Normally when I write I make jokes. But this morning I find I really don’t feel like joking about any of this right now. I finished working late yesterday afternoon to discover Graham Linehan telling me on Twitter that Twitter had announced a potential new policy that would lead to the ‘immediate silencing’ of my voice. And when I read the proposed policy I realised, with a wash of sudden cold shock, that he was right. Those of you who know me, know me. You know that I have dedicated my entire adult life to thinking about injustice, and to analysing how mechanisms of domination function to destroy the lives of vast numbers of people, because of their sex, or sexual orientation, or socio-economic class, or race. You know I’ve never bothered much with accumulating civic or financial power, because I think we live in a bankrupt neoliberal patriarchal white supremacist environmentally suicidal clusterfuck of a society, and all I really care about is saying that over and over again. And you also know, I hope, that I do this, because I believe, deeply, that all human beings have the right to live meaningful lives in which they have a chance to fulfil their potential, and to be treated with dignity, respect, and social support. But that’s not what Twitter now potentially believes. Twitter believes that people who believe what I believe think something so inexcusable that we shouldn’t be allowed to participate in public political discourse. And this is the story of why that is so.

As many of you also know, there is currently a deep and ongoing dispute between the trans rights movement and feminists who hold a material, sex-based analysis of women’s oppression. The trans rights movement has, over the last 6 or so years, effected an incredibly powerful take-over of the majority of our civic institutions. Four of the UK’s political parties (Conservative, Labour, the LibDems and the Greens) are entirely onboard with trans rights discourse, as are all of our LGBT+ organizations (at national, institutional and student level). When the government did its initial consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act, they consulted only with trans rights organization, and accepted, without question, the argument that changes to the definition of what a woman is, and how that impacts public policy, was of no political or material concern to women, and that women’s perspectives shouldn’t be entertained. Groups like Gendered Intelligence have rolled out trans awareness training in schools, social services, health care and universities, and the policy of charities like the Girl Guides is also being determined in consultation only with trans rights organizations, as is the policy of the vast majority of our trade unions (as shown by the TUC vote last month in favour of self-ID.) This sounds tinfoil hat, but unequivocally, it is not. And it should also give us pause when considering the claim that the present trans rights movements is working only in the interests of the most marginalized and politically powerless constituency in history.

While all of this is happening, a large swath of the British public remain completely in the dark about exactly what is happening, or their awareness extends only as far as thinking that the trans rights movement is just – as it presents itself to be – the latest frontier in the extension of liberal human rights. That is, a good chunk of the British public remain completely unaware about the ideology that informs the present iteration of the trans rights movement, and completely unaware of the practical implications of this ideology should it come – as it actually is at a staggering rate – to inform the creation of public and institutional policy.

One of the reasons the public remains so ill-informed about this ideology and its implications is because there has been a near-total freezing of public discourse on this matter. From the moment of its emergence, the current form of the trans rights movement has sought to make all interrogation of its discourse, or the effects of its discourse, an act of illegitimate hate-speech, and has sought to demonize critics, mostly feminist women, as evil TERF-bigots who should be vilified and ignored. I wrote about this tendency in more detail in 2015, and over the intervening years, it has only become more pronounced. The trans rights movement and its allies have exhibited a consistent pattern of no-platforming, refusal to engage with critics (and refusing media appearances in dialogue with critics), harassing institutions that give space to critical voices, and raising twitter mobs to pressure any public or commercial body that commits the sin of publishing wrongthink. In recent weeks alone this has manifested in the dismissal of humanist student Angelos Sofocleous from 3 of his positions for the thought-crime of believing that there are male and female humans, pressuring Brown University to disavow a study investigating whether the dramatic increase in girls transitioning might be due to social contagion, the Girl Guides decision to expel two leaders who had concerns about the inclusion of male-bodied children in groups of Guides, and the successful efforts of one Dr Adrian Harrop to get a billboard removed which had been placed in Liverpool for the Labour Party conference, and which merely stated the biological definition of the word ‘woman.’

The trans rights movement has effected this near-total silencing by collapsing the present ideology of the trans rights movement into the existence of trans people, and presenting all critique of its ideology as an act of hatred directed at trans people. It variously leverages claims that feminist criticism of its ideology is responsible for the deaths of trans people,  that all criticism of its ideology are acts of bigoted ‘transphobia’ analogous with right-wing expressions of homophobia, and by consistently linking the thought of left-wing gender critical feminists and their allies with the alt-right, the Christian right, and with white supremacism. It has been devastating successful at convincing the majority of right-thinking left-leaning people that anyone who raises concerns about the trans rights movement is motivated by nothing but pure baseless bigotry and spite, and that there are no legitimate questions or concerns that need to be given full public consideration before they start determining public policy. The practical upshot of this is that both the left-wing press and the vast majority of academics in the United Kingdom – and other English-speaking nations – are either fervently opposed to allowing criticism to be expressed, or, in many cases, voices of dissent are too scared about the professional consequences of speaking out to put their heads above the parapet. (The writing, and backlash to the writing, of the work of Professor Kathleen Stock, is a prime example of how this is working in the academic context.)

As feminists who hold an analysis of the sex-based oppression of women, we maintain that this is a political, and ideological, disagreement, and that it is the collapsing of criticism of the ideology of the trans rights movement into an act of hate speech directed at trans people, and the silencing of political discourse that this effects, that is democratically illegitimate. The heart of this disagreement is the way trans rights ideology is committed to erasing the fact that humans are sexually dimorphic, the denial of the political importance of the existence of male and female humans, and the effort to ensure that all public policy is executed in line with this denial. One of the great obstacles we face in informing the public about this ideology and its effects is that it’s core ideological structure runs so entirely counter to how everyone who has not been indoctrinated by trans ideology understands the world, that it is incredibly difficult to persuade people that this is a) what the trans rights movement really advocates, and b) that public institutions would be so easily swayed by this ideology and that public policy would end up being made according to its precepts, with almost no debate.

The trans rights movement will tell you that what we say is hatred. If, however, you look at the examples above of people who have been dismissed or censured for committing ‘anti-trans’ thoughtcrimes, what you will see is that, excepting the example of the Littman study, all they did was think that there are male and female humans and that this might be politically or practically important. As I discussed in my last piece, the ideology of the trans rights movement is committed to the thought that whether a person is a man or a woman is only and exclusively a matter of their ‘gender identity’ – that is, that ‘gender identity’ overrides and determines physical sex, and that all public provision that has hitherto been provided on the basis of sex should now be provided on the basis of self-declared gender identity. I don’t want to get bogged down now in the long discussion of the ideological and practical problems of this. You can find an excellent discussion of the incoherence of the concept of gender identity by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper here and here, and I have outlined my analysis of the issues and implications of the erasing sex as a meaningful political category here. What I want to stress here is that I do not consider it to be an act of hatred to think that there are male and female human beings and that that is politically important. Indeed, shockingly, I believe that it is a fact that there are male and female human beings, that the oppression of female humans cannot be explained without understanding and describing this fact. And I think, moreover, that it is actually impossible to give an account of how any system of domination arises and functions if we cannot take account of the interaction between culture and material reality.

By contrast, the trans rights movement, and the form of ‘intersectional’ liberal analysis with which it is aligned – believes that there is no such thing as material reality, that everything is culturally constructed, and this applies also to the existence and perception of human sexual dimorphism. (See my discussion of this here). What this amounts to is the conviction that the existence of male and female humans, and the fact that we can perceive the difference between male and female humans within nanoseconds, isn’t something given by the world and our perception of it, but is, in fact, purely the result of cultural training. (This is equivalent to saying our perception of all objects – trees, river, mountains, roses, tables, whatever… has nothing to do with the existence of objects in the world and our perception of them, but is entirely produced through our concepts and language. That is, it’s a crass, reductive form of a kind of debased misreading of postmodernism which fails to understand the fundamental deconstructive insight that all cognition in humans arises through an interaction between ourselves and the world.) Anyway, the thinking goes, that if we only perceive male and female humans because we have been trained into perceiving male a female humans then, tah-dah, we can just be trained out of it. Because no, there is nothing at all sinister about trying to dictate how humans perceive the world so that it conforms to your political ideology. (Ends justifies the means, right side of history, we are the possessors of the one righteous truth, this doesn’t sound much like ‘queer’ anything to me etc.)

