Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 7)

An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.

Honey, this one is heavy-duty. It really took something out of me to write this. Cherish this picture, you will need as much as I do.

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 transes!

Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? Well, I’m here to help, best beloved. 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

1. Gender Identity
2. GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
3. Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
4. Autogynephilia

The Arguments

1. 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”…
2. 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
3. Arguments 3 (this part!)
   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
4. 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
5. More soon!

The Arguments

By now, best beloved, you’ve got a pretty good grasp of what terms people use and how they employ them in arguments about… well, making life miserable for me and people like me.

We’re going to look at the next batch of talking points that anti-trans campaigners use: we will detail them and we shall hold them to a good level of scrutiny. We must agree that a concept needs to hold up to investigation, after all.

Still with me? Great. You’re a good egg, sticking this far with it all. Let’s go…

An Appeal to ‘Bringing Reality’ Into the Conversation

Who wouldn’t want the grown-ups to come in and cut through the bullshit? This is a variation on the ‘I’m just asking questions…’ point, salted with a hefty dose of arrogance derived from biological essentialism and presented on a bed of fresh tone-policing (“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”). Anti-trans campaigners love to paint themselves as the calm, collected voice of reason whilst the Trans Rights Activists lobbying for change are a bunch of screaming lunatics (“I’m just against the extremists!”).

Unfortunately for the ‘reality’ crowd, most of their arguments simply don’t hold water beyond appealing to a click-whirr response from a person’s gut. We’ve been over a ton of this when we covered biological essentialism (the reality that is apparently being brought), but let’s warm it over in the oven anyway. There are a few ways that anti-trans people try to decide what reality is:

— Declaring that ‘your sex is baked into every cell in your body’

Another appeal to biological essentialism — that we are nothing more than what are DNA says we are. Just as incorrect as biological essentialism with the added fun of being factually inaccurate as stated!

You see, best beloved, sex isn’t baked into every cell in our bodies. For starters: intersex people who may have various combinations of X and Y chromosomes.

Oh, dang, it’s those pesky intersex persons again! Wrecking a perfectly good talking point! “Bah, to hell with this tiny minority of exceptions!”, one might say… but an exception must, by definition, disprove the rule. If I tell you all elephants live in Africa, that is incorrect: it can’t be made correct by announcing Asian elephants are a minority of elephants and therefore don’t count.

Besides, what sort of utter narcissist thinks that they have the authority to dismiss a whole group of people, out of hand?

Let’s assume a “steel man” approach. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that intersex people don’t count. How about that? It’s definitely not true, but for the sake of dismantling the argument further, let’s pretend it is.

Well… it doesn’t help, really. See, roughly half of the human body is made of bacteria. These little critters mostly live in our digestive tracts and help us break down food, so don’t be too alarmed: they’re nice bacteria! We actually need them to live. They also contain no human DNA whatsoever, so have no choromosomal composition relevant to the discussion.

Oops.

Let’s not stop there, let’s write-off the bacteria, too! What about now? Is sex baked into every cell in our body now, as our anti-trans friends are desperate to declare?

…

…well, no. Of your cells in your body that actually are you, a great deal are red blood cells. About 80%, in fact. Those red blood cells don’t contain any DNA information, so no chromosomes there, either.

Will I link to the sad trombone sound effect? Hm, maybe later.

There you have it: on and on it goes with the anti-trans campaigner falling from one branch to another, like Winnie-the-Pooh going down the honey tree, with the definition of ‘sex’ becoming ever more fraught and technical until it loses all relatable meaning.

That erases women.

In attempting to construct a workable definition for “woman” that meets their essential criteria of excluding trans women, anti-trans campaigners repeatedly reduce women down to collections of chromosomes and reproductive organs. They also couldn’t care less about trans men or non-binary people. What a lovely bunch.

— Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex!’

As well as appealing to a previous argument (“I’m just against the extremists!”) about gender identity, whereby the anti-trans campaigner tries to define trans people out of existence, this is another biological statement that is completely in error.

Changing sex happens naturally in a bunch of species. The anti-trans campaigner at this point will usually move the goalposts, and refine their argument to refer explicitly to mammals, or humans specifically. Of course that’s what they meant! When you catch them out like that, it’s because you didn’t understand them properly!

