Introduction

At the Freethinker, one of our aims has always been to foster a culture of free speech and open debate. It was from this perspective that, as editor in 2022, I first became interested in the debate over the possible meanings of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and the consequences for women, men and transgender people. There was a concern that voices critical of the claims of transgender activism were being suppressed or demonised across much of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, both in Britain, America, and elsewhere. There was also a concern that transgender activists and their supporters might be putting pressure on public and private institutions to adopt their views unquestioningly.

For these reasons, the Freethinker has so far published four articles exploring objections to the claims of transgender activism: an opinion piece by the gender studies researcher Eliza Mondegreen; two interviews, one with the journalist and campaigner Helen Joyce, and the other with the philosopher Alex Byrne; and a report by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid on the spread of the ideology to South Asia.

It has been difficult to find any defender of at least some of the claims of transgenderism who would be willing to talk to us. We are therefore delighted to publish the below interview with Louise Antony, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (‘UMass’), who describes herself as a ‘socialist intersectionalist feminist’. Over a long and distinguished career, she has published widely on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminist philosophy and atheism. In October last year, she debated Alex Byrne at the Houston Institute on The Ontology of Gender.

I spoke to Professor Antony across the Atlantic via Zoom. Our conversation lasted three hours. Below is a condensed transcript of the interview, which she has read and amended to ensure that it accurately reflects her views.

Readers will observe that, in the gender debate, everything is open to question: language, science, subjective experience, objective fact, culture, nature, relations between the sexes, and what it means to be human. Hardly surprising, then, if this dialogue ends in a state of aporia or bafflement.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

The Freethinker: Which areas of philosophy have you been interested in over the course of your career, and how did you come to the gender debate?

Louise Antony: I started graduate school interested in the philosophy of language. When I went there, I discovered cognitive science. I was at Harvard. MIT is just down the road, and people there, like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and Ned Block, were diving into the idea that there could be a science of the mind, which was a view that had been in disrepute before the ‘60s. Behaviourism, which I did not find interesting, had, up till then, ruled the day. One of my teachers at Harvard, Willard van Orman Quine, said that we should study knowledge naturalistically: we should ask how we actually have knowledge. (This seemed to me exactly what cognitive science was doing, but ironically Quine never embraced it.) Quine’s philosophical outlook was called ‘naturalism’: it was the idea that philosophical questions are continuous with questions in science. That outlook coloured everything that I became interested in, including language, philosophy of mind, and the relationship between the science of psychology and the other sciences, in particular biology. Throughout my work, I have always wanted the philosophical claims we make to be consistent with and informed by the relevant science.

In the 1990s, I edited a volume of essays with my friend Charlote Witt called A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. That was my entry into feminist philosophy. I also became interested, somewhat serendipitously, in writing about atheism and religion. I edited a book called Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, where I invited philosophers who self-described as atheists to talk about their relationship to religion.

Freethinker: As a woman, have you found that academic philosophy is a tough environment? And if so, has that changed at all over the years?

Louise Antony: From an early age, I was aware that I did things that girls were not supposed to do. One of the things that I got in trouble for was arguing with people. When I first started taking philosophy at Syracuse University, I had no idea what it was. But when I got into the classroom and found it was just arguing about things, I thought, yes. I found myself naturally fitting into the ethos of asking questions, making objections. I loved the norm that when you asked somebody a question or made an objection, they were supposed to say something relevant back to you. Philosophy felt like home to me. That is not every woman’s experience, but it was mine.

That’s not to say it was easy to be a woman in the academy – there was a lot of prejudice against women, and a lot of inappropriate treatment.  There were not many of us – that has changed a little.

Freethinker: How would you define your philosophical conception of feminism as you have developed it over the years?

Louise Antony: Feminists disagree about many fundamental things. What we all have in common, I think, is commitment to the full personhood of women and its social recognition and material support. Where we differ is over the things like the nature of the obstacles that need to be overcome, and what other changes are necessary, such as in the law. That kind of reform is as far as some feminists want to go. I and my socialist feminist friends want to go much further.

Freethinker: So you would describe yourself as a socialist feminist?

Antony: I am a socialist and intersectionalist feminist. The idea is that there are different parameters or vectors of oppression, and your social location is a matter of what point you are at in a multidimensional grid. Parameters include race, disability, economic status, relationship to geopolitics, and being a woman. The thing that women have in common is their occupation of a social role that fundamentallyinvolves the idea that women are for other people: for men, for children, for the elderly and sick, anyone who is in need of care.

Freethinker: What, in your view, is ‘sex’, what is ‘gender’, and how do they relate to each other?

Antony: I am a realist about biological sex. I think it is a robust dimorphism in the human species. There are intersex conditions, where an individual has some of the characteristics typical of one biological sex, but not all of them. The estimates of the occurrence of these conditions seem to range from about one and a half to three per cent. So I do not think the existence of intersex conditions means that we do not have a robust biological phenomenon here. This puts me at odds with many other feminists. However, I do not think that biological sex determines gender, which is a social construction.

In a paper I published in 2020, ‘Feminism Without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender’, I drew an analogy between gender and parenthood. I use the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to genders and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to refer to sexes. That is just an orthographic rhetorical convenience – the terms are highly contested, and indeed, in ordinary language, they are ambiguous.

I think the existence of the biological dimorphism explains why there are systems of gender – what I call ‘gender regimes’. By that, I mean social roles that are constructed and elaborated differently at different times and places in human history, but that all have the function of trying to discipline people into particular social roles on the basis of actual or presumed biological differences. The analogy with parents is that I call contributing biological material to the development of a child being a ‘progenitor’, a matter of biology, just as being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is a matter of biology. But not all progenitors are parents, and similarly not all male or female people are men or women.

When people ask if biological sex explains gender, my answer is that in a sense, it does, because the fact that we socially divide human beings into men and women, boys and girls is due ultimately to the biological dimorphism. But there is not a deterministic relationship between being biologically male or female and being a man or a woman. There is a lot of social elaboration that is necessary.

Freethinker: Don’t the central cases, whether in being a man or woman, or in being a parent, all have a biological foundation? On this view, the central case of being a parent is a biological parent; the central case of being a man or woman is biological.

Antony: I do not know. Statistically, there are probably more biological parents who are parents in virtue of biological connection to the child than there are other kinds of parents. But in contemporary society, in the United States, for example, there are a lot of adoptive parents, there are a lot of step-parents whom we do not think of as marginal cases of parents. The central cases of parents are individuals who accept and carry out responsibility for the physical well-being of the child, have a secure emotional connection to the child, foster the child’s psychological, intellectual, maybe spiritual development, and so forth. People who fit pretty squarely inside our conception of what it is to be a parent do not need to be biologically connected to the child.

 No one thinks of anonymous sperm donors as fathers. There are cases of a so-called ‘surrogate’ mother that are very difficult. There are cases where she has contributed the egg. There are cases where she is carrying an embryo developed from an egg contributed by some other woman. Is she a mother or not? There have been court cases of so-called surrogate mothers wanting to keep the child. I think that being a parent is not so much about whether you meet the biological condition, but about how much of the total conception of parenthood you fulfil.

In the case of gender, statistically, overwhelmingly, the individuals who are socially women are going to be biologically female. And similarly, the individuals who are socially men are going to be biologically male. I do not know how significant that fact is.

Freethinker: On both these questions – the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the definition of ‘parent’ – is there not an objection that you are putting the cart before the horse? In the case of parents, would it not be preferable to say that biological parents are, since ancient times, the natural kind, and foster parents, step-parents and so on are caregivers – substitute but not literal parents? This debate about progenitors versus parents, biological versus socially constructed men and women, is this only even possible nowadays because of where we are scientifically?

Antony: The donation of an egg to another woman who is going to carry a child is certainly a new thing. But adoption is an old institution. There are a lot of societies that institutionalise the bringing of a non-biological child into, say, a royal family. There has also been a widespread practice among women of getting pregnant by another man when their husband is impotent or sterile, without acknowledging this. So in a sense, sperm donation has been going on for a long time.

There is much that is very new to our species, technologically speaking, which is tremendously important in shaping our social life. But even if many of these questions only arise because of recent technological advances, what would follow from that about gender and sex?

Freethinker: One might think that what we mean by a man or woman, or a parent, is very old. Do innovations in science mean that we need to fundamentally revise central concepts like these? Or instead, do the possibilities of sperm donation and surrogacy, or of using surgery and medicines to become more like the opposite sex, not change the meaning of our central concepts, but simply expand their range?

Antony: In philosophical terms, I think concepts are primitive in the sense of being the smallest unit of thought. On this view, a concept like ‘dog’ gets connected in thought to dogs in the world by some process. I have spent a lot of my career trying to figure out what this process is. It has something to do with the causal relations between dogs and a tokening of that primitive element of thought, dog. Words then get their meaning by being attached to these concepts.

Now, what is it that ‘man’, as a concept in my mind, gets connected to in the world? That relation is fixed independently of what I think or believe about men, or what I want men to be. It just means that when I think a thought in terms of ‘man’, it is going to have a certain set of truth conditions in the world. That does not have any bearing on who that term should or does apply to in a public language which we share.

Whatever my concept of man is, when I talk with you, a kind of negotiation can go on between us about what we want that term to pick out. And this negotiation can be very explicit, as it is when we make laws like which people are going to be allowed into a bathroom when the sign says ‘men’.

What you are calling a concept, I would call a conception: a body of ideas, beliefs, emotional stuff – a big mess. There are some beliefs that are central to that conception, and there are some that are peripheral and that get changed all the time. Every time you change your mind about something, you are changing the conception associated with the component concepts.

Take the concept of flying. For the vast majority of our history on the planet, human beings could not fly. Can we fly now? We can get in airplanes and travel through the air. Is that ‘flying’? Does it matter? It does if you are writing legislation on flight safety. There has to be a legal use for the term ‘flight’ or ‘flying’ that covers that.

