flick | I stand with Jo

I stand with Jo

Like a lot of women — like Jo Rowling — I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject of transgenderism over the last couple of years.

In my case, I went looking after receiving rape threats for saying “you need a uterus to have periods”. What on earth was so staggeringly wrong about saying that you couldn’t shed your uterine lining without having a uterus? How did a statement of biology lead to such a violent and sexualised response?

So I went looking. I spoke to lots of people, and read lots of articles, on all three sides of the debate.

All three sides? As well as the gender critical feminists, who believe that gender is a nonsense concept but that you can dress however you like as long as you accept that biology is immutable, it turns out that the trans side of things is split in two. On the one side are those variously described as transsexuals, transmedicalists and, by those who dislike them, truscum; they tend to believe that to be trans one must experience gender dysphoria and make, or fully intend to make, the fullest possible hormonal and surgical transition, and many are just as critical of both the concept of gender and the idea that one can change sex as are the gender critical feminists. On the other side are those who believe that a man (and they do tend to be men) can simply state “I am a woman” and so become one; some might go on to take hormones, or have breast implants, but many do neither.

This was something of a revelation to me. I knew about — know members of — the first group, but found the second group harder to understand. I went looking for more information.

I learnt about Karen White, a convicted paedophile and sex offender, who transitioned while on remand, went into a women’s prison, and sexually assaulted inmates. I learnt about Katie Dolatowski, who was convicted of voyeurism and sexual assault in a public toilet against two girls aged ten and twelve years old. I learnt about Rachel McKinnon, Hannah Mouncey, Laurel Hubbard, Maxine Blythin and other athletes who went through male puberty before beginning to compete in women’s sports, effortlessly beating world-class female opponents.

And I thought “Hang on a minute.”

I wondered if it was really the case that all of those people are actually women, or if maybe some of them are men who’ve seen some advantage in claiming to be women. After all, women’s prisons are more pleasant places than men’s; there are far more unaccompanied pubescent girls in the women’s toilets than in the men’s; and even a mediocre male athlete can beat a top-ranked female athlete in most sports.

(I’m not even going to get into the terrifying and irreversible side effects of the off-licence chemotherapy drugs being given to delay puberty, the schoolgirls being told that they must share changing rooms with boys, the rising number of detransitioning women, the rape survivors being told that they can’t request female medical personnel. If you want to read more about them, Helen Joyce of the Economist wrote an excellent article.)

And I learnt about the seemingly endless barrage of death and rape threats, of instructions to “suck my girl dick”, that descend upon any woman who has the temerity to ask those sorts of questions aloud. Look what Jo Rowling got just for saying that sex is real. Look at where I started, with rape threats for saying that you needed a uterus to menstruate.

So, big old coward that I am, I noped out of there and shut the fuck up, which was just what they wanted: scare women, rely on women being socialised to be nice, threaten their jobs. Whatever it takes to shut them up, so that they can pretend that no one disagrees with them.

But, you know what? Fuck it.

Sex is real. It is binary. You can be either male or female, and you can’t change that, no matter how you dress or what surgeries you undergo. Your body is of the type that produces either eggs or sperm, even if you are infertile, even if you remove your gonads. There are no in-between gametes, there is no spectrum.

(Something like 0.018% of the population has a disorder of sexual development. They aren’t hermaphrodites and they generally really, really hate it when people trot them out as an argument in favour of sex not being binary. As someone with a chromosome abnormality put it to me recently, “If I’d been born with only one leg, would that prove humans aren’t bipedal?”)

It’s because sex is real that baby girls are selectively aborted in the womb. It’s because sex is real that women undergo forced pregnancy. It’s because sex is real that getting a blood transfusion from a woman can be deadly for men. It’s because sex is real that only men get prostate cancer.

Sex-specific toilets let women go out in public for more more than a few hours at a time, especially when menstruating; sex-specific changing rooms let us exercise and maintain healthy bodies away from prying eyes and wandering hands; sex-specific domestic violence refuges let us escape from dangerous residential situations; sex-specific medical and nursing care lets us get necessary treatment without embarrassment or fear; sex-specific educational opportunities and awards give less-outgoing girls a chance to shine; sex-specific employment and salary statistics let us monitor equality in the workplace: all of these hard-won rights will be removed from women, if one allows men to access them purely by stating that they are now also women.

Wear what you like. If you’re an adult and can afford it, have whatever surgery you like. Just don’t deny that sex is real, and that women, female people, have and need sex-specific rights.

So, anyone still reading? Where does this leave us, I wonder?

I am exactly the same person that I was before you read this, but it’s possible that you have changed.

