The Gender Critical view — populism re-imagined.
I had originally vowed stay clear of the gender wars between transgender people and the Gender Criticals. The whole debate seemed niche and irrelevant to the daily lives of most people. It kept cropping up though: an article there, a mention here, a bitter argument somewhere else. People I long followed and admired started tweeting about it extensively. And so, I began to listen to the main arguments. Then, I had a sudden realisation: all this was too familiar. I had seen all this before, in the discourse over Brexit and over the presidency of Donald Trump. I have earlier mentioned populism, and populism reared its ugly head in a new setting. Instead of juxtaposing the working class and the liberal elite however, the gender critical view draws a dividing line between women and the said liberal elite.
In the UK, transgender, or trans, people — such as trans men (people born female who transition to be a man) and trans women (people born male who transition to be a woman) have a legal pathway to make their gender change recognised in law. This makes such a person gain ‘all the same rights as other people of his or her acquired gender’ (see here, 3.3). Sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is not a requirement for this legal recognition: nevertheless, the process is complicated and many trans people choose not to pursue it, living in their gender of choice ‘unofficially’. The British government — much like many governments around the world — is being lobbied to make the process more straightforward, even going as far as abolishing it altogether and allowing people to self-identify in their newly acquired gender.
Gender critical people do not wish the process to be simplified and also want to scale back the rights a transgender person enjoys. They feel that trans women pose a threat of harassment and assault in single-sex spaces, such as bathrooms, changing rooms or women’s shelters, places which by the UK law they are allowed to use. They claim that the rights of trans women and cis women are in conflict, especially when the former have not undergone SRS.
However, they also object to the medical transition, especially one undertaken early in life, some going as far as to call it ‘mutilation’. They portray both trans men and women who have had a surgical transition as victims of a ‘craze’, supposedly talked into a procedure they will later regret. It seems that whatever choice transgender people make, it will be criticised.
The interesting thing is not just the arguments, which are covered elsewhere, but the framing. What I am seeing on the gender critical side is a form of populism masquerading as feminism. Traditional populists juxtapose ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, with the said elite usually being left-wing and liberal. The people are assumed good and ‘normal’, and the elite ‘out of touch’, ideological and narcissistic. The elite has supposedly abandoned the people, is deviously working against their interests, oppressing them and taking them for granted. For the gender critical, their equivalent of ‘the people’ are ‘the women’. The ‘elite’ consists of individuals and organisations defending trans rights, accused of misogyny, homophobia and ‘medicalising children’..
The founding myth is that some of the men among the progressives secretely hated women, were supposedly unhappy with newly won women’s rights. They decided to betray women, to put on skirts, infiltrate and subvert womanhood, whilst at the same time attempting to ‘trans’ girls into changing into the male gender. Hence, any objection to this myth, and more generally to the gender critical world view, would get you labelled a misogynist in the same way that a challenge to the Brexiter world view might see one called ‘traitor’ and ‘Remoaner’.
Just like a populist — for instance a hardline Brexiter — speaks as one of ‘the people’, the gender critical often uses ‘we’, often talks as if they represent all of the women, calls themselves women’s rights campaigners as if they are the only ones, always makes accusations of misogyny and ‘throwing women under the bus’, always assumes knowledge of how every woman in the world feels and thinks. The word ‘woman’ is for them a deliberately vague catch-all that allows the speaker to pretend that anyone disagreeing is somehow ‘against women’.
Like any good populist, gender criticals never attempt to check if a significant number of women do in fact agree with their interpretation of trans women as an immediate and major threat. (Polls show that opinion is split). Indeed, such a tiny group of people can hardly be seen as a bigger risk than cis men, whose sexual violence occurs in a variety of settings every single day. Even if one accepts the gender critical argument that ‘trans women are just men’, an obsession over a single fringe group of ‘men’ is a strange way of helping reduce the overall violence faced by women — and so it would be perfectly reasonable for a woman to respond to a gender critical that, statistically, it is very much not trans women who are trying to spike their drink, attack them in the street, in the workplace or at home.
That said, many of the issues that a gender critical would point to are worth supporting. The advent of Laurel Hubbard and Lia Thomas, trans woman athletes able to far exceed the best women of their age groups is a serious problem for women’s sport. There is a concern some male prisoners transition purely in order to serve time in a women’s prison and a further concern that sex offenders may be exploiting the process. There are issues with the rigorous assessment that needs to take place before someone diagnosed with gender dysphoria is advised to embark on a path of puberty blockers and/or surgery, the latter being a massive and life-changing decision. The so-called de-transitioners need to be listened to, to further improve the assessment process and minimise mistakes.