Dang. They’ve got us. There is no known process whereby we can physically change each and every instance of a ‘male’ or ‘female’ characteristic in the human body, from the microscopic level of proteins to the macroscopic scale of skeletons. For the sake of our anti-trans campaigner’s sanity, let’s not mention to them here that many people have aspects of both… mostly because we can unravel their argument another way.

Accepting that there is no physical process to alter every male or female aspect of a human body, at all scales, the issue our opponents face is that (as we covered under our discussions on gender identity) we can change most every outward appearance of sex. Your chromosomes won’t change, sure, but…

(a) we are not our chromosomes (see previous points, I think we’ve beat this to death enough)

(b) are we going to entertain a suggestion that everyone must present a DNA test when they meet, to validate specious definitions of what pronouns we should be compelled to use?

Or, to put it even more bluntly, is being trans so absolutely, other-worldly repulsive to these nitwits that they would rather school children have their genitals inspected by a stranger to ensure ‘only girls compete in girls’ sports’?

When we get down to it, this is the problem that these people have: anti-trans campaigners want to live in this bonkers fantasy-world where intersex people aren’t real, everybody acts according to their chromosomes and we all must present extensive endocrine test results to one another in order to prove what gender we are. All this, purely in service to their rigid view that there are only exactly two genders and that they are immutable.

Talk about entitled! I thought we transes were supposed to be the unreasonable fantasists? Honestly, it’d be funny if these pilchards weren’t somehow winning the public debate…

The “You Can’t Change Sex” argument will usually, at this point, descend into Endless Debate: the ins-and-outs of what constitutes sex; what differentiates it from gender; how far intersex people should be taken into account for ‘general’ rules about gender; autogynophilia, Karen White, rapid onset gender dysphoria, shoes, and ships and ceiling wax — cabbages and kings — and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.

These conversations are without value because they are being argued in bad faith: the other person has absolutely no interest in changing their views, regardless of our evidence or strength of argument. The best thing we can do is to speak to any bystanders who may be observing, and try to sway them to the side of not being a fucking lunatic obsessed with trans kids’ junk.

— Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women in sport’

For the sake of clarity, once again the anti-trans campaigner says “men” but they mean trans women. Sigh. Also, again, this is not clear-cut. It appeals to a “common sense” argument, whereby all women are vulnerable little butterfly-like creatures and all men are hulking brutes, the sort of reasoning your mate Gavin might hold court on down the pub.

And I speak as someone who likes Gavin, I just don’t think he’s an authority on this matter.

Let’s get a couple of things straight and separate: firstly, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking “any man can beat any woman”, because that just isn’t true. A female athlete will almost certainly outperform any bloke-off-the-street because she is an athlete and the bloke probably isn’t. I don’t think I need a citation for that…? Like, it’s not physically possible for our Gavin to just roll out of the pub, fuelled by pork scratchings, and beat Gabby Thomas in the 100 metres.

She might not manage her 11 seconds best, but she’s still going to be over the finish line before Gavin is done clutching his side and wheezing. Because she is an athlete and he is some guy who mistook a penchant for fried pig fat as sporting ability. ‘Cos he’s a tit.

Following on from that, a trans woman athlete will not implicitly beat any cisgender woman athlete. It’s wrong for the same reasons. Here’s Veronica Ivy, a gifted cyclist, who has lost loads of times to the very same participants who have accused her of cheating on the rare occasions when she has bested them.

Of course, Ivy also received death threats. Because this is the world we live in. For being a good professional cyclist. Jesus.

Now, there is evidence that suggests athletes who transition from male to female may retain some physical advantages over how they would be if they had been born female. Or, put another way, if Cindy is a hypothetical trans woman who went through puberty before transitioning, she will likely have an advantage over an equally hypothetical Cindy who is a cisgender woman.

Here’s a recent research paper detailing just this, and it’s not alone. There’s a body of evidence, some of it better than others, that strongly implies “yeah, if you’re a trans women and you transitioned after puberty, you might well have a physical advantage you wouldn’t have if you’d been born a cisgender woman”.

