Transgender Body Politics Launch speech by Bronwyn Winter
Launch speech for Heather Brunskell-Evans Transgender Body Politics
Bronwyn Winter
I’d like to start off today with a cheer for Tasmanian Senator Clare Chandler, who has braved legal and political retribution and financial penalty to stand up to the transagenda, and won. In a Senate speech a few days ago Senator Chandler pointed out that if even she, an elected public figure, can be subjected to such threats and intimidation in attempts to curtail her freedom of speech by a so-called Anti-Discrimination Board, then millions of other women with less cultural, social and political capital behind them are far more vulnerable.
I’d also like to voice my solidarity with Anna Kerr and the Feminist Legal Clinic (FLC), which is facing imminent eviction from their Council premises in Glebe in Sydney because of their affirmation of women’s sex-based rights and publication of gender-critical material. Anna took up the case of Beth Rep, a Canberra journalist who was recently ordered to pay male-to-trans person Bridget Clinch $10,000 in damages for “liking” a Facebook post that was critical of Clinch. Rep is appealing the decision and is crowdfunding her costs. The FLC provides a range of legal advice and advocacy services for women, notably those with few financial resources, and is one of the few remaining women-only organisations to do so.
I have long resisted discussing the trans issue, as I considered that there are so many other matters of concern to women, which I had until very recently deemed more pressing, for more totalising in their impacts on women’s lives. But the rapidity with which the transgender lobby has risen to a position of political influence and the number and enormity of consequences for women have forced me, albeit kicking and screaming, into taking up this discussion. Heather also perhaps: she tells in her book’s prologue of having “stumbled” into researching and writing on it by accident. After a series of incidents in 2015 that directly impacted on her and those around her, she “knew that something really serious was happening, not only to women and children, but also to the body politic. Trans identifying people make up less than 1% of the population but the effect on society [is] utterly disproportionate. From that moment I was impelled to act” (p. 8).
I still deeply resent having to give what any rational human being should consider a nonsense issue this much attention, I resent having to argue for the demonstrability of biological fact and its long documented social and political consequences for women. Not because biology causes the social inequalities but because we continue to live in societies where women’s bodies, minds, indeed whole lives are considered commodities for appropriation and consumption by men, even as those same men visibly fear and despise us. The truly frightening success of the transgender lobby demonstrates just how pervasive this ideology is, and how deeply internalised by many women who have become the new defenders of the transagenda, and by so many young lesbians who learn at an ever earlier age to hate their bodies and their sexuality.
It is perhaps unsurprising that just as we had the impression of making some progress on women’s rights, at least in the letter if not always the application of the law, including: suffrage; the right to independent income and financial autonomy; anti-discrimination and affirmative action; equal pay for work of equal value; quotas in political parties, parliaments and so on; recognition of various forms of violence against women as criminal acts; recognition of reproductive rights; sex-segregated safe spaces for women; protection of the rights of lesbians; promotion of equal rights for women’s sports in terms of pay, institutional support, media coverage and so on; and many other areas again —in short, just as we had started to make some palpable progress towards institutional recognition of women as full human beings with specific needs, it is perhaps unsurprising that we see such a ferocious backlash, taking such a perverse form. For, if the very definitions of the terms “sex” and “women” are now open to question—indeed, are rendered meaningless as some sort of floating signifiers, themselves commodified in the gender-identity market— then all the sex-based rights and protections that women have fought for and have made progress towards achieving suddenly count for naught.
When otherwise intelligent, educated, rational and compassionate people lap up the fantasies erected by the transagenda, when they become seduced by a propaganda of victimhood and scapegoating, then act upon these fantasies and in support of this propaganda, without reflection and in flagrant denial of reality, then we move closer to regimes that have more to do with despotism or fundamentalist cult-rule than with any sort of secular democracy.
All this is why Heather Brunskell-Evans book is so important. In tracing the rise of the transagenda in the UK, through universities, social movements, politics, law, education, corporate funding and the medical establishment, she provides detailed evidence to both debunk the fantasies on which these new despotisms and fundamentalisms have been constructed and expose the woman-hatred that informs them. She rightly states that the dynamics and processes which have allowed this societal change to happen for so many years, on such a scale, with so much money poured into it but so little scrutiny, deserve much closer attention, not just in order to understand the specific vulnerabilities of the historic and hard fought-for rights of women and children, but also the vulnerabilities of the democratic polity more generally (p. 132.)
Heather’s book is structured in four chapters. The first focuses on women’s bodies, the redefinition of the term “woman” and the conflation of “sex” and “gender” by transactivists. She reviews some of the arguments with which we are now all-too-familiar that redefine sex as something that we are “assigned” at birth—rather than a biological reality that is observed and documented—and thus someething that can be changed at will through its replacement by an individualised “gender identity”, producing “pregnant men”, “lesbian penises” and the many other ridiculousnesses to which we have sadly become accustomed. In doing so, she notes that this conversation is one sided: once again, it is women’s bodies that are subject to appropriation and questioning. There is no significant trans discussion of the question “what is a man”: as Heather notes, “men are not threatened by constructed males and so can afford to let some into the ‘men’s club’” (p. 30). I would add that they are all the less threatened by the fact that there are few, if any, heterosexual women who claim to be gay men, contrary to the large number of heterosexual men who now claim to be “lesbians”.
