A Plea To Trans Activists: We Can Protect Trans Rights Without Denying Biology

Confidence has been damaged because any law based on self-declaration of Gender Identity would be based not on facts and evidence but on feelings and opinions. If society loses faith in the law to determine how someone might “become female,” then society may do its own gatekeeping that could be far less sympathetic to trans people than what we know at present.

When it comes to our own individual preferences, feelings and opinions are not a problem. You prefer coffee; I prefer tea. You prefer to wear a dress today; I prefer to wear trousers. But this isn’t a debate over what we choose to drink or wear. Nor is it a debate over our identities. Nobody’s identity is up for debate: we are who we are, and it’s nonsense to argue that we might be somebody else.

It also isn’t a debate over how we express our gender. And we should defend the right of everyone to express their gender however they please. Why do we still restrict men and women to different dress codes? Why does every bank need to define us by gender markers? Organisations do need to know our sex, because if they’re blind to sex they’re blind to sexism. Across society, we should also provide safe and secure unisex facilities for all who want them. Those are progressive steps that should be offered to everyone.

What is being debated is access to women’s rights and protections. Generations of women have fought to establish and maintain them, but if anyone can self-declare their Gender Identity to be female, then anyone who wants to be a woman is a woman. Women have every right to be concerned because biological sex ceases to be definitive, and womanhood is reduced to a collection of feelings. It is unclear how declarations based on feelings could be challenged. While attempts might be made to criminalise fraudulent self-declarations, how can they ever be falsified? It is dangerously naïve to assume that men would never self-declare as women with nefarious motives. Most men probably wouldn’t, but those who might are the ones that cause concern. Women’s boundaries are hardly secure if they have to rely on the assumption that men wouldn’t do that, would they?

UK law does allow providers of women’s services to apply discretion and exclude transwomen if it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. The Government has no plans to change that. However, while service providers are permitted to apply “single-sex exemptions,” they are not obligated to do so. The law is poorly understood, and providers are eager to be inclusive. Realistically, however, boundaries are maintained principally by social norms, taboos and conventions. Those conventions make a potential intruder think twice, and they allow women to challenge someone they suspect should not be there. But legal self-declaration shifts the burden of proof when concerns are raised. Women are less likely to challenge that person who looks like a man, walks like a man, talks like a man, and – most importantly – behaves like a man if they might reply with confidence, “I’m a woman because I say so.” This is hardly the way to build trust between women and transwomen.

Gender Identity is being introduced into legislation as a simplistic inner quality that drives our nature but even as a trans person I can neither prove my Gender Identity nor compare it with anyone else’s. All I know is me and my identity. That identity was certainly oppressed by the restrictions and expectations that society placed on me because I am male, and I transitioned when I could no longer cope with them. Gender Identity might label that mismatch in some way but it is merely a collection of feelings.

Creating laws on the basis of these unchallengeable assertions, opinions, and feelings is problematic for transsexual people because women are not taking this lightly. We do enjoy widespread acceptance in liberal communities but that acceptance comes not from legislation but from relationships. The law may grant us the right to walk into a women’s meeting, but it can never stop everyone else leaving at the same time; it may demand everyone to call us women because we say so, but it can never compel anyone to accept us.

Should the law try to force compulsion, genuine acceptance will be harder to find. As a teacher, I know the likely result when you try and force someone to believe something: grudging compliance, and only while you are watching. As soon as your back is turned, there is disrespect and defiance. Transsexual people need better than that. We need to maintain laws that are credible and respected. It’s not progressive to replace them with laws built on feelings that we need to defend with rhetoric such as, transwomen are women. If people don’t believe it, then repeating it ad nauseum is not going to make them believe it. If it did, we could solve the problem with two lines of computer code:

10 PRINT “Transwomen are Women”
20 GOTO 10

The transwomen are women mantra is being presented as irrefutable truth. That worries me because ordinary people know what it means to be a woman, and it isn’t a feeling. Crudely, a lot of it can be reduced to our reproductive organs. Laws that are effective need to be grounded in solid foundations: in science and in society; how we relate to nature and how we relate to each other. These are truths that are real and objective.

Science is clear. Our biological sex indicates our role in the reproduction of our species. We are like other mammals. Some of us have male sex organs and others have female sex organs. I have three children and unless there were repeat visits from the Angel Gabriel that neither my partner nor I knew about, I was responsible for the male gametes that produced them. Arguments over labels do not change the underlying facts. I know that I am not biologically female.

Society is also real. Boys and girls are socialised differently. Boys never face the prospect of becoming pregnant, nor are they expected to take on more than their fair share of caring responsibilities or make sacrifices for their future spouse’s career. They are stronger, taller, and are generally given more freedoms, and their bodies are not subject to the same scrutiny that girls’ are.

To say that trans women are the same as women, therefore requires denial of some rather huge concrete truths. I can’t do that with any integrity and, rather than identify as a woman, – a rather meaningless concept – I identify with women.

Science and society may be the truth, but they leave trans people in a very vulnerable position. I would find it intolerable to live in society as men are expected to live. Thankfully, western society is compassionate and many jurisdictions allow us to change our legal sex, and undergo medical transition. But changing your legal sex is not the same as changing your wardrobe. When we change our legal sex from male to female we acquire rights and protections granted to women at the exclusion of men. Women are affected by this and they must be heard.

Critical thinking is not hate; it builds understanding and establishes foundations that are robust and can protect trans people without compromising the rights of women. Transwomen are not the same as women, and it is disingenuous to try and argue that they are. That being said, there is much that we share in our day-to-day lives, and we both face adversity and hardship, including oppression and prejudice. We must, therefore, abandon philosophies based on wishful thinking and return to concrete reality. Only then will we be able to work together with trust and confidence, combat discrimination and build a better society that works for us all.