Three thoughts on the debate between gender critical feminists and the advocates of strong transgender rights

In other words, both sides have some epistemic privilege, and therefore both sides should be epistemically modest towards one another.

This strikes me as rather unsatisfactory. Transgender people, both transwomen and transman have some epistemic privilege with respect to what it is like to be a transwoman or a transman and to suffer the oppressions and anxieties typical of those identities. Similarly women have epistemic privilege with respect to the oppression of women (thought saying “natal women” is already question-begging). “Gender-critical feminists”, however, have no particular epistemic privilege as a group. They claim to speak for women, rather in the manner that a Leninist sect might claim to speak for the working class, but they have no more authority to do so than the Leninists have. And women, even “natal woman”, do not speak with one voice on the subject of whether having Jan Morris or Caitlin Jenner enter the women’s bathroom threatens their essential interests, rather the contrary.

Isn’t the opposite side of the debate best described as “avowalism”?

This is the view that an avowal that one belongs to gender X is not only sufficient evidence that one belongs to gender X, but is also incapable of being defeated by any possible contrary evidence. I am a member of gender X because I avow that I am a member of gender X, and nothing about my history, anatomy, behavior, etc. can outweigh that avowal or call its truth into question.

This was the legal standard introduced in the UK, and it was this position — avowalism — that caused some GCFs to speak out against the change of legislation.

re: Oldster at #3

“This is the view that an avowal that one belongs to gender X is not only sufficient evidence that one belongs to gender X, but is also incapable of being defeated by any possible contrary evidence. I am a member of gender X because I avow that I am a member of gender X, and nothing about my history, anatomy, behavior, etc. can outweigh that avowal or call its truth into question.”

I’m not sure how many people actually endorse this view. This seems to be the caricature that some people have in mind, and people might say things that sound like it. But I think everyone accepts that it is possible for someone to lie about their gender, which this view seems to say is impossible.

It’s a bit confusing because one might want to require the law to treat people according to their avowals even if one believes that avowals *can* be incorrect, because it is often better for the law to use some defeasible evidence to set its behavior, because the sort of effort needed to validate or defeat such evidence would be extremely intrusive, and extremely unlikely to be necessary.

Coming to this from a position of peripheral concern. Would I be right in thinking that there are two respectable progressive points of view:

1) The brains and minds of men and women are in every significant respect the same.

2) Some people, through circumstances beyond their control, find themselves with a woman’s mind in a man’s body, or vice versa.

If I am right, believing both at once might be problematic.

If GCF folks are ‘strong supporters of trans rights’ simply because they think trans folk have rights against violence and persecution, then so are sincere libertarians insofar as they too would (or should, if they are consistent) object to violence and persecution against trans persons for being trans. That is not what’s at issue. The primary point of contention is that GCF folks deny that trans women’s claims to be women. Secondary political debates surround policies to do with this, such as access to women’s spaces, formal legal recognition of gender changes for those who have transitioned, and public funding for sex reassignment surgeries. To my mind, GCFs are the dinosaurs here, not unlike those early suffragettes who campaigned for giving (white) women the vote by vilifying black men, and dinosaurs will die.

Hi Miriam, I appreciate your attempt trying to be even-handed here, but let me try to say why I think it’s a misplaced sort of even-handedness.

I think your first point (‘gender dogmatism cuts both ways’) is a reasonable intervention into a debate which isn’t, it seems to me, the actual debate going on. You frame it as about “whether [the demands embodied in transitioning] really are only a byproduct of an essentialising, patriarchal social construction, which can instead just be taken apart”, and suggest that “We simply do not know… More epistemic modesty is required.”

I don’t think this is a good way of capturing what the debate is about. I think that for a few reasons. Firstly, because so many people on the other side could and do happily accept radical and thorough-going social constructionism. If trans people’s genders are ‘only a byproduct of an essentialising, patriarchal social construction’, then so are cis people’s genders, and both are equally valid (“trans women are women, to the extent that anyone is” – slightly less catchy slogan, admittedly). That’s a trans-inclusive position – and if we want to ‘destroy’ gender, there’s a good case to be made for ‘gender anarchy’, i.e. letting individuals choose how they are gendered, being a great way to advance that goal.

Secondly, because this call to ‘just destroy gender’ never seems to amount to any practical alternative in practice. What is involved in ‘just’ destroying gender? How does giving talks about how trans people are a threat to feminism, or scaremongering about trans kids, or campaigning for certain social institutions to be segregated by birth sex, contribute to ‘destroying gender’? On the contrary, most GCF activism seems more like to functions to reinforce the social significance of sex. It certainly doesn’t offer a practical alternative for trans people – telling them ‘don’t dress that way, don’t use that name, don’t go by those pronouns, don’t think of yourself in those terms, instead ‘just’ destroy gender’ doesn’t actually amount to anything different from ‘ignore your dysphoria and keep living in your assigned gender’. Which, you know, they have tried.

To me ‘gender is a social construction, just destroy gender’ looks like a smokescreen position, analogous to someone campaigning against gay marriage and loudly proclaiming ‘the state should not be legally regulating romantic relationships, get the state out of our bedrooms!’ That’s a fine position to hold, but if the people saying it are specifically campaigning against gay marriage, doing nothing to undermine or challenge straight marriage, and justifying this with bizarre claims that ‘proponents of gay marriage want the government to come into your home and dictate what kind of marriage you can have’, the reasonable conclusion is that they are not, in fact, campaigning against state regulation of relationships, but against gay people.

Maybe I’m wrong about this big-picture framing. But I think it’s really important to at least recognise this possibility, because the way you’re framing the debate in point 1 looks to me like it accepts the framing that GCFs want, and which their pro-trans opponents think gets the real structure of the debate completely wrong.

