Category Archives: Gender Identity Ideology

Marxism and Gender Ideology (3) – Nothing without our body

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In reaction to the Cass Report in Britain there has been widespread denunciation of the ‘toxic’ debate around the transgender issue without specifying why this is.  There has also apparently been wide agreement that there needs to be better data to find out the effects of treatment of children and young people.. 

The second link above shows that the apparent agreement is a fiction and that the supporters of gender ideology, within and outside the NHS, have both no need for data and no need for a debate.  The report itself reveals that most of the NHS’s gender identity development service (Gids) refused to cooperate with the inquiry in providing evidence and that this was ideologically driven, i.e. they accepted gender identity ideology.

It is abundantly clear that the toxic debate is not going away any time soon because the supporters of gender identity ideology have made it plain that there is no debate to be had, and that data on clinical outcomes of those young people who have had puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones or other surgical intervention is impermissible.  This, however, is only one reason for the toxic ‘debate’.

As we saw in the previous post, the shifting, imprecise and downright misleading use of definitions means that you get routine claims about the ‘right to change gender’ when what is meant is the ‘right to change sex’ which does not exist because it cannot be done.

The issue is not therefore about a ‘right to change sex’ but the social and political rights to be acquired from claiming to have one’s ‘true’ sex recognised, which is to be established not by any sort of health care, such as hormonal treatment or surgical intervention, but by accepting the view that one knows one’s identity better than anyone else and being a woman, for example, is just such an identity.  Something that a man can be if he puts his mind to it.

This requires the belief that one can be ‘born in the wrong body’, meaning that the ‘real’ and essential person exists as something separate from the body, which is akin to the religious idea of a soul, also separate from the body. In this way the claims of gender identity ideology are a religion for which data, or any other scientific evidence, is irrelevant.  For this ideology, denial of the quasi-religious nature of its claims means that the pretence must be made to objective validity but this must then involve denial of the means of validation.  Irrational claims give rise to irrational discourse which gives rise to the toxicity.

The shifting, imprecise and downright misleading use of words, including the word ‘gender’ adds a twist to the non-debate by making it impossible to consistently identify what is being claimed or denied.

Gender can, as well as meaning sex, also be understood as the expression of social norms associated with and based on one’s sex, such as the characteristic stereotyped attributes of femininity to be expressed by women and of masculinity to be expressed by men.  We have looked at some problems with this is the previous post but let us park these for the sake of this discussion.

Effeminate expression by men, by some gay men for example , has historically been disapproved of in many countries, with patterns of socialisation generally working to impose those characteristics considered masculine that would prevent or negate such expression.  Similarly, the phenomenon of masculinised women, such as in some lesbians, has also been frowned upon.  Regardless of the advances in gay and lesbian rights in some counties, this socialisation process continues and is still considered ‘normal’ with deviations from it being ‘abnormal’.

In real life, no one fits the pure stereotyped norms of femininity and masculinity.  It therefore makes no sense to use the term gender in the way employed by one socialist: that trans means ‘people who wish to live permanently in the gender identity polar opposite to that ascribed to the biological sex’.   No one’s gender is the polar opposite of their sex, while the free expression of one’s personality is a part of what socialism is about.  Gender norms are restricting, stifling and enforce rigid stereotypes that are regressive for both sexes and for the relations between them.  

Everyone expresses some combination of the characteristics that may be said to make up the ‘polar opposites’ of the social expression of one’s sex.  To claim that one is a ‘polar opposite’ in identity to one’s sex is therefore to define oneself in stereotypical and reactionary terms, so that to assert political claims on such grounds is also reactionary.

Gender identity ideology might think it avoids this by positing the idea of numerous genders, so that ‘polar opposite’ is not the only alternative to female and male, woman and man.  This involves the creation of multiple genders, and different sources will provide different numbers of them.  If you Google ‘how many genders are there’ you might find that there are either 3 or 4 or 68 nor 72 or the number is undefined.  The BBC once claimed to children that there were over 100.

Since one’s gender is determined by one’s sense of oneself there can be any number of self-definitions, each of which must be considered to be valid by this ideology, precisely because it is self-determined.  But purely subjective identities are paraded because they crave social recognition, validation and acceptance, (otherwise they remain in a private domain without validation etc.) so the assertion of such identities is a political question.

This ideology thereby becomes the only political position that asserts its legitimacy and authority on the basis of an unchallengeable declaration demanding immediate acceptance. However, this ‘first-person authority’ championed by gender identity ideologists (trans people know themselves better than anyone else so we should all accept what they say) excludes those who disagree (for example women who deny that they have any sort of gender identity).

Whatever about such claims to novel ‘genders’, the majority are either male or female, and since women are most vulnerable to the consequent results, claims that men can become (or always ‘really’ have been) women are the most contentious.  Transmen in some male-only settings are at greater risk than the men they will encounter but this cannot be said for transwomen (men) entering women-only spaces.

This also means that while many transactivists supporting gender identity ideology think of themselves as left wing and progressive, their ideology is simply a mirror of the conservative and right-wing view of women that they claim to oppose.  While the most conservative view regards the proper expression of a woman’s sex as stereotypical femininity, trans activists often define what it is to be a woman through stereotypical expression.  The causal direction is simply reversed. For one, women should be feminine and for the other being feminine, in so far as they can make it, is to be a woman.  

Since ‘gender’ can be understood as sex, or as the expression of norms of socialisation of the sexes, we confront claims to be able to change sex, which is impossible, or claims to be able to change gender through having a sense of one’s sex being different from what it actually is. In the latter case gender is then conflated with sex.  Through identification with (or through) the social norms that are supposedly rejected the claim is made that one has changed sex.

The ‘explanation’ is to claim that to be a woman is to have some innate sense of being one.  This innate sense, in order not to be something contingent and open to challenge, is held to be common to everyone; everyone has a gender identity, whether admitted or not. We thus end up with the mantra that ‘transwomen are women’.  It is claimed by some supporters of gender identity ideology that everyone’s gender identity is expressed in terms of behaviour, appearance, including clothing, make-up, etc and is evidenced by it.

This ‘argument’ has its own problems. If a transwoman wears high heels, pretty pink dresses, lots of make-up and effects a flighty and skittish air they may be accused of believing that being a woman is existence as a crude stereotype that is insulting.  Not doing any of these things might leave the transwoman looking like a man and putting immediate and impossible-to-ignore obstacles to acceptance of their claims.  How recognition of all the other genders is to be accomplished, even by their bearers, is a moot point, including the idea of gender fluid, non-binary, non-gender, agender, third-gender etc.

More generally, what particular norms of behaviour, dress etc must be included in ‘gender identity’ and what is not, and how the mélange of social factors come together to instantiate and constitute a coherent sex status, is impossible to define.  A transwoman may seek acceptance as a woman, but fundamentally rejection or qualified non-acceptance will not be because of any presentation etc. but will be based on knowledge of the person’s sex; the real transphobe will be the one who rejects a transwomen fundamentally for their failure to represent masculinity.

