This is a response
to the essay published on Medium yesterday by Sophie Allen, Jane
Clare Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, Mary Leng, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper,
and Kathleen Stock.
I probably shouldn’t do this,
but… The authors claim that they want to have a good faith conversation. And a
number of people who I know, or know of, and who I respect or take seriously
are linking to this and taking that claim at face value. For the sake of those
people, and other people of good faith who don’t know what to make of the very
loud and very sharp arguments about trans rights, I think it might be worth
saying something.
I am not a woman. I am not
trans. I am a feminist – my earliest conversion experience was reading Andrea
Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. I love very dearly a little trans girl who I
hope grows up in a world where she is safe and free, or at least has a
righteous and fierce community of people fighting at her side for safety and
freedom.
My response follows the authors’ essay point for point, for the most
part, but it gets away from me a bit at the end. Anyway, I hope this is helpful
for someone besides me.
Section one: fallacious arguments
1. ‘Your position has been historically
associated with far right-wing thought, and hence fails’.
The authors write: “Associating our intellectual position with a far
right-wing one, because some far right-wing thinkers would agree with us in
some of our conclusions, and insinuating that our position is all the worse
because of it, is an ad hominem. Ad hominems are widely recognised as
inappropriate in philosophy.”
Political arguments are
different from purely philosophical arguments. The fact that one group of
political advocates makes the same, or similar, arguments as another –
politically dangerous and loathsome – group is not irrelevant to the political assessment
of those arguments. It is true that “the fact that person shares a conclusion
with a far right-wing person could never show, on its own, that the conclusion
was false.” However, when people claim “that women, by definition, are adult
human females,” and conclude, on this basis, that “no trans woman is correctly
categorised as a woman,” this is not like happening to agree with a far right
wing person about what day of the week it is.
The “gender critical”
position is a reactionary political position – in the sense that it is a
“backlash” position, reacting to trans people’s progress towards social and
political liberation – which politically aligns with the efforts of the
far-right to naturalize social differences and make outcast groups more
vulnerable to physical and economic harm. No doubt most, if not all, “gender
critical feminists” regard themselves as being on the left, and find it
disconcerting at the least to be accused of holding a reactionary position. But
this has happened before. When radical feminists, in the ‘80s, made common
cause with the Christian Right in the US to attack pornography and the sex
trade, they were rightly criticized for taking a reactionary position, a position
that hurt women – especially the most vulnerable women – more than it helped.
The same goes for the current “gender critical” backlash against trans women:
some left feminists are taking a bad position out of a misguided and mistaken
belief that, in order to protect cis women from sexual violence, they have to police
the bodies and movement of trans women.
2. ‘You are biological essentialists’
According to the authors, to
call the “gender critical” view “‘biological essentialism’ is a misnomer.
Moreover, it is a misnomer apparently rhetorically designed to draw some of the
harsh criticism which appears in progressive circles about biological
essentialism, in the true sense, onto the view that women, definitionally, are
adult human females.”
Frankly, I don’t understand
what this rejoinder is trying to accomplish. If the “gender critical” position
is that all and only women are adult human females, and if “female” is supposed
to denote a set (or cluster) of biological traits, then why doesn’t it follow
that “womanhood” is “biologically produced”? The “gender critical” position is
that to be a woman is to be a member of a biological sex category. To call this
position “biologically essentialist” is not a “misnomer,” and it is certainly
not a “fallacy.” Calling the position biologically essentialist does not mean
it is wrong, of course! The critics of the “gender critical” position disagree
that “womanhood” is a matter of biology alone, and calling the “gender
critical” position biologically essentialist signals this disagreement, but is not yet an argument for the
social (co-) determination of womanhood.
The authors call their position “realism about biological sex categories”; the
critics call it “biological essentialism.” The authors’ preferred term implies
that social constructivism about womanhood is a form of anti-realism. This is
no more or less a “fallacy” than calling their realism “essentialist.” These
are disagreements, not fallacies!
3. ‘You want to reduce women to their
genitalia, or to womb-possession’.
“None of us,” the authors
maintain, “hold a view according to which either a woman or a female is defined
as such by her current possession of a particular configuration of genitalia,
womb, or any other single primary sex characteristic, for that matter. … In the
light of this, the correct question should be, not ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to
their genitalia, or wombs?’ but ‘Do we ‘reduce’ women to a cluster of primary
sex characteristics?’”
I disagree. The real question
is actually this: how do we police
women? When and how do we – in our social and political arrangements and
institutions – stop people and ask them if they are “really” women or not? The
authors are concerned to keep (some) people who claim to be women out of (some)
“women only” spaces and institutions. In practice, that means looking in
people’s underpants. It means empowering the police, social workers, volunteers,
and people on the street to demand to know what is between other people’s legs.