As I suggested in my last piece, trying to structure a political movement around the denial of a fundamental and readily perceptible fact about the world marks the trans rights movement as fundamentally divergent from all previous civil rights movements. Campaigning for the removal of value-judgements and systemic discriminations based on differences between peoples is not the same as attempting to enforce the belief that such differences do not exist and must not be perceived. The totalitarian political tactics of the trans rights movement are not, therefore, an accident. Rather, they follow necessarily from the fact that attempting to legislate that human beings must not perceive a fact about the world that we do, in fact, all perceive, is totalitarian to its very bones. (Orwell was right, the existence of material facts is a fundamental bulwark against totalitarian thought control. (Trump is President of the United States FFS, how are you people still thinking that that all this ‘post-truthiness’ is liberation????)). The reason, therefore, why the trans rights movement cannot allow there to be a public discussion around its political ideology and its implications is because if people really understood that it’s political ideology is committed to denying that there are male and female humans, then the collective ‘What the Actual Living Fuck?’ would be so deafening that the whole political project would be dead in the water. So, instead, it has had to be achieved by a) a ton of behind-the-scenes collusion between trans rights organization and individuals in positions of political and civic power and, b) silencing public interrogation by bullying dissenters, hamstringing the press and public bodies, and making sure that everyone understands the very high social sanctions for speaking out.

So enter Twitter. Given the extent to which public discourse has been closed down around this issue, there are presently only a few significant online public spaces where there is anything resembling an open discussion around the nature and political implications of the trans rights movement. One of these is Twitter and the other the ‘Feminism and Women’s Rights’ boards on Mumsnet. As I’ve said before, it’s no accident that women who have created and fed other humans with their bodies are not buying this ‘bodies are politically irrelevant’ business – in fact, it’s an axiomatic non-accident, because what is at stake here is all about the political importance of reproduction, and the immemorial patriarchal erasure of the mother. ‘Mumsnet Towers’ have done a sterling job, in the face of persistent harassment by the trans rights movement, of defending the rights of women and mothers to name their bodies, the political importance of their bodies, and to analyse the political stakes of the erasure the trans rights movement is currently effecting. Unlike Twitter, however, Mumsnet caters to a particular segment of the population. It is not, as Twitter is, the 21^st century virtual equivalent of the Greek agora – the public square where people (well men) came together to debate and discuss the political and philosophical issues thrown up by running their early, democratic city states.

For better or worse, Twitter is where we now do democracy – on a global (although very much tilted, like all global power, to the Western) scale. When the internet first took over our collective lives, there was a good deal of talk about its ‘democratising’ potential – and while that utopian promise has inevitably been corrupted by commerce, and, as in the case of Cambridge Analytica, by the collusion between social media corporations and nefarious political power, it’s not complete hogwash. For all its ills, the great virtue of Twitter is that anyone with a computer and a phoneline can get on there and start shouting. It has the capacity to connect people in power, and people with public voices, with people who have particular political interests, expertise and concerns. And it has the power, sometimes, to actually give direct political voice to people who otherwise would have none.

The resurgence of feminist activism at the beginning of this decade, was down, substantially, to Twitter. Almost the entirety of my feminist political life – the friendships I’ve made, the meetings I’ve attended, the writing I have been empowered to do and the audience it has found – has been down, substantially, to Twitter. The expression and organization of resistance to the impact of trans rights activism on the lives of women, girls, lesbians, and homosexual men, is organized, substantially, on Twitter. When people find themselves confounded or shocked by something they hear briefly on the news – that Lilly Madigan has become a Labour Party Women’s Officer, that a trans woman has assaulted four women in a female jail, that Pips Bunce has won an award for being a female executive although he is a transvestite and not actually a female person – they come to Twitter. And on Twitter they find a LOT of people talking about this. Serious, smart, well-informed, researched up-the-wazoo women and men who have serious theoretical and political objections to a discourse that is holding our political life in a kind of stunned zombie-thrall. And Twitter knows this. And Twitter wants it to stop.

The proposed policy that Twitter announced yesterday would pass quietly under the nose of anyone who is not well-versed in this conflict, and in its ideological and rhetorical tropes. Despite the fact that Twitter has tolerated women being inundated with death and rape-threats – most famously in response to Caroline Criado-Perez having the temerity to campaign for there to be one woman left on a British banknote – Twitter has now decided its policy on policing hate-speech needs to be tightened up. It has decided that hate-speech is defined by dehumanizing language – fair enough – and then decided that there are two principle examples of this kind of dehumanizing speech. The first, uncontroversially, is comparing humans to animals or viruses (vermin, cockroaches, plagues etc.) So, no problem there – it’s an much-used and well-documented trope of othering groups of people, and it never goes anywhere good. The second – and this is where a MASSIVE alarm-bell starts ringing – is “reducing groups to their genitalia.” Something Twitter describes as a form of ‘mechanistic’ dehumanization.

Okay. So, first off. I’m pretty well-versed in the types of tropes that have been used in historic acts of dehumanization against groups of people, and as far as I know, ‘reducing people to their genitalia’ is not, and has never been, a form of widely used dehumanization, or a precursor to systemic violence, against any group of people. Using genital-based insults aimed at individuals is a pretty standard form of English-contempt-giving (‘dick’ ‘prick’ ‘cunt’ ‘twat’ ‘cockwomble’ etc), but these types of insults are never used to present an entire groups as either a threat, or to dehumanize an entire groups in order to legitimize violence against them. So what the hell is going on here? As anyone versed in the rhetoric of the trans rights movement will immediately recognize, ‘reducing someone to their genitals’ is one of the used-like-clockwork phrases trans rights activists turn out when arguing about why it’s not okay to distinguish male from female humans, or why it’s ‘problematic’ to think the definition of ‘woman’ has something to do with being biologically female. It’s a totally bogus argument because it relies on collapsing the distinction between ‘something being defined by’ and ‘something being reduced to’ –  to say that being a woman has something to do with having the sexual characteristics of a female is not to reduce a woman to being only those characteristics.

And what’s more, the reason for arguing this is transparently not because the trans rights movement is unduly concerned about women being reduced to dehumanizing body parts or functions. In the name of inclusivity they have promoted the use of phrases like ‘uterus-havers,’ ‘cervix-havers,’ ‘menstruators’ and in one particularly charming example, ‘bleeders.’ The function of this argument, that is, is purely political. And it’s political function is to claim that it is morally reprehensible to distinguish male and female humans, in the service or arguing that no public policy, or organization of public space, can legitimately be made of the basis of that distinction. In the case of the Twitter policy here, this function is further amplified by the fact that Twitter apparently recognises that both ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ are acceptable ways of identifying a group. But it does not recognise that sex is. (That is, it will allow us to talk about ‘women’ and ‘men’ because the category of ‘women’ potentially includes male people who identify as women. But it will not allow us to talk about female people).

When Graham Linehan told me that my voice would be silenced by the new Twitter policy, this is what he was talking about. The political line I, and many other women, have been trying to defend, is the political importance of the difference between male and female humans. The reason why we are defending this line is not because we hate trans women. We have no political argument with transitioned trans women who have committed themselves to the social and medical process of living amongst women. But we have serious concerns about changing the definition of a woman to include ‘any male person who simply asserts that he is a woman.’ And the reason why we’re concerned about that is because male people pose a very significant statistical danger to female people, and there is no reason to believe – and no empirical evidence to support the idea – that male people cease to commit male-pattern violence against women and children simply because they say that they are women. Nor, moreover, has the trans rights movement expressed the slightest shred of interest in thinking about the way that a policy of fundamentalist self-identification is manifestly open to abuse by predatory men and men who want access to children.

The other major concern we have is that feminism is fundamentally a political movement dedicated to articulating the interests of female people, and in explaining why female people are oppressed as female people. Women are oppressed by gender, but they are not, fundamentally, oppressed because of the way they perform their gender. Men rape female people. Men exercise violent coercive control over female people. Foetuses are aborted because they are female. Clitorises are cut out because they are the organs of sexual pleasure of female people. Women are paid less because they are female. And none of this can be avoided, or changed, by the way women do their gendering, or by trying to coerce everyone into thinking that female people do not exist. All this will achieve is to make the speaking of the sex-based oppression of women impossible, which is exactly what we’ve been saying is the threat hiding in plain sight in trans ideology this whole damn time. What Twitter is doing, therefore, by seeking to ban as hate-speech the actually non-existent dehumanization of groups of people by ‘reducing them to their genitals,’ is to prevent the speaking of the feminist analysis of the oppression of women, which they just happen to have framed in precisely the language used by the trans rights movement. That is, Twitter is trying to ban women from the only major public democratic space where we are more-or-less freely still able to express our political criticism against a massive assault on our rights – and it is seeking to do so explicitly in the interests of the trans rights movement.

