Transgender Body Politics

Heather Brunskell-Evans

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781925950236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti umani

Transgenderism in the twenty-first century is patriarchy emblazoned in imperial form.At a time when supposedly enlightened attitudes are championed by the mainstream, philosopher and activist Heather Brunskell-Evans shows how, in plain view under the guise of liberalism, a regressive men's rights movement is posing a massive threat to the human rights of women and children everywhere.This movement is transgender politics which, while spouting platitudes about equality, is in reality colonising and erasing the bodies, agency and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men's rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. The transgender agenda redefines diversity and inclusion utilising the language of victimhood.In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called 'innate' (a 'feeling' located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream.Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles. In a chilling twist, when feminists critique the patriarchal status quo it is now they who are alleged to be extremists for not allowing men's interests to control the political narrative. Institutions whose purpose is to defend human rights now interpret truth speech as hate speech, and endorse the no-platforming of women as ethical.This brave, truthful and eye-opening book does not shirk from the challenge of meeting the politics of liberalism and transgender rights head on. Everyone who cares about the future of women's and children's rights must read it. The micro-polit

Chapter One
Women’s Bodies

1.1 What Is a Woman?

An orthodox definition of woman distinguishes between biological sex and gender: Sex — whether one is male or female — is natural, biological and objectively factual. Gender refers to the social and cultural norms — and stereotypes — governing a particular sex category with regard to expected behaviour, role, appearance and so on. A gender critical feminist definition introduces the idea that hierarchical power structures gender stereotypes. Women are born female in the biological sense, but from childhood onwards girls have to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to be ‘feminine’ and live as women. Similarly, men are born male in the biological sense, but from childhood onwards have to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to be ‘masculine’ and live as men. Although gender constrains the flourishing and self-expression of both men and women, it is women in a patriarchy who experience the most egregious political, psychological and physical injuries.

This feminist perspective is termed ‘gender critical’ because, put simply, it requires us to bring a critical lens to gender. The norms of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ aren’t free floating, imposed from nowhere and without ultimate purpose. They are motivated and have something to do with the sex-based oppression of women, and with the extraction of reproductive, domestic, sexual and emotional labour from female people by male people. Gender critical feminism is not a biologically-based identity politics, it is a sex-class based politics. Alongside inequality based on race, economic class and other markers, there is a distinctive form of inequality directed at women as such, by virtue of their belonging to the class of people sexed female and the social consequences that arise from this. Patriarchy is a historical structure that has oppressed women on the basis of their biology. To recognise the material basis of oppression does not make the oppression necessary: it makes it a political structure and thus open to challenge and to resistance.

Women with penises: Queer Theory

The ideas that underpin transgender ideology have emerged out of a specific philosophy — postmodernism and queer theory (a branch of postmodernism) — which rose to intellectual prominence in the 1990s and continues to be influential to this day. In particular, Judith Butler, a postmodern philosopher, challenges the gender critical distinction between sex and gender. Building on a theory of language developed by the postmodern French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Butler argues that the binaries of sex/gender and therefore female/male are language constructs which are no less oppressive than gender. As she sees it, sex is socially constructed all the way down — there is no material, non-social, immutable character to sex: “the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Butler, 1990, p. 11).

To buttress her claim that sex is not a biological fact but a social construction, Butler instrumentalises intersex people who, she alleges, confound the idea of binary sex and who “medical authorities have often mis-categorised and subjected to cruel forms of ‘correction’” (Butler, 2019). She then seamlessly slips into the proposition that these medical authorities “play a crucial role” with all children “in deciding what sex an infant will be” (Butler, 2019, my emphasis). Since sex, according to Butler, is from the start normative, ‘assigned’ by powerful cultural authorities such as medical, familial, and legal institutions, those who develop non-normative identities without regard to sex take up a specific place as progressive radicals. With regard to transgender people, the deconstruction of sex

… opens toward a form of political freedom that would allow people to live with their ‘given’ or ‘chosen’ gender without discrimination and fear … Those who fall outside the norm deserve to live in this world without fear, to love and to exist, and to seek to create a world more equitable and freer of violence (Butler, 2019).

