Violence against the marginalised: it’s not just a gendered thing

CN for domestic violence and sexual violence mentions, discussions of structural violence, particularly ableism, and its role in violence

I was preparing some training on disability access and inclusion recently and I looked up the statistics on disabled people’s experiences of crime. The following graphs show the ONS statistics on domestic abuse and sexual assault.

The very blatant story these graphs show us is that disability is a stronger factor in being targeted for violence than being a woman. Now, if we look at the various stats for assault of LGBT+ people, we see the same thing – LGBT+ people, regardless of gender, experience higher levels of victimisation across the board than women as a group, and trans people’s experiences are particularly high.

So, the question is, why do we say, “violence against women and girls” rather than “violence against marginalised people” and what does this do to our understanding of the mechanisms behind victimisation?

How “gender critical” ideology has warped the conversation to serve patriarchy

Feminism talks about structures of power created to give a group advantages. Intersectional feminism talks about how these oppressive structures interlock with one another so that misogyny and classism and racism and ableism etc are not separable – it leads to the overarching concept of kyriarchy.

“Gender Critical” ideology has, I think it’s clear, flourished because mainstream non-feminist influences promoted it over other feminists. This was evident within the domestic violence sector that I used to work in, where funding went towards gender essentialist models of male violence and female passivity (discussed here), and with the publications and mainstream successes of writers who promoted this ideology. The establishment may pretend to disapprove, but it will gleefully facilitate.

And the reason this ideology serves patriarchy so well is because it erases the idea of built power structures that can be dismantled in favour of the idea of male supremacy as a biological inheritance. Men are imagined as fundamentally and biologically predisposed towards dominance and violence, sexual or otherwise. Inherent to this message is the idea that it’s not patriarchal power we need to be afraid of, but rather the dangerous, marginalised stranger lurking behind the bushes. Women need protection, it says, not equality, and safe, legally segregated spaces, not a level playing field.

Women don’t experience less violence in society from men because segregated toilets (etc) exist and because they are legally separate and can be excluded from the kinds of schools that breed many of our politicians and judiciary. But it makes a nice story in preservation of the status quo.

Let’s not learn our trans politics from transphobes

In making misogyny the “one true oppression” we bow to the erasure of built oppressive structures and reinforce biological essentialism – buying into the notion that there are fundamental differences between men and women that cause inequality, rather than simply power relations.

Meanwhile, here’s the rub: a lot of us in this community are disabled, and all of us are LGBT+, and actually, these two axes of oppression are much more salient in predicting the amount of violence we experience. Transmisogyny ensures an extra helping of many types of violence, because it adds in another dimension of oppression us TME folks don’t experience. Equally racism adds a dimension white people don’t experience, and so on.

Where our discourse goes awry is when we omit to notice that all trans people are experiencing levels of violence greater than those of cis women. It took me a long time to realise this – the inordinate amounts of violence I’ve face in my life are statistically more likely to be related to me being disabled, bi, trans or autistic than to having been assigned or perceived female. Transphobia, queerphobia and the victimisation of disability are incredibly strong forces in all our lives. Ageism, racism and classism are also much greater predictors of violence than is often acknowledged.

I think this is what has partly given rise to the “transandrophobia” debate and the unnecessary need for AFAB trans folks to talk about their (dubious) “female socialisation”. The narrative of female victimisation is so powerful we completely lose sight of belonging to groups that are far more likely to be attacked than cishet, able white (etc) women.

Where’s the discourse on violence against disabled people? LGBT+ people? POC? Young people? And so forth.

White women are also unfortunately good at co-opting the victimisation of women of colour to exaggerate their own marginalisation. Meanwhile, sometimes very privileged white middle class able women can put themselves into positions of power in queer spaces with zero ability to reflect on the ways in which they hold structural power. The apparent narrative is that “woman” is the big brand oppression and no other oppression comes close.

You cannot split our community down the middle

For me, quite aside from the fact gender isn’t a binary and gendered oppression isn’t either, trans spaces need a very vibrant awareness of intersectionality and an ability to not be blinkered to any oppressive structures. While current toxic mainstream discourse has focussed on trans women, additionally endangering them, in community spaces what we see is a much more mixed picture, in terms of who especially needs our care.

The community isn’t divided neatly by AGAB into winners and losers – there are trans women who’ve never experienced violence, and trans men who have. This isn’t because “men are oppressed too” and it certainly isn’t because trans women hold structural power over trans men, but because our identities are complex and our experiences multi-determined. If you’ve experienced violence, you probably have less in common with someone of your AGAB who hasn’t than another trans person, AGAB irrelevant, who has. If you’re living on the breadline, that’s a social factor more salient in terms of the risks you face than which label you claim.

This doesn’t mean TME folks don’t need to reflect on and unlearn transmisogyny. It does mean that transmisogyny isn’t the only oppressive structure that exists. It’s the job of all of us to reflect on the ways in which we hold privilege as well as the ways we don’t, and be mindful of which intersections are relevent in any given conversation.  

I remember once making a transphobic feminist implode by pointing out that Margaret Thatcher could and did oppress working class men, gay men and men of colour, and none of that meant that misogyny isn’t real, nor was MT exempt from it. In a conversation where gendered oppression was the One True Real Oppression, this statement was too much for said transphobe.

Of course, if we’d specifically been having a conversation about misogyny, that would have been a derail, but we weren’t, we were talking about the fact that women can be oppressive and hold power.

If we simply understood queerphobia and transphobia as Huge and Deadly forms of oppression in their own right trans men would have the framework to articulate their struggles more coherently and we as a community could hold together instead of letting ourselves be split by what are essentially outside narratives.

Equally, while the term transmisogyny is entirely justified because of the specific and prevalent phenomenon it describes, the deadly combination of being young and trans is often missed and neglected, as is the risk our young people of all AGAB are at because of the current transphobic discourse that specifically targets young people. And the way the prevalence of neurodiversity in our community is used to undermine autistic trans people is also a glaring issue. And the way ableism and fatphobia create lethal barriers to trans healthcare (and the ways barriers to healthcare create barriers to safety). And the multiple systemic barriers and risk of violence trans people of colour experience. Structural violence takes many forms, and it all matters. There doesn’t need to be a competition on this, we can care about all oppression and want to dismantle it in all its forms.

Trans men who’ve faced violence, discrimination and abuse don’t need to (and shouldn’t) insert themselves into a conversation about trans women’s experiences, they can have their own conversation on its own merits, in other words.

Right now in the UK if you don’t have the means to self-fund your transition you face 5 year waits for healthcare and that could prove fatal, and expose you to increased violence, so anyone already transitioned or with access to private healthcare carries enormous privileges in our community. I own that privilege as someone who faced a one, not five-year wait.

We all have value and many of us are in poor shape

There are many ways in which our marginalisations can put our safety at risk. They’re all violences. In community, we don’t need to figure out which of these violences is the most important because they’re bad enough, all of them are. We can and should value and care about everyone in this community and the violences thay face. The LGBT+ community has played the “we’ll send the bus back for the rest of you later” game and it doesn’t work out for anyone.

If the stats shown above tell us anything it’s that unlearning ableism is every bit as imperative as unlearning sexism. There are no lesser oppressions, no unimportant causes. And if that’s true, as a community we have a responsibility to show up for each other, work at dismantling all these structures, and building community across difference, not assumptions of sameness.

Why not to say trans and non-binary and what to say instead

CW: mentions suicidal thoughts, misgendering, transphobia, mental health, exclusion, dysphoria, trans healthcare

Not the blog post I’ve been promising, but one that’s been requested by a couple of people.

This blog isn’t about correcting individual people’s language or labels. What it’s about is how we organise ourselves, and the words we use when we come together in visible groups, the messages we collectively give to cis people about who belongs where, and why it matters.

Nothing is ever as simple as a longer-than-i-wanted-it-to-be blog post can describe. I’m going to argue, though, that trans or trans+ are good enough umbrella terms, and, more, to the point, even if they’re not, “trans and non-binary” is not useful, and there’s a reason why many of us have been fighting against this terminology tooth and nail for many years and feel frustrated by its resurgence. It’s also why I used “trans and gender diverse” in my book title, even though I’m not entirely wedded to that term either, and “divergent” would probably have been more accurate.

Words rewrite history

Recently, I was delivering some LGBT+ competency training and I was asked two familiar questions: the first – why were trans people “added on” to LGBT+ when being gay is about sex? And the second, “wait, are you saying non-binary people are trans? I didn’t know!”

Cue me patiently explaining the history – that the word “gay” was once more inclusive, and being queer is a many-faceted thing that for many people, not just trans people, is about gender as well as sex. A butch lesbian once told me “butch is my gender, lesbian my sexuality” – you cannot separate the two when so many of us have a queer relationship with both.

We were always a part of this community, so the addition of the letters B&T as an act of “inclusion” created a false story – that bi and trans people were a late addition to an existing gay movement, erasing the fact that bi and trans people were integral (and often foundational) to the movement right from the start, and “gay” at one time meant us too.

And the same thing is happening with trans.

The history of trans labels

When Leslie Feinberg popularised the word “transgender” in the 90s its meaning was close to what non-binary means now, only perhaps even wider and more inclusive than non-binary has become. Feinberg was in no way a “binary” trans person, and zie used the term to include a very wide group of people. But over time, transgender became narrowed to mean trans men and women, or rather non-binary people got forgotten and excluded, and we needed a new word to include ourselves again.

For the record, many of us wanted that word to be genderqueer, not non-binary. I don’t like the word non-binary at all and for many reasons don’t want it as my label. But I accept this is what the majority settled on. Just like, back in the 90s a lot of WLW didn’t like the word lesbian and did not identify as lesbian, but we didn’t replace the L in LGBT for them.

When I came out as non-binary a decade ago, we were fighting for the right to access trans healthcare and be included in trans spaces. We were fighting to drop the godawful trans asterisk popularised by Sam Killerman, the cis guy who plagiarised the Genderbread person from trans people and talked over our community time and time again, becoming cis people’s go-to resources on learning about gender diversity. We needed not to be seen as a footnote, something separate. We needed people to understand that misgendering us mattered just as much as misgendering any trans person. That those of us who needed healthcare needed it as much as any trans person. That we weren’t something different and separate – that we were the trans community as much as anybody.

Meanwhile TERFs back then were telling the world that “true transsexuals” were okay (as long as they saw themselves as mentally ill and biologically the sex they were assigned as) but the rest of us – the transgenders – were the real problem, and sure enough we were getting backlash from some quarters within the community that we didn’t belong and were spoiling things for the real trans people with real needs and real gender dysphoria. We were the special snowflakes identifying as attack helicopters, and so on.

This us and them splitting of a movement into the “good ones” and the “unacceptable riff-raff” is of course a classic divide-and-conquer tactic.

No specific detriment

Then in 2015 the UK government stated:

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination if it arises from their being perceived as either male or female. We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment…

Trans men and women needed to be trans, but we were just doing it for kicks, was the underlying message. We didn’t need protection or inclusion like the real trans people. Although since then we’ve had one legal case that set a precedent to the contrary, let’s be clear that “non-binary is separate/different from trans” has legal implications for inclusion, healthcare and civil rights.