Also:
You worry about calling the anti-GCF side ‘pro-trans’ because “many (if not all) GCFs would not self-describe as opposing transgender rights simpliciter”. But their opponents wouldn’t self-describe as ‘gender uncritical’ either! ‘Gender critical’ is the term that side prefers for itself, despite it embodying a controversial (in my view highly misleading) picture of the debate. Why accept it, but then back off from calling the other side ‘supporters of transgender rights’, or more straightforwardly ‘pro-trans’ or ‘trans-inclusive’?

Also, as Sophia says, moving from ’cis women have privileged access to what it’s like to live as cis women’ to ‘both sides have some epistemic privilege’ strongly implies ‘ ‘GCFs have privileged access to what it’s like to live as a cis woman’. I get that you mean cis women in general, but they’re abundant on both sides. It feels like your framing here at least plays into the persistent GCF claim that they speak on behalf of cis women generally.

There was an interesting article from a GCF in the much-derided Quillette recently. The basic point was that the number of people claiming a non-binary, non-traditional gender/sex match has grown substantially, and hence has introduced problems that go way beyond “people’s self-stated gender identity must be respected”.

To take a simple example: We now have many examples of folks who grew up male winning high school, university, and international women’s sporting events. The numbers are now large enough that it is posing a serious problem to the idea of “women’s sports”. How ought we respond? The answer that “we take people at their word on their gender” seems unsatisfying and frankly unfair for women, even if no one is directly fraudulent, and even if all athletes really do feel in their hearts of hearts that their “real” gender is what they claim.

A second issue is that gender identity as an immutable characteristic versus gender identity as a political project are difficult to separate. There are a number of prominent non-binary public figures who are explicit that their non-binary position is in part a political project designed to break down the gender binary. The traditional feminist position is that women are valuable and should suffer barriers that men do not have, not that there are no non-socially constructed aspects of being a woman! We regularly make a distinction between immutable characteristics – one’s race, for instance – where unequal treatment is objectionable, and preferences – one’s political party of choice, for example – where no particular deference is needed. And to the extent that some aspects of non-traditional gender have an explicit political goal in opposition to the political goal of many feminists, it should be clear why this controversy has arisen.

A “social construction” is not the same thing as “a lie”.

For example, all languages are social constructions that follow arbitrary grammar rules, but we still need a language to communicate.

All culture is a social construction, and therefore all identities are, by definition, a social construction. But we cannot live in a society without an identity of some kind.

So even if GCFs want to smash genders, they still have to explain what different forms of identity they do propose.

This is a different question than whether genders are based or not on biological genders. For example since I was a kid I always liked martial arts, that jibe well with male gender stereotypes.
But gender identity refer to the fact that other people expect me to be somewhat aggressive or not, not whether I’m biologically more or less prone to aggressivity (that would be the sex based behavior).

So genders are still 100% social constructions, regardless of sex, but this doesn’t mean that we can cancel genders without substituting them with some equivalent construction because people with no social construction are only half people.

IMHO.

I’ll admit that I’m not sure how useful putting these issues in terms of standpoint epistemology is, though I will admit that this doubt is in part because I’m skeptical about most claims (and certainly most strong claims) about standpoint epistemology, and also skeptical that people have special access to their own “true” self in any way. But, I think that some important issues can be put here without any appeals to standpoint epistemology.

What seems most important to me, and to be clearly the case, is that much (not all, but much) of the discrimination and disadvantage that women face is sex-based, and not gender based. This is discrimination and disadvantage based on the ability to get pregnant and give birth (and nurse children), because they menstruate, because of their particular vulnerability to rape, and so on. Because this discrimination and disadvantage is based on sex-based characteristics, it won’t be well addressed if we don’t talk about sex but talk about “gender”. It’s also discrimination and disadvantage that transwomen do not face. (It may sometimes be attributed to them, but, I think, fairly rarely.) The need to provide protections that are sex based, and therefore to make a distinction between females and transwomen, seems to me to be one of the important and clearly right issues put forward by gender-critical feminists. This seems to me to be completely independent of any standpoint issues. (It’s true that these sex based feature are mediated by gender in all societies. But, that doesn’t change the fact that these are sex based traits at the bottom.)

Miriam: the way you describe the GC position in your post would, I think, be clearer if you replaced references to “gender” with something like “socially enforced sex roles”, which is closer to what most GCFs understand the term to mean (that is, it is what they are “critical” of). For example:

If, however, claiming that all facets of socially enforced sex roles are social constructed, harmful, oppressive and (most importantly) eliminable is just as dogmatic as the conservative sex role essentialism to which feminisms is a (bloody well justified) reaction, then the claim “let’s just destroy and abolish the social enforcement of sex roles” cannot be a good answer to transgender people and their demands.

Put it like that and it’s not such a bad answer, is it?

The rejoinder would be, I suppose, that this is a misunderstanding of gender – that gender identity is a component of one’s knowledge of onesself, and some degree of conformity to sex roles is an essential part of expressing this knowledge and/or convincing other people to accept it.

To which the GCF answers: it doesn’t matter. If female-bodied people need female-only spaces to be safe from male-bodied people (toilets, change rooms, contact sports, prisons, refugee camps, whatever), or lesbians who have no interest in male bodies want to be able to gather in same-sex communities without being called bigots, or natal women believe that they share class interests with other natal women because of the way society categorises them for their biology and their perceived reproductive role, and want to advocate for those interests in a way that doesn’t include males – then all of these needs will still exist regardless of whether some natal males identify as women.

GCFs also tend to be fairly sceptical of the assumption that predatory non-trans males will not take advantage of accommodations for people who claim to be trans women, and they may be unconvinced that trans women are actually much less dangerous in very vulnerable female-only spaces than natal males in general would be.

On the other hand, if a person of either sex wants to be a gender-non-conforming member of that sex – that’s fine!

