The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All

by Shon Faye

British feminist Sophie Lewis wrote in an oped for the New York Times, titled ‘How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans’, the conditions for British feminism’s transphobia arise out of a consensus in British academia and the press that is overwhelmingly middle class and white, both in its composition and outlook: ‘middle-and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummelling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain.’

The concept of women as an undifferentiated global female sex class, more or less exploited in the same way for the same reasons, can only work by downplaying or minimizing any internal distinctions or hierarchies or exploitation within that class. Yet black and indigenous (or otherwise anti-colonial) feminisms render such a specious consensus on universal ‘female experience’ largely untenable.

The idea that after centuries of dehumanizing black women through slavery, and classing anyone not white as ‘other’, white women can claim a universal shared female experience with women of colour seems absurd.

Female socialization may well describe a collection of experiences that some types of women share in common – but at a global level it is clear that the cultural expectations of what it is to be a woman, and how these expectations are imposed, vary significantly. The same expectations are applied to different women in different ways under a capitalist class sys...

In reality, the ongoing predominance of white, middle-class and cisgender women in feminism means that any global definition of womanhood is often simply an extrapolation of these women’s particular...

Second, ignoring colonialism allows British (or other Western) feminists to disregard how the imposition of the strict gender binary of man and woman, with the accompanying hierarchy of male over female, was itself a mechanism of colonialism. Many pre-colonial societies and indigenous peoples did not view gender as binary. Some, as we have seen, had...

In contrast to this complexity, British anti-trans feminism – now known by its disciples, with unintentional irony, as ‘gender critical’ feminism (despite its lack of critical interest in how gender arises and varies according to time and place) – has tended to market itself as a common-sense approach that breezily waves nuance away.

The extent to which socio-political experience defines what it means to be a woman has always been a contested aspect of feminist debate. The heterosexual feminist Betty Friedan notoriously referred to lesbians within the movement as the ‘Lavender Menace’, whose ‘mannish’ qualities – making them not-quite-women – were a risk to the success of feminism. While this was obvious homophobia, in 1978 even the lesbian radical feminist Monique Wittig argued that the socially constructed understanding of ‘woman’ is so bound up with compulsory heterosexuality that it necessarily excludes lesbians: it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.17

The gender critical feminist insistence on a straightforward biological definition of women and men, then, relies on an ignorance of cisgender women’s own feminist intellectual history. The idea that a woman is simply an adult human female disregards the fact that the term ‘female’ refers to biological sex, which itself can denote a collection of traits (genitals, gonads, hormones, secondary sex characteristics and chromosomes), some of which can be modified. It also fails to consider that the term ‘female’ can have important social meanings for human beings beyond our reproductive role as mammals.

The case for inclusivity can often rest on whether it is ‘kind’ or ‘good’ or ‘right’ to welcome trans women as sisters, rather than any serious consideration of why their inclusion might be politically necessary for liberation from patriarchy. Rarely in mainstream debates over trans people and feminism do we consider the fatal flaw in any feminist movement that purports to be dismantling the patriarchy while disregarding the implications of trans people’s existence.

Feminism, though, ought always to interrogate biological essentialism (the idea that a person’s nature or personality is innate; arising from, or connected to, their biological traits). The idea that anyone born with a penis is inherently more aggressive or violent because they have a penis is an anti-feminist idea: it actually suggests that male violence is linked to biological ‘essence’ and is therefore inevitable, immutable, perhaps not even truly men’s fault. Yet anti-trans feminism is forced to rely on biological essentialism in its insistence that there is too great a similarity between trans women and cis men for the former to be regarded legally and politically as women. Transphobic feminism often uses imagery connected to penises (imagined or real) belonging to trans women as a powerful rhetorical tool, to suggest that trans women are exhibiting aggression or entitlement or are a threat.

Conversations about biological sex or anatomy, then, almost always inadvertently become about gender and behaviour too, even in the kind of feminism that calls itself ‘gender critical’.

They also generally incorporate an analysis of intersex people, who do not fit this reductive model, and who have suffered historical and ongoing mistreatment at the hands of a medical establishment obsessed with imposing binary biological sex on to bodies that don’t ‘fit’. The experiences of trans and intersex people show us that not all humans fit perfectly into two clear-cut categories of biological sex; indeed, the belief there are two separate sex categories is itself an erasure of sex variations that occur either naturally or through medical modification.

As the philosopher Robin Dembroff neatly explains, patriarchy is based on three key ideas: that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are a natural, immutable and exhaustive binary; that all males should be masculine, and all females should be feminine; that masculinity is incompatible with and superior to femininity. The first belief asserts, says Dembroff, that ‘every person, by virtue of their reproductive features (usually genitalia), decisively is male or female, and this can never be changed’; the second, ‘that males and females should comply with pervasive and strict rules about the sexual attractions, clothing, emotions, work, family roles and behaviours expected of them’; and the third, ‘that anything feminine is anti-masculine, and vice versa, and that masculine traits are more valuable than feminine traits’.20

To many patriarchal men, trans women are a horror, having supposedly ‘chosen’ to surrender the higher status of being men under patriarchy for being women. This is one of the key reasons why, as I’ve shown in this book, trans women worldwide are subject to brutal forms of physical and sexual violence.

