A while back I wrote a post on the gender wars, where I argued that there are reasons for both parties to acknowledge that the other might have a standpoint which they themselves (partly) lack, and that – relatedly – gender dogmatism is a double-edged sword. There is something unique and specific about the standpoint occupied by both trans and cis women: although there is a significant overlap, both typically experience some distinctive forms of oppression that the other does not, or not quite in the same way; both have unique knowledge as a result; and thus both have something to contribute to the debate. There are distinctive forms of oppression which affect biological women in their sexed features (for instance, but not only, in their reproductive capacities); hence, trans women cannot be described as knowing all the forms of oppression that women have to go through plus that of being trans. On the other hand, claiming that trans women simply do not know what it means to be oppressed qua woman (say, because they cannot be exploited in their reproductive capacities, or because they have been socialised as men and thus enjoy male privilege in some form) is reductive to the point of being offensive. Yes, some of that might be true, yet what is equally true is that, in some areas, trans women are more at risk of suffering those kinds of harms that typically affect women disproportionately compared to men (e.g. the risk of being raped); what is more, there are distinctive ways in which sexism affects them, demeans them, and humiliates them. In a nutshell, not only is this not Oppression Olympics, but the whole logic should not be one of less vs more. As intersectionality teaches us, each of us is uniquely positioned; and as standpoint epistemology teaches us, with each form of oppression that we experience come unique insights. Thus, an attitude of mutual listening is what is called for: both sides have unique pieces of the puzzle that the other one lacks.
Relatedly, just as we should not reify gender (as gender critical feminists warn us), we should not make the opposite mistake of claiming that gender is obviously nothing but a fictional social construct that can well and truly be destroyed once and for all, if only we set our minds to it. We cannot be quite sure that this is fully the case: the jury is out on that (not, to wit, on many important individual gendered norms which are clearly both artificial and harmful, but on whether gender in general is the kind of thing that can be destroyed in order to return to some form of alleged “primordial,” neutral tabula rasa). Also, as the wonderful (I am sorry, I can’t remain even-handed here, I just love her) Natalie Wynn puts it: be it as it may, we need to live in this gendered world in the time being, and there are some people who are miserable in it – for some of these (e.g. many cis women) the solution may be to chip away at gender norms; for others (e.g. many trans and gender nonconforming people) it may be to use the current labels, oppressive as they may be, a little more freely. Thus, telling trans people, “You don’t need to transition or affirm your gender identity as one different from the one you were assigned at birth: you just need to join us in destroying gender to begin with!” just isn’t going to cut it.
Where does this leave us? In the old post, I suggested that one possible practical implication of these insights might be, not to either deny or affirm sex (as opposed to gender) segregated spaces in an unqualified way, but to have some sex segregated spaces alongside gender segregated ones. The idea I want to explore today is that it might be helpful to conceive of those as Kymlicka-style minority rights.
Liberal minority rights – as advocated most prominently by Will Kymlicka, but further refined by many others – are explicitly put forward as exceptions to a norm that we otherwise consider just: we think motorcyclists should wear helmets, but we also acknowledge that, say, being a Sikh is an important enough reason to be granted an exception. Similarly, in allowing some shelters for female victims of domestic violence to be open to cis women only, we do not necessarily reject the norm that trans women should be treated as women for all relevant purposes, but merely acknowledge that being a cis woman who has suffered violence from a man – especially if sexual violence was involved – is an important enough reason for granting her an exception.
Another important feature of minority rights is that we do not need to agree on a precise account of why we grant them, nor pass judgement on the reasons that their beneficiaries have for making use of them – be it negatively or positively. For some, their best justification might be a “Multiculturalism of Fear” of sorts. For others, they might be grounded in some genuine intellectual modesty about which ways of life are valuable, as well as in an acknowledgment that some of the norms adopted by the liberal majority might be more culturally biased and less neutral than intended or perceived. For others still, whilst liberal universalism and equal rights are by all means the best way to structure society, it is equally true that it might be genuinely impossible for some to flourish without having some culturally specific accommodation made for them. Similarly, allowing an exception for women who insist on sex segregated spaces can be something we can agree on (enthusiastically or reluctantly) without agreeing on why: we can think this is a regrettable but necessary compromise, or we may think that some cis women have a point.
Finally, if these truly are to be seen as minority rights, their precise contours must always carefully be reassessed and rebalanced on an ongoing basis, to make sure that granting them does not undermine the stability of the norm to which they constitute an exception. When, say, medical professionals appeal to their entitlement to be conscientious objectors and refuse to practice, or assist in, abortions – as is allowed in some jurisdictions – this must not come at the cost of threatening the right of women to a legal, safe and reasonably swift abortion. Similarly, if trans women are to have a secure right to access women-only shelters, hospitals wards, or prisons, then the number of shelters, wards, and prisons which offer sex-segregated spaces cannot mushroom out of proportions and the facto push trans-inclusive gender segregated spaces out of existence.
I do appreciate that both parties might find my proposal somewhat abhorrent. Gender critical feminists might feel treated as an outcast minority that must, however, be tolerated. Trans women might find the very idea of allowing sex-segregated spaces to exist a symbolic and expressive threat to their status as women – we don’t allow whites-only spaces after all, not even for small minorities, do we? Recall, however, that the comparison with racism does not quite work here, as we are talking about two groups who both possess a valid claim to having unique insights and a unique perspective on forms of gendered and sexed oppression, which inform their views on these matters, and where the other party must exhibit some intellectual modesty. I have suggested that we can endorse minority rights from different justificatory perspectives (some of which will be more disgruntled than others), but this component of intellectual modesty should always be present; thus, the proposal is not on a par with letting privileged white supremacists having their own spaces – where, among other things, they can network and reinforce their privilege.
