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‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’
Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.
A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.
Looking back on the first half-century of transsexualism, it is clear that for a long time officials understood what they were doing as resolving a tiny number of anomalous situations, a task they accomplished with varying degrees of compassion and logical coherence. Two long-term societal trends influenced their decisions, though they did not tend to acknowledge this: the growth of bureaucracy and the shift to individual, rather than communal, conceptions of personhood.
The sole cross-sex behaviour that many reported, erotic transvestism, is a common fetish of heterosexual men. A study in Sweden in 2005 found that 2.8 percent of males experienced sexual arousal in response to cross-dressing.
This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’
The idea underlying all this – and which can be seen in nascent form in Einar Wegener’s feeling that he had a ‘woman inside’ – is ‘dualism’. This is the belief that the immaterial psyche and the vessel that houses it are separate and of different kinds. The best-known proponent of this was the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who saw mind as pre-eminent over matter.
The first of these is that the very notion of binary sex is an artefact of Western colonialism.
Never mind the racism inherent in claiming that the rest of the world needed Europeans to explain how reproduction worked; such third genders have no bearing at all on these traditional societies’ understandings of biological sex.
The second, dubbed ‘Nemo’s Law’ by some wit online, is the gender-identity equivalent of Godwin’s Law – the tendency in long online discussions for someone eventually to bring up the Nazis. Nemo’s Law is the observation that if you mention sexual dimorphism, sooner or later someone will bring up clownfish, which are ‘sequential hermaphrodites’ born with the potential to mature into either males or females.
The third is to claim that people with intersex conditions prove that sex is not binary.
The fourth argument, which I will consider in most detail, is that sex – not gender – is socially constructed. This is a claim of breath-taking proportions, given everything that is known about the mechanisms of reproduction and humanity’s shared evolutionary history with other sexually dimorphic species.
Our hyper-connected world makes it easier than ever for culture-bound syndromes to break their bounds. In his excellent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalisation of the American Psyche, journalist Ethan Watters argues that this is particularly likely to happen with American culture-bound syndromes, because of the country’s cultural dominance. One of his case studies is the arrival of Western-style anorexia in Hong Kong.
A generation ago, progressives campaigned for schools to crack down on taunts about gay boys being girls; now, the bullies are presented as right.
Any feminism worthy of the name must offer a strong analysis of how society can accommodate and support motherhood.
When women are limitless and formless, they can have no political demands. In particular, feminism can no longer address issues related to female embodiment – or even articulate them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
Another is because we subconsciously think they will make us look good. And sometimes, in what social scientists call preference falsification, we claim to hold views that we are well aware we do not because we think others will despise us if we admit the truth.
People are often not conscious that a belief they hold could fall into this category. But they must be aware, at some level – just as someone in a company must understand why the mayor’s idiot nephew is on staff, or else he would be fired. Similarly, we know at some level that our crony beliefs are fragile, and do not subject them to vigorous testing.
Whether someone espouses a crony belief, and how long they hold onto it, depends largely on how rewarding it is. If it is very rewarding – if their job depends on convincing declarations of faith, for example – most people will quell any doubts that arise. But if the rewards change, the energy that people put into shoring up these beliefs will too.