The whole debate over the concept of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is misspent philosophical energy. What we should be figuring out is, do we want people to be able to use bathrooms that align with their sense of who they are? Do we want individuals who have gone through male puberty to play at an elite level in women’s sports? These are the questions that people really have about transgendered individuals.

Freethinker: That sounds like a practical answer. In the UK, there is an organisation called Sex Matters. According to their website, their aim is ‘to promote clarity about sex in law, policy and language in order to protect everybody’s rights.’ In other words, as far as I understand it, their position is that there are some areas of life where, regardless of what ‘gender’ may be, it is sex that matters – for instance as to whether biological males should be allowed in women’s prisons.

Antony: What do you mean by a ‘biological male’? I do not mean to say that ‘you can’t define “male” so we don’t have to talk about it’. But it is important to recognise that many trans individuals have altered their biology in important ways. If you have got an individual who has XY chromosomes, has had their penis removed and fashioned into a vagina – ‘fashioned’ is a bad word, I’m sorry, reconstructed as a vagina with a clitoris – has had their testes removed so they are no longer producing the same level of endogenous testosterone that they had been, is taking hormones, has developed visible breasts… Is this a man?

Freethinker: Certainly there are extreme cases of people who try to alter their physical condition.

Antony: They do not just try, they are successful.

Freethinker: Would you say that a man who had undergone these changes had in fact become a biological female?

Antony: I think that biological categories are fuzzy in general.

Freethinker: You did say that sex is real.

Antony: Sex is real. In nature, you can sometimes give definitions and characterisations of categories. But in biology, the category of ‘species’ does not have clean boundaries. Does that mean that there is a big issue about what is and is not a dog? In fact, there is a division of expert opinion about whether wolves and dogs are members of the same species or members of different species. Because when you have creatures that are at the boundaries of fuzzy categories like ‘species’, the criteria will not classify them clearly one way or the other.

Trans individuals, especially if they have undergone medical or surgical alterations, are at the boundary of the male-female categorisation system, just as intersex individuals are. For example, the runner Caster Semenya has never thought of herself as anything other than a woman, but in fact, she is an XY individual with very, very severe androgen insensitivity. Is Semenya a male or a female?

Freethinker: These are questions of biological categories. Semenya may well be right at the boundary. But are we talking about sex or about gender? You have mentioned people who go through some sort of biological change or have a specific biological condition. Should we make a distinction between asking, (a), whether a man who has had his penis cut off and so forth should be allowed in a women’s prison, and (b), whether a man who identifies as a woman but has not undergone any medical treatment should be so allowed? In all these areas – prisons, sports, et cetera – is it a matter of biological sex or is it a matter of gender self-identification?

Antony: It might vary from question to question. It depends on the particularities of the biological differences. On the question of whether trans individuals should be allowed to compete in sports categories according to their identity, the empirical evidence seems to vary between studies. Some say they should, others say it is dangerous for biological males to compete with biological females. But there are lots of things to take into account when we look at the particular case of trans individuals in sports.

Freethinker: Is there not a biological asymmetry here: unlike trans women in women’s sports, surely no one ever worries about trans men competing in men’s sports, because it is clear that they will never win?

Antony: It is not true that trans men never win. They do sometimes. Trans women do not always win in their categories – although they often do. Caster Semenya does not win every time she runs, but she wins a lot of the time. Just looking at her, you can see that she has more well-defined muscles than biologically paradigmatic women generally have.

One of the things that needs to be asked when addressing the sports question is safety. I do not take seriously the idea that having trans women or cis men competing in a different category from cis women arises from concerns about the latter’s safety. If people were concerned about the well-being of athletes, American football would not exist.

Sports categorisations are supposed to put people who are physically alike into the same category, so that the only determinant of the winner is talent and effort. But what happens in elite sports is that they select for freaks. If you are a man above seven feet tall in the United States, your chances are apparently one in seven of becoming an NBA basketball player.

Freethinker: Certainly some men are stronger than others, some women are stronger than others. But is it not the case that in general, men are just, as a matter of biological fact, stronger than women – by quite a considerable margin?

Antony: Who cares? What is the point of citing the average? My husband is exactly my height. He is below average height for males. I am probably a little stronger than the average woman of my age and height because I have a personal trainer who helps me to gain strength. The interesting questions are, what needs to be done, who can do it? If I need help getting something from a tall shelf in Whole Foods, I look for a tall person: I look along the parameter that is actually relevant to the task.

Freethinker: Wouldn’t a logical consequence of this position be that there is no point in having women’s sports at all, because women are almost never going to beat men? Why not just throw open women’s sports to all men?

Antony: Take boxing, where there are weight categories. The point of categorisation is to try to equalise for fixed physical conditions, so that winning reflects inherent talent and effort. In women’s sports and men’s sports, it is not just that men are bigger or stronger, it is that their physical talents are distributed in different ways. In basketball, upper body strength is an important feature. Even very tall women are not going to be able to compete at the most elite levels, are probably not going to shoot as well, or as far as the men at top levels. Sports categories are proxy indicators because you cannot really get into the precise physiological details.

In an ideal world, there might be exceptional tall women who would compete in an NBA height-based category alongside shorter men. The system that we have now excludes a lot of men from elite competition, when they could win if they played against women. The whole system of elite sports is going to leave out most of both of the populations of men and women.  A different category system would be more inclusive in many ways.

Freethinker: In which categories, if any, do you think biological differences between men and women matter, and how far? There are so many areas we could talk about: not only prisons, but medical statistics, women’s charities and refuges, whether trans women make appropriate representatives for women, trans women who want to date lesbians, and so on. Are there any areas where biological differences ought to be the starting point?

Antony: I do not want to say in a blanket way that trans women should be excluded from any of these designated women’s spaces. I am open to the possibility that there might be specific reasons why trans women should be excluded, but not qua trans women. If there is a support group for people who have suffered miscarriages, that is not open to all women to begin with, only to those who have had miscarriages. A trans man who suffered a miscarriage should be allowed in that space.

We have to look at why the space is designated as a women’s space, what the specific nature of the gathering is such that designating it a women’s space is a good proxy for the specifically pertinent characteristic of the space.

The cases that I struggle with are those where the space is a women’s space because of the presumption that women have been exposed to certain kinds of socialisation and social pressures. Women in academia suffer – from people not recognising them when they raise their hands at meetings, for instance. This is low-grade suffering, but not getting credit for contributions, having one’s published work neglected and so forth, can have a large impact on one’s career. Women like to get together and discuss what they can do about it.

From what I have read of the experiences of trans women in philosophy, they discover that they are not getting called on as much as they used to before they transitioned. And so they are beginning to understand in a different way what it is to be a woman in the field. But I think there might be spaces where trans women should be quiet and allow the experiences of women who have grown as women, have gone into the profession and been socialised as women, to take centre stage.

Freethinker: It is interesting that you might see the case for giving women more space in issues where they have suffered from discriminatory social, rather than biological, pressures. But returning to biology, as a woman, would you not agree that when you have a child, it completely changes you (speaking as someone who has also been through it) – and in a way that only someone who is biologically female can be changed? There are scientific studies on the way the brain changes during pregnancy.

Antony: The study that you refer to was very small – which is one of the many problems with brain imaging studies. I do think that pregnancy was a singular, extraordinary experience for me, but it is different for different people.  All experiences ‘change our brains’.

Freethinker: Would you agree that it is an experience that a man cannot have?

Antony: I have several female women friends who have not been able to become pregnant for one reason or another. Yes, pregnancy is a singular experience, and some people who cannot have that experience are very sad about that.  But why do we have to pick it out by proxy and say it is a woman’s experience? When you have a child, you stop being the main character in the story of your life. That is a profound change – whether you adopted the child or had the child biologically. But I am the same person I was before my pregnancies. My personality is the same. I have learned things from having children, but we learn things from a lot of the experiences that we have. I find it romantic and unnuanced to say in a blanket way that the biological fact of having  a child changes you in some uniform way.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that there are clear, obvious biological changes to your body once you have a child? The shape of your pelvis changes, your hair falls out, and so on. And I am not a scientist, but perhaps women in general also bond with their own child in a special, biologically grounded way, as mothers.

Antony: The literature on the biology of childbirth and motherhood is partisan. People have axes to grind. But women successfully raise children under all sorts of adverse circumstances, and women fuck up their children under all sorts of propitious circumstances. This single biological parameter does not provide much information about the quality of your connection to your child, or the nature of the way you relate to them.

Freethinker: Nevertheless, would you accept that bearing a child does make a difference to a woman, and is one experience that a woman can have and a man cannot?

Antony: It is true. I would like to have a penis, because I think there are some experiences that men can have that I would be interested in having. So what? Of course pregnancy and childbirth change you, but there is very little you can say in a general, uniform way about this change, except for the things that have to do with the social implications of being a parent – which are eminently changeable, and that affect adoptive and step-parents as well.

Freethinker: You might also say, as some feminists have been saying for a long time, that being a woman should in general not matter. Biological considerations aside, women should be able to do everything that men can do. Why not?

Antony: I do not want to frame my aspirations for women in terms of something relative to men. I want people to be able to flourish – that is the goal of feminism.

As a socialist feminist, I think there are things that we can do socially that we cannot do individually, or not do as well. Many of the things women have traditionally done – caring for children, educating children, caring for the sick and the elderly – these are responsibilities that ought to be borne socially. Social support for these things will help more children flourish, and will enable women to flourish in more ways.

Freethinker: What about other areas where biology might be said to be relevant to the way in which women and men are treated? For example, in prisons – where women might not want biological males to be there because they say they have flashbacks to a man who raped them. If, on the other hand, trans women are likely to be ill-treated in men’s prisons, why not have a third category of prisons, or prison facilities, for transgender people?

Antony: We’re going to build separate prisons for trans offenders? That is not going to happen. But it is not clear that we have to have what we think of as women’s prisons and men’s prisons. The particularities matter. You cannot just say there is a woman who is going to feel triggered if she sees a penis. That is not the end of the story – it is an element of what we have to consider.

Freethinker: Is it fair on biological women to allow trans women in women’s prisons?