I have been running around on Twitter for the last few months, saying, repeatedly, to pretty much anyone that will listen, that the trans rights movement is the most totalitarian thing I have seen in my entire life – and yet, somehow, I still don’t believe, even though we are so far off the political map of normal, that any of this is really happening. That, for all the political complicity, and manifest misogyny, and the incessant, day-in-day-out, drum beat of violence and disrespect aimed at women, that we are seriously in a position when feminist women could be ejected, en masse, from the global public square, for saying that female people are oppressed as female people and that that matters. Even though I know, and have been saying, for the last five years, that the fundamental structure of trans rights discourse threatens to make feminist speech unsayable, I still somehow don’t believe that they are really trying to frame a policy to make us stop saying it. And yet, I can’t help coming to the conclusion that they really are. For those of you out there still sitting on the fence, or who still believe that I, and everyone opposing this ‘civil rights movement’, is just a nasty evil hate-mongering bigot, please, if you give one shit about women and the protection of women, wake-the-fuck-up. This is actually happening, it’s scary as shit, and we may well be running out of time. This is what woman-hating totalitarianism looks like. This is not a fucking drill.

 

So, Momentum made a video huh?

To be honest, it’s kind of a classic of its genre. Once more with feeling everyone: Trans rights are just like gay rights. Anyone who thinks otherwise is some nasty backwards morally bankrupt fuddy-duddy asshole who is going to look back on their objections to the current trans rights agenda with an enormous eggy face-full of shame. Remember peoples, we’re just telling you this for your own good. YOU DON’T WANT TO GO GETTING CAUGHT ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY DO YOU NOW????

This parallel between gay and trans rights has been leveraged for all its worth by the trans rights movement. It’s one Owen Jones has trotted out endlessly to justify his point-blank refusal to listen to anything anyone – particularly female anyones – have to say on the matter. It’s embedded in the way trans rights is now the centre of activity for many LGBTQI+ organizations, and has come, most notably, to dominate Stonewall’s campaign agenda. And it’s present, perhaps most potently, in the way objections to trans rights are immediately dismissed as bigotry and ‘transphobia’ – a thought-terminating lifting of the notion of discrimination-as-phobia taken straight from gay-rights discourse.

This strategy has been incredibly effective. One of the reasons the trans rights movement has been able to make such an historically unprecedented ascent from obscurity to wall-to-wall dominance is because if you glance at it running from twenty paces, it does look exactly like the gay rights movement. And, right now the whole world is bascially going to shit and a lot of people are too up-to-their-eyes in grind, precarity, sugar and anxiety to do anything but look at it running from twenty paces. People just want to be told what the good right-thinking progressive position is and then get on with the business of trying to get on with their business. Fair enough. But there’s a massive problem with all this. And that’s because the parallel between gay rights and trans rights is as superficial and insubstantial as that glossy sound-bite-stuffed Momentum video.

What I want to do here is think through why the concept of ‘discrimination-as-phobia’ worked for the gay rights movement, and why, despite superficial similarities, it doesn’t accurately capture what is at stake in the trans rights debate, and actually serves as a tool of political propaganda and obfuscation to push that agenda through. That is, I’m going to argue that accusations of ‘homophobia’ were a politically powerful and basically on-the-money part of gay rights discourse, while the use of ‘transphobia’ is an inaccurate parallel which grossly distorts public perceptions of the issues involved in the trans rights debate, and is doing so in the service of actually preventing that debate taking place.

So, to get down to it. The discourse of ‘homophobia’ fundamentally relies on the idea that gay-people are discriminated against on the basis of moral disgust. And inside that are two more interwoven ideas. One, that moral disgust is not a legitimate basis for telling people what not to do. (Correct) Especially not when your disgust-feels are causing serious harm to other people. (Also correct) And even more especially given that moral disgust is a nasty, vicious emotion that tends to shade very easily into violence (and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense of ‘literal violence’). Two, that because discrimination against homosexuality was entirely mediated by moral disgust, there was, in fact, no legitimate basis for that discrimination, and all objections were, effectively, moral disgust in drag. That is, the success of gay rights was substantially down to disseminating the idea that that were no good reasons for anyone to object to their agenda, and that everyone objecting was just a nasty evil bigot whose ideas shouldn’t be given any weight as part of democratic political debate.

This structure has basically been transferred wholesale to the concept of ‘transphobia.’ And it’s doing important work for the trans rights movement in several ways. First, the idea of the visceral virulence of moral disgust has been taken and amplified to the hundredth power. Our response to things that disgust us is to try and eradicate them, and I think this resonance of the ‘phobia’ designation is doing a lot to undergird trans activist’s claims that any objection to their demands amounts to a ‘denial of their existence,’ or an effort to ‘exclude’ them bordering on intent to exterminate. (It’s also a key element of the endlessly recycled claim that a bunch of mostly left-wing feminist women are in cahoots with people who’d blend seamlessly into the Westboro Baptist Church or some such nonsense. (It’s wall-to-wall self-hating lesbians over here, honest)).

Second, and we’ll deal with this in detail because it’s crucial. The use of the concept of ‘homophobia’ to dismiss objections to gay rights carried a ton of weight because the basis for a legitimate moral or political objection would be that something causes a harm, and in the case of gay rights there is a complete dearth of convincing arguments as to why homosexuality is a harm. It doesn’t harm homosexuals (whereas repressing it evidently does), and it doesn’t harm anyone else.[1] But this is precisely where the ‘homophobia-transphobia’ parallel falls completely apart. Because in the case of the trans rights agenda there is actually a load of potential harms we might reasonably be worried about. Indeed, there is a kind of dull thudding irony to the fact that the very week Momentum decide to remind us that we’re all scaremongering bigots on the wrong side of history it also became public knowledge that Karen White – a trans woman on remand for rape – had been sent to a women’s jail where they sexually assaulted four inmates. (Who could have predicted it?)

The key thing to understand about trans rights activism is that, unlike gay rights activism, it is not just a movement seeking to ensure that trans people are not discriminated against. It is, rather, a movement committed to a fundamental reconceptualization of the very idea of what makes someone a man or a woman. In theory, this equally affects both men and women, but in practice, almost all the social pressure is coming from trans women towards the idea of ‘woman’ and the rights of women. And that’s because, when it comes down to it, this whole thing is being driven by male people who want something female people have, and that something, is, in fact, our very existence. Moreover, it turns out – who knew? – that male people have the inclination and social power to exert extreme coercive pressure on female people, and to court the sympathy and support of other males when they do so. (It’s almost as if sex is a thing and that it has something to do with power after all mmmm?).

The central thought of the present form of trans rights activism is that whether someone is a man or a woman has nothing to do with human sexual dimorphism  – the patent existence of which they try, endlessly, to undermine  – and is determined instead by someone’s ‘gender identity,’  some kind of internal gender essence of subjective sense of one’s own gender that many of us simply don’t recognise as a description of our own being as men or women. This ideological manoeuvre is embedded inside the phrase ‘trans women are women,’ which looks, on the face of it, like a reasonable plea for trans women to be given the respect most people want to give them, but is actually used in political argument to deny all distinction between the existence and interests of male born people living as women and the existence and interests of female people. It is under the rubric of ‘trans women are women’ that Karen White ended up in a female jail, because there’s no possible difference between Karen White and any other woman right? That is, there are, in fact, many concerning implications of this definitional change. To not slow this down for those of you familiar with this, I’ve put a full discussion of the potential harms in an appendix to this essay. (I’d like to say it’s short but I’d be lying). But to enumerate briefly(ish):