What these point to are the limitations of subjective claims over objective reality, illustrated in other ways.   A person’s sex exists before it is ‘assigned’ (as the ideologists put it) and will exist whether it is ‘assigned’ at all, for example if no doctor is present ‘to do it’.  A baby girl and an old woman are still females; the first does not identify as anything and will, bar accidental factors such as death, develop into a woman, and the latter is still a woman whether she is, because of dementia, no longer able to be conscious of this fact or not.  When she is dead, she will be a dead woman.

It is claimed that because these subjective senses are unverifiable, we cannot test them – we cannot reach inside someone’s head to see how they really feel, process these feelings into thoughts and see how they are then formulated into claims to objective reality.  We cannot know the motivation behind a claim to a gender identity for example.  How do we know that a transwoman actually feels or thinks like a woman (leaving aside what this actually means) when they are a biological male?  In fact, the assertion would have to be to feel and think as a woman, although this lexical formulation is immediately less plausible.

How is it known that their ideas of their identity, arising (sometimes) as the result of psychological distress caused by various factors, conform to and constitute essential ‘womanhood’?  Since Gender identification is sometimes described by transgender activism as a political act, or that ‘there’s no one way to be transgender, and no one way for transgender people to look or feel about themselves’, or ‘there is no right or wrong way to be trans’, their claim is effectively denied.

Children come to know themselves through observing others and comparing themselves to others, including observing that there are two sexes and that they fit to one of them.  They learn that this cannot be changed.  In this, the sense of one’s sex is learned and not innate, even though it cannot be changed, so that for the vast majority of people it comes with the territory.  Distress caused by a perceived discrepancy between the idea of one’s sex, misnamed gender identity, and sex characteristics of one’s body can lead to what is termed gender dysphoria, but this does not allow one to change sex.  Even if medical and surgical interventions may help, that is relieve the distress to a greater or lesser degree, these will not change a person’s sex. They cannot therefore be a ‘cure’ for the claim that their condition requires a change of sex.

Such dysphoria evidences an awareness that one’s sex is different from one’s identity, from the claim to a fixed and innate identity as the opposite, or more accurately, other, sex.  Further, it is often asserted that this identity warrants the claim that despite natal sex, for example as a male, the transwoman was ‘always’ a woman.

In effect, the sexed body is rendered both relevant and irrelevant to the construction of all of humanity since trans people are still to be included under the classification of the two sexes that encompasses everyone. (We leave aside the many other ‘identities’ that render the whole ideology even more incoherent).  The claims about the meaning and importance of sex are therefore not just about trans people but about everyone and thus involve sweeping claims about the nature of the non-trans population that they are blissfully unaware of – that gender identity and not biological sex defines them and is definitive. Everyone is to be roped into the ideology whether they like it or not and the subjective claims of some become the objective claims on others.

In other words, if gender identity defines sex and everyone has a gender identity, everyone is defined by this phenomenon of gender identity with the social and political consequences demanded by the ideology.  ‘Transwomen are women’ can thus be read backwards.

If transwomen claim that they feel like women and have the same sense of themselves as a biological woman has, it implies that the feelings that biological women have, and their sense of themselves as a sex, is the same as that of transwomen.  I doubt very much whether the vast majority of women would endorse such a claim.  Not least because their understanding and feelings about being a woman are based on their female body, its functioning and the social experiences that this necessarily entails. None of these considerations involve ‘biological determinism’ in the sense that women’s social and political roles are biologically determined.

Many women therefore, as we have said, deny having any gender identity of the kind expressed by trans activism.  Their statements on their sense of themselves and the sexed bodies that they have will be more persuasive than the claims of men who do not inhabit female bodies, have not experienced life as a woman, and who cannot know how women feel about being a woman but can really only imagine or profess some idea of it.  

Women will do so with much stronger objective grounds to make such statements.  That they are often not called upon to do so makes it hard to avoid the view that a well-known hierarchy of authority between the sexes is being adopted.  In any case, regardless of any supposed authority, identifying as a woman does not make you one.

To sum up: you cannot change sex, you cannot become a different one by behaviour or appearance or other cultural attribute, and you cannot identify yourself into one.  Since we are most interested in the politics of gender identity ideology, we are left with the conclusion that any claims it makes are not based on reality.  For Marxism, if they are not, they are reactionary.

We will look at whether this conclusion can be explained further in the next post.

Back to part 2

Marxism and Gender Identity ideology (2) – What is it?

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If we look at the UK government’s 2018 consultation paper on reform of the Gender Recognition Act we see that gender is defined as ‘often expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity, gender refers to socially constructed characteristics, and is often assumed from the sex people are registered as at birth.’  Thus, do we immediately enter the world of indefinite definitions that create uncertainty as to their meaning and a tortuous journey to understand how it all is supposed to hang together in some coherent way.

In the document, a legally recognised gender is meant to allow replacement of a supposedly erroneous recording of sex on the birth certificate, although it cannot be the ‘right’ one because gender is not sex and is not defined as sex. The individual is entitled ‘to a new birth certificate issued with an updated sex marker’, and according to the definition of the Full Gender Recognition Certificate, this ‘shows that the holder has satisfied the criteria for legal recognition in their acquired gender.’  So, although it is a ‘sex marker’ it is not the actual sex of the individual, which is observed at birth.

Like so many other aspects of this question, as we shall see, sex is both central and to be displaced.

What it is displaced by is not clear, and certainly not by the above definition.  We are told that ‘gender’ is sometimes expressed in particular terms but not what it is that is being expressed.  This invites the question, what other expressions does it have that might lead us to understand what it is?  Perhaps this is explained by the definition of ‘Gender expression’, which is ‘a person’s outward expression of their gender. This may differ from their gender identity or it may reflect it.’  In which case the expression of gender that is supposed to be core to the definition of gender may not actually be a person’s ‘gender identity.’ 

The definition of gender goes on to say that ‘it refers to socially constructed characteristics’, which tells us that this is not a natural entity, like sex, which is biological, but is a social construction, but again does not tell us what it is that has been constructed.  What social constructions are we being referred to?  If it is ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, why is this not stated, although it can’t be these because these are just some expressions of it and these, we have been told, may not reflect a person’s gender identity.  If conceived as social norms, of behaviour, presentation etc., it doesn’t make much sense to refer to individuals in terms of a social norm, which is a feature of society and not of individuals.

In any case, we are not told what ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are.  These might be understood to refer to the characteristics of males and females, not to their natural attributes but to social ones that have been attached.  Could there be references to some notions of what ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are or to concrete social practices?  Both, however, vary by time and place and are not like sex, from which we are told we might assume a person’s gender, which is immutable.  Gender, therefore, is something very different from sex, considered on even the most minimum basis, and gives rise to doubts as to how it could be a substitute for it.

