Gender Critical Rhetoric as Thought Police

GC arguments boil down not to their Gender Critical Beliefs, but to a set of Gender Critical Norms.

After the Forstater employment tribunal in the UK, Gender Critical Beliefs have had a relatively tidy description set in law. That is, the gender critical ideologue believes that:

• sex is biological and immutable,
• people cannot change their sex and,
• sex is distinct from gender-identity

However, what I discover when I find time to argue with GCs, is that it’s not simply that “trans women are men”. Rather for them, frequently instead when it comes to subjects like trans inclusion in sports, sex-segregated spaces, or other endeavours, the GC believes most of all that trans women ought be regarded and treated as if we were men, and it follows on from this that it is necessary to ignore documented facts where they might trouble this obligation.

That is to say, so far as I can tell, Gender Critical Beliefs are less a set of beliefs than a practice obliged by the need to redefine trans people, our rights and human dignity out of the conversation.

As a clear example of this, any discussion of where trans people should be accommodated in sex-segregated spaces is met with an insistence that “Trans women are male and therefore belong in male spaces”. The obligation for trans women to live as men that pops out of this is made plain and clear. Trans women are permitted to live our lives in peace, so far as the characteristic that makes us trans women is not permitted. By constructing a definition in this way, there is no space for regard of the specifics of our experiences. The aggregate of men’s lives and interests are allowed to command a substantial degree of clout in defining everything from the national sport to popular music tastes to frequently political policy in a male dominant society. The specifics of trans women’s lives and interests and desires for how we want to live our lives are not just relegated to inferior provision on the fringes of gender but a form of mandatory obliteration where it is not just habit to forget about our needs but obligatory following this approach.

It’s a documented fact that trans women’s experiences of being assumed to fit profiles and expectations based on men and an assumption that trans women are best approximated by a male standard results in harm to trans women. This is a fact whether it’s a matter of sports participation (trans women are widely under-included in sport, similarly to other women, for example there were only 7 trans women registered to play rugby out of 200,000 people in the RFU at the time the ban came into force), prison safety and accommodation (trans women placed in men’s prisons are sexually assaulted at an astonishing rate several times that of any other population in UK prisons), gendered pay gaps (trans women are paid less due to both being trans & women) and healthcare (in this area in particular neither assumption that trans women are identical to men nor cisgender women particularly helps trans women).

It’s simply a fact that trans women are let down by assumptions that our provisions in society can be approximated in general by allocating us to provisions designed for cisgender men. Even in diagnosing prostate cancer — a male-organ related cancer — it has been found that trans women suffer more fatal instances of this because prostate cancers in trans women are harder to spot using cisgender men as the baseline.

Let’s ignore the philosophical question over what a man or a woman is because it doesn’t matter as much as not subjecting any group to disproportionate harms vindictively. What we have in practice if we look at the evidence here is a bloody minded social movement that is insistent on continuing to do harm to trans women by APPLYING male norms to us in full knowledge that they do not fit. This bears a striking resemblance to the ways that biases towards catering to the male norm have negatively affected women throughout history, causing fatal risks in cars, hostile environments in workplaces, and pushing women out of numerous social endeavours.

I don’t especially care one way or another for the argument that trans women are or aren’t women. I care that trans women are hurt by the assumption that we are, and should be regarded as men. This has been found numerous times to have a harmful effect on us in discrimination cases around the world where people have tried to defend anti-trans discrimination on the basis that “we just treat all males the same way” resulting in an identifiable negative effect that only affects trans women (and more broadly transfeminine people assigned male at birth who also aren’t cisgender men, see Taylor v JLR).

GC beliefs focus on definitions of what people ARE categorically in a question begging philosophical exercise about whether meaningful discrete sex categories exist in a species with so much range in overlapping sex characteristics. They do this because doing this is an important distraction from looking that the practical realities of what happens to trans women when that belief about what “is” is transformed into an “ought” in the form of law or policy. Questions of how to define a group of people do not need tight formal boundaries on them in order to have practical utility in any other circumstance, and in any other circumstance, people will generally agree that any definition of categories ought to meet the needs of those affected by categorisation. It’s because of this that categories are in natural language far from immutable and are instead regularly subject to cultural and social changes to suit the needs and norms of the culture creating them.

A consequence of understanding this is we shouldn’t be arguing from categories at all. We should instead argue from human needs, welfare, civil rights and liberties, and the basic common principle that everyone has needs that must be met and a just society is one that broadly works to balance everyone’s needs. Where we create categories in language to denote particular groups we should do this in a way that is compatible with the dignity and rights of those involved. Where we allocate resources in society to different groups which we have labelled any given way, we should do so in a way that’s compatibel with the dignity and rights of those involved.

This seems like a really simple basic, frankly liberal ethical norm rather than a radical demand. And yet it seems to be radical by present day standards where it people take this seriously as a philosophical debate between the merits of gender Platonism vs Social Constructivism or whatever while trans people are going hungry, getting raped, abused by partners, or being killed.