Mick Hartley

Debbie Hayton, a trans woman, made the news in December when she was threatened with expulsion from the LGBT committee of the TUC after being accused of transphobia for wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “Trans women are men. Get over it!”. A week or so ago she wrote an article against gender self-identification which, she argued, puts women, children – and trans people themselves – at risk. 

Now she has a powerful new piece at Quillette – I May Have Gender Dysphoria. But I Still Prefer to Base My Life on Biology, Not Fantasy:

Feelings and opinions have displaced facts and evidence in many areas of the liberal arts. This is nothing new. A more recent phenomenon, however, is the extension of this trend into the realm of biology, which has fallen victim to the idea that men can become women—and vice versa—merely by reciting a statement of belief. It is an insidious movement that combines the postmodern contempt for objective truth with pre-modern religious superstitions regarding the nature of the human soul.  […]

By now, many readers will be familiar with the basic elements of the officially enforced system of dogma that sometimes is referred to as “gender ideology,” and which is now legally encoded in many jurisdictions under the policy known as “self-identification” or “self-declaration”:

• • We all have an innate gender identity—analogous to the divine spark that religious adherents claim is lodged within us—which determines whether we are a man, a woman or non-binary;
  • A (possibly incorrect) gender is arbitrarily assigned to us at birth based on the appearance of our genitals;
  • Our true gender is determined through an unerring process of inward examination, and, once articulated, can never be falsified or even questioned by anyone else;
  • Any human adult who says “I am a woman” must be treated as if they were a biological woman, full stop, which requires their admission into vulnerable female spaces—including, but not limited to, shared prison cells, rape-crisis centres, locker rooms and sporting events; and
  • Opposition to any of the above-stated propositions amounts to transphobia, one of the worst kinds of hate crime.

The most obvious problem with gender ideology is that it is entirely circular. It’s like defining an airline pilot as someone who just has that indescribable “feeling” of being an airline pilot. When Massachusetts legislators tried to nail down the idea of gender identity in legislation, for instance, the best they could come up with was “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”

Moreover, when people begin trying to get around this circularity by actually detailing what it means to “feel like” a woman, they typically just catalogue a bunch of sexist stereotypes about how they always liked the idea of wearing dresses and maybe played with dolls as a child.

Yes, gender dysphoria is a real condition. I know, because I have it: the feeling that my male biology is at odds with my desire to have a female body. But I don’t have to invent some mystical spiritual force called gender identity to explain it. 

Just as there is no single cause of chest pain or headaches, there doesn’t need to be a single cause of gender dysphoria. But there is a well-observed typology. In the 1980s, American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard proposed that transsexualism (as it was then commonly called) in males generally manifested as either (1) effeminate gay men seeking to further accentuate their appeal to other men (homosexual transsexualism, or HSTS); or (2) heterosexual autogynephiles—self-attracted men who prefer to conceive of themselves as women—who typically come out as trans women later in life (and often to the great surprise of family and friends). The most vocal and aggressive proponents of trans rights—biological males who often will express themselves aggressively to women who bring up the issue of biology—appear to be drawn disproportionately from this second, autogynephilic category. […]

As noted above, my own experience leads me to believe that efforts to protect gender ideology from critique are most vigorously led by a specific and identifiable sub-section within the trans community. Autogynephilic males who abruptly declare themselves to be trans often experience a sense of insecurity and even shame, especially since the transitioning process can have a traumatic effect on their wives and children. Demanding that the world recognize them as actual women is a strategy for absolving them of responsibility. If gender is an innate quality, like height or sexual orientation, how can they be morally responsible? Gender ideology is the tool they use to legitimize that emotional reflex. Their sudden rejection of their old life is reimagined as a mystical journey into their own gendered soul.  […]

Not so long ago, we truly did live in a transphobic society, where people like me were subject to public abuse (or worse). And there are still scattered reports of actual transphobia. In extreme cases, trans people have been physically attacked, or even killed, because of who they are.

But on an everyday basis, many trans people are now more afraid, for their reputations and livelihoods, of the opposite threat: They are afraid of saying the wrong thing—which is to say, something based in truth and actual science—about who we are. For their own emotional purposes, members of a militant and vociferous group within our own ranks have found a way to embed a lie at the very heart of our public discussion about gender.

For the rest of society to acquiesce to this lie is not only a betrayal of science, but of democracy. And we must work to restore an attitude of honesty before more harm is done to women, children and trans people ourselves. When society realises that there is no rational basis for gender ideology, the backlash may be very severe indeed.

But read it all.