Of course, these questions are easily answered if it asserted that ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are often seen as expressions of one’s sex but not its substance and that socially constructed characteristics are often placed on the sexes, which is why we can often assume them from a person’s sex.  This however would not assist the project of replacing sex with gender.

The definition of Gender identity is ‘a person’s internal sense of their own gender. This does not have to be man or woman. It could be, for example, non-binary.’  So, if gender refers to socially constructed characteristics and gender identity is an internal sense of these, gender identity must derive from social characteristics that have been internalised.  If this is the case, gender identity cannot be innate and cannot exist at birth since at this stage of human development such characteristics as masculinity and femininity have not been perceived.  Since they vary by time and place, this also raises the question how something claimed to be innate, being inherent in the essential nature of someone, and from birth, can vary by time and place (unlike someone’s sex).

Nevertheless, this is the ground upon which the designation of one’s sex through a new ‘sex marker’ based on ‘gender’ is made, and of the political demands made by Gender Identity ideology. 

The uncertainty is increased when we are told that a gender can not just be either a man or a woman but ‘non-binary’, which is further defined as; ‘an umbrella term for a person who identifies as in some way outside of the man-woman gender binary. They may regard themselves as neither exclusively a man nor a woman, or as both, or take another approach to gender entirely. Different people may use different words to describe their individual gender identity, such as genderfluid, agender or genderqueer.’

What is meant by ‘identifies as’?  Is it a way of stating that a person is, for example, saying I am “neither a man nor a woman” or saying, “I am both a man and a woman’’?   If it is more or less the same as this, how does this make sense? 

How can gender identity, which refers to someone’s internal sense of their gender, which refers to socially constructed characteristics, refer to entities that do not exist, such as a person that is not a man or a woman?  Does this then mean that ‘socially constructed characteristics’ are, or can include, ideas or conceptions that have no material reality?  Are there any limits to the ideas constructed?  In what sense, and in what way, can someone saying they are, for example agender, be considered, and therefore treated, differently to someone claiming to be of the other sex (if these different genders are to be taken as socially significant)?

And what if the claim to be non-binary is really a political statement, in what way can the concept of gender and gender identity suppliant that of sex and its corporeal reality if such statements are also, or really, statements of political belief –  a political identity?

We are told that the Gender Recognition Act 2004: is’ an Act of Parliament that allows transgender people to gain legal recognition of their acquired gender, so long as that gender is a man or woman’, which lets us know that the law will not recognise something which does not exist, i.e. a person that is neither a man or a woman or a person that is both.  And we also don’t need to seek guidance on what the legal status is of the other genders.  This, however, leaves open the question what sort of thing ‘gender’ is, that can include things that cannot exist but is also something that can legally replace sex, which obviously does exist, for some purposes. 

We are not told what is meant by a ‘person’s internal sense of their own gender’.  What is meant by ‘sense’; is it feeling, belief, understanding, perception or knowledge?  Why should a person’s expression or statement of these be legislated as true, and subject to legal obligation by the state?  What other claims by a person of belief etc. are unequivocally accepted and acted upon by the state? Particularly when this ‘sense’ can also include things that do not make sense – like not being either a woman or a man or being both at the same time?

The definition of Gender Identity as a person’s internal sense of their own gender, is the basis of an ‘Acquired gender’, and ‘ The Gender Recognition Act 2004 describes this as the gender in which an applicant is living and seeking legal recognition. It is different from the sex recorded at birth and is instead, the gender the individual identifies with. It could be man or woman.’  Since both ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ do not require gender presentation or gender expression it is unclear how the ‘gender the individual identifies with’ could always be verified.  To identify ‘with’ something is not the same as identifying ‘as’ something (ignoring what exactly identifying as something can actually accomplish or entail).

In any case, what does it even mean to live ‘in’ a gender that is in some way different from your sex?  How can anyone live outside of or in some way different from what their body dictates, a body which is sexed and which determines so much of life and existence, even whether you are able to exist at all?  It is an elementary fact, understood by everyone, that life cannot exist outside the body because the functioning body is life.  To live ‘in’ some thing, and through this thing, is to live in a (sexed) body.

One does not live in femininity, for example, or in socially constructed characteristics, and social norms might be lived within society by a person but are not, as we have noted, a sort of internal identity.  Proof of having a collection of documents, such as driving licence, passport or utility bill, as set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004, is a bureaucratic, simulated substitute. Those with a non-binary identity might struggle.

Other inconsistencies can be noted.  While gender and gender identity refer to social constructions and internal senses, ‘gender reassignment’ refers to ‘reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.’  Since sex can be replaced by a ‘sex marker’ that recognises a person’s ‘gender’, it would also appear that gender changes (or reassigns) a person’s sex by a physical process (that does not have to be completed).  Gender identity as an internal sense can replace sex while gender reassigned involves a physical process.  These involve two very different operations, and it is not explained in what way they are able to involve and accomplish the same task.

Finally, the British Government document states that it wants to know the implications of ‘recognising a gender that is neither male nor female’, which are, of course, the two sexes and I don’t know of any other.  At this point it is tempting to repeat philosopher Alex Byrnes’ remark in his book (Trouble with Gender, p107) that “what ‘gender’ is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess.”  The labyrinthine series of definitions examined above form the basic structure, such as it is, of an ideology that is supposed to sustain certain political claims, and it is this ideology that further occasional posts will examine

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

Marxism and Gender Identity Ideology (1) – Introduction

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Last year during a break in the local anti-war meeting there was a short disagreement about the transgender issue.  The woman could barely conceal her disdain for the idea that men could claim to be women by wearing a dress and lipstick (as she put it).  The man thought that it was an important issue that had to be addressed.

The woman was primarily a Palestine solidarity activist but recognised the war in Ukraine as one in which hundreds of thousands of people were being killed and that had the potential to escalate with catastrophic results for the world.  The man thought the issue had important implications for women’s rights and should be taken up by socialists.

This brought to mind the passage in ‘What is to be Done’ by Lenin ‘that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects…’ 

So, the questions that naturally arise are about the demands that are raised by the trans activist movement and whether socialists should support them. We can start by looking at the Gender Identity ideology that grounds the politics of the movement and their ‘allies’.

Not all trans people support the same demands or Gender Identity ideology, and this ideology has various features and makes dissimilar claims.  What is hardly in dispute however, is that trans people should not be subject to unjustified discrimination or violence, and deserve respect based on our common humanity.  The specific claims of Gender Identity ideology are particular to a certain strain of trans political activism and make claims which go beyond this response.

In a series of articles in the British ‘Weekly Worker’ these issues are addressed, and in the fourth part the author writes–‘I use ‘trans people’ for the present purposes to mean people who wish to live permanently in the gender identity polar opposite to that ascribed to the biological sex in which they were born.’

