INTRODUCTION

Part 1 of this two-part blog looked at how woke identity politics, especially on trans issues, may have cost Kamala Harris the US presidential election. Protestations to the contrary have since appeared in the comments, notably along the lines “It was the economy, stupid” (albeit phrased far more politely!). However, even if these claims were true (which is debatable), my main point – that trans extremists have been their own worst enemies – appears to have won broad acceptance here, based on a range of evidence. From this starting point, Part 2 will examine the conceptual muddle that enabled so many activist “transgressions” to go unchecked before the bubble burst. To the limited but significant extent that our influence from a MAP perspective allows, the intention is to strengthen the trans cause, not to trash it. The aim today will be to bring some clarity to a tangle of convoluted issues, with a special focus on the language and concepts involved. The extent to which any newfound clarity will help us sharpen our focus on future possibilities, such as the potential for a youth-MAP-trans alliance, will hopefully emerge in subsequent debate.

Please be aware that in order to untangle these exceptionally confusing issues clearly, I have found it necessary to spell out my thinking rather fully, so this blog has ended up much longer than usual and it requires careful reading. Accordingly, it will be best if you make yourself comfortable and take your time. No need to rush through it all in one go.  

GENDER IS NON-BINARY

Part 1 included a provocative assertion that the queer strategy of challenging entrenched normative language might have a major downside. The disruption of dubious binary concepts including gender, which is about much more than just male and female, has its uses, I wrote, “but it is also capable of marooning us in a meaningless verbal morass, leaving us vulnerable to stupid policy making that harms kids.”

Let’s explore how this happens, starting with the relatively coherent, intellectually sustainable idea that gender is a spectrum, with male and female at its extremities and many different possibilities of gender identity and expression in between. Even though 99% of the world’s population identify as male or female, rather than non-binary, the spectrum (or perhaps bi-modal distribution) concept is valid – and becoming increasingly important given that those identifying as non-binary (including transgender, gender-fluid, etc.) shoots up from 1% to 4% among Gen Z respondents to the LGBT+ Pride Global Survey of gender ID and sexual orientation.

So far, so good. Gender, as understood in this context, is a concept that refers to the immensely rich variety of ways in which we humans behave and think about ourselves. Following the usefully disruptive work of earlier generations of queer theorists, it has become possible to think outside the two big gender boxes. That is how, after a lifetime of self-declared confusion, the writer Quentin Crisp found himself finally liberated from being pigeon-holed in his own mind as a “homosexual” male when he discovered in his eighties that he was non-binary, and transgender. Gender, in other words, is a social concept of flexible application, not a fixed category or “natural kind”.

SEX IS BINARY

The trouble starts when queer theory is misapplied to undermine non-social concepts that do constitute natural kinds, of which the prime example we need to examine is the binary, fixed, naturally unalterable distinction between male and female. Messing about with these terms can get us into deep water, as happened a few years ago to influential feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling. She got a bit carried away when she distinguished no fewer than five different sexes (male, female, merm, ferm, and herm). After being put on the spot by numerous scholars, she later recanted, saying her earlier work had been a provocation, offered “tongue in cheek”.

If we delve into the relevant biology, we can easily see why Fausto-Sterling had failed to curb her enthusiasm for nature’s queerness, because there is no shortage of it. As I noted in a blog on “the intersex brain” some years ago:

There are even mosaic situations in which the same individual possesses both XX (female) and XY (male) cell types. Bizarrely, as reproduction expert Milton Diamond puts it “a person might have an arm considered male because its cells are all XY while the same person’s leg might be considered female because its cells are all XX”.

More familiar, albeit rare, are so-called “intersex” conditions that result in genital ambiguity at birth. These cases can make it difficult to tell at first glance whether a baby is male or female, but that does not mean they are somewhere in between. They are always either one sex or the other.

In all anisogametic sexually reproducing species reproduction occurs by combining a large gamete (the ovum, or female egg) with a small gamete (male sperm). In mammals, each individual produces only one kind of gamete. Whether a mammal embryo develops into a male or a female is determined by a pair of sex chromosomes: XX for females, XY for males. Sex in all animals is defined by gamete size; sex in all mammals is determined by sex chromosomes; and there are two and only two sexes: male and female. This applies even when there are “intersex” chromosomal variations, such as Klinefelter syndrome, where a male has an extra X chromosome (XXY).

Now, it might seem arcane and unnecessary to dwell on microscopic stuff when our real concern is what decisions kids can make about their bodies as they are growing up, by which time all sorts of truly queer, non-binary differences in individual development will have affected us, possibly including unusual hormonal goings on in the womb before we were born, which may make us more masculine or less so. Everything we experience in childhood, from the influence of our parents and peers to what we eat, plays a part in our individuality, including our experiences and understandings of gender and sex. These things make us all rather quirky. As the old saying goes, “There’s nowt so queer as folk”.

