Blogs for me provide a way of thinking out loud. Basking in the sunshine of retirement, when CVs take a back seat, they allow for an experimenting of ideas and hypotheses. Ownership of text is no longer important, so the prospect of acting as a catalyst for others is exciting and affords a sense of warranty.
Having said this much, there are treacherous waters to navigate. In this piece I consider the debate around sex, gender and trans issues, and I do so prior to reading the key books that have triggered so much debate and antagonism. This is deliberate. I will read those books – indeed they are on my shelves – but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see where my initial leanings leave me. To those who would advise me to leave well alone, of which there would be plenty on social media, I repeat my longstanding insistence that I will write about anything I choose to. I may be missing some points of difference, but I trust I am neither naive nor disingenuous in what follows. I remain open to correction of course (via the power of the better argument).
A few parameters are indicated for what follows. The first and vital point is that I regard people first and foremost as people, and as such deserving of a full set of inclusive civil and citizenship rights. Second, I take the concept of identity – and hence identity politics – to raise important issues, not least around rights. Third, I note that our current post-1970s phase of rentier capitalism has been accompanied by an enhanced cultural individualism and a ‘pick-and-mix’ cultural relativism. Fourth, this cultural shift or ‘turn’ has privileged identity politics over the prior politics of social justice and distribution and, simultaneously, proven functional for rentier capitalism as a whole. All this, I will suggest, matters when issues like trans rights are debated.
The first point in particular is one I want to insist on.
In its time the distinction between ‘sex’, denoting the biological, and ‘gender’, denoting the social, was critical and significant. It allowed for an appreciation that one’s social roles were not ‘biologically determined’ by sex – either male or female – but rather divided up and patterned according to the norms of the day; and given the ubiquity of patriarchal systems of power, acknowledging and maintaining as much was a vital resource and fuel for feminism and feminist theorising.
The movement for gay rights embodied a dispute as to whether the identity ‘being gay’ had its origins in biological difference or social circumstance/choice. The history of ‘homosexuality’ in the Occident – from partial (elite) acceptance in ancient Greece, through Christian sin, secular crime and biomedical disease to its accommodation and acceptance today – has been well documented. The simple binary of sex and gender was, it seemed, no longer quite so robust.
Consider a person ‘ascribed’ a particular natal sex who aspires to ‘achieve’ a gender transition. Then ruminate on the possibilities that: (a) s/he seeks a biological/biomedical intervention to better realise this aspiration, or (b) s/he rejects a biological/biomedical intervention and instead seeks a social/cultural intervention (to cite Merton, a new status- and role-set). For many, (a) warrants more serious attention – even respect – than (b). Surely, they might contend, we can’t just decide our sex/gender (identity) in the absence of an enduring/permanent (biological/biomedical) commitment?
Remember again here point one: people are people first and foremost, and as such have inalienable rights, not least as citizens. I am with them, not against them.
I fully accept that biological/biomedical ‘discourse’ is socially constructed. How could this be denied? BUT I am not personally susceptible to the ‘epistemic fallacy’, namely, the reduction of what exists to what we (can) know of what exists. Ontology matters!
Reflecting a critical realist orientation to my thought I would contend that – sticking with the convenient shorthand of biological, psychological and social – causality can and does travel ‘upwards’ from the biological via the psychological to the social, and ‘downwards’ from the social via the psychological to the biological. Each stratum has – must have, for us have reached the understanding of the world that we have (allowing us to send rockets into space for example) – an array of active causal or generative mechanisms, issuing in ‘tendencies’, which may or may not be directly observable in our labs or in our experience of everyday events. There always exist ‘countervailing mechanisms’ (labs can neutralise gravity, and the impact of class can be rendered less conspicuous by the hyper-individualism of contemporary neoliberal ideology). I’ve written endlessly about this stuff, but hopefully there’s enough here to make rudimentary sense.
