Sex, gender and gender identity: why socialists should support updating transgender rights.
What follows is a contribution to the debate which has recently emerged aroundtransgender rights, mostly in respect of proposed changes tothe UK’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004 and the Equality Act 2010. Criticisms have been raised, including by some on the left, over the Tory government’s intention to consult on particular proposals to update and amend the GRA.
The proposals seem to me to be reasonable and progressive suggestions which would help address aspects of trans oppression, especially as faced by working class and non-white trans people.Not everyone on the left or among feminists agrees that they are so reasonable, however.
Thus some of the proposals’ critics are clearlytransphobic, exhibiting a general incomprehension and hostility towards trans people and a failure even to acknowledge the existence of trans oppression. Ill-informed coverage in sections of the mediahas certainly fuelled a considerable amount of unpleasant posting on social media by people who seem incapable of empathy towardstrans people and their supporters.
Mermaids, the support organisation for trans children, reported a huge increase in malicious posts to the police in August. Some of these accused parents of child abuse for supporting their children’s access to puberty blockers in preparation for their possible future gender transition.
It’s unfortunately very easy for those who never bother to support lazy, hateful fuckwittery with actual evidence to vent their bigotryand ignorance on such public forums. They take no account of the damage they cause, not least the potential effect of discouraging trans people from coming forward to seek help and support in the first place.
Other criticisms of the proposals, while not openly hostile to transgender people, seem based on misunderstandings andmisplaced fears which have resulted in some otherwise radical or progressive people ending up in what seems to mepolitical muddles.
First though, a word of caution on how these debates should be conducted. In my view supporters of the proposals should not automatically label people’s concerns as transphobic and thus alienate them and unnecessarily polarise the debate.
Nor is it helpful that accusations and counter-accusations of transphobia, misogyny and the alleged erasure of either women or trans peoplehave been thrown around.Some have suggested that one oppressed group seems prepared to throw the rights of another under a bus in pursuit of their own rights. But women’s and trans rights are not in competition or on opposite sides of a set of scales where more rights for one means less rights for the other. Nor is there a limited ‘stock’ of rights which will be exhausted if one group gets more.
Some critics on the left have even suggestedthat some of us socialist supporters of the measures being proposed are in danger of ditching a Marxist analysis of oppression and capitulating to idealism and/or Identity Theory (for example in recognising the reality of gender identity). Unsurprisingly I think this is a serious misreading of the political reality.
I stronglybelieve that socialists should support the proposed changesannounced in July by Justine Greening,the Tory education secretary and minister for women and equalities. Neverthelesswe shouldat the same time defendthe right of those on the left who express concerns to engage in honest debate. Socialists should not support, for example, the one or two recent misguided attempts to discipline those in the trade union movement who have voiced criticisms of the proposals.
Nor is it helpful, in my view, to refer to critics of the proposals, or trans-critical peoplein general, as ‘TERFs’ (trans exclusionary radical feminists). It is not very conducive to comradely debate. While it’s a commonly used epithetin transgender milieusit doesn’t get us very far, not least because some who may be critical of the proposed changes are not necessarily trans-exclusionary or hostile to trans people in the same way as are people like Germaine Greer, for example.
Similarly, ‘no-platforming’ trans-critics (this has been attempted against Germaine Greer)isalso inappropriate in my view. The tactic of no-platforming has its place on the left. There are certainly people who should be subject to no-platform demands, such as fascists who would like to use their platforms and their violence to atomise and terrorise their opponents and destroy democracy.
‘No platform’ would be a very legitimate tactic to implement in the US today, for instance, in the wake of the fascist violencein Charlottesville, against supporters of the various white-supremacist and Nazi groups that terrorised the town. But to urge the use of this tactic even againstpeople openly hostile to trans rights like Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Julie Burchill or Sheila Jeffries is inappropriate and counter-productive and simply looks undemocratic and overly defensive. Such people should be (firmly!) debated in public forums.
We need to remember that the real enemies of trans people are not radical feminists but the ruling class in capitalist society, the enemy of all oppressed groups.
So why are trans people calling for changes to the GRA?
The Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 under the second Blair Labour government. This was the same government which revoked the infamous Tory homophobic Section 28. In 2005 the Civil Partnership Act was passed, followed in 2010 by the Equality Act which granted parity of protected category status with other protected categories (like disability)on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender reassignment This was followed in 2013 under the Cameron Tory/Lib Dem coalition government by the Same-Sex Marriage Act. Similar progressive legislation has been passed in a number of other jurisdictions in the last decade or so.