But please understand that the point of dwelling on gametes is that the language of male and female is the issue right now; not, for the moment, our personal development and choices. The language we use is fundamental to our ability to think clearly, and without clarity we will run into disaster, as we shall see below.

ONE BECOMES A WOMAN

Note that the terms male and female apply to all the sexually reproducing species, be they reptiles, birds, fish, whatever, from the tiny wasp Dicopomorpha echmepterygis to the gigantic blue whale. They represent natural kinds, which hold good throughout nature. In order to think clearly about sex, we need to hold onto these terms and their clear meaning. The terms man and woman, however, apply only to our own species. To the extent that we see them as matched in lock step with male and female, as per the traditional dictionary definitions (man: adult human male; woman: adult human female) we might think these also represent natural kinds.

But this is not the case. The terms man and woman reflect the highly individual lives we have experienced when growing up, including our genderings. As Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “One is not born, but becomes a woman”. What is meant by womanhood, what is expected of a woman, what she thinks it would be feminine to wear, whether she thinks it appropriate to be ambitious in a career, or better to devote herself to home and family, are aspects of this womanly “becoming”. Nevertheless, although the word woman has a strong social element and is not a natural kind, it also has a fundamental natural component. All women are born female.

J.K. Rowling has decided we need to be reminded of this. On Mother’s Day last year, she tweeted: “Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.”

Unambiguously, this is a mocking attack on inclusive transgender language, as is her most famous earlier tweet: “‘People who menstruate’,” she wrote in 2020. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Witty, but cruel and transphobic, some would say. On the contrary, in this case we really do need to be cruel – or at least blunt – to be kind, and it is not transphobic to do so given that we all benefit (including transgender people) from sticking to clear language. Without it there can be no clear policy grounded in clear evidence and its clear interpretation. Am I making myself clear?

SEX ASSIGNED AT BIRTH

Still with me? Still clear? Then it is time to start identifying the harm to which the misguided use of inclusive language can lead, beginning with “sex assigned at birth”. As philosopher Alex Byrne and biologist Carole K. Hooven have pointed out, women (biological ones, not trans ones) are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, on the other hand, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and they too may need sex-specific treatment. For this reason, public health policy messages are best directed clearly at men and women (or boys and girls), without using language likely to confuse ordinary people outside the woke elites who obsess over these things.

You think they don’t get confused? Think again. Consider what another philosopher, Elizabeth Barnes, has said on the matter, not because of her day job but because she has Parkinson’s, although men are much more likely to get it than women, and they need different advice because, for them, the condition has differences in prevalence, symptoms, and disease trajectory. She writes:

The use of language like “assigned male at birth” is, in this context, at best misleading. If you’re male, you’re not more likely to get Parkinson’s because of a decision a doctor made after looking at your genitalia. You’re more likely to get Parkinson’s because of differences between male and female biology – differences we don’t yet fully understand, and which crucially need more (not less) attention.

She readily admits that as a philosophy professor she has no difficulty with gender inclusive terms, or their abbreviations, such as “AMAB” and “AFAB”. However, she realised that it was a very different matter when she was consulted by a less well-educated family member seeking her advice after he contracted Parkinson’s. She continued:

My family member… is among the group most likely to get Parkinson’s – an older white man without a college education from the rural south or Midwest (an area of prevalence sometimes called “the Parkinson’s belt”) who has a background working in and around agriculture. This group is also, of course, a group that has seen a sharp increase in distrust of institutions, especially healthcare institutions. And it’s a group especially likely to be unfamiliar with – and very skeptical about – something like describing Parkinson’s disease as more common “in people assigned male at birth (AMAB)”.

This old white guy, in other words, is exactly in the demographic who have been getting mightily pissed off with wokery and voting for Trump as a result. Such people are not the enemy. They are not “the Right”. Like trans kids, they are simply folks with health care needs that need to be addressed with careful clarity.

TRAPPED IN THE WRONG BODY

Speaking of which, let’s get back to those kids and their needs. They too are better served by clear language than by gobbledygook. We know that trans kids have a deep feeling that their minds and souls are of the opposite sex to that of their bodies. But that would mean nothing unless there really were two sexes, one the opposite of the other. It is far more honest to tell them so, and far more conducive to them working out their best health choices, if they are given clear, accurate information rather than indulged in fantasies such as the feminine essence narrative.

There can be no “essence” of femininity. It is literally impossible. Why? Because gender norms greatly vary from one culture to another, from dress codes to career choices. Because gender is a social construction, there is nothing in it that cannot potentially be changed. Therefore, no element of gender expression is indispensable, or – same thing – essential.