Are you thinking that I’m a TERF? If you’re using the term to refer to its actual meaning, I can assure you that I’m not, because Radical Feminism has very different political views to mine. If you’re using it as a more polite form of “bitch”, perhaps you should re-think your language.

What about “transphobe”? Does that one fit?

Well, I don’t cower in corners to avoid passing trans people (ok, maybe one or two of them who tell really boring anecdotes). I’m certainly not afraid of transsexuals as a class of people, they mostly seem to quietly live their lives.

The other trans people, though? The ones who threaten to rape and murder women who disagree with them? Yeah, they’re pretty fucking terrifying.

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I cannot say I have thought a great deal about this, but I agree with you, and this article inspired an idea: "Gender is like money. It's dubious if it is real, but treating it as such saves a lot of difficulty."

Cheers!

I’ve got to say, though, that gender has zero impact on my life.

I can't argue with anything you wrote. It's true.

There also are many transgender people who are not a threat to anyone, who are denied basic legal rights, who are high risk of being murdered. They are not safe in the bathrooms for their chromosomal sex. They are terrified — they literally are being terrorized by right-wing groups, in many places by the state. They need a community that will accept them.

I don't care any more what gender is. I just want society to stop discriminating against people because of their gender. Whatever it is. And I want all people to have access to bathrooms where they are safe.

I agree with you: male intolerance and violence against transwomen is a real threat. Surely, though, the solution should be to work towards removing that male threat, or creating a third space, rather than removing rights and safe spaces from women?

With the best will in the world, a woman who has been raped and traumatised by men is unlikely to feel safe sharing a room in a rape hostel with someone who has a penis, whether actually a threat or not.

The problem is when a transwoman needs to go, and it isn't safe for her to go in the men's bathroom, and there isn't an all-gender bathroom available. There isn't a 100% safe and easy answer. Building more restrooms would help. It isn't like there were enough restrooms to begin with.

No one should ever have to experience rape threats for any reason. Certainly not for stating what is clearly a common sense fact. I'm sorry you had to deal with that. :(

Hearing some of the rest of what you have to say makes me feel sad and tired and scared. I too believe that sex is real, but I also believe that it's a complex concept. My belief about sex, based on reading and direct experience, is that it's a cluster concept that's made up of a variety of biological factors: genetics, hormones, genitals, gonads, reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics. Sex is assigned at birth based on just one of these. The rest actually vary a good deal more than we tend to think, as do their combinations.

Transgender people can't change our genetic sex and are very well aware of this. We also can't change our skeletal sex and bone structures. We can change our hormonal sex and secondary sex characteristics quite easily and many of us do so. Gonads and genitals/reproductive organs can be removed/changed through surgery. So while some aspects of a person's sex can't change, other aspects can. The biological effects of transitioning have real implications for a person's athletic ability, sexual functioning, toileting, and other needs.

You asked, where does this leave us? I'm wondering the same. More specifically, where does your position leave me, and us? What implications does this statement have for how you think I should be moving through the world? And how can our friendship continue when you have made it clear that you don't take a core part of my identity seriously? I am male, yet from what you've said here you don't respect me as such.

If it makes you happy to think about sex in that way then that’s fine: we can disagree! (Although, please, do disclose that you aren’t genetically male on your medical records at least: it would be awful if you presented with symptoms of something like a heart attack and didn’t get the correct treatment because the doctors were looking for chest pains and you had a sore throat and shortness of breath. I’m thinking of that terrible case with the ectopic pregnancy from last year, and I don’t want to see you in a similar news story.)

I’m afraid I don’t consider you male, no, and I’m sad if that makes you unhappy but I’m also not going to lie to you. (Would you rather I did? I can’t imagine that that would be a good thing to do.) I’m happy to treat you as a man, because I know that that is what you want, and you are my friend who I care about, but I don’t believe that your sex has changed. On the other hand, I spend very little time thinking about the sex of any of my friends: people are individuals, and I approach them as such.

I’m still the same person the had a blazing row with my sister when she was rude to you at my wedding, and I would do the same thing today.

I'm sorry Flick, I had forgotten the incident at your sister's wedding, (it was just one of a daily onslaught for me), but I do know that you're someone who cares and stands up for people's rights and safety. I get the sense that this where you're coming from with this: you care about and are standing up for the rights and safety of female-assigned women.

Personally, I don't believe that trans people in general, including trans women in general, are a threat to the rights and safety of female-assigned women. You mentioned some predatory trans women specifically and you've obviously had some run ins with aggressive, threatening trans people yourself. There's no excuse for this kind of behaviour. But you could cherry-pick examples of female-assigned women who behave the same way and threaten the rights and safety of other women. My own experience of trans women, on the whole, is that they are very mindful and considerate about entering women's spaces, and quite nervous about doing so.

