The Matter Of “Material Girls”, Part 2
Fabricated Identity
A Curious Misrepresentation Of “Gender Identity”
Orientation
This is the second in a series of articles, beginning here, that discusses Kathleen Stock’s “Material Girls”.
The Central Claim And How It Collapses
The fourth chapter of “Material Girls” intends to illuminate:
“what gender identity is” [p110]
However, it is absolutely not focused on what gender identity actually is.
In the main, it is simply a vehicle for vague speculations about aetiology; how the gender identity of an individual comes into being.
But there are no neat explanations for how “identity” emerges in terms of genetics, neural wiring diagrams or any other simple set of causal factors. Thus, the content of this chapter is little more than armchair psychoanalysis, used as a vehicle for unhindered expression of anti-trans sentiments.
The Bigger Picture
It rapidly becomes clear that Stock doesn’t really understand what is meant by the term “gender identity” at all; very much a fundamental flaw in a book dedicated to dismantling the idea of “gender identity theory”.
This is apparent in her assertions that only trans people (plus a few outliers) have a gender identity, for example:
“if we want to understand what having a gender identity is like, we shouldn’t ask non-trans people, for many report no particularly strong sense of one.” [p111]
and
“most non-trans people … don’t have gender identities at all” [p138]
This is utter nonsense; it is akin to saying that only gay people report having a sexual orientation because no else has an idea of what it feels like to experience the esoteric sensation of being orientated.¹
The suggestion that having a gender identity is specifically a marker of transness makes no sense. To see why this is so, let’s refer back to Robert Stoller’s original conceptualization of what gender identity is:
Gender identity is the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female’. This term gender identity’ will be used in this paper rather than various other terms which have been employed in this regard, such as the term ‘sexual identity’. ‘Sexual identity’ is ambiguous, since it may refer to one’s sexual activities or fantasies, etc. The advantage of the phrase ‘gender identity’ lies in the fact that it clearly refers to one’s self-image as regards belonging to a specific sex.
[Stoller, R.J. (1964). A Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 45:220–226]
Clearly, anyone who describes themselves with phrases like “I am a man” or “I am a woman” is asserting a gender identity in these terms.² We can fairly say that most non-trans people do, in fact, have a “particularly strong sense” of gender identity as described here.
This completely undermines the common trope of anti-trans “gender critical” rhetoric that “I am a woman” can be understood as referencing “sex not gender” — a claim often made via the refrain “I have no gender identity, I just am a woman”.
This kind of line — which Stock is clearly following — relies on the idea that “gender” is unreal, that “gender identity” must therefore be nonsensical, and consequently, that the idea of being transgender is chimerical, aerie faerie nonsense ripe for mockery and dismissal.³
Holding that line requires insisting on a false dichotomy between sex and gender which is not reflected in real-word language usage (as Stoller’s definition shows). As we’ll see in If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another, “sex” and “gender” are near synonyms that have closely interlocked meanings, and which are often interchangeable.
Of course for cisgender people, visceral awareness of the body — the sense of interoception, sometimes instead called coenesthesis or somesthesis — will tie into one of the main factors originally conceived as contributing to gender identity:
“the anatomy and physiology of the external genital organs, by which is meant the appearance of and the sensations from the external, visible, and palpable genitalia …”
[Stoller, R.J., ibid.]
But this is not to say that interoception is somehow impaired in trans people: it’s simply that other factors can be more important in instilling and shaping that “sense of knowing to which sex one belongs”.
We don’t need a detailed explanation of how gender identity arises to accept that this “sense of knowing” exists in both cis and trans people. No justification is needed for why an individual develops the specific sense that they do, just as we don’t need to dissect the origins of sexual orientation to accept both gay and straight sexuality as equally real and valid.
Credo
The use of aetiology opens up a wide-ranging grab bag of topics; Stock uses them all to paint trans identity as phony, fragile, phantasmal, and above all amenable to dismantling.
There’s too much in the chapter to cover everything in detail, but I can, at least, clearly lay out the major strands of transphobic belief that are rehearsed, and discuss why they are wrong.
