by Laurie Penny
Personally, if I thought that my vagina, which I’ve had since I was born, was my most important feminist accessory, I would let it speak for itself. Unfortunately it hasn’t read much feminist history, and neither, it seems, have transphobic bigots. If they had, they’d understand that taking a stand against violence and gender essentialism is what feminism is all about, and that’s precisely why solidarity with trans people should be the radical heart of the modern women’s movement.
A tipping point has been reached. All over the world, online and in local communities, transsexual men and women are finding their voices, and finding each other. Their struggle for acceptance in a society that still hates and fears those who are different, those who don’t follow the rules of gender and sexuality, is vital to the modern feminist movement. Young activists understand that that’s what feminism is all about, for all of us, men and women, cissexual, transsexual and genderqueer: the fight for equality and freedom of expression in a society that still believes that the arrangement of your genitals at birth should dictate the course of your life. It’s time for cissexual feminists to put hate aside and stand with transsexual women in solidarity.
BEYOND BINARIES
When April Ashley, who in 1960 became one of the first Britons to have sex-reassignment surgery, was asked by reporters if she was born a man or a woman, her answer was always the same: ‘I was born a baby.’ For the full effect, imagine Ashley saying this with a little smile on her perfectly pencilled lips, dignified and demure in the face of the fusillade of stupid questions she has been fielding for more than fifty years. Sadly, Ashley’s point – that not all babies fit into the pink or blue box they were assigned at birth – is taking a long time to sink in.
Now, Germany has announced legislation to allow parents not to record the gender of their newborn if, as is surprisingly often the case, doctors cannot instantly determine what biological sex the wriggling, squalling bundle of growth hormones is.
There are many conditions that can cause a person to be biologically intersex. Stories about the ‘third gender’, about gods and humans who weren’t quite men or women, have been with us for millennia, but there has long been pressure on doctors and parents to ‘fix’ any baby who isn’t obviously either a boy or a girl. This often entails intimate surgery that is performed when the child is too young to consent. Traumatic reports about the effect this sort of procedure can have on kids when they grow up appear routinely in the tabloids – but the question of why, precisely, it is considered so urgent that every child be forced to behave like a ‘normal’ boy or girl is rarely discussed.
Germany’s law, which came into force in late 2013, is just a small step in the long march to equal rights and recognition for intersex, transsexual and transgender people in Europe, a trudge that is beset by bigots on one side and bureaucrats on the other.
The main detractors of the German law oppose the move not on moral grounds but because of the paperwork involved – and look at me not resorting to any national stereotypes about managerial dourness to finish this sentence . . . but what if the paperwork is the problem? What if you’re someone who is literally written out of every form and official document, every passport and bank account application, because society refuses to recognise there are more than two genders?
One in 2,000 babies, or 0.05 per cent of the world population, is estimated to be intersex. That’s 3.5 million people across the globe. That, in case you were wondering, is ten times the population of Iceland. And those 3.5 million are just those who are visibly intersex at birth: some estimates suggest that the correct proportion of human beings whose bodies differ in some way from ‘normal’ male or female, either hormonally or genetically, could be as high as 1 per cent. Some of those people prefer to identify simply as men or as women, but many do not.
The German law will give the right to ‘leave the box blank’ only to those born intersex – but gender identity is about more than biology. According to a 2012 Scottish trans mental health study, about a quarter of transsexual and transgender people do not identify as male or female, and prefer to present as nonbinary, gender-fluid or agendered.
So why aren’t we talking about this more? Why isn’t there a bigger public conversation about intersexuality and life outside the pink and blue binary? I don’t mean drooling ‘true stories’ – I mean level-headed discussion that understands that intersex, transgender and androgynous people are ‘normal’ humans, too, who spend as much time stuck on trains or waiting for trashy crime shows to download as they do considering the contents of their underpants. Why are these matters so rarely taught in schools? Why do so many children – including intersex and transgender kids – grow up believing you have to be a girl or a boy and that there are no other options?
Unfortunately, I know the answer. We don’t talk about it because questioning something as culturally fundamental as the gender binary is risky. It makes people confused and it makes them angry.
For some, the notion of large numbers of people not living as men or women doesn’t morally compute, objective fact and conservative morality never having been the most snuggly of bedfellows. These are often the same people who can be found quoting dubious evolutionary ‘studies’ suggesting there are prehistoric reasons why ‘some girls just like pink’, possibly involving cavewomen and colourful fruit, even though the practice of dressing girls in pink is barely a century old.
The idea that there are only two possible genders and that those genders are rigid and fixed is an organising principle of life in most modern societies. It affects everything, from how we dress to whom we can marry and what work we get to do and whether or not we will be paid for that work. Discussion of conditions such as intersexuality threatens all that. It gives the lie to the gender binary, exposing it as not just flawed, but scientifically inaccurate. And so we carry on shoving intersex and transgender folk to one side and forcing everyone who isn’t ‘normal’ to damn well act that way or face harassment, discrimination and violence, from the playground to the pulpit. Concerned parents of confused children are coerced into picking a sex and sticking to it – but is that for their own good, or for the good of a society wedded to a simple understanding of gender?
