The dilemma of gender identity

This will be discussed on Friday 12 July.

Let’s start with a definition – a loose one, because we want to avoid unreadable sentences full of long lists and initialisms. We will say somebody is ‘transgender’ if they seek to be recognised by others as having a gender that is not the same as their birth sex. To avoid having many branching paths, for this discussion we will not include within that definition people born with ambiguous genitalia or chromosomes. We will also not include people that say they have no gender. The claimed gender may be male (female) if the person’s birth sex was female (male), or it may be something that is neither male nor female as long as it still asserts a definite gender.

Sometimes the term ‘gender fluid’ is used. We will include that within our term ‘transgender’ because it implies that at any particular time the person is likely to assert a particular gender, and that they may assert a different gender at a different time.

We will use ‘sex’ to refer to whether a person has XX or XY sex chromosomes and has the genitalia that are usually associated with having those sex chromosomes. Cases where the genitalia are not the usual ones associated with the chromosomes, or where the sex chromosomes are neither XX nor XY (eg XXY) can get complicated and confusing, so we will not attempt to discuss them in this meeting, except in the unlikely event that we find we are all in violent agreement on all of the gender issues, and that discussion finishes early.

I will use MS as an abbreviation for a person of the male sex, and FS to refer to a person of the female sex. I will use MG and FG for someone that asserts male and female gender respectively.

With that preamble done, let us begin.

An impassioned conflict appears to have arisen in recent years between many feminists and advocates for transgender rights. It has become heated enough that it is not unusual for transgender rights activists to use the pejorative term TERF (standing for trans-exclusionary radical feminist) to refer to feminists that do not accept their arguments. No doubt there are pejorative terms used by the feminists too, but perhaps not so catchy and memorable.

Usually exhibit A of a TERF is Germaine Greer. I find that example unhelpful because Ms Greer goes out of her way to stir up controversy and generally annoy people, so it is hard to distinguish between what is an understandable dislike of her deliberately inflammatory language, and a genuine abhorrence of her core beliefs.

The nub of the disagreement seems to be as follows.

Since at least the time of Simone de Beauvoir (mid-20th century philosopher who wrote The Second Sex), but probably a lot earlier, advocates for the rights of FS have argued that society should not put constraints on what FS may do, whether by law or by social licence, based just on their sex. De Beauvoir in particular identified ‘gender’ as being the collection of societal expectations of how a FS should behave. She argued that we needed to destroy the notion of gender, in order that people would have equal rights and be free to choose how they behave, regardless of their chromosomes or genitalia.

I will call this aim to destroy gender, the SB position. I believe it is still widespread today among both FS and MS feminists, but perhaps with somewhat less passion and urgency in most developed countries than it had in the sixties because the discrimination against and constraints on FS in those countries is considerably less than it was then (although there are some troubling recent developments in the USA suggesting a reversal of direction).

The transgender movement comes into conflict with the SB position because, it seeks public recognition of an asserted gender, which is in direct contradiction of SB’s wish to remove gender from our lexicon. Some feminists are worried about that because they fear that it will lead to a revalidation of gender as an important concept, and thereby solidify expectations of how FS and MS should behave. Transgender activists reply that this should not be a problem because a FS can choose to be FG some days – maybe when she is doing quilting with some girlfriends – and MG on other days, say when she is playing football or cricket. SB would then object that they don’t want to have to identify as this or that gender according to what activity they are doing but that rather, it should be socially acceptable for a FS to do any activity that is physically possible for them and not harmful to others.

So on the one side, we can see the feminists getting upset with the transgender advocates. There is another issue that cause deep upset on the other side, which is that many feminists want spaces and activities that are reserved for FS to continue to have that basis, while the transgender advocates want the criteria to change to FG. Key battlegrounds are domestic violence shelters, public toilets and sporting competitions. The attempt of some feminists’ to keep the criteria for these spaces as FS rather than FG is seen as trans-exclusionary by some transgender advocates, and this causes a great deal of upset.

Domestic violence shelters, more often called womens’ refuges, were established as places to which women could escape from an abusive male partner. In many cases these shelters have a strict no-men rule, which has traditionally meant no-MS. This is a practical measure, as it makes it easier to prevent angry male partners sneaking in to further harrass their partner. In addition, women who have suffered bad abuse may be badly affected by a male-sounding voice, so it helps their recovery to be in a FS-only environment for a while. Transgender advocates would like these shelters to be changed to a no-MG rule so that transgender people who are FS and MG can seek refugre there. This is particularly important for them because MS-FG people more often suffer abuse than non-transgender FS people.