1. Changing the definition of woman without the consent of women. Specifically changing the definition from one based in biology to one based on gender identity. It should be uncontroversial that all groups of people have a right to define themselves, and this is particularly true when that definition describes an oppressed class of persons. It seems further true that it might be a really big problem when that definition is being changed by people born into the oppressor class, and in the interests of people born into the oppressor class. This definitional change then leads to:
2. The erasure of women, both as a biological class, and as a political category. This is profoundly dehumanizing, and results, specifically, in injunctions against women naming their bodies, and the political implications of their bodies. This then leads to:
3. Making the description of the sex-based nature of women’s oppression unsayable, that is, making the feminist analysis of the mechanism of women’s oppression a thought and hate-crime. Injunctions against the naming of sex also lead to:
4. Legislative changes which would interfere with the recording of natal sex. This will have an impact on the collection of data used to track and describe the sex-based oppression of women, including women’s representation in public life, the pay-gap, and very significantly, crime statistics and the analysis of male violence.
5. The denial that there is any meaningful difference between male people who identify as women and female people then leads to the demand that all services for female people be open to male born people who identify as women. The current form of trans rights activism considers identification rather than transition to be the criteria that determines whether someone is a trans woman, and the current consultation on the Gender Recognition Act is about whether self-declared identification rather than transition should be the basis for someone’s birth sex being reassigned. In practice this will make all women and girl’s single-sex spaces and services open to any male person who claims they are a woman. That this is wide-open for abuse by predatory men and paedophiles should be evident to anyone who has not pickled their brain in an enormous vat of trans ideology.
6. The fact that it is, therefore, in the interests of the trans rights movement to consistently deny the reality of male violence against women and girls is, by itself, evidence of the fact that trans women who are committed to the present form of trans ideology are not capable of representing the political interests of women, and are not capable of acting politically with women in feminist solidarity. The election of trans women in political positions normally occupied by women is, therefore, a harm to the political interests of women.
7. In addition to the problems that arise from the denial of the reality of human sexual dimorphism, trans ideology is also committed to a regressive theory of essentialist gender identity. This actually serves to reinforce patriarchal gender conformity by making all gender non-conforming people a different ‘class.’ Rather than viewing gender non-conformity as evidence of the fact that gender conformity is a patriarchal straightjacket, trans ideology thus propagates the idea that feminine men, and masculine women, are something other than their natal sex.
8. The association between gender non-conformity and trans identity is of particular concern with regard to the medicalization of gender non-conforming and gay children. There are serious potential consequences of that medicalization, including sterility, effects on sexual function, and other side-effects of life-long use of cross-sex hormones. None of these effects have been subjected to thorough research. There was nothing in the gay rights movement which was remotely equivalent to the potential harms of this medicalization, and, moreover, these harms are potentially being directed largely at homosexuals.
9. The potential unnecessary medicalization of children is of particular concern with respect to female children, because the massive increase in referrals to gender identity specialists since the beginning of this phase of trans rights advocacy has seen a hugely disproportionate referral of girls. This is worrying because there are reasons to believe a substantial proportion of these girls are lesbians, many are on the autistic spectrum, and there may also be issues thrown up by the trauma girls experience going through puberty in a patriarchy, especially sexual abuse and objectification.
10. Because of the erasure of women in general and the views of feminist women in particular, the trans rights movement is creating particular issues for the recognition and respect of lesbian women within the historic gay rights movements. As we’ll discuss later this is massively compounded by the fact that trans rights is committed to the erasure of sex, and hence cannot recognise same-sex attraction. This is of particular issue for lesbians because they are coming under increasing pressure to accept male bodied people who identify as women as sexual partners, in opposition to their sexual orientation. Charmingly, the trans rights movement has taken to calling exclusively same-sex attracted women, “vagina fetishists.” Nice work guys.

So, to recap: Calling people ‘homophobic’ was used by the gay rights movement to dismiss all objections to their political agenda as illegitimate moral disgust. Calling people ‘transphobic’ is playing on the same trope – and is doing a hell of a lot of work to shut down all concerns about trans rights by painting them as sketchy hate-speech beyond the pale of legitimate democratic discourse. This is massive distortion of what is actually going on here, because, as I’ve indicated above, there is a far from insignificant number of very legitimate questions about potential harms of restructuring our core ideas about sex and gender. This maneuver is, however, an absolutely central plank of trans rights’ political strategy, because as those of you who have been out there trying to argue this know well enough, trans activists actually have no substantive answers to our questions and concerns. At all.

A few weeks ago, for example, I spent 3 hours ‘arguing’ with people from that great bastion of intersectional right-thinking Everyday Feminism about what we do about the fact that under fundamentalist self-ID procedures it will become de facto impossible to stop any man entering women’s space. I was called a transphobe and a racist and a bigot (of course), there was attempted emotional blackmail (‘you come onto my TL talking about rape when I’m a survivor you evil heartless witch’ (‘well in that case don’t use your considerably larger platform to RT the testimony of other survivors so you can mock and dismiss them’)), and I was told that I was insinuating the trans woman I was talking to had a dick (I wasn’t – wouldn’t – and they couldn’t show I had). It was a litany of name-calling, deflection, and emotional manipulation. There was not one attempt to sincerely address the problem at hand with something approximating thought (unless you count ‘my rapist had brown eyes so should we try and ban brown-eyed people?’ a thought), and not one acknowledgement that women might have a reasonable interest in this or could be motivated by anything other than pure baseless spite. And this, apparently, is how we’re making public policy that will affect at least half the population now.

The way that the accusation of ‘transphobia’ is being used to control and close down the debate around trans rights is also inherent in what we might call the ‘overreach’ of the definition of transphobia being put to work here. As I’ve said, ‘homophobia’ identifies, correctly I think, the fact that the discrimination against homosexuals, and especially gay men, was coming from moral disgust, and specifically, moral disgust about people’s sexual practices.[2] If ‘transphobia’ is an analogue of ‘homophobia’ – and to ground the claim that it’s an illegitimate basis for political argument is needs to be – then it should, also, refer to a form of moral disgust, and moreover, as in the case of violence against gay people, there should be an obvious causal link between that moral disgust, the discrimination you’re trying to combat, and the arguments people are using against you.

None of this stacks up with how ‘transphobia’ is being used politically. If there is moral disgust aimed at trans people – which there’s no reason to dispute – then it would, one imagine, inhere in responses to people who are visibly transgressing patriarchal conventions by exhibiting gender expression in conflict with their natal sex. The people we’d expect to display such disgust would then be the kind of people who, say, find femininity in men distressing, i.e. patriarchally invested people, and particularly, patriarchally invested men. And indeed, the vast majority of literal violence suffered by trans people is, unsurprisingly, directed at trans women by non-trans men.[3] However, what doesn’t seem at all evident is that the kind of concerns I listed above fall easily under the banner of ‘moral disgust.’ Nonetheless, accusations of ‘transphobia’ flow, overwhelmingly, from trans activists towards the speech of feminist women making just these kind of claims. Women who, importantly, are pretty much the last people on earth who’d be morally disgusted by someone transgressing patriarchal gender conventions,[4] and whose speech show no empirically verifiable relationship with the kind of patriarchal violence directed at trans women.[5] That is, accusations of transphobia are being directed against the group of people – women who have theoretical and political objections to the trans rights agenda – who are actually least likely to experience moral disgust over trans people’s gender expression, and this is being done for purely political reasons.

The politics of this becomes apparent when we look at the definition of ‘transphobia’ being circulated by trans advocacy organizations like Stonewall. As the inestimable Mr Jonathan Best has pointed out recently, ‘transphobia’ is, in fact, conceptualised by the trans rights movement as the “fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including the denial/refusal to accept their gender identity.” (Emphasis added) That is, ‘transphobia’ is being politically leveraged to denote, not a form of illegitimate moral disgust, but any refusal to understand someone as the gender they identify as, and, given that trans ideology believes that gender identity determines sex, this definition seeks to mandate the view that trans women are female, and inscribe as hate speech the view that trans women are male people who identify as women. That is, this definition of ‘transphobia’ is seeking to enforce compliance with a deeply ideological prescription.

As I’ve already suggested, there’s nothing minor about this prescription. Trans rights politics is asking us to believe that human sexual dimorphism is not a thing, that men are women simply because they say they are, and is demanding a thoroughgoing social and political transformation on that basis. One which, to underline, because it really matters, amounts to the legal abolition of sex. That is, trans ideology is mandating nothing short of a fundamental rewriting of how we understand the world,[6] one which runs entirely counter to the everyday perceptions of everyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated by trans ideology (and even those that have will sometimes inadvertently let it slip that, lo, they do in fact perceive sexual dimorphism.) Let me just state something really fucking obvious that apparently needs to be stated: You cannot mandate how people perceive the world. That is totalitarian as all living fuck. You cannot demand people perceive the world in line with your ideology and that perceiving something that ALL humans perceive is actually the same as being a genocidal racist. (And it may surprise you ‘sex was invented by Western patriarchy and/or colonialism’ philosophical-sophisticates-cum-idiots that that sounds racist af to everyone who hasn’t marinated their brains in tumblrized queer-theory for 8 years. And let’s not even get onto the ahistoricism and anachronism involved).