Antony: This is going to sound like I am anti-woke, but I do think that talk of triggering has gotten out of hand. People can be triggered by stuff that is not systematic. If there was a spider in my prison cell, I would go nuts.

Freethinker: Do you think that biological women should ever have the right to a space which excludes biological men?

Antony: Not a fundamental right and not a right per se. Do you think people in general have a right to not be exposed to experiences that are triggering for them?

Freethinker: I would agree with you that there should be no blanket right, though I would have thought that there should be room for protection against triggering in cases, for example, of clear psychological trauma. But in the case of trans women in women’s prisons, might they not also pose the additional risk to women of actual physical harm?

Antony: I know of no evidence that cis women are more vulnerable to sexual violence, either in restrooms or in prisons, by the presence of a transgender woman. If you are a cis male rapist and you are after cis women, what better place to go than a women’s bathroom where there are likely not to be any other cis men? If it were a gender neutral bathroom, there would be a chance that there would be other cis men there to deter you from realising your intentions. A woman’s actual safety is not secured by having women-only bathrooms.  A cis-woman colleague of mine was assaulted in a ‘women’s room’ in our university building.

If you put a trans woman into a male prison, what is going to happen to her? She is going to be brutally assaulted and possibly killed, certainly raped, by some cis men in that prison. That is perfectly predictable. So why would you add to the already existing problem of rape and assault in male prisons by putting someone there who identifies as a woman?

Freethinker: But then, on the other hand, they might be a real threat to women if they went into a women’s prison. As in the case of Isla Bryson, who was convicted for raping two women as a man, and then transitioned during the trial; or the case of the violent offender, Tiffany Scott, who transitioned from man to woman during a life sentence and applied to be transferred to a women’s prison.

Antony: Did these individuals rape anyone once in prison?

Freethinker: No. In the event, Bryson was not in the women’s prison estate for very long, and Scott’s transfer was blocked. Scott had been previously been convicted of violent offences while in a men’s prison. Both Isla Bryson and Tiffany Scott also retain male genitalia. In any case, is the problem not that someone’s rights are at risk either way round?

Antony: I do not accept the assumption that a trans woman is more likely to commit a violent assault than a cis woman. Cis women commit battery and rape, too.

Freethinker: Although it seems well established that biological women in general commit a much small percentage of violent crimes than biological men. In any case, with a pre-operative trans woman, who still had male genitalia, would you accept that such a person would, in general, present a greater risk in a women’s prison than another woman?

Antony: Suppose I grant that such a person would be physically capable of raping a woman: still, how do we know when a person is sincerely claiming a gender identity that does not accord with their current physical properties? I would like to see some evidence that cis men dishonestly claiming identity as a woman is a serious concern. There is, in at least some people’s minds, an exaggerated likelihood that a biological male is going to the trouble of really pretending to be someone who identifies as a woman for the sake of winning some athletic competition or serving their time in a women’s prison. If you have someone who has been living as a woman and enduring the difficulty and opprobrium that that still brings with it in our societies, and they are doing it for a significant amount of time, that is good evidence that they sincerely have a different gender identity.

Trans women are people. To put a person into an environment where they are likely to suffer severe degrees of physical abuse is a serious harm. There is no conservative, harm-free alternative here. For a person who has the gender identity of a woman but the biological characteristics of a male, the question is whether the possibility that that person is going to cause severe psychic or physical distress to some women incarcerated in the same place, high enough to justify putting that person into a male prison – an environment where there is a high probability that they are going to suffer severe physical harm.

Freethinker: So is it a matter of weighing the risk to the trans person versus the risk to the women?

Antony: You say ‘risk to the women’. We need to consider all persons. I am not a utilitarian, but I do think it matters what the consequences of our actions are, morally speaking. And when you look at the consequences, you have got to look at not just the possibilities, but the probabilities. I would bet that most women prisoners are far more concerned about being raped by the guards than by a transgender woman. (See this article.)

Freethinker: Another problem with failing to distinguish between trans women and women on biological grounds arguably comes in scientific research and the compilation of medical data. Would it not be problematic if a trans woman was labelled female on the medical record, and then their data was used to contribute to a picture of how diseases affect women’s bodies? Would doing so not risk skewing the data – if you accept that women’s bodies are biologically different from men’s and have, to some extent, different susceptibilities to different diseases?

Antony: Maybe medical science should ask more directly about the conditions that they are concerned about. If you are an XX individual, there are certain regularities that are captured when we taxonomise in terms of men and women, whether those medical regularities are the result of innate biological differences or the differences that result from being socialised as men or women. Take, for instance, the appalling difference in the rate of maternal mortality between black and white women in the US. Is that the result of some biological similarity among black women versus white women, or is it the result of the social conditions under which black and white women typically give birth?

There are a lot of people who are uncontroversially women or uncontroversially men who are biologically atypical – and their data goes into the samples. That is why we have statistics to find central tendencies and to try to tease out causally relevant factors.

Freethinker: But men, for instance, can get prostate cancer. Women can’t.

Antony: That’s right.

Freethinker: Women can get endometriosis. Men cannot get endometriosis because they do not have a womb.

Antony: In this case, people without wombs cannot get endometriosis – including women who do not have wombs.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that people with XX chromosomes, which are found in every cell of the body, have different genetic susceptibilities to certain diseases and conditions from those with XY chromosomes? Women are more susceptible to breast cancer than men, for example.

Antony: Maybe so. But there is a much higher mortality rate for men who have breast cancer than women, partly because it is standardly believed that men cannot get breast cancer. It is clear that the parameter for effective medical intervention is being susceptible to breast cancer.

Freethinker: But how would we even know that biological men could get breast cancer in the first place, or that they had a higher mortality rate, if patients were simply able to designate themselves ‘male’ or ‘female’ on medical forms regardless of their biological sex? Wouldn’t the statistics get muddled?

Antony: Hang on. If somebody comes to the hospital with a lump that may be a sign of cancer, the diagnostic procedures are the same. Classifying them as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ does not add any information to the clinical situation.

Freethinker: But would it not add information for the future, for people down the line who wanted to know what percentage of biological males and females get breast cancer, whether one sex was more susceptible than the other?

Antony: Look, there are generalisations. It makes sense to put information about menstruation in places where girls are going to see it, despite the fact that some of those girls are going to be amenorrhoeic. There might be some androgen insensitive XY individuals among the girls. There may be some atypical XX individuals who are in the boys’ room. It is very difficult to craft generalisations in precise terms.

Freethinker: In statistical science, the way you make patterns is by amassing data. The patterns help you to make diagnostic predictions, even if they are not always accurate for all patients, who may differ amongst themselves. But even to compose the general pattern, don’t you need to have some parameters – some truth basis, such as knowing whether it represents males or females or both?

Antony: I was with you up to ‘truth basis’. What I am challenging is the claim that, for medical purposes, the proxy classifications, man and woman, are preferable characterisations. Take information about endometriosis. Why shouldn’t the pamphlets in the doctor’s office say, ‘If you have a womb, read this pamphlet’?

Freethinker: How about, ‘If you are a biological female, read this pamphlet.’ Wouldn’t that be the same thing?

Antony: Why not just say, ‘If you have a womb’? That is the specific circumstance where you need to be concerned about endometriosis. Why is it better to say ‘biological female’?

Freethinker: Because biological females may not all have a womb, but they almost all do. Even if they do not, their body still has most of the same features as other females. Would you not agree that biological males and females involve two types of body with some broad differences and which to some extent behave in different ways?

Antony: I agree that there is a robust sexual dimorphism in the human species, but it does not follow from that that we cannot do better than using the proxy categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ for scientific purposes.

Freethinker: If you believe in sexual dimorphism, why not just use ‘male’ and ‘female’?

Antony: Because when we get down to specific conditions like endometriosis, we can do better even than male and female, because there are borderline cases and furthermore because there are trans cases. Those pamphlets on endometriosis might be picked up by a trans man with a womb.

Freethinker: Why not say ‘biological female’, then, since trans men are biological females?

Antony: Because the thing that I said is more informative and does not involve having to take a stand on this issue about the biological female.

Freethinker: Do you think that trans men are biological females or not?

Antony: I do not think they are biologically female. ‘Biologically female’ is a biological category that has fuzzy borders. Trans men are in the fuzzy border region.

Freethinker: What about trans men who are clearly biologically female – as presumably some of them are, especially, say, if they are pregnant and stop taking testosterone supplements and so forth?

Antony: I do not see the usefulness of the term ‘biologically female’. There are some lasting changes from having taken the masculinising hormones. What are we adding in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that a trans man who stops taking masculinising hormones in order to become pregnant is biologically female?

Freethinker: Isn’t it the truth?

Antony: I do not know if it is the truth, because you have not really told me what is required to be biologically male. My point is, what are we gaining either in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that we take those who are in the border and classifying them one way or the other? What is gained by saying, he is really a woman or she is really a man?

Freethinker: I was using the terms ‘biologically male’ or ‘biologically female’, rather than ‘man’ or ‘woman’, at this point.

Antony: But what you seem to be pressing on is a case where someone does not fit the full criteria for being biologically male or biologically female and insisting that I classify them on the basis of one of the determinants of being biologically male or biologically female.

Freethinker: You yourself have been talking about XX and XY individuals, rather than biological males and females. Is it not the case that an XX person cannot change all the chromosomes in their body to become XY, or vice versa? So in the great majority of cases, except for those very rare instances on the border, is there not a fairly clear sense in which someone is immutably either XY or XX?

Antony: I agree there is this classification. It covers, as I am prepared to concede, 98.5 per cent of the human race. But why insist that we apply the classification to the ones who do not fit the complete profile? Why do we have to decide whether somebody is biologically male or female? Even if the vast majority of human beings can readily be so classified.  There are individuals who look morphologically like XX females who have an XY karyotype.

Freethinker: One final question. For you as a socialist intersectionalist feminist, what is fundamentally at the heart of this debate about sex and gender?

