I thought a long time before embarking on this particular blog. The trans issue has become poisonous; almost anyone who touches it gets attacked by one side or the other, mostly verbally but sometimes even physically. People have lost their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts for saying the wrong thing. This does not mean, God forbid, that anyone gets cancelled! We are told again and again that that doesn’t happen and only right-wing conspiracy theorists think it does. In real life, there are no cancellations, only “consequences”. But when offers of work mysteriously dry up, or your publisher suddenly tells you that he can’t publish your book after all because you don’t follow his company’s “values”, those consequences do look horribly like being cancelled.
Fortunately I am well past retirement age, so no human resources department can give me the sack for violating their diversity policy, and I have no mortgage, so no bank or building society can throw me out on the street. As to books, I have only written two and both were self-published many years ago now. So I am more or less free to say what I like. If other people don’t like it, they will probably put it down to my being on the edge of senility. And if anyone references this blog on Twitter (sorry, X) and kicks up a storm about it, I shall never know as I don’t visit such toxic places on principle.
It seems to me that in all the endless talk about this issue, no one seems prepared to spend a couple of minutes at the outset defining their terms. People just don’t do that any more. But how can you discuss such a complex or controversial issue if neither you nor your opponent know what precisely you mean by a word like “gender”, or whom you do or don’t include under the heading “trans”? It seems to me that at least four different things (indeed different kinds of things) are being confused in many of these discussions:
These are not only four different things; they are different kinds of things. Chromosomal and genital sex have to do with biology, gender identity is psychological, and gender roles are sociological. Even people who distinguish biological sex from gender don’t usually distinguish chromosomal from genital sex. These can occasionally differ, as in the famous case of the athlete Caster Semenya. And of course they can be made to differ artificially by using surgery. Similarly, if you don’t recognise the difference between internal subjective gender identity and socially defined gender roles, you are not going to be able to help a lot of confused young people who don’t know the difference either, but are readily persuaded that they must be trans because they lack the masculine or feminine characteristics that people expect them to have.
Nowadays when gender-critical people talk about biological sex, they nearly always mean chromosomal sex. Why they consider this to be so important I don’t know. It is obviously important in embryonic development but it has played almost no role in history, since chromosomes were only discovered in the mid-twentieth century. For uncounted centuries before that, sex meant genital sex. In most of the world it still does. What after all is the first thing a midwife does after delivering a baby, before she even cuts the cord? She looks between its legs and then says, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” according to what she finds there. She does not, even in a technologically sophisticated society like ours, take a scraping from the inside of the baby’s cheek and send it to a laboratory to have a chromosome count done except in the rare cases where the genitals are ambiguous. And when ordinary people object to transwomen in women’s lavatories, changing rooms or prisons, it is not the presence of stray Y chromosomes that they are really objecting to but the presence of penises.
A complicating factor is that both chromosomal sex and genital sex are almost binary but not quite. In each case there are a few people who are “neither/nor”. Chromosomal intersexes have weird counts like X0 and XXY and are usually sterile. Genital intersexes can have something that looks halfway between a clitoris and a penis, perhaps with a urethral opening halfway up it. Such people, unlike the rest of us, really do have to have a sex assigned to them at birth because it is far from obvious what sex they are. And when internal organs are taken into account, there is even more room for anomalies: hermaphrodites with an ovary on one side and a testis on the other, or a pair of ovotestes. Or half a uterus. Or half a vagina and no uterus at all. None of these anomalies is directly relevant to the trans issue but they do give the lie to the view often held by Christian fundamentalists that, because the Book of Genesis says “God created them male and female”, nothing else exists or can exist.
Even the belief that gender identity has no biological basis at all could be challenged on the ground that we think with our brains, and the brain is a biological organ which develops through prenatal life like any other organ. Given that there are individuals whose internal sexual plumbing is anomalous, why should there not be other individuals whose neural pathways and connections are anomalous and perhaps more appropriate to the opposite sex? And since we don’t yet know how to rewire brains, there may really be no way to resolve the inconsistency but to reshape the body to match how the brain insists it should be.