But, before we start working on our eulogy for women’s sports (destroyed by the mean old transes!), let’s first of all remember that doesn’t mean any trans woman athlete can therefore beat any cisgender woman athlete. Secondly, let’s see how this has played out in practice…

Laurel Hubbard is a superb weight-lifter who competed in the 2020 Olympic Games. She won 0 medals. The much maligned Lia Thomas broke no records, and has had her life ruined, whilst a cisgender competitor set a new world record in the same race as her. Trans women have been allowed in the Olympic games since 2004 and we won (insert tiny fanfare) no medals.

Go us! Way to crush those real women!

Lets you and I look at this from an alternative perspective now. Firstly, we’re only talking about trans women. Trans men may take testosterone supplements which, if taken by a cisgender man, would constitute a performance-enhancing drug. Yet they can compete in mens’ events without furore. Hmm.

Ah, but we’re not done. These discussions around testosterone levels and their effects on women’s sports often seem to disproportionately impact women who do not conform to Western beauty standards. As usual, it hits Black and other minority people hardest.

Aw, heck… it’s starting to get complicated again, isn’t it?

Yeah it is. Let’s throw one last spanner into the machine: why does nobody ever accuse an athlete of cheating when their biology or upbringing gives them an advantage unrelated to their gender identity? Surely it’s unfair to race against someone with longer legs, right? Or to swim against someone who has had the best nutritional supplements modern science can recommend?

Why does no-one accuse Michael Phelps of unfair competition? He has an unusually broad wingspan, more-supple-than-normal joints and larger hands and feet… that all makes for a very powerful swimmer. Why is that okay? Seems pretty unfair to me: you go up against him, you will probably lose.

What about those Olympic sprinters and their scientifically-balanced diets? Seems pretty unfair to all those people, worldwide, who might be phenomenal sprinters but just can’t afford to buy 12,000 calories of food a day?

I’m being rhetorical, best beloved, because we both know the answer: sport is inherently unfair. It’s about crowning the winners who have bested the others.

Unless all of the competitors in an event are clones, they will have different strengths and weaknesses. Some from birth, others from upbringing, some from their socioeconomic background. Sports simply aren’t fair, we just like to make some half-arsed efforts at pretending they are.

But we now have rules and laws on the statute books that, in practice, literally prohibit only one participant in a catchment area: the trans one. Imagine devoting whole hours of government business to creating legal frameworks that, in toto, affect one kid at a high school by stopping them legally playing for their proper team? Over in the UK, we’re just handing it down to individual sports bodies to decide… who can then be picketed until they ban trans women specifically.

Now, best beloved, I’m going to take a moment, here. There won’t be many references, because this is just one schmuck’s opinion…

I’m not particularly sporty. I like playing outside, I like playing outside with friends. I think competitive sports are overwrought, overhyped and overdramatised. We breathlessly report milliseconds being shaved off of world records because the athletes have new high-tech fabric costumes that lower resistance. Young people have huge careers hanging in the balance on fractional differences between them and their competitors: will I get that cereal endorsement? Will I get the gold or the silver? 1/100th of a second makes a difference between being a Guinness World Record holder and being an also-ran.

We’ve transformed a legitimate competition amongst people to see “who is the best on the day” into a nuclear arms race of nutrition, technology, supplements, training and lawyers.

Why? Because there’s money to be made. If we can’t shave a millisecond off here, we’ll take our competitor to court to have them disqualified because I must win.

You ever wonder why we segregate boxing by “class”? Because if we didn’t, you’d get boxing matches wherein a lithe, wirey person like Prince Nazeem could end up fighting a mountain of muscle like Lennox Lewis. It’d be stupid and dangerous to encourage a fight like that, so instead we separate contestants by weight: Nazeem was bantomweight and Lennox was a heavyweight.

Well supposing we did that with other sports, too? Instead of “women’s” and “men’s” swimming, we just had similar-vs-similar — classes based on weight, strength and (in the case of swimming) wingspan and size. That way a 5'7", 90kg, size-6 woman would be pitted against only another person who was around 5'7", 90kg and size-6. Nobody would need to climb into the pool, look over and see Michael Phelps and go “ah, well I’m going to lose, then!” because he would compete only with others who were likewise built.