At first reading this can be taken to mean that the issue is men, for example, who wish to live as women. Except, if this were the issue there would hardly be a dispute.  Few are going to object to men wearing women’s’ clothes, make-up etc. and presenting themselves as women, in so far as they are able, in their everyday lives.

Gender identity ideology asserts much more than this; it asserts, for example, that men are women if they consider – ‘identify’– as women.  As the mantra goes – ‘transwomen are women’.  This is stated, not as a metaphor, but as a literal truth.

This is the main problem with the definition as presented in the ‘Weekly Worker’; if we must assume that the word gender in ‘gender identity’ means something other than what it has (until this controversy) been traditionally regarded to mean – as simply another word for sex.  Instead, it is a word that is employed to substitute for sex and thereby erase it. In the next few occasional posts I will look at the ideology and the claims of the movement, beginning by asking what ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ mean.

Forward to part 2

Three books on Transgender Politics (4 of 4) – Trans – When Ideology Meets Reality

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The third book – Trans – was bought in an Oxfam bookshop in England and I wonder would I be able to buy it there again?

It is, like the first, a critique of gender identity theory, which claims that if someone identifies as a woman, they are a woman, regardless of any contrary biological facts.  It is justified because it is claimed that no one can know more or better about a person than the person themselves.  This is plausible to many, and compassion and sympathy for those minorities facing discrimination lead many to accept these claims without considering the full consequences.

The author Helen Joyce argues early in the book that this is not what gender self-identification is about – “it is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim.”

Not to do so is to invite denunciation as transphobic, including sometimes the hyperbolic claim that that to do so makes trans people feel unsafe.  The subjectivism of ‘I am who I say I am’ is replaced by ‘you must agree with what I say and agree to the demands that I make’.  Changing objective reality is what it is about, while seeking to redefine it through declaration.

Joyce says that this leads to an Orwellian world, an accusation she notes that is “often made too lightly”, but in this case is applicable because it robs language of the words to frame opposition to gender self-identification (gender ID).  ‘Male’ and ‘female’ becomes both biology and identity; for example, it is your sex when you are born and also your identity some time before and then after you transition. But if they are the same why does any transition matter if your sex is defined by your gender identity?  What does it mean to identify as female if your biological sex is unimportant to your gender identity and thus your sex?

A potential response is that medical intervention and or outward presentation is how I would like to express my identity (and therefore my sex) and this does involve a transition.  The real problem is therefore not lack of words, although this causes multiple confusion and makes any discussion a terminological nightmare, but the closed world of pure subjectivism that demands objective validation and over-rides every negative effect of this validation.

At the end of the previous review, I argued that the differences of view demonstrate that the demands of some trans activists are not the same as, and sometimes in opposition to, those of others, especially women.

But not only that, Joyce states of these activists that “this powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for.  And it serves their interests very poorly.”  One of the purposes of the book is to substantiate these claims and to show that “its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance.”

Joyce gives a brief history of transsexuality and why some men want to be women.  Contrary to the claim that ‘I am who I say I am’ must be automatically accepted, Joyce states that “in no field of medicine are patients’ reports the last word.”  

Certainly, if I were to go to a doctor and say that I have ‘X’ condition and she either says ‘no you don’t’, or ‘I would like to investigate first’, it would usually be a very good idea to accept this, even if only provisionally.  People routinely discount other’s claims about themselves, including about their behaviour, character, temperament and other proclaimed physical traits.  The claim that gender identity is some other physical and mental attribute immune to questioning and sacrosanct requires other’s faith in what they are being told, in other words acceptance without justification.

Joyce refers to studies in the 1970s and 1980s of people’s views of their sex as children and later as adults which showed that “in every one the majority outgrew their dysphoria, and the majority of those ‘desisters’ turned-out gay in adulthood.”  She reports that it is not possible to determine who among those expressing gender dysphoria will persist and seek assignment as the opposite sex, and who will desist, and cites ongoing research that whether highly feminine boys desist and identify as gay men, or persist as transwomen, or something else “is largely determined by their culture.”

Except when children are put on puberty blockers, which one study reported seemed to lead to every child in the study persisting and progressing to take cross-sex hormones.  This particular finding would thus appear to confirm the claims of some trans activists that transitioning treatment for gender dysphoria should be given without questioning or delay.  However, for Joyce, this result is likely only because such treatment itself “blocked the developmental process whereby gender dysphoria often resolves.”

The existence and reporting of such research reinforces Kathleen Stock’s appeal for “robust, accurate data.”  Joyce also comments, as did Stock, on what she sees as misleading clams.  So, she states, some of the statements made by activists to support medical intervention is misleading, citing the claims that forty-eight per cent of young trans people have attempted suicide.  This, she says, comes from responses “of twenty-seven British trans people in a larger survey promoted on LGBT websites.”  The number of respondents is both “tiny” and other explanations for elevated risk are more likely.  

Joyce notes that on the American left “activists had started to judge people and ideas, not according to the evidence . . . but according to a very particular notion of social justice.” And as we have seen, such an approach can mean accepting a three-year-old boy’s claim to be a girl.  Seeking simply to explore what might lie behind such a claim, and not immediately confirming it, is damned as transphobic and thus hazardous for therapists who might be faced with the choice.

Where Shon Faye records the stories of trans people transitioning Joyce records some of the stories of those who went through irreversible medical and surgical procedures that damaged their future health as well as life prospects, for example their future fertility, and who now bitterly regret what was done.

For Joyce, particular gender types that are today in many places considered perfectly ordinary – because the person is gay or does not, for example, fit some stereotypical masculinity – is now argued as evidence that the person is actually a different sex.  And this has the effect of only confirming the old stereotypical view of what it means to be a man or woman.

That gender ID is actually regressive is concealed by it being “defined as an inner knowing” and supposedly revealed by stereotyped appearances and action. “You long to hear that girls (or boys) are people with female (or male) bodies who behave however they damn well please; instead you hear that girls (or boys) are people who behave in feminine (or masculine) ways.”

Another way in which she states that the demands of this ideology have been regressive is that, despite complaining about the objectivisation of trans people by repeated prurient inquiry into their bodies, their demand for inclusivity has led to the objectification of women.  So, women become ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, or ‘people who bleed’, or as the Lancet recently put it ­– ‘bodies with vaginas’.  Trans women become women and women become menstruators etc.

Feminists note the absence of terms such as ‘people with sperm’ or ‘people with penises’ to refer to men.  The supposed requirement for inclusion of transmen does not seem to require the same erasure of the name for biological males. Joyce notes that while gender self-identification is a cardinal requirement of social justice for some, racial self-identification is taboo.  Lesbians who are defined by sexual orientation have this rendered meaningless by there being no meaningful definition of sex, with gender being paramount.  This leads to absurdities that they should really consider transwomen with penises as sexual partners.