Proxy Attacks
When we look some of the claims that Stock makes about “gender identity” throughout the book — having rejected the idea that it is some exoticism largely confined to trans people — they look ridiculous:
“once it’s acknowledged that gender identity involves self-interpretation, it could just as easily be true that gender identity is a response to prior mental health difficulties” [p136]
Paraphrase: “I think trans people are insane”
“the presence of a particular gender identity is in danger of looking unverifiable” [p141]
Paraphrase: “Being trans is a delusion”
It seems strange, even by the standards of gender identity theory, to say, for example, that Anne Lister’s apparently male gender identity must make her a man when she wouldn’t classify herself that way. [p148]
Paraphrase: “Gender identity is someone else’s description of you”
It’s Stock’s “identification” misrepresentation of what gender identity is that leads to the completeness of cringeworthy embarrassment here. We’ll come to that in a moment.
Crucially, the idea that gender identity is specifically a characteristic of trans people underpins the use of confected menaces like “gender identity theory” or “gender identity ideology” as attackable proxies for the existence of trans people.
Such a proxy attack is the entire basis of “Material Girls”, one which aligns it with a broader movement.
“Social Contagion”
In “Homosexuality as Contagion” by Nancy J. Knauer, some of the central themes of homophobic moral panic are analysed — and all of them are rehashed in today’s obsessive monologues against trans people.
A novel transgender version of the “social contagion” trope⁴ is put forward by Stock in this chapter, by casually eliding two disparate notions: “identity” is equated with an unrelated psychoanalytic concept of “identification”.⁵
Stock intends “identification” to have a very specific sense, which is seeing oneself as connected to an ideal of masculinity or femininity, perhaps one incarnated as an individual. (This is the classic misunderstanding of supposing that gender identity is somehow caused by the desire to express gender stereotypes — a notion I’ve previously debunked in another article).
This constructed-out-of-thin-air “model” is then used to sell the idea that having a trans identity is no different to idolising a pop star or supporting a football team: see, for example, pp 127–128 and pp 136–137.
This “identification model” is a fever dream of assertion, with nothing substantive to support it. It simply suggests the dangers of contagion in a way absolutely in line with Knauer’s observation:
“One of the most salient features of the contagion model is that everyone in society is potentially at risk because homosexuality is very seductive and, apparently, has universal appeal!”
Other aspects of the traditional contagion narrative are used freely, such as the idea that anyone claiming to be trans is likely to be simply a naive victim of baleful influences and potential dangers that they are too naive to parse: employed as a justification, of course, for controlling individuals as part of “preventative” action — as we’re about to see.
Advocating Against Medical Care
The notion of preventative action is most apparent in the belief that trans healthcare should not be available at all⁶, which Stock explicitly states here:
“Once clinically significant distress is removed as a condition of misaligned gender identity — as I think it should be — then it’s no longer a medical problem.” [p123]
But it’s unclear why we should be expected to lend Stock’s opinion on medical matters any weight whatsoever — particularly given that this goes completely against expert medical consensus.
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)⁷ has already moved away from the reification of distress as an intrinsic part of being trans, replacing gender dysphoria with gender incongruence. It places “gender-identity related health” within the section of “Conditions related to sexual health” rather under the “Mental and behavioural disorders” chapter.
This simply recognizes that distress, rather than being intrinsic to being trans, may arise as a result of stigmatization — including the withholding of healthcare.
Stock may opine, but requiring distress to be manifested is not a principle that applies to healthcare in general. The provision of sexual health services is not predicated on ample suffering. We issue glasses, hearing aids, painkillers, or antibiotics without first checking that the patient is in torment. We even have a notion of preventative medicine forestalling such outcomes. The only reason to advocate that trans people must suffer to get healthcare is that you wish them to.
Stock’s thoughts on the matter of healthcare for minors reiterate her disapproval:
“in my view there are no circumstances in which minors should be making fertility- and health-affecting decisions involving blockers, hormones, or surgery, as is now happening in many countries.” [p136]
Again, Stock has no expertise in the medical field or first hand knowledge; nothing but opinion about what is allowable for trans people en masse — painted, of course, as naive victims of contagion.
This entirely ignores that there are well established principles that determine when minors can make such consequential medical decisions and also that the positive outcomes of such treatments are, in fact, well evidenced.⁸
Note that Stock winds up to this opinion via insinuation that some minors may be incapable of making suitable decisions about medical care, which is immediately parlayed into a cast-iron certainly that no one could possibly make a valid decision about trans healthcare, that intrinsically being trans equates to being incompetent to make such a decision.
