Alex Sharpe is Professor of Law at Keele University.
The Conversation blog recently published an article authored by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper of Warwick University, titled: Why self-identification shouldn’t be the only thing that defines our gender.[1] They then invited me, as a Trans woman, to offer an alternative perspective. However, the Conversation were not happy to publish my article as written, because, as they put it, it takes the form of a ‘take-down.’ Instead, they encouraged me to rework the article as a stand-alone piece. To be fair, they had been clear about this from the outset. However, having read Reilly-Cooper’s article which, in my view, possesses neither of the Conversation’s cornerstones, academic rigour or journalistic flare, I considered a ‘take-down’ to be the only appropriate response, other than, of course, simply ignoring it. Anything else, in my view, would confer legitimacy on a position I consider to be both politically and ethically bereft.
Reilly-Cooper’s article purports to be a serious engagement with the definition of sex/gender and, more significantly, focuses on what she considers to be the political consequences of definition. In terms of theoretical and political orientation, it appears positively Greeresque.[2] Essentially, she makes two claims: First, a claim about how to define sex/gender. Second, an insistence that a more open definition has serious and negative consequences for women (by which, of course, she means Cis women, au naturel). Let us begin with her claim about sex/gender. There is slight of hand here. Reilly-Cooper begins by acknowledging intersex people (pausing only to note that well-known champion of social justice, Germaine Greer, has been equally magnanimous) and the complexity of sex which their existence confirms. However, rather than building on the insights intersex people offer, she instead shifts attention away from the question of the definition of sex/gender to the reason why she considers it to have become the subject of such public interest in recent years – enter trans. Sinister music please
Whatever the reason why society is “questioning traditional understanding of men and women” (a good thing, in my view), the scientific fact remains that sex cannot easily be reduced to a tick box of particular biological factors, discomforting though this may be for some people. Whether it be chromosomes, gonads, genitals, hormones or something else, there is no lowest common denominator of ‘woman’ or female essence. Not, at least, that is, unless we are prepared to exclude/deny those intersex people who identify as women.[3] And, of course, once the spell of rigid binary sex is broken, there is no reason to refuse trans people in terms of social and legal inclusion. Yet, it is clear that this is exactly what Reilly-Cooper seeks to do. Moreover, while she singles out a single US activist (a lesbian Latina trans woman) as the naysayer to her preferred account, it is clear that the tide is rapidly turning against a reductive understanding of sex. From the insightful journalism/activism of Laurie Penny[4] and Paris Lees,[5] to the doyen of queer theory and activism, Judith Butler,[6] Riley-Cooper’s ship, if it hasn’t sailed already, is docked in port and ready for the high and probably deep seas.
There is a further concern here that needs to be teased out. While Reilly-Cooper makes a play of centre-staging trans people who take no medical steps to realise their gender identities (and in doing so, trivialises their lives and, perhaps, available choices), it seems clear that her focus is not to accommodate any sub-group of trans people, but rather to insist on an essentialised understanding of sex as biology at birth. The fact that she excludes trans women more generally from the ‘woman’ category becomes clear through her emphasis on length of female socialisation experience (lets be clear, this is about suffering, the ugly politics of victimhood). Putting to one side the fact that gender socialisation can and does differ across class, race and culture, as well as between individual women, the fact is that trans women do undergo gender socialisation as women, often violently, from the moment they take the brave decision to transition, and let us remember that many trans people today transition when young.
It is revealing that a gender ‘critical’ theorist calls into question the way some trans women ‘dress,’ as is her claim that an understanding of sex as biology offers the advantage of enabling us to recognise the gender of others “by sight.” Here Reilly-Cooper substitutes ‘ophthalmic feminism’ for Greer’s ‘olfactory feminism’ (“real women have smelly vaginas”).[7] And yet, of course, we often cannot recognise each other’s gender by sight (or indeed smell). Indeed, it is precisely for this reason, that many Cis women living in North Carolina have recently been refused entry to women’s bathrooms, and in some cases, assaulted.[8]Of course, arguments like Reilly-Cooper’s, which seek to facilitate gender policing, always lead to North Carolina. Inhale that coffee deeply, while we move to her second and, of course, connected claim: an insistence that a more open definition of sex/gender has serious and negative consequences for (Cis) women.
