What would a revolutionary gender politics be? I don't have a clear answer, but certainly the area is one where there aren't many clear arguments of much use. The recent debacle involving Stonewall and Julie Bindel does allow us though to think about where to start.
Julie Bindel’s nomination for the Journalist of the Year prize (which she didn’t win) at the Stonewall awards this month ignited a storm of controversy, with many within the broad 'LGBTQ community’ outraged at the organisation’s recognition of a commentator with a long record of writing which they see as ridden with ‘transphobia’. This led to a colourful demonstration outside the event, and a not so colourful counter demonstration by the 'Julie Bindel fan club'.
Bindel, the Guardian’s stable ‘radical feminist’ has come up here before. Her stance on prostitutes organising was used as an example of moralistic thinking precluding effective action in this blog entry. Clearly, as a self-described ‘good liberal’ she is pretty far from any kind of anarchist/libertarian communist position, and so we shouldn’t expect much from what she writes – interesting as it is in showing how much ‘radical’ feminism in actual practice translates into simple radical liberalism, unable to go beyond various forms of civil rights activism. Her writing on transgender issues is pretty sloppy too, and the opposition to her 'transphobia' centers around two main and contradictory arguments she has made over the past few years:
1. Gender reassignment treats gender as an internal biological condition when it is not, and therefore surgically altering the genitals of transsexuals is the mutilation of gays or lesbians who identify with aspects of the ‘wrong’ gender and who are attracted to those of the same birth gender.
2. Transsexual women are not ‘real’ women, should not be treated as such, and should not receive support as such.
The first argument comes up in a number of articles, such as this, in which Bindel writes: ‘Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?’ Claiming that ‘sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation’, she argues that ‘my concerns about the increasing acceptance of "transsexuality” as a diagnosis are based upon my feminist belief that it arises from the strong stereotyping of girls and boys into strict gender roles.’
Though of course containing its own moral assumptions in seeing choosing to alter the genitals as “mutilation”, this argument is reasonably straightforward.
The second argument was used in some of Bindel’s earlier and most controversial articles on transsexuality, in particular an article from 2004 on the case of Kimberly Nixon, a male-to-female transsexual who had a human rights ruling in her favour in Canada overturned – the woman in question had been turned down employment from a rape counselling centre on the grounds that she wasn’t a ‘real’ woman: ‘The arrogance is staggering: having not experienced life as a "woman" until middle age, Nixon assumed "she" would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.’ She then, contradictorily, argues that genders ‘...are not real. We play at them. We develop traditional masculine or feminine traits by being indoctrinated, not because we are biologically programmed to behave in those ways.’
In which case it would be impossible to make claims about who is a ‘real’ woman or not. If it is the experience of ‘being’ a woman, then for Bindel’s argument to work you would have had to have been a ‘woman’ from birth, living some shared experience that possession of a ‘natural’ vagina entitles you to irrespective of real divisions (as if a cleaner and Deborah Mearden share any meaningful commonality despite both having vulvas, much the same as if a Muslim postal worker and a Muslim entrepreneur have any meaningful commonality as part of the ‘Muslim community’); having lived as a ‘male’ (with a real cock), however this played itself out, at whatever point in your life would disqualify you. Moreover this experience of being a ‘real’ woman is only accessible to those born as such, meaning it isn’t acted because in order to work it comes down to 'natural' genital endowment. This contradicts her arguments about not accepting arbitrary, institutionalised binary sexual identities, and clearly just dresses up her own gender essentialism.
She is right about one thing though: feminism’s most vital insight and argument was to decentralise the production of gender from a given biological ‘fact’ to a contingent social relationship. Gender is acted out through norms of behaviour, speech and comportment. Interpretations of this run from the fairly general acceptance that gender and sex are two different things - biological sex being the material facts of the body, gender being the roles and behaviours assigned to binary categories of people - to more radical analyses which criticise the ways in which biological sex is already a gendered category, seeking to understand the way in which sexual organs, hormonal differences, height and the rest to have meaning within a binary gender discourse in the first place.