For what it’s worth, I didn’t always agree with this way of thinking. I used to be all, like, “go trans people! smash the gender binary!” and so forth, back when gender activism seemed like a natural extension of the progress that had been made in the acceptance of LGB people. I only started to turn when I began to see the rise of a new gender essentialism as a deeply regressive reframing of old conservative sex-essentialist tropes, and after I watched people being excommunicated from progressive spaces for expressing the tiniest doubt – and when they were women, as they often were, in a viciously, violently misogynistic way that seemed to confirm what the radfems had been saying for years. I’m definitely not the only one to have gone down this path.

The issue of sex-segregated spaces needs to be revisited by GCFs. It is easy to show that their main consequence will be the harassment of natal women, and we now have strong evidence that this is happening, and primarily affecting non gender-conforming women, often from racial or sexual minorities.

@AnotherProf 24

“Someone above suggests that we can’t cancel genders without substituting something else. But why? Why do we need genders at all?”

Sorry, you are right. I explained myself very poorly.

My point is just that I think some GCFs are making a categorical error:

– on the one hand they correctly say that traditional gender roles are a social construction;

– on the other hand they imply that different forms of gender relation would be natural, as opposed to the traditional ones that are only a social construction.

But obviously all forms of identity are a social construction by definition, and “social construction” isn’t a bad word but just means “everything that is cultural”.

I suppose we could do away with genders, they would just be substituted by other forms of identity, not necessarily linked to biological sex.

When we speak of transgender people, for example, regardless of their sexual preferences the kind of gender identity that they want are totally a social construction, which doesn’t mean that their wish is somehow wrong or less important, because most things we want in our life are a social construction: e.g. marriage or voting rights are social constructions etc..

It’s just that the dichotomy between “social construction” and “natural identity” is a false one, because “natural identity” don’t exist as identities are by definition cultural.

> lesbians who have no interest in male bodies want to be able to gather in same-sex communities without being called bigots

A call to stop people from calling someone a bigot sounds like a *very* strong demand. If I have no interest in something, and someone wants to call me a bigot for having no interest in it, I don’t see that I have any standing to stop them. Some people have wanted to say that an orientation includes desires about the shape of the body of the people one is attracted to. Everyone certainly has preferences about the shape of the body. I don’t know what more is gained by calling some of these “orientations”. There really does seem to be a phenomenon somewhat related to sex or gender for which many people are robustly “oriented” and don’t just have a “preference”. But I don’t see why we shouldn’t have the borders of that interest occasionally called into question (even though it’s obviously not polite to call an individual out on it, even when their preference is on something obviously bigoted, like body fat or race or wealth).

I remember pointing out to sundry internet folk that these two agendas seemed to lead in contradictory directions several years ago, before this all became so obsessive and acrimonious, and the response was basically ‘it’s not a problem, stfu, you’re a man’. Let no-one say I didn’t try to help!

I did have to make a formatting mistake in my first comment here! What I meant to say was that “The cognitive abilities of men and women are equal in every significant respect” is a better summary of what progressives believe, and it is better supported by the available evidence, than “The brains and minds of men and women are in every significant respect the same.”

Aubergine raises the issue of

lesbians who have no interest in male bodies want to be able to gather in same-sex communities without being called bigots

It’s worth noting that one of the big proponents of this scare-theory is Julie Bindel, who is famous for advocating “Political lesbianism”, a practice in which heterosexual feminist women only take female partners.

It’s also worth observing that every heterosexual male is familiar with the homophobic and misogynist fear of men that they will pull a hot girl and when they get home discover she has a penis. It’s remarkable to me that some GCFs think they can reheat this misogynist and homophobic stereotype and call it feminism. I guess it’s cool as a plot twist in the “crying game” but up until the GCFs started making a name for themselves in phrenologist rags like Quillette this little paranoid fantasy was the exclusive preserve of middle-aged white sexpats in Pattaya. Well done to the GCFs for rebranding it!

As for athletic competitions … I have spent a lot of my life hanging around sportsmen and they aren’t generally the type of people who will completely rebrand their gender so that they can get an easy victory. Winning fair is kind of a thing for sportspeople. It’s also worth remembering that the GCFs took about 5 seconds to start accusing Caster Semenya of being male, even though she is by their own definition female. But she doesn’t look female so they decided to redefine sex to include not just the genitals but the hormones. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this sudden redefinition of sex was undertaken in response to a poor black woman from a middle income country beating a white woman. Right?

The politics of GCFs is deeply hypocritical and contradictory, and offers a very poor model for handling our understanding of sex or trans issues. You don’t have to be a feminist or even left wing to recognize that their politics – and particularly their political program of excluding trans people from female only spaces – is going to be absolutely devastating for cis women. And remember, when a cis woman sees a non-white or non-gender conforming person in the bathroom and decides to act on GCF “theory”, she will do so by enlisting the power of the state or her violent boyfriend. And as I showed above, the chances are very high that the person her boyfriend beats up is a cis woman.

It’s as if a movement based on excluding people from public services is a bad idea!

Reading the parade of entirely predictable comments here, made as if nobody had ever made them before, makes me wonder how many of those making them have even met a trans person, let alone been friends with them or tried to see the world from their perspective. Most trans people want to get on with their lives, go to work, not be disrespected or misgendered or gaslit at work by bigots or people with ideological axes to grind, and when out and about be able to find somewhere to use a toilet without fear of harrassment or violence. Etc

Btw, I strongly recommend the piece by faustusnotes linked to above, it is excellent.

(And thanks to faustusnotes for covering much of this already. I’m afraid I usually skim the comments under articles about trans issues, for obvious reasons.)

Faustusnotes @34 —

“As for athletic competitions … I have spent a lot of my life hanging around sportsmen and they aren’t generally the type of people who will completely rebrand their gender so that they can get an easy victory.”

Fair enough, but that’s not the concern that women express.

The concern is not “transgendered people are changing their gender just to win bike races”. Nope; everyone realizes that the original motivations lie elsewhere.

The concern is that having already changed their genders, for whatever other reasons, transgendered people will have an unfair advantage in certain sports because of the physiological differences that stem from having started with a male body earlier in life.