Although the language we inherit orchestrates whatever existential decisions we make as individuals, nevertheless we all struggle to craft identities in a social context where conventions change and evolve. If we build on this existentialist account of social construction and the possibilities for freedom by deconstructing sex, Butler writes, “then one may be born a female, but become a man” (Butler, 2019).

“Transwomen are women: Get over it”

Stonewall, a UK publicly funded charity, describes itself as working to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people (LGBTQ) and is extremely influential in providing equality and diversity training for institutions such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Stonewall’s definition of a ‘transwoman’ is someone who “is assigned male at birth but identifies and lives as a woman, and who may or may not have had surgery” (Stonewall, 2020). Lesbianism is now defined by Stonewall as “same gender attracted.” Stonewall describes transgenderism as “an umbrella term” for those who self-identify as “transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois” (Stonewall, 2020). Anyone who disagrees with the assertion “transwomen are women” needs to just “get over it” (Stonewall, 2020a). Stonewall, through its incredible reach into institutions and employers (including schools and universities) explicitly advises, through their training programmes and propaganda — distributed via their near-ubiquitous Diversity Champions Scheme and their Top 100 Employers Index — that “transwoman are women” for all purposes (Stonewall, 2020). Further, Stonewall states that the officially accepted pathway to becoming a ‘transwoman’ should not be gatekept by any medical professionals whatsoever, but should be achieved through self-identification and an administrative procedure (Stonewall, 2018).

Yet the classification of trans according to Stonewall’s own definition demonstrates that it can be a whole range of things. Does a man who cross-dresses on a Saturday, Monday and Tuesday become a woman on those days and thus require unfettered access to women-only spaces on the basis that denial would be a breach of ‘her’ human rights? The answer according to Stonewall’s own criteria is yes. Similarly, Stonewall’s definition of phobia extends beyond “the fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans” (Stonewall, 2020). It describes anyone who does not believe someone is the other sex because of an “innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth” (Stonewall, 2020).

Any woman who cannot agree that an inner essential ‘gender identity’ is the unquestionable and irrefutable truth is now routinely turned upon by ‘progressives’ as a trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), no matter how moderate, thoughtful, or indeed trans friendly we are. Any equivocation other than immediate affirmation puts one out in the cold — one of Them, the Transphobes, Haters and Deniers, the Old Crones who want nothing more than to impede the queer revolutionaries who, through heroic pain and suffering, are dragging society onto the right side of history for the benefit of all our freedoms.

Making women’s reproductive systems central to their identity is deemed by some transwomen to be exclusionary and therefore transphobic (see Bergdorf, 2018). A North American equivalent of Stonewall, The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, suggests the correct anatomical terminology to use in order to be inclusive of ‘transwomen’ is the term ‘vagina’ as a word only applicable to men (The Human Rights Campaign, 2020, my emphasis): “Front Hole … internal genitals, sometimes referred to as a vagina. A front hole may self-lubricate, depending on age and hormones … Strapless … the genitals of trans women who have not had genital reconstruction (or ‘bottom surgery’), sometimes referred to as a penis … Vagina: the genitals of trans women who have had bottom surgery.”

