Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 1)
A knowledge-base on transgender issues, medical best-practice, public perception and backlash.
Hey, you! Yes, you! Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those mean-old transes coming for your women and children.
Plenty of newspapers and TV shows go on about it — in fact, you’ve probably seen people getting super angry about it, mostly online.
Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? You don’t want to upset anyone… and this topic is loud, it’s confusing and you probably feel like if you ask for more information you’ll get yelled at. If only someone could just answer a few questions!
Well, I’m here to help, best beloved.
This is for you. It’s an action pack I’ve put together. I’m not going to judge you or your current opinions. What I’m going to do is to lay it all out for you: the different terms, what people are arguing about and why one side actually has a heck of a lot more research and logic going on than the other.
All I ask is that you give me the benefit of the doubt for a little bit while I lay the case before you. We’re going to look at some stuff in serious depth, because you might want a lot of detail! You’re welcome to skip bits, skim them or take them as read depending on what you need.
I’d like to show you how people talk about me and those like me, what it means and where we are now.
Entries
Glossary entries
- Gender Identity (this part!)
- GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
- Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria
- Autogynephilia
The Arguments
- Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall)
“What about the minority who are dangerous?”
“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
“I’m just asking questions…”
“I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
“We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
Some variation on “men”… - Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
Falling back on accusations of perversion
Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
Likening trans people to a contagion - Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
- Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
- Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
- Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
Appealing to protecting women and girls - Arguments 4 (Part 8 overall)
An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have - More soon!
To make it easier, we’ll need to share some terms. Like a little glossary. It’ll make everything a lot easier. You can review or skip these terms as you like. Usually, there are a bunch of them at once but our first term in a complicated one, so it’s getting it’s own part. Today, we are talking about…
Gender Identity
This is our term for today, and it means how a person sees themselves regarding their gender. You know, whether they think they’re a boy/girl/other.
Most people are male or female. Some people are non-binary. Some others are something else/some other combination. Your gender identity is the you that you are inside, it has no relation to your private parts.
Probably sounds a bit wild, huh?
Well, it’s because gender is a profound statement about you and the role, position and perspectives you take in society. It is a complicated, multi-faceted aspect of our identities. It is one of the main identifiers of who you are, as much as your name or your face. It varies, depending on the society and culture in which you live and may be fluid, changing over time and where one is located in the world.
There is no test for it and no proof you are this-or-that; no doctor can give a blood test and then declare “ah, definitely a woman” or whatever. It is also not an either/or proposition. It is a spectrum of ideas and behaviours: eg, you can be a manly woman or a femme man. Again, this varies on place: some cultures embrace ideas of third-gender, such as Native Hawai’ians and Diné Native Americans, and it varies in time. There are references to other genders in our oldest known civilisations, like Sumeria in Mesopotamia and in Ancient Egypt.
Let’s take a mini-break and do a bit of philosophising! Grab a beverage.
Ready? Now, when I say that “there is no test for gender”, it is very tempting to reply “oh, but of course there is! It’s simple!” I used to think that, myself, so I completely sympathise. It’s common sense, isn’t it?
But, see, when we write laws and statutes we can’t just glibly add “it’s common sense”… because that varies person-to-person. Two perfectly respectable people might disagree on what constitutes “common sense”. That means that we actually need to define what we mean. With that in mind, we might then say something like “okay, well… if you have ovaries then you are a woman”.
That’ll do for legal purposes, won’t it?
Possibly… possibly not. Consider this: does possessing ovaries really make a person a woman? If it does, then what happens to a woman who goes to hospital for an oophorectomy (removal of ovaries)? Does she stop being a woman, after? What is she after, if not a woman?
By the same reasoning, if a man loses his penis in an accident… is he still a man? Should he immediately take to wearing dresses and have his salary cut by 25%-ish percent?
I think, best beloved, you and I would agree: our hypothetical woman is still a woman, and our hypothetical man is still a man.
If a man is a man, even with no penis, then we must agree that having a penis is not the definition of being a man. Having ovaries is not the definition of being a woman.
Well, now that’s a pickle, isn’t it? An awkward question must then follow: what does make someone a man or a woman, then?
And that’s where it gets tricky, best beloved! For most people, they think “knowing what gender you are” is easy because their gender identity (how they see themselves) matches their physical gender (their junk). Hence, for most people, it’s just a case of “but if I look in my panties I can tell!”
However, if you consider persons who are transgender, intersex, third-gender or something else… well that doesn’t cut it any more. It’s no longer “common sense”, and we have to look much deeper. That’s where the provisos, the footnotes, the exceptions and the edge-cases pop up.
Let’s take a moment…
There are plenty of people who don’t like transgender people — especially people who do not like transgender women. One of their favourite pass-times is trying to identify and “out” trans women based on photographs they find online. These people claim “you can always tell”. The problem they have is that they can’t and often get it wrong, then they have to start conspiracy-theories that “so-and-so is secretly trans!” There’s even one of these nut-job theories about Rowling, their adopted queen!
The truth is, you can’t always tell. There are plenty of trans women who look more feminine than most biological women, and if they have chosen to have gender-affirming surgery then you wouldn’t “be able to tell”, even if you saw them naked.
Indeed, the physical complexities of one’s “biological sex” may seem straightforward, but in fact span the endocrine system (our hormones and glands), our organs and our chromosomes. Any one of these may differ from “the norm”, and does so surprisingly often.
To that point, 5–15% of people with ovaries have polycystic ovary syndrome. That’s a variation in hormones and organs that can cause infertility. Does those variations change those people’s genders, according to the definition we are trying to write?
Furthermore, 2% of the population are intersex and thus carry genetic and/or physical attributes of both sexes. What sex are these people, and why?