Thus despite the impact of neo-liberal economic deregulation, rampant privatisation, rising inequality, wars and austerity, burgeoning racism and islamophobia, scapegoating of disabled people and assaults on organised labour and working class living standards, an element of social liberalism within neo-liberalism has permitted, under pressure from LGBT+ campaigners, some significant pink-washing by centre-left and centre-right governments (at minimal political and economic cost) by ruling classes in the more advanced economies.
When the GRA was drafted fifteen years ago it was certainly progressive, both in terms of being the first UK legislation to provide some legal protections specifically for transgender people (such as non-disclosure), but also because it did not require a trans person to have had genital surgery in order to be eligible for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).
However, much has changed in recent years. Not only has much of the terminology changed but the numbers of trans people coming out has increased dramatically, partly down to the passage of the GRA no doubt.
Trans people have become much more visible and are self-defining in new ways, including non-binary ways.The passage of time since 2004 has meant that there are other outdated provisions in the Act, not least that it does not apply to those under 18 and it requires psychiatric intervention to ‘prove’ a person’s eligibility for a GRC.
I can give a simple example of the shortcomings of the Actfrom my own experience. Around a decade ago Iapplied for and obtained an interim GRCsince Imet all the rather onerous, medicalisedand not inexpensive criteria.I then fell foul of the requirement under the Act that a married trans person had to annul their marriage in order to obtain the full certificate (in order that the Act would not endorse single sex marriage by the back door).
My partner (wife) and I baulked at the injustice of this and the insecurity it generated and so we didnot proceed to the full certificate. That also meant that like quite a few transwomen I could notthen qualify for a state pension at 60, despite living in female role, having changed all my documents and records, etc.
It is true that this particular restriction in respect of marriage annulment altered with the passage of same sex marriage legislation but there is still a provision in the GRA for ‘spousal veto’ for blocking a trans person’s application for a GRC - and this ought not to be the case.
Thus it ought not to be difficult for non-trans people to appreciate the levels of resentment generated by these and other anomalies, as well as recognise the transphobia many trans people face in pretty much every sphere of our lives – education, employment, housing, access to health care, susceptibility to violence, discrimination, hate crime and so on.
Not everyone does recognise this, however, and consequently the discussion around the proposed changes and their possible implications has generated much heat and not a little acrimony. This has emanated not onlyfrom sources we might expect to be hostile to transgender rights – the right-wing media and commentators, some religious groups, trans-critical radical feminist blogs and websites, for example – but also from some socialist feminists and some on the left in the trade union movement, and even a few trans people themselves.
On this last point we should note that there is no single ‘transgender movement’, or a united ‘transgender view’. Trans people hold a huge varietyof aims, aspirations and political standpoints. Thus the journalist and newsreader India Willoughby weighed in some weeks ago on the ‘bathroom use’ issue to argue that feminist critics of transwomen’s use of gender specific toilets were right and that, in particular, some transwomen were making life more difficult for ‘genuine’ transsexuals like her by insisting that they are ‘real women’ and have the right to use women’s single-sex facilities.
Such examples of what some might call ‘passing privilege’ but I would describe as ‘pulling the ladder up after you’ might be disappointing but they are hardly new. A few decades ago it was common (using the terminology of a previous generation of trans people) to find manytranssexuals who saw themselves as quite distinct from cross dressers or‘transvestites’, and both these groups often saw themselves as quite distinct from gays and lesbians. (Or bisexuals, who nobody really talked about or bothered with until fairly recently.)
Socialists must start from recognising the material reality of both trans and women’s oppression.The question that followsfrom this is how to fight and overcome these oppressions. The answer to that requires socialist analysis to uncoverthe roots of oppression,roots which are to be found deepin the class nature of society and the role of the nuclear family.
But analysis is only a start, and the current debate will be sterile if it is merely an abstract one.The point, after all, to paraphrase Marx slightly, is not just to interpret the world but to change it.Unfortunately as good deal of the opinion being expressed seems to me to be abstract and speculative.
Any serious socialist analysis should lead to concrete political measures to address women’s and transgender people’soppression and work towards the achievement of solidarity between their struggles. The fight for reforms and against particular aspects of oppression necessitates the formulation of meaningfulconcrete demands, collective organisation, solidarity and struggle. The current debates need to be seen in this light.