One real-world consequence of this was me going without a passport for a decade, with all the difficulties that entailed, and finally succumbing to one that misidentifies me.

Back in 2015, I was in a long-term relationship with a trans man. The reactions to us both coming out were starkly different. He was correctly gendered by our queer friends quickly, I was not. His trans man friends almost never got my pronouns right, and saw me either as a trans man in denial or a cis woman – many trans men still do. In other words, refusing to see me at all. Queer friends thought I was just jumping on my partner’s bandwagon, even though I was the one who’d been involved in trans activism and talking about my complicated gender for years and we came out within weeks of one another. He got support, I got pushback, it was that blatant a divide.

In seeing non-binary genders as different, more trivial, less in need of support or as suffering less difficulty than trans men and women, non-binary people get excluded from safety and care. The exact same thing happened to bi+ people, incidentally, which is why it transpires that bi+ people suffer worse health outcomes than lesbian and gay people. Exclusion harms. Stories about groups being less oppressed and therefore less in need of inclusion harm. When we internalise those stories, we can harm ourselves and each other too.

The psychological impact of your needs being dismissed

I really hear the non-transitioning non-binary people who exclude themselves from the word trans because they feel like they’re not as oppressed, or don’t suffer enough.

But here’s the thing. People did such a comprehensive job of making me feel like an inconvenience to the “real” trans community that I started to think the world would be better off without me even existing. I began to believe I was inconvenient to the cause of trans rights in exactly the same way bi and trans people had been made to feel inconvenient to the cause of gay rights, and edged out. In having my needs trivialised, I trivialised myself and that meant it became harder and harder to ask for what I needed, or even accept my needs were real and valid.

But none of that changed what I needed or the pain I felt in trying to make my needs smaller, e.g by not coming out to my partner’s wider family, by accepting “he” pronouns for a while at work when I decided to medically transition.

It took a long time for me to understand it’s important to all trans people to realise we have the right to exist as ourselves without assimilation, neat little boxes, and medicalisation. Non-binary people being fully part of this community gives everyone breathing space because nothing about trans experiences is binary. It dismantles the tyranny of “trans enough” that can leave everyone with a sense of imposter syndrome.

The last thing this community needs is more gates and gatekeepers.

But also, understanding non-binary people’s stated needs, whether for correct pronouns, somewhere safe to pee, or healthcare, are every bit as important and necessary as for trans men and women’s is a matter of life and death for many of us. I could so easily not still be here thanks to that belief that I was taking space I had no right to chipping away at my sense that I had could ask for things that I nevertheless profoundly needed.

If I don’t get to call myself trans, does the trans man who doesn’t want lower surgery? What about the one who doesn’t mind what pronouns he gets? The one who transitioned quietly and easily thanks to private health insurance and never experienced transphobia? The one who didn’t experience anything he could have called dysphoria, only euphoria?

If trans is a term only permissible for those who have it the toughest we are going backwards to the days when you only got to transition if you would not survive otherwise. We become defined by our suffering.

Newsflash: we should have the right to transition in any way we need if it will make our lives happier or more meaningful. We don’t owe anyone a narrative of suffering in order to get what we need to thrive.

The move from transsexual to transgender to trans* to trans to trans+

There was a reason the community had gone towards “transgender” and away from “transsexual” – the community as a whole were realising we weren’t all about surgery, that not all of us, even the most “binary” among us had identical needs and profiles that could neatly be spelled out by a medical pathway and underlined with a GRC. That it wasn’t for cis clinicians to make us into who we knew ourselves to be, but for us to self-determine who we were.  Transness is a mixed and complicated experience and each of our transitions is different, tailor made for us alone. But all of us probably do share the need to change something – clothes, pronouns, names, identity labels, documents, hair, bodies etc – in order to thrive.

And this is why people distancing themselves from the word trans can be so problematic if it goes beyond personal preference and into dictating umbrella terms. Not because everyone doesn’t have the right to determine their own personal labels, of course they do, but because “I’m not trans because…” so often misdefines and misunderstands the breadth and complexity of what “trans” is. It narrows the definition of trans in order to leave people outside of it, which can have the effect of excluding non-binary people from spaces they need to be included, or to problematise, medicalise or otherwise distance from the trans community.

For instance, every time someone says “I’m not trans because I’m not medically transitioning” I die a little inside, because that person just reduced trans people to a medical process, and it’s only a small step to reinforcing the validity of trans identities only if they have the correct surgeries. Which screws over a lot of disenfranchised people who don’t have access to, or don’t want, trans healthcare.

Trans+ works fine. Or trans and gender diverse/divergent. There are genuine and legitimate reasons for someone not to call themself trans (e.g. intersex, 2 spirit) but that doesn’t mean splitting off non-binary from trans is the answer.

I understand equally that we need to signal that non-binary people are fully included in our spaces because that’s not always a given – we haven’t always been sure of our welcome. At the ICTA Project I worked on through to last year we (most of the trans researchers were non-binary) favoured using “trans (including non-binary)” to be very clear about our inclusivity. But “trans and non-binary” doesn’t signal inclusion, but separation, in the way “men and trans men” wouldn’t be an inclusive phrasing, but “men, including trans men” would, or “cis and trans men” would.

Whose needs are greater here?

I’m prepared to be proved wrong, but I feel like the damage done to non-binary people excluded from the support of trans spaces, not counted in trans healthcare discussions, excluded from trans healthcare itself, and left out of trans legal/civil rights discourse outweighs the impact on non-binary people who don’t consider themselves trans of us vetoing the umbrella term “trans and non-binary”, which we’ve been trying to do relentlessly for a decade.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to hear evidence that the same safety/civil rights imperatives are attached to the need for the specific terminology “trans and non-binary” to be used as the default umbrella term.

Someone’s right to choose what labels they want for themselves is essential, but it does not need to dictate what umbrella term should be used more generally, because no umbrella term will be perfect. For example, I choose genderqueer and trans as my personal labels, but I accept non-binary as a term that includes me, even though I dislike the word, and don’t think it’s helpful or fair to conceptualise trans men and women as “binary”.

Likewise, I see no great harm done to people when we accept trans as Leslie Feinberg intended “transgender” – an umbrella term that includes what we now call non-binary.

The growing use of “trans and non-binary” isn’t just about language: it teaches cis people that folks like me aren’t trans when we just spent a decade fighting hard to be recognised as part of this community. The real-world consequences are people taking non-binary identities less seriously and seeing our need for healthcare, accommodations and civil rights as less important. And that impacts our safety, mental health, and wellbeing.

Not cis, not trans, but a secret third thing?

I’m not a fan of binaries or dichotomies. But it’s hard to describe someone non-binary as definitively “not trans” without narrowing the definition of what trans means. People say cis/trans is an unwanted binary, but as cis only means not trans, let’s try saying “I’m neither queer nor not-queer” or “I’m neither bisexual nor not-bisexual” “I’m neither non-binary nor not non-binary” – sounds ridiculous huh?

It’s not a binary to say there are people who are trans and people who aren’t. Even though we can’t accurately measure where one ends and the other begins. We don’t need to – trans can be a land without borders, because if people need to belong here, then they do. It’s not a resource that will run out if too many people claim it, it’s not something that needs to be patrolled and guarded with high fences and “no entry without a permit” signs. It’s not exactly prime property to be located in at this juncture in history.

It is more than okay to not know if you’re cis or trans, or feel you live in the undefined borderlands between the two, but that’s a whole other thing that doesn’t require the drawing of new borders around your identity. The drawing of those borders only reinforces the “trans enough” narrative where people might feel they have to move faster than they want to or towards things they’re not sure of in order to prove their belonging and need of the safety of community. We don’t need anything to feed people’s queer imposter syndrome, which is also in infinitely available supply.

When trans people are one of the most scapegoated groups on the planet right now, I understand the need to disown the trans label, or to deny having the same difficult experiences that some trans people share. But rewriting our history and definitions, and talking over those of us in need of inclusion for our safety and wellbeing is not helpful.

By doing this, “trans” gets turned into the narrow little box it never was.

Transandrophobia: we need to ditch this word now

It’s been a long time since I blogged, I may say more about why another day. But today I want to speak up about how destructive the “transandrophobia” discourse has been.

Where transmisogyny was a clarifying word that helped us understand something about the specific attack on trans women, transandrophobia is a muddying word that has entirely betrayed our community and made nuanced discourse impossible, as well as pulling apart our spaces when we desperately need to pull together. I’m furious at the number of people who’ve adopted this word and dug in at the inevitable conflict this has stirred.

Who am I?

It feels important to own where my voice in this is coming from. I’m a disabled, transitioned AFAB non-binary person, living a relatively marginalised and fragile existence. I’ve been on the receiving end of much violence in my life that lives at the intersection of queer and transphobia. I do want a way to have conversations about that violence without talking over trans women. I’ll blog more about this later. I have thoughts on how we have these conversations, but this blog is about how not to do it.

I am transmisogyny exempt (TME), and have always considered it vital to reflect on my TME privilege. I know many trans women have highlighted how bringing diverse trans experiences into the frame when done right has the power to disrupt TERF discourse, our invisibility fosters narratives that collapse when we become more visible.

But there are ways to talk about trans men’s experiences and TME non-binary experiences (which are not the same) and this wasn’t it.

These things are relevant: I am not a man, neither am I masculine. The tedious way AFAB trans people are categorised as either “trans men lite” or “not really trans at all” is only reinforced by this discourse. I am not having an experience that can be “rounded up” into a trans man’s and I am not responsible for trans men’s or indeed masculine people’s words. I hope at some point to blog more about my own experience, including the very gendered way I get treated by men and masculine folks, regardless of their AGAB, but in this particular blog I’m going to concentrate more on the TME privilege I do have than the gendered privileges I’m not so blessed with.

But note: catch-all words with analogs of masc, man etc are not in any way helpful to my liberation and are just reinforcements of the binary. Transandrophobia is a word that, even were it not a cursed and oppressive concoction, explicitly excludes me. “Transmasculine” does not describe me.

But this is a conversation about feminist discourse that should have taken us way past the point of invoking such a word, and much as this discourse does harm me, the much bigger problem is that it harms trans women and harms our community cohesion.

Transandrophobia and its origins

The word started out as “transmisandry” and effectively it is still “transmisandry” wearing a supposedly more palatable mask. Like the word “misandry” it was intended as a mirror of “transmisogyny” – a way to equalise conversations about trans men and women’s experiences in the same way men’s right’s activists inserted themselves into feminist conversations. “What about teh menz?” we used to mockingly say in feminist spaces about these folks who would only ever talk about male suicide or the draft in the context of talking over feminist conversations, never in their own spaces and on their own merit.

Is this a way to highlight trans men’s experiences or does it simply talk over women and also, conveniently, abandon trans women at the time they most need us to be vocally and steadfastly alongside them?

What it looks like is male entitlement to take from women. By jumping onto the transmisogyny conversation, trans men did the equivalent of asking about International Men’s Day on International Women’s Day but not actually getting involved in IMD on the day it falls, or building a discourse on its own structures rather than stealing from trans women’s labour.