That is what the critics of the “gender critical” position are practically concerned
about when they say that “gender critical” feminists “reduce women to their
genitalia.” They are concerned that, to the extent that the “gender critical”
feminists get their way, people who claim to be women will be asked – in order
to access social services and facilities – to prove it by displaying their
genitals to someone or another.
4. ‘You think there is a “right way” to be,
as a woman/ lesbian/ mother’ (etc.).
The authors think that this objection “trades on an ambiguity between
two separate senses of the word ‘right’: normatively right versus descriptively
right (i.e. descriptively correct). As such, it’s another rhetorical
move. It can quickly and unfairly bring to the reader’s mind a metaphor of our
gatekeeping for a special club — ‘you can come in, but
not you!’.”
The “gender critical” feminists
object, “To say that we think there is a definition of femaleness or womanhood
is not to say that there is a ‘right way’ for females or women to be, in any
normative sense.” Ah, but it is to
say that there are people who shouldn’t call themselves women, and that the
police should be able to check your papers (or your genitals) to see whether or
not you are authorized to call yourself a woman. The “gender critical”
definition of womanhood is normative in this sense: it is political and
enforceable. It is, indeed, gatekeeping, and it does say, precisely, “you can
come in, but not you!”
5. ‘You are transphobic’; or ‘You may not be
transphobic but your views are’.
The authors want you to know
that their views are not motivated by “an attitude of disgust, fear, or
revulsion towards trans people because they are trans people,” and that their
trans friends agree with them – and not “for self-hating reasons.” I’m happy to
accept their report of their own – and their friends’ – introspection. I would
ask, in return, that when someone tells them that they are a woman or a girl, the
authors would accept this self-report and not call the police to check on the
status of their genitalia.
6. ‘You think all or most trans women are
violent against cis women’.
“This is a straw man,” the
authors claim, “and none of us have ever said this, or think it’s true.” Rather,
the authors are worried about what might happen, (1) “in a culture where it
becomes increasingly widely known that sex-self-ID (with or without a Gender
Recognition Certificate), rather than birth sex, is the determiner of entry/
lack of entry for biological males into woman-only spaces where females undress
or sleep, and so are particularly vulnerable.” They are also worried about (2)
“those who, we predict, would socially transition opportunistically for
sinister motives, if the proposed changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act were
to go ahead.”
This is the real nub of the issue, I think.
The authors – and I am
willing to believe them on this – are not worried about trans women per se, but
about opportunistic and predatory men. They are worried that opportunistic and
predatory men will take advantage of a culture in which we believe people when
they say they are women, and use that trust to harm and abuse women and
children.
When stated this way, I think this concern is reasonable. All social
institutions and norms are susceptible to opportunistic abuse, and it is worth
our while to think about how any reconfiguration of social institutions and
norms might be abused by the unscrupulous.
However, mutatis mutandis, the same scrutiny should be applied to our
current social institutions and norms, the ones trans activists and organizers
want to change. And this is where, I think, the limits of the “gender critical”
position become stark. The authors simply show no awareness of how the current
regime of gender policing harms trans and gender creative people, or how gender
policing itself exposes women and children – including trans women and children
– to predatory violence. And because they do not express any sympathy or
understanding for what trans people are going through – the harassment, abuse,
mockery, and violence they are trying to protect themselves from – the authors
end up giving the impression – against their beliefs and intentions – that
trans women are dangerous to cis women.
I accept that the authors do
not think all or most trans women are violent towards cis women, but they
manifestly do think that trans women are a vector
for the endangerment of cis women. The authors think that if we start believing
women when they say they are women – if we stop policing self-reported
womanhood, stop asking for proof – then cis women will be at greater risk of
sexual violence. The women who say “believe me when I say I am a woman” are
dangerous to women: that is the
“gender critical” position. And the authors have not at all grappled with – or
even realized – the fact that this position is reasonably taken to be deeply offensive to trans people, and is a
barrier to working with trans people on solving the common problem of how to
make people safe and secure and free.
7. ‘No true trans woman is ever violent’
(See also: ‘No detransitioned person was ever really trans’)
I have never seen an example of this argument, so I am not sure what the
authors are actually responding to.
8. ‘Women get attacked and aggressed in
women-only spaces anyway’.
All people have an interest
in being safe from physical and sexual assault. There are ways of making women-only
spaces safe that do not rely upon policing people’s genitals. Moreover, an
overall assessment of how safe women-only spaces are should include the safety
of those excluded by a policing regime as well as those admitted.
9. ‘Why don’t you want to exclude lesbians
from women-only spaces too?’
The authors get into trouble here for a couple reasons. First, they claim
that “We aren’t arguing for the exclusion of lesbians from women-only spaces,
because as far as we know, there is no documented statistical pattern of
lesbian violence or aggression towards other females, whereas there is such a
documented pattern of male violence.” This implies that there is “documented
statistical pattern” of trans women violence or aggression towards other women.