All these are legitimate and valid concerns. It is in the interests of trans and cis people alike that they are addressed. However, for the gender critical, these are not ends in themselves, but merely means to an end. If we offered them, say, restrictions on participation of trans women in sport, rigorous safety assessments in prison and an improved process of assessment before sex reassignment procedures, they would of course welcome those but keep campaigning for further concessions. How do I know this? Well, it is true that the gender critical public figures do pay lip service to respecting transgender people and their rights. However, their fellow supporters on twitter are usually less charitable. They openly call transition the affirmation of a mental illness and trans people predators..The public figures never challenge those comments: it is clear they are comfortable with those sorts of views. And sometimes, the public figures let the mask slip too: witness Australian Sheila Jeffreys openly call transgender people ‘parasites’ or the copious output of the notorious Graham Linehan.
The latter had his Twitter account banned and immediately presented this as ‘censorship’. Like any populist, gender criticals present themselves as victims in adversity, brave warriors fighting against the odds. They constantly talk of being cancelled, shut down and otherwise oppressed — despite their leading lights — Julie Bindel, Sara Ditum, Suzanne Moore, Kathleen Stock and a host of others — having an almost unrestricted access to the pages of the printed and broadcast media. When Stock resigned from Sussex University, she was offered to give her opinion in every newspaper with the exception of the Guardian and Pink News, she was invited on the BBC to tell her story to a sympathetic interviewer. The students who protested against her, the other side of the dispute, were not given a hearing in the media at all. Stock herself had previously succeeded in getting critical articles removed from student newspapers. Her notion of ‘freedom of speech’ seems like a one-way street.
Gender criticals, whilst complaining about being silenced, have a far louder voice than the people at the centre of the debate — the transgender people — who often find themselves talked over and unable to put their side of the argument across. It would be unacceptable to hold a debate about the rights of any other minority whilst allowing so little representation in the debate from that minority’s members, yet this is happening in the case of trans people. Prominent gender criticals can make long posts without mentioning transgender people even once.
The manufactured furore about pronouns is a rehashed version of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ from years gone by. Just like people used simplistic arguments to complain about using the word ‘chair’ instead of ‘chairman’ and about referring to ethnic groups such as the First Nation or African Americans in a way that accommodated that group’s feelings, they now complain about using pronouns, sometimes making extreme comparisons. A gesture of simple respect towards a person’s self-identification is being presented as ‘compelled speech’. In reality, it is the case for all of us that if one doesn’t follow a set of reasonable conventions of, say, a workplace, or a set of basic rules of a profession one might lose their job. If you pointedly disrespect people by using the wrong pronouns, you cannot complain if this is reciprocated and you are shown the door. A show of simple politeness and respect is once again being presented as a ‘freedom of speech’ issue.
Populists imagine their own beliefs as natural, common-sense and self-evident, and those of their opposition as ideological, self-serving and out of touch. Gender criticals portray their opponents as abnormal, exceptional and ‘not like the ordinary person’. They call cis women who object to their discourse handmaidens, showing that, far from fighting misogyny, they are guilty of it themselves. They ape the conservatives in using the word ‘woke’ in a derogatory way. They also copy the negative use of the word ‘activist’, similar to how members of the Tory government and sympathetic journalists used it to refer to critics during the pandemic. Their name for trans allies is ‘TRA’ — ‘trans rights activists’, and it is used in a derogatory fashion much like that other favourite conservative acronym — SJW, the social justice warrior. It is always rather convenient to pretend you are opposing ‘activists’ rather than members of a minority. At the height of the Black Lives Matter protest, their detractors also claimed to be opposing ‘activists’ rather than the rights of black people to be treated humanely by the police.
Gender critical people bristle hard at these comparisons. They loudly protest that they are not Tories, or conservatives, that they are disenchanted liberals and left-wingers ‘standing up for women and girls’. All the while, they talk about how the Tories are now the only party to vote for since the others have ‘abandoned women’ and playing ‘both sides’ arguments. Here is gender critical writer Josephine Bartosch:
We have seen an identical trend among older Leavers — former Labour voters radicalised to vote Leave and then to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 whilst insisting that they ‘voted Labour all their lives’ but are now ‘abandoned by Labour’. Gender critical people might have been on the Left in the past, but, like Leavers, they have been radicalised into abandoning progressive values. Progressivism relies on solidarity, and if you declare one minority to be not worthy of your solidarity, you are merely deluding yourself about being a progressive.
Besides, the core argument of gender criticals — one of trans women posing a danger in women’s spaces — is a conservative one. Conservatives sometimes see members of a minority not as individuals but as sources of risk, risk calculated based on how some perceived group of ‘people like you’ act. So, a Muslim would be considered as a risk because a handful of other members of the group ‘Muslim’ are terrorists and extremists. To a progressive, individual rights are more important than hypothetical scenarios. You are judged more on your own actions and less on some entirely subjective notion of risk that you might pose. There is a belief that the existence of bad people should not affect the freedoms of the good people — to give another example, the fact some cheat the welfare system should not affect the provision of assistance to those in genuine need. Gender criticals’ main argument, consisting of constantly repeating questions such as ‘how do you know which trans women are “genuine” and which are “predators in skirts” ’ is just a rehashed version of ‘how do you know which Muslims are the peaceful ones’ that some hardline conservatives love to pose.
