There was something else which made James begin to wonder whether this was really something that he wanted. As he and others in his circle were well aware, anyone who takes hormones for a period of years will eventually notice effects which are irreversible. These happen after around two years of anti-androgen treatment. And as James approached his second year on anti-androgens he began to feel nervous. The NHS had no emergency appointments for him to consult with a doctor because they were so overwhelmed with people coming to them to consult on gender reassignment. He would have to wait another six months. But James felt he couldn’t wait that long. He faced not only physical changes that risked becoming permanent, but also biological facts. After more than two years on anti-androgens most men will become infertile and so incapable of ever being able to father a child. James was wondering not only whether he really wanted to become a woman, but also whether he might not one day want to be a father. He had a boyfriend and the boyfriend was not convinced that James was actually a woman. His boyfriend just thought that James was gay like him. James himself felt that the hormones were bringing him to ‘the point of being permanent’.
And so after considering all of these things, unilaterally, and without any support or advice from the doctors who had put him on the hormones, James decided to come off them. He described coming off them as ‘very intense’. The changes it brought about were ‘much more severe’ than when he started on the hormones. He suffered terrible mood swings. And while taking oestrogen made him cry more and change his taste in movies, when testosterone came back into his body it had an equally ‘sexist’ set of effects. He noticed a lot of common behaviours. He became more angry, more aggressive and – yes – far more horny.
Today he has been off hormones for more than two years. But the effects of his time ‘transitioning’ across the sexes is still with him. He thinks he may be ‘just about alright’ but he may also be permanently sterile. More immediate is the fact that he still has breasts, or what he refers to as ‘breast tissue’. When asked about this he shyly pulls aside one side of the top of his T-shirt. There is a strap visible. It is a compression vest that he wears at all times in order to try to hide the fact that he has this breast tissue. His clothes are noticeably baggy and he obviously avoids anything that might be figure-hugging. He thinks he will probably have to have surgery to remove the remaining breast tissue.
With some of the perspective afforded by time he is able to think about his changes over recent years. ‘I do believe transgenderism exists,’ he says. The sheer volume of people who are moving in this direction at the moment is one thing that suggests this to him. But he says the whole area hasn’t been looked at or thought about with nearly enough rigour. The whole idea remains fixed on things, as he puts it, like ‘So you don’t like rugby. Interesting.’ When he told the psychoanalyst in Manchester that he didn’t get on with all the boys at his primary school, the response was, he says, ‘Aha’. As it was when he told them that as a boy he sometimes dressed in his sister’s Pocahontas dress.
‘I’ve always thought it was curious that the NHS didn’t look at wider options,’ he says. And from the moment that he went to consult the experts he ‘felt like I was on a conveyor belt’. The NHS was overstretched, with only two doctors in the UK doing gender reassignment surgery, one full time, one part time. But the doctors were always promising that with around 3,000 people already in treatment and another 5,000 reportedly on the waiting list in the UK, the NHS was busily training up lots more people to deal with the demand. Maybe some patients will hesitate, as James did, when the conveyor belt brings them up to the point of surgery. But even then, as James’s baggy clothes attest, the process is not in any way cost-free.
James is gay – ‘very gay’ as he puts it at one stage. And he feels that he has always been ‘a bit of a social chameleon. Probably the people I was spending time with had an effect.’ But he says, ‘I don’t want to be one of those people who says that trans makes more trans.’ It is too close, in his opinion, to the old claim that gay people cause more gay people. ‘But there is something in it,’ he adds: ‘The thing of “My really cool trans friend”’. He is confused, like everyone else, about what trans may or may not be. ‘If anything, we just need to know more,’ he says. For instance, why is it the case that suicide rates don’t change between pre- and post-op trans? ‘We’re running too quickly,’ he says. ‘It’s like a knee jerk. We’re terrified of being on the wrong side of history.’ But he knows it could have been worse. Looking back at how close he came to surgery, James reflects, ‘I dread to think what position I’d be in now. I don’t know if I would be here now.’
Listening to James’s story – which resembles those of many others – one of the things that stands out is how much we pretend to know, but how little we know. How fast we appear to be landing on solutions to questions we haven’t answered yet. But another thing that stands out is the way in which trans just keeps invading so many of the other controversy-laden subjects of our time.
