Is that also the case with some young people who say they are trans? Almost certainly. Yet there is no clear way of knowing to whom this applies and to whom it may not – or who should be encouraged to gravitate towards medical intervention and who should be strongly urged to stay clear of it. Even Johanna Olson-Kennedy has conceded that most individuals who identify as transgender do not have any sex development disorder.
The move to present the answers of hormones and surgery in a radically simplistic light will certainly persuade a number of people that the problems in their lives can easily be solved by addressing this one fundamental misunderstanding. It may have worked for Jazz Jennings so far, and it may have worked for Caitlyn Jenner. But it did not remedy the troubles of Nathan Verhelst, if anything could have done. The problem at present is not the disparity, but the certainty – the spurious certainty with which an unbelievably unclear issue is presented as though it was the clearest and best understood thing imaginable.
Conclusion
The advocates of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality suggest that we live in societies which are racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They suggest that these oppressions are interlocked and that if we can learn to see through this web, and unweave it, we can then finally unlock the interlocking oppressions of our time. After which something will happen. Precisely what that thing is remains unclear. Perhaps social justice is a state which once arrived at remains in place. Perhaps it requires constant attention. We are unlikely to find out.
Firstly, because the interlocking oppressions do not all lock neatly together, but grind hideously and noisily both against each other and within themselves. They produce friction rather than diminish it, and increase tensions and crowd madnesses more than they produce peace of mind. This book has focused on four of the most consistently raised issues in our societies: issues which have become not just a staple of every day’s news, but the basis of a whole new societal morality. To raise the plight of women, gays, people of different racial backgrounds and those who are trans has become not just a way to demonstrate compassion but a demonstration of a form of morality. It is how to practise this new religion. To ‘fight’ for these issues and to extol their cause has become a way of showing that you are a good person.
Of course there is something in this. Allowing people to live their lives the way they wish is an idea which reveals some of the most cherished attainments of our societies – attainments which are still disturbingly rare worldwide. There remain 73 countries in the world where it is illegal to be gay, and eight in which being gay is punishable by death.1 In countries across the Middle East and Africa women are denied some of the most basic rights of all. Outbursts of inter-racial violence occur in country after country. In 2008, 20,000 people fled back to Mozambique from South Africa after riots by South Africans against Mozambicans in the black townships left dozens dead and thousands homeless. Nowhere in the world are the rights of trans people to attempt to live their lives the way they wish more protected in law than in the developed West. All of these things can be celebrated as achievements that have come about because of the system of law and the culture of rights. But there is a paradox here: that the countries which are most advanced in all of these attainments are the ones now presented as among the worst. Perhaps it is just a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum on human rights: that claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country. You do not hear of such violations in unfree countries. Only a very free society would permit – and even encourage – such endless claims about its own iniquities. Likewise, somebody can only present a liberal arts college in America or a dining experience in Portland as verging on the fascist if the people complaining are as far away from fascism as it is possible to be.
But this spirit of accusation, claim and grudge has spread with a swiftness that is remarkable. And it has not only to do with the arrival of new technologies, even though we are only one decade into the era of the smartphone and Twitter. Even before this, something had been going wrong in the language of human rights and the practice of liberalism. It is as though the enquiring aspect of liberalism was at some stage replaced with a liberal dogmatism: a dogmatism that insists questions are settled which are unsettled, that matters are known which are unknown and that we have a very good idea of how to structure a society along inadequately argued lines. This is why the products of rights are now presented as the bases of rights even though these bases form such unstable entities. If only this liberalism could allow a dose of humility to be injected where the certainty has prevailed. For this form of dogmatic, vengeful liberalism may, among other things, at some stage risk undermining and even bringing down the whole liberal era. After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not.
The flaws in this new theory of, and justification for, existence require identification because the pain that is going to continue to be caused if this intersectional train keeps on running is immeasurable. The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know. The foundations are that anyone might become gay, women might be better than men, people can become white but not black and anyone can change sex. That anyone who doesn’t fit into this is an oppressor. And that absolutely everything should be made political.
There are enough contradictions and confusions here to last a lifetime. Not just at certain points, but from their absolute fundamentals. What are gay or straight men and women to make of the claims of those who would attribute different genders to children other than those assigned at birth? Why should a young woman who displays tomboyish characteristics be viewed as a pre-op female-to-male transsexual? Why should a little boy who likes to dress up as a princess be a male-to-female transsexual in waiting? The claims of gender experts about those who are pop tarts in the wrong packaging may themselves be the ones whose packet-reading abilities are all wrong. It has been estimated that roughly 80 per cent of children diagnosed with what is now called gender dysphoria will find that this problem resolves itself during puberty. That is, they will come to feel at ease with the biological sex they were identified as being at birth. A majority of these children will grow up to become gay or lesbian as adults.2 How should lesbian women and gay men feel about the fact that decades after they came to be accepted for who they were a new generation of children who would grow up to be gay or lesbian are being told that their feminine traits make them women and their masculine traits make them men? And what are women to make of this? After years of establishing what their rights were as women, to be told what their rights are – including their right to speak – by people who were born male?