Let me reiterate critical realism’s ‘holy trinity’: (1) ontological realism (there exists a real world ‘out there’ that will doubtless outlast humanity; (2) epistemological relativism (I’m not keen on the term ‘relativism’ here, but the point is that our fallible human ‘knowledge’ can and does vary by time and place; and (3) judgemental rationality (given (1) and (2), it remains possible to arrive at rationally compelling theories or viewpoints).
To commit to the existence of active biological mechanisms is not necessarily to commit to simplified versions of the male/female sex binary: there are many complex, simultaneously active and interacting biological mechanisms.
The argument for collecting data on natal sex seems clear-cut to me, independently of the inclusion of questions in censuses and other surveys on gender identity. And it’s of obvious concern to realist feminists (extending well beyond those of the second wave). In a continuing patriarchal societal system we need data on women’s education, employment, pay and so on to pursue gender equality agendas. On a more prosaic level, we need to plan for obstetric and gynaecological services.
Trans people – in whatever category they fall – can and do face (1) stigma and oppression, and (2) non-stigmatising and non-oppressive ‘predicaments’. As point 1 insists, I will have no truck with (1): ‘people are people’ and their rights as such should and must be respected. What then do I mean here by ‘predicaments’, and can they come into conflict with their own or other people’s rights?
These often involve the interface between trans and non-trans people, and perhaps in particular between trans people and (other) women. Consider two simple scenarios.
A woman whose natal sex was (recorded as) female and who has always considered herself a woman does not want to share public loo facilities – let alone clothes shop or gym changing rooms – with someone whose natal sex was male, but who subsequently self-identified as a woman and (temporarily or possibly permanently) retains much of the appearance of a man. She is uncomfortable, has a feeling of deep unease, plus has always resented the mess men leave behind them in public loos.
Now consider the case of an elite athlete whose natal sex was (recorded as) male but has since self-identified as a woman. This person once represented England as a rugby player and now wants to be accepted as a candidate for the English women’s rugby squad.
The first scenario might easily be deemed trivial, but it isn’t: we still inhabit a patriarchal society and many feminists sense a threat to hard-fought accomplishments. Women fought long and hard, for example, for rights in public spaces. The second is to my mind an absurd non-starter on both competitive and safety grounds (snooker, curling etc, no problem). The ‘transitioning’ rugby player is not being denied defensible rights in being refused any right to play for the English women’s rugby team. The point of scenarios like these – and obviously thousands more of various types would be required to do justice to any worthwhile discussion – is that there are multiple ‘predicaments’ that arise around trans issues, some of which involve conflicts over rights, and some of which are in fact awkward to resolve.
I have personally known two people who, as it were in defiance of the male sex they were assigned at birth, opted to transition to become women. I wholly supported both. The first chose biological intervention, went through a sharp learning curve on how to behave as a woman, and eventually, happily, re-married. The second is in his mid-60s and is at the start of the transitioning process.
A final observation: the future is uncertain. Gender self-identification might conceivably gain traction; alternatively, stigma and oppression might be ramped up. After all, our individualised and relativised culture is twinned with an increasingly authoritarian state. But my final remark concerns ‘cyborgs’! In his last posthumous book, Hawking projected that in as little as a hundred years ‘humans’ might no longer strike as the same species. Even setting aside the problematic survival of the planet, advances in genetics and, in particular, artificial intelligence could well lead to an as yet unpredictable supersession and/or shuffling of extant ‘real’ biological, psychological and social mechanisms. What price predictions of the future of sex and gender? After all, as critical realists contend, we inhabit an ‘open system’.
I close this tentative and fairly random scattering of thoughts with three comments. The first is that I remain happy to rethink all these issues if convinced of the case for doing so; second, there would seem to be a strong case for conceptual innovation when considering trans issues; and third, I absolutely refuse to remain ‘sensibly’ silent on any set of issues I feel like commenting on. As Stuart Hall insisted, critical thinking, discussion and debate is of the essence of university life.