Three “Gender Critical” Mythologies
Ideas That Propel Transphobia
Content Warning: in the remainder of this article, I often link to material from organizations and people that are widely considered to be transphobic; sometimes I quote from such articles. Please use appropriate caution if this may affect you.
Introduction
GCs
Relatively small in number, but influential in many institutions, omnipresent in the UK’s mainstream media, and intensely active on social media, people with “gender critical feminist” beliefs (GCs) frequently argue for vehemently transphobic positions — in stark contrast to the trans-inclusivity found in the mainstream of feminist thought.
I aim, in this article, to unpick some key GC beliefs and arguments: by understanding how mythologies are used to underpin transphobia, we can become better positioned to detect and guard against acceptance of the panoply of unfounded claims, fallacious arguments, and dogwhistle phrases that are the GC stock-in-trade.
The threat of transphobic rhetoric working to undermine broader support for trans people is serious — see the appendix for a selection of dispiriting effects and institutional failure on this front in recent years — but that doesn’t mean that many of the arguments used by GCs aren’t inherently ludicrous and eminently mockable. The use of a degree of sardonic humour in recounting some of them was difficult to resist; hopefully this works to counterbalance the ever-present danger of toxic ideas gaining traction through the sheer force of their reiteration.
Gender Critical Metaphysics
Let’s start by emphasizing that there’s nothing inherently transphobic about the radical feminist core of GC belief: that gender stereotypes are problematical and oppressive — a means of propagating sexism, imposed by patriarchy.
However, there are many ways of thinking about how to defang gender. The specifically GC approach is gender abolitionism: the belief that gender roles as a whole can be extirpated from society (see here). This is grounded in an overarching metaphysical assumption that gender is fundamentally unreal.
To GCs, any manifestation of gender is a mirage, a harmful phantom superimposed on “material reality” — primarily, as we will see, this means biological sex. Solely instantiated in trivial externalities such as clothing choices or behavioural mannerisms, created through the enforcement of gender roles by society, gender itself is taken as having no denotation, no existence outside of connotation.
We can see the GC understanding of gender as phantasmal reflected in the curtly dismissive phrases which are used to be ‘gender critical’ at speed: “gender is a performance” or “gender is a social construct” or “gender is a feeling, biology is real”.
Mythologies
I suggest there are three main streams of mythology that flow from the GC axiom of gender unreality, all of which feed into a transphobic mythos: a weird inflorescence of legends, pseudoscience, mockery, and conspiracy theories about trans people which is driven largely by misapprehensions and misinterpretations, constantly reiterated online.
These three streams are:
- A mythology of ontology, followed in attempts to explain the existence of transgender people without invoking gender identity
- A mythology of mereology, followed in characterizing gender expression as inherently insincere
- A mythology of monism, followed in claims that gender categories can be replaced or reified by simply looking to “biology”
This article explores each stream, illustrating how they buoy transphobia.
The Mythology of Ontology
Introduction
The word ‘transgender’ in itself immediately suggests a problem for GC thought. Given a metaphysical stance that gender itself is unreal, how can a category of people meaningfully be defined as transgender?
On Having A Gender Identity
One way to handle this would be to simply accept the standard description of trans people: that they are those people that have a gender identity that does not match the sex they were categorized as at birth.
Your gender identity is your answer to the question of whether you see yourself as a man or a woman — nothing more. To most people, gender identity is just one aspect of personal identity, uncontroversially sitting alongside ethnic, cultural, or religious identity — a small part of one’s understanding of self.
All such facets of identity can be regarded straightforwardly as describing someone’s self-image, as reflected in what they report about themself and/or how they comport themself. Elaborate medical or philosophical dissection of the origins or nature of a facet of identity is not required to accept merely that it is psychologically real.
As we all hold beliefs about hypotheticals — things that maybe exist or don’t exist or might have existed once or might come into existence — then it should be straightforward for anyone, GC or not, to accept that trans people can possess an understanding of their identity that references gender. Allowing so does not entail accepting a metaphysical position that gender itself is real.
{ Sidetrack: Note that “a man” or “a woman” are not the only viable answers to that question about gender identity. Much more on that below. }
On Having No Gender Identity
Many GCs, being non-believers in the reality of gender, claim that they have no gender identity. For example, you can see a multitude of such responses in the replies to the below pictured Council of Europe tweet:
This claim of having no gender identity is not problematical in itself. Of course aspects of personal identity can be forged through the rejection of societally imposed identities: for example, one can be agnostic or atheistic, rejecting a traditional religious identity.
But when GCs claim they have no gender identity, they are not claiming a separate kind of identity forged from rejection of imposed gender roles: they aren’t asserting an agender identity which would potentially place them within the trans community. Instead, we see what seem to be paradoxical affirmations of gender identity stated while renouncing it, such as: “I have no gender identity, but I am a woman” (henceforth referred to as IHNGI claims).
To make sense of IHNGI claims we would have to accept the GC explanation that traditional gender categories, man and woman, can also be defined in the absence of any psychological correlate to them; that we should understand ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in this situation as being labels for something objectively observeable: biological sex.
This would mean that anyone making an IHNGI claim cannot possess a subjective sense of being (or not being) a member of those categories; asserting the existence of such a sense would just be a way of sneaking a kind of “gender identity” in under another name — remember, all we are saying of gender identity is that it is simply your answer to the question of whether you see yourself as a man or a woman. Biology and psychology need to be fully divorceable for IHNGI claims to hang together: and the idea that this is possible is very striking.
Parallel claims of non-visceral self-knowledge might meet with a quizzical response. An ‘interoception critical’ renunciation of self-perception requires eyebrow-arching Spockian levels of circumlocution: “I don’t get hungry, I just monitor my biological status in reference to nutritional adequacy”. Certainly an individual’s interoceptive or proprioceptive senses may be impaired, but one cannot in the usual course of things voluntarily opt out from visceral experiences.