Cisgender men seem to have a performance edge over cisgender women of about 10–15%, assuming nobody is taking any hormones. The weight and height aspects of class would nullify that: the extra bone and muscle matter would bump the hypothetical man into a different class.

Trans women would, likewise, only be performing against cis women who are of similar weight and build. That sounds pretty fair, to me.

Why don’t we do this, then, best beloved? Well, because sports exist to make money. Mostly through ads. Ads during tournaments. Ads during races. Ads during the Olympics. Ads from sponsors. Ads with endorsements from winners.

For ads to work properly and make predictable returns, they need reliable metrics, demographics and outcomes because they are part of a business model. You screw with how we organise events and all bets are off: we won’t be able to predict who will watch what! What will their demographic make-up look like? Nobody wants to throw all that away just on a stupid notion of fairness! Don’t. Mess. With. The. Money.

That is, of course, unless the transes are involved. We transes aren’t anything to do with the ad bottom-line, you see. When trans athletes are involved, then we can’t talk about fairness enough — heck, even people who don’t care about women’s sports suddenly develop a strong interest in fairness.

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?

Author’s note: I mentioned the lack of medals trans women have won at the Olympic Games. For clarity, even if we won every single fucking medal we would still belong there, because we are women — we just have some physical differences that might improve our performance like all athletes do because we are not clones. Unless we’re going to ban everyone who has any advantage over any other player, it’s just being biased. Trans women don’t need to lose to deserve to compete. We are not taking up space owned by “real” women, whether we win or lose. Trans women athletes train hard and work like Billio for what they get and deserve their spots on their teams, for Frith’s sake!

Appealing to Protecting Women and Girls

Okay, you may say. That’s all well and good, but aren’t the anti-trans campaigners just trying to protect women and girls? After all, we can’t let just anyone into the toilets, you know!

Well, as someone who uses women’s toilets, I don’t particularly want predators or perverts snooping around in there either. We’re not at odds on that. Trans women aren’t predators or perverts (see previous points).

The fact is, we’ve been using women’s toilets for forever. In the UK, we were legally allowed to do so under the 2010 Equalities Act, but even before then there was no law preventing us. Nothing on the statute books legislates toilet use.

Some countries have gone even further, allowing full self-identification of trans people with no medical diagnosis (ie “I am a woman because I said so”) and all the “access” that entails. Here are those countries:

• Argentina
• Bolivia
• Brazil
• Canada (varies by province)
• Chile
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Ecuador
• Mexico (varies by state)
• Denmark
• Malta
• Sweden
• Ireland
• Norway
• Belgium
• France
• Germany
• Pakistan
• Nepal
• Australia
• India
• Bangladesh
• United States (varies by state)
• Uruguay
• Peru
• Spain
• Scotland (UK)

I’ve looked, and there are no reported increases in violence of abuse against women and girls attributable to these laws. And no, it’s not because “it’s too soon to tell”: Denmark passed self-ID ten years ago (2014).

Trans women aren’t causing problems, and neither is there an epidemic of cisgender men using trans women as “cover” for invading women’s only spaces.

Do you know why, best beloved? It’s actually fairly simple: the little stick-figure of a woman on the door to the washroom isn’t a magic totem that wards off bad people. Firstly, it does nothing to stop a cisgender woman from entering such spaces and causing harm. Secondly, it doesn’t stop men either. Because it’s just a damned sign.

Gee, maybe if I were a sexual predator I just wouldn’t pay any attention to the sign on the door! I’d just go in, rather than shrink from it like Nosferatu exposed to sunlight.

Incidentally, if you’ve not seen “Nosferatu” (1979), directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski as the titular character, then you really should. It’s a very good film! Image © Werner Herzog Filmproduktion via 20th Century-Fox. All rights reserved.

Any man who wants to get into a female-only space can do so easily. Ever play Hitman, with its ‘dress-up and infiltrate’ mechanics? Let’s try that: a jump-suit and a mop bucket would get most onlookers to see you as a cleaner. Who’d bat an eyelid at that? Cleaners are allowed, because washrooms aren’t actually single-sex spaces: men can go in on custodian duties.

Nobody will recognise me with this outfit! Provided nobody notices the barcode on the back of my head… and my very distinctive face and bald head… and ignores the fact I’m obviously snooping around furtively. Image © IO Interactive.