While I know you are the kind of person who stands up for people's rights and safety, it's my belief that spreading ideas about trans people always remaining the sex they were assigned at birth actually works against their safety. For example, you suggested I disclose that I'm not genetically male on my medical records. This can be a safety issue for trans people: disclose to the wrong doctor and they will focus all their attention on your trans status and miss the actual diagnosis (this has become so common that it's known in the community as "trans broken arm syndrome" - you go into hospital because you broke your arm and the doctor suggests it might be because you're trans).

Aside from that, the specific medical issue you raised, heart attack symptoms, when I started hormone treatment, I was advised that doing so raised my risk of heart attack into the male range, but no one really knows whether transgender men are likely to display heart attack symptoms that look like those displayed by male-assigned men or female-assigned women. There haven't been any clinical studies on that. Same when it comes to risk of breast cancer: I was exposed to estrogen for more of my life than most male-assigned men, but have less breast-tissue than most female-assigned women, but no one has done the studies. Similarly, no one knows how long to prescribe antibiotics when I get a UTI: my urethra is surgically constructed, longer than a female-assigned woman's, but shorter than a male-assigned man's. Again, the studies have not been done. I've never actually had a genetic test done, so, strictly speaking, I don't know my genetic sex. Given the amount of unknowns and the limited amount of information in a gender marker and the risks involved in disclosing to some medical professionals, this is something I play by ear and use my judgement on. I pick my doctors carefully, worry about whether I should get a medic alert bracelet about the fact that I need paediatric instruments to be used to be catheterised, and try like hell to stay healthy and keep away from the medical establishment. In short, healthcare is stressful and a hell of a lot more complicated than a gender marker.

One of the reasons why these studies haven't been done is because of beliefs like the ones you shared: that we are simply our assigned sexes, so it's all a known quantity. Why do studies on things when trans women are male and trans men are female and we know all about risk factors and dosages for males and females? That's a safety risk.

One of the reasons why those studies haven’t been done is as you say. Another is that, imo, the insistence that people can literally change sex makes it difficult for researchers to attempt the studies: if transmen are literally men, then performing those studies is considered to be transphobic and/or unnecessary. Look at what happened to researchers such as Lisa Littman. (And, of course, the different levels of medical treatment that relatively small numbers of different people get makes designing a study very difficult: your risks would be different again if you hadn’t had a hysterectomy, I would imagine.)

I think, very broadly, that longer-standing trans people present minimal threat to women and girls. As I said in my OP, the old-style transsexuals tend to respect women’s spaces and rights, as well as generally being nice people. More recently, though, there have been far more troubling transitioners. Half of the male-born trans prisoners in the UK are sex offenders. They make up one percent of the women’s prison population, but carry out over five percent of the sexual offences. It is unfortunate if keeping those predatory people out of women’s spaces also keeps out some non-predatory ones, but I’m not sure that there’s any better solution.

(To go back to a late thought on your first comment: being Jewish is also, I think it’s fair to say, part of your core identity (I think? Ignore if not). I don’t believe that your god exists, I don’t believe that the worship rituals that you take part in and draw strength and a sense of community from are meaningful. Does this make me anti-Semitic, or make you question whether we can be friends?)

I think the reason why those studies don't get done because of the idea that sex is a binary. My belief is that it's not a simple binary but a complex array of physical factors that tend to form broad clusters that we label 'male' and 'female'. Individual people, such as trans people, can and do alter aspects of their physicality so that they move outside of or shift between these two broad clusters.

The idea that sex is binary is damaging to trans people and it's damaging to people with intersex variations. Intersex people are not disordered, the term disorders of sexual development is a pathologising term from the medical world that is not generally liked or used by intersex people themselves. The intersex community also estimate the rate of intersex variations to be more like 1.7% - the 0.018% figure you cite is based on a conservative estimate that places a heavy weighting on genetic factors when defining sex and does not take intersex people's lived experience into account. It's this limited view of what sex is, a view that does not incorporate the lived experiences of either intersex or trans people, that leads both to intersex infants being forced to undergo surgeries and hormone treatments to "normalise" their bodies, while transgender youth are denied access to the exact same medical care.