There is no such documented pattern, and asserting that there is would cause
problems for the authors’ denial, above, that they think all or most trans
women are violent against cis women. The authors could reply that statistically
elevated risk does not imply that all or most trans women are violent. But it
won’t do to justify a categorical regime of gender policing on the basis of a
statistical risk – this is why racial profiling schemes are not only evil but
also counterproductive. Sam Harris embarrassed himself repeatedly arguing for
profiling observant Muslims after 9/11. Profiling doesn’t work.
Second, the authors also
claim that “‘lesbian-free spaces’ would be impractical as an
imposed social norm, since there’s no even roughly reliable way of visually identifying lesbians and
differentiating them from non-lesbians. In contrast, we do have a
rough-and-ready way of visually identifying males in women-only spaces. It
isn’t perfect, and will regrettably cause misgendering in some cases; but no
such system could be perfect, and we consider something as better than nothing.”
This is simply begging the question. The critics of the “gender critical”
position are arguing that the harm caused by not believing people when they say
they are women is not merely regrettable but horrendous, and that letting people
go to the bathroom or changing room where they are most comfortable would be
significantly better than what we do now. That is, they are denying that the “something”
we have is “better than nothing” – or, rather, they are denying that “nothing”
is the relevant alternative.
10. ‘You need to understand why trans women
are angry with you’.
I actually cannot bring myself to dignify this set of remarks – which are
solipsistic and condescending in equal measure – with a response. Sorry.
11. ‘You are making violence to trans people
more likely by your writing’.
12. ‘Trans rights are not like a pie; no-one
gets less pie if trans people have rights’.
These points go together. The
authors claim to “recognise two sets of rights and interests, those of trans
women and women,” and to be “determined to foster a public conversation which
takes both into account.” They treat these interests as if there were simply a
zero-sum trade-off between them, however: “we do think that
giving the social and/or legal capacity to male-bodied people to self-identify
into woman-only spaces and resources, will take something substantial away from
women, given a wider context of misogyny in society. That is precisely our
point.” And they show no willingness to trade the interests of cis women for
the interests of trans women: “We therefore request that society finds some
other, better route to realising trans rights, compatible with realising the
rights of women to lives free of harm.” I’m not sure, then, how this is
supposed to foster a public conversation.
13. ‘Feminists have already had the
discussion without you, and established that trans women are women’
The authors refuse to “defer
to” recent feminist scholarship. That is their right. I think the objection,
however, is that they do not try to engage with it or to understand what
motivates it. More on this below.
Section two: bad analogies
1. ‘In the past, some people used to think
black women weren’t real women. These days, some people now think that trans
women aren’t real women. But black women are women, and so are
trans women’.
2. ‘Excluding trans women from women-only
spaces is like excluding black people from whites-only spaces’.
3. ‘Excluding trans women from women-only
spaces is like excluding refugees or immigrants from the UK’.
4.‘ Trans women stand to women as adoptive
parents stand to parents’.
5. ‘Arguing that you can’t be both a trans
woman and a lesbian resembles the historical claim that you can’t be both a
real woman and a lesbian’.
The arguments presented by the authors here cluster around three sets of
claims. First, the authors claim that trans women’s full moral personhood is
not denied them – either by society at large or, at least, by the “gender
critical” position. Second, the authors deny that the position of trans women
is one of special vulnerability (at least vis-à-vis cis women). Third, the authors
reassert that theirs is not a normative definition of womanhood, but a purely
descriptive definition. I will take these in turn.
(1) Moral personhood: One of
the most persistent theoretical complaints I have seen about the “gender
critical” position is that it operates with an incredibly simplistic and inadequate
notion of oppression. This complaint seems to be substantiated by these sections
of this essay. The reader is told that, during the era of New World slavery, black
women were denied the status of “womanhood” insofar as “black women weren’t the
sort of female white people should be interested in, or care about, or value.
That is, it was a move which denied black women full moral personhood in the
eyes of white people, and positioned them as undeserving of human rights.” After
the end of slavery, “black people were historically subject to segregation
because white people denied their full and equal humanity.”
But, the authors assure us, the
“gender critical” position is not “that trans women don’t have full moral
personhood. We emphatically and repeatedly assert that they do, emphasising
their full human rights.” “The question is not whether they are human,” the
authors continue, “but whether they are female, and on the basis of
being female should be able to access spaces designed to protect the
comparatively greater vulnerability of female people.” “No one thinks a man is
denied his full and equal humanity merely because women-only spaces exist, and
the same reasoning applies to trans women. Not giving people everything that
they desire is not a denial of their humanity.”