In any case, regardless of how we regard IHNGI claims, we see two different ways people can understand themselves, through gender identity or through sex category, and there is no inherent conflict between these ideas — in most people the two are in perfect alignment.
We will return to the GC idea that an “objective” view of biology proves more useful than psychological or social understanding of the self when examining the mythology of monism.
Metaphysical Overreach
The claim that transgender people can be understood in terms of gender identity is only ever accepted by GCs as a polite fiction — but more often the concept is reacted to as if an ideologically hostile form of perjury.
For example, there are many GC articles in mainstream media that collocate “gender identity” with words of threatening overtone: for example, we see gender identity referred to as a cult (which is “harming children”), as an ideology (with “sinister creep”), as a pseudoscience (which is “sexist”). It seems that the authors of such articles don’t like trans people too much.
It is not hard to find examples of the much further reaching claim that no one has a gender identity, that the notion itself is simply erroneous or meaningless. It’s not enough just to claim IHNGI: many GCs also believe YHNGI — You Have No Gender Identity. This is where things decisively veer into transphobic delirium: through demands to prove that gender identity exists, and attempts to prove that it doesn’t.
Because of course no one can directly observe any inner state that another person has: qualia can only be introspected, and ultimately, you can’t tell that anyone else has mental states at all. That is an idea that underpins the philosophical notion of a zombie — a concept useful when discussing mind-body dualism, but usually not elsewhere (the attribution of zombiehood to others in real life is generally thought to be impolite at best).
Here’s an example of a philosopher, Alex Byrne, tying himself into absurd knots by trying to prove YHNGI, the non-existence of gender identity:
Byrne does not accept that anyone can have an “inner sense”, “internal sense”, or “intrinsic sense” of anything — the piece ends by denying the possibility of introspecting the self — and thereby dismisses by fiat common descriptions of gender identity that medical authorities use. (Strangely, Byrne does not object to people having a “basic sense of” or “sense of knowing”, which seems like a too-fine distinction to rely on.)
Byrne’s key argument, almost lost amidst a fog of logic-chopping that envelops terminological and conceptual confusions, hinges on rejecting the testimony of everyone except a couple of the vanishingly rare kind of trans people that he asserts do not have a particular kind of gender identity (one which he, a non-expert in trans studies or medicine, has defined using a cherrypicked sentence from the literature on which he has placed a specific, controversial, interpretation). Even if we were to accept Byrne’s characterisation of the beliefs and reported experiences of these trans people (and he doesn’t closely analyse them) their testimony does not cancel/invalidate any other person’s testimony: that’s not how it works. It would just mean that there are a multiplicity of different trans experiences.
The most fundamental objection here is that it’s hard to imagine the same oozlum bird trajectory of dismissal of “inner sense” and self-reporting being followed in parallel attempts to reason about the invalidity of, say, cultural identity, religious identity, or sexual orientation — imagine, if you can, similar You Have No… arguments that flat out deny the bulk of testimony on the matter. If gender identity can be “dissolved” by arguments about the (im)possibility of introspection of the self, then so can every other facet of personal identity: zombiehood beckons us all.
Naturally, much cruder assertions that gender identity is non-existent are made online; look, for example, within the tweets that mention identity using the GC hashtag #GenderWooWoo. There are examples there both childish and naive, reflecting a coarse kind of materialism: if you can’t directly observe someone else’s gender identity in the same way as you can, say, a boulder, you can discount its existence and import (it is ‘woo woo’).
The woowooist contempt for the very idea of gender identity seems a bizarre misstep of GC thought. Other facets of identity are never dismissed with this kind of blunt denialism: even people arguing for the destruction of deeply rooted aspects of society don’t deny that there are psychological correlates to those social constructs in others. No one argues that ethnic or cultural identities are phantasmal, even if they take an assimilationist stance; no atheist requires proof that deities exist in order to accept that a person can have a religious identity.
The GC metaphysics of gender unreality cannot validly be extended into the psychological realm, to police what kinds of self-understanding exist. But GC thought often really does propose that level of metaphysical overreach is fine, that we can simply police what kinds of self-understanding are acceptable or valid.
Trans Genderless
If you are a woowooist with respect to gender identity, happy to wield that YHNGI level of overreach, how can you understand the existence of transgender people? Is it possible to do so without invoking gender or gender identity?
There is one widely cited notion about the nature of trans people which doesn’t invoke gender identity. This is autogynephilia (AGP), a theory which attempts to explain the whole of transgender existence as being driven by sexual paraphilia. AGP is comprehensively debunked by Julia Serano:
As Serano discusses, AGP is rejected by the mainstream of both medical and trans opinion. It can be made to fly as a general theory only by disregarding trans people wholesale, and by treating deniers of the theory as liars (of course, there are many transphobes who are only too happy to do so ).
Another way to try and avoid any reference to gender identity is by referring to a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in its place, the idea being that dysphoria can be more objectively detected. (As suggested here, for example by one of the vanishingly rare trans people that takes an IHNGI stance). But there are a couple of major problems with the idea.
Firstly, experiencing dysphoria is not a necessary attribute of being trans, so this fails to characterise those people.
Secondly, gender dysphoria is not an something objectively observed: it is diagnosed using subjective criteria which rely on self-reports about a person’s experience in relation to gender, such as a desire to live or be treated as a specific gender that doesn’t match sex as assigned at birth. It’s unclear how this differs from expressing a gender identity — to fully untwine the two, we would need a way of diagnosing dysphoria not based on subjective report, which doesn’t exist.
{ Sidetrack: There are claims that gender identity may have a neuroanatomical basis, based on research about brain structure in transgender people. However, the history of such research should engender (sic) doubt about whether such claims will stand up to close scrutiny; and one should necessarily be skeptical that any facet of identity could ever be simply reducible in this way. }
Ultimately, these “genderless” explanations don’t stand up to close scrutiny.