And what in any case do we mean when we say that someone is transgender? Nowadays this word is used to conflate several things that used to be kept separate. In other circumstances, such conflations can be useful. Science often advances when conceptual links are formed between things that were previously seen as different and unrelated. But when a subject is as contentious as this one, careful and exact definition of words is the only safe road to go down. So we have:
Actually when children with gender dysphoria are allowed to discuss their problems with a properly qualified child psychologist, they often find that they are not transgender at all but have autism or a developing gay orientation. This is not as surprising as it sounds. A lot of gay men go through a period of effeminacy as boys, and a lot of lesbians were tomboys at school. Apparently some people at the Tavistock Clinic used to joke that “gender-affirming surgery” was the final solution to the gay problem and that parents preferred a trans son to a lesbian daughter. There are some indigenous American nations living along the Pacific coast who have found a similar solution. They force gay boys that get caught to redefine themselves as girls. They are given female names, dress as girls and learn female arts such as cooking and beadwork. In return for being good girls, they are allowed to marry legally as women. Their husbands of course are the gay boys who didn’t get caught, since only a gay man wants a male spouse. In effect these people are allowed to do whatever they like in the privacy of their own tipi as long as they keep up the pretense outside the tipi that one of them is a woman. And the tribe can say, “We don’t have any gay people here! That’s a white man thing.”.
As for autistic children, all the social expectations and rules around gender roles must be a waking nightmare for them: what you are supposed to wear, what you are supposed to like, how you are supposed to talk about sex and to whom... Being autistic already means living in a world governed by hundreds of rules that everyone else seems to know intuitively and that no one ever explains to you. No wonder they live on the edge of panic much of the time, and nothing panics them more than change, so puberty is even more difficult for them than it is for neurotypicals. And just as they are trying to cope with all those weird changes in their bodies, along come a whole mass of new rules about how to be a man or a woman, much of it totally at odds with their own likes and dislikes. It must be a great temptation to see if being the other gender might perhaps be easier — or just switch the whole thing off with a course of puberty-blocking pills.
When I was in my teens, I remember being distinctly unenthusiastic about becoming a woman. I was simply not interested in making up my face and trying to be pretty or wearing pretty clothes. I did not want to have boyfriends (or girlfriends for that matter), let alone get married. I did not want to have children; I found babies revolting and still do. But neither did I want to be a boy or a man. I was never a tomboy. I wore my hair short for convenience but in those days I really disliked the idea of wearing trousers. I never saw anything remotely interesting or attractive about climbing trees, going camping or getting into fights. I was intellectually competitive but quite uninterested in sports. I liked reading and music and studying insects, not socialising or flirting, and certainly not being a team player or doing what was expected of me. I was happiest on my own, and gradually I developed my own preferred lifestyle, working out where I had to compromise with social expectations and where I could afford to dig my heels in and say no thanks.
Children like that are not allowed to exist today. They get pounced on by all kinds of “intersectional” experts and told that they need to identify as non-binary or trans or maybe as cats, and use silly pronouns. They can’t just be themselves, one of a kind. And they certainly can’t be allowed to spend time on their own, away from social pressures, to find out who they actually are and what being themselves means. Because everyone is now permanently online, chained to the internet by their smartphone as if by an invisible umbilical cord.
In the world that I grew up in, sex and gender ID were regarded as fixed, but gender roles became increasingly fluid as the 1950s gave way to the 60s. This meant that my generation, the boomers, could decide which bits of our assigned gender role we wanted to take on board and which bits to jetison, without ever having to quarrel with the way our bodies were made. That was not entirely true of my parents’ generation. My aunt Felicia became a paediatric consultant at the Vienna General Hospital, but she had to give up the expectation of marriage and motherhood in order to do so. Effectively she had to become a kind of honorary man. And in my grandparents’ generation, even that was not possible. Gender roles were set in iron, as unchangeable as biological sex.
I find it ironic and worrying that we seem recently to have gone right back to a new version of that 19th century tyranny, an upside-down version in which gender ID may be fluid and even genital sex is modifiable, but gender roles are once again treated as fixed and unalterable. If you aren’t GI Joe with a gun, then you aren’t really a boy. If you aren’t a princess in pink, waiting for her prince to come, you aren’t really a girl. And in either of these cases, some kind of gender reassignment, social or medical or social followed by medical, is being pressed on young people as the all-purpose answer to any kind of psychological problems that might cause them.
We used to have a saying back in the 1960s: do not adjust your mind; there is a fault in reality. Perhaps we need to update it for the 2020s: do not adjust your gender ID; there is a fault in society.
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