To anyone reading this who is intersex – and I know that there will be at least a few – I apologise for how basic this must sound. My sincere hope is that in ten years’ time articles such as this one will look outdated to the point of offence, rather like a column from the 1960s making the stunning observation that, gosh, some men fancy other men and might even like to marry them.
The journey from here to there will probably involve a lot of paperwork – but for millions of people across the world, it’ll be worth it.
ON THE ‘TRANS TIPPING POINT’
I have a colouring book in front of me. It’s called Finding Gender, and it was sent to me by an activist who knows how much I love social justice and felt-tip pens. In the book, a small child and a robot go on marvellous adventures, and children and nostalgic adults get to scribble on their clothes and costumes, their hair and toys. It’s an ordinary colouring book in every respect, apart from the fact that the child isn’t identifiably male or female. Neither is the robot. The person with the crayons gets to decide what they’re wearing, whether they’re boys or girls, or both or neither.
This is how it happens. From dinner-table conversations to children’s books, the lines of gender are being redrawn. Suddenly, transsexual and transgender people – those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth – are everywhere in popular culture. Suddenly, people who are transitioning from male to female, or from female to male, or who choose to live outside the gender binary entirely, are no longer universally portrayed as freaks to be gawped at or figures of fun, but as exactly what they have been throughout human history – real, flesh-and-breath people with feelings and dreams that matter.
In 2014, Time magazine published a cover story titled ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’. The trend-hun
gry American press is toppling over with spurious tipping points, but this one is real, and it’s important. Centuries of marginalisation mean that the statistics are still shaky, but it is estimated that between 0.1 and 5 per cent of the population of Earth is trans, genderqueer or intersex. Whichever way you slice it, that’s millions of human beings. As a species, we have come up with space travel, antibiotics, and search engines so it seems rather archaic that so much of our culture, from money and fashion, love and family is still ordered around the idea that people come in two kinds based roughly on what’s in their knickers.
Something enormous is happening in our culture. In the past three years, and especially in the past twelve months, a great many transsexual celebrities, actors and activists have exploded into the public sphere. Some have taken the brave step of disclosing their trans status after they were already household names, like American presenter Janet Mock, rock star Laura Jane Grace, athlete Fallon Fox, Oscar-winning director Lana Wachowski or activist and former soldier Chelsea Manning. Others have simply become successful without hiding or apologising for their trans status, like sassy British columnist Paris Lees, or actress Laverne Cox, star of Orange Is the New Black, who graced the Time cover as one of a new generation of breakout trans stars.
At the same time, the Internet is making it easier for members of a previously isolated section of the population to find and support one another. Until recently, the threat of violence, coupled with the relatively small visible number of trans people, meant that coming out was a fraught, complicated process. It often meant moving away from your hometown, finding a community in a city, changing your job, your school. Transgender people in isolated or rural areas found it very difficult to make connections with others who might be able to understand their situation and offer advice. A great many trans people waited decades before deciding to transition in public – and some attempted to keep that part of their lives secret for ever, at great personal cost.
The Internet changed all that. Partly because of the Internet, and partly because of a new wave of transgender role models, more and more people are coming out as trans, and they are doing so younger, and their friends and families now have the language to understand what that means. As celebrated trans author Julia Serano told me, ‘The truth is that trans people exist and our lives are fairly mundane. In the US, the number of transsexuals is roughly equivalent to the number of Certified Public Accountants. Nobody views accountants as exotic or scandalous!’
If gender identity is no longer a fixed commodity, that affects everybody. Not just those who are transsexual, their friends, families and colleagues, but everybody else, too. If gender identity is fluid – if anyone can change their gender identity, decide to live as a man, a woman, or something else entirely, as it suits them – then we have to question every assumption about gender and sex roles we’ve had drummed into us since the moment the doctors handed us to our panting mothers and declared us a boy or a girl. That’s an enormous prospect to consider, and some people find it scary.
Changing words changes the world. The word ‘cis’ is both necessary and challenging, because previously, people who weren’t transsexual were used to thinking of themselves simply as ‘normal’. If being cis, in Dorothy Parker’s terminology, isn’t normal but merely common, that changes everyone’s understanding of how gender shapes our lives, individually and collectively.
Of course, ‘cis’ covers a lot of bases. A great many cis people experience gender dysphoria to some degree, and a great many women, in particular, experience the socially imposed category of ‘womanhood’ as oppressive. I’m one of them, and that’s why I believe trans rights are so important to feminism – and why it’s so dispiriting that some feminists have been actively fighting against the inclusion of trans people in anti-patriarchal and LGBT politics. The notion that biology is not destiny has always been at the heart of radical feminism. Trans activists and feminists should be natural allies.