Of course, this spurious claim is what informs Reilly-Cooper’s desire to keep trans women out of women-only spaces and to ensure that state resources earmarked for women are channelled exclusively to those women who bear the prefix, Cis (it is the Cisterhood, not the Sisterhood, that Reilly-Cooper seeks to advance). It is imagined (if, of course, it really is) that trans women pose a danger to Cis women in “women-only spaces, such as changing facilities, toilets, refuges and prisons.” As in North Carolina, there is no evidence for these claims, nor does Reilly-Cooper provide any. The reality is that trans women need to pee, to receive support as a result of sexual abuse, and to be placed in an appropriate prison, as recent suicides and instances of sexual assault attest.[9] Moreover, in relation to UK prisons, there is provision for assigning Cis and trans women to a male prison, in circumstances where their security profile means they pose a danger to others within the female estate.[10]
There is no reason to assume that trans women pose some kind of threat to Cis women, beyond the threat Cis women pose to each other, and to perpetuate the assumption that they do is, to say the least, unhelpful. Thus, in addition to being on the wrong side of history, it would seem, that lacking any credible evidence of harm, Reilly-Cooper is on the wrong side of social-scientific protocol. Of course, she appears to know this. As she says, “we don’t know to what extent anyone would seek to exploit legislation designed to allow people to self-identify as women.”[11] Exactly, we don’t know. In fact, we have no reason to think anybody is going to do that. I find her statement offensive, trivialising the lives and gender identities of trans people, and reminiscent of the view, all too prevalent in our recent past, that homosexuality and paedophilia are somehow connected. This is nothing but an appeal to prejudice, a gender politics of fear.
Ultimately, some Cis women feel uncomfortable about the idea of having to share sex-segregated space with trans women. This is driven not by any evidence of harm, but by an ideological view that trans women, whatever the shape of their bodies or their actual gender socialisation experience, are not women. Ultimately, the question of sex/gender identity is not only a matter of theory, or political consequence, but a question of ethics. As Judith Butler has reminded us recently, in drawing attention to the totalising, simplistic and joyless kind of feminism with which we are dealing: “we are all ethically bound to recognise another person’s declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender.”[12] And, of course, recognition, if it is to mean anything, requires inclusion.
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-self-identification-shouldnt-be-the-only-thing-that-defines-our-gender-57924
[2] Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1999); see also Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: the making of a she-male (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1979); Sheila Jeffries, Gender Hurts: a feminist analysis of the politics of transgenderism (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2014).
[3] It is also noteworthy that a biological explanation for gender identity is ignored. While I do not think biological evidence should dictate social and legal ordering, it is nevertheless the case that a considerable body of scientific literature now exists claiming that transsexual women possess a female brain structure (see, for example, LJG Gooren et al, ‘A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality’ (1995) 378 Nature 68-70; FPM Kruijver et al, ‘Male-to-Female Transsexuals have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus’ (2000) 85 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 2034-41).
[4] http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2014/06/laurie-penny-what-transgender-tipping-point-really-means
[5] http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/paris-lees-terf-war-twitter-radical-feminists-088
[6] See, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993); Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
[7]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11954673/Germaine-Greer-is-a-misogynist-I-dont-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry.html
[8] http://winningdemocrats.com/bigot-cops-refuse-to-let-lesbian-use-womens-restroom-because-she-looks-like-a-boy-video/
[9] I refer here to the recent deaths of Vikki Thompson (HM Prison, Armley, Leeds) and Joanne Latham (HM Prison, Woodhill, Milton Keynes), both of whom died in November 2015. Tara Hudson, who was originally placed in a men’s prison, was moved to a women’s prison after a high profile public campaign. In relation to sexual assault, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/transgender-woman-raped-2000-times-male-prison-a6989366.html
[10] Para 4.3 Care and Management of Transsexual Prisoners (PSI 07/2011).
[11] She is referring to the recommendations made by the Women and Equalities Committee in its Transgender Equality Report (14 Jan 2016) HC 390, pp 79-80 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmwomeq/390/390.pdf
[12] Interview in TransAdvocate, 1 May 2014 http://www.transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm
Hi Alex,
You seem to have misunderstood my argument. I’m not uncomfortable sharing spaces with trans women. I am uncomfortable sharing some spaces with men. My position is that both trans women and natal women need some safe and private spaces away from men, and that self-declaration of gender makes distinguishing between men and women impossible. If you want to preserve any women-only spaces at all – which both trans women and natal women have an interested in doing – you need a definition of woman that is not entirely subjective. In that piece I argued only against subjective definitions of womanhood based entirely on self-identification. I did not defend a biological definition of womanhood. Hope that helps to clarify my view.
This is not what you said in your published article;
“A legal redefinition of our existing gender categories so that they reflect gender identity, instead of biological sex, would have the consequence of overriding existing legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex.”