Masculinity is complicated by various marginalisations

Black men have specific experiences at the intersection of masculinity and blackness. This means, for example, that black men can be prized for their physicality in a way that is deeply objectifying. Think of the dehumanising way Linford Christie was treated when he was winning as a runner, for example. Young black men face profiling and institutional, state violence, including murder by the police, as in the case of Chris Kaba here in the UK. Just two examples among millions.

Working class men have specific experiences at the intersection of masculinity and class. In some cultures they can be drafted, for example, or in certain contexts have no prospects outside of work that is physically damaging to them. They may be heavily indoctrinated in toxic masculinity; ideas that encourage them to not value their own health and safety, take risks, see themselves as expendable, neglect their emotional wellbeing and each other’s, see themselves as inessential to family life and nurturing children, see themselves as needing to be physically strong and capable of violence – all of these values are indoctrinated into working class men to serve the ruling class.

And just so we’re clear, a way working-class men are ‘rewarded’ for this terrible deal, is by being placed above working-class women.

Disabled men and gay men may fall foul of masculinity based on not meeting the expectations of masculinity that society holds. These expectations can prove fatal for gay and disabled men.

Any man who also occupies a place in an oppressed group will have their masculinity complicated by oppression in ways that create a unique group experience. Trans men are not remotely special in this regard.

Expectations of maleness and masculinity are called toxic for a reason. Nearly every time an MRA shouts “misandry” what they are reporting on is in fact toxic masculinity and they just need to go read about that through a feminist lens. Start with Bell Hooks Feminism is for everyone and go on from there.

There are many experiences that gay men have that lesbians do not. But they do not need a special word for their oppression, nor do they need to claim parity with lesbians in a game of oppression top trumps. Misogyny, while it undoubtedly is part of the origin story of homophobia, alongside colonialism, is still a structure that gay men (conditionally) benefit from.

Masculinity is constructed to make everyone insecure

Of course there are specific experiences for those who live at the intersection of transphobia and masculinity in all its toxic constructions. Masculinity was designed to be a game most people lose and fall foul of. Just like wealth, it makes you insecure, and is by its nature precarious and violent to even its most privileged members, let alone those otherwise marginalised. It is designed to create power and incite fear through strength, violence and rape culture, but the cost of that for marginalised men is high.

But these negative associations with men did not come from some group of people oppressing men. So when trans men post those tiresome entreaties that “men are good, we shouldn’t hate them” they are ignoring that “man hating” is usually the term levelled at people who call out men’s violence as it is enabled and constructed by patriarchy as a system of oppression.

Example: when a trans man entitles himself to physically lash out at a partner because culturally the message is that’s something excusable for men to do, he is not being oppressed by toxic ideas about men, he is being indoctrinated into toxic masculinity, the seductive idea that men can’t help being violent, and therefore are held to less account when they are violent, even in queer spaces.

Masculinity is a pyramid scheme, just like wealth and power. Just like whiteness was a tool to divide white working men from enslaved people in order to make them feel like they were winning at something and stop them rising up together, these structures were created to maintain the power of ruling classes. Toxic masculinity and male supremacy is designed to make men feel like they have something special, to feel superior.

Masculinity as a construct lures marginalised men into thinking there is one power in the world they ought to have. And when they find that they don’t have as much power as the story told them they should, they blame women and cry “misandry!” when women did not create this unequal structure.

White women, do of course perpetuate the objectification of black male bodies, and they are also co-opted into white supremacist ideas of men of colour being a threat to them, something that has perpetuated racism and segregation throughout the history of white supremacy. These oppression structures interlock – they are designed to work together, so even though we talk about them separately, we really can’t pretend that colonialism, white supremacy, male supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and class are not interlocking systems that are designed to support each other.

So yes, being marginalised complicates masculinity and the entitlement to the benefits that male supremacy sells. But male supremacy is a fiction, men are not better than women and they don’t deserve to have things easier or be in charge.

More to the point, the reason gay and trans men have certain experiences lesbians and trans women don’t is because they are falling foul of the expectations society attaches to masculinity and power. It is because of the power story associated with masculinity – gay and trans men threaten that story and so they are attacked. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be power attached to being a man even when your marginalisation disrupts that power.

Who gets their own special word?

If the community want a special word that really means transmisandry, then it’s probably because a lot of the TME community haven’t had to think this stuff through collectively since 1976, Sandy Stone and Janice Raymond. And that’s because of privilege. They are only just now grappling with the reality that TERFs hurt them too because they haven’t been in TERF lines-of-sight for half a century. That’s the only explanation for such a half-assed and obfuscating discourse starting up around this at the worst possible time, like someone asking a really basic question in class because they didn’t do the reading.

If we’re to keep “transandrophobia” we’re going to have to accept that we also need a special word for gay men, and black men, and disabled men, and working class men, and so on. And we’re going to have to accept that in doing so we’re saying that these particular intersections are specifically notable at this moment in history in the same way that transmisogyny and misogynoir are. That there is a particular reason above other intersections why the world is piling on trans men because they’re men and not just because they’re trans. Otherwise the word we’re looking for is transphobia.

Transphobia is bad enough on its own

I cannot overstate how much we ignore that transphobia is in and of itself bad enough for all trans people. At a time when we are being scapegoated by fascism, hell yes all trans people are subject to a monstrous and violent form of oppression. Transphobia is not the low-powered junior sibling of misogyny, far from it. I’ll talk about this further in another upcoming blog.

We can talk about things better if we don’t insert ourselves into other’s discourses. For example, it’s problematic to talk about trans suicide at TDOR because on that day we centre the violence happening disproportionately to trans women of colour. When white trans people bring the conversation away from that and centre the more universal difficulties we face around mental health, it’s white people centring themselves in someone else’s emergency. You have every right to be upset about your leaky roof, but best not to draw attention to it when people are responding to another person’s house burning down.

Likewise, we should not be inserting ourselves as TME folk into conversations about transmisogyny. The word transandrophobia does exactly that. It tarnishes every important conversation we want to have about our experiences of transphobia with the lie that there is some sort of equivalence here with transmisogyny. There isn’t, and there doesn’t need to be. A leaky roof is a leaky roof, regardless that it’s not the same as a house on fire. It needs attending to. We don’t have to compete with people to get our own needs met. That’s a questionable neoliberal idea, that says we can only get anything in this world in competition with others.

By pre-loading our discourse with the word transandrophobia – and I cannot state this in strong enough terms – we have entirely lost the ability to have this conversation in the appropriate spaces, at the appropriate times, and on its own merits. The discourse has trampled in big, patriarchal boots over my need to talk about the violence I’ve experienced on its own terms, and not in comparison with transmisogyny.

Every time the word transandrophobia is used, its user is co-opting a trans woman’s discourse by default. Nothing after that is going to be listened to by anybody who’s a feminist, however important the point is.

Thus the word transandrophobia is a manifestation of men’s violence against women because it diminishes a particulary lethal type of misogyny and puts it on the same level with men’s experiences as well as co-opting women’s labour instead of building something from scratch. It’s also often a lash-out at trans women with a veiled insinuation they have privilege (which is transmisogyny) rather than a genuine call to attend to trans men-specific issues. It is invariably breathtakingly unaware of the extent of male privilege and transmisogynistic violence.

It’s ugly. It has done nothing but seed conflict and it needs to end before it tears our communities apart.

The level of hate, fear, disgust and vitriol levelled at trans women is specific and extreme, and when Serano coined the term transmisogyny it functioned in a very useful way to name the way pseudo-feminist arguments were killing trans women. It helpfully added to a growing collective understanding of intersectional feminism.

Who are trans men trying to have a conversation with by using the word transandrophobia? Not intersectional feminists, because there are so many other ways of having a conversation about how toxic masculinity and gendered oppression damages marginalised men, without seeing masculinity in itself as a form of oppression. It could appeal to the same people who like the idea of men’s rights activism in general – the people who claim that women hold the power in this world. You know, the right wing. But if trans men think they’re going to find a home with Jordan Peterson’s buddies, they need a reality check.

For me, it’s worrying to see how closely the transandrophobia discourse mirrors men’s rights activism discourse circa 1990s which I thought we were past. It’s a testament to how little trans men have needed feminism that they are so cut off from its arguments as to fall into this trap. Proof if we needed it that trans men are men and hold male privilege.

The conversation we should be having is the way that TERFs have essentialised gender oppression as the “one true oppression” (well, they would, they’re a bunch of middle-class white women, many of them millionaires), and so trans women and trans men are left dragging our oppression origin story over onto their territory and completely ignoring the huge structure that overwhelmingly harms all of us – transphobia.

I’ll offer a better term that fits the complexity of this: we are talking about a nexus of gendered oppression and yes, it manifests in so many interlocking ways that relate to misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, classism, the imposition of the gender binary, ableism, endosexism…

But, transphobia is bad enough. Transphobia is violent and deadly.

It’s big and it’s ugly and being a man or masculine does not mitigate it, it just doesn’t add to it.

You do not need a special word

Trans men do not need a special word. And neither do AFAB non-binary people (and if we did it wouldn’t be this word). Transmisogyny and misogynoir are not words to be jealously copied.

If trans men deserve a special word for how they face a special kind of trans oppression, here’s a list of other trans people who should be in the queue ahead of them, all deserving of their own words: trans people who are sex workers, trans people of colour, disabled trans people, fat trans people, autistic trans people, young trans people, immigrant trans people, poor trans people, trans people without access to healthcare…

When all those people have their own special words, well, trans men still shouldn’t get one, because being a man is still not a form of oppression.

We cannot have the conversations in community we could five years ago, thanks to this obfuscating discourse. I’ve seen good, supportive mixed trans spaces unravel over this discourse. We need to be pulling together and we need to be fully alongside trans women right now, not finding excuses to look away from what TERFs are doing to them by claiming “TERFs hurt us too”. Yes, they do, and it’s still not equivalent. We will find our moments and spaces to speak about our own experiences without inserting ourselves into a discourse that isn’t about us.

A lot of people steeped in this discourse got there by engaging with TERF nonsense rather than spending their time on good feminist discourse, especially trans feminist discourse. TERFs have warped the way we speak about everything, and it’s not good. Most of the arguments for the term transandrophobia would quickly be cleared up by intersectional feminist responses to the men’s rights movement. Feminism has been here before, we had these conversations, and it’s tedious to have them again.

Trans men and masculine folk, please stop tearing our community apart with this sense of entitlement to this special word of yours and understand what, structurally, the invocation of that word actually means and why we can either have good discourse about our experiences or we can have the word, but we cannot have both.

Can I be non-binary and transsexual?

I talked in a recent blog post about ditching the term “binary trans person”. I want to talk about another binary in this blog, the TS/TG (transsexual/transgender) binary. This is as a result of an admin of a trans group telling me I shouldn’t comment on a thread because it was for “transsexuals only” and “being TS means you identify with the traditional binary”, that non-binary  people “absolutely cannot be transsexual”.

Obviously, I felt hurt and excluded by these remarks, and wanted to explore them. The subsequent conversation left me feeling unwelcome in the group as a non-binary person, and I left. It’s sad, but there are still many trans spaces that feel unwelcoming to non-binary people.

So here we have yet another binary, but also one created so that non-binary (NB) people can be excluded. We can be trans or transgender, but never transsexual, which smacks of the age-old issue of who gets to be “trans enough” and what it means not to be.

