Trans resources: some suggestions for understanding recent controversies

A very quick collection of a few resources that might be relevant to people who are new to trans issues, and who might be sympathetic to some trans-exclusionary arguments, especially those coming from left/feminist circles:

This article by Roz Kaveney is the single best summary I’ve seen so far of the current controversy around the Gender Recognition Act, and the political forces in play (for those who’ve missed it, it now appears that the right-wing/radfem alliance have been successful, at least in the short term).

For an understanding of wider questions around trans politics, I still think this speech from Hackey Pride for a few years back is an excellent introduction to what an anarchist/communist perspective on these issues can look like. One of the trans-exclusionary talking points that can seem appealing at first is the claim that trans people are actually reinforcing the gender binary, the distinction between Real Women and Real Men, so this piece is particularly important as a corrective on that point: “Every boy and girl, to some extent, has to grapple with the difference between who they are, and what a Real Man is.  What a Real Woman is.  Every body suffers from the invention of the Man and the Woman.  And I consider myself an extreme casualty of this- I don’t really consider myself a Man- but I know, violently, that I’m not a woman.  I think that transpeople generally are an extreme casualty of this problem.”

It’s also notable for being from the perspective of a trans man, which is important because a lot of the rhetoric from trans-exclusionist feminists tends to erase the existence of trans men and non-binary people, in favour of trying to present these issues as being purely a contest between trans women and cis women.

This examination of statistics around trans people’s employment and income is also a useful contribution to a class struggle perspective on trans issues, particularly for its challenge to the common mistake of thinking that trans people as a whole can be equated with the relatively wealthy and comfortable figures who are most likely to appear in the media. Of course, the fact that trans people are disproportionately likely to be found in the most impoverished sections of the working class doesn’t automatically mean that any particular trans person, or “trans people” as a whole (if that’s even a meaningful category), will be on the right side of any particular question, but it should give pause to anyone who might be tempted to dismiss controversies around trans exclusion as just being one bunch of privileged academic/journo types arguing against another.

Jacqueline Rose’s 2016 article on trans narratives is, in my opinion, a hugely important piece of writing for anyone wanting to get a fuller understanding of these issues. It’s long, but that’s because it’s trying to engage with complex questions without being simplistic about them, which makes it a useful corrective to the simplified narratives you often find in the media. In a change from the normal rule of “never read below the line”, I’d actively recommend reading the exchange between Rose and people like Beatrix Campbell that follows, particularly for Rose’s final conclusion: “Competitions over victimhood are never politically helpful. In the words of Edward Said, in a very different context: ‘There is suffering and injustice enough for everyone.’

Arguments about whether trans women and men reinforce or disrupt conventional gender categories, or whether trans women experience themselves the same way as non-trans feminists, are futile. In the complex realm of human sexual life, no one should be deciding these matters for anyone else. You can – we should – liberalise the law on behalf of oppressed groups, but you cannot legislate the unconscious.”

“Why Trans-Inclusion”, from Plan C, is another short introduction to the connections between trans politics and a revolutionary critique of gender.

While looking at these questions, it is also vitally important to note that, while trans-exclusionary feminists focus obsessively on the potential, hypothetical threat that’s supposedly posed to women’s spaces by allowing trans women to access them, they’re distracting attention from the far more urgent, central problem, that government plans to change housing benefit will directly lead women’s refuges to close down from a lack of funding. It is genuinely baffling to me that some people would rather put time and energy into campaigning to make sure that “the wrong kind” of women aren’t allowed to access services, rather than trying to make sure that those services are able to stay open in the first place, whether that’s by supporting mainstream lobbying groups like Women’s Aid, the more direct action approach of Sisters Uncut, or determined local campaigns like the one in Doncaster.

Having given this much space to the trans-inclusive side of the argument, it seems only fair to at least consider what the trans-exclusionists have to say for themselves. The website of the “Socialist Feminist Network” seems like an attempt to shake off the “terf” tag, but, in contrast to other, genuinely socialist feminist(-influenced) groups like Feminist Fightback, Plan C, Sisters Uncut, or Global Women’s Strike, it’s completely unclear what the actual politics of these “socialist feminists” are, since they seem to begin and end with an objection to trans people – you’ll have to look elsewhere for an analysis of welfare reforms, the threats to women’s refuges, ongoing struggles by low-paid workers in female-dominated jobs like cleaning, care work, or teaching assistant roles, and so on. As their FAQ makes clear, the role of this “socialist feminist network” is solely to fight against “gender identity ideology”, particularly in the form of the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act* Of the questions and answers they choose to offer up, one is particularly noteworthy:

“The Republic of Ireland has had the policy of gender recognition for over two years without any detrimental consequences to women. Why do you remain concerned?

We see reference is often made to the limited impact on women of gender recognition law in the Republic of Ireland. We find this mystifying. Ireland is very different to the UK, largely rural and in reality with a small visible LGBT community. Ireland may have made strides in so called “gender identity rights” but women in Ireland are subject to some of the most draconian abortion laws in the world. Reproductive rights do not exist in Ireland. If we consider an historical materialist way of looking at this the reality of these two things co-existing at the same time begs a few questions.

If women had even some small power in the Republic over the church and the state and their patriarchal forms of expression then abortion would be safe, legal and free. Instead, in the Irish constitution, women do not have the right to bodily autonomy. That means misogyny is functioning at the level of the state in Ireland. Doesn’t that suggest other “advances” are pyric? This is the key to understanding the balance of forces in Ireland, women live in constant fear of unwanted pregnancy and the humiliation of seeking illegal abortion but there is a right to self- identity. Women cannot “identify” out of unwanted pregnancy.”

If you’re paying attention here, you may notice a slight mismatch, one that’s crucial to the entire argument being made. The whole reason that these people are so concerned about allowing trans people to self-identify is because they’re convinced it will lead to harmful consequences, but when challenged to point out what harmful consequences have come from the existing law that’s been on the books for years allowing people to self-identify in Ireland, they just fall back on “well, not everything in Ireland is perfect, self-identification there has not magically solved all problems that women face”.

If you ask your boss for a living wage, and they say that they can’t afford to pay living wages otherwise the company would go out of business, and you point out the example of competing company X which pays a living wage and is still profitable, and your boss responds by pointing out that company X has long working hours and has very harsh policies on punctuality and sick leave, that is still very obviously not an adequate reply to your argument.

And if you mount an entire campaign based around the idea that a proposed new law will lead to terrible problems, and people point out that the law you’re so bothered by has been on the books in Ireland for years and not caused any problems, and you respond by saying that it also hasn’t solved some earlier, pre-existing problems that were there before the law was adopted, at that point it is pretty glaringly obvious that you don’t actually have an argument at all.

 

 

*they also describe support for trans rights as “the hysterical and authoritarian agenda of a minority”, which is kind of funny, because there are very good historical reasons to try and avoid using that word wherever possible, the kind of history that you might think feminists might be aware of.