Further to the Open Letter I signed (see my previous post), I think it is important to remember that Trans Exclusionary, binary attitudes not only impact on trans people (ie those who don't identify with their assigned sex and are male to female or female to male trans) but also other gender identities, including various non-trans people, gender neutral people, non-binary people and masculine women*. I started reading around and found others share the same concerns as me.
One thing Gender Critical women ignore completely is that transitioning includes living as your chosen sex for a period of time before you consent to gender reassignment surgery. At this stage, transwomen still have their male anatomy. By trying to prevent them from accessing women's spaces, you are disrupting a vital stage in their transitioning process, which is unacceptable.
Another point they ignore is that assigned sex at birth isn't always biologically accurate. Apart from all the intersex babies whose sex and gender are often misassigned, there are babies born male who nevertheless have a working female reproductive system of which no-one is aware. For example, Mickey had external male parts so was assigned male at birth and the parents were told they'd had a boy. But, unknown to all, Mickey had PMDS which means she also has an internal female reproductive system as well as infertile male external parts so could become pregnant and has! Mickey always felt she was a girl not a boy (came out as gay at 13 and then later thought she was trans) and, as it turns out, with good reason! The doctor wanted her to have an hysterectomy but because her male parts are infertile, she identifies as female and wanted to become a parent one day, she decided to have a baby and is currently 4 months pregnant. So how does an ID help in this case? It would say male on her birth certificate, she hasn't had time to transition as far as I can tell from the article below, and she's pregnant. So which bathroom is she going to be sent to? The bathroom bill would send a pregnant person to the men's toilets! 🙄😲🙃
Another article (available at the link below) is very informative about the Gender Critical movement. It is well written and argued, so worth a read!
https://freedomnews.org.uk/whats-wrong-with-womans-place/
It makes many excellent points but, in this post, I'll focus on a quote from it which highlights the completely unacceptable and wide ranging consequences of the Gender Critical Movement's campaign messages and how this relates to objections to Kathleen Stock being awarded an OBE:
"It is astonishingly authoritarian and it would not just harm the lives of trans women, but gender non conforming and ambiguous people, Intersex people and of course trans men – quite possibly most of all. Many in the Gender Critical movement seem perfectly relaxed about this with regular WPUK speaker Kathleen Stock declaring masculine appearing women being quizzed about their sex assigned at birth as an acceptable but regrettable cost in the fight to keep trans women out of women’s toilets and changing rooms."
This is based on Lisa Mullin's tweet which points out Stock's attitude towards non-trans people who are simply gender non-conforming in some way, assessed on their clothing and superficial appearance:
https://mobile.twitter.com/LisaTMullin/status/1153061437138333696
Can you imagine the confusion backstage when the gender swapping Shakespeare actors need the powder room 🚽and are still dressed in their cross-gender costumes! What's Stock going to do about that?! 😂 Run after each character in the play checking their ID? 🙃
It also doesn't seem to bother Stock that a bathroom 🚻bill would affect many non-trans lesbians because a fair percentage of lesbians identity as masculine women, often referred to generally as butch lesbians. I'm struggling to see how a so-called lesbian would want to adversely affect lesbians 🤔😕😒. That makes no sense at all.
Not all butch lesbians are the same as each other. Butches can range from being cis and slightly so-called gender non-conforming to those who prefer to identify as gender neutral or be masculine and use male names*. Unlike Stock who argues for binary categories, I think identities work on a spectrum. There is a spectrum of lesbian identities, just as I agree with those who show that there is a sexuality spectrum and a gender spectrum. In other words, there's an entire range of identities which vary up and down a scale, rather than just binary categories for each identity e.g. male/female; gay/straight. And I'm not sure why Stock intermingles and so conflates sexuality and gender/sex identity e.g. discounting transwomen from being able to identify as lesbian if they wish. It is well-known in the LGBT+ community that sexuality and gender or sex identity function separately from each other and combine in a myriad of ways. Has she read anything relevant and unbiased on the subject? 🤔📚 Has she been to Gay Pride?!🌈
And why is she so sure this wouldn't impact on her? I don't know Stock, have never exchanged any words with her (not even a hello) but I did attend a 3 day conference in 2011 where she happened to be the organizer and a speaker. All I remember about her is that she sat a few seats away from me in the main lecture theatre and as she was too busy staring at me, she spectacularly fell off her seat as she attempted to sit down and missed. It was obvious she was fine and unhurt. But I couldn't work out why she was staring like that at me in the first place (and no it wasn't a lesbian, appreciative look). We didn't know each other, I was unaware she calls herself lesbian or gender critical. It was hot weather so I think I was just wearing short jeans shorts, a sleeveless top and had medium length hair, probably sports shoes. And? Do gender critical women have a problem with sporty women? I didn't look masculine there and she shouldn't know what I have or haven't worn elsewhere. I am muscular but so what? That just means I exercise and I'm very fit. Besides, she shouldn't know who I am e.g. that I've trained to be an athlete.
She looked very much like any other woman, I didn't notice her until she started staring at me. Later, I see in photos that she's changed her look from longer hair to very short hair. Which goes to show that the same woman can look two totally different ways hence appearance means nothing. So how does this translate into monitoring who goes to the powder room? Length of hair? How muscular you are? (Athletes beware, you won't be able to go to the loo in peace anymore.) What clothes you are wearing? Make-up? Shoes? What about Intersex people? What about all the various non-binary people? They don't wish to be forced into one gender expression: Androgynous, polygender, pangender, genderqueer, genderfluid, intergender, agender, etc. None of these are trans, but this ridiculous bathroom bill would affect them. Even a weaker version in North Carolina was found to be unworkable and was scrapped.