It's interesting that you brought up my Jewish identity, because yes, there are some very strong parallels there. I was raised to think of myself as culturally Jewish and have affirmed my identity as a religious Jew with the Progressive, Masorti, and Orthodox movements of Judaism. Being Jewish is a core part of who I am and how I live my life. And yet, because my mother isn't Jewish, and because I haven't converted with their specific rabbinic board of choice, there are certain sectors of the Jewish community who do not accept me as a Jew. I tend to avoid coming into contact with those parts of the Jewish community, to be honest, because I honestly don't feel I can be friends with people who deny a core part of my identity. You and I have different beliefs, but you still respect that I am a Jew. These are people who hear me tell them that I am Jew and respond by telling me that this is not true and that I am not Jewish. That feels incredibly disrespectful and dismissive. As someone who has spent most of my life not having core parts of my identity seen and recognised in my social relationships, this is not something I'm able to tolerate from someone who supposedly cares about me as a friend.

I am a non-binary middle aged person just as I was a non-binary child, though I didn't have access to such language then or any support outside of occasional science fiction books for decades. Surgical and hormonal interventions were policed. You had to be either a woman or a man and then behave and want to look within a certain narrow range of "manly" or "womanly" characteristics to qualify, and certainly in the U.S. have a lot of money and energy and spare time to travel and jump through hoops and pay to simper to condescending teams of "professionals" who would judge if one was unhappy *enough* or outwardly non-conforming/passing *enough*.

People quite comfortable with their assigned gender violate these prescribed norms all the time, sometimes by choice, but often times because there's a lot of variation within humans. It's part of why using public restrooms can be so treacherous for so many when they/we just need to quickly and privately as possible perform basic bodily functions. Many a butch woman will have a story of being met with anger at daring to not sort into an onlooker's set of approved gender categories. The pandemic, I see, has highlighted for many how limiting it is to be unable to access the toilets on a trip into town for supplies.

As someone who developed a suite of chronic illnesses as a younger adult, that took a very long time to get diagnosed and finally controlled because, in part, my symptoms did not match my demographics, I can assure you, that though trends exist, bodies don't sort neatly in any direction

There are lots of reasons to still not get surgical or hormonal interventions including medical (side effects, interactions, concurrent conditions, etc.), expense, likelihood of success, the hard work of self acceptance being already done, advancing age, geographic location, other life responsibilities, etc.

I know that some cis women athletes have been attacked and excluded because their unadjusted hormone profiles are deemed not "correct." Sports are generally not my thing so I'm not particularly inclined to look up the studies on effects of hormones on muscle mass over time.

Much of your complaint seems to focus either on cis (dudes declared dudes at birth and who know themselves to be dudes) men exploiting burgeoning equality to abuse people or on a percentage of particularly shitty trans people. This seems familiar from any civil rights struggle. One can indeed focus on the worst of the worst, or on those who would manipulate innocents, preferably without broader context, when one would like to, say, deny women the vote, or deny migrant farm workers legal identification, etc.

Threats of sexual violence are inexcusable. And IME common in the pettiest of discussions on the broader internet. Quite often not thought of as being literal (see the recently widely lauded "...and choke on it; I yield my time" meme based on a comment at a public meeting.) And still inexcusable.

Neglecting or actively helping to abrogate the civil rights of one targeted group because of the (intersecting!) entirely valid pain and ongoing neglect of another group's civil rights is not on. Working together for everyone's rights and welfare, here and now, is the only way forward.

('scuse typing, DW is a pain on my phone so I've switched to laptop, but I had a riding accident last week and my hand's a bit knackered.)

I think in the US you have the whole gender-roles thing a lot worse than in the UK (at least until recently). My mother's generation grew up with mothers who'd been told "thanks for all the help with the war, now back to the kitchen you go", and they rebelled against it and the society that led to it, from big things like Greenham Common to little things like not expecting their daughters to be girly. When i was little, my sister actively wanted to wear frilly dresses, so my mother ended up making them for her, but we still played with lego and scalextric as well as Barbie. (I'm not saying I grew up in a gender-free world, by any means, I just think it was much less gendered than an equivalent upbringing in the US.)

Sadly, it seems to have swung the other way in recent years: I'm not surprised that girls exposed to things like Instagram either think that it's normal to wear an inch of make-up (and then feel bad because they don't look surgically- and photoshop-created 'perfect') or want to opt out of that and so reject the only version of womanhood to which they are exposed. Similarly, boys are bombarded with Instagram and porn, and if that's not how their lives are then there's always the incels, gurgling away like slime mould in the background and telling them that women and Chads have it easy and deserve hate. Toy and clothes shops are back to being firmly pink and passive or blue and active. I wish that it wasn't so.

On the athletes: are you thinking of people like Caster Semenya? Caster is one of the 0.02%, with XY chromosomes.

