences in women’s prisons on the basis of self-ID, and to pass a so-called Equality Act that would interpret the word ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender identity’ right across federal law.

What same-sex marriage, women’s franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase ‘trans rights’, they assume something similar is being demanded – that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by ‘trans rights’ is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are. This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. 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.