Gender-critical / TERF

A solid summary of a distressing few months that seemed to go on for years.

A few weeks ago an anonymous person threatened to kill my friend. Her crime: being trans. This sort of thing is depressingly familiar to anyone who dares to be or support trans online. Away from the darker reaches of the internet, however, the so called “gender critical” (what I understand to be “anti-trans”) movement enjoys platforms in national media and access to the highest corridors of power. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has even appeared to make high profile statements in support. This summer, however, the GC movement’s claims to legitimacy crumbled.

Judith Butler, a titan of feminist academia, argues that the movement enforces the patriarchal gender norms favoured by the religious and far-right. “Men” and “women” are confined to tightly defined stereotypes and anyone who deviates is punished. It would explain why GCs receive support from authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, and far right politicians like Giorgia Meloni.

One might be forgiven for thinking the GC movement spent the summer trying to prove Butler right.

For a special edition of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar is joined by philosopher, author, and one of the world's most cited academics, Judith Butler. Their new book, 'Who’s Afraid of Gender' charts how a transphobic moral panic morphed into an all-our war on so-called ‘gender ideology’. Together, Ash and Judith explore how Britain became TERF island, the limits of self-identification, and what really defines a woman.

Their starting premise (and desired conclusion) is: There must be a strict binary because that would define trans people out of existence. When we discuss how gender identity and gender expression vary in the population, they claim that “gender” is somehow completely divorced from “biological sex” (it isn’t, see video). When they insist that genitals are the primary determinant of sex, we point to trans and intersex people who fall outside of those expectations. When they shift from genitals to sex chromosomes, or the SRY gene, we point to even more exceptions there. So now they’re championing gametes, but once again, there are always exceptions. Because human beings, like all animals, display some degree of sexual variation.

Speaking of all animals, the second reason why gender-critical activists have embraced gametes is that they believe they have stumbled upon a universal definition of sex that overrides all other conceptualizations (and we know how much they love their definitions). Their argument goes something like this: “In organisms that sexually reproduce, scientists categorize the sex that makes the larger gametes as ‘female’ and the sex that makes the smaller gametes as ‘male.’ Therefore, we must use this same standard when [checks notes] deciding which human beings can use which restrooms or play in which chess tournaments. Because science!”

In 2014, the Religious Right’s morale reached its lowest point. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2011. Same-sex marriage looked inevitable as court after court struck down ban after ban behind a wave of rising public support. Time magazine had declared a “transgender tipping point.” It was here that the Right made a decision to shift their culture-war focus to transgender people. Simultaneously, they began funding ostensibly feminist anti-trans groups like the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which took $15,000 in seed money from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Religious Right legal group dedicated to basing U.S. law on the Bible.

At the 2017 Values Voters Summit hosted by the Family Research Council, Meg Kilgannon outlined the religious right’s plan to co-opt anti-trans feminist groups, and use their feminist-sounding language to seem more secular while hiding the true motivation behind their animus. Ultimately, they would loop back around to finish off LGB people once the trans community had been dealt with.

“For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

Dykes on Bikes Melbourne describes itself as a volunteer-run, not-for-profit motorcycle club for LGBTQ+ folks who identify as women, non-binary or genderqueer, and the group is known for its activism. As a Melbourne member, one of Kieran’s favourite recent experiences was leading the Trans Day of Visibility: Reclaim the Streets protest in March 2023.

After Nazi protesters spouting dangerous transphobic and racist rhetoric were offered police protection, Dykes on Bikes stepped in. The group led thousands of trans folks and allies in a huge protest, and Kieran remembers riding down the street and hearing the marchers chanting: ‘You can’t run, you can’t hide, Dykes on Bikes are on our side!’ Kieran said: “Just thinking about it now gives me chills. I will remember it forever.”

Like “detransition,” “regret” can also have different meanings. Narayan et al. (2021) surveyed surgeons who perform gender-affirming surgeries about their experiences with patient regret (which they reported to be in the 0.2–0.3% range). They documented three different “types” of regret: “true gender-related regret” (typically a change in gender identity), “social regret” (typically due to external pressure from family members or societal transphobia), and “medical regret” (e.g., complications due to surgery). Notably, they reported that only 6.5% of patients who experienced regret believed that they had been “misdiagnosed.”

In other words, just as we shouldn’t conflate “detransition” with “regret,” we also shouldn’t conflate “regret” with inadequate assessment or having been misdiagnosed as transgender. Once again, this confirms my previous point that the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative only applies to a small fraction of those who detransition, and thus represents a miniscule number of people who choose to transition in the first place.

To put these numbers in perspective, let’s try a thought experiment: Imagine 10,000 people transitioning. If 2% of them experienced detransition or regret, but only 6.5% of those individuals felt that they had been misdiagnosed as transgender in the first place, that would represent 13 people. Out of 10,000. That’s an incredibly small number of people — no wonder journalists and politicians who want to promote the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative have to rely on the same handful of detrans interviewees over and over again.