A response to “Why What JK Rowling Said is Transphobic” by Katy Montgomerie
Original piece here:
Katy opens by insisting that it is absurd to say sex exists, since “nobody” disputes it.
I am a trans woman who knows hundreds of trans people and who is very active in the community, and I’ve never heard any trans person or expert say or imply otherwise even once.
This is the deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster, denying that sex exists, since transwomen are literally female. Would this fit KM’s criteria of “trans person or expert”? Probably not. But then, her party was behind the Gender Representation On Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.
The highly contentious guidance for this act was published 3 days before Rowling’s tweet. It is here:
The upshot is, that it contains 7 paragraphs to redefine “woman” to be at minimum a declaration of pronouns, with no requirement to check more thoroughly, and no punishment for misrepresentation.
“Man” does not receive similar treatment. In fact, there is no definition of “man” anywhere in this guidance.
This is exactly the legislative erasure of the meaning of sex — but only for women. In an act whose purpose is to ensure a 50/50 representation of women on public boards, the end result is guidance that protects only the representation of males.
This is an act that, after 2 years of lobbying from groups ostensibly pushing for the rights of trans people, and through a process which ignored the voices of women, has resulted in this gloriously insane legislation. Here, a transman with a GRC would be disadvantaged relative to absolutely any man in the country prepared to introduce themselves as “she” at interview, because that would mean they met the minimal criteria for “woman”, and thus receive preferential treatment (all else being equal) if doing so attained “gender balance”. This is doubly true given the current state of Forstater v CGD Europe 2019, where someone would be disinclined to challenge the man’s (plainly absurd) claim, for fear of being sacked.
Even better, this guidance would still potentially allow the hiring of the man-self-identifying-as-woman over a self-identifying transman, because in this instance, it would recognise that the man was a woman, but not recognise that the transman was a man.
When people say “no-one is denying sex is real” this is a lie. Many do, and some are already legislating it out of existence.
So why did she say that?
Because it is true, and the shocked denials that that’s what is happening, both openly and legislatively, are pure gaslighting. The reaction to what ought to be a banal and uncontroversial statement proves it.
It is an attempt to create a false dichotomy between supporting trans rights and just agreeing with the entire field of biology. The argument is “If we call trans women women, then we can’t discuss sexism against women or sexuality”, but in fact the truth is the exact opposite.
No, it is an attempt to speak clearly, and openly. Sex is real, it exists, people experience different treatment because of their sex, people are protected in law on the basis of their sex, and should continue to be so. Where there is a conflict of existing rights, or changes to those rights, need to talk about it with precision.
Trans women face misogynistic sexism and sexual violence for being women every day.
Those that “pass” do, simply because misogynists who cannot tell the difference between a woman and a male who outwardly appears indistinguishable from one, will treat them as badly as any other woman.
The rest experience violence and abuse not on grounds of sexism, but on grounds of being nonconforming. That aspect is to do with homophobic disgust, and the rigid enforcement of gender norms.
Those responsible for the hate and violence want to inflict it on men who don’t act like “real” men. They don’t want them to be men at all. They want to eject them from the category of man. They want to other them, and bully them, punish them for stepping out of line.
“Transwomen are women” also means “transwomen aren’t men”. By making it taboo to state that transwomen are still male, and accept that some people are challenging this orthodoxy in favour of a wider definition of “man”, you are empowering their persecutors. By refusing to allow me to say that I stand in defence of my nonconforming brothers against that sort of hate, you enable and assent to the very basis this exclusion and violence.
And while I’m at it, this goes double for those who use “concerns” about the trans/sex-based rights issue as a figleaf while you spew hate and bigotry towards nonconforming men and women. You’re worse.
This all revolves around the desire to label trans women as men in order to justify taking away the rights they have today.
No. Perhaps in the US, where legislation is different, but here the rights and protections of a trans person are unaffected by what sex category they literally were born as and continue to belong to. Acknowledging a transwoman to be truly and always male changes absolutely nothing about how they are treated under existing UK legislation. Because under UK legislation, they are protected from discrimination as “trans”, no matter what stage of transition they are in, to be treated generally as the sex they are transitioning to, and additionally treated legally as their acquired sex in most (but not all) situations if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate.
Trans women have used women’s spaces in the UK — the country JK Rowling and I live in — longer than either of us have been alive, and they have been legally protected to do so for over a decade (before that there were no laws either way. It has never been illegal).
It has been protected for longer than that, the 2010 Equality Act was a unifying piece of legislation that tied together existing rights.
Some people have only just learned what a trans person is since the rise of trans visibility in the media, and they just don’t like it.
The transsexual character of Haley Cropper first appeared in Coronation Street — favourite of everybody’s parents and grandparents — in 1998, and was watched by tens of millions of viewers of all ages, across the political spectrum, every day, for a decade and a half. There is no doubt that her on-screen wedding and multiple awards were part of a landscape of popular acceptance and normalisation that led to the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. Since that time, Britain has been a world leader in trans rights.