The effect on women is further taken up in the argument for single-sex spaces for women on the grounds of “risk reduction, comfort and an opportunity for women to be somewhere that their needs are centred.”  So, while not all males are violent, almost all assaults on women are by men and “it is impossible for women to tell which males pose a risk”.  In some circumstances, such as prisons, self-identification is particularly dangerous as transferring to a women’s prison is especially attractive to the most dangerous men.

She notes therefore that the demands of some trans activists have a direct effect on women, including lesbians, that they do not have on men, including gay men.  It isn’t obvious to her why gay people have not reacted more than they have and gives the example of the fight to add sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the US Civil Rights Act, to which trans activists tried to tag on gender identity.  When the latter was dropped some “furious trans activists not only withdrew support for the slimmed-down bill, but campaigned against it’, an example with relevance to Shon Faye’s assertion that the demands of trans liberation are “synonymous” with the goals of the gay rights and feminist movements.

She notes, as have others, that although trans’ campaign groups “talk is about the world’s downtrodden . . . the money comes in large part from the world’s most powerful people . . .”  Faye similarly speaks of the oppressed but also notes that the cause she supports is corrupted by corporate interests for whom a gesture to trans rights is good PR.

Joyce argues that trans activists’ influence is exercised through providing training to judges, through the charity Stonewall’s ‘diversity champions’ scheme covering 850 organisations, employing a quarter of the workforce, and guidance to the press, who then report on female paedophiles, homicidal sex-offending teenage girls, and an axe-welding woman, all of whom are male.

That the trans movement is a top-down movement and not a mass, popular one is demonstrated by Joyce’s recounting of how the Irish State brought in gender self-identification under the cover of same-sex marriage.

As Joyce notes: “there was no public consultation or information campaign about gender self-ID.  Even now, hardly anyone I talk to in Ireland knows they can change their sex more cheaply and easily than they could get a passport.  And that, it turns out, was deliberate.”

She then points out that a large international law firm working for a network of LGBT youth organisations noted that the right to change one’s legal sex without parental consent would be unpopular.  However, the firm pointed out that other unpopular trans-rights policies had become law, citing Ireland.  It therefore “recommended linking such proposals with unrelated ones that commanded broad support” as in Ireland, advising clients to stay out of the news, and informing them that “Irish transactivists had ‘directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum.’”

Yet this is held up as an example to follow by Shon Faye in her book.  She endorses a letter by trans rights activists who opposed British feminists coming to Dublin to debate the issue.  This was, for these activists, an example of the arrogance of imperialism and colonialism.  Faye states that “the whiteness and unexamined colonialism of mainstream UK feminism correlate(s) directly with its tendencies towards transphobia.”

The conflation of British feminists coming to Dublin for a debate, and British colonialism/imperialism in Ireland, would be a serious minimising of the crimes of the latter, if one could take the argument at all seriously.  The misdirection seriously mistook its Irish audience, misreading a very large room.  As a letter to ‘The Irish Times’ noted, such an attitude assumed Irish women could not, after a debate, be able to make up their own minds.

Joyce argues that:

“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 fleshy mortals whose sex can easily be perceived by others.  Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality.”

Back to part 3

Three Books on Transgender Politics (3 of 4) – ‘An Argument for Justice’ based on the definition of Woman

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Only in the last two chapters of her book does Faye really focus on the debate she said she would not engage, and when she starts, she says something startling.

“The effect of both division and consumerism is to encourage individual identity over and above commonality. A person’s sense of their own identity is certainly important for their psychological wellbeing – but as a political end point it leads to solipsism and detachment from others.  From this perspective, identity is understood as a set of immutable and finite categories with particular criteria for membership.  Yet the political justification for the LGBT coalition must begin with something different . . .”

This reads like a critique of the transgender politics she advances in the rest of the book and with them the impossibility of forging the unity she declares she wants.  Her definitions of being trans are however not always consistent, being feelings about one’s gender identity not being aligned with one’s body, to the female nature of trans women being the case “by virtue of her social, legal, political and sometimes medical reassignment or experience as a woman.”

Leaving aside the question begging of how being a transwoman can call on experience of being a woman to justify qualification of being one, the list might seem to put forward objective criteria, as opposed to the demand that the declared unverifiable feelings of a transwoman is sufficient to make one a woman.  What is missing however, and explicitly rejected, is any idea that being a female is determined by biological sex.

Less than twenty pages later this has changed somewhat and “accounts of colonial domination . . . demonstrate clearly that what it means to be a woman or man (or neither) is not a fixed and stable entity, but a complex constellation of biological, political, economic and cultural factors, which may shift over time.” (emphasis added)

Since this passage is in the context that “society’s understanding of gender can be changed as society itself changes” perhaps Faye is saying that being a man or woman is to be understood in terms of gender, as in one of the two definitions advanced by Kathleen Stock in her book ­– as one of social stereotypes or projected roles – but this would not support her argument that being trans is a product of a personal understanding.

This is because if this private understanding is itself the product of changing factors, that are objective factors, comprehension and analysis also shifts to how these objective factors create this personal understanding. But this leads to interrogating any claims that arise and this brings us back necessarily to a debate that she sees as consisting of ‘hostility’ and ‘misunderstanding’ of trans people.

It is possible that the passage is based on Stock’s remaining definition; on an understanding that gender is another word for sex (by supplanting it), which leads to claims that there are multiple sexes since it can easily be imagined that there are multiple gender types (ideas that people might have about their own sexuality).  As the passage argues these can change, presumably on an individual basis, and not as some societal view of what sex and gender are, so that someone might consider themself a woman one day and a man the next, or gender fluid as it is called.

However, on the same page (p237) as this passage Faye compares her “complex constellation” with the words now condemned as transphobic, the dictionary definition – ‘Woman, noun, an adult human female’ and goes on to say that “leaving aside the fact that dictionary definitions are a product of a culture and not its arbiter, the definition of ‘woman’  as used here focuses solely on the biological and entirely disregards a point that feminists have largely agreed upon: the idea that being a woman is defined by political experience, how you are treated by others, especially those with power over you.”  Another definition.

But all feminists do not define woman as a political experience, or where would be the debate?  Being a woman will involve a political experience but a woman is not any sort of experience.  To encounter some event, to have some practical contact with or observe some fact, and for this to leave some impression on you, there has to be some prior ‘you’ to begin with, and this ‘you’ may be a man or a woman.  Both a man and a woman might have the same political experience but this will not determine their sex.  As has also been argued – what political experience, in common with all other women, makes the British Queen a woman?

This hardly matters for Faye’s argument because she concludes that “the ‘common sense’ argument of the ‘adult human female’ billboards is specious: there are many ways of legitimately interpreting the brief dictionary definition that would, in fact, include a trans woman as an “adult human female.”