Stock’s language also presupposes various myths:
- it implies that all of these interventions are commonplace; which is very far removed from the reality that access to such treatments ranges from extraordinarily difficult to non-existent
- it centers fertility; this a) taps into exaggerated fears about puberty blockers and HRT affecting fertility⁹ and b) creepily implies that fertility outweighs all other aspects of wellbeing
- the use of “health-affecting” implies that these interventions are necessarily negative (iatrogenic) in impact¹⁰; yet we’ve already noted the positive impacts, which include ensuring that less medical intervention is needed later in life
The fact that a word by word dissection is required to point out and break down the multiple ill-founded assumptions packed into this single anti-trans commonplace reflects that these phrases are well-rehearsed attack lines, ones used over and over again in anti-trans rhetoric.
There aren’t many steps between rejecting medical expert opinion in this way to espousing conspiracy theories about the medical profession.¹¹
Advocating For Conversion Therapy
One step further into transphobia is treating “being trans” as a disease in and of itself, an undesireable state that can be quashed.¹²
Abusive quack “cures” for being trans or gay are collectively known as “conversion therapy” — a set of practices condemned by reputable medical groups in the UK in a joint Memorandum of Understanding.
These practices are becoming outlawed in many countries, because they are understood to be a form of torture.
Stock openly advocates for conversion therapy, and extensively rehearses the kind of seemingly anodyne justifications often made for it¹³.
For example, gaslighting trans people about their gender identity is appropriate:
“an identification with the opposite sex isn’t always to be ‘affirmed’ without question” [p134]
We might simply harangue people out of being trans:
“Changing a person’s background beliefs by exposing them to new evidence can change the associated foregrounded feelings.” [p134]
Anyone not amenable to being “cured” has simply not had enough pressure applied to them yet:
“No period of therapy prior to the age of majority could be long enough to untangle all these possibly contributory strands.” [p136]
And so Stock condemns the consensus of professional opinion, disgracefully aligning herself with quackery, in order to advocate abuse:
“In light of all this, the current professional prohibition of ‘conversion therapy’ … looks profoundly misguided” [p137]
This is not a casual misunderstanding about the meaning of “therapy”. It is a stance that Stock repeatedly and openly takes; for example, here is the headline from a recent newspaper article in which she makes the same arguments, using starkly conspiratorial language about Europe’s largest and oldest LGBTQ+ rights organisation:
What Stock apparently utterly fails to understand is that efforts to end conversion therapy for sexual orientation and gender identity are inevitably intertwined, simply because most of those who advocate for conversion practices are homophobic, and regard being gay as as betrayal of gender norms just as much as being trans.¹⁴
In fact, wittingly or unwittingly, she makes the same connections herself, based on her “identification” misunderstanding about what gender identity is:
“Equally, can some non-trans people have misaligned gender identities? Again I think yes … many butch women seem to fit the criteria” [pp138–139]
In which case, everything she advocates about conversion therapy for gender identity could equally well be applied to butch lesbians, drag queens, and other cis gay people who don’t comply to gendered expectations. Conversion therapy targeted at gender identity (as Stock conceives it) can easily be aimed to queer people in general, justified through a deeply regressive heteronormative perspective about sexual orientation which Stock also explicitly shares:
“a perceived similarity with the opposite sex might be partly based on being attracted to the same sex as them” [p131]
This kind of blindness to the intertwinedness of how trans and gay populations have historically been targeted is a hallmark of the widely condemned anti-trans group LGB Alliance, which Stock is a trustee of.¹⁵
Advocating Against Recognition Of Human Rights
On p140, Stock suggests that the recognition of a person’s gender identity should not be treated as a basic human right, arguing against the idea that:
Each person’s self-defined sexual orientation and gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom. [Yogyakarta Principles, Article 3]
Her argument for this is that both self and self and personality are fluid.
But the (potential) transience of a characteristic is not relevant to human rights: this argument would also imply we should strip legal protections against discrimination for many disabilities, sexual orientation, religious belief, marriage and pregnancy/maternity. (Gender identity is usually more stable than most of these other characteristics).
A ludicrous and ill-thought through piece of motivated reasoning: it fits perfectly with the rest of the chapter.