Gay rights campaigners have argued for years that anybody can be gay and that the historical view of gay people being effeminate men and masculine women is not just outmoded and ignorant, but prejudiced and homophobic. And then along comes another rights claim which is so close that it even gets to share an acronym with ‘gay’. But this one suggests something infinitely more undermining than the idea that certain behavioural characteristics are typical of gay people. The trans claim keeps suggesting that people who are slightly effeminate or don’t like the right sports are not merely gay but potentially inhabiting the wrong body and are in fact men, or women, inside. Given the number of connotations it is surprising that so few gay men and women have objected to some of the claims that have become embedded in the trans movement. Gay groups have generally agreed that trans rights exist within their orbit, forming part of the same continuum and acronym. Yet many of the claims made by trans do not simply run in contravention to the claims of the gay movement: they profoundly undermine them. ‘Some people are gay. Or possibly trans. Or the other way round. Get over it.’
But it isn’t just gay that trans runs against. Rather than ‘unlocking’ the intersections of oppression, as the intersectionalists had claimed, trans simultaneously throws their own movement’s aims into the starkest possible relief and produces a veritable pile-up of logical contradictions.
At Wellesley College in 2014 there was a fascinating case where a student arriving at the all-female college announced that she was a ‘masculine of centre genderqueer person’ who wanted to be known as ‘Timothy’ and expected people to use male pronouns. Despite having applied to Hillary Clinton’s alma mater as a girl, the other students reportedly had no problem in particular with their male-identifying contemporary. That is, until Timothy announced that he wanted to run for the position of multicultural affairs coordinator: the purpose of this role being to promote a ‘culture of diversity’ on the university campus. It might have been expected that a ‘masculine of centre genderqueer person’ might have the perfect scorecard for the position. Except that students at Wellesley reportedly felt that having Timothy in such a position would perpetuate the patriarchy at the college. A campaign got under way to abstain in the election. One student behind the ‘campaign to abstain’ said, ‘I thought he’d do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a white man there.’29
In one way Timothy had gone all the way around the oppression cycle. From woman, to trans, to white man and therefore to the personification of the white patriarchy. From minority to oppressor. Where female to male transitioners can create one pile-up, male to female transitioners produce another of their own – most obviously with people who have been born as women. And on this occasion, unlike the ‘G’ bit of LGBT, the women who feel their turf being trodden over have not all been silent. Indeed, it is this portion of the new intersectional rights alliance that has gone south fastest.
The Feminist Tripwire
The women who have t
ripped on the trans tripwire over recent years have a number of things in common, but one is that they have all been at the forefront of every women’s issue. And this makes perfect sense. For if a significant amount of modern rights campaigning is based on people wishing to prove that their cause is a hardware issue, then trans forces other movements to go in precisely the opposite direction. Trans campaigners intent on arguing that trans is hardware can only win their argument if they persuade people that being a woman is a matter of software. And not all feminists are willing to concede that one.
The British journalist Julie Bindel has been one of the most consistent and hard-fighting feminists in Britain or anywhere else in the world. As one of the founders of Justice for Women she has campaigned since 1991 to help women who have been imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment for killing their violent male partners. As an out lesbian and a lifelong feminist of the pre-third- and fourth-wave variety, Bindel has never kept any of her views to herself. And in the early part of this century she started to notice that people who had been born men and were now demanding to be regarded, and treated, as women (whether they had had any surgery or not) were all over what had been her area – including the most understandably sensitive parts.
In 2002 Bindel was specially incensed by news from Canada where a Vancouver Human Rights Tribunal had ruled that a male-to-female transsexual named Kimberley Nixon should be allowed to train as a counsellor for female rape victims. Indeed, the tribunal had ruled that Vancouver Rape Relief’s refusal to allow Nixon to train for this role had breached her human rights. The tribunal awarded Nixon $7,500 for injury to ‘her dignity’, the highest such amount it had ever awarded. The decision was later overturned by the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver. But for a feminist of Bindel’s generation the idea that even in rape-counselling a woman could not be certain that the female helping them was actually female was a Rubicon that could not be crossed. She let rip, in the pages of The Guardian, defending the Rape Relief sisters who ‘do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman’. She warmed up, ‘For now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.’ Perhaps Bindel knew the world of pain she was getting into, perhaps not. But in the early 2000s it was easier to tread on this landmine than it soon would be. In any case, she rounded off her tirade with a flourish. ‘I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man.’30
For this phrase in particular, and for the article as a whole, Bindel was going to suffer for the rest of her life. In the first phase the newspaper was flooded with letters of complaint. Bindel herself swiftly apologized for the tone of the article. But in the years that followed she found it hard to speak in public without efforts to cancel her speeches or her appearance on panels. When she was allowed to speak, aggressive protests and pickets were often arranged to stop her. Even a decade later she was forced to cancel an appearance on a panel at the University of Manchester after dozens of rape and death threats against her were reported to the police.