You seem to be misrepresenting your own views here, which seem to me to be pretty clearly essentialist in their foundation.
The big lie that you tell is to maintain that trans people, but their very existence, undermine “existing legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex” yet you fail to show any instances of this. This is just the same as the arguments of the religious fundamentalists and right-wing politicians (and thuggish male assailants) in midwestern America. Your arguments are based on hypotheticals without causal links rather than on actual evidence.
Straw man rhetoric designed to harm trans people, which is not at all dissimilar to the rhetoric used in North Carolina. “We cis people want the right to police trans people’s minds/bodies”.
This article is one straw man argument after another. Clearly the author has not read the original text in question. I have. It does not address the text but conveniently creates an imaginary text of what Reilly-Cooper has not stated. I think this is why it was not published in The Conversation.
Thank you.
Good.
Not posting comments? Wow! What a faux platform that you demonstrate your sour grapes and them take off comments you dislike!
I’ve tried three times to post comments on the science and specifically the biological aspects of transgenderism. All my comments have been “swallowed” up. Where are they?
Hi Rebecca,
I do not think I have misunderstood you. I have responded to what you have actually written in the Conversation and the way you have chosen to present it. If biology is irrelevant to your arguments, as you claim, it is curious that you make repeated references to biology throughout.
You also make important ‘how trans women dress’ and ‘how long they/we have lived in role.’ Such comments undermine your claim that your real concern is to protect all women (cis and trans) from men. And in relation to this claim:
(i) I do not think, not has it been established, that men are likely to pretend to be women in order to access women’s spaces. I think this to be sheer fantasy
(ii) your emphasis on this rather bizarre possibility is likely to serve only one political purpose – state regulation/harassment of trans women. And, of course, here there is no need to imagine harm.
For these reasons, I continue to find your position politically and ethically suspect.
I agree with Alex’s comments. It is incumbent on writers who do not want to be misunderstood to be as clear as possible about their arguments. I read both the original article (how ludicrous to suggest Alex didn’t!) and the response. The response is based on the most plausible reading of the original piece. There are many problematic and sweeping statements in the original piece which demanded a response. If self-identification is not good, what then? Perhaps those who support Rebecca R-C’s argument can enlighten us on what a non-transphobic or non-trans-harming alternative way of defining gender would look like. Until then, they cannot blame those who take R R-C’s arguments with more than a grain of salt.
Whether “woman” is used on the basis of biological sex or self identification, this doesn’t alter the fact that the vast, vast majority of humanity are quite readily identifiable/classifiable as male or female, terms applicable to their function in the reproductive process (males being the ones that, all going well, can as adults produce the sperm, females being the ones that all going well can produce the eggs, and carry a baby to term, obviously). There will always be males and females, however we may amend the meaning of the terms “man” and “woman”.
The male/female distinction is always going to remain of relevance in my opinion, for instance, even if the world generally comes to use the word “woman” as applying to anyone with a female gender identity (hence including trans woman but excluding trans men). For instance in the area of sexual attraction, cisgender people (and maybe trans people too, for all I know) will continue to seek partners based on their preferred sex – the sex of the partner being very much part of what attracts them.
As to state regulation etc., the question is to whether some legal distinctions should continue to be made on the basis of sex as opposed to gender identity. Clearly there are some cases where the distinction must be on male/female basis – e.g. giving more parental leave to the female parent than to the male parent, however they identify. The male/female distinction is also clearly relevant in sport – males as a class are significantly stronger than females. It would also be legitimate presumably for some doctors/medical centres to specialise in specifically female medical/health issues.
I think that there are other areas where distinctions based on sex are reasonable, and that it is valid to permit the exclusion of male people, or at least people with male genitalia, from certain female only spaces, probably limited to spaces where females are undressing, or are particularly vulnerable.
“….the scientific fact remains that sex cannot easily be reduced to a tick box of particular biological factors…” Well, actually, it can: scientific research in many areas is advancing rapidly. In physical medicine: diseases of gene expression and resulting disruption of metabolic pathways, problems of endocrine metabolism, understanding of normal developmental biology, etc… and in psychiatry: new approaches in psychotherapy and a renewed interest in psychoanalysis to pinpoint possible trauma in childhood as the key to understanding and unlocking a pathological psychology.
There is a need to bring various strands of research together to come up with new insights and new avenues for scientific research.
I am optimistic that satisfactory outcomes to the troubles of trans people will eventually come from these initiatives, which aim to comfort and ease their distress, and help them to be “happy in their skin”. Surgery and exogenous hormones will then not be necessary.