Thus, part of me wants to say: if both parties leave the negotiating table feeling somewhat cross and done over, isn’t that the very sign of a good compromise?
{ 50 comments }
MPAVictoria 02.22.22 at 4:11 pm
For what its worth I think this is a sensible and thoughtful approach that respects the rights of all involved but that achieving any kind of consensus of what spaces are cis-women only and which are not is likely to be a fraught experience…
Sophie Jane 02.22.22 at 4:37 pm
As a trans woman, my problem with this “sign of a good compromise” is that the “compromise” would involve giving trans people fewer rights than cis people, in way that will materially affect our ability to live, work, and generally exist in public, while simply allowing me to continue to exist with the same rights as everyone else harms no one.
Naamah 02.22.22 at 5:00 pm
One of the challenges here is that the gender critical side demonstrably will not permit any trans-inclusive spaces. They believe that every single bathroom and changing room is a battleground. GCs have a habit of using social media (and sometimes other means) to harass any women’s service in the UK (since that is where they are concentrated) that is even nominally trans-inclusive, much less one that hires a trans woman in any role. While some trans people have done the reverse (such as to a gender critical domestic violence shelter in Vancouver), it’s demonstrably much less common, particularly when understood relative to the sizes of the groups in question.
While I believe in the right of freedom of association in many cases and I don’t have an priori problem with some spaces being designated “cis women only” so long as there are equivalent trans-inclusive spaces easily accessible (honestly, it’s nice to know when you’re actually welcome vs grudgingly allowed for legal reasons), that isn’t a stable equilibrium, particularly in places like the UK where GCs have a lot of influence, unless a lot of gender critical people (and other trans-hostile groups) were to deradicalize significantly. Also, the process of judging “is making this space cis women only going to harm trans women” would be fraught with politics and easily tampered with by a sufficiently motivated government, as we see with the current state of the EHRC in the UK, which has had much of its leadership replaced by gender critical people or outright social conservatives and seems to have only been stopped in being more direct about pursuing those aims by the need to keep up appearances.
oldster 02.22.22 at 5:32 pm
Good luck, Miriam!
Sophie Jane 02.22.22 at 5:51 pm
This paragraph from Sara Ahmed’s 2016 article “An Affinity of Hammers” is also relevant:
How often: some forms of violence are understood as trivial, or not as violence at all. How often: violence is reproduced by not being understood as violence. So much violence directed against groups (that is, directed against those perceived as members of a group) works by locating that violence as coming from within those groups. Thus minorities are often deemed as being violent, or as causing violence, or even as causing the violence directed against them. To give an account of trans people as causing violence (by virtue of being trans) is to cause violence against trans people. We are most certainly talking about lives and deaths here; and we are most certainly talking about incitement to violence.<\i>
MPAVictoria 02.22.22 at 6:42 pm
Sophie Jane and Naamah thank you both for those comments – Excellent points. I really don’t know what to do in these situations…
NickS 02.22.22 at 9:10 pm
The original post matches my intuitions fairly well, so I’ll be curious to see how the discussion in comments goes — does it make me think my intuitions hold up well or poorly.
J, not that one 02.22.22 at 9:47 pm
I admit I have seen a few different definitions of gender critical feminism, and the suggestion that it holds gender can and should be “destroyed once and for all, if only we set our minds to it” isn’t one of those I’ve seen before, so it is somewhat confusing for me. Is it radical separatist lesbianism, which believes (as far as I know) that there’s a right way to be a woman but it isn’t what we call femininity, or is it something more like difference feminism, which believes (more or less) that femininity—or some version of expected roles for women as understood in some communities—possibly not traditionally feminine and/or “womanly” as that would be understood in all communities—is natural and unchanging and the right way to be a woman? You may notice my terms are those of thirty years ago and I don’t know whether they’re still used in the same way now.
Miriam Ronzoni 02.22.22 at 10:14 pm
I’d say it’s neither (although some GCFs are lesbian separatists, but they’d definitely be all opposed to difference feminisms). It’s rather the idea that, apart from biological sex differences, everything else is socially constructed (norms of gendered behaviour etc.) and the result of patriarchal oppression, so should just be disposed of “as a norm about gender”. It’s what grounds the intuition, which they have, that trans people simply identify/like norms of behaviour, poise, clothing and grooming etc. that are normally associated with the opposite sex but should not be, so they should stop saying they are trans but rather say – I am going to put it in a deliberately brutal way – that they are men who love wearing make up and high heels, or women who love suits and ties. That why they sometimes say that they have a viable solution for trans people, for destroying gender will enable everyone to dress/behave/move however they choose regardless of sex.
Miriam Ronzoni 02.22.22 at 10:16 pm
Yes I would definitely be in favour of allowing spaces for trans women only.
Miriam Ronzoni 02.22.22 at 10:18 pm
Even if we also make room for trans women only spaces, or trans people only spaces, when trans women and trans people believe that there is a case for them (as per Naamah’s suggestion)?
Miriam Ronzoni 02.22.22 at 10:19 pm
And yes of course the proposal is not going to do much to sway GCFs who think there shouldn’t be any trans inclusive space period, no ifs no buts.
J, not that one 02.22.22 at 11:24 pm
Miriam @ 9
I guess my confusion revolves around a sense that the variability of dress and so on that gets labeled “gender nonconforming” as opposed to merely “not especially common” has shifted back and forth over time, and we’re now, possibly, in an era where it’s narrower than it has been at any other point in my lifetime. Similarly, the idea that feminism is mostly about protecting women from sexual violence is somewhat foreign to me. For that reason, I’m wondering whether “gender critical feminism” is being defined simply by contrast to some other kind of feminism, and whether this contrast would be at all meaningful to me. But I sense that this is not the appropriate place to discuss this.