Public toilets and change rooms suffer the same problem. While plenty of FS people are comfortable with unisex toilets, many FS people see a ‘female toilet’ as a ‘safe space’ away from overly-solicitous MS people. There is also an issue of modesty, that many people feel uneasy at the idea of being seen partly clothed by a person of the opposite sex. The question then leaps out – to what toilet can a transgender person go? A MS-FG would feel much safer in a female toilet, and may even fear being attacked by bigots in a male toilet. But in many places there are only two types of public toilet. This is a particular problem in schools. A suggestion that has been made is that transgender students could be granted permission to use staff toilets, which are usually single and unisex. That works as long as there are not many transgender students at a school.

Sporting competitions. Should MS-FG be allowed to compete in female competitions, or in the female category of an open event? Sporting bodies have struggled with this since long before the transgender movement became a significant social phenomenon. In the 1970s there were considerable problems with FS people from the Soviet bloc taking testosterone to improve their performance. Those people suffer detrimental health effects to this day of their chemical ‘treatment’, which history suggests was not voluntary. African runner Caster Semenya was found to have XY (male) chromosomes and internal testes in testing after she won the female World championships at 800m. She had lived her whole life as a female and never knew she had male chromosomes until that test. Under new IAAF rules she may not compete in female events unless she undergoes treatment to lower her testosterone levels. That is a case of an intersex person rather than transgender, and outside the scope of this discussion. But the issue of whether a MS-FG person may compete in a female competition is a live one.

Questions:

Do you agree with SB that it would be best for society to rid itself of the notion of gender? If not, what genders would you like to be recognised and what characteristics and activities should the definitions of each encompass? If you agree with SB, how do you think the extinction of the concept could be best achieved?
What if any exclusion criteria do you think a domestic violence shelter should use to ensure it is a safe space for the residents?
What criteria do you think should be used for public toilets and change rooms? What about in schools? Other options? Should we start from scratch and make all toilets and change rooms unisex? Or build three (or more) types of public facility?
What criteria should be used for sporting competitions? Should it be different at elite level like the Olympics, World Cup or Tour de France vs what happens in local club competition (local soccer leagues, tennis)?
What about competitions in which there are not natural sex-based advantages because of average strength, size and speed differences, but there may be other, advantages that arise out of socially conditioned responses to sex differences. An example is debating tournaments. Debating at the elite level is dominated by MS, despite more than half of debaters being FS. Apparently research shows that many people are conditioned to (subconsciously) find lower-pitched voices more persuasive. Consequently, Australia universities, as well as having mostly open competitions, also have occasional intervarsity ‘womens’ competitions. There have been reports that transgender MS-FG debaters perform particularly well in these (transgender is much more prevalent in university debating societies than in the general population), and this has raised concerns about whether voice pitch may give them unfair advantage over the FS participants.
What gender or sex criteria should be used for admission to what are currently called ‘single-sex schools’?
If you were raising a child now, how would you approach issues like activity and clothing choice in relation to what is considered usual for each sex? If you have raised children, how does this compare to what you actually did?
What constraints if any would you like there to be on medical treatment (drugs or surgery) for sex re-assignment? How would they vary by the age of the person? What about public funding? What about treatment for somebody that has ambiguous chromosomes and/or genitalia? Of interest is that the Tasmanian parliament is considering banning ‘gender normalisation’ surgery on children without their informed consent. This is in line with medical practice over the last fifteen years or so for Disorders of Sexual Differentiation (DSD), which has moved from the previous practice of removing male characteristics of infants with ambiguous genitalia, to delaying any intervention until informed consent is possible, except where intervention becomes necessary for the patient’s health (eg tumours).
Currently it is common for such surgery to be performed on intersex children in their infancy. This is different from voluntary ‘sex change’ treatment, as the person will already have a minority variant sexual configuration, but there are some overlapping issues.
What education would you like schools to have about sex (the characteristic rather than the activity) and gender? The ‘Safe Schools’ program generated some controversy in recent years because it taught about transgender issues.