One underlying issue that creates this supposed divide is specific to trans women. A frequent complaint I hear from trans women is about happily-living-as-male crossdressers (CDs) throwing their weight around, as people with a bit of male privilege often do, without understanding the oppression and violence trans women suffer. Because many who might once have been called “crossdressers” have now adopted the term non-binary, this has perhaps created a narrow impression of what non-binary means. Some assume non-binary is synonymous with having less gender dysphoria, desiring less medical intervention, or not needing to socially transition. But none of these things is true.

I will fight forever for a diverse community to be held and protected under one umbrella. But we are not all the same. Non-binary covers a variety of people who don’t fit the prescribed and artificial binary that society currently inflicts on us. It does not mean we don’t transition, or don’t experience gender dysphoria, or have less gender dysphoria, or have less legitimately gendered or sexed bodies after transition.

So can transitioning non-binary people be transsexual? Some folks say that NB people cannot be transsexual because the historically older term was coined at a time when NB was not recognised and we had no civil rights. We are excluded because, well, we always have been.

But what’s the difference between a transitioning trans man or woman and a transitioning NB person? I have what some people call gender dysphoria, both physical and social. I changed my name, live in my identity, underwent medical treatment to change my physical sexual characteristics. Many NB peeps have lower surgery, and I’m not ruling it out. But some insist NB folk can never be transsexual. Our dysphoria is not like trans men or women’s dysphoria. Their gender identity carries some meaning and legitimacy that mine does not. Legally and socially that’s currently true, of course, but it still hurts when the trans community perpetuates this separation, particularly because they are people who have themselves faced a cis society that delegitimises their identities.

But what is dysphoria?

Not everyone likes the term gender dysphoria, because it’s associated with medical diagnosis. The opposite of euphoria, it means the clinically significant distress some trans people feel as a result of being trans. Some argue that in a perfect world, being trans should not cause distress, and a landmark Lancet study agrees that being trans is not, in and of itself, a cause of mental illness, but rather the treatment of trans people in society is.

Looking back at the conversation that sparked this blog, the implication was that having “lower dysphoria”, the desire to change your genitals, is what makes a person TS. But how do we know, when people desire to change their genitals, that it always means the same thing or feels the same way? Or if they don’t, might there also be multiple reasons for this?

Let’s look at how trans guys and AFAB non-binary people feel about their bodies. For a start, dysphoria is not just one thing but many strands of experience. You may feel that having a penis is part of being a man or male, and you will be incomplete/not a man without one. That it is impossible to be a man without a penis. This is an aspect of social dysphoria – a feeling created by the way society sees men and thinks about trans men. If you are surrounded by people who accept trans men fully, whether or not they have a penis, this type of dysphoria is less likely to cause you to need surgery. You may be disabled and fear how you will be treated during personal care, or fear personal care when you are older, if your genitals do not match the way you look. The experience of many trans men with their carers bears this fear out. Again, this would be resolved by feeling confident that carers will always treat you as a man no matter what is in your pants. This, too, is social dysphoria. You may fear being rejected by lovers or partners based on what your genitals look like. Again, that’s social dysphoria, and this may be lessened if you are in validating relationship.

Physical dysphoria is something different. Sometimes likened to “phantom limb syndrome” it’s the feeling that something should be there that isn’t. Or shouldn’t be there but is. This can happen with all kinds of body parts, a wiring glitch where the brain does not accurately map onto the body. So, there are people who, for instance, feel like certain body parts do not belong to them. Brains and bodies are weird and the way people experience their embodiment is diverse. So for instance, there are AFAB peeple who feel agender or woman-identified but have strong physical dysphoria, desiring male-typical anatomy.

For some, physical dysphoria is unendurable and the need for surgery is intense. For others, it can be resolved through the use of prosthetics and surgery is unnecessary. For people like myself who are dissociative or out of touch with their bodies, it may be easy to ignore or we may even be unaware of physical dysphoria, as I describe here.

There is also a third kind of dysphoria some people call internal dysphoria – neither physical nor social, it is about how the person feels inside of themself, outside of a physical or social context. Again, this varies hugely from person to person.

Let’s not forget also that for AFAB trans people reproductive organs are more than just external genitals. Some people, like myself, feel far more physically dysphoric about our internal reproductive systems (owning a womb, having periods, hormone cycles, potential of pregnancy) than we feel about the size of our erections.

Because with or without intervention, AFAB people get erections! We have our very own erectile tissue. And when we take T, it generally grows (a bit, don’t get *too* excited). And for many of us, this growth is sufficient for our needs. Or we might be much more focused on chest reconstruction. Or just hysterectomy. And if we do decide we need more length, or want to stand to pee, there are a range of options from the very simple clitoral release, the more difficult metoidioplasty to the very complex surgery of phalloplasty. And of course, many disabled people and people without access to funded healthcare find lower surgery unavailable to them, however dysphoric they feel.

Am I defined by my gender or my sex?

I’ve written about how gender and sex are far more interconnected entities than we would like to believe. The reason transgender as a term has gained traction over transsexual is, I think, an acknowledgement of how much trans lives are affected by social gender (including birth assignment) rather than simply the shape of our genitals/size of our gametes. It’s the social consequence of our body shapes that affects us more than our bodies themselves. We are trapped in people’s perceptions of our bodies, as the saying goes.

The other reason the term transgender has gained traction is because more trans people now consider their gender to be something pre-existing a desire to transition – transition does not create us, it helps us be more comfortable. So I, for instance, feel I was trans as far back as I can remember – that my experience of gender, and the way I was treated, is not the same as the experiences of women who are my contemporaries. In other words, transition doesn’t make me trans, I just am.

But the term transsexual persists, usually meaning a trans person who alters their sexual characteristics medically. Let’s take it down to brass tacks – sexually, what am I now, with a male hormonal profile and secondary sexual characteristics, but XX chromosomes? If I can’t be described as transsexual, then how can that term carry any meaning at all?

I have so many questions about how this TG/TS distinction could possibly work in practice, and even more about why it is needed. Of course the reality is, it’s just some people preferring one term and some the other, and the terms thoroughly overlap each other.

Divide and conquer?

We know TERFs want the TS/TG distinction because they are trying to convince trans women that a special exception will be made for them if they have had all the available treatment, that they will be allowed civil rights and be partially treated as women as long as they hold the line against the rest of us gaining any rights. A classic divide and conquer tactic which alas seems to work all too well, playing into a widespread fear that non-binary rights are just going too far. But trans women already have civil rights, and these were never TERF’s to bestow. Whether or not they have surgery, they can have their gender recognised. The Equality Act 2010 defines “transsexual” as “proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person’s sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.” Transitioning non-binary people are understood to be covered by this wording.

So in law, I am transsexual. In my gender doctor’s notes, I am transsexual. It’s not my favourite word, and I tend to prefer my trans umbrella to be wider rather than narrower, but if TS is to endure as a term, can we at least make it mean something that isn’t NB erasing? Because saying my transition is so fundamentally different from a trans man or woman’s transition that it needs a separate word is unbelievably othering.

What is the underlying fantasy in all this? That there are clear lines dividing transsexual from transgender, non-binary from trans men and women, and that we can pin everyone down clearly, with no bodies straying over the lines? But many “crossdressers” are “true transsexuals” waiting for the right moment to take the plunge. Many NB people have more medical intervention than people who identify as trans men or women.

Ultimately (trust me on this) when you drill down into people’s experiences, the words they claim to describe themselves are often used in unique and idiosyncratic ways, and we are all still floundering around for the right universal language. So there are people who identify as non-binary transsexuals, some others who see the word transsexual as old hat, and some who think it signifies a binary, because it was coined by people who hadn’t imagined anything more than a binary.

Who gets to decide? That’s always an interesting question. Who are the gatekeepers of any community, the holders of the keys, who get to set the terms? Personally, I believe “transsexual” will remain with us as a term. Some people like it, some loathe it, but as long as it’s alive, and used by some people to self-identify, it’s valid, and we shouldn’t be denigrating its use. Is using it a valid way of creating spaces and discussions that explicitly exclude non-binary people? No, that would be really oppressive.

Do non-binary and other trans people need to reflect whether they have relative male privilege, or whether they are comfortable enough in their assigned sex they will never need to socially or medically transition, and so are exempt from particular aspects of trans experience? Sure. I know I’ve had moments of anger when someone happily living and working as a man has taken a place on a podium speaking as a trans woman.

But we need to remember if we were to exclude those with assumed “male privilege” we might also exclude the most vulnerable of trans women and NB people. I know many trans people who are unable to access trans medical treatment because of other, pre-existing physical or mental health conditions. If you’re homeless, access to healthcare, to clothes, to shaving equipment and all the other means to present in your gender may be inaccessible, not to mention how unsafe it can be to present as trans or gender non-conforming while homeless. Other trans people are awaiting the result of asylum applications before embarking on transition because they would not be safe in their country of origin. Some are not safe to transition for economic reasons (they would lose their income, home, or other security), others are waiting for elderly parents to die, for whom they are sole carers, or for children to grow up. Or perhaps they are children themselves, with unsupportive parents. Still others are in abusive family situations where it would not be safe to come out. Some of us had to work through complex mental health issues before coming to terms with our gender.

Non-binary people have the additional hurdles of trying to live within genders not legally or socially recognised, which restricts our choices and means there is no clear transition pathway for us. Many non-binary people have publicly transitioned and are living in their gender as much as they are able yet their identity is perpetually erased and defaulted back to their birth assignment, and this is certainly not a privilege. So “living as” is not the same as “identifies as” is not the same as “perceived to be”.

Not forgetting that NHS waits are 2 years now, and everyone deals with that wait differently.

There is a variety of privilege, and a range of experience within this community. But is there a TS/TG binary? A TS/CD binary? Is there a clear dividing line between non-binary and trans man or woman? The hell there is. Life is just not that simple. We all exist on a continuum. We are who we are, all our self-identities are valid, but gross generalisations need not apply.

Why we need to drop the term “binary trans person”

We, as humans, keep creating false binaries, and I’m so tired.

Oh, how humans love a dichotomy, an either/or, when messy nature is so often more both/and. Why do our brains do that? I suspect it’s a programming glitch.

The most ridiculous and artificial dichotomy is binary/non-binary. Honestly, if I could wish on a magic unicorn for anything at all, it would be for a much better word for what I am. Non-binary really does not work as a term, but we seem to be stuck with it.

Let’s spell this out. Binary means 0 or 1. It means 2 mutually exclusive and incompatible options. It means there can only be male or female, that these two things exclude each other, and no other options exist.

Non-binary means there is more than 0 or 1. It is an analogue, a continuum, much like the Kinsey scale (only way more complex). Let’s just borrow from Kinsey for a sec, and say “Man” scores 0, “Woman” scores 6, and everything in between is non-binary. Technically, that’s everything from 0.000001 through to 5.999999, but of course for practical purposes “Man” extends all the way to at least 2.5 and maybe more, and it all gets a bit fuzzy and complicated in the middle because English doesn’t have very good words for this sort of thing.

Anyway, it’s completely not like that at all, it’s way more complicated, but I hope you see the point – man and woman still exist completely and safely, perhaps even more expansively than if forced to hover over one precise point. They exist, just not as a binary.