FWIW, I’ve personally not really gotten along with separatists in my few interactions with them, and personally I think they did subscribe to a kind of difference feminism, but that’s neither here nor there.
morg 02.22.22 at 11:50 pm
This is a great example of why I hate thought experiments: you’re ignoring geography, mobility, everything except idealized quantities of frictionless, perfectly spherical domestic violence shelters. The rights discourse is all very pretty and not at all relevant next to the question “can someone who is suffering from domestic violence access care and help?”. It bears mentioning as well that your solution is in fact the current standard, with the Salvation Army and others having long records of turning trans women away.
SusanC 02.22.22 at 11:53 pm
There’s something very inconsistent about a political position that
A) aims to destroy gender
B) resolutely insists that they have to know the (legally verified) gender of other people they share a space with, on the grounds that this gender is a reasonably reliable predictor of how people will behave.
.. but I think the position Miriam outlines above is something of a straw man, in that it isn’t actually what a lot of the “gender critical” feminists believe.
To really make the point. If, hypothetically, you could actually achieve (a), this would completely undercut the rationale for separate bathrooms etc, in (b).
But I think many of the gender critical feminists don’t actually assert (a), so they’re not as blatantly self-contradictory as this.
Orange Watch 02.23.22 at 2:12 am
Creating trans-only spaces seems like the most diplomatic (for lack of a better word) compromise, though I suspect it will not really please anyone. And I’m very wary of it owing to how demographic realities would de-prioritize resource allocation to creating those spaces.
Having said that, this area of activism and accommodation is not zero sum, unlike many others. This is a more difficult problem to resolve than simple exclusion – what equality would look like is neither clear nor agreed upon. To springboard off of @9, it concerns me that in the last decade as the struggle for trans rights has become more mainstream, I have seen non-binary erasure seeming to grow more popular for some groups of trans-positive gender essentialists – basically, the polar opposite of the brutal take in @9. It seems like a mirror to bisexual erasure. I caveat this with the admission that I’m ill-equipped to judge if this is a significant outlook or whether I’ve simply had the ill fortune to encounter it a great deal – my social exposure is not representative of much of anything these days.
J-D 02.23.22 at 5:41 am
Is anybody making this mistake? I know there are people who make the assertion that gender is a social construct, but I don’t know of anybody who makes the assertion that gender is fictional, and even if there are people who make the latter assertion (that gender is fictional), it is confusing and harmful to misunderstand the former assertion (that gender is a social construct) as being equivalent to the latter assertion (that gender is fictional). Asserting that money is a social construct does not mean asserting that money is fictional! Fiction is a social construct but social constructs are not fictions.
Again, asserting the desirability of attaining a condition in which gender is absent is not equivalent to asserting that there was a primordial condition in which gender was absent. I am not sure whether it would be possible to eliminate gender, but I can understand why some people might aspire to such an achievement, even though I can’t believe in a primordial gender-free condition: does anybody?
In both cases there is an important practical question about how the segregation is to be achieved. Is it on the basis of an honour system of self-identification? Are there people who will be satisfied if, in practice, there are spaces which admit all (but only) those people who declare themselves to be cisgender women, those self-declarations not being subject to challenge? If self-declarations are to be subject to challenge, how are those challenges supposed to be resolved?
All my life I’ve been using public toilets, in schools, in parks, in restaurants, in universities, in pubs, in shopping centres, in cinemas, in theatres, and so on. I’ve never been challenged using a public toilet; nobody has ever asked me to demonstrate my sex or my gender. I don’t want a situation where people’s access to public toilets can be challenged by people who believe or suspect that they are trying to use a toilet which is not the ‘right’ one for them; does anybody?
Anvil 02.23.22 at 6:02 am
The proposal sounds reasonable enough – of course oppressed groups should have the right to carve out their own spaces – but then comes the fight over which spaces are segregated by sex and which by gender expression or identity. For my part, I’m not interested in social spaces or activist groups reserved for femmes, not having a strong conscious identity as a feminine person or any interest in forming an identity based on how masculine or feminine I am, and I’m dismayed that some progressive groups in my area that used to be women-only are now femme-only. For one thing, femininity does not preclude misogyny, and for another, kicking unfeminine women out of what used to be a women’s group (or at least making them feel unwelcome) is incredibly regressive. If the gender-based groups existed alongside sex-based groups, that would be one thing, but instead they’ve replaced them.
Bethany 02.23.22 at 1:18 pm
I second J-D’s comments. Single-sex spaces are unenforceable unless you subscribe to the idiotic notion that “you can always tell” when a woman is trans. I’m trans and also have never been challenged once going into a women’s restroom. I’m very tired of these arguments for single-sex spaces especially since they all tend to be based on the idea that trans women are mostly middle-aged men with 5 o’clock shadows, bad makeup and an ill-fitting dress.
Miriam Ronzoni 02.23.22 at 1:33 pm
JD and Bethany: I am NOT talking about spaces like toilets here! What I have in mind are cases like the ones I discuss in the post – less ubiquitous, more heavy duty stuff, and cases in which it is a requirement to do paperwork show your ID etc. anyway. Say a safe shelter. And with a big emphasis that this is minority accommodation. So one would have to prove anything at all in most spaces. And even in cases like shelter, one would have to prove anything in most shelters which would keep being gender rather than sex based.
