Like a moth to a flame, I keep getting drawn back to the debate over trans rights. I’m not as interested in who is right as I am in why we can’t even seem to talk about who is right without the question itself being taken as inflammatory, since the other side is so egregiously wrong. (If you are familiar with the background to this you can skip to “Mapping the (dis)agreements”.)
I have made several attempts to facilitate a discussion between people who take opposing views. I managed one (published as a three part podcast) but neither participant was trans and both were so moderate it was hardly a peace-mission. The last person I asked seemed puzzled by the very fact that I thought there was a debate going on. “Can you clarify the disagreement that you are referring to?” they asked. I was baffled, How can they not know exactly what the disagreements are, since they are discussed ad nauseam?
Put simply, on one side of the main dividing line are those who argue that the category of biological sex is either empty or irrelevant when deciding how to classify trans men and women. This camp lacks a clear label, in part because they see themselves simply as people who support trans rights, have been the most vocal activists, and have therefore often been seen simply as the “trans rights lobby”, even though not all trans people take their line. We could call them trans-affirmative, meaning that they believe we should affirm the gender identities people say they have.
On the other side are the “gender critical” who say that biological sex matters a great deal in certain contexts, and that therefore to say “trans men and men, trans women are women, period” is too simplistic. We can and should often respect people’s gender identities but what people say they are is not the final world. Saying you’re a woman should not automatically qualify a criminal to be incarcerated in a women’s prison, for example.
Of course there are many sub-variants on both sides. The problem I have encountered is that the vast majority of the trans-affirmative do not see the gender-critical position as worthy of any respect. As my latest correspondent put it, “I’ve yet to see an articulating of the ‘gender critical’ position that does a sincere job of engaging with historical, biological, sociological, or anthropological data.” In other words, to be gender critical just is to be ignorant, speaking in bad faith, bigoted, or all three. You no more talk to these people than you do to avowed racists or homophobes.
This baffles me because I’ve read gender critical thinkers and even though they may be wrong, most seem to be sincere, informed and certainly not transphobic. So why the antipathy?
Mapping the (dis)agreements
Here’s my latest quixotic attempt to get to the bottom of this. When I try to think about what the different parties actually disagree about, I find myself with a very short list. Indeed, I can think of more that they do agree on. So I am going to present a list of three propositions to people on both sides and ask which they agree and disagree with. (I’ll tell you why I think this is doomed later.) Here they are:
1. Trans people deserve equal rights. There is a slogan going round “Trans rights are human rights.” I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. Gender critical feminists agree with the trans-affirmative that trans people should not be second-class citizens. But of course equal rights does not mean exactly the same rights. Men and women typically have different rights that reflect their biological differences, children have different rights to adults, those with diminished mental capacity or the physically disabled have special rights, and so on.
So there is a potential difference of opinion here. One could think either
1A. Trans men should have exactly the same rights as cis-under men, and trans women exactly the same rights as cis-gender women.
1B. Trans men and women should have equal but different rights to cis-gender men and women.
1A is not obviously true. In fact, it is prima facie implausible. A trans woman could not have a meaningful right to cervical smears because a trans woman doesn’t have a cervix. Neither is it obvious that a trans woman should have the right to compete in male sports where the physical advantages of having gone through a male puberty are huge. So if trans-affirmative people believe 1A they have to make their case and there is no reason for them to believe that people who agree with 1B are just ignorant or hateful.
But as it happens, it seems to me that many trans-affirmative people do not support 1A anyway. When I interviewed Sophie-Grace Chappell she accepted that there are at least some sports where trans women would not be allowed to compete alongside biological females.
So isn’t it the case that most people agree with 1B and only disagree when it comes to exactly which rights should the same and which should be different? If so, why can’t that discussion be had civilly, since both sides are in favour of equal rights?
2. Trans people should be treated according to their gender identity as much as possible, as long as doing so does not create more harms than not doing so. This is really an extension of 1. If you are committed to equal rights, you only confer different rights when there are compelling reasons to do so. So the default should be for trans men and women to be treated as their preferred gender. I think most gender-critical feminists accept this.
The differences emerge when we judge what “as much as possible” means. Again, it cannot simply mean “always”. It would be absurd to treat a trans man as a man, full stop, if that means denying him gynaecological health care. So again we have an issue where the question is about what the exceptions should be, not whether there should be any.
Of course, it is open to maintain the stronger position:
2A Trans people should always be treated according to their gender identity without question. If this means denying biological sex differences, this is a non-starter. But armed with abstruse academic theory, it is possible to make sense of this claim. It would amount to the idea that in every case where it seems we have to challenge gender identity, we can in fact get around the issue without using the language of sex or gender. So trans men are entitled to cervical smears as possessors of cervixes, or to child-birthing services on account of being pregnant, and so on. Many people laugh at this. They shouldn’t. This needs to be discussed without one side claiming those who propose it are being ridiculous and the other side claiming those who oppose it are bigoted or ignorant.
3. Trans people are not, and should not be portrayed as, dangerous or a threat. It is undeniably the case that there are many transphobes who do portray trans people as perverts out to corrupt children and rape biological females. But serious gender critical feminists do not. Kathleen Stock in Material Girls went out of her way to make it clear she didn’t think this, while lamenting that it was even necessary for her to do so, since none of her views imply it. Why must she do this?