This means if “non-binary” exists, there is no binary and “non-binary” becomes too vague a term because it includes everyone, including people who are just men, and just women – cis, trans, intersex, male, female, enby.  I will use “enby” from here to differentiate from “non-binary”, meaningless as that term is in the absence of an authentic binary. I use “enby” for people who cannot live within the artificial legal/social binary that is imposed on us. And enby people need everyone else to understand this legal/social binary is not fixed or objectively real, and can be reshaped or dismantled without hurting anyone, to allow for the reality of our existence, and to give us the civil rights everyone else has.

It should not be controversial to say neither sex nor gender are binary. Intersex people exist, enby people exist. To invoke or enforce a binary is to erase us. There has to be another way of doing things. But for those more comfortable in this artificial binary, it may be hard to see that.

The trouble is, enby people require an adjustment of how things are done, a change in social understanding away from the idea that there are only men and women and that’s that. At this point sometimes people get cross and say I want to erase men and women. Trans men and women, despite the social, legal and linguistic changes that have made their lives easier, still sometimes resist the idea that we should change from a binary system into something else – a ternary system, or a fully open, self-determining system, for instance.

Sometimes it’s about the fear we may be pushing too far and that the push-back will hurt trans people who are comfortable with things as they now are. Be patient and wait your turn, the bus will come back for you, they say to us, just as gay people said to trans people 40 years ago as they disappeared over the horizon without a backward glance. Of course, some of us would say that if we stood together for rights for all we would be stronger, not weaker, and that the dilution of civil rights caused by glossing over some people’s needs only serves to reinforce prejudice and limit everyone’s options. Plus, what makes one person’s rights more of a priority than another’s, exactly?

I do want to undo the idea that men and women are “opposites” or clear and distinct categories that neither overlap nor have an alternative, but I cannot deny the existence of men and women, nor do I want to. I like men and women, trans or cis. I like that people are different from each other, and the last thing I desire is for us all to live in some grey unisex fog. And I can’t deny that the majority of people sit comfortably with the idea of being (more or less) one or the other. I see no need for this to change.

I just want enby identities to be as legally and socially valid. To have complete parity. I want my civil rights please.

And this is where as a community we sometimes come unstuck, because trans men and women seem to often want the “binary” to exist, and to be held sacrosanct and separate, and for “enby” to be a category outside of this. And that simply is not possible. At best, we have a ternary. I suspect though, we actually have something multi-dimensional. What we can’t have is a binary.

You can see how our own language dooms us enbies, and in a way we have only ourselves to blame. We actually coined, or at least gave rise to the terms “binary trans man/woman” where once trans man/woman was sufficient (as it should be). We constantly talk about being “outside the binary” “beyond the binary” as if the binary exists but we are somewhere else entirely, when we have always been right here, in the detail of ordinary, everyday human existence. This horrible othering banishes us into number three of only two imagined options. An impossible conundrum, created by the way legal and social sex was conceptualised in the 18th Century and just hasn’t moved on much since. Before then, everything was much more flexible. And it could be again.

I think, unfortunately, we might be stuck with the word “non-binary” for want of a better term. Like “lesbian” and “bisexual” its meaning has shifted from what the term means literally, and it has become a fait accompli as the accepted term for our community. A way of talking about people whose existence cannot be described by the word “man” or “woman” alone.

But the newcomer term “binary trans person” has no such use or purpose. Neither does it have enough heritage or traction to warrant preserving. There is no compelling argument to justify its use other than a vague and muddled sort of “tit for tat”. It was coined to differentiate from non-binary, but it is redundant – the terms man and woman already exist, and are entirely sufficient. What the term “binary trans person” does is achieve an over-emphasis, a reinforcement of the legal binary and the legitimacy of those identities over others. It also exaggerates the distance between enby people and trans men and women. It feels othering to many of us.

And it’s often accompanied with a criticism of any perceived attack on “the binary”. The binary must be preserved, we are told, and trans men and women’s identities are somehow under threat if the binary is not preserved. But as enby people cannot exist within a legal (or social) binary, we are at a standoff. The preservation of the binary does violence to us.

Much like the artificial pitting of trans and cis women’s rights against each other, our rights are seen as somehow in conflict. For us to be legally recognised, the binary cannot help but be broken – that sounds violent, but what breaks is not people’s identities but a dividing wall built where people need to live. To use an analogy, East and West Berlin still exist and have their own styles and cultures even now the wall has come down, it’s just that now travelling and mixing and living in the centre become far easier.

Eventually, we’re going to gave to stop talking about “binary trans people” and simply talk about “trans men and women” or else we are going to keep reinforcing the idea that a binary exists. Which, if I exist, and intersex people exist, it doesn’t. Trans men are real, trans women are real, but the gender “binary” is a lie.

Here are things you can say instead of “binary trans person” – someone more aligned with, or comfortable with, the binary. A non-enby trans person. A trans man. A trans woman. There are plenty of language uses that validate trans men and women without reinforcing an artificial binary that does enby people genuine violence.

Part of accepting the need to reflect on language use is accepting the privilege trans people hold if they have legal and civil rights that enbies don’t. And when I talk about us not having civil rights, I am explicitly talking about those of us who require a change in law in order to have a correct gender marker on our passport, marriage or birth certificate. Those of us who use pronouns other than he or she and titles other than Mr/Ms. This doesn’t apply to all enbies, and there are some people who might be described as enby, like Eddie Izzard or Grayson Perry, who live in relative privilege compared to most of the trans community. We are by no means a homogeneous group.

My existence does not threaten other people’s, but of course, the usual reaction to any emerging civil rights campaign is to try and suppress it by claiming it poses some sort of threat. I am asking, from the bottom of my heart, for trans men and women to stop talking about themselves as “binary” and to stop reinforcing or clinging onto the idea of a gender and sex binary that does not need to exist. Please allow me to exist alongside you and just as real and valid and equal. Embrace the ternary.

Trans, autistic and celebrating difference

There’s a lot said about the co-occurrence of transness and autism, but I am struggling to find an article that does not slip into unhelpful speculation about how autism might “cause” transness. The latest article I read is good for the most part, but still falls in to speculation about cause along with other tropes and inaccuracies, particularly about non-binary people, that I found unhelpful.

I wanted to write a little about my own personal journey to embracing the simple fact that a lot of people are both trans and autistic, including me.

Human variances often co-occur

Let’s start by laying out a simple fact. We know, from research, that there are a whole bunch of divergent traits that cluster together in the population – non-heterosexuality, left-handedness, genius, synaesthesia, certain tissue disorders such as EDS, gender variance, certain physical appearances, dyslexia, adhd, sensitivity, autism, etc.

So, “different” people tend to be different in lots of ways.  Break some of the above “things” down a bit more, and we see that they are in fact clusters of other traits that come together, like Seurat’s dots, to make a certain kind of picture – and that actually, when you start looking at these individual traits, you discover that no two geniuses, and no two autistic people, have quite the same formula of traits, even though the overall effects can have something in common. Genius isn’t a “thing” and neither is autism, nor transness – these are all many threads of experience woven together to create overall effects that are broadly similar but often diverge in the detail.

Which differences do we see as “pathological”?

How we respond to these traits is interesting in itself. A hundred years ago, left-handedness was seen as unacceptable. In my (left-handed) grandmother’s time, children were forced to write with their right hand. In my (also left-handed) mother’s time, left-handedness was still disapproved of, but reluctantly allowed. Now, I hope, prejudice against left-handed people has all but vanished, though the vestiges of it remain in language in words like sinister.

Suppose the stigma was still around today, in our society that loves to pin things down with “hard answers”. Would the co-occurrence of left-handedness and autism start people down a track of “maybe autistic people just don’t feel able to conform the way neurotypicals do, and that’s why they write with their left hands”. Would the inevitable bullying that any person who is different gets, and the resultant anxiety and stress, lead people to see left-handedness as a symptom of mental health problems or abuse, rather than understanding stigma and bullying due to being different as the cause of any mental health problems or abusive treatment?

Society decides which traits are a “problem” and which are an asset. Nobody is going to diagnose somebody with “genius disorder” and raise funding for a cure. Thus Alan Turing was celebrated for his genius, treated (relatively) neutrally for his left-handedness, isolated for his (probable) autism, and driven to suicide as a result of horrific criminal and medical interventions for being gay.

Nature or nurture?

I’m guessing most people, looking at the list above, will have some traits they prefer to think of as more “biological” and some which they would prefer to think of as less so, but we are all, as Cordelia Fine says, the result of a ““sheer exhilarating tangle of a continuous interaction among genes, brain and environment.”

What matters, is that trans people are more likely to be autistic, and autistic people are more likely to be trans. Not why this happens, unless you want to see human variation as disease, and look to cure it. This non-affirmative, pathology approach is what leads to tragedy, as in the case of trans and autistic Kayden Clarke. If both/all aspects of Kayden’s identity had been affirmed and accepted, he might still be here.

Besides, what dullness and lack of creativity would ensue if some humans did not exist outside the boxes the world expects, and thus teach people to expand their horizons and frontiers? If we try to iron out differences society sees as problematic, what other treasures might be erased in the process?

As somebody who instinctively picked up a lot of male socialisation, but fumbled with female socialisation, I reject the idea that my gender identity is caused by my autism in a “you are poor at reading social cues, therefore you didn’t learn how to be a girl” way. If I was so bad at picking up cues, how did I take to male-socialised behaviours like a duck to water?

Then there’s “your thinking is rigid – you’ve decided because you liked boy things you must be a boy”. I hear this a lot – that the autistic mind is deluded, unable to cope with nuance. But my autistic mind is just a fountain of nuance – I am open to so many possibilities, so sensitive to detail that yes, I can get overwhelmed and lost, and it has taken me a half a lifetime and a lot of therapy to find my own edges amid a sea of information and cultural story about gender.

That I must be socially labelled and legally categorised according to the shape of my genitals is a rigidity I cannot live with. To me, it’s an idea that becomes increasingly bizarre and arbitrary the more times I think about it. If my autism helps me more easily defy these arbitrary rules, why then it is an asset.

Conformity vs divergence

I think in our increasingly individualistic society, it’s important to understand that human beings have evolved to cooperate with one another, and that this is generally a positive thing about humans. But I like to think of human difference as an important balance to our tendency to conform. Cooperation can put a person on the moon, but people are also too good at going along with things that are not in the best interests of anyone – this is how we can end up voting for fascists, or arbitrarily colour coding our children.

We need to both go along with each other, but also put our feet down and say no. It’s a delicate balance between our immense capacity to work together for the greater good and our equally immense capacity to form a mindless mob that can be led into all kinds of nastiness.

People who smell colours, kick the ball with a different foot, experience gender differently, and focus in on all kinds of human experience in a drastically different way to the norm, are able to offer up different possibilities, remind us our experience is not monolithic, introduce the element of uncertainty that we require to balance progress that can take us to the moon but also over cliffs.

Combating the shame

The process of coming to terms with being both autistic and trans has led me to at times fall into a pit of shame. “Why can’t I just be like everyone else, why do I have to make it awkward for people?” is a constant theme, as I find myself presenting a challenge for everyone I meet that makes our interactions at times not fun for anyone. I feel shame that I can’t perform woman, or small talk, or gratitude for being allowed to exist, but instead speak my mind, tell people how I really feel, and who I really am.