But either way, gender must be understood as something which is learned and acted, and that a society that we’d want to live in would involve the dismantling of binary gender identities.
It is this argument which seems to be causing so much anger in the transgender community. Ultimately it comes to clash with the underpinnings of much trangender activism. Gender reassignment surgery does reify gender, it seeks to objectify and materialise a social relation. The argument that sex change surgery makes you a man or a woman is clearly reactionary – the belief that surgery makes you more of a woman is reactionary whether it is a transsexual or Katie Price doing it. And here is the controversy. Lefties of many varieties who will criticise cosmetic body modification as the attempt to make bodies fit into binary, ideal gender types when ‘natural’ women have it done will see the same argument applied to the modification of the body by transgender people as ‘transphobia’. It is not a coincidence that gender-reassignment surgery is supported by fatwa and easily available in Iran, whilst having sex with someone with the same genital arrangement is punishable by death, as the setup there reifies heterosexist, binary gender norms.
What matters, then, is the practical implications of the best insights of feminist theory. Clearly, the violence and intimidation transgender people routinely face is unconscionable. But the question again boils down to the contradictions between the politics of affirmation and the politics of negation. This may at first seem strange. As Slavoj Žižek amongst others has argued, the difference between the politics of oppressed and marginalised groups seeking to defend themselves and the politics of class struggle is that class struggle seeks as its end point the abolition of class. “Class pride” is a reactionary concept, and though class relations can and do express themselves through communities and class identities, if class struggle is to be part of a revolutionary project rather than the affirmation of the working class within capitalism then it must abolish capitalism and with it abolish class. Class is furthermore a material position within capitalism – those who have nothing to sell but their labour and who must work for the money necessary to live, those dispossessed of ownership of capital and who must sell their labour time and labour power to those who have or administer it. It is not a sociological category, but a condition and a social relation. The struggles of women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians insofar as they are organised around the marginalised group must struggle for recognition of various kinds. But this, as so often, is an oversimplification. The various marginalised roles are themselves constituted within the process of their marginalisation – and though the material proletarian condition which is the prerequisite for capital accumulation is demonstrable in a different way to the constitution of various marginalised identities, we can still see the issue in terms of affirmation or negation: in the case of gender, either liberal feminism’s affirmation of women as bourgeois subjects with equal legal standing, or the radical project of the negation of gender binaries and with it gender identity.
So what would this look like in practice? I don’t pretend to have the answers. In the case of negating the proletarian condition, the answer is relatively straightforward: the direct communisation of the means of production, the abolition of wage labour and the replacement of the state by the construction of real human community through linked councils. Gender cannot be negated in the same way, though the same processes of seizure and transformation growing out of class antagonism. Its fairly easy to imagine that a society where the production of the entire social environment is no longer alienated would allow for a new kind of society and more radical possibilities, but its not enough to talk abstractly of revolution as being the cure-all we must invest our faith in.
But we do know where it can’t start – certainly not from the reification of binary gender identities. The task must be to destabalise and desacralise gender, and this cannot be done whilst upholding a belief in the ability to “match” bodily organs to gendered behaviour. The critique of gender cannot be held back because it offends the sensibilities of marginalised groups, and whilst we recognise the difficulties transgender people face, we can’t let those difficulties be an excuse to suspend critical thought.
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Well, trans politics stands at the intersection of several other issues. Of course, these include different views of bio sex, gender roles, and sexuality, as well as medicine, psychology, and body modification - cf. the breast enlargement and limb removal analogies.
I think we share the same goals: to enable people to develop themselves, to create networks which enable this, and to undermine systems which prevent this (the state, capitalism, patriarchy, etc.).