Waldo 02.23.22 at 3:24 pm
SusanC – I’ve encountered a number of people who subscribe to the aim of destroying gender; I’ve never got the impression that they hold that view while also wanting to refer to gender as a demarcation line, which would indeed be wildly incoherent. I’d characterise the GC position more as
a) aiming to destroy gender
b) believing that biological sex is an immutable fact
c) wanting to maintain single-sex spaces as single-sex (if possible without anyone checking anyone else’s genitalia – perhaps by societal agreement on a) to c))
OP:
the jury is out on … whether gender in general is the kind of thing that can be destroyed in order to return to some form of alleged “primordial,” neutral tabula rasa
I don’t think the belief that gender should be destroyed is necessarily or invariably phrased in terms of a return to anything, let alone to a pre-civilisational “tabula rasa”. Gender could just be something that we as a society haven’t managed to get rid of yet, like racism or class distinction – epiphenomena of a set of exploitative relationships that benefit one group over another and entrench the division between groups, and hence tend to reproduce themselves over time.
More importantly, I don’t think GC feminists would necessarily accept that there’s any such thing as “gender in general“. Etymologically speaking, “gender” is a word for two quite distinct concepts developed in different professional and social milieux – “the set of expectations that lead your friends to describe your infant predominantly as either ‘strong’ or ‘beautiful'”, on one hand, “the personal experience of a sexed identity distinct from and sometimes at odds with one’s sexed body” on the other. Abolishing the first of these in toto would be a big job, but it doesn’t sound inherently impossible. (It’s certainly something we can all lend a hand with.) The second is very different, and certainly not susceptible to being abolished; the subjective experience of “being in the wrong body” is of a different order from the experience of “liking long hair and the colour pink”.
Waldo 02.23.22 at 3:24 pm
we need to live in this gendered world in the time being, and there are some people who are miserable in it – for some of these (e.g. many cis women) the solution may be to chip away at gender norms; for others (e.g. many trans and gender nonconforming people) it may be to use the current labels, oppressive as they may be, a little more freely
I sympathise with the sentiment, but I don’t think the argument’s going to work. If one believes that gender is oppressive – or rather, that gender, like racial or class distinction, is an epiphenomenon of a system of oppression – using gendered labelling more can only help perpetuate oppression.
Perhaps there’s also a “stock vs flow” argument. It may be the case that a certain % of people just are trans or NB – just as a certain % of people have green eyes – and that the greater salience of those groups in today’s society is just down to the removal of societal pressure to conform. (This is a risky road to go down, though, as it suggests the possibility of an objective (genetic?) determination of cis/trans status – which in turn would make it possible for a doctor to make a trans person’s life even harder by telling them they weren’t really trans at all…) Or it may be that more people identify as trans/NB at some times than others. If that’s the case, GC feminists might quite reasonably argue that a society with rigid and prescriptive gender norms is also one where more people are likely to be uncomfortable with their birth sex and its associated expectations – in which case a gender-free world will also be a world in which far fewer people than at present identify as trans/NB.
Final note: this both is and isn’t an argument within feminism; the assumption that gender is an epiphenomenon of a system of oppression depends on the prior assumption that women are in fact oppressed as women, which many people who dispute the point about gender also share. What makes the argument particularly contentious is that many people who aren’t feminists – which is to say, many more people – see it as a much easier argument about whether a minority group should have equal rights, whether we should all be able to go for a pee when we need to, and so on – to which the answer is of course, easily and obviously, Yes and Yes. So thanks to the OP for keeping it difficult and for bringing feminism back onstage (AIUI) (IANAF).
Chris Bertram 02.23.22 at 3:36 pm
A slightly tangential issue, but the term “gender-critical” just seems hopeless to me, since it is now actually used (at least in the UK) not just by the radical feminists who critiqued gender as a regulatory system bolstering a supposed system of sex-class oppression/exploitation, but by any person who opposes trans rights, even if they buy quite uncritically into all sorts of gendering.
SusanC 02.23.22 at 6:39 pm
I wonder if there are significant national differences in what a gender critical feminist is.
Chris Bertram and I are both in the U.K.
Over here, there is a considerable amount of anti-trans sentiment in our national newspapers (e.g, The Times, The Guardian), and there are some highly salient trans rights issues (obtaining a gender recognition certificate has been made extremely difficult due to the government massively underfunding the healthcare personnel who are, in the U.K., legally needed to endorse such certificates ).
Two possibly consequences:
When you say “gender critical” to a British person, what they will imagine is a viewpoint that is particularly objectionable by international standards
“Gender critical” has got a really bad political reputation in the U.K. It’s like waving a Confederate flag in the United States.
Stephen 02.23.22 at 6:44 pm
Let’s start with agreement. Sensible and fair-minded people be they trans activists (TA) or gender critics (GC) agree:
Transgender people have the same human rights as people who are not transgender
Transgender people should not be unfairly discriminated against
There should be appropriate support for transgender people
Transgender people and their life choices should be respected and
There can be discussion about concepts, and discussion as to how the above principles should be practically applied
A typical basic TA conceptual framework is:
The sex binary does not apply to humans
There are more than two genders
There is a gender spectrum and
Gender identity is of critical importance
This conceptual framework is relatively modern, but is regarded by some as sacrosanct. It is widely promulgated. This conceptual framework is widely taught and is to be found on advice sites for children (e.g. ChildLine, Mermaids etc.). It is the espoused view of the public sector, of many concerned with social justice and of various charities (e.g. Amnesty).
Some GC, however, do not accept the basic TA conceptual framework. They believe it is incoherent or false. To express such views or to attempt a critical discussion is to be exposed to the risk of condemnation. The position that a person takes on this TA conceptual framework can seem to be a litmus test of righteousness.
However, surely, this question, at least, can be asked: Why should this new conceptual framework be preferred to the received conceptual framework?