In the worst moments, I consider it would be better for everyone if I did not exist – the road would be smoother. But the road to where? Where is the human race going, that it cannot take people like me with it? Where is the LG community heading, that it hasn’t got room on the bus for people who don’t conform to an assimilationist idea of monogamous, neurotypical, gender conforming respectability?

I feel like an inconvenience, but maybe I am the grit that forms the pearl. Maybe I am the grey cloud that waters the dry earth.  Maybe people like me are meant to be here and have our value and our place.

Maybe we could be celebrated, instead of being constantly, relentlessly pushed aside.

Trans kids won’t be okay until non-binary is accepted

Another article published in Beyond the Binary:

Transgender children have been in the news spotlight recently, with unhelpful and misleading “debate” and sensationalised headlines. The impact this will have had on trans children and their families is considerable.

As a therapist who has mainly worked with children and young people, and a trans trainer for schools and colleges, all children’s welfare is very important to me. Because of their isolation and marginalisation, trans kids are particularly vulnerable to bullying, abuse, and poor mental health outcomes. We need to discuss trans kids, and the discussion needs to be well-informed. Read more

Testosterone Myths

I remember when I first realised my partner Robin might take T (testosterone) I was totally freaked out.

“You don’t need to act like any more of a man than you already do!” I whined, terrified that in changing his outsides to be more manly, I would lose from him some of the softer side of his already pretty blokey behaviours. “What if you get aggressive?” I pleaded. At one point I remember having a particular freak out and telling him I wouldn’t stick by him if he took that drug.

Oh, the shame.

And frankly, the unnecessary stress I put myself through because of a whole chunk of lies society tells us about testosterone. Now, a little more learned on the subject, I sigh inwardly when I watch a film and see the male protagonists’ adolescent, competitive bragging put down to “testosterone”.

T gets a really bad rap, and it also excuses a whole lot of crappy behaviour it isn’t responsible for.

So first, let me tell you what it’s like living with a trans guy who has been on T for a couple of years.

Right from the start: So much calmer. Yes, you heard me right.

Robin has always, like me, been a little high strung and occasionally temperamental, but since taking T he has calmed right down. I’d like to say he’s happier, but that’s complicated. Life hasn’t been easy, with two of us transitioning. But he is less temperamental than he used to be, he really has chilled out.

The only exception was a few months in, he seemed edgy and grumpy and out of sorts and I thought to myself oh, aye, is this the T finally showing its true colours?

Turns out his T levels had dropped really, really low. A quick boost and he was right as rain again.

A year and a bit after Robin started on T, and a bit more than a year ago, I followed suit, and have experienced similar. I wouldn’t say I am calmer, exactly – I used to bite down my anger way too much, and these days I’m more likely to express it, to say “back  off” to someone who’s out of order rather than patiently explain myself ad nauseum. I don’t think it’s the T making me like that, it could be a growing sense of male entitlement or simply confidence as I feel more me. I’m less of a pushover, and I think that’s probably a good thing, although I have some way to go on that. One thing’s for sure, there have been no uncontrolled, T fuelled rages, no noticeable changes in my personality or who I fundamentally am. Maybe I am a bit more centred and growing into myself, but the changes are subtle.

And honestly, throughout life people change anyway, with or without hormones.

Of course, not all guys report this calmness, but most of the ones I know do. I worry about T’s bad rap, though, because just like it falsely legitimises crap behaviour in cis guys, so it can in trans guys who probably need to get counselling or anger management or do some anti-sexism work rather than blaming their shitty attitudes or bad behaviour on T. When Chaz Bono complained he was finding women’s voices more irritating, for instance, he blamed his “increasing maleness”, when a more likely culprit could be sensitivity to sound, a sensory problem common in trans people and exacerbated by stress. That or he’s just plain sexist.

And then there’s the sex drive thing. Yes, it does increase, and some guys don’t quite know what to do with that. Again, male mythology plays a part in this, as trans guys think they’ve developed a “male” sexuality with all the narrative baggage that comes with that. Having not (in some cases) enjoyed puberty first time round, they may have missed that burgeoning sexuality in their teen years, and think this is something exclusive to men (it isn’t).

Often, we’re just not quite ready to share this emerging sexuality with partners, we need to explore it on our own, along with a changing relationship with our bodies. It settles down, but my gosh we have such a dim view of men and their control over their own sex drive (poor helpless babies, my ass) that it can be almost frightening to feel like your body has been “taken over” by this drive. The mythology is at least as powerful as the increase in libido, and takes a bit of coming to terms with.

There is nothing exceptional about a male sex drive, and men’s sexual violence and objectifying behaviour has everything to do with rape culture, with notions of power and dominance, and nothing to do with testosterone or body parts. Studies show social and environmental, rather than biological, causes for human violence, including male violence. Meanwhile, guess what? Sex drives, violence, masculine traits and everything else are on a continuum, there are no binaries.

So, guys and enbys taking masculinising hormones: No excuses. it isn’t your hormones, it’s your socialisation, your trauma, your unchecked privilege, your sexism, your unsifted baggage. Roid rage happens to guys down the gym because they’re not being carefully, medically dosed and hormonal fluctuations indeed can cause problems, as can taking testosterone when you already have enough of it. Messing around with artificial hormones, taking them off prescription is not to be recommended, but if you’re transgender, and your brain maps onto a different hormone than the one running through your veins, T just might help (and it might not, and you can stop taking it if it doesn’t).

Just an ordinary day

A snapshot of one day in the life of a transitioning non-binary person

CN: TERFs, mental health, dysphoria

About me: I am taking masculinising hormones, but am still generally read as female. I identify male-ish, femme-ish, queer, bisexual and (for want of a better word) non-binary (all these words are equivocal). I actually just prefer “transgender person” in some ways rather than trying to define things that are all so loaded with complex and variable social meanings. I use they/their/them, hate she, tolerate (barely) he, cope with Mr and for some unaccountable reason don’t like Mx. Will eventually try to destroy all titles. Or become a Dr. One or the other.

7 am: Facebook status update:

I’ve been on and off ESA this last year, mainly stress related. Going back to work is a big deal, not least because I had some difficult trans-related discrimination to deal with last time I worked (I’m self employed too but that’s unreliable, and the coffers are getting low).

7.25 am: I’m still in bed. I’ve been arguing with TERFs on Twitter over the NSPCC’s aborted “debate”. Since I wrote a take down of one of Sarah Ditum’s articles and it went somewhat viral, she and her friends have been oh so attentive. I ask myself, as always, what good I am doing listening to this poison, what point there is in repeating facts they already know but don’t care about. If this was really about child welfare, they would be jumping up and down on behalf of intersex kids. They’re not. They just want to erode trans civil rights, legitimacy, recognition. They want to end us. It’s oppressive and abusive, and I know it is, and I have trauma reactions still lingering from some of my worst encounters with local TERFs.

The plus side is I discovered a great community via challenging their twisted ideology. Doing my homework built bonds and understanding with this huge, diverse, messy trans community. Yes folks, you heard it here first, TERFs turned me transgender! Or rather, they helped me to admit it and understand it better.

Unfortunately I now have a miniTERF living permanently inside my head. Logically I know it lies and manipulates, but that nasty, perpetual, gaslighting question plays incessantly “how do you really know who you are?”

The feelings I have about gender are political, feminist, radical and yet . . . they are also deeply personal. I have an experience – of soaking up male socialisation instinctively from an early age (the science geek bit of my brain whirrs . . . could gender identity come from the hypothalamus?? Is “gender instinct” a better term than “gender identity”?). I just wanna know why I am the way I am, to prove that I’m not crazy, that this really is a thing.

“You’re making it all up” says miniTERF, echoing the words of abusers everywhere. “You’re just unhinged”. Well who wouldn’t be unhinged with this constant drip of doubt challenging your own lived reality? I just can’t be a woman, it doesn’t work. I tried, god knows I tried. I tried every way to get comfortable in that lie but it kept falling off me like an unstitched suit.

These are the sort of thoughts I generally have before breakfast.

7.30 am: I get up, wash, shave off my still patchy stubble, put on my testosterone gel. Like I do every morning. Put on a somewhat flattening bra because I can no longer wear a binder. Too many health problems. Try to tell myself the contours don’t matter, but they do to me. I didn’t want to want them gone. Didn’t want to (miniTERF alert) “mutilate” my body. But it feels more like incising tumors. I can’t seem to be in my body with those there. I wish I could. Years of therapy, mostly from a radical lesbian feminist, hasn’t fixed me on being a woman. Okay, maybe, beloved as she was (and still is) to me, the radical lesbian feminist therapist didn’t help my trans self-esteem.

I try not to argue with TERFs any more because it nearly destroyed me, brought me close to suicide in the past. Logically I can see how they operate, how they twist everything, how they seem to live in a bubble where pronouns and toilet doors and words and birth certificates are straight from nature and untouched by human hands, while my fundamental and lifelong experience of myself is nothing, is just made up, simply cannot be.

Ugh. I eat breakfast, leave the house tea in hand. I manage to make the train. Donald Trump’s rapey behaviour all over the front page of the Metro. Ugh again.

9.20 am: Need a toilet and can only see Ladies and Gents at the station. Haven’t used the ladies for a few years now. I deal with using the gents, but always feel fear. Nobody gives me trouble. I still get ridiculous anxiety and sometimes it will wreck a trip out. I’ll be avoiding a pub toilet because of drunks, wondering how long I’m going to last, or I’ll realise people have wrongly assumed my gender as female and that using the gents will out me. My anxiety gets the better of me and I’m not much fun to be around.

Seeing a gender neutral toilet or accessible toilet that isn’t locked makes me ridiculously happy when it happens.

9.45 am: Arrive at HR reception with DBS check, the one with my prior name erased like a dirty secret. I shouldn’t have to feel shame because one day I decided to take back the name I chose for myself as a kid, the one nobody would use. Because names are also biological facts, sewn into our skin, apparently.

The receptionist rings the office and I tense, waiting for her to say “this lady has brought her form” or some other gendering words.

It doesn’t happen. She didn’t gender me! This is amazing. How often in our even casual interactions are we not gendered? I start to breathe again. I want to hug her.

10.00 am: Meet my line manager for the third time. He misgenders me “she, sorry, he” and I say as breezily as I can “I prefer they”. I already told him this. It takes a lot of practice and grit to sound easy breezy every one of the thousand times you get misgendered when each time it’s threatening to snap your very last nerve. He tells me it’s going to be hard for him. I get it. “They” is hard for the brain to get used to. I really understand, because I mess up myself with my “they” friends.

Only . . . wouldn’t it be nice if one time a cis person didn’t say “this is hard for me” and instead said “this must be hard for you”.

It sucks. (“You’re not real, you’re not real, transgender doesn’t exist and non-binary doesn’t exist even more!!!” miniTERF shouts gleefully).

12.45 pm: I get my staff pass. I’m waiting for her to go “Oh, there’s been a mistake, this says mister”. Holding my breath again. Don’t smile for the photo, men don’t smile.

