Notes for the sex-and-gender debate
I am going to write this as though it were a letter to someone who thinks of themself as ‘a trans ally’ or perhaps a trans rights activist. I know such a person is highly unlikely to read my blog, because they think their opponents are ‘anti-trans’, and because I know that I, and my blog, are on that list but I also know that there are people on either side of the #NoDebate crew who have never ceased striving to reach across the divide. Now it is beginning to open up for discussion, I hope the following might inspire some thoughts about what works, and why.
First off, let’s make a vital decision. There are those who thrive on conflict, who enjoy hurling abuse at those they disagree with as though divides over politics and current affairs were a team sport. There is no point in debating people like that until they grow up. These notes are for those who are on one side or other of the trans debate because of genuinely held beliefs and values. Where beliefs are based on evidence, they can be discussed, tested and where necessary, revised. That is where the debate should be.
So here it is, friend-across-the-divide, this one’s for you.
I know that you’re told from all sides that people like me are bad, wrong, ‘bigoted’ and all the rest of it but I know that you knew at least some people like me before all this happened, so you know that we potentially could actually communicate. In the same way, I remember some of your people when we were friends, or comrades in socialism or whatever, so please could we suspend judgement for a while. We have to be aware that we both come to this conversation sure that the other is wrong, and needs to be taught something.
This conversation is going to require a lot of patience, because the language around the topic is so charged now, we’ve been primed to see ‘hate’ in each other’s habitual words. If you see anything like that in this letter, I promise I’m not trying to wind you up, we probably are just looking at some words and phrases in very different ways.
Gender identity
I have spoken to you, or people like you, enough to understand this: that you believe people have an innate gender identity, that it is a real part of them, and that it’s immutable so that if a child is born with a gender identity that doesn’t match their physical sex, they are in deep trouble, that they need at least for the world to acknowledge that they are the other sex ‘inside’ and ideally, to be helped to change their body to match their gender identity.
I know you believe that innate, unchangeable gender identity causes dysphoria, and that some children need puberty blockers to protect them from ‘the wrong’ puberty, and that denying them that, or the cross-sex hormones and surgeries that follow, that even delaying those things into adulthood, causes extreme distress, a distress that can put their lives at risk. I know you also believe that, because trans women really are women, and vulnerable women at that, it’s cruel of people like me to say that they shouldn’t have automatic access to women’s spaces and services.
I understand that, and I see that believing that, you are shocked by what appears to be the callous cruelty of questioning or ‘misgendering’ those people. I understand that’s why you expend so much effort trying to silence people like me, keep us out of jobs and political roles where we might upset people, and it’s why you try to stop us selling books or showing films that you think exacerbate gender distress.
I know you think it’s a sad indictment of our society that our books become best sellers, and people run the gauntlet of aggressive protests to see our films.
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As sure as eggs is eggs, I haven’t got that exactly right, and if you want to comment on this blog and tell me the ways you don’t see it the way I think you do, please feel free.
The main thing is, I understand that you’re trying to protect people, not hurt people.
I wonder if you would consider that the same might be true of me?
What I believe
I am not convinced humans have an innate ‘gender identity’. In fact, for as long as I can remember, I’ve taken a feminist view of gender. I believe it is a set of norms and rules, created by society – a prescription of how women and men respectively are ‘supposed to’ dress, think, behave and feel. As a girl and then as a woman, I always saw gender as my enemy. I wanted to decide those things for myself and, more often than not, my decision did not match what my particular bit of our society thought I should be doing.
Do you imagine I think trans people don’t exist? I get accused of that a lot – but I know they do. I am good friends with several. I see them, as Kristina Harrison once put it, as ‘gender refugees’. If you grow up in a particularly sexist, conformist section of society and you aren’t able to be as you are ‘supposed to’ be, or you get bullied for being what you are, it’s easy to see why you might want to present as the opposite sex, if that’s closer to what feels natural to you.
As to all those dysphoric youngsters well, in a sexist, pornified society, I don’t think it’s one bit surprising that some kids are appalled when they start to develop sex characteristics. You know, there was never a time when most adolescents did feel comfortable with all that going on, so for kids who are distressed anyway (and most of the kids who turn up at gender clinics are already distressed for other reasons – violent or abusive backgrounds, homophobia, bullying and all the rest of it) that, I think, explains why adolescent discomfort can mutate into a determination to change their body, to ‘be a new person’ – and if they’re spending time on the internet around sites where transitioning is presented as the answer to all ills, it’s almost inevitable they’re going to think that way.
I believe that’s why the figures for young people (particularly girls) declaring as trans have gone through the roof, and I believe it’s something distressed young people urgently need to be protected from.