The received conceptual framework regards 1-4 above as false or incoherent. Such a GC position claims to be widely accepted, robust, grounded in biology, experience and capable of supporting a moral/political framework which fully respects trans rights, and the rights of inter sex people.
This is not a scientific question as such (although science is deeply implicated in any discussion), rather it is a question about some fundamental concepts which we use to understand the world.
Sebastian H 02.23.22 at 7:42 pm
It feels like there isn’t very much attention to numbers here. Trans people are very very very rare. (Which should not be used to deny them full human dignity).
On the trans side, of course trans people can’t be satisfied with trans-only spaces because there can’t possibly be enough of those spaces unless a huge number of them sit empty all the time. Maybe in the very biggest cities you could have a very few trans only spaces. But anywhere else that can’t possibly be the solution.
On the cis side, we need to be frank–cis abusers/harassers WAY outnumber trans people. I don’t just mean trans abusers/harassers. I mean literally all trans people. And not just by small numbers like ‘twice as many’ or ‘ten times as many’. Almost certainly the smallest guess would be something like 100 to one. I suspect it is more like 500 to one but for the sake of discussion lets say 100 to one. That has ramifications if the UK or US go to self-ID systems. Trans activists couch fear of a cis abuser pretending to be trans as an anti-trans trope. But given those kind of numbers only a very small number of cis abusers would have to be willing to strategically self ID (and only when it helps them, because we aren’t following people around demanding that they always ID the same to everyone) in order for it to be a very scary problem. And we are already talking about abusers–so people willing to defy social expectations to gain access to victims.
Bathrooms aren’t really a worry, but violence shelters and prisons and psych wards absolutely would be.
Jim 02.23.22 at 8:22 pm
This discussion parallels the discussion in gay spaces about straight women in gay (male) bars. One aspect of that, that I don’t see reflected here, is that often straight women going into gay bars expect accommodation. in other words they impose heteronormativity in a gay space.
J, not that one 02.23.22 at 9:35 pm
My initial assumption, since “gender-critical” appeared to signify something like “insistent on gender,” was that it referred to a purely theoretical system that holds gender (rather than class or race) to structure all societal oppression. What people seem to be talking about, however, are political groups with little or no theoretical commitment, not even an incoherent one. Certainly the Salvation Army (which at least in the 80s forbade women members to marry except to men of higher rank than themselves, because otherwise a women might command a man) are not feminists of any kind.
Susan C might be correct that it’s primarily a UK term. As I said, for some decades my awareness of the latest theories has been filtered through the Internet and glossy magazines.
J, not that one 02.23.22 at 10:42 pm
Also, what I have seen of the women who are being called gender critical feminists in Britain, they are not claiming to want to destroy gender at all. If their other commitments amount to “destroying gender,” well, I guess I may have to accommodate myself to a future with even stronger gender norms than my ancestors experienced!
J-D 02.23.22 at 10:50 pm
When I am asked to show my ID, what I usually show is my drivers licence. I would guess, based on my experience, that drivers licences are the most commonly produced and most commonly accepted forms of identification in this country.
In this country, or at least in this State (although I’m reasonably confident this is true nationwide), drivers licences don’t state sex or gender. So I expect that in this country it is not a practical suggestion to have a shelter with access restricted to people who can produce ID to confirm their sex and/or gender.
There’s nothing obviously impractical about establishing a shelter where access is restricted to people who are prepared to declare themselves in writing to be cisgender women. Is that a thing that (some) people want and would be satisfied with?
J-D 02.23.22 at 10:59 pm
If you are talking about people who have no compunction about engaging in lies and deceit, what measures are you proposing to guard against such people?
Orange Watch 02.24.22 at 3:47 am
Waldo@22:
I’ve encountered a fair number of activists and slacktivists who are definitely enamored with the idea of genetic determinism WRT gender identity, even though we do not have any such objective genetic distinction nor even an agreed-upon consensus of what such an objective distinction would refer to. This appears to be a result of popular acceptance of oversimplified genetic explanations for sexuality, and an assumption that this must also “work the same way” even if sexuality doesn’t work that way. I’ve encountered it primarily in a hard identitarian context where the (sl)activist makes an extremely strong essentialist argument about almost all sociopolitical identity.
What concerns me most here is the liberalness with which hypotheses are treated as neurological prescriptions by (sl)activists. As you point out, perceptions of what defines cis/non-cis is affected by the sociopolitical zeitgeist, and when trans-acceptance is encouraged there will be a certain number of well-meaning parents who are a bit too zealous in their praxis – there are plenty of examples of this WRT other aspects of parenting. Parental expectations and reinforcement is a powerful thing, as evinced by what parents have done in terms of indoctrinating cishet norms on non-cishet children since time immemorial. If the social dialogue is primarily one where non-conformity is viewed as being trans – and there is definitely a trend in some quarters to identify even a child’s earliest explorations of the definitions of gender as “knowing they’re trans” – it’s not hard to imagine trans-acceptance becoming a de facto tool for reinforcing gender norms. An extreme example would be Iran’s policies in this regard, where it has been argued that it is used as a tool to reinforce not just the gender binary, but heteronormativity. We’re a long way away from that point, but it’s worth being aware that this is not a simple question.