Trans Eliminationism
“The Transsexual Empire” (1979) by Janice Raymond openly stated the basic tenet of modern anti-trans thought:
“the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”
Raymond’s own explanation of what this passage means is:
“What this means is that I want to eliminate the medical and social systems that support transsexualism and the reasons why in a gender-defined society, persons find it necessary to change their bodies” (https://janiceraymond.com/fictions-and-facts-about-the-transsexual-empire/)
This approach to trans eliminationism is precisely what we’ve see Stock advocating, coming out:
- for the elimination of medical care
- for the active suppression of trans identity via coercive means, through “conversion therapy”
- against the idea of rights that guarantee protection for trans identity and equality for trans people
There is no plausible fig leaf; Stock’s claims that she is “not transphobic” are risible. These are straightforwardly examples of transphobia.
Less than two years after the publication of “Material Girls”, trans eliminationism is being rapidly put into wider practice, which will have predictably devastating results:
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines five different categories of genocidal action towards groups, one of which is:
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
The action of “morally mandating out of existence” the population of trans people would very arguably be genocidal in these terms.
This is far from being a “hyperbolic” characterization of where we are, as advocates of “morally mandating” would suggest:
We are in a dangerous place.
It is shameful that Stock’s voicing of trans eliminationist philosophy has received institutional support, even broad collegial support, and given the oxygen of publicity through her extensive and largely unchallenged platforming in the media.
Either such blatant bigotry is palatable enough to supporters and reporters that they feel complacent in amplifying its message, or they are simply incompetent to recognize or challenge it.
Both kinds of failure are contemptible.
Next Article
The next article in this series is If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another.
Footnotes
[1]
The nonsense of a parallel claim like “non-homosexual people … report no particularly strong sense of orientation” should be immediately apparent.
However, what may be less apparent is that the focus on the cause of gender identity here absolutely mirrors the historic homophobic focus on the aetiology of sexual orientation:
“Scientists have looked for a physical origin for homosexuality for over a hundred years, but found none. But no such origin has ever been sought where heterosexuality is concerned. Scientifically speaking, this is indefensible — if one sexual orientation demands a biological basis, so do any others — a fact that sheds enormous light on the extent to which our presumptions about sexual orientation bias our thinking.”
from https://outhistory.org/items/show/1296
This chapter is simply reiterating this obviously skewed thinking.
[2]
There is an anti-trans trope that “gender identity” is unverifiable because it is intangible: a behaviourist position in its denial of the existence of mental contents.
But operationally, you can simply take a gender identity to be expressed as a person’s answer to the question “Are you a man or a woman?”.
This captures not only the yes/no of binary gender, but also non-binary genders, for which the answer may be “both”, “neither”, “sometimes” or “it’s complicated”.
Gender identity in this respect is no different to many other significant facets of identity — sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious identity — as well as any other internal state such as pain, hunger, depression, happiness, seeing the colour red, interoception, and so on. We can only access the “sense of knowing” all of these things in others through their assertions that they experience them.
[3]
For someone that believes this, it’s a short step to excitedly referring to “gender woo woo” at the same time as insisting on conceptualizing “sex” as some kind of mystical elan that permeates the body: something contained in every bone, every cell, every molecule.
[4]
Elsewhere in the transphobia ecosystem, the contagion notion is even more explicitly weaponised using the baseless notion of “ROGD”, an endlessly recirculated piece of ludicrous hand waving which is handily debunked in the following:
[5]
Stock cites ‘Who Needs Identity?’ by Stuart Hall to justify her leap from “identity” to “identification”.
However, the proscriptionist/prescriptivist attitude of “Material Girls” towards identity — as expressed specifically, for example, on p126 or pp32–37 — is diametrically opposed to the anti-essentialist stance towards identity that Hall is discussing, one which connects with the work of Judith Butler.
The notion of “identification” explored in the paper is that of a process that allows for the redrawing of what Butler calls “historically revisable criteria of intelligibility”. It is taken to be a component of discourse that allows for newly intelligible ways of understanding self and body to emerge, a means of resistance to the hegemonic imposition of fixed categories of identity.
“Material Girls” in these terms is not part of the solution, but part of the problem, a card-carrying component of:
“the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications”
[Judith Butler, Introduction to “Bodies That Matter”]
And while both Hall and Butler belong to an intellectual current in which psychoanalytic notions have a substantial influence, the blunt weapon that Stock makes of “identification” is very far removed from what Butler has in mind:
“Identification is used here not as an imitative activity by which a conscious being models itself after another”
[Judith Butler, Introduction to “Bodies That Matter”]
[6]
She is in alignment here with the many Republican states in the US that are introducing or have introduced draconian bills to remove trans healthcare — many of which also aim to outlaw other aspects of transition, sometimes even including any expression of gender non-conformity. A blast from the past.