Stock's 2011 talk there was on aesthetics, unlike later at the fortnightly Aristotelian Society lecture series at Senate House, London, in 2019. I didn't go to that because I looked at the draft copy of her paper the Society puts on their website in advance. It was so riddled with inaccuracies, displaying a non-academic, biased view that I couldn't be bothered to make the effort to go and listen to that. There was no point in attending to ask questions because there would be too many of them and her views are too entrenched to have a rational philosophical discussion. There were also some objectionable implications and explicit claims in that draft paper that adversely impact on LGBT+ people, which are inappropriate and don't belong in academia. The Aristotelian Society's reason on their website for platforming her was that they allow all academic schools of thought. But what she had to say in that paper does not constitute an academic school of thought in any way whatsoever!
Recently, the UK government has announced they will fine unis who no-platform so-called controversial speakers e.g. anti-trans, racist, etc. on the excuse of allowing free speech. I hope people vote with their feet - don't attend or walk out of the talk/debate!
What Oxford Uni thought acceptable when they debated issues and invited controversial speakers decades ago is not relevant now, or at least shouldn't be. Free speech wasn't even a thing in those days and what they debated behind closed doors was unknown to the general public so it didn't have the added consequence of sending a bad message in society. It didn't impact society and minorities, unlike today. It's also unacceptably biased 🙄😠for the Conservative Party to announce these fines after a Conservative MP was no-platformed at Oxford Uni! How it is that the Conservative party doesn't extend this free speech to people politically centre or left of centre? What did Rees-Mogg call them? The "loony left"? So we all have to be Tory right wing to avoid being labelled loony ie a bit mad, crazy, indeed, I see the word unorthodox in the synonyms list! 🤔 That reminds me of an email I received.........
It doesn't constitute free speech if it's targeting a specific, minority group and could lead to prejudice and harm. Free speech doesn't mean anything goes! Speakers have a duty to respect others and be sensitive to those attending their talk or listening/watching online. Here again, I emphasise empathy - if you are an empathic speaker, it would never occur to you to perpetuate stereotypes and make arguments which could severely impact on minority rights.
It's also not free speech if speakers or movements incite or cause mental/psychological, emotional or physical harm or worse and severely impact negatively on people's quality of life. It's not feminism to ignore that trans women are the victims of patriarchy and femicide, not misogynistic perpetrators of it. It's not free speech to slander all trans women as potentially violent, predatory and dangerous: if you have met genuine trans women, as I have, they are indeed very attractive, feminine, sweet and gentle and just want to fit in and be one of the girls. Society cannot oppress a social group's human rights simply because some people are fakes: we don't roll back gay and lesbian rights every time a fake gay or lesbian gains access to an LGBT+ space and commits homophobic abuse or murder, so we cannot roll back trans rights because fake trans harass women and trans women in toilets or elsewhere. It's not pro-Lesbian, Gay and Bi people for the LGB Alliance to erase others in the LGBTQIAPD2S+ community. They also indirectly impact on Lesbian, Gay and Bi people and their relationships by imposing labels on their gender identity and relationships which they themselves reject e.g. by claiming a transwoman and a cis woman can't be in a lesbian relationship just because the transwoman wasn't born a woman. This reduces how many lesbians and lesbian relationships are recognised so lowering the stats of how many lesbians exist. It makes them look like a much smaller minority group than they are. What Lesbian or Bi does that?
In addition, free speech does not include preventing other's freedom and free speech to support trans people in society and in universities, such as Stonewall attempts to do. It must be about equal opportunities for all irrespective of sexual orientation, gender identity, race, religion, political stance, wealth, class, disability, nationality, cultural background and so on.
I think there's confusion about gender identities and conflation between the different types. This partly arises, I think, because trans is often used to refer to both a specific gender identity (ie not identifying with your assigned sex and being male to female or female to male trans) as well as being used as an umbrella term for a range of gender identities outside of the binary concept of being cis male or female. People's lack of knowledge about all the various gender identities is, I think, being exploited by the Gender Critical Movement and the LGB Alliance Movement (ie. those who claim they are lesbian, gay or bisexual and are trans critical hence exclude the T from their acronym). At the moment, their arguments over-focus on male to female trans in a way which gives the impression this is their main issue. However, on closer inspection, you find that their arguments implicitly and explicitly impact severely on the entire LGBT+ community. The whole of the LGBT+ community is affected in one way or another, directly and indirectly by their unscientific, strawman fallacy stance that can bring about draconian laws for all, which is completely out of line and out of step with international human rights!
*There is an excellent article on queer suffragists who dressed as men and were known by male names and had lesbian relationships, calling each other darling and lover. There was gender fluidity amongst suffragists who often "expressed themselves in traditionally masculine ways":
www.them.us/story/queer-suffragist-history
'The Queer Suffragists Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote" Sarah D Collins August 14th 2020
This article also gives a list of women who were suffragists in same-sex relationships eg Annie Tinker (1884-1924) who often wore "a traditionally masculine look"; Frances Willard (1839-1898) who went by the name of Frank; the same is true of Dr Margaret Chung (1889-1959) who dressed as a man and was known as Mike.
Comments
Post a Comment