A society which pressures people into breast enlargement (e.g. parts of the West) or sexual reassignment surgery (e.g. Iran) includes systems which prevent self-development. A misunderstanding of the self could also prevent self-development. A society which erects barriers to sexual reassignment surgery (e.g. most of the West) can also prevent self-development. Obviously, my desire for moderately-sized fully-formed breasts makes it hard for me to criticize other women for wanting larger breasts, or smaller ones. If the procedures were safer, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing for them to be moderately widespread, although I don't want anyone questioning the womanhood of someone who prefers to keep AAs or to reduce them.
I suppose our debate comes down to whether the desire to have more typical hormone levels and more typical sex organs for the sex one identifies with represents false consciousness, represents self-actualization, or can represent either one, depending on the circumstances. I'm actually inclined to believe it can be either one, and that gender roles confuse people. I wish trans activists - particularly those of us who don't, at least consciously, feel any strong attachment to masculine or feminine gender roles - would draw the line and oppose any mention of gender roles in the DSM and SoC. I wish cis activists would understand our perspectives.
admin: sentence with offensive language removed after the post was reported, June 2012
Quite frankly transexual politics are irrevelant to all but a tiny minority of people who if not massively confused pathos of a sexist gendered society are just as politically confused.
Have your ops, suck up to the medical establisment, just quit expecting 'cis' (wtf does that even mean) people to give a fuck on a political level.
Well, I wouldn't call it false consciousness - I'd never use that term. What I think is interesting is how we decide what 'makes' gender, and if we have a critique of it and where it comes from, how we should approach the politics of it being consciously 'made' in various ways. so from my perspective that would mean questioning whether there is a physiologically gendered 'self' which can be 'actualised' through a surgical transition or hormone therapy as part of that process.
A few points:
1) Transgenderism does not intrinsically affirm the stereotypical gender binary. Because simply put, transwomen and transmen do not abide by simplistic gender stereotypes. Surely individuals simply have an intrinsic right to identify as a particular gender if they choose? If I identify as a female why should you force me to identify as male or genderqueer (non-binary)? Personally I do not consider transgenderism to be intrinsically an "illness" (even though in present-day capitalist society such connotations are unavoidable). It simply becomes a matter of one's own right over her/his own body and her/his own social identity. Not only do the majority of trans people not fit into gender stereotypes in terms of personality and behaviour (e.g. just because I identify as a transwoman doesn't mean I can't do stereotypical "male" things), but actually even in terms of biology many trans people don't fit into stereotypes either. E.g. many transwomen actually have penises. (But they still identify as women) To consider transgenderism as simply affirming gender stereotypes and the gender binary is therefore ridiculous - what's more radical than the notion of a woman with a penis for instance? Not to mention some trans people actually do identify as genderqueer or non-binary.
However, it is utterly stupid, from any kind of left-wing perspective, to ideologically force trans people to be "neither men nor women". I consider myself to be a woman, and it is simply my right to do so, and as long as I'm not playing into gender stereotypes, I'm certainly not falling for the "gender binary" any more than a cisgender woman is, and to suggest so is clear transphobia.
I feel some people here simply do not understand what transgenderism actually means, beyond a rather old-fashioned and excessively medicalised definition of it.
2) I'm a Marxist not an anarchist. I don't know too much about anarchist theory and I know this is more of an anarchist site, but from a Marxist perspective there is no imperative for the revolutionary socialist to "abolish gender" in any kind of intrinsic sense. This might indeed happen in the future (even literally with transhumanist technologies say), but it is certainly not necessary to intrinsically abolish gender to establish a communist society. The only thing that is necessary is to end gender stereotypes as we have them under class society, and as long as transgender people like cisgender people do not fall for gender stereotypes, I frankly don't see what some of your problems with transgenderism are.
3) As for body modification, it's true that certain forms of commercialisation of body modification may be deemed reactionary to some extent, but intrinsically speaking I have a right to modify my own body, do I not? And does it not occur to you that I am actually BREAKING gender stereotypes since even though objectively I was born with a male body I'm changing it into a female one? Isn't body modification in this case an extension of the rejection of male gender stereotypes in terms of behaviour and personality? Unless you are a religious type who sees something intrinsically wrong with body modification, there cannot be anything reactionary about it as long as I do not fall into female stereotypes either in my life as a woman, certainly no more than you can accuse any cisgender women of doing the same.