“…those intersex people who identify as women”.
There are two confusions here: (1) “Intersex” is a set of real physical abnormalities which have been recognised for years but only elucidated fairly recently at a molecular level. Some intersex people look like women. Some look like men. Some look in-between: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#/media/File:Third_International_Intersex_Forum.jpg
(2) As I understand their position, intersex people “identify” as intersex. NOT women, not men. That is why they claim (rightly!) a distinct biological existence.
The references which you give to the two Dutch papers (to support the claim “… that transsexual women possess a female brain structure”) have been widely discredited.
“…once the spell of rigid binary sex is broken”: the existence of chromosomal and metabolic variations which give rise to intersex human beings is a scientific fact. The existence of such deviations from simple 46,XX (women) and 46,XY (men) pattern does not detract from the fundamental biological reality of the binary chromosomal division of sex. The variations are an elaboration, a further layer of complexity which reinforces the validity of the original simple categorisation.
This is science. It is both simple at a superficial level (XX and XY) and complex when you get into more detail. The science is beautiful and powerful!
“…the question of sex/gender identity is not only a matter of theory, or political consequence, but a question of ethics”. Is it a matter of “ethics” to recognise that a mouse is genetically different to a cat? I’m sorry, it really is all a matter of genes (and endocrine metabolism).
You can cry that you want to be Napoleon, but that isn’t going to make you Napoleon.
Please try to understand that some facts are immutable.
I posted the following comments this morning. They are about biological facts, not about legal or philosophical questions. Can I please post them?
“….the scientific fact remains that sex cannot easily be reduced to a tick box of particular biological factors…” Well, actually, it can: scientific research in many areas is advancing rapidly. In physical medicine: diseases of gene expression and resulting disruption of metabolic pathways, problems of endocrine metabolism, understanding of normal developmental biology, etc… and in psychiatry: new approaches in psychotherapy and a renewed interest in psychoanalysis to pinpoint possible trauma in childhood as the key to understanding and unlocking a pathological psychology.
There is a need to bring various strands of research together to come up with new insights and new avenues for scientific research.
I am optimistic that satisfactory outcomes to the troubles of trans people will eventually come from these initiatives, which aim to comfort and ease their distress, and help them to be “happy in their skin”. Surgery and exogenous hormones will then not be necessary.
“…those intersex people who identify as women”.
There are two confusions here: (1) “Intersex” is a set of real physical abnormalities which have been recognised for years but only elucidated fairly recently at a molecular level. Some intersex people look like women. Some look like men. Some look in-between: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#/media/File:Third_International_Intersex_Forum.jpg
(2) As I understand their position, intersex people “identify” as intersex. Not women, not men. That is why they claim (rightly!) a distinct biological existence.
The references which you give to the two Dutch papers (to support the claim “… that transsexual women possess a female brain structure”) have been widely discredited.
“…once the spell of rigid binary sex is broken”: the existence of chromosomal and metabolic variations which give rise to intersex human beings is a scientific fact. The existence of such deviations from simple 46,XX (women) and 46,XY (men) pattern does not detract from the fundamental biological reality of the binary chromosomal division of sex. The variations are an elaboration, a further layer of complexity which reinforces the validity of the original simple categorisation.
This is science. It is both simple at a superficial level (XX and XY) and complex when you get into more detail. The science is beautiful and powerful!
“…the question of sex/gender identity is not only a matter of theory, or political consequence, but a question of ethics”. Is it a matter of “ethics” to recognise that a mouse is genetically different to a cat? I’m sorry, it really is all a matter of genes (and endocrine metabolism).
You can cry that you want to be Napoleon, but that isn’t going to make you Napoleon.
Please try to understand that some facts are immutable.
Will you allow me to post comments on the science aspects of the transgender debate? You have treated these in a cursory way which is rather unsatisfactory, and detracts from your other arguments. The science must, I hope, underpin your arguments? If not, why not?
Thanks for this. I am really grateful for your openness about your own standpoint as a transwoman as well as your careful treatment of the question of gender identification, insistence on documentation (e.g. men’s likelihood to pretend to be women), and your focus on the experiences of non-Cis women. There isn’t enough of this kind of analysis in the public debate.
It’s astounding how people are permitted to make these blithely illogical arguments — in this case that there is no physical sex binary, or that “sex cannot easily be reduced to a tick box of particular biological factors”. Of course it can. It’s like saying that human beings don’t have a right arm, because, hey, some people are born with deformed right arms, or lose their right arms in accidents, there are right arms with black skin and right arms with white skin, etc. Aristotle dismissed all that stuff thousands of years ago with his notation that the natural characteristics of bodies do not cease to be natural because of the occasional deviation from the norm due to disease, mutation, etc.
