‘Decent people stand up for us.’ Photo: by kyle-kx on Unsplash
Sex symbols: Abigail Maxwell asks Friends to stand up for transgender people
‘The answer is to celebrate gender diversity.’
In 2021, Yearly Meeting minuted, ‘We seek to provide places of worship and community that are welcoming and supportive to trans and non-binary people who want to be among us. Belonging is more than fitting in.’
A culture war is being waged against trans people. The government works to take our rights away, and spread fear of us. Trans people are frightened of transition, or being known to be trans. So the minute does not require vaguely benevolent feelings, or a lack of active hostility. It requires, for example, use of our pronouns, including singular ‘they’. It requires you to value our unique individuality, and challenge transphobia wherever you see it. You need a basic knowledge of trans rights, and what is transphobic. Transphobia is any expression of fear, disdain, or erasure of trans people, or any statement promoting those feelings, or attacking or diminishing trans rights.
The news media carries hideously transphobic articles. The Times, for example, has published many articles praising anti-trans campaigners, minimising trans rights, and demonising trans people. To have trans rights and recognition discussed in the same conversation as the rapist Isla Bryson has been horrific for trans people. She should be punished for her crimes, but not for being trans; all prisoners should be kept safe and treated with some dignity. Newspaper reports initially deadnamed Brianna Ghey. There have been vigils and memorials for her around the country. Decent people stand up for us, and if they don’t understand words like ‘deadname’, ‘misgender’ or ‘microaggression’, they should look them up.
There have been trans people as long as there have been people. The Maxims of Ptahhotep, from around 2400 BCE, advise ‘Do not sleep with a lady-boy’. Any suggestion that trans is new, or a fad, is transphobic. It seeks to minimise and deny our reality. Similarly, any suggestion that a man wakes up one day and decides to be a woman is transphobic. I agonised for years before deciding to transition. I know people who are agonising like that today.
Trans people exist. I have no idea why, any more than a lesbian might know why she is attracted to women rather than men, but I have a settled desire to present female, expressed over twenty years. There are trans people, whatever gender stereotypes are in force. So trans is not an ideology, and any suggestion that it is, is transphobic. Pretending that human sexual dimorphism is relevant is transphobic: I am a woman.
Language and culture should serve people, not some mythic rationality that crumbles as soon as it is examined. Most of the differences between men and women are entirely cultural, or greatly magnified by culture. To treat trans women as women, and trans men as men, enables us to thrive, and liberates everyone.
Any adjustments to keep people safe should take account of trans needs. Because of male violence, women need women-only services: rape crisis centres, loos and changing rooms. But working to ensure that absolutely no trans women ever use those services does not advance cis women’s rights, and turns trans lives upside down. A ban on trans women reinforces gender stereotypes. Women judged as having masculine appearance are challenged in women’s loos more than trans women. The demand to exclude all trans women, however expressed (sometimes using the term ‘sex-based rights’, or calling services that might admit a trans woman ‘mixed sex’) is transphobic.
Will male predators take advantage of gender recognition? Will they pretend to be trans in order to enter women’s services? A sex offender seeking gender recognition to enter women’s services would indicate premeditation of the crime, and would be the additional offence of fraud. It has not been a problem in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, or Uruguay, and now Spain has instituted self-declaration. Sex offenders do not need gender recognition to commit crime.
Excluding trans women because some are criminals is like excluding Scots, or left-handers, because some are criminals. Treat us as individuals. Seeing us as a threatening group is transphobia.
Meeting houses will rarely have separate women-only services, and it will be rarer still for there to be any objection to a trans woman in a women’s loo. Any such objection should be discerned in a Meeting for Worship for church affairs, taking full account of trans women’s needs. Meeting houses should not let rooms to groups that fearmonger about trans people, attack trans rights, or exclude trans women from women’s services.
Trans is not a mental illness. We should not need to see a specialist psychiatrist for gender recognition. But we grow up in a transphobic society, and suffer internalised transphobia – a sense that our needs or feelings are unreal, wrong, or unimportant. The acceptance of others helps with this.
Gender recognition (GR) is mostly symbolic in the UK. Trans people can get a passport and driving licence showing their true gender, and use gender-appropriate services, without a GR certificate. Harriet Harman, who drafted the Equality Act, says GR does not affect whether trans women can use women’s services. Its main effect on my life is making it more likely that my death certificate will give my true gender. From the day we decide to transition, which may be the first day we express ourselves in public, we are entitled to use services for our true gender, unless there is a good reason in an individual case to exclude someone. The Court of Session decided that if a trans man says he’s a man, he is telling the truth. Denying all this is transphobic.