Antony: I am a gender eliminativist. I believe that gender is real, but I think it should not be. People should be allowed to flourish in all sorts of different ways, depending on their different aptitudes, proclivities, characteristics and so forth. It is a fundamental injustice to try to package people into these socially preformed categories of man and woman, boy and girl. The elimination of that kind of categorisation is very important to me. As a feminist, I think that anyone who is being gender transgressive is putting us on the right road. So I want to give absolute support to trans people.

The post On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Alex Byrne is not necessarily the sort of person whom you would have expected to become involved in the ‘culture wars’. After an initial career in advertising, he studied philosophy at Birkbeck, King’s College London and Princeton, and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Instructor in Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he is now a professor. Up till a few years ago, his research centred on abstract philosophical questions like the nature of ‘colour’.

Byrne became interested in the disputes over the meaning of sex and gender in about 2017, after learning about an early academic furore over the analogy or disanalogy between transgenderism and transracialism. He then had a ‘ringside seat’ in the trans debate, or gender debate as it is also known, when his wife, Carole Hooven, was ‘cancelled’ by certain people at Harvard University for publicly expressing her view that sex is biological and binary. His own book, Trouble with Gender, was under contract to Oxford University Press, but the latter withdrew from the contract last year. He discussed the possible reasons for this in an article for Quillette. Trouble with Gender will be published by Polity on 27 October 2023.

I interviewed Professor Byrne across the Atlantic via Zoom. In the edited transcript below, we explore the origins of his interest in the trans debate and his later experience of it, what the debate is actually about, his reasons for writing a book about it, and how a philosopher can contribute to the debate by making clear distinctions.

We also consider how the atmosphere in philosophy departments has changed in recent years, and whether philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction.

On debating the trans debate: polite notice

The Freethinker is committed to open, well-reasoned and civilised discussion, in particular on issues where dogma, authoritarianism or fear have led to the suppression or distortion of certain points of view. We are also opposed to extremism and fanaticism of any kind, considering such qualities incompatible with our guiding principles of liberty, reason and humanity. Further discussion here.

We have endeavoured to find contributors to oppose the views advocated in previous articles on the trans or gender debate, but our invitations have so far been met with silence or refusal. If there is anyone out there who has experience or expertise on this topic, and who thinks that the various arguments put forward by Alex Byrne, Helen Joyce and Eliza Mondegreen are fundamentally flawed, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch via this link.

As always, any opinions expressed below are the sole responsibility of those expressing them.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Alex Byrne: It was a rather convoluted route. I think that is true of many philosophers. I started off doing mathematics and physics and then I worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And while I was doing that, I went to Birkbeck College in the evenings to study for a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. I had always been interested in philosophy, but in Britain at the time, it was very hard to put a name to the sorts of issues that I was interested in. I did not realise that there was an actual subject that dealt with these problems and questions that fascinated me. One formative episode was when I saw Men of Ideas by Bryan Magee. I also read AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and found it completely enthralling. I believed for a while that logical positivism was the solution to all philosophical problems – I was soon disabused of that.

Looking back over your career in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, what are the contributions you have made to these fields of which you are the most proud?

That is a difficult question. You should really ask someone else about my contributions, such as they are. I have done a lot of work on perception, and in particular the perception of colour. Most of this has been with David Hilbert, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have written many papers together defending the view that colours are physical properties. In particular, they are just ways of altering the incident light. This is quite a controversial view in the philosophy of colour – a little subdiscipline of philosophy. One view that is perhaps more popular than our physicalist view goes back to the ancient Greeks, that nothing actually is coloured. Even though it seems or looks as if tomatoes are red and grass is green and the sky is blue, in fact, this is just some sort of global illusion and nothing is really coloured. Or at best, if something really is coloured, it is an item in the mind, a mental image or picture.

I think it was Democritus who said, ‘By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void…’

Yes. Democritus is the standard source for this eliminativist view. As that quotation brings out, it is not just colour that is supposed to be an illusion or only in the mind or a matter of convention. It is also other perceptible properties like heat, tastes, smells, sounds and so on.

How and why did you move from this rather abstruse subject to sex and gender?

I had always been interested in sex differences and the explanation of sex differences – why males and females of our species in particular differ in some trait. Also I had always been interested in issues of free speech and was temperamentally inclined towards an absolutist position about speech. And then, in 2017, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published a paper called ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, which appeared in the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia. There was a huge fuss about this paper, which essentially argued that the same courtesies and tolerant attitude granted to a transgender person like Caitlyn Jenner should be extended towards a transracial person like Rachel Dolezal.

The whole message of Tuvel’s paper was very progressive, and you might have thought that, within feminist philosophy, her paper would have been praised. But instead, the opposite happened: it was widely condemned as having the potential to cause great harm to various communities. An open letter appeared signed by many academics, including Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, calling for the paper’s retraction. It was not retracted in the end, fortunately, but it brought home to me very vividly that philosophy at that time had an extremely intolerant side, opposed to academic freedom, which I thoroughly disapproved of.

You mentioned Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Your book is called Trouble with Gender. Is that a deliberate allusion?

Yes. It is also an allusion to Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, the British science fiction writer.

You talk about the trouble that Tuvel’s paper caused in academic philosophy. When I was at Oxford in the 2000s, the Philosophy Faculty had a reputation for competitive, no-holds-barred debate. From what I have heard, that was true of many philosophy departments at the time. Is it still the case today? Is frank discussion still possible in university philosophy departments?

Yes, it certainly is, although I think that, over the years, that style of open combat and trying to tear the speaker down has changed. Back in the day, when an invited speaker came to deliver a talk at a colloquium, the attitude of some philosophers was, ‘We have to go into the talk with the aim of humiliating the speaker or destroying his or her ideas, and if we do that, then that is a satisfactory colloquium session.’ Sometimes philosophers went too far in that regard, and the result was that the discipline was less hospitable and welcoming to some people than it should have been.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: the emphasis is much more on constructive criticism and telling the speaker that his or her paper was excellent and incisive and a great contribution to the topic at hand. There is much more overt praising of speakers at the end of talks than there used to be. And as far as hot-button topics like sex and gender go, unfortunately it is not possible to have a freewheeling discussion without some people getting offended or hurt. As a result, we do not have no-holds-barred discussions about what women are or whether sex is binary.

This timidity came as something of a surprise to me. Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

In your experience, is that true on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes.

Apart from the trans or gender debate, are there any other issues that cause this amount of friction?

At the moment it is mainly sex and gender. Race is another topic with plenty of no-go zones, in philosophy and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the subdiscipline called the philosophy of race, it is perfectly acceptable to argue for a biological theory of race – that what it is to be black or east Asian or white is to have a certain kind of ancient ancestry, a pure matter of biology, in some broad sense. 

Why is it that this issue of what a person is, or rather, what a woman is, has become such a huge bone of contention among so many people?

That is a good question. I am not sure what the answer is. The question, what is a woman, was asked most famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). And feminist philosophers have been obsessed with the question ever since. But it has never before had the valence that it has now. I suspect that part of the explanation is that in the UK, for example, organisations like Stonewall started hanging their hat on the slogan that ‘trans women are women’. If they had said instead, ‘trans women are trans women’, or ‘trans women deserve to be treated as women’, there is no reason why the issue of what a woman is would have become so contentious. It is quite surreal the way the ‘what is a woman’ question is now used as a kind of ‘gotcha’ question to ask politicians.

In response to this question, for instance, Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, said in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix. Then in March this year, he said that, ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Finally, in July, he decided that a woman is an ‘adult female’. And as you point out in your book, ‘woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022. Is there a sort of fixation on this question? Why is it always about women?

Of course it is ‘what is a woman?’ – rather than ‘what is a man?’ Not because the ‘woman’ version of the question is harder to answer, but because issues of access to various spaces – sporting competitions, prisons, shelters and so on – are really only an issue for women; there is not a corresponding issue for men. Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate. In fact, I think most trans men would very wisely choose to be in the female estate rather than the male estate.

This is one of those rare examples, like the Beatles, where the direction of cultural export goes from the UK to the US. The ‘adult human female’ slogan started in the UK, in 2018, when the infamous billboard went up that quoted the then Google dictionary definition: ‘Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female’.

It was only some years later that this made its way over the Atlantic, when Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is very popular over here, made a documentary called What is a Woman? The answer that Walsh’s wife gives at the end of the documentary is that a woman is an ‘adult human female’. To get to that rather unexciting point, Walsh interviewed many experts – including, memorably, a gender studies professor – who were completely unable to answer the question coherently.

To sum up, what is really at the heart of the trans debate? What exactly is it about?

That is a good question. There are specific questions or specific issues that divide the so-called gender-critical side from the trans-activist side. One question is about the nature of women and men. What is it to be a woman or a man? Another question is about the nature of sex. Are there two sexes or more than two? Or is sex in some sense socially constructed? Is the notion of sex in good order anyway? Maybe it should be completely junked. And another question is about gender identity. Do we all have gender identities? And is a misaligned gender identity the explanation of why some people suffer distress at their sexed bodies?

There are all these specific issues which are hotly debated. And then, of course, there is the even more contentious issue of how to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria – whether to give some of them puberty blockers, for example.

But beyond listing these questions, it is not clear to me that there is some sort of overarching issue which is really what the whole trans debate is about. Everyone sensible in this debate thinks that trans people should be afforded the same dignity and rights as everyone else. They should not be discriminated against, they should receive proper health care, they should be treated with respect in day-to-day life just like their fellow citizens, and if some adults wish to transition, they should be able to.

Is the struggle for trans rights analogous to the historic struggle for gay rights?

No, it is not, because there is no particular right being demanded that trans people lack.

Are there points at which women’s rights and trans rights, whatever these are, will inevitably clash, or do you think there is a way of reconciling them?

I would not put it in terms of a clash of rights, but there certainly are points of conflict. The most obvious of these is in sports. If you are a trans woman and you live your life as a woman and are treated by most people as a woman, it is at least understandable that you would wish to join the women’s team or take part in women’s sporting competitions. On the other side, women have an interest in having female-only categories for many sports. So there is a clear conflict of interest there. Another clear conflict of interest is in the case of prisons.