This new definition of what it means to be a woman performs a number of ideological functions. The category ‘woman’ is broken down into two sub-categories: ‘cis-women’, who are allegedly comfortable with the sex ‘assigned’ to them at birth; ‘transwomen’ who were wrongly ‘assigned’ male at birth but are in fact female ‘inside’. It would be a mistake to think this new definition is connected to biological division: born females and born males who identify as females. If so, this would mean that ‘transwomen’ are simply males who (for whatever reason) prefer to identify with the socio-cultural gender role of women. In order to make the claim that ‘transwomen’ are equally female, it is necessary to erase biology in two ways: Identity, not genitalia, is the empirical basis of being female, thus rendering ‘femininity’ innate and not socially constructed and thus political. Binary sex is therefore not a fact but a social and political construct. This sub-division performs further political work, namely the creation of a hierarchy between ‘cis-women’ and ‘transwomen’: Although both sub-divisions are oppressed by patriarchy, ‘cis-women’ are privileged since ‘transwomen’ are doubly discriminated against because of transphobia. The moral claims of those who insist ‘transwomen’ are women are founded on their idea that the human rights of ‘cis-women’ and ‘transwomen’ are not competing but fundamentally enmeshed.

Affirmative psychology: A man is a woman if he says he is

Dr James Barrett is the Lead Psychiatrist at the adult Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) at the Tavistock and Portman Hospital National Health Service Trust, London. Barrett’s approach to transgenderism is underwritten by queer theory and the deconstruction of dimorphic sex as an empirical reality. He argues that the claim that sex is dimorphic in mammals is “less than common sense.” He uses the reproductive variations of plants, molluscs, amphibians, reptiles, fish, and insects to demonstrate his point that sexual reproduction has a large number of variations in practical application (Barrett, 2019, my emphasis). In contrast to sex, ‘gender identity’ is indisputable since how anyone feels is “their reality” (Barrett, 2019). “It is soul-crushing and miserable” for someone to live their lives inauthentically (Barrett, 2019). Transgender people, as a group, face disempowerment via stigma, discrimination, and bias. History demonstrates the blighted lives of gay and lesbian people who tried to live as if they were straight. Barrett believes that it is “equally soul-crushing to live in an inauthentic social gender role, and just as life-enhancing to, at last, be able to be one’s true self” (Barrett, 2019).

In a spectacular move, it is now not only individual women or men who can’t question transgender identity or speak about possible psychological causes for men identifying as women. It is now all psychological associations — professional bodies that register and govern practicing psychologists — that are compelled to comply with the fiction that trans identity, unlike all other identities, has no psychological basis or components. In 2017, a Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MoU) was ratified by all the major psychological service providers and therapy organisations in the UK, as well as Stonewall, NHS England and NHS Scotland. The Memorandum uses ‘conversion therapy’ as an umbrella term for an approach which would seek to convert or to help reconcile the person to their biological sex (MoU, 2017, no. 6). Organisations are referred to the latest British Psychological Society (BPS) guidelines on working with gender and sexually diverse clients to comply with equality and diversity issues (MoU, 2017, no. 17).

In 2019, the BPS also created guidelines for psychotherapists working with “gender, sexuality and relationship diversity.” The committee was chaired by trans identifying Professor Christina Richards, who alongside Barrett is a lead consultant psychologist at the GIC. The guidelines apply to all those clients who are non-heteronormative, that is, they “do not identify as heterosexual, monogamous or cisgender” (BPS, 2019, p. 4). This group includes: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people; people who engage in BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism); people who are agender (have no gender), are non-binary gender (have a gender other than male or female), are pansexual (have attraction irrespective of gender) and many others.

The BPS guidelines state that in the same way that current society no longer attempts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality but understands “same-sex or gender attraction” as a normal part of human sexuality, similarly, “diverse gender identities are a normal part of human diversity” (BPS, 2019, p. 5). They point out that self-defined ‘gender identity’ is not in itself a mental health disorder — although exclusion, stigma and prejudice may precipitate mental health issues. Furthermore they argue that stigmatising trans individuals can lead to increased risk of emotional problems, suicide attempts and substance abuse. This should not be treated as de facto evidence that gender identities are psychopathological, since “it is the marginalisation and repression which causes the difficulties, rather than the identities and practices themselves” (BPS, 2019, p. 5). A ‘transwoman’ experiencing distress should have ‘her’ identity affirmed in therapy, and the grounds for counselling would be to facilitate ‘her’ “to live more comfortably, reduce distress and reach a greater degree of self-acceptance” (MoU, 2017, no. 6). BPS suggests that therapists need to be trained in the theories that underpin the affirmative approach such that they can work effectively with trans clients (MoU, 2017, no. 16).

