Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

 "This book is about an idea, one that seems simple but has far reaching consequences. The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology.” [p1]

Helen Joyce’s skill as a journalist is to find excellent ways to articulate difficult matters. Her book has rightly been welcomed by a huge number of readers because it captures their current concerns about gender ideology and will enable readers to get up to speed with the “gender critical” perspective. It has also been greeted with howls of outrage from those activists who reject any such criticism on principle, and also with some sharp complaints by people who resent the way Helen Joyce has presented her material. There is a risk of losing sight of the book’s merits in addressing these protests from friend and foe but it is best not to ignore them.

The book is not primarily about the experiences or lives of transgender people, but rather about a set of ideas which the general population as a whole are being asked to accept, and the radical impact this has on the lives of people who are not transgender in any way. ”The other belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside other believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others.” [p4]

Once the irrational premise that “transwomen are women” is transformed into a legal principle, extraordinary consequences follow. ”Men who raped and murdered women are gaining transfers to women’s prisons. Women have lost their jobs for saying that male and female are objective, socially significant categories. I think it is deeply unkind to force female athletes to compete against males, and a scandal to sterilize children….” [p8] ”Ideas have consequences.” [p10]

Joyce gives a history of sex reassignment surgery and medicine from the start of the 20th Century, and of early attempts to accommodate the resulting changes legally in the US and the UK. She then turns to a landmark study in the US by Richard Green, who studied the development of a group of boys considered very feminine and a control group of more masculine seeming boys. In this and a number of other studies, every “sissy” boy outgrew their dysphoria and most turned out to be gay as adults. She considered also research by Paul Vasey comparing gender nonconforming boys in Samoa, Mexico and Canada, concluding that children classed as transgender in Canada were clearly accepted as and identified with their biological sex in other countries and cultures without any support for the concept of a third sex. She looks at length into the work of Ray Blanchard in Canada, including his classification of male transsexuals as autogynephilic or as gay men, and she discusses some of the conflict around this work.

Joyce uses The Matrix as a model to explain the main claims of gender ideology which she identifies as follows: that binary sex is an artefact of western colonialism, that clownfish demonstrate the possibility of switching from one sex to the other, that people with intersex conditions prove sex is not binary and that sex – not gender – is socially constructed. The last idea is associated especially with the writing of Judith Butler. None of these claims survive critical scrutiny.

Joyce looks at the fairly recent innovation of treating children as transgender, and discusses the spurious evidence deployed to justify the increasingly early use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. She makes particular note of the quite weird arguments used by Diane Ehrenshaft, at the University of California, to promote transing children as young as 3 years old. Her next chapter examines the evidence of social contagion driving teenage girls to transition in growing numbers. She then reviews the way gender ideology is packaged for education and media aimed at children. This is a complete inversion of equal opportunities teaching in the past, when children were encouraged to widen their understanding of what girls or boys may do and think, since it entails convincing children that they must select a gender identity from a set of rigid sex stereotypes, in which there is a defined way that boys think and a way that girls think. Gender ideology is also acting to destroy all of the safeguarding built up over many years to protect children from predatory males. “The history of institutional child-abuse has shown how predators can ‘groom’ people and organisations to accept behaviour that should have raised red flags.” [p127]

In her next chapter, Joyce points out that this leads to dire consequences for feminism. “They define womanhood as stereotypes enacted by people of different body types, rather than a body type that need not in any way limit the behaviour of the people who possess it.” [p135] The ideology acts to erase the very category of woman; it also erases the basis for same sex attraction and homosexuality, with especially serious consequences for lesbians exposed to harassment and intimidation.

Historically, when women have been excluded from male spaces and the opportunities associated with them, whether schools, jobs, sports, or political institutions, there has been no difficulty discriminating between men and women. Today there is a widespread attempt to deny sex differences as men who identify as women demand and are granted access to women’s spaces and Joyce pays particular attention to the increasing admission of males, including violent sex offenders, to women’s prisons, before devoting a whole chapter to the issue of men competing in women’s sports. A long discussion of so called “bathroom wars” in the United States describes a decade of legal and political battles which Americans have interpreted in party political terms, with the incongruous result of establishing Obama and the Left as enemies of women’s rights and Donald Trump as their defender. “Many of the country’s culture wars have become ‘frozen conflicts’ where the combatants have dug in and a peace deal seems out of reach.” [p221]

In other countries, though, the pattern is more typically one of progress by stealthy lobbying and backdoor influence, with major legal changes affecting the entire population introduced and implemented with a complete absence of public consultation or debate and a total refusal to balance the demands of trans activists against the rights of other parts of society, especially of women. Joyce makes an especially powerful comparison of the huge public debate through which abortion rights and gay marriage were introduced in Ireland, with immense popular support as a result, with the secretive methods used to pass and implement radical gender recognition legislation whose effects are only slowly becoming apparent and starting to be reported. She also refers to the behind the scenes influence used to insert important language into Britain’s Gender Recognition Act without proper scrutiny. There has been no attempt to win hearts and minds in support of these changes, only silencing of debate and attacks on critics. No less striking has been the adoption of trans ideology by non governmental organisations. “…it has led organisations right across civil society not only to abandon their core principles but to actively work against them. This is further evidence – if any were needed – that the campaign for self-ID is the opposite of a civil rights movement.” [p248]

This is the difficult context to the emergence in the UK of an effective and growing gender critical movement, including the birth of new feminist groupings, parents organisations and of the LGB Alliance. Joyce described some of the factors that worked in their favour in a critical period of time and predicts that they will succeed in challenging the transgender lobbies, exposing their tactics and forcing this debate into the open, which is where any authentic civil rights movement belongs in a democracy.

