Transgender Body Politics

Acknowledgements

Prologue

I am often asked, How did you get into researching and writing about transgenderism? The answer is that I stumbled into it by accident. Five years ago, among my friends was a ‘transwoman’ called ‘Emily’. Unlike many men following the current trend of no surgery, Emily had undergone surgical removal of his penis and testicles in order to transition. He narrated how, as a boy, he had been taught by his parents to ‘make a man of himself’ but couldn’t help exhibiting traits which in the eyes of his parents made him ‘not man enough’. As an adult, Emily had decided he needed to take on a stable, coherent, ‘feminine’ identity and had been prepared to do this through ingesting powerful chemicals, undergoing surgery (thereby forgoing future genital pleasure and any possibilities of fatherhood), fully understanding he had turned himself into a medical patient for life in a never-ending battle with his body. At the time, I saw his desire to identify as a woman as something which should elicit kindness, generosity and tolerance.

I don’t think Emily really believes he is female, and certainly he knew that I didn’t believe it but that I was happy to respect his fictional female identity. Why not? Gender norms are painful and disciplinary, and if for him ‘femininity’ is more comfortable than ‘masculinity’, then I supported his right, and anyone else’s for that matter, to identify with socially constructed gender norms for the opposite sex.

Emily adopted many roles in my home — he came to parties presenting as a tall glamorous woman, but when brawn was needed, he jumped the ‘gender ship’ as it were. For example, at a house move, he whipped off his long blonde wig, revealing male pattern baldness, put on his jeans, and despite fifteen years or more of injecting oestrogen, he lifted heavy furniture as easily and as competently as the male members of my family. When I thought about Emily in feminist terms, I saw his identity as a woman as an indictment of masculinity. I believed that the implicit question posed to society by Emily and other ‘transwomen’ was: What is a Man?

My raised consciousness

A series of events in 2015 lifted a veil off a world of transgender ideology and politics with regard to ‘transwomen’ about which I had been completely unaware. I now know that that year was an iconic one for the trans rights movement, when the sustained political lobbying of the previous years reached an apotheosis (Burns, 2018).

At that time, I worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leicester in the Centre for Medical Humanities. Amongst other things, I researched, wrote and taught postgraduate students about the philosophy and social history of medicine, sex, and gender. One day, I walked past a newsagent shop and was struck by the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Bruce Jenner, then a 65-year-old man, a one-time American athlete who won the gold medal for the decathlon at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976, and father and grandfather of children in the (in)famous Kardashian family, had now apparently transformed himself into a woman named Caitlyn.

I wrote a short critical commentary on a University of Leicester internal publication platform called ‘Think Pieces’ (Brunskell-Evans, 2015). I described the photoshopped front cover image as bearing

… all the hallmarks of the sexualised performance of femininity: a state of semi-undress in a satin corset; long, tumbling hair; exposed ‘look-at-me’ breasts in a push-up bra; and a cinched waist to give an hour-glass figure.

I relayed further details: Jenner had undergone a 10-hour facial feminisation operation and breast augmentation although not genital surgery. I described how the online image was immediately followed by an explosive endorsement of it as ‘iconic’ by social and print media alike. We had also been directed to the appropriate moral stance. The simulacra of femininity were apparently accepted as indications of ‘real’ inner ‘femininity’. We were given to understand that Caitlyn is a woman, a very brave woman, a woman who had not formerly been a man but had been female all ‘her’ life, including the time ‘she’ had fathered children. In an Orwellian twist, the artifice of gender (the constructions, fabrications and deceptions of Jenner’s airbrushed and siliconed body) had apparently transitioned him into an authentic woman, but the empirical reality of his biological sex, including his fathering of children, was a fiction.

Strict parameters were laid down about how to think about Jenner. The media-monitoring USA organisation GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, 2015) immediately issued a number of general guidelines directing us to what is good and what is bad with regard to what we should say. It told us:

DO use female pronouns (she, her, hers) when referring to Caitlyn Jenner. DO avoid male pronouns and Caitlyn’s prior name, even when referring to events in her past. AVOID the phrase ‘born a man’ when referring to Jenner. If it is necessary to describe what it means to be transgender, consider: While Caitlyn Jenner was designated male on her birth certificate, as a young child she knew that she was a girl. DON’T indulge in superficial critiques of a transgender person’s femininity or masculinity. Commenting on how well a transgender person conforms to conventional standards of femininity or masculinity is reductive and insulting.

GLAAD posits transwomen have always been women: Yes, even when they were ‘fathering’ children. Gender is what’s inside — and for Caitlyn, finally on the outside too (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, 2015).