But so much hangs on the word “legitimately” in this sentence.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that such legitimate interpretation involves words meaning what their author chooses them to mean, “neither more nor less”, as one author placed in the words of his character – the real question being whether they are just tools to be mastered.

That there exists an objective biological reality which is real and observable, distinct from social concepts attaching to that biological reality is, for Faye, “an oversimplification.” And in any case, she argues that the “two separate sex categories” can be erased . . . “through medical modification” although, as she has already informed us, such interventions are not necessary for a trans woman to be female.

One problem with this approach is that you can end up ‘proving’ too much:

“. . . the increased populations of, for example trans women with a feminine appearance, body and breasts who have a penis, and trans men with chest hair, muscles, lowered voices, beards and a vagina, mean that it is possible to have a mixture of sex characteristics and signifiers on the same body . . . women who will date women with penises, lesbians with vulvas in relationships with women with penises; gay men in relationships with men with vulvas and (naturally) women with penises in relationship with men with vulvas.  Consequently, trans people’s challenge to the gender binary is as physical and sexual as it is intellectual or political.”

Unfortunately, this passage does not challenge the binary nature of sex since it still repeatedly categorises humans as men and women (and the demand for medical intervention certainly does).  What it does point to is that any combination of characteristics is consistent with categorisation as either sex, in which case there is no difference between the sexes.  So, in this sense then, it does erase the binary nature of sex; in which case there is really no need for separate words for humans who are male and humans who are female, or for transwomen and transmen.

The way out of this for those advocating gender ID is that it is the internal view in the mind that determines you are a certain sex, but this realistically requires perception of an objective world in which real sex differences exist and are observable, which is why language that reflects this – ‘men’ and ‘women’ – is employed, as in the passage above.  If these really were erased there would be nothing in the objective world that the mind could reference and thus no way of self-identifying one’s sex.

Opening up the objective world as an influence on your view of your sex, indeed the idea of sex in general and of the male and female sexes, invites inquiry into how this objective world has influenced your view.  And such interrogation, as we keep coming back to, is not permitted by certain trans gender activists for whom this identity is innate, which is an unprovable proposition.

So, the sexed body (that of a female or male) while not determinant of one’s sex as a trans person, is determinant of whether one is trans, because “to be trans, is on some level, to feel that this standardized relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities that are supposed to accurately reflect your feelings about your own body has been interrupted’. So, your sexed body is determinant of being trans if only to determine you as the opposite, or rather different in perhaps multiple gender defined ways, from your natal sex.

Faye claims on page xiii of her book that “the central demands of trans liberation are not merely aligned with, and no threat to, gay rights and feminism, but are synonymous with the goals of those movements.”  The rest of the book and the polemic with those who disagree demonstrates that this is simply not the case.

Her central arguments are not necessary to defend trans people or to remove the prejudice and discrimination they suffer from.  In fact, these arguments are difficult to construct and maintain consistently and an obstacle to these objectives.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4

Three books on transgender politics (2 of 4) – The Transgender Issue – an Argument for Justice

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Shon Faye is a trans woman and activist who argues that trans people should unite with others to overthrow oppression, asserting that trans demands are “synonymous” with the goals of gays and feminists.

In the prologue she gives her rendering of the meaning of the “relatively new term” ‘cis’; – “’Cisgender’ is the Latin antonym for transgender.” While recognising that the word is controversial and that some hear it as an accusation or slur Faye says she needs a word to denote the 99% who are not trans. Unfortunately, this word defines everyone else as something that they are not, as not-trans, and includes gay men, lesbians and all those who are heterosexual.

She (I use trans people’s preferred pronouns for the reason and with the hesitation argued by Kathleen Stock in the first book reviewed), rejects the idea that her book has to regurgitate the debate on the trans issue (on toilets, changing rooms, pronouns and sport) as this “is itself a tactic of those who wish to oppress us.”  As noted, ‘trans rights are not a debate’ is an oft repeated declaration.

Faye wants instead to write a book about what it is like to be trans and the problems trans people face, partly on the grounds that any debate typically includes those who are not “equally affected by the discussion.” She describes such debates as “confected” and “a vehicle for increased hostilities towards and misunderstandings of trans people . . .” She presents a power structure which talks about trans people; so for example the media “want to talk about their issues with us, not the challenges facing us.”

She dismisses the “myth of a powerful trans lobby”, one of the themes especially of the third book to be reviewed, and now the subject of a number of podcasts by the local (to me) BBC journalists Stephen Nolan and David Thompson.  Instead, she notes that there are no trans newspaper editors, MPs, High Court judges etc.  What is at issue then is a question of power, and the need for trans people to have a healthy conversation about the issues facing them.

So, while refusing debate outside, she argues that within the trans population voices are dominated by professional and middle-class members, and that the task is to create solidarity where there is an “overlap with other minorities or marginalised groups.” “Change will only be brought about by bringing class politics back on the political agenda.”

The book is meant to set out the reality of the challenges trans people face.  These include prejudice, discrimination, intimidation and violence and the additional burdens particularly affecting them, including unemployment and reactionary policies such as austerity, especially its effect on health care.

She records a School Report from Stonewall (2017) that “64 per cent of British trans schoolchildren report being bullied for being trans or for their perceived sexual orientation . . . 13 per cent of trans pupils experience physical violence . . . [and] a shocking 84 per cent of British trans young people have self harmed.”  She also notes that “45 per cent of trans young people had attempted suicide at least once.”

Trans people also face domestic abuse – “19 per cent had experienced domestic abuse from a partner in the previous year . . . which is significantly higher than the recorded rate of domestic abuse among the wider population . . .” (The Trans 2018 report referenced records a higher number of 28 per cent).

Elsewhere, these statistical claims have been challenged, for example the finding that “45 per cent of trans young people had attempted suicide at least once” is based on the Stonewall report.  Kathleen Stock says of this that “a non-probability sampling method was used. It’s widely agreed among statisticians that this is an inadequate method with which to extrapolate to a population as a whole, because the sample isn’t random.”

Stock reports that the NHS Gender Identity Service quotes a Freedom of Information request that between 2016 and 2018 one of their patients committed suicide and two attempted it.  Two others on the waiting list also committed suicide; so three in two and a half years.  The doctor making the FoI request notes that “anorexia multiplies the risk of suicide by 18 to 31 times (depending on the method of estimation), while depression multiplies it by 20.”

Stock does not deny the existence of hate crime against trans people but argues that we need better data, and “data that isn’t produced by trans activist organisations for the purpose of lobbying.”

Faye does not argue that trans people are ‘born in the wrong bodies’ but does believe that unjustifiable obstacles are put in the way of medical interventions that support transition.  This would appear to mean opposition to any questioning of the need for such intervention or any delay.  For her it is a question of bodily autonomy, similar to a woman’s right to choose.  She quotes one young person seeking such intervention, that those questioning the relatively high proportion of autistic children also seeking it is “so ableist and insulting that autistic people can’t make decisions or know themselves . . “

Faye argues from the beginning that cis men and women are credited with more authority, insight and experience on both their own identity and those of trans people than trans people themselves, and welcomes the acceptance and confirmation by parents of the declaration by their 3-year-old male child that “I’m a girl”.