What we have here then is a politically driven ideology that:

1. Refuses to engage in any meaningful debate about any of the implications of the changes it is forcing through and attempts to shut down every question or objection by screaming ‘phobia’ and ‘hate-speech’ and ‘genocide’ and
2. Is attempting to legislate people’s basic perceptions of the world, and recast the very fact of that perception as a form of illegitimate moral disgust overlaid with resonances of intent to harm or even eradicate.

It should be pretty evident that any political program based on attempting to reframe such a fundamental aspect of human perception is only going to succeed by using totalitarian methods. By relentlessly drilling its axioms into public consciousness and by making people who reject them pay a very high social price. The phrase ‘Orwellian’ is madly overused, but it documents the methods of trans activism almost to the letter. We have the profligate rewriting of history – including the transing of the gender-non-conforming dead (um, I thought it was self-ID?), the transing of the drag-queens who started the Stonewall riot (even though they didn’t, because that was a black lesbian called Stormé DeLarverie), and the absurd suggestion that literature or history about people cross-dressing for social, political, or economic reasons harms trans people because past cross-dressers were actually just expressing their ‘authentic selves’ (you fucking bigot Shakespeare). It’s only slight hyperbole to say that right now a lot of us feel like we’re stuck in Room 101 except O’Brien looks like Riley Dennis and the ‘2+2=5’ is ‘Sex does not exist’ and the rats are a bunch of trans activists threatening us with baby blue and pink baseball bats (and in case you want to wilfully misinterpret me, I’m not saying trans people are vermin, I’m using the exact reference of the thing that scares Winston shitless and is used to coerce him). We could go on pointing out the parallels all day, but really people, when you start doing shit like this, you really should be asking yourself whether you’re getting a touch Ministry of Truth-y.

To make the point plain. Some aspects of gay-rights politics did involve the use of non-peaceful protest. As also did parts of the women’s rights and Black civil rights movement. What none of them involved was the demand that people change their fundamental perceptual systems – as opposed to value judgements about things they perceived – and the attempt to enforce that perception using our culture’s most lucid analysis of ‘this-is-what-totalitarianism-looks-like.’ (Clue: it was never supposed to be a ‘how to’ guide). The great sickening irony of all of this of course – as many gay-men are now waking up to – is that the abolition of sex implies the abolition of sexual orientation. Trans ideology’s conviction that the truth of our ‘authentic selves,’ and of whether we are man or woman, is based only and exclusively on ‘gender identity’ necessitates the effort to deny that we fuck people’s bodies (at least in good part) on the basis of the sex of those bodies, and that sexual attraction is sexual, in both senses of the word. That is, the gay rights movement has wedded itself to an ideology that cannot actually recognise that homosexuality is a thing. Given the social and physical power imbalances, this doesn’t necessarily involve a clear and present danger to gay-men (although it is an ideological one, and for those of you who have seen it, and are pitching in, I hope you know we see and value you). For lesbians, this is a first order existential threat. Not only are they being erased along with the class of women in general, but their right to be exclusively attracted to female-bodied people is being consistently challenged by some of the most rapey, entitled misogynist bullying I have seen in my entire life. To amend a famous slogan: Lesbians don’t do dick. Get over it.

How the LGBTQ+ institutions – and public policy more widely – came to be colonized by a totalitarian political ideology that is hostile to the interests of women and is, in its fundaments, hostile to the very existence of homosexuals,[7] is a million dollar question.[8] I strongly suspect that ‘millions of dollars’ is not just a turn of phrase here – and I hope, over time, we will come to better understand the deluge of cash and the corporate plutocratic interests that must inevitably be behind such a breath-taking take-over of gay and lesbian politics. Right now, women, feminists, lesbians, gay and straight men, intersex people, concerned parents, and many non-ideologue trans women are fighting tooth and nail to stop the roll back of rights we thought had already been secured. Time’s arrow is not pointing forwards. Right side of history my arse.

Appendix —–>

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The frankly out-of-control feetnotes:

[1] I guess maybe it harms people who don’t get to project their disgust-feels onto other people (yup, not sorry, go take your punitive super-ego and recalcitrant misogyny to therapy) and it maybe harms the patriarchal family (or maybe not, but even so, booooo-bloody-hooooo).

[2] Here, we should firstly note that it’s not at all clear to me that the discrimination directed at gay-men is of the same type as that directed at lesbians. The moral disgust aimed at gay-men derives, at base, from the patriarchal injunction against the penetrability of men. I wrote my PhD thesis on the metaphysics of penetration, so, I’ll try and stop myself from going off here on a tangential footnote that will take over this whole damn essay, but the basic point is this: patriarchal male subjectivity is grounded on the idea of invulnerability and impenetrability, and being fucked is hence to be dehumanized by being made-woman and/or made-object. (Hence all those irritating ‘Don’t bend over’ quips straight men make around gay men). That is, the visceral – and violent – form of homophobia directed against male homosexuals is, basically, a variant of patriarchal sexual misogyny most viciously exhibited by straight men. By contrast, the aversion to lesbianism (when it’s not being eroticised for the straight male gaze) is, I think, probably a lot more to do with men’s outrage about women not being sexually available to them and perhaps, not really being very interested in them at all.

[3] For a fuller discussion of the issues around the deaths of trans women please see here. Briefly, the vast majority of murders of trans women are committed by men against trans women, and principally against black trans women, many of whom are sex workers. Given the high rates of violence against women, people of colour, and prostitutes, this somewhat confounds the claim that this violence can be specifically attributed to ‘transphobia’ as opposed to the other reasons for violence against these groups.

[4] Speaking for myself I can say here that my sexual orientation is basically ‘pretty-straight-boy-sexual’ – aka, ‘Princesexual’ – that is, I find femininity in men the very opposite of disgusting. (And, while we’re here, can you please not trans them all? There’s precious few enough to go round as it is.) It is my firm belief that visceral aversion to gender non-conformity in men is not a common reaction, and indeed, would be an incoherent one, for most gender critical women. That said, it is the case that a small minority of feminist women have been known to mock trans women’s appearance. I won’t defend it, and I find it distasteful and downright cruel. But from where I’m standing, it comes from a horror some women feel about what they perceive as men adopting ‘woman’ as a costume. (Some feminist women also hate drag-queens for the same reason, which the screaming camp fag-hag in me also finds incomprehensible*).

The obvious parallel here is with critiques of minstrelsy, and it is one that certain radical feminists have explicitly made, particularly by claiming that trans women are performing ‘woman-face.’ I have two things to say here. One, that the accuracy of this parallel would depend on denying that sex-dysphoria is a thing, that there are trans women who desperately need and benefit from transition, and that they are deserving of all empathy and support in doing that. I’m not going to do that. Two – I feel that white women making this parallel is the kind of ‘appropriating Black people’s experience’ we should be wary of. This is an infinitely complex issue, and as I said in a footnote to my piece on Butler, I think it’s very damaging for us to rule out of court all drawing of parallels between race and gender as metaphysical-political systems. However, my instinctive sense here is that this is something that should be left for Black feminists and womanists to speak to.

Whatever our thoughts about the parallel between minstrelsy – or transracialism – and trans identity, what remains clear, however, is that feminist women’s dislike of the appropriation of women-as-costume bears no empirically verifiable relationship to patriarchal male violence against trans women. Moreover, while I might not experience or endorse that perception myself, I do also think it’s worth asking whether women’s experience of aversion about their identity being appropriated can be neatly collapsed into an idea of ‘completely illegitimate moral disgust.’

*A short digression on drag-queens. It’s probably overstating the case to say I find some women’s aversion to drag queens incomprehensible, but I don’t share the aesthetic response, and I don’t really buy the argument. My take on drag is  much more – oh the horror – Butlerian. It doesn’t look or feel like appropriation to me, it looks like performative destabilising. Taking things – like gender conventions – and theatrically exaggerating them is a way of delineating their artifice. Which is also why the current appropriation/ erasure of drag-queens by the trans lobby is a problem, and a very revealing one. Trans ideology actually cannot tolerate the performance of gender as artifice, because it has such an essentialized notion of gender. Soon – and this is already starting to happen – they will start saying that people who are not trans cannot be gender non-conforming, because it threatens their identity. And I think they’re going to get a great big fuck right off to that.