Eliminating Possibilities
If you can’t accept that people can validly express a gender identity, then there does remain one way to place a GC ontology on a stable foundation: denial that transgender people really exist.
Framing trans people as mistaken, lying, or confused about their own identity and existence allows for trans testimony and concerns to be dismissed or downplayed: the very basis for the flourishing of a transphobic mythos.
To take a single example that relies on this framing (we will see many more in the other mythologies), let’s examine an egregious claim that is made concerning conversion therapy: that not using conversion therapy on trans people equates to enforced conversion therapy for gay people.
You can see this argument laid out (slightly less pithily) in an article by GC philosopher Kathleen Stock:
{ Sidetrack: Stock is a highly controversial figure, and for counterbalance it is very much worth reading a general analysis of her writings by Christa Peterson; for a truly comprehensive demolition of the logical flaws in her reasoning there is also this article by Aleardo Zanghellini. We will see more of her arguments later in this article. }
Stock’s article is nonsensical at core, relying on an entirely confected problem: the conjuring trick it uses is defining sexual orientation as something that changes as different category labels are applied to a person rather than being understood in terms of the internal feelings of sexual attraction that someone experiences. In other words, rather than thinking of a hypothetical person as “someone attracted to women”, the labels “lesbian” or “straight” are applied to them depending on what gender identity they express. That change of label is what is taken as effecting “conversion therapy”, even though no attempt is made to change who this person is attracted to.
But there is no genuine conundrum here; simply accepting a person’s stated understanding of their gender and sexuality resolves everything. One just has to be able to accept that any combination of gender identity and sexual preference is valid. The problem for Stock is that she cannot do that, cannot accept that a person can validly have a gender identity, and so presents her trans character as confused or mistaken:
There’s no prior underlying psychological story to give us the ‘real’ fact about Margie’s transness, or lack of it; nor to tell us why Margie would reliably know that fact.
In other words: Stock’s claim is that gender identity isn’t real, but sexual orientation is, and the argument for that is simply— because Stock says so. Just disbelieve what Margie says.
And if gender identity isn’t real, then of course conversion therapy for trans people isn’t real; Stock suggests that if we disbelieve trans testimony we can “therapeutically question that narrative” — a dangerous, possibly deadly, path to follow, one condemned by medical groups.
Eliminationism can also be much more starkly expressed.
Janice Raymond stated in the exceptionally transphobic 1979 book The Transsexual Empire:
The problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.
Sheila Jeffreys in her 2004 book Gender Hurts suggests similarly:
But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist.
(Jeffreys’ unmeasured rhetoric about trans people is notorious).
But overt eliminationism is not just a purely theoretical notion. We can see it being directly implemented in Hungary through the stripping of legal recognition for transgender identities — an active rollback of human rights.
Hungary’s far-right government uses a justification for this based on exactly the notion we saw earlier of declaring gender identity invalid, and turning to sex in its place: implementing this as a legal definition for all people works precisely to “mandate” trans people out of existence. Being transgender is thereby characterized as fundamentally invalid, based on an error of thought.
This mythology of ontology resolves itself, then, in a mandate and method for enforcing the non-existence of transgender people. There are few ways to be more fundamentally transphobic, barring direct incitement to violence.
The Mythology of Mereology
Introduction
As the first mythology was concerned with ontology, so this second mythology is concerned with mereology, the relation of parts and wholes.
In discussing this, I use the word ‘shuckable’ to indicate something with a readily detached outer layer, as in “oyster shucking”. This is contrasted with ‘flensible’, which I use to indicate something with an externality that cannot be removed without systemic disruption to the whole, as in “whale flensing”.
Loose Wires
First, let’s consider the GC idea that gender expression — the tangible manifestation of gender, the patterns of bedecking and behaviour that we adopt — is readily shuckable, a detatchable covering unconnected with an inner self. This idea has far reaching consequences for how transgender people are regarded.
The use of specific gender expression cues implies nothing, in itself, about the sincerity with which gender is being expressed. The insincere use of gender non-conformity as conscious artifice can be used purely as a means to shock, to gain attention, to subvert tired tropes, to circumvent taboos, to consciously transgress boundaries, and so on. For GCs that assume YHNGI, gender expression is taken to be always insincerely used — and therefore readily shuckable — because there is nothing internal to the self that expression can be connected to. In this view, gender expression is taken to be the result of an external driver: society acting to enforce the use of gender conventions.
A GC view of how gender abolition might be practically achieved is therefore to remove that external driver — simply to disregard or destroy those social conventions. On a grand scale, the functional equivalent of sumptuary law could be used — the mere regulation and/or deregulation of gender expression would suffice to shuck gender from society as a whole. And this is not a mere theoretical notion — here is an example of a popular campaign based precisely on that notion, interlinked with similar campaigns actively aiming to remove gendered signifiers from childhood:
GC and trans people may coalesce in support of such campaigns, but it’s far from clear that supporters share a single vision of gender eschatology. Is the ultimate aim here gender equality or gender elision? Is the idea simply to alleviate the pervasive and pointless gendering of childhood or to work as a precursor to a ungendered adulthood? To remove all gender signifiers or not?
(Irruptions of transphobia in this campaign’s twitter feed seem to signal the stance of those running the campaign).
No More Interstice Guy
We don’t have to understand gender expression as driven from the outside, however. We can instead think of it as being tightly bound to gender identity: not shuckable, but flensible.
We know that identity and expression are closely interconnected in other fields. For example, we have no problem in seeing the expression of religious or national identity through artifacts (including clothing) as driven by an inner sincerity: the artifacts are not where belief inheres, but we see no interstice between the possession of that belief and the expression of it. It’s not just that the artifacts are mere conventions, social constructs imposed from without — rather they are a tool used to externalize an inner conviction.