If you don’t think this is a real concern, then you have not read the exchanges between Rachel McKinnon and Martina Navratilova.

I liked your linked piece on Bayesian qualms about bathrooms, and it taught me some things. Thanks for that. So I am sorry to see you engaged in straw-manning the sporting question.

E.g. here:

https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/21/disciplining-martina-heretics-and-the-church-of-trans-normativity/

Miriam, the exchange can be found in articles like this, where I think it’s safe to say oldster’s characterization of the concerns of GCFs is a little too charitable (Navratilova, btw, is not a GCF). It’s worth noting that the object of her criticism, Rachel Mckinnon, has not had a record of unparalleled achievement in cycling (as implied by someone above), and was in fact beaten most of the time she raced by the woman who complained about her male advantage. This is also not elite Olympic sport.

There are very few trans women in the world and even fewer going into elite sports. This is an example of beating up an issue because it’s convenient.

I also note, oldster, that you claim to have learnt from my analysis of what will happen to cis women if the GCFs get their way, yet you still insist on exclusion. That means you haven’t learnt anything. As I say in that post, you can’t escape from this problem. If you want to exclude a certain group, and that group is very rare, the majority of the people you exclude will not be from that group. It’s a fundamental fact and everyone who wants to exclude transgender people from spaces they want to be part of needs to deal with that fact.

Hi Miriam,
I think the problem of trans men, non-binary people and intersex people is practical as well as epistemic, inasmuch as they raise questions about who is allowed in sex-segregated spaces and why. Unless I mean that the “epistemological” problem is also personal and political, inasmuch as sex-segregated spaces of the kind proposed by transphobic feminists contain the implication that trans men are not men, trans women are not women, non-binary people are “really” binary, and intersex people don’t exist?

The practical solution that’s already coming into use is to disconnect bodies from gender and speak of pregnant people, people with prostates, people who menstruate, and so on… but for all their talk of biology, that isn’t generally the kind of segregation transphobic feminists call for.

(Another complication, of course, is that sex is also a social construct. There’s no single set of criteria for who counts as “female sex” that won’t either exclude some cis women or include some cis men. The best you can do is to make a kind of diagnostic checklist and set a threshold.)

I’m afraid I don’t find faustusnotes’ Bayesian argument very convincing, for a couple of reasons.

First, you are way overstating the influence of gender-critical feminists who most people have never heard of. Woman are, in fact, quite capable of deciding that the presence of males in spaces that were previously understood to be female-only is unsafe and reacting accordingly; no need for a preceding philosophical justification. Or perhaps the incidents you refer to were inspired by anti-trans (and anti-feminist) conservatives. Or maybe they were inspired by trans-rights activists making it clear that all female toilets are now unisex, and that a lot more males are going to be using them from now on.

You understand, don’t you, that many natal women spend much of the time in public places with at least a sliver of attention keeping track of risks to their personal safety? And that part of this sliver’s role is to be constantly alert to a sense that something is wrong as a signal to get the hell out? And that a public toilet – usually a secluded place, with a single exit, where people are often partly undressed and extremely vulnerable – is exactly the kind of place where this sense is going to be set to maximum? It’s really not surprising that women are reacting to the breakdown of the general assumption that female toilets are not a place for male bodies by adjusting the specifity of this risk-sense (which is, of course, directed at males in general and not at trans women in particular), and I see no reason to pin the blame for the inevitable results of this on GCFs who point out the problem but who did not create it.

Second: all that said, there is a genuine problem here: how should a woman respond when someone pings her risk-sense, but she can’t tell whether they’re a harmless trans women, a harmless natal woman or a dangerous natal man pretending to be a trans woman? (or some other source of danger) There are no easy answers here! But why oh why does the first solution have to be “women should Just Get Over It” instead of “males should stop claiming the right to access to female-only spaces”? Why is it, once again, the woman’s role to accommodate, placate, validate…?

Sophie Jane @ 48 —

“(Another complication, of course, is that sex is also a social construct. There’s no single set of criteria for who counts as “female sex” that won’t either exclude some cis women or include some cis men. The best you can do is to make a kind of diagnostic checklist and set a threshold.)”

Some kinds have simple membership conditions, and some kinds have complex conditions, and some of the complex conditions are in the form of family-resemblances (where there are no unique necessary and sufficient conditions, but the thing needs to have enough of the a good variety of them to count).

But there’s no general connection between “having simple conditions” and “being a natural kind,” or “having complex conditions” and “being a social construct.”

There are social constructs that have simple membership criteria, and natural kinds that have complex membership criteria. So the fact that “female sex” may have complex criteria does not guarantee that it is a social construct.

In addition, the fact that some simple criteria for “female sex” do not agree with classifications of cis women might show that female sex is a social construct, but it might instead show that “cis women” is a social construct.

Faustusnotes @25: the Bayesian argument is nice but falls far short of justifying your conclusion. In addition to Aubergine’s points @51, most disputed spaces are just not like this. In prisons, crisis centres, sports, or school changing rooms the process of stranger-challenging-stranger is not what happens. Your post also ignores the question of whether the trans person in the space has transitioned or still has male genitals. Oh, and I’m absolutely with Dipper in their reaction to your bizarre claim that all men have worried about the “hot girl with a penis”.

Two examples from here in Canada where single sex spaces matter and your argument has nothing to say.

The outrageous case where at least one immigrant women has lost their salon business as a result of a human rights case brought by untransitioned trans woman Jessica Yaniv: that a dozen salon owners discriminated against Yaniv by refusing to wax her balls. GCFs publicising this case have been accused of “cherry picking”, but that’s not the point. Of course Yaniv does not represent most trans women, any more than rapists represent most men. It’s the behaviour allowed by the law that’s at question, and this is one case where “strong trans rights” campaigners, who may not represent all trans people, are damaging their own cause by refusing to accept that this case is a problem.

