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.

About John Barrowman . . .

Just in case you missed it, I’ve been doing a spot of guest writing for The Queerness, and I wanted to share two of these pieces with my blog readers

Here, I discuss why Barrowman’s “transgender Tardis” comment was certain to bait the trans community: Read more 

And a while back I wrote a piece about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comments about trans women. Read more

 

 

 

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.

No, trans women don’t have any of the privilege

Recently I asked why, during their consultation meetings, Stonewall appeared to have elected to hold men only groups but not women only groups (I am now unclear whether this is actually the case, but the subsequent discussion still warrants some thought.)

As a feminist, I’m sure you can imagine I was outraged by the idea of men only groups without women only groups. But I was assured the situation is different within the trans community, because trans women “dominate” the discussion and are over-represented, so man-only spaces are needed. It wasn’t long before the underlying belief was voiced – a trans man boldly stated that trans women have louder voices because they were raised in male privilege.

What scares me is that hardly anyone seemed to bat an eyelid at this statement.

If this is going to be the underlying assumption influencing Stonewall’s thinking about trans people, then we are moving into dangerous territory. The idea that trans women have louder voices in the community because of male privilege is an assumption based in a repeated myth from second wave feminist spaces, reiterated so often it begins to sound true.

I believe the reality is that trans women, due to the unique oppressions they face, often have to learn to be “fighty” when it isn’t actually in their nature or upbringing at all. Most of the fight I’ve experienced in my trans women friends has developed as they transition – it is a response to their experience of oppression. The association with “maleness” is a lazy and unfounded leap, based on a transparently false assumption that all AMAB people are socialized with identical traits.

I also see trans men, who generally get listened to without the need to shout, being worryingly uncomfortable about acknowledging the structural inequality between themselves and trans women. While I agree trans men also experience some misogyny when they are perceived as women, I am not sure how many trans men or AFAB non-binary folks are aware of how toxic an entity transmisogyny is – that is the specific violence that is targeted at AMAB people when they expose even the slightest hint of their femininity. Transmisogyny is linked to society’s undervaluing and violence towards everything that is perceived as feminine, which is in turn an enormous part of what underpins the structural inequality between the sexes.

Trans men do not experience societal violence in the way trans women do, because becoming more “manly” and “masculine” is not seen as faulty or transgressive in the same way – femininity is cast, even by some feminists, as weak, artificial, pointless, valueless, and of course, inherently sexual. This means that trans women are more scrutinised and suspect, and experience higher rates of harassment, violence and murder. There is less social stigma in somebody assigned female wanting what’s perceived as a male role, male dress or male occupation. The evidence of the inequality between trans men and women can also be shown in this article about pay and employment.

Trans men are also less visible – pre-transition, they can dress as they choose with less stigma, post-transition, they are more likely to “pass” because of the one-way effects of male hormonal puberty. Because of this, most trans guys I know are not as interested in being involved with a trans community, except for a brief period while they are more visible during transition. It’s not a good thing for any person to feel compelled to hide their history in order to feel safe, but reality is a lot of trans guys can and do hide – they choose to quietly live their lives and not be visible.

Trans women receive a greater degree of social stigma and harassment, often coupled with increased visibility. Understandable, then, if they throw themselves more into activism, get more angry. But just as has been said to many feminists over the years in order to put women back in their place, trans women who speak up are told they are “acting like men”.

That such statements come from within the trans community is especially troubling. Trans men who say they don’t have a voice, who cry “what about the men?” are replicating something that is happening everywhere. That we see it as being outrageous that trans spaces are women-led says a lot about how we think about women, and echoes how threatened cis men feel by women-dominated feminist spaces.

Hooray for women-dominated spaces, I say – how dare we as a community twist that and misgender trans women rather than admiring the long fight and painstaking social organizing that has helped trans women fight back against the forces of their oppression.

Sure, trans men and AFAB trans folks need to be more visible, but we do that by taking our place within the community and not minding having our masculine expectations shattered – we are not the most important people here. I have no problem with more leaders in the trans community being women. I accept that transfeminine people are at greater risk in our society; they experience societal violence from birth, in the form of physical, sexual and emotional attack on all perceived femininity in assigned male people.

I am less afraid of loud and fighty trans women than I am of a community of trans women who meekly learn to “know their place” in order to rebut accusations of maleness. I also fear that in being seen as the “default” trans person, trans women will have their unique experiences as women invisibilised, and will quickly lose their ability to speak about transmisogyny as women’s issues once again get swept to the side in favour of the issues that affect men too.

This is a crucial time in the evolution of our relationship with Stonewall – allowing lazy assumptions about the male privilege of trans women to pass unchallenged could have a long term impact on how Stonewall handles future issues.

edit – after feedback, I’ve edited two sloppy bits of wording – I was never against men-only groups if there are women-only groups in parallel, and suggesting masculine clothing on AFAB folks goes without comment was definitely an overstatement. Apologies to those whose cages were unnecessarily rattled by my poor choice of words.