And you can’t, of course, change an existing aspect of identity simply by legislating against its impedimenta. Externally mandated changes to conventions of expression can be interpreted as a direct assault on identity: indeed, flensing is an appropriate description for the turmoil involved in disputes concerning the semiotics of religion or nationality. It was the violent conflict between iconoclasts and iconodules in the Byzantine empire that gave us the very word for people who attempt to tumultuously topple the status quo. Such changes to societal conventions aren’t achieved by fiat but are the result of broad social upheaval.
There is nothing special about gender that should make us regard it differently from these other domains. Both trans and cis people likewise use gender expression to assert a conviction: their possession of an identity. And ultimately, it is not really possible for an individual to avoid expressing gender — because social practice is to read everyone in terms of gender — there is no opt out from that. All we can do is navigate that situation.
Instead of an immaterial set of rules that can be discarded at will, we can see social constructs as part of material reality. The social world, instantiated through ritual, custom, and law, creates an environment of constraints and affordances in which the mind and body develops — just as the physical world does. Social constructs can therefore become as equally material to us as brute physicality; they can act to shape our mental architecture at a profound level, becoming hardwired into the brain. We cannot simply shuck such internalized constructs— they are not voluntarily adopted (you cannot toggle literacy on and off, for example).
We do not directly apprehend the world, but rather we learn to perceive and act within it in ways that are intimately moulded by all of the diverse aspects of our environment. When talking about human experience, there is no chasm between physical, mental and social domains: all feed into our construction of what is “real”.
Expression and Mythology
The notions of shuckability and flensibility give us broad-brush ways to understand different understandings of what drives gender expression: these in turn drive attitudes towards trans people.
The GC characterization of gender expression as shuckable scaffolds the idea that transgender people are merely acting in shallow conformity to a pattern of stereotypes: that it is therefore simple for trans people to “change gender”, that it is something done without sincerity.
This is the myth of shuckability, which underpins many elements of the anti-trans mythos. Trans expressions of gender can only plausibly be read as deeply sincere: as any cursory engagement with trans testimony would reveal, coming out as trans frequently involves the upending of a life entire, at great personal cost. There has to be a powerful, visceral component driving any such radical shift in gender expression, for it to be maintained in the face of the hostility of society in general, through the turmoil of the destruction of relationships, material hardship, and all the other stressors that trans people live with.
Expression and Enactment
Most fundamentally, the idea of shuckability operates to deny the genuineness of transgender people. Without the attribution of sincerity, there is no way of distinguishing trans people expressing their gender identity from cis people simply enacting gender stereotypes; no way of grasping the world of difference between Lili Elbe and Lily Savage.
The use of cis actors to play trans people reinforces this narrative of shuckability, the idea that being trans is just a kind of enactment, a tweaking of the superfice of gender expression. The issues with this practice, the harm it directly causes, were explored in the documentary Disclosure.
Comparisons With “Transracial” People
Trans people are commonly mocked via the “attack helicopter” meme and its many variants — in which arbitrary and absurd objects are claimed to be an expression of identity. Obviously the more absurd the notion, the clearer the signal of scorn that the memer has for trans identities (and the clearer the indication that trans insincerity is assumed).
There is, though, a superficially plausible comparison very often used as a more intense disparagement: the comparison of transgender people with so-called “transracial” people. This is a term which has been used to refer to people such as Rachel Dolzeal or Archibald Stansfield Belaney, generally white people who masquerade as being of a different ethnicity/race for their own benefit. (There is a related phenomenon of blackfishing.)
Of course the borders of racial identity are blurry; race is an ideological construct, not a natural kind. And the notion of “passing” across blurry racial boundaries is nothing new:
However, we are sympathetic to exploitations of ambiguity that show us people escaping from bigotry, subverting racism; this is radically different from people with white privilege benefiting from exploitative “transracial” cultural appropriation, reinforcing racism.
This whole transgender/transracial comparison relies on the idea that both types of people are being insincere in the way they express themselves to the world, that being transgender is just a form of acting, expression that can be shucked. People that make this analogy see no difference between transgender identities and minstrelsy — and indeed, the word ‘womanface’ is sometimes explictly used by transphobes to parallel ‘blackface’ — a grossly offensive and contemptuous sneer.
But the only real similarity between ‘transgender’ and ‘transracial’ is that they share a prefix. Some transgender people do use a kind of “passing” as a survival strategy: being openly trans may be unsafe. But being proud of being trans, being open about personal history, does not undercut a trans identity: this is wholly unlike a “transracial” status which relies on an exploitative fabrication, the maintenance of a false history — it can never be a sincerely expressed identity.
Ethnic/racial identification is something given to you due to your heritage: it is tied to your history, a function of culture and place, an index of where you were born and/or the environment you were raised in. We might say that it is deictic in nature, specific to context. (Likewise, age is an index, deictic in nature, invalidating this banal, publicity seeking legal attempt to identify as younger — another mocking false analogy).
Sex and gender identity are fundamentally different from this: they are not inherited as a kind of legacy, and they are not deictic in kind: they are characteristics purely contingent for each person, wherever and whenever they are born.
Fear Of “Theatrical Predators”
The idea that gender expression is just a kind of acting also propels the mythos trope of theatrical predators: the idea that cis people might pretend to be trans in order to more easily commit crimes.
This is surprisingly often used to argue against trans rights, although the slippery slope fallacy ought to be immediately obvious: “if we allow trans people to have rights, then other people who are not trans people might do bad things” is not a sound principle to base policy on.
The evidence that we do have concerning trans inclusion in services and spaces is that it does not cause any issues:
In fact, if a predator wanted to use disguise to gain access to a space whether by crossdressing as a service user, or simply by pretending to be a maintenance engineer, a facilities manager, or otherwise — they could, in almost all cases, do so whether trans people have the right to access that space or not, simply because access to most spaces is not formally policed. (Heavily policed exceptions, such as prisons, can place individuals as warranted by their individual case, regardless of gender).