It is increasingly clear that gender is not a binary. Unfortunately, we’re living in society which has organised itself for centuries on the principle that it is, and that everyone who disagrees should be shouted down, beaten up or locked away.
For centuries, it was standard practice to compel anyone who didn’t conform to the rigid roles set out for their sex – from gay and transgender people to women who were too promiscuous, angry or ‘mannish’ – to do so by force and medical intervention. Generations of activism have fought this type of gender policing, but for the transgender and transsexual community, that sort of bullying is still an everyday reality. Trans people are more likely to be victims of murder and assault than any other minority group – recent studies suggest that 25 per cent of trans people have been physically attacked because of their gender status, and hundreds of trans people are murdered every year. Up to 50 per cent of transgender teenagers attempt suicide. That, of course, is what violence and prejudice are designed to do. They’re designed to make people hate and hurt themselves, to frighten them out of being different, to bully and brutalise any perceived threat to the social order out of existence.
Explaining why this is so significant is hard for me, because I’m about as close as you can get to the trans rights movement without being trans yourself. I’ve been associated with trans activism for years, and while I don’t know what it’s like to be harassed, threatened or abandoned for being transsexual, most of my close friends do. Right now, I’m watching the rest of the world begin to understand the community that has become my home, and it is incredibly exciting – but it’s frightening, too, because the backlash is on.
Even as reports come in that the Southern Baptist Convention, an influential American religious lobby, has made it official policy to oppose trans rights, even as the anti-trans opinion pieces mount up, I’m watching my trans friends and colleagues attacked and harassed online, made to fear for their jobs and their safety. With greater visibility, the stakes are even higher – and sadly, some sections of the left, including feminists like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond, have allied with social conservatives to attack trans people as deranged.
Time magazine is correct to call this the ‘new civil rights frontier’. The cultural Right has largely lost the argument on homosexuality. Those who argue against gay marriage and gay adoption are increasingly at odds with social norms, and the type of popular pseudo-religious homophobia that was common in the days of Section 28 sounds more and more frothingly bigoted. But gender and sexuality still need to be policed – and if you can no longer call gay people sinful and expect to be taken seriously, someone else has to be the scapegoat, the ‘other’ against which ‘normality’ is defined.
The time is coming when everyone who believes in equality and social justice must decide where they stand on the issue of trans rights – whether that be the right to equal opportunities at work, or simply the right to walk down the street dressed in a way that makes you comfortable. Those are rights that the feminist and gay liberation movements have fought for for generations, and those who have made gains have a responsibility to stand up for those who have yet to be accepted. If we believe in social justice, we must support the trans community as it makes its way proudly into the mainstream.
5
Agency
You gave up being good when you declared a state of war
Grimes
IF MEN GOT PREGNANT
The seahorse is a fascinating creature. Aside from being evidence that whatever god of creation may have existed was on some truly excellent hallucinogens, seahorses – Hippocampus hippocampus – are a species where the male gets pregnant. Life would be a lot more interesting if human beings had to breed like seahorses. For a start, I highly suspect that the right to terminate a pregnancy would not be under violent attack across the Western world.
In late 2015, an armed misogynist broke into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and killed three people after a stand-off with police. PP is the biggest organisation offering
abortion, contraception and sexual health services in the US, and it has been under sustained attack from conservative activists and politicians who will not rest until abortion is illegal.
Just a few days after that attack, a high court judge in Belfast ruled that abortion might just be permissible in cases of rape, incest or foetal abnormality, which is a huge step forward, considering that women across Ireland are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term in all circumstances. Those who commit the grievous sin of having consensual sex, however, are still on their own, unless they have the funds to travel to England.
There is a pattern here. The concept of women having actual goddamned agency over their lives and bodies, the idea that we might get to decide when, whether and how to have children, is still a threat to the status quo. We grudgingly allow women to make decisions related to sex and reproduction as long as they feel an appropriate degree of guilt, and hoard that guilt away in private. Have an abortion? You’d better be sorry about it for the rest of your life. Get pregnant without a partner? Be prepared to spend eighteen years explaining yourself. Leave paid work to have a child? You’re lazy, spoiled and frivolous. Carry on working after your kids are born? You’re cold, selfish. Get sterilised? You’re an unfeeling, unnatural monster. Whoever you are, if you have a uterus and dare to make a decision about what comes out of it, shame on you. Shame is the overarching theme here, shame and scorn for anyone with the temerity to behave as if their own humanity is important.
I am sick of explaining to misogynists that women are people whose choices and autonomy matter. Instead, let’s go back to considering the seahorse. Consider how different the world would be if the people with the capacity to bear children were the people society already considered fully human. Consider what would happen if men got pregnant.