> Much of your complaint seems to focus either on cis (dudes declared dudes at birth and who know themselves to be dudes) men exploiting burgeoning equality to abuse people or on a percentage of particularly shitty trans people.

Yup, pretty much.

> Neglecting or actively helping to abrogate the civil rights of one targeted group because of the (intersecting!) entirely valid pain and ongoing neglect of another group's civil rights is not on. Working together for everyone's rights and welfare, here and now, is the only way forward.

I'm happy to work towards trans rights. I just don't think that that should happen at the expense of women's rights. Women spent hundreds of years fighting for rights, why are they now expected to give them away?

I think we need to split sex and gender. Sex is biological, strongly bi-polar and attempting to changing it with hormonal or surgical techniques is hard and risk prone. Gender is how people are perceived, and we can strive to treat everyone with tolerance, though trying push through social changes that go against how our brains are wired by biology is also difficult. I know there are physiological changes in me when I see a pretty girl. I also know how important it is to suppress such urges when they are unwanted.

People should be treated equally irrespective of their gender, but you need separation by sex at the top in sport to allow it to be competitive. Different sexes have different medical needs which also spreads into social provision like bathrooms. I'm much less convinced about treating genders differently, as for each division you make generates boundaries, and a group of people who feel no label applies to their circumstances.

I pretty much agree with you, but I have to say that I've come around to the Radical Feminist view on gender: it's just a bunch of harmful, sexist stereotypes and should be done away with.

I mean, look at this:

> You wake up wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. As you walk into your kitchen to prepare breakfast, you’re expressing an adrogynous-to-slightly-masculine gender. However, you see your partner in the kitchen and decide to prowl in like Halle Berry from Catwoman, then you are expressing much more femininely. You pour a bowl of cereal, wrap your fist around a spoon like a Viking, and start shoveling [sic] Fruit Loops into your face, and all-of-a-sudden you’re bumping up your levels of masculinity. After breakfast, you skip back into your bedroom and playfully place varying outfits in front of you, pleading with your partner to help you decide what to wear. You’re feminine again.

So men get to walk around wearing comfortable clothes and eat food, while women get to... pose sexily, skip and plead helplessly? Yuck.

Our brains are wired to assess people quickly and assign them to pigeon-holes, and people want to belong to certain groups. So I think that its inevitable that people will dress and act in certain ways so others will given them the right labels. And anyone not following the conventions will have problems.

I think the core of masculinity and femininity is because our brains work differently in some areas. Some distinctions are misguided, oppressive and untrue, but others, like masculine=dangerous are true.

I think tolerance of difference is better than not acknowledging it.

I'm not saying that there aren't differences, everyone is different. Just that saying "I'm a woman because I like wearing dresses and sewing" is harmful: men should be able to wear dresses and enjoy sewing without being stigmatised (and, similarly, women should be able to have short hair and enjoy woodworking without being told that they're "really" men).

PS and lots of masculine/feminine traits adjust dynamically as a conversation progresses. Your passage is all about flirting, where people will move into roles. Or Lads become laddish and girls girly as they socially bond, and not conforming to stereotypes can lead to ostracism.

Eating breakfast cereal is flirting...?

Thank you for a measured assessment of the issues. And for being brave enough to post. I am sure that much of the debate is being engineered for purposes entirely at odds with the views of the people who are most affected. We are now at the point where any reasoned debate is shouted down, and that achieves nothing but hatred.

Absolutely. And the more people get shouted down, the less likely people are to speak up.

I believe that there's a small minority of people who are whipping things up, but unfortunately they're being vocal enough to convince otherwise-unrelated organisations that they form the majority opinion.

I do understand that you seek to protect women. You describe a very small subset of trans people who are predators. How would making life harder for people to transition help? They'd still be predators, and would find other ways to victimise others. It's unlikely to reduce predation but in the meantime would cause very real harm to trans people (some of whom will be women, however defined). So even on a purely Benthamite level, it makes the world measurably worse.

The problems faced by women in terms of sexual threat and assaults absolutely need to be addressed; let's lobby for measures that would make an actual difference.

On gender/sex, my views I think are very similar to electricant's. There's a very large number of scales (genetic, epigenetic, physiological, and cultural) where one could be classified as more male or more female. Personally, I picture this as ginormous vector space, so that each individual is almost unique in their sex/gender coordinate. A binary view of sex is a first-order approximation only. It seems there is a common enough emergent property that makes one recognise oneself (feel? identify?) as male, female or something else. Only the person with that particular brain can know. Why would I not trust someone on their assessment, whether cis or trans, if I trust them on other things?

I hope you will reconsider.

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