And then, down the street from there, we have the spectacle of Vancouver Rape Relief, Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, being denied funding and then vandalized with “Kill Terfs” scrawled across its windows (yes, Terf is a slur). The OP argues for a mix of single-sex and single-gender-identity spaces, and there are several crisis centres in Vancouver that operate on the basis of gender identity. If the experience of Vancouver Rape Relief is anything to go by, then there is no appetite for the proposed middle ground from strong trans rights advocates.

Society needs to accommodate trans people, but I will not be that man who tells women, especially women in crisis, that they need to shut up and get over their concerns.

Just to clarify my previous comment, in case it’s needed.

“soul” -> “innate gender identity”

Also, I do believe it is important that people who believe they have a soul should be treated with respect and live the way they want, I don’t think that’s patronizing to religious people, and I don’t think it contradicts disbelief in the soul.

To get back to the original post (and I hope this doesn’t come across as piling-on; I think your “three thoughts” raise some good questions that deserve serious reponses)…

A minor detail:

First of all, whilst the idea that gender can be destroyed is an actually philosophical claim, which some GCFs endorse and defend literally, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” is a political slogan, which is meant to serve a difference purpose (of advocacy and emancipation).

I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” for years, and these days it seems to be regarded as potentially offensive (“man’s body” implies that a trans woman is, on some level, a man). What will be said is things like “I am a woman, so my body is a woman’s body”, or maybe “I am a woman, so my body is a female body”. These look more like philosophical claims, although they serve as political slogans just as well.

In other words, both sides have some epistemic privilege, and therefore both sides should be epistemically modest towards one another

I think there is room for this on the GC side. GC ideas don’t require the rejection of a transgender person having epistemic privilege with respect to being a person who sincerely believes that they have a transgender identity – that may not sound like much, but it generally means that GCFs have no problem agreeing that transgender people should be able to make their own spaces, should have full access to spaces for people of their own sex, should not suffer discrimination for being gender-non-conforming, etc. Some GCFs are willing to accept trans women in women-only spaces as long as this does not compromise natal women’s personal safety or other interests (although this view is certainly not universal).

For example, something like this:

Or we can decide that saunas, spas and gyms which have gender-segregated days should also have sex-segregated events with sufficient frequency.

should be fine.

The other side, though, will find any form of epistemic modesty a lot harder. It’s a basic tenet of gender ideology that there is no epistemic privilege that a natal woman can claim as a woman that cannot also be claimed by a trans woman (with trans women having the additional epistemic privilege of being trans). They are not going to budge on this, I’m afraid.

Think about the functional/anatomical language, already mentioned a few times above, that is becoming mandatory in some contexts: pregnant person, person with a uterus, person who menstruates, person who breastfeeds/chestfeeds, etc.. I believe that most of the time when people use these terms they do so out of goodwill, because they genuinely want to be inclusive. But what this language actually does in practice is to force women to abandon most of their epistemic position.

It says: you can claim privileged knowledge with respect to one or two of these particular functions at a time – but not too many, and don’t try to suggest that there is anything special about the kind of body that tends to combine these functions. And – most of all! – you definitely must not claim that there is any connection between any of these things and your identity as a woman.

GCFs will never accept this; most of the time, trans activists won’t even talk to anyone who refuses to do so. So we’re back at the impasse.

However, and this is precisely the sticking point, biological women/ciswomen (is there a term that we can agree on here?)

If what you’re looking for is a gender-ideology-approved term corresponding to “adult human female”, you won’t find one. That’s the point.

It is refreshing to see it basically confirmed, notwithstanding a lot of blather above about whether souls exist or whatever, that a lot of this noise is just about a concerted campaign aimed at keeping trans people out of toilets marked according to sex/gender.

Oddly, I’ve been thinking about access to toilets as a political issue a fair bit recently and am/was planning a post on it just as soon as I’ve read Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go. In one essay, Lowe writes:

“according to a 2013 UCLA study, 68 per cent of trans people have experienced verbal harassment in gendered bathrooms. Nine per cent reported physical violence.”

That seems pretty significant to me. Maybe some of the posters above think at least that such verbal harrassment is justified? Obviously, I do not.

Lowe’s book is reviewed by Owen Hatherley here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n09/owen-hatherley/the-socialist-lavatory-league

Hatherley’s perpective is that of a sufferer from Crohn’s disease, but another useful account is that of Jeremy Waldron in his well-known essay “Homelessness and Freedom” who makes the argument that a lack of access to places to shit and piss is a significant restriction on the freedom of the homeless. Interestingly, work on the history of women’s public toilets reveals that they were developed not as protection against male stranger danger, but rather in order to give women access to the public sphere. Basically, you can’t function as an equal member of society unless there is somewhere for you to go.

See:

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/History-of-Womens-Public-Toilets-in-Britain/

It is entirely forseeable that trans people, faced with campaigns to exclude them from the means to relieve themselves and faced with the threat of abuse or violence whichever toilets they happen to use will suffer avoidable anxiety and will often be reticent to play a full part in society. These are real and serious harms that are inflicted on a minority by those intolerant of them.

Chris Bertram, you come across to me as indifferent to women’s need for their own spaces. Why could washrooms not be designated differently? For men, for women, and several individual washrooms that would serve anyone, one at a time, or a parent with a child. Our local swimming pool already does this.

“notwithstanding a lot of blather above about whether souls exist or whatever”

Maybe I missed some “blather about souls” farther up in the thread, but Tom Slee (@56) presented a thoughtful analogy between the idea of belief in a “soul” (the concept of the soul being an essentialist concept if ever there was such a thing), and the belief in an essential gender identity, further analogizing his approaches to reaction to these concepts.

I don’t know if TS’s comment is what triggered your gratuitously insulting language (maybe there is some internecine academic squabble subtext!), but if it is you might consider whether you owe TS an apology!

That’s your call, of course (In the same way that it is your call as to whether you are pissed, indifferent, or something in between, to my own comment. I’ve seen a good deal of your snark at commenters here over the years; if it makes you feel any better, you’re pretty damned good at it!).