No, what has happened is that in the last 5 years, Stonewall and other lobby groups have been educating and training public institutions to treat “transitioning” in a way that was never envisaged in the original act. No longer must it represent a sincere process of becoming the opposite sex. Now, it must be “identity” that is protected, and a simple declaration of that identity is sufficient. We’ve gone from:
Trans Women Are Women means that we treat those who are transitioning (or have transitioned) with dignity and respect, allow them to go through life unmolested, and don’t spend our time unnecessarily and cruelly outing them when they don’t wish to be.
To:
Trans Women Are Women means absolutely any man who says he is a woman, literally is the same thing as any female who’s ever been born, more oppressed in fact, starting from the point he says it, and projecting backwards such that they always were a woman really, and if you question it, you’ll get the sack.
Most people in the UK still think when you say TWAW you’re talking about a sympathetic, ordinary, minding-their-own-business transsexual like that portrayed in the character of Haley Cropper.
Some people though, upon finding out eg. that popular celebrity transvestite Eddie Izzard would gladly take the place of a woman on an all-woman political shortlist, have had a moment to reflect that perhaps not all is as progressive as it seems.
Other people saw The Matrix promoted as an example of a great female-directed film on International Women’s day, and thought, wait, what?
And before that, one woman saw a man — who goes to work half the time in a suit, and half the time in makeup and a dress — win a place in a list of top 100 female executives, questioned it, and ended up losing her job for doing so. And when JK Rowling said that was wrong, she was denounced as hateful — which is where we are today.
Female directors. Female executives. But again, nobody is denying sex, right?
If those opposing trans rights were to just say “we want to take away the rights and freedoms of trans people” they know it’d sound as heinous as it is
If those supposedly championing trans rights were just to say “we want to take away the rights and freedoms of female people” they know it’d sound as heinous as it is.
Because that’s actually what this is about.
Declaring that the law stay as it is does not take away rights and freedoms.
But campaigning for removal of sex-based protections does.
This is all a bit of a giveaway. How can someone simultaneously argue that existing sex-based exemptions that have been there for years are “taking away rights”, and at the same time campaign to remove those same protections, while pretending this does not affect women?
Also worth pointing out again that the distinction between trans rights and sex-based rights have coexisted in UK law for many years, and during that period we were the number 1 country in the world for trans rights.
Trans people, intersex people, feminists, medical professionals and experts across the world aren’t saying “sex isn’t real” they are saying “sex is more complicated than what they taught you at school”, and that is a fact.
As soon as someone starts talking about intersex, they’ve completely shifted the conversation. These are people with complex medical conditions, who have been historically very badly treated, and we should be campaigning for more awareness, education and resources for those affected. This is 100% a different thing than “trans” and exploiting DSDs to make your argument is pretty low.
Every person with a DSD is either male or female. There is no third sex. There is no spectrum of sex. That sometimes we may be outwardly confused by the tiny minority of cases, does not change somebody’s sex. We are, after all, pattern matching creatures. The standard of what something “is” is not whether it can pass my simple mammalian heuristic.
And it certainly does not mean that sex is something you can change by declaration.
The whole point is that sex is binary, the small/large gamete is the basis of our reproduction, and all of our external variability, the outward sex characteristics we develop, and all of our complicated gendered trappings, are about allowing us to recognise and access or exploit that reproductive role. Our ability to recognise sex in the vast majority of cases is the basis of sex-based discrimination, and just because sometimes we get someone’s sex technically wrong, doesn’t mean we aren’t still discriminating on the basis of the sex we thought they were.
If you have atypical sex characteristics (unusually tall women, unusually hairless men, infertility) you aren’t on the spectrum of sex. You are on the spectrum of variability within your sex.
Trans women being women is a conclusion of the evidence, not a premise.
No, “transwomen are women” is a thought terminating cliche.
The truth of the statement depends entirely on the meaning of “trans”, “transwomen”, “women”, and “are”. Unless you can actually state in a non circular way what any of it actually means, its just in group/out group signalling. It is a mantra to be repeated, to prevent any thought or inquiry.
It is dehumanising colonisation. Women’s existence reduced to men’s idea of what one is. A nice slogan we all said in order to be kind, turned into an edict to be enforced.
Insisting that we treat sex as an unchangeable binary based on some invisible characteristic removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.
No it doesn’t. We all know a transwoman is technically male, its literally the only prerequiste characteristic. Whether they grow a beard and stick pronouns in their bio, or pass so well most people would never know, sex doesn’t literally change, and as such neither does the need for clarity in some areas of law. We don’t have to insist on saying to their face, there is no need for rudeness or hate and disgust, and we can treat people how they wish to be seen — indeed, in many cases how we actually see them — without having to believe there is literally no distinction between a male who one day declares himself to be a woman, a male who wears women’s clothes occasionally and declares himself to be a woman on those days, a male who has undergone extensive surgery and hormone treatments to as close as possible resemble an adult human female, and an adult human female.
By contrast, preventing people from even talking about the reality of their sex is removing their ability to not only meaningfully discuss their lives, but also to preserve their existing rights in law.