People should try to understand what a contemporary definition of transgenderism actually is before criticising it. Don't attack a strawman.
The point about transgenderism is that one's social gender identity is not reductively determined by one's physical biology, whether with or without bodily modifications. I have the right to modify my own body, just like a woman has the right to have an abortion, but to be frank with you even without any bodily modifications I still have the right to socially identify as a woman. Unless you think that in a future communist society it is imperative for everyone to be "neither a man nor a woman" in the literal sense, there is obviously nothing wrong with identifying as a woman or a man per se, as long as one does not limit oneself to gender stereotypes. As I said already, there is no Marxist analysis which states in a communist society human gender must be literally abolished. This may indeed happen in the future, but it's certainly not a necessary requirement for a communist society. The only necessary requirement is that gender stereotypes are eliminated. Just as male and female can still exist without gender stereotypes, so transgenderism can also exist without gender stereotypes.
Consider also this: Suppose I do something, and a cisgender woman does exactly the same thing. It would be unfair to criticise me for falling into gender stereotypes but not the cisgender woman, because it is a form of privileging the cisgender woman's "natural biology". That is to say, she is doing this because she was born a woman and therefore "cannot help herself", whereas I (as a transwoman) is doing the same thing by choice (body modification, behavioural expression etc), and therefore is to blame. This privileging of one's "natural instinct" is precisely the basis of cissexism and transphobia. Surely unless you are a naturalist, you can see that if something is reactionary, it shouldn't matter whether it's done by choice or natural instinct? Therefore transwomen and ciswomen should be treated the same. If a cisgender girl isn't being reactionary for simply having breasts, then I'm not being reactionary for changing my body so that I can have breasts. (Reaction only comes into it if either the ciswoman or the transwoman buys into the media stereotype of women with extra-large breasts and have breast implants, in which case BOTH women are equally to blame) The idea here is simply that why should any human being be limited by the body he or she was given at birth? What is the "metaphysical essence" that accompanies one's birth condition which somehow must never shift or be altered? It's a mystical and Platonic-style idea.
I'd say it is a "false consciousness" to think that one must be forever stuck with the gender/sex/body one is born with.
On transgenderism, I'm pretty sure there is an objective material basis for it, since the idealist post-modernist view that "everything is a cultural/social construction" is basically nonsense. There have been a lot of scientific research on this subject, but no-one has the "last word" on this topic yet so I won't give details here.
What it boils down to is "My cis-gendered Ideology trumps your lived experience".
The brain is sexually dimorphic. Just like height is sexually dimorphic. Most women are shorter than most men.
That's not a political or ideological statement, nor one regarding "performing gender", "gender role" or "gender identity". It does not make the essentialist claim that "All men are taller than all women, therefore...". It does lead to certain conclusions though about men and women as groups, their abilities to reach tall shelves, what size clothing fits them, and so on, but with plenty of room for variation and exceptions.
Getting back to neurology.... a sexually dimorphic brain, with (typically) most parts feminised/masculinised, some masculinised/feminised, some intermediate, some neither, leads to certain instinctive behaviour, and rather more instinctive tendencies. That's why they call them "Instincts", they are the parts of personality that are not programmable, they're hard-wired.
That's not much of the personality, but is some.
Here's an example - a mostly feminised brain masculinised in particular areas leading to observable instinctive behaviour:
What needs further work here is what makes toys sexed, what characteristics do they have that make them attractive to masculinised/feminised brains, and to do this without confounding social pressures is hard.
Not impossible though:
So what does a sexually dimorphic brain lead to? What consequences are there?
A child with female-typical emotional response, sense of hearing and smell, body language, cognitive patterns, all instinctive stuff will tend to identify as female.
Regardless of what they look like, how they are dressed, how they are treated.