But of course, the notion of a “trans-disguised cis person” does not have to be plausible enough to survive close inspection: it is rarely subjected to that. Just asserting it is possible serves to implant the notion that trans rights enable criminality. And of course, to cast aspersion upon the motives of trans people themselves, while not saying anything directly on the topic (although this does tie in to a wider set of bathroom panic narratives that are not so coy in their transphobia — and of course, these directly recycle the homophobia of years past).
{ Sidetrack: To paint trans people as inherently criminal, transphobes often focus on trans people in prison, and also circulate propaganda that lists trans/GNC people who have committed crimes. Yes, some evil trans people exist, but no, they are not evil because they are trans. In just the same way, we don’t impute the evilness of evil cis people to them merely being cis. And due to the rarity of trans people in the population, evil cis people are way, way more common than evil trans people, by some orders of magnitude. }
Healthcare Denial
Trans people struggle to get appropriate healthcare: even in countries where it is available, access is difficult and resources are inadequate. This is a direct result of transphobia, propelled by the myth of shuckability.
People who believe in shuckability are likely to minimize the importance of medical support for trans people. Because if you believe being transgender is solely about surface expression, then you likely believe medical treatment is superfluous, targetted at superficialities.
This leads to the offensive “why not just learn to love yourself as you are, and just be happy as a man in a dress / a tomboy” type of questioning so often put to transgender people. If we broaden the principle it represents, we would never need to medically intervene in anything — just get people to be happy with the way they are.
Suggesting this to a trans person evinces a complete lack of empathy, and an utter failure to understand the visceral nature of trans experience: the driving power of the need for personal authenticity to an internal sense of identity, the alleviating of any concomitant dysphoria.
It’s also completely contrary to the evidence that we have about the efficacy of transition as a medical treatment for transgender people:
This kind of “it’s shuckable” attitude also drives the “why spend money on trans healthcare?” question. A serious answer would point out the benefits, and note that the costs of trans healthcare are minimal and that failure to provide it is likely to cue up more serious health issues — directly harmful to the individual, and in any case more costly in the long run. But of course, a cost-benefit analysis is irrelevant to people just gunning for elimination of such care on ideological grounds.
The assumption of shuckability is a driving force behind the ongoing degradation and denial of healthcare for trans people, such as:
- A general lack of concern at the barriers that exist to access. For example, in the UK, waiting lists for clinics extending for years have become routine, in contrast to the interval of weeks that is supposed to be the maximum wait for an appointment; worse, some gender identity clinics are no longer dealing with new referrals at all due to being utterly underfunded and overloaded.
- Denial of the validity of the experiences of trans people in childhood, and the consequent pushback on making medical support available to children. This is behind the widespread promotion of the pseudoscience of “ROGD”, which is debunked by Florence Ashley here.
- Pushes for withholding of proven medical treatments in favour of disproven interventions that favour ‘desistance’ — in other words, another route to support of conversion therapies for trans people. Part of this is the weaponization of the experiences of the very small number of detransitioners, which is analyzed here. A recent court case using these kinds of arguments led to the withdrawal of medical support for trans children in the UK — an outcome condemned by healthcare bodies around the world.
In other words, the provision of appropriate trans healthcare is being undermined by the widespread takeup of transphobic myths.
Shuck and Shock
Reinforced by woowooist views of gender identity, the notion of shuckability is widely believed with respect to trans people, and as we have seen, drives diverse elements of the transphobic mythos.
But there is no compelling reason that gender expression should be thought of as uniquely insincere or shuckable compared with, say, symbols of religious or national identity. Perhaps it is because many trans people do shift gender expression — shunning socially imposed elements of gender expression that are not connected to their gender identity — that some people struggle to attribute that sincerity. But that’s looking down the wrong end of the telescope — a vehement rejection of tropes externally imposed in the strictest terms from earliest life is not evidence of insincerity.
The Mythology Of Monism
Introduction
The third mythology is a mythology of monism: the idea it is possible to deny a dualistic view of sex and gender, that gender categories can be replaced or reified by simply looking to “biology” as the arbiter of how to classify people.
We have encountered this idea in passing as an enabler of eliminationism; but the notion of a “material reality” of biology standing in opposition to the unreality of gender fuels bigotry more broadly, as our journey through this mythology will reveal.
The Boundary Of Transhumanism
First of all, it is worth pointing out that it is not logically necessary that biological sex categories have to take centre stage in a gender abolitionist philosophy.
For example, there is a kind of radical postgenderism which posits that new technologies will interface with the human body, liberating humanity not only from gender but also from biology. For example, the basis of reproduction might be transformed using technology. (Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex outlined possibilities of this kind in 1971 — a contemporary equivalent is xenofeminism: see here and here).
GC thought rejects this kind of “transhumanist” radicalism; it strongly emphasizes the importance of biological sex categories, reflecting a traditionalist view that seeks to maintain what is ‘natural’ for humanity (which of course is inherently a value judgement). See, for example:
This streak of traditionalism is important in understanding the ease with which GC narratives often harmonize with far-right / evangelical religious rhetoric (for example, in the invocation of a nebulous “gender ideology”, a conspiratorial notion which can be seen as simply pro-trans or more broadly as anti-patriarchy, depending on who invokes it). All these groups push back against ‘transhumanist’ engagements with biology: GCs view transgender people as an example of this; but the extremist conservative just extends the definition slightly more broadly so that ‘transhuman’ encompasses reproductive technologies already part of a broadly accepted status quo, including means of birth control and IVF.
GCs are seemingly largely complacent about the dangers of aligning with forces that will happily target women’s rights on the basis of what they regard as ‘natural’ (patriarchal hegemony). See, for example, the trajectory of Poland as it uses the notion of “gender ideology” to roll back both LGBT+ and women’s rights: policies floated in 2015 as discussed here, and implemented by 2020 as covered here.