1.2 Shaming Gender Critical Feminists

Intersectional feminism

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectional’ to describe how interlocking systems of power combine, overlap and intersect with each other to affect women’s experiences and opportunities. The term reminded feminism that women are not one homogenous category since our experiences are affected by different axes of oppression such as race, economic class, heteronormativity, ethnicity, age, religion and ableism. The 1980s had witnessed a wave of postmodern feminism that had become very individualistic and detached from analysing patriarchal social structures and power. Feminism was thus rendered toothless in defending its constituency — black, working class, disabled, lesbian women and so on — sometimes proudly announcing it was ‘postfeminist’. Young women grew into adulthood thinking that feminist battles had been achieved, women and men now have equal opportunity, and that, for example, working in the pornography or prostitution industries is a feminist act.

The laudable analytical category ‘intersectionality’ has unintentionally fed into a form of ‘feminism’ that mobilises the new branch of the men’s rights movement, transgenderism. Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, is a trans-affirmative intersectional feminist, who has reduced the term ‘intersectional’ to ‘inclusivity’ missing the point that including ‘transwomen’ in the category ‘women’ is not the same as white women including black women. She argues that questions around the position of “transwomen within feminism” cuts “to the heart” of “the constitution of ‘woman’” (Hines, 2009, p. 155). She alleges gender critical feminists police the boundaries of who can or cannot be allowed into “the category of ‘woman’” and, as such, hold rather unsophisticated, unreconstructed ideas that it is shared biology that constitutes the category woman (Hines, 2009, p. 157).

Hines returns to the catechism of queer theory which warns against seeing identity as “authentic.” In deconstructing the “inside/outside binary” of who can be classified as belonging or not belonging to “woman,” queer theory moves against the biological essentialism of gender critical feminism which excludes those ‘transwomen’ who “inhabit gender borderlands” (Hines, 2009, pp. 155, 156). In explaining “the marginalised histories, experiences and social and political demands of women,” at the core of gender critical feminist politics is the concept “‘woman’ as a fixed category … distinct from ‘man’” (Hines, 2009, p. 157). She suggests that such feminist theory, for the most part, assumes that it is biological women who not only initiate “feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitute the subject for whom political representation is pursued” (Hines, 2009, p. 157). Hines describes “feminist biologically based politics of gender” as nothing more than “identity politics” (Hines, 2009, p. 157).

Hines’ analysis makes a number of reductive and frankly simplistic assumptions: firstly, gender critical feminism specifically refutes a direct link between biology and gender. Indeed, as philosopher Dr Jane Clare Jones points out, it is gender critical feminism that offers “the radical proposition that what you like, what you wear and who you are should not be dictated by your chromosomes, hormones or any other marker of biological sex” (Jones, 2018). Binary sex is turned into binary gender, a political, externally imposed patriarchal hierarchy with two classes, occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, ‘masculinity’ over ‘femininity’. Women are born as female in the biological sense, but from childhood onwards girls have to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to be ‘feminine’ and live as women. Similarly, men are born male in the biological sense but from childhood onwards have to navigate a series of social norms and figure out how to be ‘masculine’ and live as men. There is nothing authentic about femininity: indeed women should resist it since femininity is the internalisation of oppressive gender norms.

Secondly, if Hines acknowledged that male and female are empirical biological realities belonging to two groups or classes invested by society with different social value, she would be forced to face ‘the elephant in the room’ of intersectionality, namely that human beings wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 Women’s Bodies
• 2 Girls’ Bodies
• 3 The Male Body Politic
• 4 The Naked Emperor
• Epilogue
• References
• Acknowledgements