Chris @ 61 —

I agree with you that access to safe toilets is a human rights issue, and that every person deserves access to safe toilets. I also agree that a society that denies trans people access to safe toilets is an unjust society. No one should be denied access to safe toilets. Physical violence and verbal harassment are never justified.

But agreement on that point does not settle what sort of provision of safe toilets a given society should make, or how access should be managed.

My personal inclination is to think that we should respond to the discovery of complexity by embracing complexity, not by retreating to false simplicity.

We used to think there were only two kinds of people, sc. men and women, and so we had only two kinds of toilets. It was simple.

But it was also predicated on a false belief: that there were only two kinds of people. It turns out that there are lots of kinds of people — men, women, transmen, transwomen, intersex people, and lots more varieties. That’s great — our understanding of humanity is enriched by finding out that there are many more ways to be human than we had thought.

Having discovered complexity, we should now respond by embracing complexity — more toilets is better. There should be toilets for men and toilets for women and toilets for transmen and toilets for transwomen, and toilets for every other human condition. More is better.

And in addition, our society should work to guarantee that the toilets provided for everyone are safe for everyone — which was never the case even in the simple old days, where we thought there were only two kinds of people. Society has a long way to go in providing safe access to toilets for *anyone*, much less transpeople.

When this blooming of a hundred loos is not practical, then we need to make various practical arrangements and compromises. We may need to treat some groups as though they were members of other groups, in order to make up for an inadequate provision.

And that’s fine with me, too. If a group of women wants to open their toilets to transwomen, and treat them as women for the purposes of bathroom access, then I have no objection to their doing so (and probably no standing to have an objection, or to have no objection, for that matter). I would be happy to share public toilets with transmen, and probably have done so already without knowing it — it does not matter to me, because I never interact with anyone in public toilets anyhow.

I would be content with lots of different arrangements for toilets, and this seems like a question that can be answered in many satisfactory ways. More options will probably have unexpected benefits for everyone. A parallel: in the States, the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated the provision of a new class of services and access for disabled people, and it has been a positive development not only for the disabled, but for lots of non-disabled people as well. Among other things, it created a new class of toilets for disabled people, which has been useful to everyone. So too, new provisions of toilets for new (or newly recognized) kinds of people would most likely benefit everyone.

Some people have proposed a different approach to the practical problem: preemptively declare that transwomen simply are, literally and in every other way, women.

This would have the good effect of solving the problem of access to bathrooms — transwomen would have access to bathrooms that were roughly as safe as women’s bathrooms have ever been (which is to say, nowhere near as safe as they should be in a just society), simply because transwomen, having been declared to be literally and in every other way women, would have access to whatever women have access to.

But it would have a different problem, namely that it would be predicated on a different false claim, that transwomen are women, when they are not. It would also have a different problem, in that it would be resisted by many women, most of whom have never heard of TERFs and GCFs and autogynophilia and the rest of this nonsense. The resistance to having transwomen in women’s toilets is far more widespread than the small corner of the internet in which people argue over acronyms.

Now, maybe that resistance should be overcome by arguing that there are good practical reasons, resulting from a conflict between human rights and limited resources, to allow transwomen to have access to women’s toilets. The argument that we should treat transwomen as women for the purposes of access to toilets might well win the day, and I would be happy with that solution. But if the campaign starts by declaring that transwomen are women, then it is not going to succeed at all. False claims are not tenable in the long run.

So I have no desire to keep trans people out of toilets, and to the contrary, I agree with you that they have a right to safe toilets. Please: if there is a fund to create safe toilets for transpeople, send me the coordinates and I will donate to it. But saying true things is something I care about. And allowing women to have control over their spaces is something I care about. Why, to repeat Aubergine’s point from above, why is it, “once again, the woman’s role to accommodate, placate, validate…?” Why is it not, instead, incumbent upon men to make toilets of any kind safe places for everyone?

Stephen@50- Yes, they are. To use a trip analogy, one is an assertion that we can get to the same place in the same time, the other is an assertion that the routes will be different. They are compatible.

@61- This is kinda the core of it for me. Safety and access to public spheres. And in this case, trans women are a heck of a lot more threatened and excluded in almost all cases that come up. IE, the bathroom debates: there are a lot of instances of trans women getting assaulted in “Men’s” restrooms, but I’ve yet to see a single case of a trans woman assaulting someone in a “Women’s” restroom. So I’ve got the view that even flagging this as debatable is explicitly making people less safe. (I have also heard of a number of cis women getting harassed in women’s restrooms because other women thought they were trans.)

@59 – There’s an interesting angle to be had on that if you include trans men in that framing. As you said, “But what this language actually does in practice is to force women to abandon most of their epistemic position.” And I’d agree that is true, because the principal “there is no epistemic privilege that a natal woman can claim *as a woman* that cannot also be claimed by a trans woman” is the flip side of noting that those same epistemic claims can also be made by trans men. Who are not women and will definitely tell you so. So yeah- there are epistemically privileged claims that can be made from growing up a certain way or having a certain body configuration, but those are very much separate from epistemic claims made on the basis of gender. Epistemic modesty would limit claims to avoid conflation- ‘as someone who grew up presenting female’ is a totally acceptable platform to make a claim from, ‘as a woman’ needs to include all women and exclude all men if it is to be true.

My opening para about in the comment above was meant to encompass a whole range of anti-trans reaction here and not just Tom Slee. But let me focus on Slee anyway. Slee writes:

“soul” -> “innate gender identity”

The problem here is that Slee, breezing past the thoughts in the OP about epistemic humility and standpoints, has decided to interpret what trans people say about themselves in the most reductive fashion possible, to posit some “entity” analogous to having a soul and then to dismiss the interpretation he has helped himself to as nonsense that he isn’t bound to take seriously. This sort of move is pretty common on the “GC” side of things and various philosophers have made it.