This is not to deny that “trapped in the wrong body” feelings can be very real and important. But it makes sense to look for an explanation in reproductive and developmental biology i.e. in factors such as in utero masculinisation or feminisation of the foetus (including the foetal brain), comparable with those that have been implicated in the development of homosexuality and paedophilia. Indeed, neurological research of transwomen has detected (albeit controversially) a degree of brain feminisation. This has nothing to do with gender as that word is understood these days i.e. the social construction interpretation of the term.

GENDER, A CLOSER LOOK

It may be helpful to distinguish four ways in which the word gender is now used: 1. As a synonym: another word for sex; 2. In grammar; 3. As an element of identity; 4. As a performance.

Before the rise of second wave feminism in the later part of the 20^th century, which Simone de Beauvoir pioneered with her 1949 book The Second Sex, the words sex and gender were often used synonymously. One major use not directly tied to human biology, though, is the fascinating role it plays in grammar, where in many non-English languages it is assigned to inanimate things, with apparently arbitrary and uber-queer results. In French, for instance, not only are “table”, “chair” etc., designated as feminine, but there are also slang words for the genitals that are the reverse of what might be expected. So, for cunt we have the masculine definite article “le con” and “le barbue”, and for cock we have the feminine article “la queue” and “la pine”. Male nouns for female sex organs, and vice versa! Would you Adam and Eve it!

This grammatical aspect makes an entertaining diversion, but of course the main focus of current public concern is gender identity, which is expressed through performance – Judith Butler’s fancy term for enacting gender roles through our dress and behaviour. Mercifully, having already attended to “trapped in the wrong body” as a conceptual issue, we will not need to dwell any further on either identity or performance in the abstract. We already have a good enough working understanding of the terms.

WHAT IS A WOMAN?

There is one further linguistic abstraction I should touch upon, though, at least briefly: polysemy, the ability of words to have several valid meanings. I had a long email debate last year with a philosopher friend who holds the view (which is orthodox in itself but susceptible to being taken too far) that words mean whatever a significant number of their users intend them to mean, or even a single user, such as a famous podcaster, if their newly coined meaning of a word goes viral. Dictionaries reflect this. The definitions they give do not come from an academic ivory tower. They are based on actual usage by speakers and writers of the language in question.

My friend professed himself comfortable with trans activists’ insistence that “A trans woman is a woman”. He felt that, because they were using the word “woman” in a new(ish) sense that had clearly gained quite widespread currency, it should be accepted. The main standard definition of woman (“adult human female”) should remain in the dictionaries, he averred, because that is the sense in which most people still use it, but a further definition could be added to accommodate those who identify as women and choose to live in accordance with accepted female gender roles and performance criteria (dress codes, etc.).

There is certainly a case to be made for this; and, as I have indicated before, I have no problem with using a transwoman’s preferred pronouns and, as a courtesy, behaving in her company as though she is indeed a woman. But this cannot be any more than a courtesy. Why not? Because, as we have seen above, there are medical issues (among other comparable social concerns: see Gribble et al.) that make it necessary for the primary definition of woman to trump the courtesy one. As the philosopher (sorry, yet another one!) Alex Byrne has argued, the fact that a word may have many legitimate different meanings does not mean that language cannot be harmfully misused, and his opinion is that misuse (through, in effect, denying the primacy of the primary meaning) has been a feature of the great “What is a woman?” debate.

A TAXONOMY OF GENDER DYSPHORIA

Having thus addressed the conceptual framework and unpacked its confusions and conundrums, it is time to take a final and more detailed look at the wisdom or otherwise of pursuing a policy of “gender affirming care” for all children who self-identify as transgender.

Like adult transgender people, gender dysphoric children are individuals, who need to be treated as such. It will help, though, to consider a basic taxonomy of four different transgender types, to which distinct treatment pathways are applicable. As identified in an HTOC blog some years ago, these are:

1. child-onset gender dysphoria (GD) associated with marked gender nonconformity (both natal sexes)
2. adolescent-to-adult onset GD associated with autogynephilia (AGP) (natal males only)
3. late-onset female-to-male GD associated with unusual sexual and gender fantasies (natal females who want to have sex with/as gay men…); broadly, gay transmen.
4. adolescent-onset GD in natal females that has a strong social/iatrogenic component, specified as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

The opinions on treatment I will now briefly set out are merely personal rather than expert, but they are based on a much closer acquaintance with the evidence than will be found in most public discourse. In general, social transition for children is fine. I have no problem with it. But many kids regret being fast-tracked towards risky hormonal treatments and, far worse, disastrously mutilating and irreversible surgical procedures. Fast-tracking can and should be avoided. Every case needs extremely careful consideration.