This image of the trans woman as a living, breathing act of rape is a potent and persistent trope in the transphobic discourses of both right-wing men and anti-trans feminists: both groups are capable of providing cover for the other to perpetuate it. If transition itself is a rape, so this argument goes, then the trans woman is already guilty by the mere fact of her existence and can expect to be punished.

Such rhetoric is of course a way of distracting the general public from the reality. The reality is that transition is an act most trans women and girls see as lifesaving, and one for which they can be punished severely: with violence, with community and familial rejection, with poverty, with mental illness, with sexual abuse, with domestic violence and, yes, with murder. That we can be both highly at risk of rape by men and blamed for rape by feminists is made possible because the media constructs trans women simultaneously as deviant men and as dangerous women.

Again, even where trans women are not seen as authentically female, neither do they tend to be simply thought of, regarded or discussed as if they are men.

Dismantling patriarchy requires a full analysis of all the ways it manifests itself. Ignoring the concerns of any woman or person subject to misogyny will mean that, instead of abolishing patriarchy, all the feminist movement will achieve is the creation of a sub-class of woman against whom gendered violence and misogyny remain acceptable.

As the poet Jay Hulme puts it: The approach transphobes take towards trans men is far more insidious [than transmisogyny directed at trans women] and is much more difficult to explain and identify. Because transphobes see trans men as women, and because much of the political and online transphobia at the moment is perpetrated by women under the guise of ‘feminism’, there is a sense that trans men are misguided allies, that we are mistaken, and simply need to be welcomed back into the fold, and into womanhood itself. This welcoming seems like a kindness. It is not, and needs to be called out for what it is – a form of conversion therapy … As a trans man, I am, and always will be, belittled, disrespected, spoken down to, and patronised, by transphobes.27

Jay Hulme agrees: ‘[Transphobes] obsess over our surgeries, our ages, and our presentations. The prospect of a trans man exercising his right to bodily autonomy horrifies them.’ Echoing Henry, Hulme says that a key tactic of transphobic feminist discourse is infantilizing trans men and body horror: They speak of trans men as ‘girls’ even when we’re well into our twenties, and even beyond … They speak of ‘testosterone poisoning’ (having normal male levels of testosterone in our bodies and maybe growing facial hair), of ‘mutilation’, of ‘hacking off healthy body tissue’ – they care more about the sexist ideal of the perfect untouched female form, than about the people whose bodies they actually are.28

The logical endpoint of their ideology is that a person with a deep voice, full beard, masculine clothing, a typically male name and in some cases a penis will be permitted to enter a female space because he is a trans man or, in fact, just because he says he is (you cannot test for chromosomes in a public toilet).

Anti-trans feminist rhetoric about female spaces tends to rely on the false premise that it is always possible to detect a trans woman on sight and challenge her access to the space. This simply is not true in many instances, and could easily lead to a situation where masculine cis women and intersex women are challenged erroneously as ‘male’ based on their appearance. In reality, most trans men I know would not want to make cis or trans women uncomfortable in spaces set aside for people currently subject to the kinds of misogyny women experience, even if those same trans men did once experience it themselves.

But it is wrong to equate the mainstream media with the LGBTQ+ movement or, more specifically, the trans movement. The idea that greater visibility automatically leads to greater political power is a misapprehension, particularly when some of the most celebrated trans women in media are actresses, models and writers – industries in which all women are sexualized and obsessed over. To use trans women’s commodification and objectification in the media (because femininity has always been more easily commodified than masculinity) to suggest that trans women speak over, control or ‘dominate’ trans men is transmisogyny. That’s to say, it falsely implies that trans women, deep down, are really still men and afforded the privileges of being male, while erasing the ways in which famous trans women are still exploited, sexualized and fetishized in the media, just as cis women are.

Trans men should never be forced into a reactive position of denying their experiences of sexism, misogyny or transphobia in order to have their identity as men respected.

In one sense, the claim that everyone is non-binary isn’t wrong: the binary is a powerful and pervasive myth, and everyone is somewhere on a spectrum. ‘Non-binary’ is only useful insofar as it is a term which can be used to make such ideas legible to policymakers, families, schools and societies. It is a term designed to make conversation easier; it is not the end point.

I think, however, that whether in North America or Britain, it’s still naïve to pin all our hopes for trans people’s wellbeing, safety, dignity and liberation on liberal squeamishness about the ‘wrong side of history’. The reality is that many who were homophobic twenty years ago remain so today, and a clear record of past homophobia is no bar to power or popularity.

This misappropriation of activists’ language doesn’t mean that the radical demands for transformative politics they are making are a sham. The same is true of trans justice and trans freedom.