In either case, one points out in vain that, in a liberal society, human rights do carry a risk that some people will abuse them but this is a price we pay for freedom. You will be met with a deluge of anecdotal evidence about the wrongdoing of Muslims and trans women respectively together with ‘how would you feel it if was your mother or daughter’ (claims of defending women and children from members of various minorities being dear to the hearts of the people on the political Right). The ‘freak show’ pictures of trans criminals being passed around are eerily similar to ‘european criminals’ being passed around by Leavers prior to the EuroRef in 2016.
Like conservatives, many gender criticals believe that teachers radicalise the youth. Recently, the US conservatives have accused schools of teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT). Now, CRT does exist and is controversial, but it is only taught at university level. It is not taught in schools. Yet, people flock to school board meetings and angrily demand it to be scrapped claiming that even if teachers don’t explicitly teach CRT, they are somehow ‘influenced’ by it. Gender criticals accuse teachers of ‘promoting a trans ideology’ and ‘transing kids’ — essentially making them want to be transgender. Their activists stand outside various schools ‘making a protest’. The reality is more mundane: children sometimes need to be able to speak to school staff in confidence. If a gender identity is revealed during such a discussion, it is confidential information and should not be divulged. Likewise, a school is required by the government to provide information to children about gender identities and to have a flexible dress code that allows to accommodate children who feel theirs is different from birth sex. Yet, this is spun into blaming the teachers for the fact that more and more children become trans. The narrative of ‘social transition’ — essentially that of children being pushed into transitioning by either peer pressure or institutional pressure — is not dissimilar to one used in Eastern Europe against homosexuals..
Like populists, gender criticals love playing class politics. Brexiters present themselves as ‘the voice of working class’ against ‘the liberal elite’, and the gender criticals are aping this method of attack. Here is Josephine Bartosch again, this time ranting about ‘elites’:
The emphasised distinction is not just cultural — it is class-based. Supposedly, transgenderism is the preserve of the middle class, woke, privileged students whilst the ‘true’ salt of the earth working class is naturally gender critical. Like many other claims, this is never justified.
This is a part of a more general distrust of experts. Gender criticals present their beliefs as ‘reality’, portray them as founded in science and biology. That is, until you point out that gender dysphoria is recognised by science and transition is overseen by medical professionals who have recommended it as the best treatment. Then, it turns out that the only biology they really believe in is of the simplistic high school kind: expert doctors who advocate transition as treatment for gender dysphoria become the enemy. So do lawyers, sociologists, psychologists and any other expert who believes that people’s need to change gender should be recognised. That discourse can smoothly transition into talk of conspiracy, in which a sinister group of powerful people wants to ‘medicalise children’, ‘trans away the gay’ and ‘subvert womanhood’. Occasionally, this spills over into antisemitism.
Like many populists, gender criticals love their conspiracy theories: central to these is the so-called ‘trans lobby’. The internet is awash with stories of ‘big pharma’ colluding with the doctors to medicalise children. Aided and abetted by social media influencers and other assorted ‘wokes’, they, the story goes, create a ‘craze’ which ‘transes’ as many children as possible. Perhaps as a result of believing this, gender criticals react particularly painfully to any promotion of trans people, seeing it as a part of the ‘craze’. A favourite target of the conspiracy theories is the LGBT campaigning group Stonewall, which is assumed to be all but omnipotent within British society, supposedly controlling organisations to conform to ‘the gender ideology’. The default gender critical assumption is that many women trans allies in reality agree with them but are ‘scared of Stonewall’ into silence. The other conspiracies are too numerous to list, many being about trans women themselves — accusations of them lying about their gender identity, being fetishists, of concealing paraphilias such as ‘AGP’, having connections to paedophilia and bestiality, of hating women and wanting to destroy womanhood are rife. Each such theory is backed up by scant, anecdotal evidence, discussing outliers in order to smear all trans people — witness this piece by, again, Josephine Bartosch, making far-reaching conclusions on the basis of one single manipulative man.
A final note: most, if not all, of the ‘traditional’ right-wing populists of the and Trump variety are very much transphobes themselves. To paraphrase a well-known saying, every transphobe is a Conservative, but every Conservative is a transphobe. Not only do conservatives hold transphobic views, they also see it as a wedge issue to play divide and conquer. And British ‘gender critical’ organisations certainly do take advantage of their quite unexpected allies.
The Heritage Foundation, Andy Ngo and Jennifer Bilek are just some of the known Conservative links of prominent gender criticals. It is important to not overstate the case here: there is no evidence this has gone beyond association. And yet, given every other similarity in rhetoric, one has to wonder.