This book covers a lot of ground but it is not an academic book and does not offer footnotes or identify sources for most of its comments. Perhaps Joyce was rushing to get the book published. Perhaps (pure speculation) she assumes a general readership would find such academic diligence tedious; I can’t say as I’m not a general. This annoyed me as a reader – I find original sources comforting - but for the most part (with exceptions) it would not be terribly difficult to track down the original from the information given and most of the material is already well known. Her task is not original research but popular presentation of the issues. There is also a strong suggestion online that it annoys people whose work Joyce relies on without giving proper credit; of course careful acknowledgement of other’s work is a standard practice which Joyce and her publisher are surely aware of. I can only speculate that Joyce does not think she ever claims credit for other people’s work – it is pretty obvious that she is summarising material from many different sources.

Maybe, too, she is trying to keep away from controversies that are not about her and not worth the energy of joining. That won’t work in this environment. Already at least one Goodreads review pronounces that Joyce is a fascist on the grounds that a page or two in her 300 page book relies on information which is likely to originate from the work of Jennifer Bilek, an extremely credible feminist who has researched this topic extensively and who, in the course of active public engagement over many years, did, on one occasion, retweet a link to a YouTube video made by someone whom all agree is indeed a fascist. For added virtue, accusations of antisemitism can be made on the specious grounds that the book refers to some billionaires who happen to be Jewish. It is a short step from this to allegations of genocidal intent. If you find that kind of guilt by tenuous association convincing, then you can become a social justice warrior and have many internet friends.

Since the problems cannot be avoided, and activists will transform the slightest hint of a disparaging red herring into the basis for an all-out attack, maybe it would have been better if the book was a bit more loyal towards others working in this area who have been vilified. Apart from Bilek, who was offended by omission, I was struck by the inclusion of a sideswipe at Graham Linehan on page 254 that was gratuitous and undeserved; saying he became “a target for mass reporting (assisted, it must be said, by the ease with which he could be goaded).” This implies he was partly responsible for his own harassment. We really will need another writer to give a proper account of the personal sacrifices made by people willing to take a stand against gender ideology, but also of the clever ways they found to bring this issue to wider attention. Examples include the PR genius of Posey Parker (she is mentioned) and the cross party political work of Emma Nicholson in Parliament (she is not mentioned). But I’m not sure how Joyce might have fitted this into her already lengthy book. There is always room for more writing and more research in this topic.

I don’t agree with the more excited commentators who see this as the full and definitive statement of the gender critical position regarding gender ideology but I do agree that it is a successful book in its own terms; it announces its intentions on page one and it achieves what it set out to do. This is a terrific introduction to the topic and it will surely will help to force the gender ideology lobbies into a public explanation and testing of their demands for such a radical legal and social transformation.

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Material Girls: Why Reality Matters

Kathleen Stock teaches philosophy at an English university and brings to bear both her academic discipline and her evident competence as a teacher and mentor in this very accessible, readable account of gender identity theory in this country. She strives, courageously, to build a bridge between opponents and advocates of gender identity theory. Where possible, she aims to give a charitable reading of the beliefs that she is trying to understand and evaluate. When specific arguments turn out to be demonstrably unsupportable, her inclination is to make a distinction between the defective ideas, opinions or indeed political tactics on the one hand and the genuine interests and concerns of trans-people on the other. She is impatient with what she perceives as tribal mantras and has sharp words for radical or gender critical feminists, claiming to believe only in “evidence based feminism,” a new category to my mind. If she fails to impress those with strong views on either side of this debate, she may prove very helpful to civilians wishing to be informed without being pressured to take sides. I personally find it hard to imagine how being informed and being neutral can be reconciled and so I find Stock’s stance unconvincing, even rather arrogant, but this remains an excellent discussion of the subject, it included some great material that I value and it is well worth reading.

Ultimately, she argues that there is a large scale political lobby promoting ideas and positions that do not, in reality, serve the interests of transgender people themselves and that it would be desirable if her criticisms were seen as an opportunity for transgender people themselves to demand better and less self-defeating kinds of support. It does not help transgender people of any description to promote bad science or irrational concepts. It certainly does not help them to permit let alone submit themselves to medical malpractice or protect professional service providers from scrutiny. But none of this can be subjected to the types of scientific or philosophical scrutiny required so long as the supposed defenders of transgender people, the professional lobbies, the well-funded charities and the trans rights activists, pursue a vendetta against proper investigation. Cancel culture, which is demonstrably rampant and growing, is harmful to the interests of transgender people themselves; it is certainly not compatible with academic, scientific or clinical standards in a democratic society.