Let’s talk about your book in a bit more detail. In the ‘acknowledgements’ section, you say your greatest debt is to your wife, Carole Hooven, who was a lecturer on human evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2021, she published T, which was a popular science book about testosterone. Last year, she wrote an article describing how she was accused of transphobia by certain members of Harvard for explaining on Fox News that sex is binary and biological. To what extent have your wife’s experiences influenced your own interest in the trans (or gender) debate and your views about it?

As a result of the episode you mention, Carole is no longer a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. She has a position as an associate in the psychology department, in Steven Pinker’s lab. When this whole affair snowballed, it became apparent that it was not feasible for her to continue teaching in her old department. So she left. Carole’s experiences influenced the book a great deal. In addition to witnessing the backlash against Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock and other philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, I got a ringside seat when it came to Carole’s own cancellation over sex and gender.

That experience made me more determined to write a book on the topic. It is not that I am a particularly courageous person, but it did seem to be extremely unchivalrous to stand by and do nothing when I knew that I had things to say. And many philosophers were promulgating various confusions and mistakes which, I thought, I was in a position to correct.

Where would you put yourself politically?

I am a boring centrist. I have no political affiliation to speak of. I have always voted Democrat in the US. Temperamentally, I think I would really like to be a conservative, but I have never found an intellectually satisfactory way of being one. Socially, I have liberal views of the sort held by most academics.

In your introduction to Trouble with Gender, you write that your book is not about the ‘vitriolic political issues’ associated with the trans debate. Nonetheless, it was refused publication by Oxford University Press, after previously having been accepted. Why do you think OUP refused to publish your book in the end?

This is speculation on my part, but it is worth looking at the immediate history, in particular the fuss over Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism, also published by Oxford University Press. Announcement of its publication produced two petitions of complaint. As I discussed in Quillette, one of these was signed by the OUP Guild (the union representing OUP staff in New York). The other was signed by ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press’. The letters protested against the publication of Lawford-Smith’s book and told OUP to change its procedures so this sort of thing would never happen again.

As for my book, it is not as if OUP should have been surprised by what I actually produced, because I wrote a proposal, eagerly accepted at first, which accurately described the final manuscript. OUP’s single formal complaint against the book, namely that it did not treat the subject in ‘a sufficiently serious or respectful way’, is ludicrous. At least, I hope that readers will find it ludicrous.

Do you think that OUP’s response to your book is a symptom of the way things are going in academia at the moment? Is there a cowardice and an unwillingness to deal with arguments that challenge a particularly entrenched view about things?

Yes, for sure. It is a worrying trend. It is the same phenomenon as the philosophers who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. To put it another way, when academic publishing is subjected to a genuine stress test, it completely fails, even though the advertising beforehand was that it would work perfectly. OUP publishes all sorts of controversial philosophy books, which defend views that other philosophers think are ridiculous, misguided, or completely wrong. Often, in the pages of OUP philosophy books, the author will criticise other philosophers in the most uncompromising terms. It also happens that OUP philosophy books are reviewed by other philosophers in an extremely critical way.

So you might think that OUP would gladly publish a book on a hot topic like sex and gender – maybe that book would get trashed by other philosophers, but this is just the way of academic publishing, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is not what happened.

Your book is designed for a popular rather than an academic audience. Did you intend it to stir up controversy or make inflammatory claims?

No. I knew that some of the claims would be controversial. For example, there is a chapter in which the view that women are adult human females is defended. There is a chapter on sex which defends the orthodox view of what sex is and tries to expose various confusions surrounding this topic. There is a chapter which argues that gender identity, at least as people popularly conceive of it, is a myth. All these are inflammatory claims, but I did not intend to provoke or stir up controversy. No doubt I will, though. The book has eight chapters, and each one will annoy some people.

What does your book contribute to the trans debate that has not been said before?

It is a very different book from, say, Helen Joyce’s Trans or Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. It deliberately does not take a stand on any social and political issues. It is not written from a feminist or gender critical perspective. It just brings the tools of philosophy to bear on the questions that everyone seems to be asking these days and tries to sort things out. The fact that it is not about social and political issues gives me more room to treat these topics in the detail that they deserve.

I would regard it as a success if readers discovered how you can actually argue about these issues. They do not even have to have to agree with what I say; they just have to see how evidence and argument can be brought to bear on questions like, ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘does everyone have a gender identity?’ Normally, in public discussions of these issues, people do not really argue, in the sense that one side presents evidence and reasons and then the other side counters or presents their own evidence and reasons. They start shouting at each other instead.

What can a philosopher specifically contribute to a debate about sex and gender? Should it not be left to the biologists and psychologists?

I hope that my book demonstrates exactly what a philosopher can bring to the table. Philosophers are good at making crucial distinctions, being relatively clear and precise, and being able to set out arguments in the appropriate way, so that you see why the conclusion follows from the premises. It is not possible to master all academic disciplines in one life, so we need contributions from different specialists. That includes the biologists and the psychologists, but sometimes their discussions of these topics are flawed because they lack a crucial tool from the philosophical toolkit. But it must be admitted that philosophers also have their blind spots and weaknesses.

You observe in your book that ‘a concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made by prohibiting or redefining certain words.’ How far would you argue that sex and gender should be distinguished, and why?

In one way sex and gender should not be distinguished at all, because one of the many senses of the word ‘gender’ is simply ‘sex’. That is, ‘gender’ is sometimes just a synonym for ‘sex’; in this sense, sex and gender are the same. Because ‘gender’ has many other meanings, and to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea only to use the word ‘gender’ to mean sex. That is my first point.

My second point is that there are all these other things which we definitely want to distinguish from sex. For example, we want to distinguish being male from being masculine. Everyone going back to the ancient Greeks has seen that there is a distinction here. You can be a feminine male or a masculine female, and one sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for masculinity and femininity. We need to distinguish being male from being masculine, but there is absolutely no reason to use the word ‘gender’ to mark that distinction.

Another distinction we would want to make is that between being female and being a woman. There are numerous females who are neither humans nor adults, so there are females who are not women. On anyone’s view, there is a distinction here. You should not identify being female with being a woman, even if you think that all women are female. Now another sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for the categories man, woman, boy, girl. But again, it is a terrible idea to use the word ‘gender’ to mark this distinction between being female and being a woman.

Another distinction is between being female and having a female gender identity. Assuming we can make sense of the notion of ‘gender identity’ in the first place, we need to distinguish between being female and having a female gender identity, because some males can have a female gender identity, for example. Yet another sense of ‘gender’ is ‘gender identity’. But yet again, it is a bad idea to use the single word ‘gender’ to mark the distinction: we already have the phrase ‘gender identity’ and we should use that instead.

It is sometimes argued that the claim that trans people cannot change gender is incompatible with a humane (or humanist) outlook. Or that to require trans people to live in the sex which they are ‘assigned’ at birth, rather than accepting that they can change, is contrary to their human rights. Therefore, it is argued, to be ‘gender critical’ is fundamentally a right-wing, if not extremist, position, and harsh and oppressive to trans people. What would you say in response to this line of argument?

I am not a gender critical feminist, but it is not part of their position that people should not transition. And if people do transition, it is not part of the gender critical position that they should be discriminated against or their human rights should be reduced or downgraded. If you think of transitioning as it was always thought of, as a palliative measure to deal with gender dysphoria, then assuming that this actually works, at least for some people, it is hard to see what objection there could be to it, because it is an effective medical procedure to deal with a troubling psychological condition. It is not that people transition just for the hell of it or to gain access to women’s spaces. They transition because life has become unbearable living as their natal gender or natal sex.

Like many people on the side of free speech in debates of this kind, you quote from George Orwell’s 1984 in your book. You choose the part where Syme, a worker on the Newspeak dictionary, says,

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

In your view, how far is the whole of the trans debate – or gender debate – really a battle about words?

In one way, it is not about words at all. Take the question of what a woman is. That question is not about the word ‘woman’, although of course I have asked it using the word ‘woman’. I am interested in people of a certain kind, women, not in any English words.

But in another way the trans debate is about words. Various trans activist projects concern language: if you can stop people from using various words or get them to use other words or phrases instead, then the various distinctions that the activists do not want to be made, become a lot harder to make. One example of this is the frequent replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘sex assigned at birth’. If you want to get people to stop talking about the fact that we come in male and female varieties, then one excellent way of doing it is to try and enforce a rule where you never say that someone is ‘female’, but instead that she was ‘assigned female at birth’. This has the effect of suggesting that people’s sex is a matter of some doubt or speculation – that maybe no one really knows what sex people are.

Similarly, for expressions like ‘cervix havers’ or ‘uterus havers’ – if you want to avoid the suggestion that any adult female person is a woman, then substituting ‘uterus haver’ for ‘woman’ is an effective way of doing that. Language is extremely important if you are an activist – for the reason that Orwell identified in that quotation.

Do you think that philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction?

They have a duty to defend established ways of making valuable distinctions. One very valuable distinction is between males and females. To the extent that people are trying to prevent others from making that distinction, philosophers, I suppose, should step in and say, ‘no, stop, that’s a bad idea’. But that is not to say that anyone will listen to us.

In your experience of academia in the US and elsewhere, how far would you say that free and open enquiry and debate are under threat in today’s environment? 

We are going through a bad patch – I do not think there is any doubt about that. But the pendulum will swing back sooner or later. There are already many signs of pushback; books seem to be coming out all the time explaining what went wrong and how we can correct things. I have a book that just came out called The Identity Trap by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk, all about the origins of so-called ‘wokeness’ – which is of course closely connected to this present cultural moment and the enthusiasm for cancelling speakers and shutting down certain kinds of speech.

So there is already some momentum in the other direction, and, if history is any guide, these things come in waves and recede eventually. But that does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing.

Do you hope that your book will help to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

I hope that in a very small way it will widen the Overton window and broaden boundaries of acceptable speech to some extent – whether people agree with the conclusions or not.