But what exactly is this 3-year-old identifying as?  What is the character of the identity that those adults who are not biological women have, and how do they know it is the same or similar to the gender identity of biological women, if the latter admit to any such identity at all? Or would it not matter if it is not similar, introducing another irrelevant difference?

If a woman is also, or even simply, a person identifying as a woman then a woman becomes a person identifying as a person identifying as a woman, which is itself a person identifying as a woman . . . and so it goes on indefinitely.  Defined this way there is no intelligible way of securing the claim that trans women are women.  The definition includes what has to be defined.

Despite the early declaration that she would not get into ‘closed-loop debates’ and “repetitive talking points” this proves impossible and her book moves to take up the issues.

As an indication of her general position, she argues her view that trans women prisoners should not be kept in male prisons.  She quotes a BBC report in May 2020 that “in the previous year, eleven trans women housed in male prisons had been sexually assaulted.”  She states that not only are they more likely to be victims of sexual assault than to perpetrate it, but likely to be assaulted at a higher rate than cis gender prisoners.”

She recognises that there are cases in which transwomen prisoners have assaulted women prisoners and mentions the case of Karen White, but states that this has been weaponised to derail the campaigns for the rights of all trans people.  “In 2018, some sixty prisoners in England and Wales convicted of a sexual offence were recorded as having declared themselves trans.  The rhetorical importance given to this small cohort can be exhausting for the 200,000–500,000 trans people in Britain who fear being tainted – and denied civil rights – by association.”

“Human rights, broadly speaking, are inalienable. Every human being has the right to autonomy over how they define their gender and to some appropriate expression of it.”  

“This topic is emotive” she says.  Trans peoples’ rights cannot only be “given for good behaviour.  There is no easy way out” and Faye rejects possible solutions that might be seen as just such a way out.  She rejects trans wings in men’s prison or in women’s prisons because trans prisoners who are at risk are harmed further, dehumanised, isolated, and their human rights not respected.  

Faye has a lot to say about the prison system, its endemic violence, and her proposals for change, which she admits are currently “a big ask”, “with little hope of achievement in the foreseeable future”, and which entail “moving towards a world with no prisons at all.”  In the meantime, sexual predators that are trans such as Karen White, must be allowed into women’s prisons despite knowledge of the danger.

Shone reaches such an unappealing conclusion because she must.  ‘Transwomen are women’ and we know they are because they say they are; and since they are they must be accorded all the rights that women have, even if those rights have to be modified somewhat because, as she and everyone else in this ‘non-debate’ knows, women’s and transwomen’s bodies are not the same.  In this case, some of the rights associated with women must belong to transmen even though they are also men; so abortion rights apply to women and also to men.  It is just such men for example who make it ‘transphobic’ to say that only women have cervixes.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

Three books on Transgender politics (1 of 4) – Material Girls

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The three books under review tackle an issue on which there is no agreement in the debate or even whether there should be one.  No agreement on the terms used and no agreement on the facts, no agreement on what the status of the terms employed have in relation to the facts and which are relevant to the issue.

Making resolution much, much harder is the conviction that what is involved are not only conflicting views but conflicting interests, and although there are some claims to these overlapping to some degree, both sides see the fundamental issue as one that cannot be resolved given the differences; what is therefore involved is a conflict that must be won.  What one side considers as philosophical critique the other identifies as physical intimidation and threat.

So, even to assert that there is a debate is seen as taking sides.  This review cannot help but notice that there is a debate so will even by this fact alone be taking sides; already we are into disputed territory. 

The author of the first book, Kathleen Stock, has been in the news recently because trans rights protesters at the university she taught in demanded she be sacked for being transphobic, with the statement that “until then, you’ll see us around.”  The New Statesman summarised the situation:

“Stock – who believes that biological sex is immutable and occasionally takes precedence over someone’s gender identity – told me that a campaign has been waged against her since she raised concerns in 2018 over a shift away from sex-based rights to a world where any male could identify as a woman through self-declaration alone (a process known as “self-ID”). “This month is just the endgame. Some of my colleagues have been spinning a line against me for a long time,” she told me.”

“I asked Nehaal Bajwa, the diversity officer at Sussex Students’ Union, how Stock was contributing to the “dire state of unsafety for trans people in this colonial shit-hole”, as the leaflet put it. Stock’s views created “an unsafe atmosphere” for trans students, Bajwa said, as protesters overtook the campus square, setting off pink and blue flares, while Stock cancelled her courses and followed police advice to stay off campus and secure her home. I asked a protester whether the demo was designed to be intimidating. “We’re standing still,” they said. “Her presence to us is intimidating.”

Not long after this she resigned from her post at the university.

*                   *                   *

Stock begins by explaining how we got here – ‘a brief history of gender identity’ – from what gender identity theory is to the eight intellectual steps taken to its current status.  The idea that gender identity, not biological sex, makes you a man or woman; and that this identity is an inner state that we all have, but that the identity some have – trans people – does not match their biological sex.  In such cases everyone has a moral obligation to recognise and legally protect rights and claims based on gender identity and not biological sex.

Stock explains the different ways in which the word gender is used, which are absolutely necessary to follow the debate, and identifies four:

1. A polite expression of the biological difference between the two sexes, males and females; what might be called the traditional understanding.

2. Social stereotypes of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.

3. The projection on to males and females of the social roles of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ respectively; historically endorsed by feminists as explanations of roles performed by the sexes that were not determined by biology (or at least not alone) but by social imposition.

4. Finally, the definition employed by ‘gender identity’, which Stock describes as a “private experience” or “roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or woman, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.”

Having defined gender Stock goes on to explain what sex is in terms of an account based on gametes, an organism’s reproductive cells, small in males and large in females.  She then explains the chromosome account based on the XX chromosomes of women and XY of men, including the situation of those where this is not the case due to some disorder of sexual development (DSD), which in the majority of cases will still lead to a “clear answer as to whether someone is male or female.”  The third “cluster account” identifies morphological characteristics relevant to identifying people as male or female and can be employed where there is not a clear answer.  

This can lead to a small number of difficult borderline cases but Stock argues that “hard cases are not a special fact about the categories male and female” and that “difficulty about borderline cases is absolutely standard for biological categories.”

On this basis she critiques views that the sexes are social constructions (and not biological constructs) such that language and the words we use don’t refer to an independent and prior reality but are ‘productive’ or ‘constitutive’ of that reality.  Marxists are conscious that there is an independent reality – we are materialists – but aware that humans are also a part of that reality and that their thoughts and actions interpret and shape that reality.