Trans men
I think it’s absolutely fine for mature – really mature – adults to make decisions like that. When women launch on transition in order to live as men, I have absolutely no objection. Adults should be free to choose. My personal opinion is that it would be easier, safer and more socially useful if they settled for dressing and behaving ‘like a man’ — in other words, challenging the gender norms by becoming a ‘gnc’ (gender-non-conforming) woman — but that’s my opinion. I don’t have the right or the intention to force my opinions on others.
Trans women
As for men who transition in order to live as women, that’s fine by me as long as they don’t come marching into women’s groups using their gender identity as an ‘access all areas’ pass, demanding that we change our language and activities and make everything about them – and I’m well aware that most trans people don’t behave like that. Most of all kinds of people actually prefer to get along with others, and shy away from making enemies. It’s a human trait.
Unfortunately, a very small number of demanding, bossy people can make a hell of a lot of noise. That’s why having very good friends who are trans people doesn’t stop me wanting to keep the established legal right for women (sometimes, in a few places) to gather in protected, all-female groups, but most of the time, in most places, for most of my life, women and trans people have not been a problem to each other at all.
So what changed?
Thousands of women did not suddenly become bigots overnight, nor did thousands of girls suddenly, independently, decide they were trans. We should ask ourselves what has changed. Two things, I think. One is that a few years ago, Stonewall attempted to get the government to drop the sex exception from the Equality Act to allow un-regulated ‘self ID’. That was the threat to women’s sport, politics, refuges etc. Women who challenged that quickly discovered that organizations with the same agenda had been quietly feeding similar anti-women’s rights moves into governments and companies’ policy documents for quite some time.
The other big change was a part of that quiet ‘capture’. From around the start of this century, groups like Stonewall have been teaching ‘gender identity’ in schools. It’s far enough in the past now that teachers (who are very young, these days) tend to believe it, and pass on the idea that if you’re distressed by your body, or by adolescence in general, you are probably a victim of an innate, cross-sex ‘gender identity’.
Trans kids
Anyway, however it came about, suddenly there are ‘trans kids’ and those kids are having a hard time. I know you’ll say that all the sufferings those kids report are signs that our society is horrendously transphobic, that they’ve experienced bullying and all the rest of it because they’re trans, but you and I disagree about which way round cause and effect are working.
You think they’re bullied because they’re trans, and so you need to be out there all the time with all those flags to defend them. I think they’re trans because they’ve been bullied, and ‘coming out as trans’ was presented to them as a solution. I think the more all those flags and petitions and rules about ‘misgendering’ get out there, along with people shouting about transphobia and so-called ‘hate speech’, the more those kids will believe they’re surrounded by bullies. The fuss about ‘transphobia everywhere’ makes them feel even more vulnerable, and it all gets worse and worse.
I am pretty sure that ‘social transitioning’ (that is, parents and teachers going along with a child’s attempt to present as the opposite sex and forcing other kids to act as though they believe it) locks that child into an acting role they’re not old enough to really understand. I think kids believe ‘sex change’ is easy — that you can go into hospital as a woman and come out as a man and that everything will work just fine, and I think it’s cruel to encourage that belief, and to ‘protect’ them from alternative views, when transitioning is actually a difficult, risky, expensive, lifetime’s work — especially if started when young, by using puberty blockers.
That’s why I can’t force myself to go to political party or trade union meetings any more. All those motions demanding that we go along with something I believe is harming kids, all those times I was shouted down as a ‘bigot’ for trying to state my case, have persuaded me that my presence is just a stressful waste of time.
That’s why you got a clear run with all those supposedly LGBTQ+ ‘transwomen are women’ motions – not because it was a widely understood, majority view, but because people like me had already left. Democracy doesn’t work when bullying, slander and misrepresentation are tolerated.
I know a lot of people, particularly young people, believe with a passion that gender identity is real, is innate, and is very important but I think that’s because organizations like Stonewall and Mermaids have been going into schools teaching them that for the best part of 20 years now, and I think it’s really harmful, because they use gender-stereotypes to persuade the kids and that makes them vulnerable to sexist bullying, because those stereotypes are ingrained in our society everywhere you look.
I think it’s really important to do the opposite of what all those ‘trans support’ groups have been doing. I think we need to show kids that gender is not a part of them, it’s a social force that oppresses them, and is something they might want to resist. We shouldn’t be deciding for them, but we need to teach them to resist prescriptive demands, and to deal fearlessly with disagreement, so they can consider different view points. We need to persuade them that they can be whatever they like, regardless of their biological sex, without resorting to drugs or surgery. I think it’s only when they know that, that they can truly be themselves.