Wow. I don’t think the authors
have thought through what having your full and equal humanity denied might
actually look like. It doesn’t, generally, mean that people deny that you are
actually human. That does happen, of
course, especially in rhetorical or polemical forms. But slaveowners never
doubted for a second that black women were human – otherwise they would not
have raped them systematically in order to breed more slaves. Enslaved black
women could very well be the daughters and granddaughters of their masters.
Their masters knew well enough that they were dealing with human beings. Nonetheless,
“black women weren’t the sort of female white people should be interested in,
or care about, or value.” Their wants, their desires, their interests didn’t
count for anything in white people’s eyes. And nor did they count for anything in
the eyes of the law.
“Not giving people everything
that they desire is not a denial of their humanity.” True. But not taking
people’s desires seriously, discounting what they say they need, dismissing
their self-reports about what is most important to them – that is exactly what
denying people’s humanity has looked like historically.
(2) Social positioning: The
authors have a fall-back position, though:
Second, racial segregation
was an exercise of power by a culturally dominant group against a culturally
subordinated group. The dominant used their power to keep the subordinate out.
Women are not a culturally dominant group; rather, they are a culturally
subordinated group. When they act to maintain women-only spaces, we judge that
they act to maintain protections that are important in light of their status.
At best, trans women are a distinct subordinated group; at worst, trans women
are members of the dominant group. At best, exclusion is a lateral move; at
worst, it is an ‘upwards’ move. In neither case is it a ‘downwards’ move, and so
in neither case is it comparable to racial segregation.
The authors use the same sort
of argument to dismiss the analogy between the exclusion of trans women and the
exclusion of refugees and migrants. They shouldn’t, because it is a very bad
argument. They are, of course, right that racial segregation – and the xenophobic
exclusion of migrants – are exercises of power by a dominant group. But notice that
some of the people doing the segregating and border-closing are women (members
of a subordinate group) and some of the people being segregated and excluded
are men (members of a dominant group). Notice, also, that some of the folks in
Britain (and the US) most supportive of a harshly exclusive immigration regime
are poor and working class folks, and that some of the most virulent and
violent opposition to integration in the US came from poor and working class
folks. Just because you are a member of a subordinated group doesn’t mean you
don’t have anything to lose – or anything you think you might lose if you don’t
jealously guard it against newcomers.
Anyone who doesn’t realize
this, I submit, hasn’t thought very much about how systems of social power
work, or about how they cut across and complicate one another. There is even a
bog-standard keyword of recent feminist research that names this incredibly
common phenomenon. You know the one.
Anyway, for our authors to
deny that trans people – especially trans women, and especially poor trans
women and trans women of color – are “desperately vulnerable, and seek to
access better life chances,” for them to deny that many trans people are
desperate to pass – and go to great lengths to “exaggerate” their femininity or
masculinity in order to avoid being “clocked” as trans – in order to avoid street
harassment, assault, and worse, for them to deny that having a bathroom or a
locker-room where you “belong” and where you are safe from harassment is a valuable
“privilege” – well, yeah, that looks pretty “callous.”
(3) Pure description: Finally,
the authors are at pains to impress upon us that “Our claim is a descriptive
claim about category membership. It isn’t the claim that trans women don’t
match some stereotypical sociocultural norms of womanhood.” Hence, also, “our
arguing that a person can’t be both a trans woman and a lesbian is not done on
the basis of our covertly assenting to some norm or stereotype about womanhood.
Rather, our argument that a person can’t be both a trans woman and a lesbian is
grounded in a claim about descriptive conditions upon the category of lesbians.”
They’re just describing the world, okay?
In response to the suggestion
that “trans women stand to women as adoptive parents stand to parents,” the authors
respond that this “begs the question against the gender critical position.”
Both adoptive parents and
biological parents have in common that they actually have — or have had — children that they parent. To accept that trans women
are to natal women as adoptive parents are to biological parents suggests then
that there is something essential to womanhood that they both share. But this
is precisely what is at issue between us and our critics, so that the analogy
settles nothing on its own.
But I think we haves seen that there may be something “essential to
womanhood” that both trans and cis women – even “gender critical” women – do share
– and I think the authors have shown us this. It is the conjoint desire to
belong to the category “woman” and to escape from the terrible burden of belonging
to that name. This is what Marilyn Frye calls “the double bind.” I am not a
woman. I am not trans. I am not speaking from any experience of my own. But I
have studied and learned from and loved and listened to women and trans people,
and I think I see a pattern. When a person calls herself a woman, and wants to
be seen as a woman, and yet fears the social punishment that comes with being a
woman, and rails against the limits imposed on women – I think that person is a
woman. And I think we should both treat her as a woman and not treat her as a
woman, because women aren’t treated well, and the only thing worse than being
treated as a woman might be being treated as not quite a woman, or a failed
woman. And if the authors can’t see that, well… I’m sorry, but I don’t think
they are going to contribute to “more fruitful discussion from now on.”