These claims do not intersect, they derange
Contrary to the claims of the advocates of social justice, these categories do not in fact interact well with each other. The oppression matrix is not a great Rubik’s cube waiting for every square to be lined up by social scientists. It consists of a set of demands which do not work together, and certainly not at this pitch.
In 2008 Advocate magazine was campaigning against Proposition 8, which would overturn the possibility of gay marriage in the state of California. In its quest to continue campaigning for same-sex marriage the front page of America’s most prominent gay magazine in November 2008 read: ‘Gay is the new black’. The claim did not go down well among black Americans. Any more than did the front-page story’s sub-heading: ‘The last great civil rights struggle’. Even the addition of that old journalistic get-out, the after-the-fact added question mark, did not dampen the criticism.3 As one critic put it, the ‘gay is the new black’ argument was offensive for – among many other listed reasons –
‘the complete disconnect between same-sex “marriage” and anti-miscegenation laws’.4 Whenever it looks as though such controversies and comparisons may be superseded, and all the rights demands and achievements may all exist in harmony, similar rows break out.
Sometimes this is because someone asks the wrong question. In the aftermath of the Rachel Dolezal affair the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia ran a piece by an untenured academic called Rebecca Tuvel. She raised a most interesting question. Comparing the treatment of Rachel Dolezal with the treatment of Caitlyn Jenner, she questioned whether if we ‘accept transgender individuals’ decision to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races’. This argument did not go down well. In terms of logical consistency Tuvel had a very good point: if people should be allowed to self-identify why should that right stop at the borders of race and not at the borders of sex? But in terms of the current mores she could not have been in a worse place. Black activists, among others, mobilized against the piece. A petition was organized against Tuvel, an open letter was signed, and one of Hypatia’s associate editors was among those denouncing her. The publication was accused of allowing ‘white cis scholars’ to take part in arguments which exacerbated ‘transphobia and racism’.5
The fall-out in the world of this little-known feminist journal was such that within a very short space of time Hypatia apologized for ever publishing the piece, the editor resigned and the directors of the magazine were all replaced. Tuvel herself begged that she had written her piece ‘from a place of support for those with non-normative identities, and frustration about the ways individuals who inhabit them are so often excoriated, body-shamed, and silenced’.6 But the ‘extension of thinking’ which she pleaded was her sole aim was clearly not welcome. If Rebecca Tuvel had watched Rachel Dolezal on The Real in 2015 she would have had an answer to her question. The women of colour on that show made it clear to Dolezal that trans-racialism was not acceptable because a person who had grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like. They could not have had the same experiences.7 This was the point that the second-wave feminists were making at the same time about the transsexuals. But an argument that had worked with race had not worked for women.
Sometimes the problem develops because somebody has asked the wrong, or awkward, question. And at other times it is because the person who is being lined up to make matters nice and neat turns out to be a messy and complex human being.
In October 2017 the British magazine Gay Times announced its first BME editor, Josh Rivers (this was in a month when BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] had not yet been replaced by the longer, now more acceptable, acronym: BAME [Black Asian and Minority Ethnic]). Rivers lasted three weeks. Shortly after the announcement Buzzfeed chose to do a trawl of his Twitter history and found yet another person with a long online trail of hostages to fortune. From 2010 to 2015 Rivers had made a number of comments to his two thousand followers that Buzzfeed warned ‘would shock many readers’.
Rivers was not very anti-racist. In fact he seemed to have a particular issue about Jews and did not like Asians very much. Others – including Africans and particularly Egyptians – came in for worse. He called Egyptian men ‘fat, smelly, hairy, cunty-face, backward rapists’. He disliked people who were fat, people who were working class and people who he called ‘retards’. Lesbians were another object of his considerable ire. And his views on transsexuals was especially unenlightened. In 2010 he had told one person ‘Look here tranny. 1) You look like a crackhead 2) YOU’RE A TRANNY & 3) your wig doesn’t deserve a mention. Avert your eyes, honey.’8 This tweet was given a health warning by another gay publication which was un-gleefully writing up the whole affair. This tweet was, they warned readers, ‘particularly horrific’.9
Gay Times carried out a swift ‘investigation’ of their own and within 24 hours announced that their first BME editor’s employment had been terminated with immediate effect and that all his previous articles had been removed from the website. The magazine ‘does not tolerate such views and will continue to strive to honour and promote inclusivity’, they promised.10 Some weeks later Rivers apologized for the content of his earlier tweets, and also explained his own interpretation of these events in an interview. The feedback to his tweets had, he said, been ‘racialized’. He continued, ‘White feedback has been: Ha ha! Ha! Ah ha! And it’s so – it’s actually that cut-and-dry. Black and white, as it were!’11 For him, criticism over his racist tweets was itself in fact racism.