Stock’s selection of topics to review reflects her status as a philosopher. She continually asks what it is that we mean when we use or refuse to use important concepts. She explores and refutes very succinctly and effectively the suggestions that sex is not binary and that biological sex can reasonably be disregarded. She sets out a variety of areas of life in which a proper understanding of sex is indispensable. She evaluates critically the notion of sex being a social construct, puts to rest mistaken readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic remark that women are not born but made, and dissects the ill constructed theory that every human individual has a gender identity.

She also illustrates the way trans lobbies have successfully imposed their objectives in the public domain while pushing aside and silencing alternative voices. Whether the Women and Equalities Committee of Parliament reviewing the Gender Recognition Act in 2016 or the capture of Stonewall as a charity founded to support gays and lesbians by people who directly attack same sex attraction and have used Stonewall funds to promote teaching about the “cotton ceiling,” somehow society has allowed trans activists to set aside the needs of women, children, gays, lesbians and promote instead an ideology that not only lacks proper academic foundations, but lacks political legitimacy and fails to serve the interests even of the transgender people who are supposed to benefit. Her few examples could have been multiplied but perhaps at the expense of her purpose.

Stock works to devise a constructive path forward for transgender people while demanding at the same time respect for the methods of scientific evidence and critical reasoning. She relies especially on the notion of “immersion,” which I think is intended to mean a psychological method of acting as though things were other than they really are. She gives the analogy of immersion in a computer game environment. I think she could usefully have invoked Coleridge’s well known concept of “suspending disbelief” to describe a scenario in which we can accept an invented reality without losing our ability to return to realistic thinking as required. In general, it is feasible and even common to hold two conflicting views of reality in mind when that is socially useful or psychologically comforting. What she argues, though, with vocal support from some older trans people, is that we may not sacrifice the self-evident truth that sex is immutable and we may not set aside our awareness that women, children, gays and lesbians continue to suffer serious disadvantages for which they need protection or remedies.

There is nothing new about the idea that we each construct for ourselves a “self” that depends on narratives and beliefs given to us in our particular culture. I think for instance of Mary Midgely’s book, “The Myths We Live By”. This is a fascinating strand in philosophy, in religion and more recently in psychology that can be traced back for example to the earliest Buddhist teachings, is often speculated upon by psychotherapists and in the psychoanalytic tradition, or examined by experimental psychology in the context of child development, including long term research into attachment theory and other work underpinning educational psychology. The use of a computer game analogy is entirely appropriate to a culture that is increasingly allowing children and young adults to take their guiding myths from social media and the internet, permitting direct influence from the most unexpected and least responsible sources. What I think, and Stock does not pursue, is that there are vulnerable people who can be extremely susceptible to persuasion and that there are people sufficiently malevolent to use the power of persuasion for harmful ends. I don’t think one need read terribly far into Queer Theory to identify a well-funded and influential movement seeking to destabilize conventional notions about sex and gender in ways that are not benign and not properly challenged (see “Queering Schools”). I don’t think it is hard to recognise the impact of the trans industry and the influence of names like the Arcus Foundation drumming up demand for their products in a way that Plato himself would have recognized (and what philosophy book is complete without Plato?):-

My trial will be like that of a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children. Just consider what kind of defense such a man could offer... children of the jury, this fellow has done all of you abundant harm, ... giving you bitter draughts and compelling you to hunger and thirst, whereas I used to feast you with plenty of sweetmeats of every kind. What do you think a doctor could find to say in such a desperate situation? If he spoke the truth and said, All this I did, children, in the interests of health, what a shout do you think such a jury would utter? Would it not be a loud one?

There is a view that writers who appeal to logic / reason as some higher level platform from which to survey our mortal ponderings are in reality using a rhetorical strategy to silence critical thought; effectively they rely on an appeal to authority which is, of course, a type of fallacy. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I think that Stock’s attempt to be dispassionate is unconvincing and her sharp attacks on radical or gender critical feminists are unacceptable. My concern with gender identity theory is not only that it lacks empirical grounding (which ought to be fatal in itself for pity’s sake) but also that it rests on crass and sexist gender stereotypes and offers young people an impoverished and unhealthy framework on which to construct a meaningful sense of self. It is destructive of all the work invested by feminists and educators generally in raising the aspirations and enriching the imaginations of children and young people, but especially of girls and women, producing [some] boys who write poetry or cook and [some] girls who enjoy maths or football and both treating the other and themselves as unique individuals rather than objects or members of a category. This conflict between the attempt to press us into socially prescribed categories or drawing out the complexity of individual difference, including sex difference, is a theme which feminist philosophers have, again, traced back to the roots of Western philosophy and the values embedded in our culture. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

As long ago as 1979 Janice Raymond explained in detail the sheer sexism of the gender identity concept, anticipated most of the major issues that remain central to today’s debate [including those discussed by Stock in this book] and recognised that the people driving this movement were not acting in good faith and could not be deterred by reasonableness. “Medicalized transsexualism represents only one more aspect of patriarchal hegemony. The best response women can make to this is to see clearly just what is at stake for us with respect to transsexualism and to assert our own power of naming who we are.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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