Here I think we have to understand that for many trans people, this is not a polite common room debate but an existential struggle. They believe that there are reactionary forces who want to see trans people eliminated. Although it is implausible to believe that this is the aim of most gender critical feminists, if you think that their views put wind in the sails of people hell-bent on trans-elimination, you can see why the trans-affirmative don’t want to give them any oxygen of attention. But it is surely both wrong and counterproductive to portray people who want equal rights for trans people as enemies of the rights of trans people even to exist as trans.
So, it seems to me that both sides generally agree on three key claims: 1. Trans people deserve equal rights; 2. Trans people should be treated according to their gender identity as much as possible, as long as doing so does not create more harms than not doing so; and 3. Trans people are not, and should not be portrayed as, dangerous or a threat. In any sane world this would be enough agreement for people to be allies, not enemies. I even suspect that although both the first two are open to different interpretations, many on both sides agree on the same variants. So all the disagreements are about matters of detail. These may indeed be important details but they are disagreements among trans-rights supporters, not between them and trans-rights opponents.
If this analysis is wrong, there are two explanations. One is that I have been fooled and most gender-critical feminists reject one or more. The other is that most of the trans-affirmative take the “trans men are men, trans women are women” slogan to be literally true, with no ifs, buts or caveats. This would be astonishing, unless their insistence were more semantic than substantive. No reasonable person could deny that there are real differences between cis and trans men and women. You can’t even do biology without acknowledging the existence of sexual dimorphism. The only questions should be about how much these differences matter.
I’m going to ask various people on both sides whether they agree with these three principles. But here’s why I think it won’t work. Many will say “I cannot answer because the principles are framed unhelpfully/inaccurately/misleadingly,” even though they are actually framed clearly and plainly. This is exactly what happened when I once tried to see if I could get liberal theists to be clear about what their apparently non-literal faith meant. I came up with some pretty clear and unambiguous articles of 21st-century faith and many just refused to either agree or disagree with them. Someone summed up my predicament very well on twitter: “I’m sorry Julian, you seem to be working hard to establish a middle ground that nobody wants to occupy.” That sometimes seems to be my doomed mission on the trans issue. There is common ground, but both sides are leaving it fallow. I hope I am wrong.
News
I was on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week just after the last newsletter, with Sarah Bakewell, Leila Aboulela and host Adam Rutherford. We had a good discussion on humanism, thinking philosophically and related issues raised by Leila’s novel.
I’ll also be interviewing Sarah Bakewell for a Bristol Ideas event on 25 April.
I’m taking a mid-season break of series five of the Microphilosophy podcast, filling the hole with something completely different as a bonus episode. It’s a recording of an experimental live stand-up philosophy performance that has been sitting in my archive for several years. Whereas the series so far has been about how to think like a good philosopher, this one explores what happens if you apply philosophical methods in wildly inappropriate and opportunistic ways. You can subscribe to the series at Apple, Google and all the other usual podcast outlets.
I was also the guest of boxer Tiffanee Cook on her Roll With The Punches podcast. Since I never listen to myself I don’t know how it came out, but it was fun to record.
I’m coming to Scotland for the first time since Covid-19 stopped us travelling. Some talks are currently being arranged so I should be in Glasgow in May for the Aye Write festival and in Wigtown for its 25th anniversary book festival in late September.
On my radar
So much of my reading is for research or review that few of my recommendations are books. However, I would reiterate that Leila Aboulela’s novel River Spirit is terrific. It’s a genuinely gripping read and also gives fascinating historical insight into Sudan in the late nineteenth century as is temporarily escaped colonial rule. The contemporary resonances are instructive for understanding radicalism today, although the book doesn’t push these: the reader will just notice them.
I’ve reviewed Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis’s book Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape, although the review hasn’t been published yet. It’s an extremely readable and well-informed overview of what is wrong with the way we feed ourselves and how it should be put straight. The answers are system based, not willpower and individual consumer choices.
The Economist’s new podcast series Next Year in Moscow is a grimly informative. Arkady Ostrovsky travels across Europe and the Middle East to find out what the future holds for Russia, especially for those that opposed the war.
Over at the BBC, Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On revisits the events of two decades ago with admirable objectivity, talking to key players, including Tony Blair. It’s hard to listen to it and not conclude some terrible, avoidable mistakes were made, but it gives as fair a hearing to those who supported the invasion as is possible, without actually backing them.
Breaking Mississippi with US public radio journalist Jenn White is if anything even more absorbing. It’s the story of James Meredith’s battle to become the first black person to study at the all-white university of Mississippi. Americans are probably more familiar with such stories but for Europeans the scale of prejudice and division so relatively recently is astonishing.
“The limits of expert judgment: Lessons from social science forecasting during the pandemic” was especially interesting because it was published on the excellent The Conversation, the selling point of which is “Academic rigour, journalistic flair”. The article suggests academic rigour is not as reliable as we might hope, although I would stress it is still better than the alternative.
I’m not keen on blaming mobile phones and the Internet for all our social ills, but it seems there are good reasons for thinking that, actually, they do have a lot to answer for.
That’s it for now. And remember that if you enjoy these newsletters and would like to support my work, you can get access to exclusive content and regular online discussions by becoming a supporter.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.