Stock is referring to Judith Butler for whom “there’s nothing ‘underneath’ or ‘before’ language that would secure linguistic reference to something ‘outside’ of it.”  For Marxists there is something ‘underneath’, ‘before’ and ‘outside’ that make their understanding of the world and political programme to change it relevant and realistic.  The importance of this link is why regular readers of this blog will see the long series of posts on Marx’s alternative to capitalism justifying these claims.

Stock therefore states that “over 99 per cent of humans fall unambiguously into one category or the other,” that is, male or female, with this categorisation being “one of the most stable and predictable there is . . . sex is not ‘assigned at birth’ but detected . . . sex cannot be ‘reassigned’ through surgery or a change in legal status, nor ‘changed’.”

Her next step is to explain why sex matters – for medicine, sport, sexual orientation and the effect on heterosexuality, including the need for reproduction of the species.  So, only females are capable of pregnancy, and whatever the generally greater strength, speed and power of men, only women can grow another human being inside them and give birth to that human being (as pointed out by the author of the third book to be reviewed). 

Stock then refers to the problems of downgrading sex when it comes to data collection, including crime statistics, and access to certain single sex facilities, which are also addressed extensively in the second and third books reviewed.

Most of the rest of the book goes deeper into the concepts she has defined in the first chapters – what is gender identity and what makes a woman, as well as an extension of the story of how we got to where we are.

Stock challenges the view that everyone has a gender identity, as many non-trans people “report no particularly strong sense of one.”  She recognises that trans people do but also that many women “are unhappy with their sex – but without making them trans.”  She then explains what she means by “lots of women don’t enjoy being female”, in terms of “greater or lesser feeling of incapacity, frustration, and self-consciousness.”  Nevertheless, her focus is on the experience of trans people and she interrogates three models of ‘gender identity’.

The first is the ‘stick of rock’ model (like lettering through one) – a fundamental part of the self, innate, or ‘a core part of who we are’ according to one mental health counsellor quoted.  It states that it is there even if the person isn’t aware of it, although it is something you can become aware of.  Only that person can know what it is so no one else can, except by being told by that person, so that ‘whatever a trans person says about their identity is true’.

This can lead to some trans people stating that they were ‘born in the wrong body’ but this is not necessarily the case and the author of the second book who is trans does not. 

Stock concludes that “when trans people say that they ‘know’ their gender identity or have ‘discovered’ it, or that their gender identity is their ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ self, it’s highly unlikely to be because they somehow gained privileged access to some prior brain fact about themselves which justifies this attribution directly.”  She therefore argues that it is not innate.

She then looks at what she calls the Medical Model, which essentially sees a misaligned gender identity as a mental illness or disorder, the main symptom of which is a condition called ‘gender dysphoria’.  Stock is also critical of this for a number of reasons and believes that the treatment trans people receive on foot of it can be harmful.  “Unusually for a psychiatric diagnosis, sanctioned treatment aims to change the body first, and not (directly) the mind.”

In the third, queer theory of gender identity, she sees an almost opposite problem, that it is not psychological, or any sort of physical issue, but is a political question and its assertion a political act.

Instead, she sets out what she thinks is a “more helpful and detailed account” that involves, for a misaligned female gender identity, a strong psychological identity with a “particular female or with femaleness as a general object or ideal.”  This, she says, “fits well with first-hand testimonies about experiences of gender dysphoria.”  She argues that it does not then have to result in the medical and surgical intervention demanded by some trans activists.

She defends the traditional concepts of what a woman is and its necessary employment for how we live, including its importance for other concepts that are important, such as mother, daughter, lesbian etc.  She notes the radical revision to our understanding of concepts if adult human males could be considered as mothers, sisters and daughters, and adult human females considered as fathers, brothers etc (although some advocate removing words such as mother).

But in order to be trans-inclusive this would have to be the case.  And if this was the case, it would require new words, for example, for those who are not only mothers but also adult human females etc., although these new words would also necessarily be trans-exclusive.  A new word for lesbian would be required not only to denote same-sex attraction (if ‘sex’ is understood as equated to gender and not biological sex) but sexual attraction to those with a female body.

Again, this too would exclude transwomen.  Eveyone, including trans activists, would have to become accepting of concepts that are trans-exclusive, without this automatically being characterised as transphobic.  If not, then the charge that the activist project is really the erasure of women would more justifiably stick.

However, it might still be the case that a parallel series of words denoting concepts that identified biological females and excluded transwomen would still be unacceptable for some activists, who believe that the existing definition of woman as ‘an adult human female’ does include transwomen (see the second book to be reviewed).

Stock thinks it is preferable to retain the existing concepts and therefore the meanings of man and woman and to have separate concepts, and therefore names, that might encompass women and transwomen, and men and transmen; although her proposals are hardly pithy, as she admits.  These would not however have automatically built into them the concepts of MAN and WOMAN.  She is quite clear that “If trans women are women, they are not ‘women’ in the same sense in which adult human females are ‘women’.”  And the same applies to trans men.  Membership of TRANS WOMAN does not entail membership of WOMAN; and the same for TRANS MAN.

She is well aware that in saying this she is challenging key claims of some trans people so she immediately states what she is not saying.  As we have noted above, criticism of some transactivists’ claims are treated by some as attacks on the people themselves.  So, for example, she is not saying that it is never reasonable to alter oneself physically to look like the opposite sex, or that trans people cannot get relief from thinking of themselves as members of the opposite sex.

What she does go on to say is that “at least some of the time many trans and non-trans people alike are immersed in a fiction: the fiction that they themselves, or others around them, have literally changed sex . . .”  Having explained what she means by this fiction she then sets out some of the consequences.

She looks at state action that supports the demands of some trans activists and the sympathy that exists in broad sections of the population for trans people.  In explaining both she says that “one important factor, I think., is public awareness of a history of prejudice against sex-nonconforming people, plus a commendable desire to be (seen to be) on the other side of it.”  She also thinks that trans activist’s propaganda has been important, and quotes what she sees as misleading and misrepresented statistics employed within it, an issue arising within the other books reviewed.  

She concludes with hopes for a better activism in future, including her belief that trans people are not well served by current trans activism, and calls for all sides to be “more non-binary” and to look for areas where “common cause might still be found.”.

She opposes the expansion of feminism to include opposition to almost all oppression – “in other words, feminism is now supposed to be everybody’s mum”, and bemoans that “gay activism has, relatively recently, become ‘LGBT’ activism and so has merged with – and arguably been taken over by – trans activism.  In some parts of the culture, this has expanded yet further into ‘LGBTQIA+’ . . . “  

In response she advocates more intersectionality, although it is not at all obvious that this is a solution since it could be argued that intersectionality does not guarantee harmonious congruity of the demands of the oppressed and has in fact led to the cannibalisation of many, with the rise of arguments by some trans activists as evidence of this.

Forward to part 2