She doesn’t correct it! My pass says Mr and nobody blinked!!! Today is a good day.

“Thank you so much.” I say in that lilting, raised, people-pleasing voice it took me years to learn in my efforts to properly pass as a woman. Dysphoria crashes down on me – I know my voice will give me away forever now.

The usual raft of options run through my head. It’s not too late to stop this, I do a pretty good job of passing as a woman, even if it took decades of practice. Surely it would be easier to pretend to be the person everyone wants me to be?

Easier, yes, and yet also impossible. You can’t unlearn the truth about yourself, unawaken. I can’t explain it, but there it is. Even if I don’t know exactly what I am, I can’t be a woman anymore, not even a boyish woman who in no way conforms to what a woman should be. I did that most of my life, and it never resolved that pervasive truth that no matter what I wear or how I act I still was being forced to be socially labelled and segregated according to what’s in my underpants.

I just can’t manage the drip drip drip of words that all mean the same thing; “you have a vagina and socially that means more than anything else! It defines you.”

Fuck you, assigned gender. Just fuck you.

2.30 pm Walking to a meeting across town, I have a difficult phone call about a homeless trans woman I’m (voluntarily) supporting. Everything suddenly feels difficult and busy and overwhelming. I suddenly feel the weight of this entire lost, rejected, hurt community on my shoulders. Why the hell can’t people just listen and help? Just be kind.

I stop to take pictures of a pigeon in the fountain and come back to earth. I don’t remember being this easily overwhelmed, but I guess my bucket is full from that drip drip drip. Minority stress. I lived as a lesbian for years but it wasn’t like this. Trans is worse. Folks treat trans people like shit, treat non-binary people like an insubstantial but very unpleasant fart.

4.30 pm: I’m on the tram and I have no idea where I’m getting off. A nice woman tells me she’ll warn me when my stop is coming up. We share some idle chat and I remember I will miss this, being talked to as if I’m a woman, as if therefore I’m safe to talk to, to make eye contact with. I really don’t want to be a man, I just want people not to gender me at all. I want the impossible, I remind myself.

Everyone will gender you, one way or the other.

6.30 pm: Home. Twitter is on fire. Must stop reading TERF poison.

11.00 pm: Had to deal with a TERF infestation on my Twitter feed. They’re like ants – first one comes, and the next thing you know they’re swarming all over you giving you no time to think. Profiles set up seemingly with the sole purpose of antagonising trans people. Pictures of Buffalo Bill, the serial killing pseudo-trans character from Silence of the Lambs. Self-descriptions that serve no other purpose than to mock or delegitimise trans people. Parody and hate and attack all dressed up as Freeze Peach.

My Achilles heel is I try to treat their manipulative questioning with sincerity, but really all they want from me is that I will be hurt enough by them to snap and say something that will then be used against every one of the millions of trans people on the planet (we are a hive mind, don’t you know). When I start blocking them others go on the attack, how dare I set boundaries and end a conversation they want to have over and over and over?

Maybe about a hundred (it feels like) TERFs now blocked. MiniTERF has fed well, and is pretty powerful and vicious right now.

The theme of tonight’s tweets was “detransition” and the idea that if a handful of us (hundreds amid millions) change direction, then the existence of all of us is a lie.

Here’s the truth. You can’t do anything about being transgender, whatever flavour of trans you are, and there are many. But there are choices – narrow ones, in a world that makes life damn near impossible. There are calculated risks you can take, and by and large they pay off. But not always.

People detransition. I might. I probably won’t, but I might, because the world is not a friendly place to non-binary trans people, and it’s significantly easier socially and professionally to live as a gender non-conforming queer woman. I know from experience.

But whoever I live as I will still be transgender, have always been transgender. And if I regret attempting transition, it will only be like the many other regrets in my life -shags, jobs, relationships that didn’t go as planned. We know statistically the outcomes are good for transitioning, but we can never know if it will work for us until we try it. It’s a leap of faith.

Midnight: Time to sleep. It’s been a long day. TERFy days are always the hardest, they shred your head if you let them. But I was out in the world and only got misgendered once, that’s a win. Generally, the world has been kinder than usual, and I can put the cruelty in its place. Is it worth all this stress and trauma? Still yes.

 

 

Sarah Ditum – not “gender critical” enough

Sarah Ditum’s article in the New Statesman this week is very clever. I’m not going to link to it – New Statesman knows well enough that publishing Ditum’s ongoing campaign against my community will always attract a lot of traffic to its site – drawn by the inevitable controversy that follows.

This is business, make no mistake, and if the trans community gets hurt and make a fuss, well that will be good for business too.

Sadly, folks don’t read enough articles written by actual trans people to see through the holes in Ditum’s arguments, and this latest article in particular reads to the ignorant as being very comprehensive, reasonable and balanced. So, for those who have already read it and been taken in, here’s what’s wrong with it. For those who have not read it – don’t bother, it adds nothing new whatsoever to the feminist conversation and is in fact a warmed-over version of some very past their sell-by-date ideas.

I’m going to take us through the over-long article point by point to expose its manipulations and distortions, so apologies if this is also a long response.

1. The header image

The header image shows a pair of false eyelashes nestled in a makeup box. This is a trope – it signals the “falseness” of trans identities by boiling them down to how we adorn ourselves. It sets the tone subtly to undermine the “realness” of us.

2. The subtitle

“In the US and UK, politicians want to enshrine respect for “gender identity” into law. The only problem? There is no scientific consensus on what gender is.”

Right in the subtitle of the piece is the heart of what this article is about. There is a “problem” with enshrining respect for gender identity in law (i.e. giving trans people civil rights), because science has not explained gender identity yet.

In the same way, I suppose we can’t enshrine respect for gay people because science hasn’t fully explained them either.

We cannot respect what we don’t understand. Let that sink in for a moment.

3. The threat

” Alex Drummond, who is male and identifies as female without having had any surgical or hormonal treatment – and with a full beard”

Alex Drummond is a woman with a beard. Harnaam Kaur is also a woman with a beard. One is cis, one is trans. But Ditum wants us to be afraid of Alex. Ditum calls Alex “male” knowing full well the baggage that goes with that word is so much more than biological. She is effectively gendering Alex. Misgendering her, in fact.

Why can’t Alex just live her life in a way that makes her healthy and comfortable? Why can’t she just be accepted as herself? Ditum will show us how dangerous this all is, and in doing so will take us back to a very regressive place, where as long as trans women have all the surgery and make every effort to “pass” in conventional terms, they will be somewhat tolerated, but trans liberation must not be allowed.

4. What explains us?

Ditum lays out four possibilities for what makes gender identity.

a) Gender is hardwired in the brain.

The idea she cites as favoured and acceptable. She makes it clear that this is essentialist (I agree, and so do most trans people I know) and not popular with feminists (quite right). She infers it is popular with trans people – not so.

Ditum then goes on to imply there are only 3 other options (also not true):

b) A sexual fetish, ie. autogynephilia

This is where her earlier (disputed) assertion that there are more trans women than men comes in handy – we can just ignore how trans men don’t fit this theory, can’t we? Oh, and we can ignore all the research that debunks the theory, too (I particularly like this one that shows cis women have identical experiences).

c) Faulty thinking due to autism.

Ditum exploits the fact that there is a higher incidence of autism in the trans population to suggest that autistic people “latch onto” gender identity due to feeling different. As an autistic person myself, this disableism is very unsettling. The idea that autistic people cannot know themselves as well as neurotypical people has no basis in reality.

Interestingly, the link between autism and sexuality has been explored in the past in similarly problematic ways, but now it is no longer acceptable to speculate about whether gay men are gay due to faulty wiring (Alan Turing, anyone?), we have moved on to scrutinise and undermine trans identities instead.

d) A response to trauma

Another nasty contrivance. Kids that grow up different are far more easy to marginalise and therefore to bully and abuse. So of course the levels of trauma in our communities are higher, as within the LGB community.

Yes, they used to say being a lesbian was caused by abuse too.

Apparently there are no other ways to frame our existence. We’ll see about that later.

5. Trans children must be stopped

Ditum goes on to stick up for “poor” Ken Zucker, saying he “was attacked for not conforming to the current trans political line, and ultimately forced from his job”.

Zucker, if you are not aware, is a proponent of reparative therapy for both LGB and trans children. Zucker increasingly shifted the focus of his work away from gay kids and towards trans kids due to “political” changes. Imagine if Ditum was writing now about that political shift – away from it being ok to try and “cure” gay people.

All the reputable psychological organisations condemn reparative therapy for gay and trans kids, and Zucker was a lone proponent, ultimately fired by an independent investigation.

The man was a renegade, so why is Ditum not citing other research by people who work with trans kids, for balance? The article pretends to be comprehensive and even handed, but look at just a small sample of what’s missing.

Ditum later rehashes a tired old myth when it comes to trans children. Using the very scientific method of watching a TV documentary and listening to an anecdote, she concludes that trans children think they are trans because they like things associated with the opposite sex. She perpetuates the myth of desistance and misleadingly cites:

“studies suggesting 80 per cent of gender non-conforming  children go on to live in their original gender as adults”

Yes, this figure is true, but that’s because trans and gender non-conforming are not the same thing. Read this article to understand how this statistic is misused over and over again. There is also a better study that shows that gender identity in trans kids is equally as consistent as for cis kids. Not to mention (oh ok, I will) the other important recent study that demonstrates extremely positive outcomes for trans kids that receive treatment.

It is frustrating how much good work has been done to clear up these myths and yet how often they get trotted out to trap the unwary people who haven’t done the reading.

Has Ditum not done her reading? Or is she deliberately suppressing one side of the story – I will leave you to decide. Given the size of her platform, can anyone see the danger for trans people if she has not been fully ethical, balanced and diligent in her research?

A transgender child’s identification with another gender goes far beyond mere gender expression, and is extremely persistent. Often kids and parents talk about expressions and choices as some of the clues they had along the way, but obviously you cannot encompass years of gender dysphoria into a soundbite or even a documentary. And having seen the BBC documentary mentioned, Ditum is also guilty of having cherry picked the one line out of an hour’s programme that fits her own biased narrative.

6. Ergo we don’t exist

“arguably non-existent gender identity”

“In the absence of compelling evidence for brainsex”

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – we are still exploring the complexity of gender and biology. It is interesting that the lack of fully established evidence for brainsex spurs Ditum to fall back on possibilities that have even less evidence, including the entirely debunked theory that it is a paraphilia (autogynephilia, see above).

Like Ditum, I believe gender identity may well be multi-determined, and I am fiercely in the middle of the nature/nurture debate, as are most reputable scholars – it’s likely to be both. I do however see there are hints of a mosaic of brain and hormonal differences that, as Daphna Joel has discovered, are by no means binary. These findings back the notion of sex-similarity far more than sex-difference. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the entirely debunked theories of Simon Baron-Cohen and others, it is possible that there is biology at work here, as well as, of course, gender socialisation.

Ditum also cites “a response to homophobia” as one possible cause of being trans. As a person who identified as a lesbian for a decade as a response to transphobia and my reluctance to come out as trans, my challenge to Ditum is this – show me the evidence that there is more stigma attached to being gay than trans in this country and I will believe you. Show me a single study that prompted you to throw that one in the mix. Or are you just falling back on the tired old trope that trans women are “confused gay men”? Yes, there is an interrelationship between gender identity and sexuality, but they are not the same. Neither are they in competition with each other.

