Gender is Boring; Rights are Where It's At
Words by Elle Henderson | She/Her/They/Them
As a transgender woman, I have found questions of what gender is, and how/why trans people exist, increasingly tiresome. Considering we have been debating our nature for a long time, we haven’t actually made a lot of progress in being recognised as people, rather than as oddities or scapegoats.
Whatever transgender people’s origins, we exist as people and maybe it’s time to stop giving anti-transgender activists time and space by debating how our particular brand of personhood comes about. Maybe instead of discussing our rights and position within society through the proxy
argument of what gender means, we should focus on reorienting the way society manages people on a more contextual, case by case basis? I’m going to introduce the argumentative trap that keeps trans people from developing as a people by holding back allowable debates before suggesting what could be done about it in the aims that in our day to day lives, all of us can change the discussion to be more productive.
Brian Earp (a philosopher who writes on topics concerning sex and gender) recently published a piece in The Philosopher titled “What is gender for?”. In this piece, he briefly outlines the basic debate over gender that I’m sure many of us are woefully tired of and upset about.
On the one hand, transgender people and their supporters emphasise the phenomenological, experiential aspects of one’s life as to where their gender sits, de-emphasising the role of the body in determining it. In this view, gender is real, but it lives in a world inaccessible by others, depending on our claims and expression for anything about it to be known.
From the other side, anti-trans advocates and self-titled gender critical feminists claim that gender is entirely determined by bodily characteristics, variably emphasising the genitals, hormones, and chromosomes as the site of gender determination. Brian Earp describes this debate as one about ontology. Ontology, simply speaking, is the branch of philosophy concerned with what exists. What things, or stuff, or kinds of stuff are there in existence? What is the nature of those things or that stuff? In this debate between trans people and anti-trans advocates, the issue at hand concerns the nature of gender as a thing that exists.
The ontological status of marginalised properties or identities has always been central to issues regarding civil rights. For example, consider some of the earliest modern arguments for gay rights. Karl Ulrichs campaigned for the legal rights of gay people in Germany during the 1800s. He did this by challenging the dominant view of the time (that homosexual activity was immoral and degenerate) by putting forward a new ontology of the human in which there existed Urnings and Dionings, types of men who were attracted to men or women, respectively (as well as the women counterparts Urningins and Dioningins). Instead of homosexuality being itself just immoral behaviour, that behaviour driven by natural features of the person.
By essentialising sexuality this way, it was argued it could not be illegal as that would be to criminalise the basic nature of a human. Obviously, the story does not end there. Whether things exist, and their natures should they exist, has been debated by many socially consequential identities.
Ulrich’s argument that gay people are gay by nature has extended well into the modern age as the debate about what gayness is, and how people become gay is repeatedly resurrected.
Reactionaries would push that measures provided for gay people were unnecessary or even downright wrong on the basis that being gay was far from natural. It was, in fact, something you could learn or catch from deviant men or women who were out to convert and defile children. In New Zealand, this debate would show its head again during homosexual law reform in the 1980’s, around the Civil Union bill and corresponding Destiny Church ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign in 2004, and again in 2013 around marriage equality. It’s not to say that the debate didn’t happen at other times, but that as society geared up towards some pragmatic change for a marginalised portion of its population, people came out in droves to argue those changes didn’t need to be made because the people they address are just people who chose to be bad.
This same thing is happening now. Anti-transgender activists argue that trans people are just part of a political movement, a movement to exterminate men and women, a movement to ‘trans’ their children in order to eliminate gayness/the family/science. When they do accept the notion that being trans isn’t a choice or the result of conditioning, they argue that it is a mental illness to be corrected, that trans people naturally experience psychiatric issues and disproportionate suicide because they are naturally broken or inadequate.
This ontological argument puts trans people into a double bind; we can accept that trans people are made and thus we are a potential threat, or we can accept that trans people are born and we are faulty. The discussion being had provides little space for people to argue other ways of being. Underneath the argument about whether and how gender, and thus trans people, exist are other issues. These other issues around civil rights and social treatment of trans people are really what is at stake and what is obfuscated.
So, what is the alternative to debating the existence of trans people? What can be done to break out of the trap that reactionaries produce. Brian Earp argues that rather than be bogged down by ontological concerns when it comes to grouping people and constraining (or opening up) their participation in certain activities, spaces, etcetera, we should be considering what features of people in any given situation are most relevant when dividing people up. By considering what some decision, or service, or law is actually designed to accomplish, we will likely find that the relevant features of people, and thus the relevant ways to group people, will be different, and likely more specific, than just grouping by complex categories like man and woman.