That is what feminists are trying to say, when they get accused of ‘misgendering’ or ‘hate speech’. That is where this belief comes from, that there’s a tide of ‘transphobia’ out there. the #NoDebate movement has always called disagreement ‘transphobia’ or ‘hate speech’.
Non-binary kids
I used to think ‘non binary’ kids had found a good form of self-defence. I thought ‘I am non-binary’ meant ‘I refuse to be any of these stereotypes, leave me alone’. I thought kids who said that were safe – until I learned my local GP was being offered funding to ‘treat’ non-binary youngsters as though they had DSDs (actual, physical disorders of sexual development). Now I know that trans world is also telling non-binary kids that their bodies aren’t any good as they are, and pushing hormones and ‘affirmatory surgery’ (mastectomy) for them, too.
To me, that demonstrates that even ‘non-binary’ is something made up by people who want to interfere with our young people, just as the diet and beauty industries do, to make money by telling them they need to be ‘mended’ in some way — because it’s private clinics, mostly owned by US companies, that do those surgeries, since our NHS in the UK won’t operate on under-age kids, and has generally got more cautious about it for young adults, too.
Learning more
I expect at this point you’re busting to show me a load of books, articles and films that would persuade me I’m the one who’s got it wrong way round but unfortunately, that wouldn’t work. You see, I’ve already read those articles, and seen the rebuttals, and read about the dodgy methodology and tiny samples of those studies that ‘prove’ the trans ideology case.
The crazy thing is, I know exactly the same thing would happen if I asked you to read Helen Joyce, or Hannah Barnes or Julie Bindel, or to watch Adult Human Female, so the swapping books and films thing won’t work but at least if we understand what each other is thinking, we can perhaps start to consider that neither of us is wrong-headed or hate-filled? That neither of us means any harm? That we disagree because there’s a lot of misleading, passion-raising stuff out there?
Doesn’t it make you feel better, to consider the possibility that trans kids are not, after all, faced with a barrage of hatred from women like me? We just think they’re being misdiagnosed, and that they have other problems that need attention, problems that get neglected if their doctors, teachers and parents fall back on saying they are trans instead of looking further for the source of their distress.
Yes of course there are people who hate trans people. For every category of people ever who are visibly different, there will be some people who hate difference and will treat them badly but that’s no reason to believe that feminists and lefty materialists are the same as bigots and fascists. Isn’t it nice to know that really, there aren’t so many people going around hating unfortunate kids? That whatever the real fascists are doing, it really isn’t what the women’s sex-based rights campaign is about?
Re-launching debate
Perhaps we can agree that a possible way forward would be for those of us who are willing, from both sides of the #NoDebate wall, to start a series of small-group conversations – for acquaintances to send out an invite, sit down and talk this through? Why has that been so hard?
I think we need to do two things, to make it happen.
Put the safety catch back on
The first thing we must do is to digest the fact that it’s possible people on both sides of the debate are genuinely trying to act for the best. Out with the assumptions of hate! To do that, we on each side have to recognize all the trigger-phrases that have been weaponized in this debate. I see red when you say ‘transwomen are women’, and ‘trans rights are human rights’, ‘keep the LGB with the T’ and ‘you are what you say you are’ because I’ve seen how abusers twist those words.
You see red when I do what you think of as ‘misgendering’, or talk about cases of safeguarding failure, because you’ve seen how abusers twist those stories. Let us listen more carefully, and find out why each of us is really saying those things.
Secondly, we need to come up with definitions of sex, and gender, and gender identity and gender-critical, and trans and transition and non-binary before we start, laying out the evidence for each definition, so we’re not in danger of arguing about what we mean when we say the words.
Let’s demand proper research into those issues, and into precisely what happens to kids who transition, one year, five years, ten and twenty years down the line — not just filming the drug-induced euphoria of the ‘newly transitioned’, not just ‘he said, she said’ reporting, but regular studies leading to films and articles in good plain language telling us how they’re getting on. They could look at whether gender identity exists, whether it is innate and immutable, whether sex exists, and is innate and immutable, why it is that so many kids who want to ‘change sex’ are distressed in so many ways, why they think a ‘sex change’ will save them, and what other causes there might be for that distress.
Meanwhile
I know that’s all beginning to happen. The Cass Report, and some recent TV documentaries have made a start so in the meantime, let’s tell the haters and shouters of abuse that there are in fact decent people on both sides of the fence who are trying to work it all out, so could they please just put a sock in it while we’re trying to think.
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Dear Reader,
Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.
Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 