The post ‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Joyce started working as education correspondent at the Economist in 2005, rising through various positions to executive editor for its events business in March 2020. She is currently on a sabbatical to enable her to focus on her campaigning work. In summer 2021, she shot to greater fame, or notoriety, with the publication by OneWorld of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

A few weeks after I spoke to Joyce, she gave an interview at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, despite opposition from the college’s master and some other dons and students. The closing submissions in the Mermaids case, which was adjourned, took place on 7-8 November. When this article was published, judgment had not yet been handed down.

This interview forms part of our series on civil liberties. The Freethinker is committed to open, clear and well-reasoned discussion of difficult issues. Comments are open below.

For more on the trans debate, see the articles by Eliza Mondegreen and Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, and my interview with Alex Byrne.

~ Emma Park, Editor

What motivated you to write Trans?

In 2017, I was editing the International Section of the Economist. A commissioning editor asked me, why do kids keep coming home and saying such and such is ‘trans’? This was not something I was aware of. I tried commissioning someone, but that did not work out, so I wrote the article.

I have a background as a mathematician, and so a circular definition of something as fundamental to human law and life as what it is to be a man or a woman bothered me. To say that a woman is anyone who says they are a woman is a circular definition. It does not tell you what a woman is. And it actually does matter who is a woman and who is a man in quite a lot of situations.

In 2019, I went to an event in Manchester with some detransitioners and I realised that an appalling policy misstep had occurred – an actual full-blown medical scandal. I had not said those words to myself before. There were six young women, all of whom had identified as men. Some of them had taken quite extreme medical steps, including sterilisation – removal of their entire sex organs – before realising this was a mistake. These young women were lesbians and they misinterpreted their gender non-conformity as meaning they were meant to be men. [See this recent story by a Cambridge student – Ed.]

That was the night I decided I had to write the book, because it gave me a sort of moral clarity. I decided that if I lost my job for writing about the fact that they were sterilising gay kids, I would not regret it.

Do you have children yourself?

I have two boys, neither of whom are gender dysphoric. One is straight and one is gay.

What has the response been to Trans? Have you had a lot of negative coverage?

The response has been a thousand times better than I thought it would be. Nearly all the reviews have been fantastic. There is a separate response that views me as a hate figure. They are not mostly trans people, but those who have made a profession out of seeing fascism in the most unlikely places. They see many people as being the beginning of fascism – including me, apparently.

Is it men and women equally, would you say?

It is hard to answer that. By far the most aggressive and unpleasant are the men; but numerically, it is women who disagree more with me. There is no demographic group that buys into the claims of gender identity ideology in a majority, but the group that comes nearest to it is young women. Boys and older people are significantly more sceptical.

What do you mean by ‘gender identity ideology’?

The claim that what makes you a man or a woman is what you say you are and what you say you feel like, as opposed to your biology.

Why do you think young women are more likely to buy into gender identity ideology than other demographics?

Having been a young woman myself, I think that before you have kids, you can be unrealistic about the bedrock nature of female embodiment. You think that you will not be trapped by domesticity the same way that your fool of a mother was. And then you realise to your horror that actually she was not an idiot. Pregnancy is hard; you fall in love with your baby, they are helpless when they are little, and before you know it, you are on the ‘mummy’ track. You realise that the policies around supporting women to give birth, helping women back into work at the pace that they want to, letting women look after their children the way they want to, have not been fixed.

When you are 18, you think they have been fixed – and you do not necessarily want to be reminded about the fact that you are the weaker sex physically. It is not nice to have to face up to what an incredible change having a baby, giving birth and all of that makes to you. It is not nice to focus on the fact that we are the rapable sex.

The very women who claim that ‘there is a rape crisis on campus’ are the ones who object to the policies that protect women, like single sex spaces – because these policies are unpleasantly animal, that’s the best way I can put it. When you are a young woman, you want to pretend that you are an equal human being. That is a good pretence. But the fact is that you need to be careful; you need to have separate spaces; you need to do your sports separately or you will never win. I think young women can live in a fool’s paradise – I certainly did.

How far can biological sex and gender be distinguished?

Biological sex is an evolved characteristic of all higher animals and plants: everything except single-cell organisms and some fungi comes in two sexes. Some plants have two sexes on the same plant; worms are hermaphrodites; clownfish can change sex; with crocodiles, which sex the individual becomes depends on temperature. But in all cases, there are two reproductive strategies. Just two: one where you produce big immotile gametes, and one where you produce small motile gametes. And in all mammals, it is one or the other – there is no mammal that can change sex. [See Richard Dawkins, ‘Sex is pretty damn binary’, in Areo Magazine – Ed.]

That sounds technical, but it is as basic to human life as the fact that we breathe air, not water, and that we cannot fly. If you think about those two analogies, breathing air and not being able to fly, they shape the entire world around you.

The word ‘gender’ is so ambiguous that I try not to use it any more, but if it means anything other than ‘sex’, it is the equivalent of the built environment – the consequences of the fact that we come in two sexes. Some of those consequences are pretty hardwired, such as that it is women who will need to be supported during pregnancy, childbirth and the early childhood [of their babies].

We forget how unusually difficult pregnancy and maternity are for human animals. There is no other mammal that has it as hard as we do. Women are not able to look after themselves entirely when they have kids. That has consequences for the way that marriages and societies are organised. You cannot pretend women are men in society at large, because this is such an incredibly burdensome process.

I do not draw a very rigid distinction between sex and gender, because I think that a lot of things that are called gender are actually more linked to sex, and are not as mutable as we think they are. For example, women suffer from depression much more than men, and there seems to be a biological substrate to that. Sex is the bodily reality, and when we forget about that bodily reality, we do not make a world that is fit for humans.

Would you say it is not possible to have a sex change as such?

Yes, I would. Sex is in every cell of your body. There are thousands, literally thousands, of impacts on every bit of our body from what sex we are. It impacts on our immune system, endocrine system, the shape of our hands, the thickness of our skin.

We live in this world where we think of ourselves as disembodied robots. Because we are in a very technological society, we do not think about our embodied reality very much – but actually, everything from how flexible your joints are, to the proportions of your shoulders and your hips, is sexed.

Talking of technology, do you think that gender identity ideology has taken hold recently in part because scientific developments have made us believe we can change ourselves dramatically – perhaps more than, in reality, we can?

There are a number of reasons for the recent popularity of gender identity ideology. One is that we have got used to this progress narrative – that we are conquering more and more things, and also that we are being better and better to more people. You bring more and more people inside the tent. Women can vote now, too; slavery is a thing of the past; gay people can marry. If you are looking for the next bit of progress, and if you do not examine it very closely, the idea that men can count as women and women can count as men might sound like it.

A lot of being a woman is irreducible. It is not like being black, which really does not matter. It is not like being gay. Why would that matter, except when you are looking for someone to sleep with? In the case of women, it is that, actually, we are different.

And here we are in a world with this progress narrative – in medicine too. You can believe, if you are not a specialist, that we can make anything happen.

And science has made such incredible progress in so many respects.

Yes. People who think that someone can change sex have often not given the matter any thought – or asked how you could build the reproductive anatomy of one sex inside a person of the opposite sex. They think doctors can work miracles. At the same time, we are very dissociated from our bodies, because we are staring at screens all the time.

What is the best way to help people who have gender dysphoria?

The first thing to recognise is that we are creating gender dysphoria in our society. This is not a disease like cystic fibrosis, with a clearly biological cause. It is culturally created, socially constructed and a social contagion. I am not belittling it. It is like anorexia, which kills people. But there are societies that do not have anorexia – which is created by ideas about what it is to be a man or a woman, what the meaning of self-starvation is. Anorexia is very real, but the amount of it there is in a society is not a given.

The most important thing we can do is to stop creating gender dysphoria. There is far too much of it. Most people feel ill at ease in their bodies during puberty. It is a very hard time. All teenagers probably have a fair amount of body dysmorphia. It is a question of how this is interpreted in a particular society. In our society at the moment, we are telling them that they have probably got gender dysphoria. Rather than treating it, it would be better not to create it. You would still occasionally get people who were gender dysphoric, but, as with self-starvation, it would be far fewer.

Some commentators have argued that trans ideology is similar to a religion or a cult, with its arcane technical terms and rules for pronouns. What are your views on this?

I do think it is a neo-religion – a godless neo-religion. It is an incredibly dualistic belief system, which sees us not just as our bodies. I am the sort of atheist who sees us very profoundly as only our bodies. Our bodies are amazing – we think with them. Our whole body is us. We are not just a vessel carrying around a little homunculus behind the eyes. I do not think there is a separate thing inside our body, but they [proponents of trans ideology] talk about it as though there is. They would say to you, that is just a way of speaking – that they cannot express what they are trying to feel.

Something like the ineffability of God?

Exactly. I was brought up Catholic, although I do not believe any more. If you talk to somebody who is a profound and interesting religious thinker as an adult, you struggle to talk to each other, because they say that they are trying to express something ineffable. But what can you go on, except for what they say? I do not think anything useful is explained by this concept of gender identity, any more than anything useful is explained by the soul. They are concepts we do not need.

Would you be happy to call people by their preferred pronouns?

It would depend what they were doing. If we were sitting here and you told me that you went by ‘they’, I would do my best to remember, because I am not an arsehole. If you were saying that you did not even agree that there was a gender binary and you wished to make the world gender neutral, I would not accept that. If a man said, I identify as a woman, I would think he was sexist, because all he could possibly mean would be ‘I perform femininity.’

What do you mean by ‘performing femininity’?

By definition, no man can feel like a woman. Whatever he feels like is just what a man feels like. A man who says he feels like a woman must be looking at women in a surface way and thinking, that suits me better. But he is not talking about menstrual pain, giving birth, or being physically weaker. He must mean that he feels more at home doing the things that women are supposed to do or wearing the things that women are supposed to wear. That is just not what makes me a woman. I would be a woman on a desert island with no clothes and never seeing another human being.