But it seems this is a “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” kind of alliance for radical feminists
The Wrongs Of “Sex-Based Rights”
The alignment of GC and far-right tropes is also illustrated by a common flourish of recent GC rhetoric: that women’s “sex-based rights” need to be protected. The insinuation is that “sex-based rights” describes hard-fought-for women’s rights, the culmination of a battle stretching back to the suffragette movement and beyond.
But usage of the phrase is very recent, dating back only over the last few years. And it’s a quintessential dogwhistle — it looks perfectly reasonable on the surface (as though it is merely a statement of anti-sexism) but it signals a particular stance to those in the know. By emphasizing sex over gender, by using this reification to biology, it is used to imply that trans rights are in conflict with women’s rights, to signal a mindset that trans people should not be protected by legal enforcement of equal rights.
For the rights of different groups to be opposition with one another, the calculus of a zero-sum game must apply: if someone wins, another person must lose. But if the driving principle you are looking to achieve is equal rights, rather than preferential treatment for specific groups, this calculus can’t be right. If you claim that enforcing the equality rights of a group with a protected characteristic is in conflict with the rights of another such group, you can only be upholding a current inequality, or arguing for a degradation of the status quo. Equality, by its nature, needs to apply across the board.
Imagine a parallel: someone talking about their long-established “skin-colour-based rights”. Imagine them talking about the need to maintain “single-skin-colour spaces” based on the threat to people of one skin colour from people of another skin colour. Now also imagine this was backed up with pseudoscientific garbage about the inherently inferior/criminal nature of people with particular skin colours. Just imagine.
That is what GC people espousing “sex-based rights” sound like once you can hear the dogwhistle. That is what many are like. Segregationists. Bigots.
A sibling claim is that “sex is being erased” by transgender people — or sometimes, “same-sex attraction”. This equally maps to the argumentation of racist bigots railing against “miscengenation”. Both are variations on familiar, tiresome fascist rhetoric directed against minorities; invocations of fantasies of contamination, impurity, invasion, erosion of tradition, and so on.
The superficial “reasonability” of debate around trans rights evaporates once we consider how these patterns of rhetoric are used and reused in different, more familiar, contexts of bigotry — the expression of overt prejudice it is becomes clear.
When reading anything written about trans people, think about how it would read if a different protected minority was being talked about in the same way.
Natal Distraction
In talking of “sex-based rights”, GCs use the argument that categorizing people by gender rather than using biological sex has important, harmful consequences which need to be guarded against.
It isn’t straightforward to find clear, well-evidenced statements of what those consequences would be. For an example, we’re going to take a list of the “unintended harms” given in another Kathleen Stock article — harms which would result from not taking into account whether someone is a “natal woman” or not:
{ Terminological note: this use of the word “natal” is, by the way, another dogwhistle signal. }
Here’s Stock’s list of things about “natal” women that we might lose an understanding of:
“These include a heightened vulnerability to rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exhibitionism; to sexual harassment; to domestic violence; to certain cancers; to anorexia and self-harm.”
Stock is assuming, unwarrantedly, that the difference between cis women and cis men is mirrored by the difference between cis women and trans women — that biology determines who experiences these vulnerabilities. But closer consideration shows that this is a blasé assumption, perhaps superficially plausible to a casual reader — but not evidenced.
Firstly, let’s take: “a heightened vulnerability to rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exhibitionism; to sexual harassment; to domestic violence”. Why does Stock think that trans women are not equally vulnerable? How can they be truly linked specifically to “natal” biology? In fact, the evidence is that rates for all of these things are extremely high for trans people: for example almost half of trans people experience sexual assault; likewise rates of harassment and domestic violence are extremely high. Vulnerability to these things is not the result of biology: they are societal issues.
Next, let’s take vulnerability “to anorexia and self-harm.” Again, are these really biologically determined? Does Stock believe psychological and sociological factors do not play an important part in aetiology? The evidence also seems against her here; rates of eating disorders and self-harm may be experienced by trans women at even higher rates than cis women: see here and here.
So that leaves us with vulnerability “to certain cancers”. And of course, biology does determine this, as well as susceptibility to other medical conditions. But when it comes to inclusive language around cancer that actually references biological reality, rather than “natal” categories, then suddenly that importance appears to evaporate:
Online pile-ons eviscerating organisations for using language inclusive of trans people are routine. One has to conclude that this is not done due to genuine concerns about fidelity to biological truth, but rather out of sheer transphobic prejudice:
It’s also worth noting that the “natal” category of a trans person is not necessarily a good guide as to their current biology; it is only one factor among many in a person’s medical history. (For example, the fact that someone is undergoing hormone therapy may be far more significant for many medical treatments than “natal” sex category).
So, having worked through this, it is hard to find any genuine advantages of referring to “natal” biology rather than gender with reference to the examples given, other than in specific medical situations. It’s perhaps even harder to understand why direct, inclusive references to biology in the context of medical care are in actuality clearly objectionable to GCs — other than attributing it to ignorance and/or prejudice.
The entirety of a life is determined by much more than biology, as we saw in Stock’s own examples of experiences of vulnerability: those examples actually serve to underline that so much of what we experience is due to the way we are perceived, due to gender, rather than being directly caused by “biology” .
Let’s take one more of Stock’s concerns:
If self-declared trans women are included in statistics, understanding will be hampered.
No real life examples are given of where this is likely to be problematical. What understanding will be hampered? Trans people are so statistically rare, that it seems unlikely that their inclusion will ever skew broad population statistics significantly. And why wouldn’t understanding be just as hampered by not including trans women, or lumping them in to another category — surely that depends on what is under investigation?
Concrete examples of specific issues that need to be considered are fine, but a blanket supposition that trans people are — in some ineffable way — a problem to be solved (or eliminated) are most certainly based in transphobia.
