Greer’s views on trans issues were, they said, ‘problematic’. She had demonstrated ‘time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women’. Only years earlier it would have been deemed the height of insanity to dismiss Greer as a misogynist. Yet here they were, with the anti-Greer petition organizer describing herself as into ‘lefty queer feminist politics’. These students claimed that among Greer’s crimes was ‘continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether’. Whilst acknowledging that ‘debate in a university should be encouraged’, the petitioners warned that ‘hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalized and vulnerable groups is dangerous’.36
In a subsequent BBC interview about the controversy Greer said, ‘Apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative transgender men are women, I’m not to be allowed to talk. I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure. What I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman. It happens to be an opinion, it’s not a prohibition.’ What is more, as Greer explained, trans issues weren’t even something she talked about much. ‘They’re not my issue. I haven’t published anything about transgender for years.’ But for the trouble of even touching this rail, she said, ‘I’ve had things thrown at me, I’ve been accused of things I have never done or said, people seem to have no concern about evidence or indeed, even about libel.’ Asked whether she would still bother to turn up at Cardiff University she responded: ‘I’m getting a bit old for all this. I’m 76. I don’t want to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me. Bugger it. It’s not that interesting or rewarding.’37
But insulting Greer, and indeed excommunicating her from the latest version of feminism, became a rite of passage for a generation of women who had – whether they knew it or not – benefited from her trailblazing. In Varsity magazine at Cambridge University (Greer’s own alma mater in the 1960s) Eve Hodgson wrote an article headlined ‘Germaine Greer can no longer be called a feminist.’ According to its author, ‘Greer is now just an old, white woman who has forced herself into exile. Her comments are irreparably damaging, reflecting a total lack of regard for trans lives. Thinking what she thinks, she cannot be a prominent feminist any longer. She no longer stands for the same things we do.’38 Just as Peter Thiel was no longer gay and Kanye West no longer black, so Germaine Greer was no longer a feminist.
As the years went on it became clear that this attitude of contempt for one’s forebears was not limited to the universities, but had spilled out everywhere. And the presumption that feminists of Greer’s generation were to be vilified for their attitudes on trans became completely normalized. In September 2018 a stay-at-home mum in the north of England called Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull paid £700 to hire a billboard in Liverpool. The poster she had put up consisted simply of a dictionary definition. In full the poster read: ‘woman: women, noun, adult human female’. Keen-Minshull said that she had paid for the poster because of her concern that ‘woman’ was a word that was ‘being appropriated to mean anything’. But the dictionary definition did not stay up for long. An academic and self-proclaimed ‘ally of the transgender community’ called Dr Adrian Harrop complained to the police that the billboard was a ‘symbol that makes transgender people feel unsafe’.39 In a subsequent television discussion a Sky presenter accused Keen-Minshull of being ‘transphobic’ for putting up the poster. And after Harrop had told off Keen-Minshull for not using his full title of ‘Dr’ when referring to him, he then explained that excluding trans women from a definition of women ‘is not something that is appropriate in a modern and progressive society’.40 Even right-wing and conservative news sites ran stories about Keen-Minshull’s TV appearances, headlining that she had been ‘branded “disgraceful”’ by viewers for ‘insisting’ that trans women are not the same as women.41
Women who tried to hold the boundary of womanhood around women started inviting the same vitriol everywhere. At the ‘London Pride’ event in 2018 a group of lesbian campaigners spoilt the LGBT party by protesting at what they saw as the transgender takeover of the celebrations. The UK gay press accused these women (‘TERFS’) of bigotry and hate speech, and a few weeks later at Manchester Pride there were reportedly ‘loud cheers’ when a gay male MC announced that the protestors in London should have been dragged off by their ‘saggy tits’.42
Amid the no-platforming, threats and silencing, one question which is rarely asked is why feminists of a particular tradition should not object to elements – at least – of the emerging trans argument. The more women get chased away for treading on this terrain the clearer the point of contention becomes. Feminists like Bindel, Greer and Burchill come from the schools of feminism which remain concerned with matters of women’s reproductive rights, the rights of women to escape violent and abusive relationships and much more. They are also women who believed in breaking down the stereotypes over what a woman should be or could be. Perhaps the most obvious point of non-overlap with the trans movement is that in many ways trans does not challenge social constructs about gender, but reinforces them.
Consider a prominent male-to-female transsexual YouTuber like Blaire White, who on becoming a woman (prior to announcing a de-transition late in 2018, in order to father children) adopted the body type of a sort of teenage male fantasy pin-up woman: all prominent breasts, flicking hair and pouting lips. Or consider the other end of the female archetype spectrum. In December 2015 Julie Bindel was finally allowed to speak at the University of Manchester where she appeared on a panel with the trans writer and activist Jane Fae. During Bindel’s speech and at other points in the event Fae sat knitting a purpley-pink garment of some kind. She had brought her knitting with her. Or consider April Ashley, who in one documentary film celebrating her 80th birthday in 2015 was shown going back to her childhood haunts in Liverpool, where she was receiving the keys to the city. Throughout the film it is impossible to throw off a sense that Ashley is auditioning as a stand-in body-double for HM the Queen.43 Despite the vilification that a particular generation of feminists has received for not getting on the trans train, it is never explained why they should. Their language may be colourful when they attack this target – as when they attack other targets – but the accusations of being hateful, dangerous, encouraging violence and even of not being feminists sidestep the legitimate questions they raise. Why should certain feminists feel entirely fine about men who become women only then to either flaunt their perfect breasts, ape the royal family or take up knitting?