So I can find a man’s claim to be a woman sexist, but I can go along with it. Many things are sexist. I can have conversations with people who have religious beliefs that I find repulsive – a lot of which are sexist, too. So I can say to a man, ‘I am happy to call you “she”, I do not mind what you wear – I do not mind what people wear anyway. But you cannot come into the women’s changing rooms and you cannot compete in women’s sports.’ It is a question of the policies – those are what I care about.

What do you think are the main harms that have been caused by gender identity ideology, as you define it, so far?

There are a lot of them, more than I realised when I started writing about it. I would put them into three categories: women, children and gay people. But actually, I think it is harmful for everybody, because it is a very sexist ideology, and that is not good for anyone. If you deny the reality of sex, it is women rather than men who suffer, by and large, because the man is the default human and the world we live in has been organised for men to move around in. Unless you specifically account for women, you are making a world that suits men.

Could you give us the background to the Mermaids case?

Stonewall was set up to campaign for people who were lesbian, gay and bisexual. That means people who are male or female who would consider sleeping or solely sleep with people of their own sex. These people faced gross discrimination. In 2013, gay marriage was legalised. In 2015, Stonewall became an LGBT organisation. At that point, it started to accept the idea that trans people really were the sex they are not, and when you do that, you mess with the definition of not just sex, but sexual orientation too. A heterosexual woman who identifies as a man becomes a gay trans man, a heterosexual man who identifies as a woman becomes a gay trans woman.

What about the people who are just LGB? Are they meant to see this ineffable essence within trans people? According to Stonewall, they are. Stonewall says it is ‘transphobic’ for a woman to say she would only consider female partners – because that excludes trans women.

A few years ago, the LGB Alliance was founded to represent LGB people who wanted to be able to say, without any equivocation, that their sexuality is based on sex, not gender identity. They were registered as a charity. In the Mermaids case, Mermaids and other LGBT charities are taking the Charity Commission to court to say that LGB Alliance [which joined the proceedings as the second respondent] is a hate group and should never have been allowed to register.

Mermaids claims that saying your orientation is based entirely on sex is a transphobic dog-whistle. They do not see that there are people – most people, actually – who see their sexuality that way.

What issues arise from the application of trans ideology at hospitals?

Sex used to matter in lots of places it should not – pension ages, who can vote, who can go into what profession, who can go to university – but it does not matter there anymore. Now we are left with the irreducible fact of sexed bodies. So where sex is taken into consideration into public policy now, there is a reason – as in hospitals.

It used to be a popular policy to have single sex wards for women, because female patients do get attacked. But now Annex B to the government’s policy [added September 2019] makes sex a matter of self-identification. Hospital admissions now are done on the basis of gender identity, even though they say they are done on the basis of sex.

Has this caused harm so far?

Yes. It is very hard to get numbers as to how many women have been raped by admitting men to women’s jails or allowing men onto women’s hospital wards. A lot of the time, harm is recorded as having been done by a woman, so you cannot unpick it. But rape is not the only harm. It is about dignity. People were embarrassed – you are very vulnerable in hospital.

When it comes to other spaces, like swimming pools and gyms, women will self-exclude. At Sex Matters, we did a call for evidence. We asked, ‘If single sex spaces matter to you, why do they matter?’ A lot of people wrote pages and pages explaining how they were raped as a child, or they had this hideous experience in a pub when they were sixteen, when some bloke masturbated in the women’s toilets as soon as they came in. Women have awful stories. Many, many women feel very strongly about single sex spaces.

But the sentence that jumped out over and over again was, ‘I never went back.’ Women would say, ‘I used to use this leisure centre. Then they started allowing people to go into whichever changing rooms they felt like to match their gender identity. I went in one day and there was this bloke and he was naked and I didn’t know what to do. I never went back.’ It is never recorded anywhere. All around the country, women are excluding themselves from public life because of this, but nobody is counting it.

Could you say a bit more about Sex Matters?

Sex Matters is a human rights organisation that campaigns specifically on the question of sex, which is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, in law and policy. It is for men and women, every religion, race, sexual orientation. Both men and women need sex-based rights, and the law needs to be clear about places where sex matters.

One example is the human right to have your birth registered with your mother’s name on the birth certificate. The reason for that right is that there is only one moment when a child is irreducibly somebody’s responsibility, and that is the moment of birth. That must be written down. Kids who do not have birth certificates are more at risk of becoming child soldiers, being stateless – they go on to be poorer, and so on.

The journalist Freddy McConnell is a trans man who has a gender recognition certificate and is recognised legally as a man. Freddy gave birth to a child and went to court to be registered as the father on the birth certificate. Rightly, in my opinion, that request was turned down on the basis that it is not Freddy’s birth certificate, it is the child’s.

Sex Matters is there to campaign about these issues and to get people to talk about them. Because you are not meant to say, ‘Freddy McConnell is actually female,’ but we have to.

So would you argue that someone like Freddy McConnell – a trans man who gave birth – is actually female?

Yes. Freddy has given birth. It is definitional, the fact that you have got a female reproductive system. Freddy is a mother in material reality. Freddy is a mother in law as well – the word ‘mother’ refers to women who give birth.

Do you think people should have their biological sex recorded on their passport?

I am not trying to make everybody go on and on about their sex all the time. In lots of places, sex does not matter. If you want to have a passport that has no sex on it, fine by me.

The question is, who are you going to be searched by when you go through airport security? Remember that the person who is searching you has rights too. I understand that a trans woman going through security may feel humiliated when there is an ‘unexpected object in the groinal area’ – this is what they say. I think you should train staff to deal with it sensitively. But the bottom line is that a woman cannot be forced to search men. She has rights too.

A trans woman is a male. That is meaningful for other people in some situations, not at all meaningful in others. Where it is meaningful, it is their sex that is meaningful.

Looking at the main political parties, what are their positions on trans ideology and the policy issues arising from it?

There is growing understanding within the Conservative Party that there are problems here – because they are less in hock to young graduates, who have really picked up on this ideology, and of course they [the Conservatives] are more religious. I do not think it is a conservative issue as such. I am not a conservative person – I am a feminist, an atheist. I have always thought of myself as liberal. My activism comes out of that position.

The Conservatives do have a significant number of people who are terrible [on trans issues]. There are internal battles. The Conservatives are the people who have been in power since 2010, when all the worst stuff has happened.

What in particular?

They introduced Annex B. They nearly brought in gender self-ID. All the stuff about teaching children nonsense in schools about sex and gender and how sex is not binary and sex is a spectrum and whatever you say you are – that has all been under the Conservatives.

What about Labour and the Liberal Democrats?

The Lib Dems are absolutely lost. They are the party of the young, liberal…

Idealistic?

Yes, idealistic, but, as it were, so open-minded the brain has fallen out. I have voted Lib Dem in the past. There is the Liberal Voice for Women [which supports ‘basing policy in…biological reality’], but they are a very beleaguered bunch, bless them.

Within Labour, working class people are not into this bullshit. So to the extent that you are a Labour person who speaks to working class constituencies, you are not either. Unfortunately, parties are always difficult coalitions. Labour has working class, ‘red wall’ voters, but also young urban graduates, who do not want the party saying that sex is real. So what Labour is trying to do is not talk about it. But it comes to the point where you make a total fool of yourself, as nearly everybody in the Labour Party has, including Keir Starmer.

Do you think that Keir Starmer’s equivocation on trans ideology has had a bad effect on his own voters?

I do not think it does him any good. It is an issue that people care about enormously once they realise it is happening – but most people do not know it is happening. It does not tend to come up massively on the doorsteps. There is war in Ukraine, ten per cent inflation, the energy price crisis, rising crime: other things come first to people’s minds. People are not talking about this idiocy of allowing men into women’s jails – but when it happens to them, they get very angry.

And it is happening. People are seeing it most in schools. Sex Matters is thinking hard about what to do about schools. There needs to be clarity about sex in schools for the extra reason that schools are meant to be an environment where safeguarding comes first. Safeguarding requires you to speak honestly about sex: it is part of any risk assessment. Anyone whose sex you cannot talk about honestly is a problem in a school. That does not mean you cannot have trans teachers – of course you can. But you have to be honest with children. You have to find an age-appropriate way to explain why a trans woman teacher dresses like a woman, but looks like a man, and then you risk-assess them as male, not female – because they are male.

How do you think the approach to trans ideology compares in Britain with the other side of the Atlantic?

It all originated in America, so it has gone much further there. We imported it, so did Australia and Canada. It plays out differently in each country; it is an Anglosphere thing, largely. In America, there are two totemic issues for the Democrats: one is how you think about race, and the other is gender identity. Because the country is so polarised – most Democrats by now loathe Republicans and vice versa – this issue is incredibly polarising.

We [the UK] imported it via universities, social media, big tech, the EDI industry within multinationals. That is a large part of our economy. It has not touched the self-employed plumber, but it is big in Google.

When you write about trans issues, it takes a while to realise that quite a lot of people in elite circles, the opinion formers – people who work in newspapers or government departments – have a trans child. That is the most paralysing thing that can happen to an organisation. It makes it impossible for anybody to talk about the issue honestly, because people are so sensitive about their children.

I have an awful lot of sympathy for these parents, because they were faced with a dilemma where there was a forced choice. A child comes to you and they have all learned these scripts online – that you say that you will kill yourself if you are not transitioned. It is incredibly manipulative.

And the scripts change. Now it is to bake a ‘gender reveal’ cake that is pink on the outside and blue on the inside, or vice versa, and you leave it in the kitchen with a note saying, ‘I have always been a boy,’ or ‘I have always been a girl.’ You are coached online to believe that your parents are massive bigots if they do not instantly say, ‘Wonderful, darling’ – that they hate you, that you must report them to social services and refuse to speak to them, that you will kill yourself if they do not go along with it.

A lot is self-coaching from the internet. And there are charities, like Mermaids, which are promoting it. Mermaids’ CEO, Susie Green, has a trans-identified child.