GENDER AFFIRMING CARE

The watchword among cautious practitioners has been that medical interventions should only be considered when kids have shown they are sure they know their own minds by being “Consistent, Insistent, and Persistent” (CIP) in their GD and their pursuit of transition. This strikes me as a good criterion for category 1, those who since early childhood have manifestly been girlish boys or boyish girls. But it is not the last word. Many of these youngsters are quite simply gay; they might well be happier growing up to be gay adults living in their natal sex than changing. Only in homophobic societies is there any need to change. Accordingly, a better outcome than changing the kids to fit society, is to work for social change that accommodates us all.

The CIP approach works less well for the later-onset dysphoria seen in categories 2-4. When adolescents present with these types of GD there is less time in which “watchful waiting” (another professional rule of thumb) can be usefully applied. Puberty itself does not wait, so puberty-blocking hormones must be applied in timely fashion to be effective. It could well be the case, though, that it is in these categories that many young people might be best served by physical change, because it would appear impossible to meet their sexual, romantic, and other life-style needs in any other way. See transwoman Natalie Wynn’s marvellous ContraPoints podcast and you will understand why. Wynn denies that she is AGP, and she has a witty, slickly presented blast against the psychologists who have championed AGP as a category, in part because she sees them as wrongly pathologising trans people. I think she has a point; but she also honestly ends up by admitting to some common ground with the experts in question.

As for category 4, ROGD, the theory it puts forward is based on the observation that in recent years there has been a sudden, very large increase in adolescent girls identifying as trans, and that in this group the impulse to transition has been driven by social factors such as peer group dynamics, social media use, and prior mental health issues. Lisa Littman, whose research published in 2018 gave ROGD its name, speculated that rapid onset of gender dysphoria could be a social coping mechanism for other disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Her hypothesis sparked outrage and accusations of transphobia. But it is a hypothesis with strong explanatory value in relation to a striking social development that otherwise lacks any convincing explanation; and now, following further research the deniers are in retreat. If you read nothing else from all the links in this blog read what Amy Tishelman, former research director of Boston Children’s transgender clinic, said in a recent interview. She has become a critic of the field she helped to create and is now clearly paying serious attention to ROGD. The implication is that the mental health history and social influences on every child need to be explored thoroughly, without rushing headlong towards the conclusion that “gender affirming care” is the right option.

THE TERFS AND J.K. ROWLING

I should point out that in none of the extensive analysis above have I even touched upon any of the objections to transgender rights that have been put forward by the TERFs. The case for caution in relation to adolescent physical transition has nothing to do with their claims, which often do seem to be grounded in transphobia – definitely so in the case of the hateful harridans of Reduxx, who are also (more than coincidentally) virulently anti-MAP, and whose co-founder Anna Slatz has flirted with the neo-Nazi Far Right.

Which brings me back to J.K. Rowling, who has been strongly identified with the TERF camp thanks to her belief that transwomen who have a penis should be excluded from women’s spaces (such as rape crisis centres, women’s prisons, female designated public conveniences, and competitive women’s sport) but who insists that she is not against trans people. I think the TERF case is strong on all the above issues; but I suspect that unlike the truly transphobic hard-liners, Rowling would be among those who would be interested in potential compromise solutions that would keep all reasonable parties happy:  such as working towards more unisex public conveniences.

I come back to Rowling because something needs to be said to fellow heretics here who expressed their “disappointment” at Part 1 of this blog, and who may now be even more upset to see me double down in Part 2. I urge them to consider carefully the arguments and evidence I have presented, rather than reacting in knee-jerk fashion.

Rarely is it easy to take a stance against strong opinion within one’s own “tribe” and friendship circle. But sometimes it is necessary to tell hard truths and “do the right thing”. In her first book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling emphasised this very point. Soon after that book appeared in 1997 and became a global sensation, followed by the associated film in 2001, I wondered why the kids were being blown away by it, and decided to read the book myself, to find out.

I was impressed, and one incident in the story stood out for me. Do you remember a character called Neville Longbottom? He is presented as someone of no great distinction, just a modest boy with not much confidence, the sort who manages to “get by with a little help from his friends”. So, he really needed these friends. But there comes a time when he must risk losing their friendship by telling them they are in the wrong. This is his big moment. He finds his courage, sticks to his guns, and wins the day.

Rowling has said in an interview that “there’s a lot of Neville in me – this feeling of just never being quite good enough… I felt that a lot when I was younger”. For that reason, she wanted Neville to do something brave, in which Neville “finds true moral courage in standing up to his closest friends – the people who are on his side” towards the climax of the novel.

There is much less at stake for me than for Neville, or even than there was for Rowling when she was a young unknown. By contrast, I have no lack of self-confidence these days (different when I was younger), and I am not that bothered over making myself unpopular. After all, I’ve had a lifetime of experience at it! 🙂