Importantly, Heather exposes the queer-politics appropriation of conceptual tools developed by others, notably the concept of “intersecctionality”. African American law academic Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 to describe the experience of African American women bringing workplace discrimination matters to court. As black women they experienced a specific form of discrimination that lay at the intersection of sex, race and (usually) class, but the law only allowed them the channels of either sex discrimination or race discrimination. The term neatly summed up the gist of arguments made by feminists of colour in the US over the previous decade, and captured the imagination of activists and researchers worldwide, to the extent that it became a veritable buzzword, and much misused. As a result, it also became much discussed as to its proper meaning and applicability, to the extent that Crenshaw herself had to remind us in 2016 that intersectionality was not in fact primarily about “identity” but about systems and structures that rendered some categories of people vulnerable. (1) The term has been appropriated and perverted by transactivists, who also routinely deploy Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, in a process of individualised identity-commodification.
The political and medical institutionalisation of the discourse of gender identity is most clearly evidenced in the UK by the NHS-funded Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), which is part of the now notorious Tavistock Clinic in London. Heather notes that the GIDS has operated historically within “three competing conceptual paradigms … medical, developmental psychology and minority rights” (p. 41). It is this last pardigm that is dominant at the moment and is heavily influential in the current rash of transgendering of pubescent and prepubescent girls, which is the focus of Chapter 2 of the book. The minority rights paradigm means that “any response other than affirmation of a girl’s claim to ‘be’ a boy is understood as a violation of her human rights” (p. 41). This paradigm is reinforced by workshops conducted by transgender advocacy organisations contracted by schools to provide them. Girls are provided with a normative “transboy” identity as the only solution to their confusion or distress about their bodies, their sexuality or other affective or relational issues, thus binding them “ever more tightly to the gender stereotypes which have helped contribute to [their] alleged identity as ‘male’ in the first place” (p. 74).
(I note in passing that this same “minority rights” paradigm dominant in LGBTIQ discourse similarly provides a justifying narrative for gay men who wish to access surrogacy services, also exploitative of women with often disastrous psychological and health consequences. (2))
Heather’s third chapter, titled “The Male Body Politic” looks at the embracing by the British political class of the transagenda, including “consultations” that are open to the views of transactivists but do not solicit nor listen to the views of feminists defending sex-based rights. It is this acquiesence by the political class that led to the passage in 2004 of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which allows an adult person to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate, making it then possible for them to retroactively have their birth certificate changed to the opposite sex. The law does not require genital surgery, but does require a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria”, evidence that the person has lived as their acquired “gender” for at least two years and intends to do so for the rest of her or his life. Transactivists have long lobbied to have even these minimal restrictions removed such that people can have their “gender” officially recognised through a simple act of performative speech, that is, a declaration of one’s “gender identity”.To date they have not been successful. One of the highly perverse impacts of the GRA is the ability for male prisoners, among whom there is a high proporition of sex offenders and authors of violent crimes, to request—and, sadly, obtain—transfers to women’s prison, where the proportion of sex offenders and violent criminals is, as we know, extremely low (Heather discusses the 2017 Karen White case in this chapter). Heather also discusses the activities of A Woman’s Place UK, and the torrents of abuse, including physical assault, and regular noplatforming of this group for daring to advocate for women’s sex-based rights and feature speakers, including “detransitioners”, who speak of the harm done to women due to the influence of transactivism. The same “rights” discourse that is used to promote the transing of young girls is also used to justify the abuse of these feminists, on which, Heather notes, “the Labour Party leadership remains completely silent” (p. 114), even though Labour Party members and activists are among those targeted, such as veteran Linda Bellos, who was the second Black woman to become leader of a local authority in Britain (she led Lambeth Council from 1986-88). Some of us remember her from her days working on the feminist magazine Spare Rib : she was the first black woman to join the collective.
Heather’s last chapter is titled “The Naked Emperor”. The metaphor is apt. She writes:
..despite robust evidence to show that biological sex is still extremely relevant to women’s experiences of discrimination, policies that represent a profound conceptual change to our understanding of about what it means to be a woman have been introduced into governance without due diligence, democratic oversight or scrutiny. Trans policy-capture demonstrates how easily systems have been influenced by the determintion of single-issue, ideologically-driven groups such as Stonewall, Press for Change and Gendered Intelligence. These organisations consist of a small number of influential actors who represent an extremely small constituency but who have secured a monopoly on including queer theory into policy-making and law (pp. 121–22).