Here’s an example of what I mean by gender/sex as complex categories and how their complexity can be problematic. In psychology, sex/gender is often recorded so that some relationship can be drawn up between it and some other interesting phenomena. Imagine, you are participating in a psychology experiment and you are asked to indicate whether you are a man or a woman on an information sheet. You have to ask yourself; are they asking what I call myself, or what others call me? Do they want to know what genitals I have, what hormones, what, chromosomes? Common sense would have most of these things lining up in certain ways such that ticking the man box would be understood to mean you are saying you have a penis, dominantly testosterone, XY chromosomes et cetera.
But imagine you are a trans woman and these things don’t line up so nicely in the common-sense way. Maybe you take hormones, or have had an orchiectomy (i.e., removal of the testes). Maybe you are intersex. It's not clear which box people in these situations should tick. It gets even harder if the gender/sex information is to stand as a proxy for even less strictly yet still common-sensically grouped features, like presence/absence of facial hair, size, or strength.
I know when I personally have to check these boxes I deliberate heavily, attempting to understand which piece of information is relevant in order to know which box to tick in any given setting. Leaving the identification of your variables of interest to the guesses of your participants seems like a bad way to do science. The obvious alternative that would solve this situation is not using categories like gender/sex as proxies for more detailed, specific information. Psychologists, for example, could record the details they actually think are relevant to their study. Rather than ask about people’s gender when you’re studying something that would be more reasonably be governed by hormones than genitals, they could measure hormone levels instead, for example.
Admittedly this change to more direct labelling/description is not taken up well by anti-transgender activists who still want to keep the debate at the level of ontology. Recently, anti-transgender activists engaged in a public discussion on Twitter regarding the language used in a sex education curriculum that they claimed was just laced with trans ideology. An example of the problematic language was “unplanned pregnancies can occur if penis-in-vagina sex happens where the penis ejaculates sperm and the person with a vagina also has a womb.” Because this sentence doesn’t refer to men or women, anti-trans activists recognise this phrasing as ideological because the use of man and woman would be objective to them.
Taking Brian Earp’s stance of looking at what is actually relevant here, using the terms man and woman would actually be less objective. People who would have been previously generally identified as women are typically shorter than those identified as men; is size difference relevant here? Is muscle density? Typical voice pitch? Typical heart attack symptoms? Typical life expectancy? These are all things that have some culturally established link to sex/gender but none of these are relevant for talking about the mechanics of how pregnancy works, so referring to the most general terms possible for grouping people (man and woman) would be including far too much for consideration.
In this way, referring to people with penises and vaginas and wombs is more factually accurate and relevant. Where anti-transgender activists think avoiding categorising people by gross (meaning general, not disgusting… but also maybe that *shrug*) gender terms is ideological, transgender people and their allies tend to think of it as more descriptively accurate.
The key thing with this change in language is that it deals with the actual matter at hand, without bringing in other unrequired notions. Discussing the biology of sexual health can be done with simple description without reference to ideas that are not important or mean nothing in that context.
This same can be done with other sex-divided arenas. Rather than men’s and women’s sports leagues, divide the leagues on the basis of whatever is relevant. Presumably this would be size, age, strength. This way the things that actually impact competition are foregrounded in the distinction. Fashion is already divided up in terms of season, type of clothing item (dresses, trousers, et cetera), sizes, degree of casualness. Rather than having men’s and women’s clothing, why not just call clothes what they are? And you know what—if you really want a space where only people with certain genital configurations, or previous gendered experiences can hang out, then go for it. But call it what it is; a genital-determined space.
Another prime impact of discussing things in terms of their relevant features is that it highlights that a lot of the things trans people talk about are not only transgender issues. When we talk about access to medical care for transgender people, its because we think all people who need medical care should get it. When we talk about autonomy to change, or not, our bodies, it's because all people should have that right. When we talk about legislative change that allows people to amend the sex on their birth records it's because all people should have authority over how their identity is recorded, preserved and used by some third party with power over us. When we say we want protections for trans people in housing and employment, it’s because everyone should have those protections.
Very few of the things transgender people want are only for transgender people. While many of these things would impact transgender people’s lives more currently, they would benefit everyone to some degree.
Debating gender, and transgender lives, is a distraction. Anti-transgender activists would prefer we kept the discussion at this level so as not to show that society can be organised in a different, more equitable way. And to some degree this is fair when you consider the amount of work that has gone into managing gender as it stands until now. But we cannot let them hold the status quo when it means limiting who can participate adequately and equally in society.
None of these are new ideas, but I’m hoping that in considering them now, when the popular discourse on transgender people extend only minutely beyond “Trans people are real and they are the gender they say”, we can all move discussion towards genuine access to, and participation in, society.