A better way of proceeding would be to listen, charitably and being open to learning something, to what trans people say when they are trying to make sense of their own experiences, and not to subject what they say to the immediate “gotcha!” of the academic seminar.

(Frankly, Slee’s way of proceeding reminds me strongly of the episode in Hard Times when Gradgrind asks a little girl to define a horse.)

@Chris Bertram A better way of proceeding would be to listen, charitably and being open to learning something, to what trans people say when they are trying to make sense of their own experiences, and not to subject what they say to the immediate “gotcha!” of the academic seminar.

I say it depends. If the discussion takes place in an academic seminar, then the usual norms of academic seminar should apply, and I have no problem declaring in that context that a unified concept of gender makes little analytical sense to me (the fact that the word does not quite exist in my native language does not help) or that the strong transgender right position as described above by Miriam Ronzoni appears to me to be logically incoherent.

If we are discussing the political question of how people should get on with their lives, then the precise analytical meaning we attribute to gender does not seem very relevant – philosophical questions rarely are in such political conversations -, but this also means that practical questions remain as open as ever. Is it legitimate for a rape relief center to ban everyone except biological women to enter the premise? Should a trans man who transitioned at 30 lose his driving license for having failed to have accomplished his military obligations at 18? Should a female victim of rape be able to request psychological, medical and social support provided only by biological women if she wishes to?

Taking only the last example, Tom Slee indicated in his first and latter comments that he thought it was an acceptable request to him but anticipated advocate of strong transgender rights would disagree and deem it unacceptably hateful. Dismissing his comparison of gender identity with soul does not help deciding one way or the other.

Last thought: in my backpacking days a lot of hostels used to have two types of dorm, mixed and female only. What would be the pros and cons of that as toilet policy? It seems it would solve most the practical problems (plus hitherto unmentioned unfairness of women queuing more on average than men) although it would still be open to the charge that the existence of the (biological) female-only toilets was a kind of state-approved discrimination/transmisogyny. And men would have to give up their urinals.

@59: So yeah- there are epistemically privileged claims that can be made from growing up a certain way or having a certain body configuration, but those are very much separate from epistemic claims made on the basis of gender. Epistemic modesty would limit claims to avoid conflation- ‘as someone who grew up presenting female’ is a totally acceptable platform to make a claim from, ‘as a woman’ needs to include all women and exclude all men if it is to be true.

This is the sticking point, really. GCFs believe that society and its patriarchal institutions designate natal women for oppressive treatment on the basis of the physical characteristics and reproductive role that, as a class, they tend to share (or are perceived to share), and that it is useful, even necessary, to be able to acknowledge this when analysing and opposing this oppression. Trans activists disagree. Either way, GCFs are never going to accept that their own identities can only be expressed in terms of sex-role stereotypes (or a “gender identity” that they have never felt any personal connection to) plus a set of sexed bodily functions that they are supposed to pretend have no relation to each other, and there are a lot of trans activists – not all, but a lot – who are never going to accept anything less, so too bad for the epistemic accommodation proposal, I guess.

There’s another issue here that hasn’t been discussed very much in this thread – “as someone who grew up presenting female”.

There are, of course, many trans women who present in virtually all respects as if they were men, but identify as women. I know that the legitimacy of this kind of identity is an open issue in the transgender community, but GCFs have to address that community as it is and not as parts of it would prefer it to be, and from the GC point of view a masculine-presenting trans woman is very hard to tell apart from any other masculine-presenting natal male (and a masculine-presenting lesbian trans woman is very hard to tell apart from, well, an ordinary heterosexual man).

(Meanwhile, a masculine-presenting GC woman would be very unimpressed with any suggestion that she is somehow less of a woman, or that she has any less access to the epistemic position of being subject to the oppression that is applied to all natal women, because of her non-conforming presentation.)

This is one reason why it’s misleading to frame the practical issues that GCFs raise about accommodation as being concerned only with trans women in spaces for women: because if gender identity can be a purely subjective thing, spaces for women effectively cease to exist. There are only unisex spaces that men are supposed to refrain from entering, but if they do enter then nobody is allowed to question their right to do so. And if anyone genuinely does not understand why not all natal women are A-okay with this, may I suggest that you stop demanding over and over again that they shut up and listen and start doing some listening of your own.

As for souls, I don’t have one – and I don’t feel like a “woman trapped in a man’s body” either. There have always been things about my body that I didn’t like but it’s definitely my body, and now I understand what’s going on and can start to correct the effects of going through the wrong puberty I’m becoming steadily happier with the way I am.

I would like to be recognised as a woman, though(*). This seems an easy thing to me, but apparently it makes me a proponent of “strong transgender rights” and thus controversial. The alternative seems to be “weak transgender rights” by which I might eventually hope to be recognised as something other than a woman, providing I’m willing to put in years of effort and don’t do anything that makes cis people uncomfortable?

(*) Or more specifically, as a kind of woman. There are many kinds of women – trans women, cis women, working class and bourgeois women, women with or without various disabilities, white women and women of colour, and they all have different experiences of privilege and oppression that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t. Hence intersectional feminism.

Alato@62: “To use a trip analogy, one is an assertion that we can get to the same place in the same time, the other is an assertion that the routes will be different. They are compatible.”

Many thanks, that is a most thought-provoking analogy.

The problem that occurs to me, with some experience of map-reading, is that starting from the same place at the same time, and setting out by different routes to the same destination, it may well happen that we both arrive there together. Or maybe not. Or by some alternative routes, one may arrive there and the other become hopelessly lost.

You wrote earlier that ” there is a very large difference between a brain in a testosterone-dominated hormone regime and one in an estrogen-dominated one. So I do regard differences between how men think and women think as real.”

Could you, from your very valuable transgender perspective, let us know what those differences are?

Faustusnotes @ —

“We see in many comments above that people simply refuse to accept either that trans women are women or that they experience a unique level of violence….”

What a bizarre statement. These two issues are totally different from each other.