I lived a prosperous life as a lesbian and have suffered a massive loss of privilege and circumstance in coming out as trans. I came out not because it was advantageous but because my lesbian identity was a half-truth and not a full expression of who I am, and I could not continue to manage living in that half-truth.

8. Trans is a narrow option

“as the doctrine of gender identity draws tighter, options become ever narrower”

Again, where is the evidence of this? My experience of the trans community is that the more freedom to explore ourselves and be accepted we have, the more diverse narratives spring up, the more options become open to us and the more the walls between us break down. Where 20 years ago trans people were expected to live heteronormative lives, now many of us are out and challenging many of society’s preconceptions around gender.

My trans circle is fiercely feminist, distinctly radical, and demonstrates a range of possibilities from assigned female “trans dykes” who use she/her but challenge what it is to be a woman, to non-binary people who manage to live outside of gender entirely. People who ease their dysphoria through medicine and people who don’t. And yes, people who know themselves to be women but don’t go through a medical process, who face huge challenges because of that. It’s funny how the nonconforming trans people like Alex Drummond are held up as the threat, and at one and the same time it is our community that is supposedly narrowing the options. Meanwhile, ultra conservative trans people like Caitlyn Jenner falsely dominate the public’s idea of what it is to be trans.

An observant person might suggest that cis people keep narrowing our options, while we keep trying to widen them so that we can live more healthily and congruently.

9. Cis people know better

“The fact of suffering is not evidence that the sufferer has unimpeachable insight into the source of that suffering”

A clever one, this. Yes, it’s true in a way, but it’s also deeply patronising. As a person-centred counsellor I have learned time and again that my client, whoever they are, is the expert on their own life. What is certainly not true is that Ditum can claim any real ability to shed light on this discussion.

10. It’s dangerous to give us rights

Finally, after an awful lot of going round the houses, we reach the real point of the article.

Ditum is very clearly arguing against trans people having civil rights, citing harm to “women” (read cis women) as the reason.

So, Ditum has cast trans acceptance as conflicting with both the gay community and the cis women’s community. A classic capitalist tactic to divide the groups that could be working together. She could almost be working for a neoliberal elite, so helpful is she being to them. At least, her career is probably doing very well because her message is so helpful in preserving the status quo.

So what do we know? We know, in fact, that the people who are most at risk of sexual, physical and domestic violence are trans women, and we know that there has never been any real problem accommodating them. I have experience of working in trans inclusive women’s services and it was never an issue.

What Ditum ignores is the position a trans woman has within women’s spaces. She will be scrutinised and suspected and watched. She does not hold the power in that space. How exactly is she to be a danger to others?

Ditum also plays on a fear that it is in patriarchy’s interests to perpetuate: women must keep themselves apart to be safe. Never mind that this excludes women’s voices in society, as I discuss in this blog post. Men want women to be afraid of them. They use the threat of rape and violence to enforce that fear, to convince women segregation is in their best interests. Fear of trans women is just another way of establishing that status quo.

Meanwhile, gender non-conforming cis women and lesbians are sharing with trans women the often violent consequences of this fear, as they always have.

Let’s be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that trans rights will have any detrimental effect on women’s rights. The changes in trans rights and acceptance that have happened so far over the last 40 years have not created problems for women. The problems people like Ditum feared have not come to pass. In fact, the experience of trans women and the violence, sexualisation and objectification they experience has highlighted the fact of misogyny and added a useful perspective to the feminist conversation. Transfeminism is exciting and vibrant and has earned its place within mainstream feminism.

11. Trans people are criminals

So, one Swedish study from a long time ago that has been much critiqued suggested that trans women (and trans men, as it happens) are incarcerated more than an average population of women.

It also says that trans people are more suicidal than the average population, no surprise there given how we are treated. This is often misrepresented, as in this article, to suggest we are more suicidal post-transition than pre-transition, something that has again been thoroughly debunked.

I could point out, as others have, that the study is old, has not been replicated, and was a very small sample. But actually, in the case of the criminality statistics, I really don’t need to.

Instead, imagine if Ditum was quoting the incidence of incarceration of other minority women compared to the norm for all women – say, lesbians, mentally ill women, women of colour, women living in poverty, women who have experienced trauma. Now let her continue to say those incarceration rates are due to something inherent in that population, rather than the fact that we know marginalised minority populations have higher offending rates for complex sociological reasons.

Ditum then says that prisoners might pretend to be trans to get more favourable housing. Well, yes initially they might, but when they see the hoops they have to jump through they will probably think again. Nobody is suggesting that there will be instant prison transfers on an inmate’s say-so, meaning of course that the prisoner will have to live as a woman for some time in a men’s prison, and experience the full force of misogyny that trans women experience.

All incarcerations are risk assessed, as are hostel placements and refuge placements. The reality is, sometimes cis women are too dangerous to house in a women’s prison, hostel or refuge, and special accommodations have to be made. We don’t need a special rule that affects an entire minority group, because we already have rules in place to deal with violent, dangerous, and sex offending cis women.

Ditum fails to mention Vicky Thomson, who killed herself when she was put in a men’s prison despite having lived as a woman for years. Or Tara Hudson, who was also imprisoned and sexually harassed in a men’s prison despite having transitioned long ago. Or Mary, who was raped 2000 times in a men’s prison. She fails to highlight the women who really are at risk in all this, as if trans women’s lives don’t actually matter in the same way. She also fails to highlight that those women are likely to be in danger in women’s prisons too, if we continue to stigmatise and doubt their existence.

Then, apparently thinking it will clinch her argument, Ditum cites a case of a trans inmate having sex with other inmates. Not rape, let’s be clear, but sex. Because apparently sex doesn’t happen in prisons when there are no trans women around. It takes the presence of a penis and testicles (yes, of course Ditum has to mention these) for sex to happen. And note the wording – the trans woman had sex with the other inmates, no possibility that, excited by the appearance of a penis in their midst, they might have been the ones “having sex with” her. Because cis women are always passive?

Don’t let all this essentialism slide – who people are and in what way they can move through society is being brought entirely down to the shape of their genitals. Note how, in all her discourse, Ditum is actually pushing trans women back towards a medicalised model where they will have to have “full surgery” to be tolerated. She is pushing us away from people being able to live as Alex Drummond lives.

11. Trans feminists aren’t proper feminists

“Julia Serano, who insists on a definition of feminism that contains no reference to patriarchy”

Ditum grossly misrepresents Serano’s work. I would recommend reading Whipping Girl and Excluded, but here’s a blog about this, where, funnily enough, Serano mentions the reality of patriarchy, as she often does:

“In Excluded, I describe these “gender systems” – whether it be patriarchy, the gender binary, and so on – as being models that provide a fairly decent approximation of how sexism and marginalization function in our culture. However, like all models, they are necessarily incomplete, and there will always be instances where they do not accurately describe the world.”

Why would Ditum be so dismissive of the nuanced and thought-provoking (although not always perfect) work of a noted transfeminist? Isn’t this a balanced article that’s supposed to be looking at all sides of the issue?

12. Save us from this false ideology!

“There is a real danger that an unproven theory of innate gender identity is now directing treatments”

Again, where is the evidence? Treatments are outcomes-based, not theory based – doctors try to alleviate suffering, and continue doing what works best until a better solution is found. Despite quoting again that one discredited Swedish study, we know treatment outcomes for trans people are really positive.

The answer to the philosophical question of “who are we, really, when you get right down to it?” is not necessary to know that gender reassignment works for those who want it, saves lives, and saves the NHS a fortune in mental health services that will never resolve the issue.

Whoever we are deep down, being allowed the freedom to live in a way that resolves our sense of incongruence is good for us. And actually, what’s good for the individual is generally good for the people around that individual too. Allowing trans people to be happy and healthy is a win-win.

Also note Ditum mentions that one Swedish study and fails to mention the many many more recent ones – so much for balance. There’s a handful of papers on my professional web page to get you started. Hey, that one old, unreplicated study has done an awful lot of heavy lifting for gender critical feminists, it must be tired by now.

Conclusion: Not critical enough

Despite the length of the article, I think I’ve demonstrated Ditum’s cherry picking of information prevents this from being a genuinely critical look at the full story.

But for me, the biggest issue here is the way Ditum’s argument reinforces gender.

Gender is a social construct, this is rightly a tenet of feminist belief. Gender is the word we use for everything man-made about the differences between men and women. I use “man-made”advisedly, because nobody here is arguing that patriarchy is not a real thing. As I have argued before, though, this inevitably means sex as a man-made social class and legal status is actually a part of gender.

Cue my favourite training slide:

So, in trying to reinforce the legal segregation of gender, upon which all social construction of gender is built, Ditum is in fact propping up the very thing she claims to want to dismantle. She has argued (on BBC Newsnight, earlier in the year) that sex needs to be legally recorded for women’s protection.

Let’s put that to the test in the usual way: “In order to ensure you as a gay citizen are protected, we need to legally record your status as a homosexual on all your documentation.”

No way that could go wrong, is there?

So, here is a possibility Ditum never discussed. Women and men are not that fundamentally different, although there are all sorts of complex nuances to our neurological, chromosomal, hormonal, and social experiences that create variety in how we are embodied and how we experience and interact with the culture around us.

That culture is oppressive in a number of ways – it favours heterosexuality, masculinity, men, and the idea of oppositional sex, as Serano terms it (as well as whiteness, able-bodiedness, neurotypicality, etc).

Gender segregation, in the form of legal and social sex (really gender) assignment at birth, is one way in which the culture is oppressive. This legal and social process oppresses gay people, women and trans people. Trans people are fighting to exist comfortably within this oppressive system, but many of us are also fighting to change it.

Ditum, let’s be clear, is fighting to preserve it.

Post-script- added 20/5/16

Given how hastily I wrote this, in just one afternoon, I am overwhelmed by the messages of support it has had. The only response I had from Ditum herself is as follows:

A friend pointed out this is a fine example of “dead cat politics“.

Of course that is not what I am saying! I am saying, however, that gender segregated toilets are not a feminist invention, and not necessarily in the interests of feminism, but that reaction to fear of men and rape, legitimate as that is, can sometimes lead to decisions to back gender-enshrining legislation that isn’t ultimately in women’s interests.

So, some folks then brought up the risk to women from lack of appropriate sanitation facilities in India and Africa. White women appropriating the experiences of women of colour to further their own agenda? Surely not. So let’s get this clear:

We do not have to have gender segregation enshrined in law to make safe provisions for diverse people in diverse situations. There are times, of course, when people are getting naked and need appropriate privacy, and it’s important to provide them with that. Women’s safety and children’s safety are absolutely important. This safety and privacy is generally achieved by providing a door with a lock on it, along with other reasonable security measures like safe external access. I think you’ll find most UK toilets and most new changing facilities afford this safety and privacy, and women everywhere have a right to demand this. Desegregated does not mean not risk assessed.

If facilities are not safe for everyone to use, we should probably stop letting our boy children use toilets. And women should probably start worrying about the 64,000 registered women sex offenders who are permitted to use all these facilities.