Oppression, for Marxists, is not an unfortunate and eradicable failure or blemish of particular capitalist societies or a matter that can be addressed by better education – it is endemic to and necessary for capitalism economically and ideologically in order to make the extraction and accumulation of profit from our labour feasible.
We should note also that as the 21st century has progressed, for millions of women their oppression has grown worse since the economic crisis of 2008 and the neo-liberal assault on working class pay and conditions has intensified. Across the world millions of girls are denied education and may be subject to FGM and a life of child-bearing and domestic servitude. Poverty forces millions of women into dehumanising prostitution and the sex trade and even sex slavery,and women workers in general face lack of equal payand status with men.
Oppression has also grown worse in many countries for trans people.They are one of the groups often scapegoated for the impact of austerity and globalisation. Transwomen are a high risk group for HIV infection. Trans people generally are economically and socially marginalised, often rejected by family, at risk of physical and sexual abuse with few opportunities for regular employment and housing.
Revolutionary socialists argue that ultimately the only way to overcome this alienation, exploitation and oppression and achieveliberationisthrough a revolutionary Marxist strategy of changing our world by mobilising the working class to overthrow thecapitalist relations of production which generate particular oppressions.
This big picture of the necessity for revolutionary transformation, in dialectical relationship with the pursuit of particular reformist demands, is not only essential but achievable.
The background to the current debate
Some UK radical feminists (Germaine Greer, Julie Burchill and Julie Bindel, for example) have been promoting a transphobic, radical feminist narrative for a long time. Burchill and Bindel haveat times used their platforms in the nationalpress to make grossly transphobic comments leading to widespread criticism and (successful) mobilisations bytrans people and their supporters against them. They stand in the same transphobic tradition that Janice Raymond set out in her 1979 book The Transexual Empire: The making of the She-male.
Recently Dame Jenni Murray of BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour got into hot water for claiming that transwomen are not ‘real’ women and can’t be real feminists because they have not experienced socialisation as girls and women.
Likewise the feminist writer ChimamandaAdichie caused considerable disappointment to many of her admirers by making similar comments about transwomen not having shared the same life experiences as natal women, although she simultaneously claimed to be trans supportive.
They two arenot alone in their views. A number of websites (such as Transgender Trend) and blogs have been attacking what they call the ‘transgender lobby’ for years. When Justine Greeningeventually announced the Tory plans to streamline the GRC application process(welcomed by both Jeremy Corbyn,and, as it happens, Teresa May)some in the labour movement and the Press were also quick to voice concerns.
The government has long had a stated commitment to review transgender rights, partly to examine the operation of the 2004 GRA which had been in place for some years by the time the Tory/Lib Dem coalition came in after the 2010 election, and partly because of a recognition of the pace of change in many matters transgender.
Greening announced a consultation on the GRA to be published in autumn 2017. This will also consider whether a person whose gender is ‘non-binary’ — neither exclusively male nor female — should be able to define themselves as ‘X’ on their birth certificate.
In Whitehall-speak the announcement of this consultation suggests at least the possibility of changes in the medium term, subject to parliamentary approval.
What is actually being proposed?
On the face of it the proposals are hardly earth-shattering. As well as suggested changes to legislation there are calls to changeand make more trans supportive current practices, staff training and guidance circulating in various public bodies such as the NHS. This is in response to trans people’s concerns and wide experience of inadequate and often transphobic NHS staff and facilities.
The background to the proposals was a review of transgender rights by the Women and Equalities Parliamentary Committee, a cross-party select committee chaired by the Conservative MP Maria Miller. It took evidence from a range of individuals, trans groups (such as the Scottish Transgender Alliance, Gendered Intelligence and GIRES – the Gender Identity Research and Education Society) and various women’s and feminist organisations, as well as Ministers, public sector representatives and others. The committee published its report in January 2016.
It’s worth quoting from the Report’s findings. It opened by stating:
“High levels of transphobia are experienced by individuals on a daily basis (including in the provision of public services)—with serious results. About half of young trans people and a third of trans adults attempt suicide. The recent deaths in custody of two trans women, and the case of a trans woman who was placed in a men’s prison, are particularly stark illustrations of the issues.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 was pioneering but is now dated. Its medicalised approach pathologisestrans identities and runs contrary to the dignity and personal autonomy of applicants. The Government must update the Act, in line with the principle of gender self-declaration.”