And when concrete examples are raised they need to be evidenced, not based on presumptions. For example, it is quite often argued that the inclusion of trans women in salary surveys would work to disguise the extent of the pay gap between genders: but this doesn’t account for the realities of trans life and the data we currently have (see here and here, for example).
(The rest of Stock’s article rehearses a tediously familiar litany of transphobic mythos elements including: bathroom panic, theatrical predators, and trans women “erasing” lesbians.)
Opposites Distract
The appeal to “biology” as an arbiter of what is real is a common theme of bigotry of all stripes. Racism, ableism, homophobia, the casual sexism of pop-psych ‘brain sex’ blockbusters — all attempt to impose an ideology by insisting that the structure of nature mandates it.
The GC claim for “biology” seems relatively simple, though: that sex is binary, with male and female being the only two possibilities for sex categories.
But sexual differentiation is a complex process, meaning there are a range of different possible outcomes: a spectrum of different biologies, as described in this Scientific American article. And the word that describes many of the people within that spectrum is “intersex”.
The diversity of this spectrum makes untenable the reification model that “male” and “female” are defined in a clearcut way by essential biological properties. (To insist on this denies intersex people the right to state what their gender identity is.)
In the attempt to impose their ontology, to insist that there is a binary division of sexes only, GCs use a breathtakingly wrongheaded argument: the idea of “spectrum” is misrepresented as being just a kind of “gradient” — and then this strawman notion, which they just introduced, is mocked.
Here is what this looks like:
The smug sarcasm this embodies is sadly misplaced.
The assumption of binary thinking seems to leads GCs to fix on the idea that “male” and “female” are, in some sense, opposites. And, given this, if they are not complementary opposites — exclusive and exhaustive ways of categorizing people — then they must be gradable opposites, opposites that allow for intermediates — like pairs such as like sharp and blunt, or tall and short. Such pairs define a gradient on which intermediates exist: but everything on that gradient is understood in relation to the binary: anything inbetween can be seen as tending towards one pole or the other.
The example ‘sperg/spegg’ above is attempting a reductio ad absurdum by suggesting this kind of continuity would then have to exist between all characteristics associated with biological sex.
Of course none of this sarcasm makes any sense, because none of this is what is meant by describing things as being part of a “spectrum”. For example, the colours black and white are gradable opposites, but that does not mean that every other colour must be a shade of grey. Colours belong within a spectrum, not within a single gradient.
The idea that different categories make up a spectrum is very different from insisting that they exist along a single gradient. Spectrum categories might be discrete; they might be related or overlapping in various ways. For example, they may be defined by a mosaic of different characteristics that can vary independently — think of an HSV or CMYK model of color space (perhaps quantized, if you want to think of a model without continuous variability in those characteristics). Or the category structure might be more complex, best understood through a more sophisticated model of classification.
And, given this, we can see that gamete type doesn’t magically define sex and allow us to classify everyone as male or female accordingly:
- Not everyone produces gametes.
- The hypothetical property of ‘the type of gametes a body would produce if it produced gametes’ is just question-begging (considering the range of body types in the sex spectrum).
- Gamete type is just one of the mosaic of characteristics that define sex, which together define a spectrum of possibilities. It is not ontologically important in isolation; reproductive capabilities are just one biological characteristic of sex among many, and are obviously not the main yardstick we should use to categorize people.
The biological reality that GCs insist is so important is not merely neglected, but negated, by this insistence on binarity. Imposition of the idea that all people are ‘really’ either male or female drives the imposition of unnecessary, damaging surgery on people born intersex in order to “mandate” categories of humans out of existence — a practice which should have no place in the modern world.
Ironically, GCs elsewhere claim that “sex is immutable” when attempting to enforce the idea that “natal” sex characteristics are important above all else. This is a way of denying the “realness” of medical treatments that transgender people may elect as part of the process of transition. Describing biology as monolithically “immutable” is dogma of the kind used to justify preventing trans people from legally changing gender: it is a position incompatible with fundamental human rights.
None of the above is denying the existence of biological sex, nor does it claim that the great majority of people are not intersex. But it is important to understand that crude GC appeals to “common sense” or “basic biology” are not based on science but are ideological in nature. A classification system that forces all people into binary sex categories — in some instances by mandating surgery, in others by ignoring surgery — can only be an ideology, and it is one that is actively harmful to many people.
Prism Reform
A major inadequacy of treating binary sex as a reification of gender is that conceptions of gender differ between cultures and times. And these conceptions often go beyond the dichotomy of man/woman, encompassing polytomous genders.
There are many culturally specific identities that are “beyond the binary”. These identities are all distinct, specific to the society in which they exist, and should not be understood as mapping directly to “western” LGBT+ categories. However, the existence of these groups show there is a great diversity in how gender is understood by around the world (and throughout recorded history), each within its own specific metaphysical system.
A few examples are listed here, and some specific communities are spotlighted in these articles:
Within “western” society, there are also categories of gender beyond the binary. We already briefly mentioned, in the mythology of ontology, the existence of agender identity. But in fact, there are many other gender identities, which are often subsumed under the label of non-binary gender.
{ Sidetrack: the term “non-binary” is somewhat misleading, as it suggests all such identities are defined relative to the binary; the term in fact encompasses a spectrum of different genders, not simply positions on a gradient between male and female. }
All of which is a very shorthanded way of saying that the social or psychological realities that we live by are almost always more salient than physicality alone — which is important in limited spheres, but does not define the entirety of the person.
