I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
Thank goodness, and good for her. Rowling has been under increasing fire and pressure over the past months to walk back her rather mildly-expressed views about the biological reality of the sexes. She has not backed down and has indeed come back with this thorough and well-reasoned essay.
I have written about this quite a bit, and I will link to those pieces in a minute, but first, a quote from a tweet from Maya Forstater, whose case prompted one of Rowling’s early comments on this issue.
Just so you understand the bottom line here – what is prompting the row in general is the possibility of laws being passed that make gender whatever you like. As Forstater tweeted today, succinctly:
There is a public debate that desperately needs to be had about whether the definition of woman in law and policy should really be changed from meaning female to meaning “anyone who says they are a woman”.
Also: in this moment in which our nation is engaging in a deep, deep conversation about race, consider how it would be if forces entered that conversation determined to detach race from biology and lived experience insisting that it’s perfectly sane and correct to assert, Sure, I’m Black. Why? Because I feel Black and I say so. Bigot. Do you want me to kill myself? Because if you don’t see me as Black, I probably will.
Because, you know, you can dye your skin – one way or the other. Or wear a lot of makeup. It’s probably easier to do that than to slice off your penis and testicles, reform them into an open wound that you must dilate daily for the rest of your life, along with taking hormones for the rest of your life as well.
And of course we wouldn’t go for that. Why wouldn’t we? Because it’s patent nonsense and it’s profoundly disrespectful of the experiences of actual Black people. It’s performative appropriation, it’s rejection of personal, social and cultural reality.
In so many ways, what we see, talking big picture, is the triumph of narrative and nominalism over Things As They Are. We throw off the chains of creation’s connection to the Creator and the transcendent, we can be whatever we want and name it whatever we want, and inevitably, we find ourselves lost in a fundamental way.
Anyway, my writings on this are linked on this page. I’m wordy and discursive and much of what I say is summarized in this article I wrote for Catholic World Report.
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Where I part with Rowling is in terms of evaluating the moment we’re in. The why and how did we get here. First, she is, understandably, not at the point of simply calling an extreme rejection of one’s embodied existence what it is: mental illness. I don’t think much progress can be made on this issue until that’s part of the conversation. Secondly, I have more of a tediously philosophical perspective on this. Which you can read about here.
In the future – hopefully not the too distant future – people are going to look back at this transgender moment in the same way they look back at the lobotomy moment or the satanic-childcare-abuse – moment. They’re going be amazed and maybe a little embarrassed for humanity’s sake.
They’re going to see in this moment the culmination of the worst aspects of patriarchal, misogynist thinking, aided by technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies: the moment in which the best women are men and women are better off by becoming men.
It’s also – although no one will probably see this, because we’ll be deep into Brave New World/1984 territory by then anyway – absolutely the consequences of a contraceptive, sterilizing,affluent culture.
When human beings are sterilized and approach sexuality as sterile beings in a sterile landscape, when procreation has no necessary connection to sexual activity and everyone has – relative to what human beings have had through most of history – loads of free time and money – what does “sex” and “gender” become?
A costume to wear during the pleasure-seeking performative exercise called Life.
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So – part one. Affluence, privilege and procreation-free sexuality.
Part two: pathologizing normal pre-adolescent and adolescent bodily discomfort for financial gain, because parents are stupid and other people are frankly, perverts.
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Part three: Add to my list above: an affluent, sterile, leisure-oriented, performative culture – a material one stripped of the transcendent, with no road but an earthly one and no destination but a grave.
And being taught from the beginning of your life on this earth that fulfillment and happiness are not only possible, but expected. That a great deal of this happiness and fulfillment lies in just who you are and the wonderfulness that you are and being accepting of the marvelous being that you are.
But what if you’re not feeling it? What if you’ve had horrendous experiences in life that have made, it seems, a sense of self – much less a contented, whole self – challenging? What if what’s inside doesn’t match what your family, your community or even the big world tells you is correct and normal?
Raised in a material, appearance, emotion and achievement-oriented culture – despair for the dis-oriented might seem to lie just on the other side of every door, around every corner.
But consider another way – formed to value this life and who you are, but also understanding that, because of weighty mystery, you – along with everyone else on earth – is broken, sees through a glass darkly – including yourself – and that as hard as it is, it is also okay, because this is not your home.
Oh, the suffering remains, and strangeness. But one just might be spared the perceived need to fix oneself right here and right now and make what’s outside “match” what’s inside.
And the older you get, the more true you see this is.
I turned – unbelievably – 59 this week. (Update….60 coming soon…) A few weeks ago, on our way back from Spain, I spent time with my friend Ann Englehart, who also turned 59 this summer. Over great Greek food in Astoria, I looked at her and asked the question that had been weighing on me:
“Do you feel fifty-freaking-nine years old?”
“NO!” she exclaimed, clearly relieved to hear someone else say it.
What does it even mean? we wondered, articulating the same thoughts aloud. What does it mean to be “almost sixty” – but to feel no older than, say forty, and to wonder – was I ever even 45 or 52? I just seem to have leapt from still almost youngish adulthood to AARP discounts without blinking. My appearance is changing, and I look at women two decades older than I and I know – God willing I make it that far – that there will be a day when I, too, will be unrecognizable to my younger self.
It’s very, very weird. It’s challenging. I completely understand why people – especially those in the public eye – get work done to stave off the sagging and the wrinkles. It’s so strange when what you look like on the outside doesn’t match what you feel on the inside. It’s disorienting. You might even say it’s dysphoric, if that’s a word. Centered in those feelings, living as though this were the only reality and all that matters, the temptation to use all the technology at one’s disposal to fix it – to make it all match up – might be very strong.
But understanding that disassociation and sense of dislocation in another way, as an invitation. An invitation, a hint to listen to the heart that seeks and yearns for wholeness and unity, to understand that while it’s not perfectly possible on this earth, the yearning for it is a hint that somewhere, it does exists, and it waits – and the hard, puzzling journey we’re on does not, in fact end where the world tells us.
For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.
And those of you who call yourselves feminists, take note here. The greatest energy in the trans movement is of biological males demanding access to women’s spaces: restrooms, athletics, locker rooms, shelters, prisons and honors. You do not see female–to-male individuals making the same demands. As I’ve said before, I see this movement in part as Peak Misogyny, enabled by medical technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies. (Because if you do physically transition, guess what? You’re on medication…for the rest of your life.) Peak Misogyny which is trying to create a world in which actual girls and women commit to their own erasure and the best women always turn out to be men.
Yes. Erasure of actual women, is what it all seems to be about, in the end.
Charlotte was Both 