Among the many troubling effects of this rule of the Naked Emperor are that statistics on such things as violence against women, violence perpetrated by women, women’s homelessness, poverty and so on are rendered completely meaningless. The Australian case of Evie Amati is elqouent in this regard. In January 2017, Amati attacked three strangers with an axe in a 7/11 convenience store in Sydney’s Inner West because apparently “she” was upset that lesbians she met on a dating site did not want to sleep with “her”. (Transactivists, including the cashed-up and influential organisation Stonewall in the UK, routinely use the term “cotton ceiling” to label as “transphobic” lesbians who refuse sexual relations with men who claim to be women.) Amati’s original sentence was for nine years, with half of that period non-parole. After the Crown appealed against the inadequacy of the sentence, the court increased the sentence to fourteen years and doubled the non-parole period to eight years. In 2019 Amati, who had been sent to a women’s prison and picked fights with women there, began “detransitioning” in gaol. The court acknowledged that Amati had significant mental health problems.
The issue of mental health is one that is routinely ignored by the trans lobby and the medical and political establishment that panders to it. We have increasing evidence that the so-called “gender dysphoric” include a far greater proportion of people with mental health disorders than the general population and that these disorders frequently worsen post-transition. Most recently, it has been found that a higher number of supposed trans individuals are on the autism spectrum than among the general population.
At the same time, Evie Amati’s violence was male violence, and it was of the sort very, very rarely committed by women, even when mentally unstable. Yet in all media reporting, Amati was referred to as a “woman”. So, not only are women disappeared by the transagenda, who is responsible for the violence that happens to women is also disappeared.
Both Heather and I work at universities. In her last chapter, Heather also discusses the thought-policing of academics, including a campaign to have a gender-critical woman, Michele Moore, removed as editor in chief of the journal Disability and Society. In a rare counter to the current trend of persecution of academics, the board did not stand Moore down. But these constant assaults on our academic freedom and freedom of speech are stressful and fatiguing. In my own union (the National Tertiary Education Union, NTEU), there is a campaign by otherwise perfectly reasonable, intelligent and progressive members, many of whom have PhDs, to have the national leadeship of the union intervene antidemocratically to remove an elected officer from her position because of her support for women’s sex-based rights. So far the NTEU leadership have not complied, as it would indeed breach the union’s own regulations, but neither have they openly denounced this bullying campaign. Moreover, some in the union are now lobbying for staff to have “transition leave” written into their Enterprise Agreements (legally enforceable workplace industrial agreements).
University managements have got in on the act too. Among other things, they have launched so-called Ally or Pride networks, complete with “training” programs to complete in order to become a network member (this is the case at my university). A gender-critical colleague told me that when she was told to do this training in order to be admitted to membership, she retorted “I’m already a lesbian and a long term activist, I don’t need university ‘training’ for that” and declined to join the network. Research projects advocating trans ideology receive significant research grants, and an elite of so-called “intersectional” queer scholars, many of them, sadly, lesbians, ally with transactivists to dominate “gender studies” conversations. When one challenges these Naked Emperors, one is at risk of marginalisation, public humiliation, institutional reprimand, censorship, or even prosecution: none of these impacts are of course limited to academics. But when our universities shut down debate in the name of some manufactured notion of “minority rights” or “inclusivity”, when individual academics face “legalling” or other forms of intimidation or censorship, then our universities, like our democracies, have strayed very, very far from their original purpose as encoded in their written charters.
Naked Emperor, indeed. Because as Heather writes, “transgenderism, wearing a liberal democratic face-mask, is patriarchy emblazoned in imperial form. … the transgender movement”, she concludes, “shape shifts by wearing a cloak of progressivism, human rights, equality, diversity and inclusion. It is particularly dangerous as it hides its authoritarianism in plain sight” (p. 158). The sort of scenario, in short, that is usually described as “Orwellian.”
But Heather gives us hope as well. She suggests that maybe, just maybe, we are reaching what is popularly called “peak trans” and the “wokes” of the world will finally stand abashed in their nakedness.
I highly recommend this book to you.
(1) Keynote address at the Women of the World festival, Southbank Centre, London, 8–13 March. https://world.secret-paths.com/533/its-important-kimberly-crenshaw-on-intersectionality/
(2) See Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique (Routledge 2020).
Bronwyn Winter is Professor of Transnational Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research interests include: transnational feminism (including women in the Muslim world and diaspora; post-9/11 militarisation and globalisation; women’s human rights; transnational social movements); women and politics; the European Union; French and Francophone societies, politics, and cultures; postcolonial studies and migration, especially in relation to Europe; the politics of religion and culture; the Philippines; global lesbian and gay politics and human rights; comparative cultural studies.
Watch the video of the launch below.
Feminists around the globe joined Heather Brunskell-Evans to launch her new book in the Spinifex Shorts series - Transgender Body Politics.