One might naively think that “gender critical” thought would be interested in the notion of polytomous gender, as providing alternative ways to conceptualise and therefore critique/deconstruct notions of gender. But the metaphysical overreach we previously saw — the insistence that gender identity is not real — is also applied to dismiss the validity of all such genders, as in this article:
Reilly-Cooper is utilising a very familiar conflation of a spectrum with a gradient between graded opposites:
If gender is a spectrum, that means it’s a continuum between two extremes
It’s not clear if this is just because it is useful for the purposes of argument to disingenously confuse the two, or whether GCs genuinely find it hard to understand the difference. There are consequent misapprehensions about the nature of a spectrum throughout. Just to take one example:
On the face of it, there seems to be an immediate tension between the claim that gender is not a binary but a spectrum, and the claim that only a small proportion of individuals can be described as having a non-binary gender identity.
This is like claiming there is a conflict between the existence of rainbows, and the claim that a specific tomato is red. The existence of multiple colours does not dictate the amount of any one colour in existence. (Even if conceptualizing gender as existing along a gradient between two opposites, there is no reason why there should be a uniform distribution of people across that gradient).
Reilly-Cooper seems to think there is only one way in which gradable opposites can work, that is with the opposite poles being defined in terms of statistical distributions across a population. She uses the analogy of height:
One example is height: clearly height is a continuum, and individuals can fall anywhere along that continuum; but we also have the binary labels Tall and Short. Might gender operate in a similar way?
Tallness and shortness are indeed defined relative to the average of a population. But this is only one model for gradable opposites; many such pairs do not work in this way. For example:
- “sharp” and “blunt” define opposite ends of a continuum, but the property of a knife being sharp is not defined by statistical distributions: it is defined teleologically — what can the knife cut?
- “black” and “white” can be defined straightforwardly, regardless of the distribution of different greys in any population of objects
- “push” and “pull” define a continuum of actions —but the inflection point between the two is very sharply defined
So, the arguments she makes from analogy with height don’t hold in their own right. But more fundamentally still, none of this describes a spectrum.
Much of the remainder of Reilly-Cooper’s article reads as nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated recasting of the mockery directed towards the idea of a list of “one hundred genders” by professional provocateurs such as Piers Morgan (who has a line of shtick in which he claims to identify as a “two-spirit penguin”, a not atypical example of British cultural sensitivity in full flight).
But any list of multiple gender categories that encompasses various constructs of gender used in different cultures around the world is really no more surprising than a list of honorifics containing hundreds of different titles, or a list of hundreds of different nationalities. Why get so hung up on the number of genders? The key question is whether a classification system is useful, and the acid test of that is whether people use it.
Clearly, where multiple genders are part of the cultural norm, the system is useful. And given the prominent rise in use of singular ‘they’, for example, it seems that “western” society has found that it, too, needs more than a reductive, binary notion of gender.
Reilly-Cooper’s conclusion is that we should all just seen ourselves as unique individuals, and therefore do not need any gender categories. But this is trite: a platitudinous invocation of individuality that views humanity as atomized, one in which understanding commonalities and community is not important. (The same magical coup de poing would liberate us immediately from race, nationality, organized religion, and war. Imagine: it’s easy if you try.)
Funes The Memorious is not a role model: categories are what enable us to think abstractly, to make useful generalizations, to see patterns. And if gender categories help us in understanding the world and the self, then those categories will persist. But, unlike an ideology locked to biology, they are capable of evolving or ramifying, to accommodate new understandings, to be adapted — or abandoned — as the world changes or as they change the world.
Attempting to impose a model in which there are only two sexes and no genders is not liberating. It is an oppressive fantasy, a vision of a regimented world in which people who are transgender, non-binary, or intersex do not exist.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve tried here to understand and present GC views as motivated by a set of coherent beliefs, and to articulate problems and objections that arise from attempts at literal enforcement of the GC metaphysical idea that gender is unreal, and to object to the naive notion that the “material reality” of the physical world works to override both psychological and social constructs.
A countervailing view is that our reality is woven as a braid from physical, psychological, and social strands: that notions of identity, including gender, are formed through this braiding, and the concept of a “material reality” that triumphally overrides the other strands is itself the mirage.
Much of the anti-trans argumentation we’ve seen consists of extremely thin post-hoc rationalizations for pre-existing prejudice. It includes many examples of rewarmed bigotry: the use of bathroom panic and social contagion scaremongering, for example, is basically word-for-word recycling of late 20th century homophobia; and there are numerous other examples of rhetoric that echoes or borrows that of the far right.
These kinds of ideas and arguments give a superficial cloak of reasonableness to profoundly unreasonable positions, but they do not survive contact with any level of real scrutiny. It’s sometimes hard to credit that these kinds of flimsy fables and nonsensical arguments are really constructed and delivered in good faith: but many people are convinced by them, indeed many are mainstream talking points, frequently platformed without challenge — see appendix for examples.
But perhaps this is not so surprising in an age when conspiracy theories — QAnon, anti-vaxx, climate change denial, and so on— are flourishing. Such ungrounded tinfoilism needs all the critical scorn that can be mustered against it, and I hope this article delivers some ammunition on that front.
Ultimately, I believe that tackling the toxicity of sexism does not necessitate the abolition of gender, just as ending hunger does not require that we outlaw appetite, or being anti-racism does not mean repudiating ethnicity. Instead of aiming for the elision of gender, we can look to the end of its usefulness as a tool of social control, by remaking it into a force that helps break apart the repressive sureties of rigid, cis-centric systems.
Instead of treating gender as a problem, and policing what it is acceptable to express — a commitment to monotony, neutrality, banality, rigid binarity, conceptual poverty — we can accept the profusion of gendered existence, and encourage its ramification into new forms: through the acceptance of polytomous genders; through a ludic, playful attitude to new possibilities instead of repressive attempts to close down behavioural avenues; through embracing the messy complexities and compromises of human existence.
Appendix: Institutional Transphobia in the UK
The voices of trans people struggle to be heard over the relentless media platforming of GC opinions in the UK. Here is a selection of articles from the past couple of years that give some indication of the scope of institutional transphobia within mainstream UK media.