[5] Trans advocates tend to respond here that the speech of feminist women is responsible for creating a climate which is hostile to trans people and is, hence, implicated in their mental and physical vulnerability. To this first it should be pointed out the incredible impact of the trans rights movement on public policy is nothing if evidence of the lack of power of feminist speech to set political agendas or determine popular consciousness, and the claim that such speech is the cause of actual discrimination by patriarchally invested people against trans people is basically laughable. That said, I do fully accept that the constant propaganda used by the trans rights movement to inculcate the idea that feminist women hate young trans and gender non-conforming people and wish to do them harm can’t be good for their mental health. Given that our young people have statistically the worst mental health of any generation in living memory, I consider the instrumentalization of this crisis by the trans rights movement in order to create a generation of political foot-soldiers to target feminist women to be an act of exploitative human rights abuse.

[6] This move in some sense actually turns on a slippage between the two meanings of ‘to discriminate.’ Trans ideology is wedded to the notion that the negative treatment or value attributed to trans people (i.e. discrimination in the political sense) resides in the very act of making a distinction between male and female people (i.e. discrimination in the perceptual sense). The idea that we can recognize difference perceptually and not attribute hierarchical value is entirely incomprehensible to them. Which is also effectively the same as the non-recognition of the sex (biological difference and its perception)/gender (value culturally attributed on the basis of sex) distinction. Hence, every time we say we believe in biological sex, they hear (or claim to hear) us say that we want to uphold the gender binary. Then they tell us because we want to uphold the gender binary we aren’t feminists. And we all smash our heads repeatedly into the desk.

[7] Whether to use the word ‘homophobic’ here is a complicated question. What trans activists are presently directing at homosexuals – and almost entirely at lesbians tbh (male socialization and entitlement? Nah, that’s TERF-talk) – isn’t really ‘moral disgust,’ it’s a type of narcissistic rage indistinguishable from the rage of Incels. Sorry people, but other people not wanting to fuck you is not a human rights violation. I thought we’d been through this. (And to the Laurie Pennys – I want to say that I a) respect the shit out of the rest of your politics and writing and b) know that you have deep personal investments here, but we are not making this up). With respect to the transing of a population of kids who are likely mostly homosexual, the issue is more complex. That clearly plays on patriarchal gender stereotypes, and also then, homophobia directed at gender non-conforming children. It seems likely that parents most inclined to buy the narrative would be those that were sexist and/or homophobic, and it seems also likely that parents most horrified by the idea of their children being medicalized and sterilized for gender non-conformity and/or homosexuality are those that are not sexist and/or homophobic. (That would be those evil terrible parents that trans ideologues claim are abusing their children because good parenting apparently now means affirming whatever your child says no matter how potentially damaging you think it might be (and the fact that that makes a lot of medicalized money is just incidental I’m sure.))

[8] There’s something worth pointing to here which may – if we factor out the actual millions of dollars probably at work here – tell us something about why the gay rights movement was so susceptible to being colonized by a movement that is, in fundamental respects, inimical to its original intent. That is, there is one substantive similarity between gay rights and trans rights, and that is that both of them deal with a form of discrimination which arises as an adjunct to patriarchal oppression. As I’ve explained elsewhere, oppression, as opposed to discrimination, arises from conditions of material exploitation of one class by another. Discrimination, by contrast, may arise from lack of attention to the needs of particular groups (as in the case of access to buildings for people with mobility issues for e.g.), or it may be a set of attitudes which arise in association with a system of structural oppression, as in the case of discrimination against gender non-conforming people, or people who challenge dominant heteronormative conceptions of sexuality. What this meant in practice for the gay-rights movement was that it was free to focus on the set of negative attitudes which impacted the freedom of homosexual people, without necessarily embedding that in a deep analysis of the material oppression from which that arose. When the trans rights movement came along leveraging an idea of discrimination-as-phobia, that is, the need to remove a set of negative attitudes, this obviously resonated with many people who had done gay rights advocacy. Gay-rights has been more-or-less just about getting rid of people’s bigotry and TA-DAH!!! SPARKLES. (And don’t get me wrong, I LOVE sparkles).  However, what wasn’t picked up then was that the trans rights movement was doing a hell of a lot more than just trying to get rid of bigotry, and that the redefinitions they were mandating actually ran headlong into the concepts women need to describe, monitor and resist their own oppression. Because gay rights advocacy hadn’t been that firmly embedded in an deep analysis of patriarchy, when trans rights came along suggesting it was super-rad to erase the materiality of people’s (by which I mean, women’s) bodies, a lot of alarm bells that should have started wildly screeching, didn’t.

Christ, where to start…..

Trans ideology is based on the idea that human sexual dimorphism is not a thing, that the classification of male and female humans is in some way arbitrary, that the only meaningful concept with respect to whether someone is a man or a woman is their innate sense of ‘gender identity’, and that someone with a ‘gender-identity’ of ‘woman’ is therefore a woman in exactly the same way as someone ‘assigned female at birth’ is. This thought of the fundamental identity between trans and non-trans women is encapsulated in – and demand for universal acquiescence to – the slogan, ‘trans women are women.’ It is absolutely critical to understanding this debate to understand that the new form of trans-ideology – unlike the beliefs of many of the transsexual women that pre-date it – considers self-identification of gender identity to be the sole criterion of whether someone is a man or a woman. A man does not necessarily have to take cross sex hormones, or undergo sex reassignment surgery, to be considered a woman. He simply has to assert that he is one.

Leaving aside for a moment the staggering batshitness of the idea that the existence and recognition of human sexual dimorphism is somehow arbitrary. (And yeah, burble burble spectrum burble intersex burble burble clown fish burble burble bullshit). And the fact that the erasure of bodies, and specifically women’s bodies, is the most patriarchal-immortality-project-death-cult-on-crack idea I have seen in my entire life, there are such terrible political and practical implications of this that it fries my fucking brains.

Implications for women

1. If a woman is ‘whoever claims to be a woman’ the definition of woman is changed from ‘adult human female’ or (in feminist) ‘member of the reproductive sex class’ to a subjective state which has no objective, or socially agreed upon, definition. There are many practical and political implications of this, but even were there not, it seems to me evident that women have a legitimate right to have opinions about changing the definition of the class of people to which they belong.

Trans ideologues tend to claim here either that what they are proposing has no effect on women and pertains only to trans women. Which is false. Or they claim that the act of redefinition is merely descriptive. One of the most contentious redefinitions here is calling non-trans women ‘cis’ – which is purportedly ‘just the opposite of trans.’ However, according to trans ideology, the definition of ‘trans’ is ‘someone whose sex assigned at birth does not match their gender identity’ and ‘cis’, conversely, is ‘someone whose sex assigned at birth matches their gender identity.’ There is nothing ‘just descriptive’ about this. It demands both the acceptance that sex is ‘assigned’ rather than ‘observed and recorded,’ and the acceptance that a ‘gender identity’ is something we all have, despite the fact that it is a) a meaningless concept to many of us and b) one to which we have political objections (see point 7).

The concept of ‘cis’ also does political work to posit non-trans women as the ‘oppressors’ of trans women (‘cis-privilege’), and hence to nullify our claims that we are an oppressed class and have a legitimate right to exclude members of the oppressor class in certain instances (as, we will see, is recognized by the exemptions for single-sex space enshrined in the 2010 Equalities Act). The political stakes embedded in women accepting the designation ‘cis’ are pretty quickly manifested whenever a woman refuses it. (Self-determination and identification are a sacred right for trans women apparently, but no such right is granted to natal women – that, rather, is a hate-crime). A particularly notable example of this happened on Twitter recently, when the gay and lesbian icon and general national treasure Alison Moyet declared that she was not ‘cis’ and was relentlessly piled on and scolded for the temerity of thinking she had a right to self-define. I would bet my left-arm on the fact that were natal-women attempting to redefine the concept of ‘man’ and telling natal-men their interests in this were hate-speech, none of this would be happening, let alone directing public policy.

2. Changing the definition of woman to something that is subjective is an undermining of the class of women, and of women as a political category. Moreover, the requirement of trans activism is that ‘woman’ or words associated with ‘woman’ never be used in a manner which is ‘exclusive’ of trans women, or not ‘inclusive’ of trans men. The practical upshot of this is the demand to change much of the language traditionally used in the articulation of women’s issues so that it is – allegedly – ‘neutral.’ The Green Party has started calling us ‘non-men,’ pregnant women become ‘pregnant people,’ people who have periods become ‘menstruators,’ women become ‘uterus-havers.’ This is dehumanizing, othering, and an erasure of ‘woman’ which serves to conceal the structure and reasons for the historic oppression of the class of reproductive persons. Patriarchal oppression, sexism and misogyny, are not incidentally related to women’s biology, and are not simply unmotivated ‘bad attitudes’ towards women that can just be erased by changing our discourse, or by pretending that the material basis of women’s oppression does not exist. Erasing women as a political class is also an absolute gift for misogynist lefty dude-bros who have been waiting for the last however-many-years to have a reason to tell uppity feminist women to STFU whenever they make a claim about the oppression of women. Now they can just tell us we don’t exist (and are being super-oppressive by insisting we do) while burnishing their woke-halos. So, thanks for that.

