I'm seeing suggestions that transgender rights are all a big conspiracy to hurt women. I'm not quite sure how that's supposed to work but I think some context of why transgender rights have become such a hot topic in recent years would be helpful. I have tried to keep this as neutral as possible and confined my editorialising to specific paragraphs which I've italicised, rather than scattering it around. I am by no means an expert in this but, like J K Rowling, I have spent a fair amount of time reading about this issue over the last few years as I have been trying to give my feminism a more educated grounding. I'm not trying to single out anyone whose commented and am instead trying to give a bit of background for those who haven't been following things that closely. I'm not addressing any specific claims made on this thread or by Rowling. For a good examination of her post I highly recommend this
Twitter thread.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004
What really kicked it all off was the UK government’s
Reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 consultation which ran between 3rd July and 22nd October 2018. The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004 requires that people who wish to legally change their gender must, among other things, have a medical report confirming that they have or have had medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and that they have lived as their “acquired gender” for at least two years. The
consultation document (PDF) prepared by the government explains why they feel the GRA needs amending,
Many trans people feel that this process is overly intrusive, humiliating and administratively burdensome. Further they argue that by requiring a diagnostic psychiatric report, the process perpetuates the outdated and false assumption that being trans is a mental illness. As part of the process, the trans person has to collect a range of personal documentation, including information about their medical history, finances and identity which they send to people who they do not meet who then make a decision about their gender identity. The fee of £140 and associated costs are seen as expensive and there is no right of appeal against the decision unless on a point of law. (Point 24, page 21)
Other issues with the GRA are that it makes no provision for non-binary people and those who were born intersex and misidentified as they have no gender dysphoria diagnosis, rather their gender mismatch is due to medical error.
The consultation attracted a lot of attention, as I’m sure happens with any government consultation. What has been particularly noteworthy to many has been the involvement of
feminist groups who have opposed to the GRA and to any reform that makes it easier for transgender people to have their gender legally acknowledged.
Concerns from Anti-Trans Rights Feminists
The concerns of these groups can, I think, be summarised as follows:
- Allowing people to legally change their gender more easily will enable cis-men to claim they are trans-women in order to access female-only spaces for nefarious purposes
- Allowing trans-women into female only spaces will put cis women at increased risk due to trans-men having been socialised as men and having the physiology of men, both of which increases their tendency towards violence.
- Allowing trans-women to come under the banner of ‘women’ waters down the meaning and thus the legal protections afforded to us as a class.
On point 1 there’s very little documentation in a UK context but there’s a fair bit from the US so I’m using that. Comparing States where people are allowed to use the bathroom according to the self-identified gender with States where people aren’t allowed, there is
no increase in voyeurism.
Politifact found very few cases across North America of men dressing as women to access women’s bathrooms and in none of the cases did the men claim to be trans-women. They did, however, find instances of men dressed as men entering women’s bathrooms to assault women, which is a risk regardless of the formal recognition of transgender people.
On point 2, a particular focus of concern is the risk that trans-women pose to cis-women in domestic abuse shelters and refuges. This concern is unfounded. Trans-women are allowed to access these facilities already, both legally, as a result of the Equality Act 2010, and practically as the policy of the facilities, and there have been no problems. A report commissioned by
Stonewall based on in-depth interviews with 15 organisations across England, Scotland and Wales found that trans women were already being given access to refuges and while there may be issues regarding transgender residents,
Refuges can be an intense environment as you can imagine and other service users have discomfort with each other for a lot of reasons, and often there can be issues, if it’s not a trans issue, more often there is an ethnic or a religious or sexual orientation issue or other issues that occur... So it is within our policy that where there are other service users that have discomfort around sharing services with trans users we will work with them to support and educate them in the same way as we would with any other equality issue in general. (page 15)
I understand that some women are concerned about seeing trans-women with penises in changing rooms but some women are concerned about seeing fat women, women with colostomy bags, women with mastectomies, women with amputations, and women of different races and ethnicities in changing rooms too. But we don’t say those are legitimate concerns that must be indulged. We say that women are diverse and if it offends you that’s your problem, they have just as much right to the space as you do.
It’s worth pointing out that the concerns around amending the GRA are unfounded.
Multiple countries - including Ireland, Argentina and Portugal - have changed their laws to allow self-identification of gender without incident.
Links to the Conservative Right
One aspect that I think is not widely known is the involvement of the Conservative Right with the current transphobic rhetoric. In the US the Conservative think tank
Heritage Foundation has been hosting panels with anti-trans feminists from the Women’s Liberation Front, who have also joined forces with the public policy arm of Focus on the Family, called the
Family Policy Alliance. The Heritage Foundation has also been
paying for UK activists to come to the US and protest against transgender rights.
Wikipedia notes that,
Researcher Cole Parke at Political Research Associates (PRA), an American liberal think tank, wrote in 2016 that conservative groups opposed to the transgender rights movement were basing their arguments on the work of feminist authors such as Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, whom Parke described as "TERFs".
[76] The Southern Poverty Law Center, an American civil rights nonprofit, reported in 2017 that American Christian right groups were trying to "separate the T from LGB", including via casting transgender rights as antagonistic to feminism or to lesbian or gay people. The report said this trend was "part of a larger strategy, meant to weaken transgender rights advocates by attempting to separate them from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates".
The reason I bring this up is that the claims transgender activists are somehow in the thrall of MRAs or other anti-women’s rights groups is fallacious. The evidence suggests the opposite. It’s also worth noting that many of the fears surrounding trans-women come from a very misandrist perspective. They assume that men are, whether by biology or by socialisation, inherently violent and pose a constant risk to women.
Summary
While the anti-trans rights rhetoric has been around for decades (something I decided not to get into for fear of this post exceeding the length limits) the most recent rise has been due to the publicity surrounding the proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act. Anti-trans rights activists have used the momentum of the consultation to publicise their view that transpeople, and trans-women in particular, pose a threat to women both physically and philosophically.
Those of us who support transgender rights believe that these fears are based on bias and misunderstanding. We believe that for feminism to be truly effective it needs to be intersectional and to recognise that womanhood encompasses a whole range of experiences, not all of which will be shared by all women. Trans-women are women with a different set of experiences than cis-women but they are no less valid.