I’m tempted to say the ubiquity in popular culture of the idea that inherent = genetic is at least some of the problem, which owes its existence to an extremely understandable desire to push back against regressive claims that non-cishet people can be “corrected” or “prevented”. That’s not really how neurology works, though – even if we identify genes associated with a trait, gene expression is not that simple – and we don’t even have a good record of unambiguously tying genes to sexuality or gender identity. I’m inclined to invoke an analogy from language acquisition WRT gender identity. My native language is inherent, but it is in no way genetic (although my genetics may impact my abilities to make/recognize certain sounds). It is not a choice I made, nor is it even a conscious choice my parents made – it emerged as a result of the existing cultural/linguistic milieu and the family’s interactions with it. Society very frequently does not even make an explicit decision to (rein/en)force a particular native language proficiency in public education – it’s just “how things are done”. (Ofc, in both cases, parents and societies CAN make explicit decisions to prioritize or restrict certain native language proficiencies, with obvious parallels.) Your native language proficiency will be shaped by what languages you’re exposed to, but it’s not a conscious choice you make nor something you can reverse later in life – and the older you get, the more fixed it becomes, for better and worse – if you want a society with a diverse range of native languages, you need to make sure it’s possible for children to be exposed to and raised in the environments where that can develop, and you need to make sure that social efforts to impart the lingua franca make it possible for children to be bi/tri/etc-lingual rather than enforcing the lingua franca as all childrens’ native tongue. The problem with accepting this conception of gender acquisition is that it invites regressives to study how conceptions of gender are imparted and spread, and socially engineer society and education such that even if there is a genetic predisposition towards a given identity it can be overcome or suppressed – but 1) they’re already trying to do this despite prevalence of genetic determinist narratives, and 2) if this is closer to how neurological development works, we’re not doing ourselves any favors by telling ourselves genetic determinism is how reality works strictly b/c it’s politically convenient.
In writing the above out, it immediately occurred to me that the genetic determinism stance invites parallels to very contentious topics regarding heredity and deaf culture. It’s not a parallel I’ve explored, but it does seem like would be worth exploring, if only to contrast social attitudes towards respecting genetic predispositions.
Sophie Jane 02.24.22 at 9:08 am
If you want to understand where all this “debate” is heading, by the way, then I draw your attention to what’s happening in Texas – and note that the legal opinion he’s drawing in cites Bell vs Tavistock, whose effects are still denying life-saving medical care to trans teenagers in the UK. Transphobic feminists and the Christian right are finding themselves with a common cause:
(“ Texas Governor Pushes to Investigate Medical Treatments for Trans Youth as ‘Child Abuse’”)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/science/texas-abbott-transgender-child-abuse.html
Moz 02.24.22 at 10:37 am
What I have in mind are cases like the ones I discuss in the post – less ubiquitous, more heavy duty stuff, and cases in which it is a requirement to do paperwork show your ID etc. anyway. Say a safe shelter.
First can I admit that when I read the original essay I assumed the demarcation would be “womyn born womyn only” shelters vs “open to any victim who appears woman-like” shelters (and obviously distinct from the “male victims of sexual and domestic violence”, shelters otherwise known as police cells). The idea that there would be a “place for the shunned” where being dumped there would be a formal outing, a declaration by the organisers that this person is trans… that strikes me as inherently violent. The mere act of publicly labelling someone as trans and saying “this person does not deserve our help because they are trans”… that’s not very nice.
I’m admittedly biased because I have trans friends, some of whom have used women’s shelters, and their experiences were on the positive side of mixed. I also have a friend who supports women who are imprisoned, and sadly one of the places we definitely do need segregation is trans-women-only prisons. No doubt the GC types would agree with that, and argue that obviously only male staff should be used in those places, with whatever other tortures they can come up with to ensure that those places are even closer to being a death sentence than existing prisons.
Moz 02.24.22 at 10:48 am
Also, it’s worth noting that some countries issue a complete set of ID to trans people with their new state-approved sex on it. So it’s going to be difficult to impose TERF rules on trans women in those countries if you’re using ID rather then, say, stereotyping, gossip or prejudice. The gap between “passes as female” and “masculine looking chick” is often flipped from how TERFs expect.
Will these “born womyn only” shelters also be open to trans men? I assume so, which means you’re going to have big burly biker boys sauntering round looking all hearty and masculine (take a look at “dykes on bikes” some time… they’re going to tweak your ideas about what “feminine” is). My observations locally suggest that at least some MtF trans guys still hang out in women or lesbian only spaces because that’s the social group they have. Expecting them not to go to the shelter their community runs if they need help is going to cause problems.
It’s also worth looking at the tale of the person who got “no” recognised as a legal gender in Australia. They’re quite a cool person in their own right, but the fight to have their gender officially recognised is an interesting tale.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/03/11/australia-is-first-to-recognise-non-specified-gender/
The census here also included more than just “boy” and “girl” as sex/gender types.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australian-census-to-include-a-gender-non-binary-option-for-the-first-time/7wfcf5nk6
Sophie Jane 02.24.22 at 4:35 pm
@Moz
And the USA now issues passports with an “X” gender option for non-binary genders, of course
Sebastian H 02.24.22 at 6:28 pm
“ If you are talking about people who have no compunction about engaging in lies and deceit, what measures are you proposing to guard against such people?”
Self ID is essentially just letting people state what they are. In settings where there is a specific sex related danger, gender self ID to get around it seems like it isn’t sufficient. You’d want very strong indications that the trans-identification was more than casual. Something like actual gender reassignment surgery. Or long pre-arrest record of an intense hormone regimen.
And again it’s really important to attend to the numbers. Cis-abusers vastly outnumber the total number of trans people. It doesn’t take many of them willing to use easy self-ID systems to make them outnumber actual trans people within the system.
oldster 02.24.22 at 7:47 pm
Moz, can I ask you to expand on this a bit?
“I also have a friend who supports women who are imprisoned, and sadly one of the places we definitely do need segregation is trans-women-only prisons.”
What kind of segregation is needed? Separating whom from whom? What is the current system, what is the problem with the current system, and how would this proposal address it?