[7]
Stock throughout cites DSM-5, a manual for psychiatric diagnosis which is used mainly in the US — which may be an indication that she is taking cues from US sources here.
ICD-11 is a broader and more widely used global standard.
[8]
This view is simply a stance against Gillick competence and Fraser guidelines, the standard that in the UK establishes when minors can make consequential decisions about their own healthcare.
In terms of trans healthcare, this argument is familiar as the position rehearsed in Bell v Tavistock, which was resoundingly rejected on appeal by the UK’s Supreme Court.
This was an attack on the use of puberty blockers through questioning the validity of Gillick competence, which appears to have been a speculative — and initially successful — attempt by anti-abortionist forces to open a route towards attacking birth control more generally.
It’s unsurprising to see such an alignment: anti-trans campaigning often aligns with the goals of the religious (far) right .
[9]
Gamete storage might be sensible for people undergoing treatment, but:
- The literature on puberty blockers does not support the idea that they cause infertility.
- The evidence for the effects on fertility of long-term gender affirming hormone treatment is mixed (see this study, for example)
It is notable that myths about impacts on fertility also circulate about contraception, another kind of “interference” with the “natural” which ultraconservatives and the religious right find objectionable.
[10]
Unsurprisingly, we also encounter in this chapter the weaponized anti-trans equivalent of the “ex-gay” movement; regretful detransitioners.
While detransitioners deserve respect and support, the use of detransition narratives as propaganda does not. Detransition and regret are not experiences of the vast majority of trans people.
[11]
Next stop down the medical conspiracy rabbit hole is ranting about the role of “Big Pharma” — a not so subtle placeholder for “sinister moneyed forces that secretly control the world” — in actively “transing” people.
The idea that drug companies might aim to create such an income stream is breathtakingly implausible:
- trans people are a very small population and the costs of ongoing medication very low, meaning any potential profit is miniscule
- you have to believe in “transgender contagion” as a precursor to believing that it’s possible to “trans” random people
The Evil Conspiracy would be better off diligently working on creating a range of indigestible snacks to boost the sales of antacid.
[12]
Stock repeatedly uses the phrase “misaligned gender identity”, a framing that stigmatizes being trans as a disorder.
But the idea that “misalignment” is possible in Stock’s terms means she must believe in the naturalness of a connection between sex and femininity / masculinity (which she believes are idealized stereotypes that are central to “identification”, remember).
This perhaps indicates that Stock’s purported support for gender non-conformity is rather superficial.
[13]
On pp 135–136, Stock cites Az Hakeem, who is a member of Genspect, an organisation that advocates for conversion therapy:
[14]
It’s not clear that it is so much a failure as a wilful misunderstanding. Because Stock elsewhere exploits this intertwining, making a particularly ludicrous argument that medical care for trans people equates to conversion therapy for gay people.
It is an idea that makes literally no sense. All such “transing the gay away” narratives are based on absurd assumptions, raising problems such as:
- there is no cohort of parents that are less transphobic than homophobic who might actively seek to “trans” their children
- the vast majority of trans people are queer; the idea that people transition to “become” heterosexual is a groundless myth
- the very idea that gay people are just “confused” about their gender, and could therefore respond to such treatment is homophobic in and of itself
- conversion therapy does not work
I’ve already walked through the outright absurdities in greater length in a previous article, as you can see here, in the section called ‘Eliminating Possibilities’.
If you want a complete dismantling of the notion, Aleardo Zanghellini in an article called “Philosophical Problems With the Gender-Critical Argument Against Trans Inclusion” takes apart Stock’s original article, as well as many of her others.
[15]
Stock does note that gay people have always been regarded as gender non-conformant (pp218–219), but fails to join the dots in understanding that there is a deep and pervasive historical intertwinedness at work:
http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/transgender_activism_S.pdf
Instead she suggests that there is, in fact, a sharp discontinuity between trans and gay people, and segues directly to the ahistorical notion that “T” was arbitrarily added to “LGB”, a favourite trope of the LGB Alliance and their fellow travellers.
This idea stems from a historical disagreement about Stonewall (the UK rights organisation) expanding their campaigning focus — a parochial strop leveraged into a global conspiracy theory.