It’s not really a question we can ever answer, because whatever definitions we draw up, invariably someone will fall through the middle. There’s an old adage that says “as soon as you make something idiot-proof, someone will invent a better idiot”… I think we could coin that phrase to be “as soon as you’ve legally defined gender, natural human variation will then create a new gender.”
To actually determine someone’s biological sex is surprisingly difficult.
Now, one could say that this is because “we’re including too many edge-cases! Just ignore intersex people and judge trans people based on genetic screening!”.
To that suggestion I would say: a law must apply to everyone or it is not a law — an exception to a rule disproves the rule. Furthermore, it is backwards to suggest we hand-wave away the 2% of the world’s population who are intersex (160,000,000 people) just so we can cling on to a comfortable, Christian, Western-European, traditional view of gender.
It is not wisdom to try to change the world to match our theory, the theory must change to match the world.
Even if it were, allow me to frost our cake with this confection: when was the last time you or I asked someone for a genetic screening when we met them, to ensure we used the genetically-correct, gendered pronouns? Have you ever done so? Would that be a logical way to live our lives?
I’m hopeful that, at this point, you will join me in admitting that “the Christian, Western-European, traditional of gender kinda works… most of the time… if you squint… and you’re talking about Western Europe and North America”. There’s no two ways about it: it just ain’t a hard-and-fast rule. It’s best seen as a very fuzzy guideline, based on behavioural norms and customs. It is no more insightful or binding than that.
So, we must agree with each other: gender is complicated, when you really get down to the mechanisms of what our bodies do and how it varies person-to-person. It’d actually be disingenuous to say otherwise. Humans, and life in general, is way too nuanced, textured, subtle and wonderful a songbird to be put into so small a cage. Vive la différence!
Alright. Probably time for another beverage and a few nice, calming breaths.
We’re not quite there yet. Let’s do a little more philosophy. You and I shall pretend that we can set up a “toy” world, with rules of our choosing, and then use that to further explore ideas about gender.
Let’s create our first rule for our toy world: we can establish a dividing line between “man” and “woman”, with no grey areas or exceptions. Our toy world, in this regard, works exactly as anti-trans campaigners, the Right wing and some evangelicals want the real world to work.
Next rule: we have a medical technology that, over one or more cycles, can alter any aspect of the human body painlessly and perfectly — from bones, to chromosomes to DNA.
Last rule: in our toy world, every person’s gender is decided, at birth, by a supercomputer that’s programmed to ensure an exactly equal number of men and women in the population.
In our Huxley-esque toy world, any person — regardless of their initial toy-world gender — may have been perfectly transformed, at birth, to the other toy-world gender. The number of cycles the transformation requires depends, based on the person’s needs, because different people may need different alterations.
Given our medical technology can make any physical changes we choose, and we know exactly what separates man and woman, at what point in the process does man become woman and woman become man? For example, if the machine were to break down, leaving a person one alteration away from “completion”, and far more female than male, what toy-world gender would they be? Does it change when the machine is fixed and they are “completed”? If that one alteration makes the difference, why were any other alterations needed?
It’s a little like The Ship of Theseus, and I can capture it for you with an even simpler riddle:
If you and I were to use tweezers to pick up individual grains of sand, one at a time, and drop them into a group… at what point would that group become a pile? When does a pile of sand become a dune?
If I were to then take away a single grain, does it then stop being a pile and become only some sand again?
Let’s take another example. Perhaps we tire of playing in the sand and do some painting, instead. If I add one drop of yellow paint to the blue paint, is the blue paint now green? What about if I add two drops? Three? When does blue paint plus yellow paint become green paint, and why?
You see, best beloved, we’re having a really hard time with defining these boundaries and states — and that’s because we’re trying to ascribe discrete states to things that don’t have them. It’s like trying to decide which of two boxes a toy tank should go in: cars or buses?
Luckily for us, though, we can solve our problem very easily! It’s surprisingly simple:
We stop trying to define and just go with the rule “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck”. A little like “cogito, ergo sum” — I think therefore I am — if something has the qualities of a thing, then for our purposes it might as well be that thing.
Let’s try it out: some sand becomes a pile when we look at it and call it a pile of sand. We can use it for our paint-problem, too: blue paint becomes green paint upon addition of yellow paint when we look at the result and call it green.
As we’ve gone to great lengths to establish, a person’s gender has only one externally measurable metric: what they say they are. Therefore, a woman becomes a man when that person refers to themself as a man. A man becomes a woman when that person refers to themself as a woman. A person is whatever they say they are.
More succinctly:
A person who says they are a man, and chooses to interact with their world through the avatar of some shade of masculinity, is a man.
If that seems a little disorderly, consider the truth of how we live our lives in the day-to-day: no human society has it that we must undergo regular, extensive endocrine, genetic and blood scanning and then ritually offer such data to any other person we meet in order that they be able to refer to us as he, she or they correctly.
Know what we do instead? We just kinda guess. If we guess wrong, they tell us and we accept it. Doing that has worked perfectly well since long before we knew even how to till the earth or milk a cow.
Outside of a doctor’s appointment, whereby diagnosis or treatment may require more intimate knowledge of internal organs and body chemistry, no further review is required by society-at-large.
That is the concept of gender identity. It isn’t solved with the vox populii of “common sense”, “just looking for penises” or “you can always tell”. Like most things in our world, it’s beautifully complicated. Especially around the edges. We cannot believe ourselves truthful observers of reality if we try to legislate-away ambiguity around gender to uphold a fantasy of what some of us want gender to be.
It would be the opposite of wisdom to do so.
This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.