The Parents
The late Robert Conquest once adumbrated three rules of politics, the first of which was that ‘everybody is conservative about what he knows best’. And parents, it might be said, know about their children best. One explanation for a recent upsurge in critical questions being asked about the nature of trans is that parents in countries like America and Britain are beginning to worry about what the next generation is being taught. They are also worried about what, in some cases, is already being done.
Parents worry when they hear the San Francisco-based developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft claim that a one-year-old ‘assigned male’ baby who unsnaps a onesie and waves it in a particular way is in fact giving a ‘pre-verbal communication about gender’.44 Unlike parts of the media, parents do not rejoice in a nine-year-old drag queen being given a modelling contract with an LGBT fashion company and telling other children in a viral YouTube video, ‘If you wanna be a drag queen and your parents don’t let you, you need new parents.’45 And they worry when their child’s school allows anyone who says they are the opposite gender to be recognized and treated as such. One parent from the north of England recently described how her 16-year-old daughter came out first as a lesbian and then as trans. When her mother and father attended a parents’ evening they discovered that the school had already been using their daughter’s chosen male name and were using male pronouns to describe her. ‘The school was “fu
ll on affirming”.’46
Advice to schools from the Scottish government is that the parents of a child should not be told if their child wishes to change gender. Elsewhere the Scottish government’s document ‘Supporting Transgender Young People’ suggests that pupils should be able to compete in sports in the gender that they feel comfortable with and that parents should not be informed if their child wants to share rooms with members of the opposite sex on school trips. In other parts of Britain parents have told of going to parents’ evenings where a teacher called their child by the ‘wrong’ gender, only to be told by the teacher, ‘Oh didn’t you know, your son/daughter identifies as a girl/boy.’ This happens at schools which have to get parental permission to issue their child with an aspirin during the school day.
Parents are also becoming familiar with the phenomenon known as ‘clustering’. For example, in 2018 the ‘equality information report’ at one school in Brighton known for its ‘liberal vibe’ had 40 pupils between the ages of 11 and 16 who ‘do not identify as [the] gender presented at birth’. A further 36 pupils said they were gender fluid, meaning that they did not identify with their assigned gender at birth ‘all the time’. One effect of all this is that the UK has seen a 700 per cent rise in child referrals to gender clinics in just five years.47
Of course trans campaigners like the group Mermaids suggest that the clustering and the increase in referrals is happening because some people are simply more aware of the possibility that they are trans than they would have been even a few years ago. But other explanations are at least equally possible. One is the way that trans is portrayed in popular culture – especially online. Another is the increasing number of concessions to any and all trans demands by figures in authority.
In online culture it is not at all unusual for the taking of hormones to be turned into an absurdly easy and consequence-free exercise. On YouTube, Instagram and other sites there are countless people who say that they are trans and who push the idea that you might be too. A single video by Jade Boggess (a female-to-male transsexual) called ‘One year on testosterone’ has more than half a million views on YouTube alone. Another by Ryan Jacobs Flores about the same subject has more than three million views. In such videos testosterone injections become known as ‘T’ or ‘man juice’. Some of these people who are transitioning in real time become celebrities in their own right. Not older figures like Caitlyn Jenner, but bright, bubbly new YouTube stars like Jazz Jennings.
Born a boy in 2000, Jennings began to appear on the media talking about being transgender at the age of six. At the age of seven the child was interviewed by Barbara Walters, who among her other questions asked who the child was attracted to. The promotion of Jennings was unabated. At the age of 11 the Oprah Winfrey Network broadcast a documentary on her called I am Jazz. As a teenager Jennings has received numerous media awards and been put in ‘Most Influential’ lists. There have also been product promotion deals, and the other advantages of fame. The documentary series I am Jazz on TLC is now in its fifth season and continues to make her, her parents and siblings (who all appear on the show) both famous and rich. Season 5 follows Jazz turning 18 and going into her ‘gender confirmation surgery’. On the trolley she clicks her fingers sassily and says ‘Let’s do this.’ The YouTube excerpts alone of ‘I am Jazz’ have received millions of views.
But it is not just the element of popular culture in this that is likely to be having an effect. There is also the willing agreement of medical professionals. On series like I am Jazz it is clear that there are medical professionals perfectly happy to do everything they can to help turn somebody who was born a boy into a girl. It is all part of a slide of acceptance which led the NHS in England to sign an agreement that NHS professionals will never ‘suppress an individual’s expression of gender identity’.48 But despite some healthcare professionals warning about the potential for ‘overdiagnosis and overtreatment’ the assumptions all continue to go in just one direction.