Now most such children will look like girls. They usually have female genitalia, though may not be aware of that. They may not, genitalia may be ambiguous, masculine, or just not present at all. But usually female. Which is great if the body map in the SPL (superior parietal lobule) is feminised, partly, mostly or completely, they're comfortable with that, the way most people are comfortable having two arms rather than one or three.
Now though we get into definitions of what do we mean by "male" and "female". And what happens when things don't match up.
This is already too long, and frankly, I'm fed up of trying to teach idealogues about Intersex. All the rubbish and arrogance of cis-privilege gets to me. It could be excused when it comes to Transsexuality, but Intersex people get exactly, and I do mean exactly, the same crap handed to them when there's no question of "feelings" but objective anatomy. It's obvious those whose Ideology denigrates TS people don't care about biology, just power.
Zoe, I don't think it can be excused when it comes to transsexuality. I don't think you can say that intersex rights are more important than transsexual rights.
Not really. A transwoman developing breasts due to taking hormones is completely different from a cisgender woman having breasts implants solely for cosmetic reasons. The former is a need, the latter is not. (Not to say the latter is necessarily categorically wrong, mind you)
Interesting that this has seen a flurry of new comments recently after several years. As you can see, this blog post is nearly four years old, and isn't
something I'd fully stand by now.
It looks like while there's no conclusive argument for a biological basis for gender identity there's an incredibly complex set of variables in play overdetermining identity of which some may be biological. The jury's out, and I don't know enough to say.
Of course this is miles away from "female brains prefer pink" crudeness, which is how these kinds of studies tend to percolate down to the mainstream media.
Cordelia Fine's book has been recommended to me on this subject but I've yet to read it.
Django, I'm pretty sure there is a material basis (material basis, not just biological basis in the reductionist sense) for transgenderism.
But, just for argument's sake, even if hypothetically transgenderism is nothing but a subjective choice, (I don't think it is like this) why does that necessarily make trans rights any less valid? Why can't people simply CHOOSE to change sex, as long as they don't fall into certain harmful and reactionary stereotypes associated with the gender/sex they are changing into?
I think this is something to think about. I believe there is something fundamentally problematic in the general assumption (especially in Western culture) that somehow gender lines cannot be crossed and there must be something wrong whenever it is crossed. I believe this assumption needs to be challenged, rather than simply taken for granted.
I posted these comments because a transphobe who was on my Facebook contact list posted the link to your article on my FB wall. I have subsequently blocked him after he made transphobic comments towards me. (I didn't know he was transphobic before)
Yeah, like I said above this is nearly 4 years old and I don't stand by it all now.
Zoe, not only are the studies you quote pretty dubious, but their conclusions aren't a pre-requisite for supporting trans people.
As far as the CAH study is concerned, no attempt seems to have been made to work out whether girls with CAH are drawn to some particular quality in boyish toys or whether they're drawn to them simply by virtue of the fact they are associated with males. Also when stereotypical girls toys are painted to look like boys toys then they are chosen by boys even though boys colours and girls colours have changed over time too.
In the Alexander and Hines study the toys given to the monkeys were a police car and a ball as boys toys, a doll (a human-looking doll, not a monkey doll) and a toy pan (a toy version of what humans use to cook, in spite of the fact that monkeys don't cook) as girls toys. The gender neutral toys were a picture book and a toy dog (though it's not clear why a female monkey would have less maternal instincts towards a toy dog than a toy human). The amount of time each monkey spent with each toy was what was measured even though the doll wasn't so much cared for as ripped to shreds.
The claim that the brain is sexually dimorphic is not one which has been shown to have any validity. Height is something which is not socially determined so not a very apt comparison. The brain not only changes shape depending on what parts are used (which in turn is affected by social factors) but depending on the size of the brain. Most of the differences between brains that are attributed to gender in fact show a stronger correlation if people are divided up according to the size of their skull.