Paris Lees, a British self-identified ‘transwoman’, warned that the majority of transgender people face such hideous discrimination in the job market, not to mention social and familial rejection. Lees said that many trans people are forced into sex work in order to pay for the medical aspects of gender transition, and often this puts them at risk of drug abuse and physical harm. Despite the privileged position Jenner occupies both materially and symbolically, Lees reminds us that Jenner has endured years of hiding who she is, of trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who she was supposed to be and, more recently, cruel tabloid speculation, ridicule and bullying. Lees points out that Jenner matters culturally — and we need people who inhabit that space to complement the work being done at grassroots level to improve life for transpeople (Lees, 2015).

In my piece I commented that on the one hand it is a cause of celebration that within a relatively short historical period, society is now sufficiently tolerant of gender confusion that a mainstream publication could support a man’s ‘gender identity’ struggles. On the other hand, the claim that Jenner is a woman, rather than that he prefers to identify as a woman, had brought into focus the need to re-address the question, usually asked and answered by men: What is a Woman? I suggested that a catalyst for progressive social change could be to return to a feminist analysis of the social context — patriarchy — out of which Jenner’s new ‘gender identity’ had emerged. I also commented that in liberal democratic society where free speech is lauded it was troubling that there seemed to be an authoritarian diktat of what one is ‘allowed’ to say regarding transgenderism.

It is hard now to credit my own lack of consciousness of the stakes involved in writing this article, but once written I can honestly say that I didn’t even expect a response, let alone a backlash. Within 24 hours, Natascha Kennedy, an academic who identifies as a woman (and who also writes as Mark Hellen, see Kennedy and Hellen, 2010), demanded my University retract the article from publication. Kennedy complained it was

… in breach of the Equality Act 2010 because it misgenders (i.e. deliberately uses the wrong gender) of Caitlyn Jenner. This is clearly not an unintentional misgendering but done for effect and done deliberately … Misgendering trans people is abusive and likely to make trans students or employees feel threatened and is unacceptable. Under the legislation this represents direct discrimination and could be interpreted by students or staff as representing victimisation or harassment.

My ‘Think Piece’ was duly removed, sent to the University Legal Team, with all subsequent email correspondence copied to the Vice-Chancellor. I was extremely worried. Firstly, in all my years working in universities I had never been brought to the attention of a Vice-Chancellor. Secondly, the sheer fact that he was drawn into such a trivial issue demonstrated the nervousness and fear of everyone managing the situation. Thirdly, I had only a superficial knowledge of the Equality Act 2010 and was rather frightened of being accused of breaching it. The lawyers responded:

In our view the article is not discriminatory either directly or indirectly. It could be argued that in exploring the issues openly Heather is effectively advancing equality of opportunity through enabling people to understand better some issues relating to transgender.

The article was reinstated. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had experienced the whole episode as a form of masculinist coercive control of what I could think, and say, about being a woman whilst a man, Jenner, was given a global platform for that purpose. Sanity, or so I thought, had been restored to a world which I temporarily experienced as being turned upside down.

I remained preoccupied by the fact there clearly was a trans rights movement that had grown over a number of years and which was rather confident and self-righteous. How had I missed this development? Many people were obviously already ‘in the know’. On the one hand, I received emails from numerous parts of the globe telling me how brave I was and that they didn’t dare to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. I received another email from the heart of British Establishment, the BBC, offering a secret meeting. On the other hand, I received a letter from a mother saying my article was effectively telling her she was a bad mother for transitioning her primary school age ‘daughter’.

I discussed this debacle with trusted colleagues. I explained that if women are compelled to accept that men who identify as women are women, both in law and in life, this could have a profound effect on women’s previously hard-won human rights. One Australian colleague with whom I was collaborating on a project said: Don’t go down the transgender route Heather. It’s a vortex — it will suck you in and you’ll never get out. It will be the end of your career.

I was troubled. One day, some months later, a friend sat stricken at my kitchen table. Her daughter, whom I had known from birth, was now identifying as a boy. The school had been allowing ‘him’ to transition behind my friend’s back, including using a male name and masculine pronouns. My friend asked my view on whether she should support her daughter’s new identity, including her wearing of breast binders and her expressed wish for testosterone as soon as she reached sixteen and double mastectomy surgery at eighteen. I was horrified. My advice was that her duty as a mother was to refuse to go along with the trans narrative, and that she owed it to her daughter to continue to nurture and protect her body from harm. My friend told me that if she didn’t affirm her daughter as a boy, it was she that would be seen as abusive rather than the school or those trans lobby groups responsible for the online propaganda her daughter was consuming. I knew something really serious was happening, not only to women and children, but also to the body politic. Trans identifying people make up less than 1% of the population but the effect on society was utterly disproportionate. From that moment I was impelled to act.

Chapter One

Women’s Bodies

1.1 What Is a Woman?

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

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