Similar disappointments mount in all directions. When male-to-female transsexuals are allowed to participate in women’s sports the results often go dead against the idea of parity between the sexes. In October 2018 the women’s world championship at the UCI Masters Track World Championship in California was won by male-to-female transsexual Rachel McKinnon. The woman McKinnon beat into third place, Jen Wagner-Assali, called McKinnon’s victory ‘unfair’ and demanded a rule change from cycling’s international body. But the idea that male-to-female transsexuals in any way threatened the participation of women in sports was dismissed by the winner as ‘transphobic’.12
This row rumbles along. When Hannah Mouncey had trouble getting nominated in the Australian women’s handball team she said it sent a terrible message to women and girls about their bodies. According to Mouncey it said ‘If you’re too big, you can’t play. That is incredibly dangerous and backward.’ Mouncey was the only transgender woman in the squad and the disparity in her size was not slight. The team photo of the Australian women’s handball team with Mouncey in it looked like a team of handball players with one very large male rugby player at the back. Was this more size-ism? Is it backwards to notice it? As it is to comment on the advantage somebody born a man – like Laurel (born Gavin) Hubbard – has in women’s +90KG weight-lifting competitions?
In 2018 an 18-year-old called Mack Beggs won the Texas girls’ Class 6A 110lbs division wrestling title for the second year in a row. Beggs is transitioning from female to male and is taking doses of testosterone. Press write-ups of Beggs’ victories have tended to focus on the boos from some members of the crowd as another female opponent is beaten, as though bigotry and small-mindedness are the real problem here. But a remarkable self-deception is being sustained. After all, in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds to prevent someone from competing – unless, it turns out, the person is taking testosterone to transition to the opposite sex. In which case sensitivity overrides science. As always, it gets worse.
One precept not just of feminism but of any decent, civilized society, is that men should not hit or beat up women. And then the world turns its face away from the discovery that in a variety of contact sports people who were born men are now regularly beating women to the ground. In Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighting this controversy has been building for several years. The case of Fallon Fox is the most famous. Having been born a man, married, fathered a child and joined the Navy, Fox came out as trans in 2013, at the start of her time competing as a woman. As one board-certified endocrinologist (Dr Ramona Krutzik) explained it, Fox’s advantages included the bone density she had accrued from her time as a man, the muscle mass she will have accrued from those years and the testosterone imprint on the brain which does not go away through taking androgens or having surgery. All this could give Fox not just a physical edge but also a potential aggression edge.13
As MMA expert and podcaster Joe Rogan pointed out, ‘there is a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate . . . There’s a difference in the shape of the hips, the size of the shoulders, the density of the bones, the size of the fists.’ And this is a sport where, as Rogan put it, the objective is very clear: ‘Beat the fuck out of the other person in front of you.’ Yet even questioning whether someone with the physical advantages of having been born male should be allowed to floor women in front of a live audience produces the strong
est possible objections. As Rogan later put it, ‘People came down on me harder than anything that I’ve ever stood up for in my life. Never in my life did I think there was going to be a situation where I said “Hey, I don’t think a guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the shit out of women” and then people were like “You’re out of line”. But that’s literally what happened.’14
If a growing awareness of people’s differences was meant to unlock some grand system of justice, or allow interlocking prejudices to free everyone up, then even at this fairly early stage the process has produced more problems than it has solutions, and more exacerbation than healing. The casting wars continue to turn colour-blindness on its head and make everybody colour-obsessed, while ignoring other characteristics has become a part of the problem. Everywhere the custom grows that people have no right to portray someone they are not. Having survived the attacks for playing an Asian woman’s consciousness inside a white android in Ghost in the Shell (2017), Scarlett Johansson had the bad luck to be cast the following year as a 1970s crime boss in Rub & Tug. But the real-life character she was to portray had been trans and the actress Johansson would only have been impersonating a trans woman, so after criticism she withdrew from the role. Even those places which raised questions about this direction of travel found themselves in the line of fire. The financial news website Business Insider originally published an opinion piece defending Johansson from being ‘unfairly criticised for doing her job’, but it swiftly unpublished the article once the backlash against Johansson got under way.15 That same year there were calls to boycott a film starring the gay actor Matt Bomer. The calls for a boycott came not from some fringe church but from people complaining that a ‘cis white actor’ – even a gay one like Bomer – playing a trans woman was an ‘affront’ to ‘the dignity of trans women’.16
The Madness of Crowds Page 29