Maybe the mop and bucket is too much effort for our hypothetical jackass. Why, he could just poke his head in and sheepishly say “I’m sorry, my kid came in a few minutes ago — I just want to check up on them!”. Bang. Some rando is now in the washroom thanks to the most trivial social engineering imaginable.

And that’s assuming that the predator actually bothers using any pretext at all. They might just walk in because they’re bad and they don’t care.

You know what? We’ll be good to our anti-trans campaigner: let’s you and I, best beloved, take another steel-man approach. Let’s say that trans women are dangerous and cisgender women must be protected. That’s what the anti-trans campaigners believe and want, isn’t it?

Here’s Kathleen Stock putting the lie to this by explaining that, if some butch women are misidentified as trans women and removed from a washroom, then that’s just the cost of doing business:

She’s meant to be smart. Bet her students learnt a lot from her.

Oops.

Turns out not all cisgender women must be protected. Some of them are expendable. They can be sacrificed for the greater good. That greater good being screwing-over trans women, which seems to be more important than… protecting women.

Oh, Kathleen. I almost admire the sheer chutzpah of someone who realised she was queer later in life (good for her) but was then so possessed with admiration for her own queerness that she now spends her time telling other queer people how to be queer. That’s some pro-level c**t energy.

Stock isn’t alone, either. Here’s another example from a different anti-trans campaigner:

Some rando.

You read that correctly. People in this movement will happily make nice with actual, literal fascists if it means hurting transgender people.

Here’s Dr. Stock (again) making the same point:

A thing Dr. Stock said. She thinks she’s on the Good Guy side!

And here she is again, this time praising someone called Posie Parker (real name Kellie-Jay Keel-Minshull, an attention-seeking ghoul who has made her life’s work harassing trans women).

An actual Tweet from Dr. Stock.

Parker has, in no particular order:

• Flown to the US and filmed herself verbally harassing a trans rights campaigner, Sarah McBride.
• Mocked Black Lives Matter protesters.
• Called for ‘men with guns’ to start using women’s toilets to protect them from trans women. Yep, that’s something she actually said.
• Regularly sided with bona fide, card-carrying neo-Nazis and white nationalists — even going so far as to interview them on her podcast and herself to be interviewed by them.
• Personally funded publicity stunts revolving around putting dogwhistle messages on billboards.
• honestly, the list goes on. Google her and watch the mental gymnastics of anti-trans campaigners and newspapers with anti-trans editorial stances (like The Telegraph or The Times) try to rationalise her antics as something positive.

Best beloved, come closer. I could use a hug. Just for a moment.

Okay. I think we’ve established that these anti-trans persons aren’t really interested in protecting anybody. They just don’t like transes and think that attitude should be legalised so that they, personally, don’t have to feel guilty about it. “I’m not a bigot, I’m just following the law!”, they could say.

I try to argue in good faith, and as such I keep my mind open to the possibility that evidence may be revealed at some point in the future that demonstrates self-ID specifically (or trans people in general) are some sort of legitimate threat to women and girls. That could happen, but that’s true of anything at any time. Anything might happen.

Why, you could wake up tomorrow and discover you’ve been turned into a giant cockroach. Does that mean you should sell all your stuff and begin stocking up on sugar and trousers with six leg holes?

No. Of course not. That’s a nonsense way to think, and it’s a nonsense way to govern. We can only base our decisions on the evidence we have and where we are now, not on every hypothetical what-if we can think of that may never come to pass.

Trans people have been using our preferred washrooms, under the Equality Act 2010, for decades. Before that, we used them covertly. We’re not a threat.

You know what is a threat? The Far Right, with its patriarchal, misogynist views. Young men being radicalised into abusive bastards by the likes of Andrew Tate. The appalling conviction levels for rape (2.4%, if you’re wondering). The gender wage gap (~8%, if you’re interested). Casual sexism and not being able to walk alone after dark. But no, best beloved, turns out the real threat is that trans women want to use the washroom! Booga booga booga!

Image © 20th Century-Fox via The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.

…I am actually under threat, in the UK, of a ghoulish Right-wing government taking away my right to use the women’s washroom. Please help, best beloved… or at least another hug, maybe?

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.