Sophie Jane 02.24.22 at 9:49 pm
My sex is female, incidentally
J-D 02.24.22 at 11:01 pm
The intent of this suggestion is unclear because the description is incomplete. I can imagine ways of filling in the gap in the description, but I want to stress that I am confident that the results of doing so do not match the intent; I am going to illustrate this, not because I think it demonstrates what was intended but rather because it illustrates by contrast the unclarity of the original intent.
There is, obviously, a gap in this sentence: ‘It shall be a mandatory prerequisite of ———– to provide evidence of gender reassignment surgery’. One conceivable way of filling it would be this: ‘It shall be a mandatory prerequisite of admission to a women’s shelter to provide evidence of gender reassignment surgery’, but it should be obvious on reflection that this can’t possibly be what’s actually intended, because if that’s the whole of the position, with nothing left out, then cisgender women who haven’t had gender reassignment surgery wouldn’t, under the precise terms of that rule, be able to obtain admission to the shelter. We could fill in that gap in the meaning to create this rule ‘It shall be a mandatory prerequisite of admission to a women’s shelter to provide evidence either of being a cisgender woman or of having had gender reassignment surgery’, but then what evidence of being a cisgender woman is going to be accepted?
The point can be made even more precise, specific, and clear with a scenario presentation. Somebody seeks admission to a shelter and is met by a staff member who says, ‘This is a women’s shelter’.
‘I know that’, says the person seeking admission. ‘I’m a woman, and I need shelter.’
Staff member: ‘I’m not allowed to accept self-identification.’
‘You want identification? Okay, here’s my drivers licence.’
Staff member: ‘It doesn’t say anything here about your being a woman.’
‘No, of course it doesn’t! It’s a drivers licence, it doesn’t have that kind of information.’
Staff member: ‘Do you have a passport?’
‘No, I don’t have a passport! Do you only admit women to this shelter who have passports?’
Staff member: ‘Well, do you have a birth certificate?’
‘I suppose I must have had at some point, but I don’t carry it around with me! Do you only admit women to this shelter if they carry their birth certificates around with them? Look, I do have other forms of identification. Here’s my EFTPOS card, here’s my student card, here’s the staff card my employer issues, and here’s my Medicare card.’
Staff member: ‘None of these say anything about your being a woman.’
‘I know that! Tell me, what do you think I’m supposed to do? What do women who need to get into this shelter ordinarily do?’
Moz 02.24.22 at 11:16 pm
Can I apologise to anyone who uses the “gender critical” term, I can’t bring myself to do that. My experience of anti-trans activists is that they are very rigid about gender roles and often claim to be gender essentialists (viz, someone’s gender is determined strictly and only by some biological marker, whether that be external genitalia, genes or some other signal).
Separating whom from whom?
Obvious trigger warning for basically every kind of horror if you click any of these search results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=violence+against+trans+women+in+prison
Sadly trans women in prison tend to get assaulted from all sides. It’s not just sexual and physical assault by guards, there are anti-trans prisoners as well. Plus we have occasional anti-trans authority figures who actively look for ways to send trans woman prisoners into the male-specific parts of the system, whether that be police cells on arrest or male prisons after conviction. Don’t ask what happens to trans men.
Prisons seem to me to be the obvious place to start because they’re more obviously a site of violence for both cis and trans people (they’re the literal expression of the state arrogating the right of violence against its citizens to itself). We deliberately prevent prisoners from protecting themselves, and accept a corresponding obligation to protect them as a result.
So as with the idea that anti-trans activists are going to build a whole new network of women-born-women-only shelters, we end up saying we need a network of trans women only prisons.
Moz 02.24.22 at 11:27 pm
I feel the need to expand on this: the idea that anti-trans activists are going to build a whole new network of women-born-women-only shelters
I’m very cautious about entryism and repurposing, since I’ve seen both from anti-trans activists. If anti-trans activists want to build new shelters only open to people meeting their criteria for “acceptably woman-like people” then that’s kind of fine by me. Sure, they’re competing for resources with existing women’s facilities, but at least they’re not immediately taking away existing ones.
Sadly most of the noise I hear is anti-trans activists wanting to do exactly that: take facilities away from trans women. Bar transwomen from toilets, shelters, hospitals, whatever they can reach. That’s much easier than building new things, or indeed building anything. Tearing down is always the easier option.
It’s a hard line to draw in some cases because the women doing the work are sometimes the same women as the anti-trans activists (there’s at least one shelter I know of that is explicitly anti-trans now). But if we can’t draw a definite line saying “here are the replacement facilities for trans women and anyone who is comfortable with trans women”, I think we need to be absolutely resolute that nothing currently available gets taken away.
Trader Joe 02.25.22 at 12:30 pm
@26 Sebastian
I’m not sure what sort of numbers you are using but gender spectrum persons are usually estimated as somewhere between 3 and 7% of the population so its impossible for Trans harrassers to be 100x the population and improbable that its even as much as 10x. More practically there is a relatively small minority that bother to harrass and a much larger number that simply don’t accept. That may not fully invalidate the points you are trying to make, but I’d encourage you to revisit your priors as to the size of the minority you are asserting.
@30 J-D
The issue of producing an actual ID is really part of the problem for most Trans persons, while it is possible in some places to secure an ID where the sex on the ID matches the self identified sex in most cases it will be the sex which appears on a birth certificate (US centric – but nearly all drivers licenses have sex on them). Said differently, among all the persons who are Trans, only a fraction of them will have full legal documentation that matches the sex they identify. The system is simply not designed to make this easy and that’s even if they have the confidence/ lack the fear to go up against the system in the first place.
J-D 02.25.22 at 9:20 pm
Judging by information I obtained from a quick scan through Wikipedia, countries where drivers licences show information about sex (as is the case in the US) include China and Indonesia; countries where they don’t (as is the case in Australia) include Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, and countries which conform to the European driving licence standards of the European Economic Area (which covers most countries in Europe). So I don’t think it would be accurate to say that ‘nearly all’ drivers licences show this kind of information.