If you [as a parent] are put in this situation, you look for information and you find two polar opposites: people like me, and people on the other side saying that your child will commit suicide if you do not allow them to transition. As a parent, you have to choose. And whichever one you choose, you have to try to think badly of the other side, because this is a choice for your child.

The people who have transitioned their children must believe that I am the worst person in the world – for their own sanity. There are some parents that I cannot name because they are not out about their child. But I know through the grapevine that some of the people who are strongest in trying to push government and media have undeclared trans children. I feel very sorry for them. They have basically made a promise to their child that the whole world will accommodate them as a member of the opposite sex. It won’t. So they have got to try and make us – that is why it gets so vicious.

One of the things that we say [at Sex Matters] is that people should be able to talk about the reality of biological sex using ordinary words. I am not talking about slurs, I am just talking about the fact that we come in two sexes. We need to be able to talk about it, but they need us not to talk about it. That is where the silencing comes from.

What is the way forward from this situation?

I strongly believe that we are not going to continue thinking like this about gender identity, because it is too divorced from the basic reality of what it is to be human. I also think there is a fashion element to it that will burn out. But it matters how much damage is done along the way to institutions, policies, laws, rights and to individuals. Are we able to keep sex based rights or will we have to rebuild them from the ground up? How many lives will be destroyed? We are already seeing quite large numbers of detransitioners – there are 35,000 people on the Detransition Subreddit [as of 17/11/22, around 41,800], and the stories are heartbreaking.  

How many people is it acceptable to have sterilised in their teens? Sterilisation is irrevocable. For comparison, America probably did about 50,000 lobotomies – this is still regarded more than 50 years later as one of the greatest human rights abuses in modern medicine. I think we will sterilise many more children than that in the name of gender identity.

I am not saying trans people are all damaged, but that this process, if it turns out not to have been the right process for you, is a damaging one. It is also going to be hard for institutions, as in America, to go back to sex-based rights when they have destroyed them. We [in the UK] are hanging on by our fingertips to our sex-based rights. Also, if this issue goes completely mad, as in California, the backlash is going to be horrendous, and it is going to hit feminists and gay people, as well as anyone who advocated for it.  

I want to limit the harm done to individuals and institutions before the pendulum swings back. And then, hopefully, we can come back to a proper equilibrium and to proper accommodations of people who think about themselves differently – as we do with Orthodox Jews or vegans. We are in a pluralistic society; people can have many different ideas about themselves.

The post ‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce on the trans debate appeared first on The Freethinker.

The new politics of marginalised identities, now marching across the West, frequently clashes with classical liberal values like freedom of speech and association. Nowhere, however, is this clash and its consequences for civic life more obvious – and dire – than when it comes to the trans movement.

What began as an informal social and economic pressure campaign has crossed over into a formal effort by coercive state agencies to restrict freedom of expression, assembly, and conscience. In Norway, a feminist organiser named Christina Ellingsen could face up to three years in prison for tweeting that males who identify as women cannot be lesbians or mothers, because this statement violates Norway’s newly expanded hate crime laws. In Canada, a human rights tribunal entertained the complaints of a trans-identified male against religious-minority women who refused to provide intimate hair-removal services. Professors like Selina Todd and Kathleen Stock have needed security to accompany them on their own university campuses after voicing concerns about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In England, police have investigated ordinary citizens for tweeting salty limericks or displaying ‘transphobic’ stickers.

In the United States, with its uniquely robust First Amendment protections, we are unlikely to see police sent to investigate violations of new identity doctrines. But here, as elsewhere, activists rely on aggressive use of private coercion to shut down dissent, targeting critics’ reputations and livelihoods. In November 2020, a prominent lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that ‘stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on’—referring to a book that questioned the sudden spike in girls identifying as transgender. Feminist groups attempting to organise in-person meetings have faced bomb threats and cancellations by venues nervous about optics and security risks. Teachers have been suspended or fired for refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns.

Then there is the soft pressure campaign underway across the West, involving the expectation that good, progressive people will not exercise certain freedoms: that lesbians will not refer to themselves as same-sex attracted, that women’s groups will make space for males, that everyone will engage in routine self-censorship, lest feelings be hurt or certain uncomfortable realities be drawn into the light. What is politically inconvenient becomes unfashionable, morally objectionable, even ‘dangerous’. Civil liberties have become distinctly uncool, panned by young activists, and more than a few grown-ups who ought to know better, as tools of marginalisation and oppression. Advocate for the right to freely speak your mind and activists will accuse you of harbouring specific heresies. In an interview with the BBC in September 2021, Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, defended his party’s decision to cast out a female member for asserting that women are adult human females: ‘Well, we absolutely believe in free speech but we also believe that we need to protect human rights and we believe in equality.’

Civil libertarians who have sat this conflict out so far may be startled to see free speech set up in opposition to human rights and equality. But when it comes to gender, an atmosphere of wartime censorship has set in. Trans activists claim these strictures save lives, but in reality it is the survival of the cause itself that requires such exceptional treatment.

So why do civil liberties violations and calls for further clampdowns follow trans activism wherever it goes?

The short answer is that the trans movement threatens civil liberties because the movement is not what it claims to be and thus is threatened by free and open enquiry. If a movement cannot withstand scrutiny, it will create and enforce taboos—and undermine civil liberties in the process. One of the trans movement’s central claims is that there is no conflict between its claims and demands and the rights of any other group. Stonewall, a leading trans rights organisation in the United Kingdom, states upfront that ‘we do not and will not acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and “sex based women’s rights”.’ Merely ‘claiming [that] there is a conflict between trans people’s human rights and those of any other group’—such as women, children, religious minorities, or lesbian and  gay people—is defined as transphobic hate speech that governments and private corporations alike should censor.

Unfortunately—for the trans movement and the rest of us—the conflict exists, whether we are free to acknowledge it or not.

To put the conflict in plain language: trans activism argues that gender identity should override sex in law and society. Trans activism redefines ‘women’ and ‘men’ from sex classes based on reproductive role into mixed-sex classes based on individuals’ inner sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither. A mixed-sex definition of ‘woman’ will put males on women’s shortlists, in women’s sports, prisons, and domestic violence refuges. Even if we were to believe that redefining women as a mixed-sex class inclusive of males who identify as women is an urgent and just cause—that is, even if we believe that the outcome should be settled in a particular way—there remains a conflict between two clashing interpretations of the law and two distinct groups of people.

Rather than acknowledge this conflict and propose a satisfactory resolution, trans activists seek to deny it altogether—largely by stripping meaning from language. This is how the ubiquitous claim that ‘trans women are women’ functions. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter if ‘trans women’ outcompete female athletes in women’s sports. In fact, if ‘trans women are women’, then questioning whether Lia Thomas should compete against female athletes becomes part of a ‘long tradition of “gender policing” female athletes’. Rather than make a compelling case for why trans inclusion should trump fairness, trans activists seek to make sex—the very crux of the conflict—unspeakable. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter whether or not placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons puts female prisoners at risk. ‘Trans women are women’ means no scrutiny and no debate.

We see the same approach at work when it comes to ‘gender-affirming care’ and its casualties. If activists inside and outside the medical profession want to remove barriers to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, then the experiences of detransitioners and people who have been harmed by transition represent a serious challenge. Rather than address these concerns head on, organisations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health seek to reframe detransition in an attempt to deny its relevance. Detransition, regret, and medical harm become ‘gender journeys’, ‘non-linear gender transitions’, or ‘gender dimensionality’—just another exciting detour on a patient’s lifelong quest of personal discovery, with no implications for clinical assessment, treatment, and accountability.

This insistence that there is no conflict lodges a falsehood in the very heart of the trans movement. When a movement is not what it pretends to be, this creates a vulnerability that activists must defend.

There is a parallel here to when individuals come out as transgender and seek to be seen by others as members of the opposite sex (or as sexless, in the case of non-binary people). When someone comes out as trans, they ask other people to overlook their sex. Ideally, they want everyone they come into contact with—family and friends, classmates and colleagues, even perfect strangers—to personally redefine sex and re-educate themselves to see trans people as they want to be seen. You will reinforce your trans friend or family member or colleague’s self-identification with your speech and actions. At a minimum, you will keep your perceptions and objections to yourself, lapsing into polite silence so as not to upset your interlocutor’s feelings. Trans activism operates with the same expectations, but on a society-wide scale, and with civil liberties as the target.

The temptation to violate civil liberties and undermine the basic principles of a free and open society will remain as long as the need for cover remains. Whenever activists attempt to smuggle undeclared goods under the guise of a civil rights movement, undressed speech becomes a threat that must be managed.

The only way out of this situation is for the trans movement to reconnect their public pronouncements with their actual agenda: they must make their case in the open and anyone must be allowed to question it.

However, there are compelling reasons to think that the trans movement would not have got this far operating in the open. The lobbying guide by IGLYO, ‘the world’s largest LGBTQI Youth and Student organisation’, even seems to acknowledge as much, urging campaigners to ‘get ahead of the government agenda and media story’, ‘tie your campaign to more popular reforms’ and ‘avoid excessive press coverage and exposure’. The guide praises Irish activists for piggybacking on marriage equality and using it to provide a ‘veil of protection’, since ‘marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for’. It then observes that: 

‘[M]any believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress, as much of the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise. In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue.’

This approach has been a success for trans lobbyists in countries like Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, but it has done great damage to the fabric of civil society. If the trans movement insists on its current course—shutting down public debate, subverting open democratic processes, and punishing critics—the movement will create openings for opponents with much more objectionable agendas than recognising that sex matters and advocating caution on youth gender transition. As Jonathan Rauch warned in his 1993 book, The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought:

‘[No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.’

The realities the trans movement is so keen to suppress will persist—no matter how doggedly activists hound dissenters. It is time for them to return to the public sphere and play by the same rules as everyone else: no special pleading and no final say. And it is time for every institution that has enabled this movement to put an end to trans exceptionalism. Free and open societies depend on it.

The post The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement appeared first on The Freethinker.