Please let me begin by saying that, as a radical feminist with transsexual history, I see a fully radical feminism as critical of both the sex and gender binaries. And in my view it is very important to see natal and transsexual women, both members of the female sex class, as equal sisters who face many common oppressions as well as some additional and unique ones: for example, childhood female socialization and most often reproductive vulnerability under patriarchy for natal females; and childhood trans oppression and the experience of transitioning for transsexual females. Thus I must question either the “cis/trans” binary concept which tends to portray natal women as privileged over transsexual women; or the misgendering and/or missexing of transsexual females as “men” or “males” that focuses on the real experience of past male privilege but erases what are often many years or decades of ongoing female socialization and reeducation in feminist process and ethnics.
As an endosex (nonintersex) ally to the intersex community, I would like to clarify that intersex people born with bodies deemed outside the sex binary face special oppressions which need consideration in their right, and not merely as an adjunct to some debate on trans issues. Organisation Intersex International (OII) estimates that 1%-2% of humans are born intersex, and emphasizes that the leading intersex concern is outlawing Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), nonconsensual surgeries and other forms of medical abuse inflicted without medical necessity on infants and children not old enough to discover and appreciate their own sex identities and make informed decisions about whether or how their bodies should be altered — or, often when they are allowed a choice, left alone! While the United Nations considers IGM, like Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a basic human rights violation, only Malta and Chile have so far banned IGM.
Most intersex people, at least in the “developed” world where patriarchy generally prevails, identify with the binary sex assigned at birth. But some wish to and do transition to the other binary sex, sometimes identifying as “trans” or both “trans” and “intersex”; and some identify as “intersex” in a nonbinary sense, with Dana Zzyym in the USA, for example, recently winning a decision in a lower federal court requiring the State Department to issue them a passport with the nonbinary “X” gender marker. For an intersex explanation of the variety of ways intersex people identify, please see .
A truly radical feminism, without losing its focus on female reproductive enslavement and servitude as central to the origins and history of patriarchy, can and must join the intersex community in challenging the sex binary as well as the gender binary. Attempts to play down or underestimate the size of the intersex population, or to marginalize or pathologize it, should not be part of any feminism, and especially not of any radical feminism
While intersex people are born with bodies outside the sex binary, transsexual people through our own choices of medical as well as social transition also arrive at bodies with mixed sex characteristics, but without experiencing the vulnerability that intersex people do as infants and children with sex variant bodies subject to “therapeutic” violence including IGM. Both patriarchy and some varieties of “gender critical feminism” which do not challenge the sex binary tend to focus on the sex characteristics of transsexual people which cannot be altered (e.g. chromosomes, lack of reproductive capacity in our new sex categories) while ignoring primary and secondary characteristics which are altered in transitioning.
Thus I would describe myself as “a female with mixed sex characteristics,” or perhaps a “xenofemale,” with the prefix xen- referring to a “strange” origin, and to my need over the years and decades for a kind of “naturalization.” This process of adult female socialization, at least for me, more particularly is one of acquiring sex class consciousness, which means a solidarity with the vast majority of my sisters who have lived their entire lives as female, and some of whom have also faced intersex oppression.
And this solidarity means being “gender critical” in the best sense: questioning gender norms and stereotypes, whether associated with patriarchal sex binary categories or with hypotheses of “brain sex” sometimes used, mistakenly in my view, to justify trans identities. The moral claims of a right to live and alter one’s social sex or gender status and body according to one’s sex identity should not depend on the question whether that identity is somehow genetically or neurologically determined at birth, or is shaped by social experience in one’s earlier years — either occurring before one can exercise moral choice. Some “brain sex” arguments do tend to naturalize patriarchal gender roles, a result which radical feminists should resist.
Finally, I agree with radical feminist Finn Mackay that a thriving women’s community will offer many diverse spaces, many of them widely inclusive but some more specialized. Thus if groups of transsexual women, intersex women, or women who have lived their entire lives as female wish to establish separate spaces or events, I respect their right to do so. It is possible to respect this right of free association while at the same time recognizing our need for mutual solidarity within a larger female sex class.
Please note that in my comment above, “feminist process and ethnics” should obviously be “feminist process and ethics”; and the link on how intersex people identify evidently needed to be in a different format, which I hope I am now supplying: How Intersex People Identify .