That said, checking for this information reminded me that a lot of countries, unlike both the US and Australia, wouldn’t rely on drivers licences as primary identification in the same way because they have national identity cards. Whether these show sex in all or nearly all cases I haven’t checked, but it does seem at least plausible.
It still seems reasonable to me to point out that, no matter how many countries there are where a system of requiring people to produce identification to prove their sex would be practicable (odious, but practicable), my own country isn’t one of them. Here, it would just not be possible to do it.
Something else which I am sure is not true in a lot of countries but which is true here is that it is possible to get the official primary record of sex/gender–the birth certificate–legally and officially amended. So, one and a half cheers for us?
Sophie Jane 02.26.22 at 11:36 am
Another apposite passage from Sara Ahmed:
“Historically, feminists have often been positioned as those who are imposing restrictions upon others because they have an agenda or because that’s their agenda (we can’t call women darling! We have to say Ms! We can’t use men to describe everyone!). In fact, anyone involved in trying to challenge norms and conventions to enable them to be more accommodating, we will know how quickly you will be judged as imposing restrictions on the freedom of others. A norm is a restriction that can feel like freedom to those it enables. To challenge a norm is thus almost always treated as restricting other people’s freedoms.”
“It is not only a bitter irony that tactics so often used against feminists are being used against trans people by “gender critical” feminists. It is telling us something about “gender critical” feminists that they are willing to use these tactics. Why has sex has become a tactic, not just a position but a project? By using sex as if sex was natural, material, and gender as if it was not, some people become “not,” not natural, immaterial, not real even, unreal. Danger can be located in the “not.” When sex is used tactically, turned into a project, trans people are treated not only as not natural, as immaterial, but as being powerful and dangerous.”
https://feministkilljoys.com/2021/10/31/gender-critical-gender-conservative/
tl;dr: by creating a false dichotomy between gender and sex, transphobes create the impression of a conflict where there is none. The purpose of this conflict is to represent trans people – particularly but not exclusively trans women – as a threat which they can then campaign to have eliminated. We can see this playing out in Britain and America in a series of moves to make it harder for trans people to exist (by restricting access to medical care, domestic violence and homeless services, and information for young people questioning their gender), to be visible in public (by restricting access to changing rooms and public toilets), and to have their voices heard (by “balancing” our media appearances with the opinions of bigots, smearing us with stories of harassment, and labelling anyone who speaks out as a “trans activist” whose words are by definition to be dismissed as extremism). As I said in comments on the previous article, making this a “gender war” in which we are invited to fight for your amusement is not a neutral position.
Sebastian H 02.27.22 at 5:22 am
Trader Joe: trans people are estimated at somewhere between one in ten thousand and one on thirty thousand. My understanding is that ‘gender spectrum’ is far too broad a category for what we are taking about including some gay people (butch lesbians and effeminate gay men) and non-binary people (who definitionally aren’t trying to get into single sex spaces). Those people are at most tangentially relevant, and honesty it feels like trying to include them it about two levels of abstraction too high. This is almost exclusively about people with male sex but female gender wanting to get into female sex only spaces. (Eg Trans men generally don’t want to be put into male prisons because they know that male sexed prisons won’t be safe for them.).
SusanC 02.27.22 at 4:37 pm
Co-incidentally, in the news right now…
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/government-no-interest-banning-trans-people-single-sex-toilets-liz-truss-tells-equalities-tsar-1474413
J, not that one 02.27.22 at 6:31 pm
Sophie Jane,
That looks like an interesting piece, though as you note, it’s very long.
It’s also (from what I saw skimming it) very focused on theory and academic disputes to the exclusion of the political (unless “political” is narrowly defined to involve the academic and only the academic). But it doesn’t persuade me that “gender-critical feminist” describes anything more than a UK-based political movement which I would have to live in the UK to understand anything about.
I understand that things have switched from “allies should understand gender is different from sex and is socially constructed” to “allies should understand that kind of gender-theoretical thinking was a mistake” (this move can be traced in Butler’s writing, for instance in the preface to the recent editions of “Gender Trouble”). My takeaway from the speed and completeness of the switch (not to mention its extreme recency) is that theory is irrelevant.
What matters is actual people’s needs and rights. Those people may have theories (I gather Butler has been generating a theoretical account of a community’s self-image, but that’s not quite what I mean), and I can respect that without committing to a course of study to understand them. Other people’s theorizing about them from afar doesn’t seem very helpful.
J, not that one 02.27.22 at 7:16 pm
I did notice Ahmed reads Beauvoir’s line “one is not born but becomes a woman” as support for an expansive notion of sex/gender. That is absolutely not how it reads to me. It posits a group of people who believe they are women but have not accomplished their “becoming” in the accepted way (and that through not having done so, they are essentially children and ought to be treated as such). At best, it suggests that what society expects of adult women, though not in any sense optional, is difficult and not at all “natural.” At worst, it suggests that one is not a woman until one has subordinated oneself to some man. Ahmed’s reading, that “woman is becoming,” amounts to essentially the same thing, as it removes entire categories of human experience from the range of possibilities open to someone who calls herself a woman.
oldster 02.27.22 at 7:29 pm
Moz @41 —
Thanks for the reply.
So, you show good reason why trans women and trans men need to be separated from the population of male prisoners. Did you intend as well to argue that they need to be separated from the population of female prisoners?
That’s what it looks like, when you say:
“Sadly trans women in prison tend to get assaulted from all sides.”
I don’t know how to interpret “all sides,” except to mean “by both men and women.”
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