Many of us say we knew from early childhood that we were trans. Studies showing that trans children ‘desist’ – later change their minds – are outdated. The word ‘desistance’ implies that trans is a bad thing, like desisting from criminality. Using it is transphobic. Those studies arise from the last century, when a child might be referred to a gender clinic for breaching gender stereotypes. Now, they are referred if they express a consistent desire to transition; few detransition. The harm done to a trans child by forcing them into the wrong puberty is as great as to a cis child mistakenly given treatment. Out of millions of children in the UK, only a few hundred a year have ever had puberty blockers. Paediatric endocrinologists and psychologists are entitled to an opinion on this. Anyone else objecting to medical treatment for children should show some humility.
One of the tragedies of the anti-trans campaign is that many female anti-trans campaigners are traumatised by male violence and particularly distant from gender stereotypes. They often resemble people who identify as nonbinary. Gender is strongly policed by society. Gender-variant people are tempted to insist that their own way of dealing with gender variance is the only acceptable way. So we are set against each other. The answer is to celebrate gender diversity, and all ways of expressing it.
The courage to transition, and express one’s true self, is a beautiful expression of the inner light.
Comments
Are trans women allowed in women’s services? The best guide is the EHRC code of practice, https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/services-public-functions-and-associations-statutory-code-practice
Trans people are entitled to use services for our correct gender from the moment we decide to transition, if expressing that gender. Any exclusion must be “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”- not discriminatory in itself. Any exclusion “must be applied as restrictively as possible and the denial of a service to a transsexual person should only occur in exceptional circumstances.” (para 13.60).
The hate campaign is at the heart of government. Kemi Badenoch, Minister “for” women and equalities, proposes to stop recognising gender recognition in countries which do not require a psychiatric diagnosis. 190 people in 13 years claimed UK recognition of their foreign gender change. Badenoch foments fear of the Scary Trans in women’s loos, and bends the UK civil service to research foreign gender change systems, with an entirely mythical threat. It is not worth the time of the Parliamentary written statement, but she wanted to make people fear us, and roll back LGBT rights.
By Abigail Maxwell on 2nd March 2023 - 8:32
I will try to be brief though Abigail Maxwell’s article raises dozens of issues, and offers no evidence to substantiate those claims. I risk being labelled as transphobic but I can only speak plainly.
I wouldn’t offer appetite suppressants to someone with anorexia, nor offer them liposuction so that their outward appearance matched their ‘authentic self’.
The vocabulary of the trans community is filled with euphemisms that mask truths and betrays Quakers’ oldest testimony, to truth. Sex is not ‘assigned at birth’, it is observed at birth. ‘Gender affirmation’ is conversion therapy targeting confused and vulnerable children, often with serious mental problems. ‘Gender reassignment surgery’ includes genital mutilation and castration. ‘Top surgery’ is the removal of a woman’s breast so she will never be able to breastfeed.
Insisting on access to women-only spaces and services opens the doors to sexual predators.
Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones condemn people to lifelong and irreversible ill-health.
In recent months I have waded through hundreds of tweets, and watched hours of videos, and I’ve read several books including.
Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes
Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce
I am not an anti-trans campaigner, until my retirement I was a child protection officer – that is my starting point: Firstly, do no harm.
By Ol Rappaport on 2nd March 2023 - 15:56
Transphobia is not “plain speech”, but lack of empathy. Thank you, Ol, for demonstrating transphobia is in our meeting houses.
Anti-trans campaigners compare top surgery to radical mastectomy, but the difference is the purpose. Mastectomy is done when unavoidable, and it is a loss. Top surgery enables people to be themselves. A woman told me she had a lot of fun with penises, but would not want one of her own. There’s the empathy. Nor would I.
The revulsion in Ol’s comment is clear transphobia. If trans women in women’s services “opened the door to sexual predators” it would have happened by now, as the EHRC statutory guidance explains that trans women have that right now here, and the countries listed have self-declaration. But that is still asserted, contrary to the evidence. It is an assertion designed to trigger and terrify: plain transphobia. And much of the public transphobia around use of women’s services (not Ol’s specific comment) revolves around scary penises in women’s loos. The transphobes’ insistence on surgery makes us more likely to get it.
Like other conspiracy theorists, transphobes multiply detail without knowledge. Ol has consumed books and videos, but perhaps not The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye, or Philosophy Tube.
By Abigail Maxwell on 3rd March 2023 - 7:47
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