Promoting these sexist, half-baked theories, while it may seem to provide some justification for trans people's choices within an already gender essentialist worldview, isn't necessary to respecting someone's choice to change their body, or their pronoun, or their birth certificate, or which floor of primark they buy their clothes on, or any combination of these things. What it does do is encourage gender stereotyping and gendered expectations of everyone, whether they are trans or not.
The insistence that gay people are “born this way” with a gay gene, is a defence against the idea that homosexuality is sinful and implicitly accepts the sinful nature of it but argues that “we can't help it”. Similarly the attempt to offer biological explanations for the existence of trans people is a defence against a society which punishes people for stepping outside of the expectations for their assigned gender. These arguments pose no threat to the expectation that people's genitals “match” their gender* but make it difficult to change your gender without changing your body or change your body without changing your gender.
The abolition of gender would make it easier for people to choose exactly what they wanted to do (whether it be their choice of childhood toys or what they wanted to do with their body) without the pressure of conforming to the norms of the binary gender system. We can't predict whether people would still take hormones and get surgery, but the abolition of gender doesn't preclude this as a possibility. Abolishing gender stereotypes without abolishing gender is not something I can see being an option. We have to make some sort of sense out of the fact that there are two distinct categories of people with different terms to refer to them and different sets of pronouns. If I had grown up in a society where this was the case for race instead of gender, I'd no doubt subconsciously try to draw conclusions or recognise patterns regarding what whites, for example, “are like”.
The article refers to the “politics of transexuality” as if there was such a thing (I know Django posted this a while ago so not attacking him but the ideas, some of which are quite widely held). As far as I can tell there's no coherence amongst trans people on this subject. In fact, while the article seems to assume that trans people went to defend gender essentialism from Bindel's attack, I remember at the time that a great many trans people went to defend themselves against the accusation that they were gender essentialist and were more pissed off at Bindel's presumptuousness and her offensive language, than her suggestion that gender was socially constructed. The article links to a post about the protest which doesn't say anything supporting these ideas at all and one of the pictures in the protest shows someone in a t-shirt with an image of someone throwing the male and female symbol in the bin. While the article makes reference to the politics of affirmation and the politics of negation, it doesn't consider what form the politics of negation might take amongst people who fall into the category of trans.
*When I say gender, I'm referring to the social construct created by categorising everybody into one of two distinct genders, plus the expectations that come with those categories, irrespective of whether those expectations are satisfied.
I am not referring to an internal gender identity or male/female brains, which if they existed, wouldn't need to be changed.
Konsequent
That's factually incorrect. Just plain wrong. The arguments are purely about what effects the anatomical differences have. That they have some isn't in dispute, except by those to whom the idea is ideologically unacceptable, and have no knowledge of the subject.
I do suggest you read Fine's book. It's very good for showing how most of "gendered behaviour" is no such thing; but also that some is biologically based.
It doesn't mention Transsexuality though (except in terms of societal reactions to transsexuals), and barely touches on Intersex, only dealing with girls with the most common forms of CAH.
Height is not socially constructed; but neither are relative proportions of cell types in brain structures, nor their relative sizes.
The latter is often a consequence of the hormonal mix the brain is exposed to (though in some structures it's not), the former is insensitive to that, and all other environmental factors too.
See for example:
Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041
White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study. - Rametti et al, J Psychiatr Res. 2010 Jun 8.
Regional cerebral blood flow changes in female to male gender identity disorder. - Tanaka et al, Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2010 Apr 1;64(2):157-61.
Changing your sex changes your brain: influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure by Pol et al, Europ Jnl Endocrinology, Vol 155, suppl_1, S107-S114 2006
Prenatal exposure to testosterone and functional cerebral lateralization: a study in same-sex and opposite-sex twin girls. Cohen-Bendahan et al, Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2004 Aug;29(7):911-6.
These differences have measurable effects:
Male-to-female transsexuals show sex-atypical hypothalamus activation when smelling odorous steroids. by Berglund et al Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1900-1908;
my god Bindell's been at it for years