3. Following from this is the fact that it is a central point of feminist analysis that women are oppressed on the basis of their membership of a sex-class, and because of male investment in appropriating and controlling women’s reproductive capacities as a resource. A resource, it should be underlined, which is absolutely necessary to the creation of human life. (The denial/erasure of the facts of human fecundity, and the mind-body dualism inherent in determining definitions of being solely on mental states is why I consider trans activism to be a patriarchal death-cult. The idea that minds/souls are separate and superior to our ‘flesh-house’ bodies is a denial of the conditions of life, and the oldest patriarchal fantasy in the world. It is, in fact, the foundational binary hierarchy of Western thought and culture. And unlike the distinction between male and female mammals, which is actually a thing, there is no clean distinction between minds and bodies, although all the people screaming ‘smash the binary’ don’t seem to have noticed that.)

If you cannot name sex, and you decide that naming sex is a hate-crime, you effectively make the feminist analysis of women’s oppression unsayable. Trans ideology has a tendency to claim that we don’t need an analysis of the sex-based oppression of women, and, as I argue here, their account of that is, let’s just say, unconvincing. At the same time, some of them have also been going around of late – it seems to be dawning that  maybe after all there is a conflict between trans ideology and feminism – floating the idea that we made up the feminist analysis of patriarchy as a form of sex-based oppression that works through the social imposition of gender just for the purpose of oppressing them. (Fifty years before the fact? Yeah. Um). The utter narcissism of this – not to mention the time-travelling loopiness of it – is almost beyond comprehension. Hey, guess what people, maybe we invented feminist analysis for our own liberation, and maybe what you’re doing right now is trying to turn our analysis of our own oppression into hate speech, and maybe we have every right to tell you we’re not having it?

4. Following from this is the fact that a significant part of the analysis, documentation, and statistical evidencing of feminist analysis depends on the recording of sex. The most extreme forms of trans activism are demanding that there should be no statistical documentation of natal sex except for the purposes of medical records where it is relevant to a particular condition. This would, at a stroke, make it impossible to keep track of the sex-based oppression of women. We won’t be able to tell you about the pay-gap, or women’s political representation, or rape as a sex-based crime with any degree of authority. The crimes of natal males who identify as women will be recorded as women’s crimes. This has dramatic implications for the feminist analysis of male-pattern violence. There are important questions about whether male-born and socialized people stop committing crimes overwhelmingly characteristic of men simply because they say they are women. Trans activism is committed to the proposition that they do, because they have ‘female souls’ or some such and have always been women, and the demand for access to women’s space is predicated on this belief. No statistical evidence has been produced to support it. (You would think that if oversight was being exercised we would need more than ideological conviction before we started experimenting with women’s safety wouldn’t you?). If we stop recording natal sex in crime statistics, it will never be possible to settle this question. That is, if we are to give women confidence that trans women do not commit crimes characteristic of male-pattern violence then we need to record those crimes as the crimes of trans women. And sorry if that hurts your feelings. But male-pattern violence against women is a thing and I’m not about to start pretending it isn’t because its ideologically inconvenient. (We’re feminists, since when did we make it a point of political principle to not talk about violence against us because it hurts male-born people’s feelings?)

5. It is impossible to enshrine both gender identity and sex in law as protected characteristics because they are in conflict. I’m not big on either/or thinking – because it spatializes and excludes things that are often not spatialized and exclusive. But weirdly, when we are dealing with access to spaces, things are spatialized, and are exactly either/or. Either access to spaces is determined on the basis of sex (which for most of us in this fight, including the many transsexual women who are our allies, would include transitioned sex), or it’s determined on the basis of self-declared gender identity. In the last case, non-transitioned male-bodied people will have access to women’s space, and sex-based protected space for women will cease to exist. It’s really that simple.

This will – and is already starting to – affect toilets, girls and women’s changing rooms, rape crisis and drug-rehabilitation centres, prisons, sleeping compartments on trains, women’s sports etc. Many of which are places that contain partially undressed women, women asleep, and vulnerable women who have a high incidence of experiences of male violence. Trans advocates are fond of claiming that our fears about male violence are unfounded and hysterical, or that we think all trans women are perverts or predators. On this let’s note: a) As discussed above trans activists have not provided any statistical support for the assertion that self-identified trans women commit violence at a rate, or of a type, that differs from men. The fact that in just the last few weeks there has been a trans women convicted for trying to kill people with an axe, a trans women found sexually assaulting four women in a women’s prison, and a trans women suspended from work for flashing their penis, doesn’t, to say the very least, inspire a great deal of confidence. (And yes, Miss Madigan, we’re only interested in somebody assaulting women with their penis in a woman’s prisons because the perp was a trans women because were it not for your nutbag ideology there wouldn’t be people with penises in women’s prison you total dolt), b) If you find yourself in the constant position of telling feminist women that their analysis of male violence, and their desires to be protected from male violence, are unfounded and hysterical because y’know, women are violent too, you really should ask yourself i) why you’re using arguments from the MRA-playbook,  and ii) whether there might be some reason we’re not so sure you’re such great feminist allies.

Trans activists latest line on this is that we are ‘conflating’ the proposed new Gender Recognition Act with the Equalities Act – because apparently laws exist in total isolation from each other and doing one thing with one law which affects the world will in no way impact another thing in the world, even though they’re in direct conflict. Anyway, this is all subterfuge and backtracking. Women’s Place UK has compiled a list of the recommendations made by trans activists groups regarding the removal of the single-sex space exemptions from the Equalities Act. The present crop of trans activists want access to women’s space as a matter of political priority because it serves the function of ‘validating’ their identities, and they seem to give not one shit about whether it opens women to danger, or reactivates the trauma many women carry from male violence. Let’s just be clear about this – women’s single sex space does not exist to validate anyone’s identity, it exists to protect women from male violence. Refusing to recognize this is a very clear instance of the divergence between women and trans women’s interests, and of the effort to prioritize trans women’s interests over women’s interests using ‘hate-speech’ as a bludgeon. Which brings us to…

6. This issue about trans activists interests in downplaying male violence is indicative of a more general problem about the coincidence, and conflicts, between trans women’s (or trans ideologues’) interests, and women’s interests. And this is of particular importance with respect to trans women’s participation in feminism and their capacity to represent women politically. There has been a ton of talk over the last five or so years about ‘trans inclusive’ and ‘trans exclusive’ feminism (lo, summon the EVIL TERF). To this I mostly want to say…feminism is not a fucking girl’s club. It’s a political movement, and it has political objectives, and established forms of political analysis. You are very very welcome – as many older generation trans women have done – to enter into feminism, and to ally yourself with our political projects. What you are not welcome to do is demand access to our political movement, and then demand that we change the core elements of our political project and analysis because you find it ‘alienating.’ (Rachel Dolezal joins the NAACP and then demands people stop talking about the history and effects of slavery because it ‘excludes’ trans-racial people. That’s actually the parallel. Just let that sink in).

We do a lot of work on reproductive justice, and female bodily autonomy, and reclaiming women’s bodies from the darkness and shame that patriarchy has cast them into for millennia, and you may be surprised to discover we don’t much fancy casting them back into that darkness because it unsettles your identity and you want to rub out the extreme political relevance of our bodies. It is not even vaguely reasonable to demand this – especially given that we have a long history of understanding why the erasure of embodiment is patriarchy’s ground-zero. (And like, it’s not an accident Mumsnet is gender critical central, people who have made and fed other people with their bodies are strangely resistant to the idea that bodies are an irrelevance). We also do a fuckton of work on male violence, which, as we saw above, trans activists have a specific interest in side-lining. The fact that Lily Madigan, in her purported capacity as a Labour Party Woman’s Officer, was interested only in shouting ‘transphobia’ at feminist’s concerned about women being sexually assaulted by male-bodied-people in prison, basically tells you the whole story about the non-coincidence of women’s and trans activists’ interests with respect to male violence. A trans women who is committed to the present formulation of trans ideology is not, therefore, capable of representing the political interests of natal women.