Bindel may have been one of the first left-wing feminists to trip the trans wire and suffer the consequences, but she was certainly not the last. In January 2013 Suzanne Moore fired a column off to the left-wing New Statesman magazine about the power of female anger. The column addressed many of the injustices against women that Moore could see, from the patronizing of female members of parliament to attitudes towards abortion and her claim that 65 per cent of cutbacks in the public sector affected women. Unfortunately for Moore, amid this blizzard of points she included the claim about women themselves that ‘We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.’31 If an article could have a puff of smoke over it, then Moore’s was it.
In the real world and the virtual one it was clear that Moore had made a serious error. Among the more printable accusations against her was that she was a ‘transphobe’. Moore did not help matters by responding that, among other things, she did not care for the word. People who were used to beating women down with the accusation were even more furious that their weapon had not worked. Nevertheless, so vociferous and furious was the backlash that within hours Moore was having to ‘clarify’ her views and assure readers that she was not the hate-filled figure she was now called.32 A day earlier she had been a progressive left-wing feminist. Now she was a reactionary hate-filled right-wing bigot. After being hounded by trans people and others accusing her of the most base bigotry, Moore announced that to avoid the ‘bullies’ and ‘trolls’ she was leaving social media.
One of the people who took all this least well was Julie Burchill. The enfant terrible of 1980s journalism, Burchill had developed her reputation not just as a literary stylist but as a literary pugilist. In her own description, the sight of her friend Suzanne Moore being bullied, at risk of losing her job and livelihood for one passing trans reference, was too much for her.
In Burchill’s reckoning Moore was not just a friend but one of the very few other women like her from a working-class background who had made it in journalism. Burchill was not going to allow her ‘homey’ to go down without someone fighting more nastily for her at her side. And so in that Sunday’s Observer Burchill decided to hide Moore’s puff of smoke by producing a mushroom cloud.
Among much else Burchill attacked Moore’s critics for attacking a woman. As Burchill put it, women like her and Moore had had to go through their whole lives as women. They had suffered through period pains, batting off sexual advances from male strangers, gone through childbirth, had stared the menopause in the face and now had the delights of hormone replacement therapy. Women like Moore and her were damned if they were now going to be lectured at or called names by ‘dicks in chicks’ clothing’ and ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’.
The response was instantaneous. The British Home Office minister in charge of ‘Equalities’, Lynne Featherstone, immediately declared that Burchill’s ‘rant against the transgender community’ was not merely ‘disgusting’ and ‘a bigoted vomit’ but something ‘for which the Observer should sack her’. The minister also called for the editor of the paper to lose his job. Duly cowed, the Observer issued an apology for the column and swiftly unpublished it from its website. In the apology issued by the paper’s editor explaining why the paper had chosen to ‘withdraw’ the piece from publication, John Mulholland wrote, ‘We got it wrong and in light of the hurt and offence caused I apologise and have made the decision to withdraw the piece.’ Something which is very nearly unheard of in British journalism. Five years later Burchill herself blamed this episode as one of the reasons why her own career in journalism had ended up, as she put it, ‘up the creek’.33 Meanwhile, though the woman who had called for her sacking, Lynne Featherstone, soon lost her seat in Parliament, she was immediately given a lifetime sinecure in the House of Lords.
The next person to go up the same creek as Bindel and Burchill was perhaps the most famous modern feminist of all. The author of The Female Eunuch had only dealt with trans issues in depth once in her career. In her 1999 book The Whole Woman Germaine Greer devoted a ten-page chapter (‘Pantomime Dames’) to her contention that people who were born men could not be classed as women. Although it wasn’t the main point she was making, she referred in passing to the ‘mutilation’ that ‘transsexuals opt for’. She decried the fact that so many male-to-female transsexuals chose the ‘profoundly conservative’ body shape that she believed reinforced stereotypes. And she was alive to the fact that none of the surgical procedures often talked about so blithely was remotely straightforward. In 1977 the gender clinic at Stanford University had said that its two-stage sex-change procedure in fact required an average of three and a half operations, and that at least 50 per cent of the patients experienced some form of complication, often making
the relationship between surgeons and patient lifelong.34 Greer also put her finger on something that very few other people noticed, but which parents of children claiming to suffer from gender dysphoria soon began to worry about: the fact that the transsexual ‘is identified as such solely on his/her own script, which can be as learned as any sex-typed behaviour and as editorialized as autobiographies usually are’.35
Greer had not pursued the subject in the years that followed. But it took only a decade and a half for her views to become firmly outside the acceptable norm. In late 2015 Greer was due to deliver a lecture at Cardiff University on the subject ‘Women and Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century’. However, a significant number of students didn’t want to hear from the most significant feminist of the late twentieth century. Instead, they lobbied their university with the excommunicating words of their time.
The Madness of Crowds Page 26