One Family’s Story
This is the experience of just one American parent whose family has had to navigate the trans journey in recent years. To protect the identity of the child I will be deliberately vague about locations and some specifics. But the family were living in one of the big cities of America and have only fairly recently moved to a more rural location. This is where they are when I speak with the child’s mother, who I will call Sarah.
Sarah is, in every way, an average middle-class mom. She cares for her children and like her husband works to support them. She describes her politics as ‘slightly left of centre’. Four years ago, at the age of 13, her daughter announced that she was trans and that she was actually a boy. The daughter had already been diagnosed with a mild form of autism, and had had trouble being accepted by some of her peers. She had trouble picking up on conversational signals. Invitations to play weren’t reciprocated, and her fashion choices weren’t deemed quite right by all of her peers. In time Sarah’s daughter found that boys in her school were slightly more amenable to her than girls. But even then she couldn’t quite get the degree of social acceptance which she wanted. ‘Why doesn’t anyone like me?’ she used to intermittently ask her mother. Trying to make sense of why she was ‘not fitting in with girls’ in particular, she was also trying to work out why she wasn’t fitting in with her peers in general.
Then one day she announced to her mother that she was in fact a boy and that this was the cause of her problems. Sarah asked her what had given her the idea that she was trans. After all, for her family it had all seemed to come on very suddenly. Her daughter said that she had got the idea after a presentation at her school. At this point it emerged that around 5 per cent of the children at her daughter’s school now identified as transgender. They included a remarkably similar range of children, including children who had been diagnosed as having forms of autism and a history of being unpopular or poor at connecting with their peers. Of course her mother wanted to know more. If there had not been any other children at her school who identified as trans, would she have decided that she was a boy? Sarah’s daughter said that no, she wouldn’t have done so because she ‘wouldn’t have known that it was an option’. It was not that she thought she was a boy, but that she was a boy. And what is more, her mother would not be able to understand this, because she was ‘cis’. Sarah had never heard the word ‘cis’ before, let alone been described as it. Sarah’s daughter repeatedly told her mother that ‘trans children know who they are’.
But Sarah was supportive. She agreed to call her daughter by her new, preferred, male name and began to address her using male pronouns. She even introduced her daughter to her friends as her son. Trying to be as supportive as possible, mother and daughter even went on a ‘trans pride’ march together and danced along to Lady Gaga’s ‘Born this way’. Sarah was so supportive that she bought the first binder her daughter needed to conceal her developing breasts. It is hard to see what more a mother could have done.
At the same time, quite understandably, Sarah started to read up online about the whole trans business. It was new to her family’s life and she wanted to get a range of views in order to arrive at some understanding of her own. By Sarah’s own admission, her first impressions of the online debate were not good. A lot of the critical reading online was, she thought, marked by a strain of ‘anti-LGBT’ sentiment. The people who wrote about it often seemed to be what she describes as ‘bigoted or religious’. She had never explored any of this deeply before. She was ‘just concerned about my daughter’. And so Sarah went to speak to some professionals – starting with some gender clinicians.
The first of these told her something which echoes what many other people in her position have heard. The clinician told her that ‘parental acceptance was the first step to prevent suicide’. As with any parent, this was a threat of the worst nightmare imaginable. The doctor clinician also told Sarah that since her daughter had been ‘insistent, persistent and consistent’ in her claims this meant that
her daughter was indeed a boy.
Sarah was not only worried by the words of the professionals but also by some of what her daughter was saying. Whenever Sarah’s daughter described her feelings of gender dysphoria her mother noticed that the words seemed ‘rather scripted’. And to say that the script was manipulative is an understatement. At one stage her daughter issued a list of demands which included blackmail and threats unless these demands were met.
Sarah’s daughter was 13 and a half when she announced that she was trans. At 14 and a half she went to the therapist. And at 15 she was told that she should start taking the puberty blocker Lupron. At each stage it was stressed that it was ‘insulting’ for the mother to question the feelings of her daughter and that as with trans people so with autistic people: ‘Autistic people know who they are’, she was reassured. Even to question this was to be ‘able-ist’. A number of different therapists were approached and eventually mother and child returned to the first one. When Sarah expressed some concerns over the choices being offered to her daughter by the profession, and specifically the idea of her daughter going on puberty blockers, she was told, ‘You have a choice between puberty blockers and the hospital.’ And so at 17 and a half Sarah’s daughter announced that she wanted to transition.
Of course Sarah asked her daughter about whether she really wanted to do this. She stressed the irreversibility of the path down which her daughter was going. Even more irreversible than the hormones was the irreversibility of transitioning. What if – Sarah asked her daughter – after choosing to transition she then felt the need to de-transition? What if having made this change she decided she didn’t want it? Her daughter’s response was, ‘So. I’ll kill myself.’ While no parent should ever take such a threat lightly there does seem to be a pattern to it, as Germaine Greer had claimed much earlier. And not only from the young people, but from some of the medical professionals who are pushing their case.
The Madness of Crowds Page 27