Implications for feminism and gender non-conforming people

7. In addition to the erasure of the material reality of sexual dimorphism, and the attempt to make analysis based on that reality unsayable, trans ideology is also committed to an essentialist theory of gender. Whether someone is a man or a woman is thought to inhere in their ‘gender identity,’ or someone’s ‘subjective sense of their own gender.’ In this regard trans ideology is a direct inversion of feminist thought. Feminism thinks sex is real and gender is a social construct which functions as a hierarchy in order to hold the structure of patriarchal oppression in place. Trans ideology think sex is a social construct and that gender identity is real. What the ‘realness’ of this identity consist of is undefined. There is the assertion that transgender people have the brains of one sex trapped in the body of another sex – and it should be clear why feminists would raise eyebrows about beliefs in blue and pink brains. There is also the issue that it is entirely unclear how anyone could have an ‘internal sense of their own gender’ which is not informed in any way by patriarchal gender roles, and which did not amount to the reification of patriarchal gender conventions.

Despite trans-ideologues protestations that there is a distinction between ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression,’ the un-pin-down-ability of ‘gender identity’ as a concept, and the inability to define it without reference to gender norms, means that in practice, trans identity frequently comes to be evidenced by gender non-conforming behaviour. As we will see in point 8, this is particularly the case in much of the testimony around the identification of transgender children. It is also evident in transing of dead gender non-conforming people – both gay and straight. (And people, you cannot both claim the criterion is an internal sense of gender evidenced by self-declaration and then simultaneously trans dead men who never self-identified as trans because they wore high-heels and eye-liner. To wit, back away from Prince).

There are several implications of this:

a) It serves to naturalize and reinforce patriarchal gender conformity. Trans ideology likes to claim it is challenging patriarchal gender norms. What it is actually doing is saying that everyone who does not conform to patriarchal gender norms is a different ‘type’ of person and putting them in a separate category. The boxes ‘(cisgender) man’ and ‘(cisgender) woman’ are thus left for the gender conforming – which is a further reason why we reject the notion of ‘cis.’ It does not shatter the gender conventions of the patriarchal definition of man to say that all men who manifest femininity are thereby not men. It is, in fact, a re-inscription of the definition of patriarchal masculinity as a repudiation of the feminine, and conservative as hell. That, under present conditions, some people find it intolerable to live in their socially prescribed role, and that they need to transition, is a fact which should be treated with compassion and social support. That is very different from reifying the basis of the underlying experience of sex dysphoria and turning it into a conservative political ideology.

b) Given that the gender conventions associated with patriarchal idea of woman are oppressive and frequently restrict our agency, voices, subjectivity, movement, and ability to occupy space or express our needs, the idea that non-trans women ‘identify’ with these conventions is troubling at best and offensive at worst.

c) The degree to which trans-identity implies medicalization is, hence, a medicalization of gender non-conformity. I’m not saying here that there are no ‘genuine’ trans people. But I am saying that by changing the criterion of being trans from sex dysphoria to gender identity – especially conjunct with the way many young people have been exposed to trans ideology through social media over recent years – that this does amount to medicalizing gender non-conformity, and that there are reasons to be worried about that. Which brings me to…

Implications for children, especially homosexual children, especially lesbian girls

8. Over the last 5 years there has been a dramatic increase in referrals to gender identity clinics. The impact of trans-ideology on clinical practice – and how this also affects social workers, teachers, mental health services, and other services that work with young people – has shifted from an approach based on ‘watchful waiting’ to one based on immediately affirming a child’s trans identity, and making moves towards transition, including the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors. Previous to this change, the clinical opinion – which is evidenced by several studies – was that most gender dysphoric children and teens would desist from cross sex identification by adulthood, and usually grow up to be gay and lesbian. The push to medicalize trans identifying children thus constitutes the medicalization of homosexual children, in a manner which, effectively, straightens them out. It is perhaps only a touch hyperbolic, therefore, that some members of the adult homosexual community are now calling this ‘gay eugenics.’ (And it is beyond ironic that the trans lobby is pushing for the refusal to immediately affirm trans-identity to be understood as ‘conversion therapy.’)

Beyond the utter conservatism of transing potentially homosexual children without due diligence, there are serious reasons to be concerned about this medicalization. Puberty blockers are potentially reversible, when used for only a small window of time in order to delay precocious puberty. Medical experts are, however, very clear, that when children are put on puberty blockers and then progress directly onto cross-sex hormones (as do almost all children who start puberty blockers) it destroys their fertility. It may well be the case that pre-teen children do not care about this outcome at the time they make the decision, but it seems evident children of 11 or 12 are not at a stage of life where they are able to make an informed decision that has such a far-reaching consequence. And this is before we even get to the thought of what is effectively the mass sterilization of homosexuals. In addition, we have no long-term longitudinal studies on the effects of these treatments. We are, in fact, experimenting on populations of children for ideological reasons (and arguably, also for financial ones). There are many known side-effects of long-term use of hormones, which, if possible, it would seem prudent to avoid other than in cases where it is completely necessary. There is also some early indications emerging now that for male children who begin transition at the start of puberty, their capacity for sexual pleasure is completely destroyed. I almost cannot bear to think about that. (But there is maybe something interesting going on there about how transformation into a ‘woman’ is so heavily tilted towards achieving the correct appearance, and hence, in later life, to giving pleasure to men, but doesn’t include the capacity to feel sexual pleasure oneself.)

9. The figures from the Tavistock suggest that of these increased referrals, a massively disproportionate number are FtM. The fact that until the recent increase in overall referrals there was no evidence of this imbalance is concerning. Were it the case that the recent de-stigmatization and increase in information about trans identity were simply making it possible for existent trans kids to come out of the closet and become their authentic selves, there would seem to be no reason why there would be such a sudden and stark increase in the number of female children seeking transition. Also, testimony from concerned parents, and also from some female desisters, is increasingly giving evidence of a new phenomenon know as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria – in which a child who has previously shown no evidence of trans identity announces they are trans, often after spending a great deal of time on the internet, and often in association with other underlying issues such as depression, anxiety, social isolation, eating disorders, and especially, autism.

Feminists would also argue that it is imperative to also factor in that entering puberty in a patriarchy is, in itself, a traumatic experience for many girls – because it involves the experience of your body becoming a sexual object, and a target of violence which makes you vulnerable. This, along with the sexual abuse it often occasions, is a significant factor in many of the disorders that affect teenage girls, and it seems readily comprehensible to us why teenage girls would be attracted to the idea of being able to avoid this traumatizing process, and regain control of their bodies and the social treatment of their bodies, by presenting as male. We are not, however, convinced that medicalizing girls is an ideal solution to the trauma of patriarchal violence, especially under conditions in which providing them with alternative feminist analyses which could help them understand their distress, has been rendered a thought-crime.

The further factor which must be underlined here, is that, following from point 9, we have reason to believe that a substantial proportion of these girls are lesbians. The now dominant clinical and social practice of simply affirming trans identity, without allowing for exploration of underlying issues which might be contributing to that identification, constitutes, therefore, the mass sterilization of lesbians. And I cannot tell you how angry that makes me.

Implications for lesbians

10. Given the power imbalances between men and women it is the case that the gay rights movement has been historically weighted towards the representation of the interests of gay men. This tendency is now being enormously exacerbated by the fact that the gay rights movement has wedded itself to a political ideology that is invested in both refusing recognition to female people as a group, and in refusing to recognise that some people are exclusively same-sex attracted. The consequence of this is that many lesbians now feel that the LGBTQI+ movements are no longer their home, and will not defend their identity as women, their identity as lesbians and the political interests that follow from that. This was what was behind the recent protest at London Pride in which lesbian women disrupted the start of the march with banners proclaiming ‘Lesbian = Female Homosexual’ and ‘Transactivism erases Lesbians.’ Both of which are true statements.

One of the main issues here is that there has been a marked tendency over recent years for certain trans women – who were previously heterosexual males, and are hence, after changing their identification, still attracted to women – to redefine themselves as lesbians, even when they are still male bodied, and to suggest that lesbian women who will not accept them as sexual partners are guilty of discriminatory transphobia. This is, firstly, a ridiculous attempt to legislate people’s sexual choices through political ideology, and to make acts of sexual discrimination equivalent to acts of political discrimination. Secondly, it is, moreover, a refusal to recognise the existence of homosexuality as such which, in itself, amounts to a profound act of political erasure. And lastly, it absolutely reeks of the kind of rapey male sexual entitlement that patriarchy breeds into straight men. If you want to convince someone that you are a) a woman and b) a lesbian, I can assure you that attempting to shame, bully or otherwise coerce women into having sex with you is about the most ineffective method you could dream up in a million fucking years.