No one on this thread has denied that transpeople suffer a disproportionate level of attacks and persecution. The data on that are quite clear. And if someone were to persistently deny what the data say about the rates of assaults, harassment, murders, and so on, then they would indeed open themselves up to charges of being bigoted, uncaring, and generally horrible people.

Denying that transwomen are women is nothing like that, at all. It is not bigoted, uncaring, or transphobic. It is simply a matter of trying to call things by their correct names, of not lumping together unlike things. Of being pretty sure that the correct theory of what makes people women, however that will turn out, will not simply be that it’s a matter of someone’s avowal (even sincere avowal). And of respecting the autonomy and dignity of women, most of whom themselves deny that transwomen are women.

By running these two issues together, you seem to be trying to use a reasonable and important point (transwomen suffer disproportionate levels of violence) in order to gain an unreasonable political victory over people who resist being forced to chant the Orwellian slogan that transwomen are women.

“One of the tricks the GCFs have pulled off is to make us accept that our limited public hygiene infrastructure is a fact of life….”

This also strikes me as bizarre on a thread in which many, many people have advocated for changing the provision of toilets to address the existence of people other than men and women.

Are there GCFs out there who are resolutely opposed to the provision of more kinds of bathrooms? Maybe so — I don’t know much about what GCFs say, other than a few things I have read which made no such arguments whatsoever.

But even if there is *some* GCF out there who both points out that transwomen are not women and also insists that we must have no more than two kinds of bathrooms (and what a weird insistence that would be), it is clearly not the view of anyone on this thread. And it is clearly possible to take the common-sense view that transwomen are not women, while also advocating for fundamental changes to our infrastructure. I do it above, at tedious length.

Probably the upshot of this is that taking the common-sense view that transwomen are not women does not make one a GCF, and that GCFs are just one subgroup in the much larger group of people who don’t think transwomen are women. Certainly if being a GCF requires one to think that all transpeople are motvated by “autogynophilia”, then there will not be many GCFs. (Why would anyone want to have any unified theory about why people want to transition? Surely lots of different people do it for lots of different reasons?)

So there may be some terrible people out there who are GCFs and have weird views about toilets and “autogynophilia”. But you are not talking to them on this thread.

I’ve not personally noticed a big difference between my brain on testosterone and my brain on estrogen, but it’s only been six months since I started HRT. I do feel calmer, happier, and more centred than I used to but I think that’s because the process of getting HRT (not to mention coming out as trans) is protracted and stressful, especially in the UK, and it’s a big relief to be through it.

I certainly know a number of trans women who put a strong emphasis on testosterone and its effects but I don’t know any trans men who do, which I think may be significant. At the very least, it’s obvious that the ways gender is expected to be expressed (and indeed the number of genders available) vary from culture to culture in ways that make it hard to reduce to simple biology.

I am, by the way, happy to answer reasonable questions about my experience as a trans woman. Though it’s not actually been very difficult or dramatic – the world, it turns out, is much less transphobic than the internet.

Why, for example, is the issue of sexual assault in prison being dealt with by forcing trans women to be assaulted by men rather than changing prison systems to eliminate sexual abuse altogether? It’s as if rich white tenured professor Kathleen Stock doesn’t really care about the rights of poor non-white male criminals at all,

Not just rich and white, but *tenured*! (And for all I know, one of those “heteronormalized”, “not-gay-enough” people, like Pete Buttigieg.) Well, what does she actually say?

Kathleen Stock:

For instance, crime figures, both in the UK and US, suggest that transpeople are no more at risk of homicide or violent attack than the average person, and may in fact face a lower risk. But even if we take the comparisons at face value, it’s possible to also fund dedicated spaces and resources, specially for transwomen. There’s no reason why females should – as a sexist society regularly expects them to – be the only group to sacrifice their interests in favour of others.

So: reference to evidence regarding dangers to transwomen, and to solutions *other than* forcing imprisoned transwomen into general populations. It’s not hard to find out what her priorities, claims, and arguments are. Why not address those?

Though I obviously can’t really respond for him, since TS has said he’s done I’ll take up a response to Prof. Bertram and to faustus.

I’m struck in reading these replies at the lack of engagement from the “radical trans” side (or whatever the correct term is) with the issue of conflicting rights raised by the OP and then lots of other commenters. I guess the perspective is that once you declare “trans women are women” to be a fact not subject to debate, there can’t possibly be any true conflict of rights, since there’s just one homogeneous group of women under discussion.

At any rate, I can’t help but notice that neither CB nor faustus responded to TS’s raising the case of Jessica Yaniv, the trans woman who demanded of multiple Vancouver area salons (run mostly by poor immigrant women) that they wax her genitalia, which happen to be male. There seems to be an unarguable clash of at least asserted rights here. One could, I suppose, respond that this is no different from the anti-gay baker refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, but that seems a stretch. Demanding that a woman wax your balls seems a bit more personal. (It’s also hard not to think that Yaniv’s actions – forcing the salons into bias hearings at a provincial tribunal – look an awful lot like stereotypically aggressive male tribal behavior. Provoking the “enemy” so your mates can witness your bravery.)

Faustus wants to argue from a position of harm minimization. That seems like a fair general position to take, but you’re still stuck with the problem that there are conflicting individual rights in play here. You can’t simply compare A’s asserted harm with B’s asserted benefit, decide B’s is larger and declare them the winner. There needs to be some work toward finding a mutually satisfactory accommodation, unless you’re willing to just deny the legitimacy of A’s claim. Whether the GCFs are overstating their case, it seems pretty clear – certainly to many people, if not all – that some, perhaps many natal women will find genuine harm in being forced to share spaces like rape crisis centers or even just locker rooms with people with male bodies and brains formed under the influence of male hormones. The radical trans position seems to be to simply dismiss this harm and call it bigotry. I frankly don’t see how this is going to work as a strategy, though if it does it certainly won’t be the first time that natal males use their power to impose their wishes on unwilling women.