Transphobia and Language 1
Gender (in) Trouble?
The shift that has been taking place in contemporary culture is not easy to characterise, but one way of starting to do so is to identify two groups: those who accuse others of being transphobic and those who deny the accusation. It’s not always clear if those in the accused group know what it is that they’re being accused of (other than that they “hate transgendered people”) or indeed even acknowledge that there is such a thing as transphobia; but clearly those doing the accusing have a clear sense of what it means—or at least they ought to. And anyone who has a clear sense of what transphobia is must presumably have an at least equally clear sense of what a transgendered person is if such persons are the target of transphobia. The Sentencing Act extended to those with a “transgender identity” the concept of “aggravated” offences outlined in the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), and so our initial line of inquiry has been to focus on what the law recognises as a transgendered person. In Transgender and the Law 1 and Transgender and the Law 2 we looked at the legal situation in the UK, and noted the pressures the existing legislative framework is under to change in response to what appear to be rapidly evolving social attitudes. In Transphobia, Hate Crimes, and the Right to Identify—which was a sort-of interim report/summary—the conclusion was that the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act enshrines a commitment to acknowledging a right to gender self-identification, a right that the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill attempted (though failed) to put into law. In this and the next piece we’ll turn away from the legal situation and seek an answer to our related questions (“What is transphobia?”/”What is a transgendered person?”) by looking at how language has and is changing. As will become clear, the lesson from the front line of ordinary language is that the only coherent way to understand what it is to be transgendered is in terms of that already identified right, and correspondingly the only way to understand the charge of transphobia is in terms of a denial of that right.
Transphobia appears to indicate a certain attitude towards a specific group of people, and according to the OED it follows those expectations: it’s the ‘fear or hatred of transsexual or transgender people’. In a sense, talk of “fear” or “hatred” already seems out of step with current usage. Regarding homophobia, for example, the OED’s stress is no longer on “fear”—this being demoted to the ‘less commonly’ used—having shifted towards ‘hostility’ with an emphasis on ‘prejudice’. And it’s evident that this change from what seems like a purely reactive or visceral response applies likewise to transphobia. On the one hand, one can fear—and, perhaps, even hate—something and yet, recognising that the attitude is unreasonable or no long socially acceptable, strive to overcome it and perhaps act in accordance with one’s better self. On the other hand, when someone is accused publicly of being transphobic they are not necessarily assumed to viscerally hate or fear transsexual or transgender people; and for that reason, when the accused claim—as they invariably do—that they are not subject to such feelings that isn’t taken by their accusers as evidence that they aren’t in fact hostile to or prejudiced against trangendered people and that therein lies evidence of their transphobia. The apparent direction of travel here becomes clearer still when we consider those more storied markers of change the “isms”. Although definitions of the term “racism”, for example, have long acknowledged that there are both “personal” or reactive and doctrinal or systemic expressions the latter have come to predominate[1]. Likewise, when we talk about transphobia in connection with hostility and prejudice it’s clear that the prejudice in question is more of the doctrinal variety, which aims to impede in some systemic way a person’s life-chances.
Given that, what group of people are the target of transphobia? Until the end of the last century that would have been a simple question to answer: transsexuals. A transsexual would have been defined as ‘a person who has undergone or is undergoing sex reassignment’, and by “sex reassignment” would have been understood to include the sort of hormonal and surgical interventions that brought about major changes to someone’s morphology (see Transphobia and the Law 1). However, things have become less clear. The OED reports that ‘The word transsexual is now often avoided’ and that ‘terms such as transgender (person) or trans (person)’ are ‘preferred’. But if emerging usage suggests that the targeted group is that of “transgender” persons, what is a transgender person? Again, the OED reflects contemporary uncertainty, defining members of such a group indifferently as both
TG(i) ‘transsexual or transvestite,’ and as
TG(ii) persons [a] ‘whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond to that person’s sex at birth, or [b] which does not otherwise conform to conventional notions of sex and gender’.
This increasingly commodious definition embodies the shift that has taken place over the past 20 years or so; but given the foregoing it’s clear that—notwithstanding the reference to “cross-dressing” in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act—TG(i) no longer has the relevance it once had. Being transsexual (as traditionally defined) may be a sufficient condition for being transgender but it certainly isn’t necessary; and being [a] transvestite is neither necessary nor sufficient.
What then of TG(ii)? The operative contrast is between sex and gender, but what is gender? Here’s the OED again:
[gender is] the state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one’s sex (emphasis added).
By itself this definition might not appear terribly enlightening, but we can draw a number of distinctions that will prove useful as we proceed. The first is that there is nothing to indicate that as defined gender assignments are any less objective than the associated biological assignments. As the OED definition makes evident, this objectivity is accounted for by envisaging gender talk as the extension or projection into sociocultural discourse of a naturalistic distinction; namely, the “state” of being male or female.
This is not a trivial matter. The contribution of the concept of gender to progressive thought comes from helping unmask what are purported to be features determined by biological state as cultural accretions—things merely associated with it—whose real functions are oftentimes coercive and discriminatory. As such, specifications of gender are entirely parasitic on biosexual difference and without that dependence gender-discourse loses its critical function. When terms like “woman” and “man” are used in gender talk as so conceived, then, that need not signify that they have been given a special meaning: they are not as it were specifically gender-terms, norms for the correct use of which have been (“socioculturally”) liberated from those relating to biological state and which consequently now pick out a new set of beings.
This critical conception of gender-talk is rather out of fashion these days and we get a sense of the changes afoot by looking at the response from psychiatrists. Here’s the DSM-V (2022) definition:
Gender is used to denote the public, sociocultural (and usually legally recognized) lived role as boy or girl, man or woman, or other gender.’ (511)
Read quickly, this seems to suggest the following: gender denotes “the lived role as” a boy/ girl/ man/ woman (say “Z” to cover all these), where the Z in question has a non-gender specification. That would correspond broadly with the OED’s suggestion that sexual differences (“boy” as male child, “woman” as adult female, etc) can be expressed in public/sociocultural terms. But it’s evident that the supplemental “or other genders” implies that “boy” does not mean biological male child and “woman” does not mean biological female adult because these are in fact gender terms. And this is further supported by the missing articles: not as a boy but “as boy”, not as a girl but “as girl” etc. If the articles were included the implication would be that despite being “lived” the roles were nevertheless mimetic, that someone is “presenting” being a Z by living as if they were a Z, where being a Z is a matter of sex not gender. The upshot of this is that we should not be reading this as “lived role as” a Z but as “lived-role-as-Z” where there is no non-gender specification of Z. If the first is akin to giving the Oscar for best performance to the character and not the actor the second is like awarding it to the actor but not saying what performance it’s for!
Now, the very idea of a “lived role” is clearly intended to impart some sort of existential heft to presentation or performance: to give it the sort of determinacy that biosexual difference has. But notwithstanding the attempt to insinuate that such roles are somehow more authentic or sincere because they are lived (as opposed to…?), if gender does indeed concern role it is either (i) essentially mimetic/ relational/ parasitic on those Zs (as per the OED definition), or (ii) it is indeterminate. Establishing (ii) can be done in a number of ways, but consider the simplest:
If to be woman is (simply) to live as-woman, and to live “as-woman” is to fulfil a certain role, then what constrains the meaning of “as-woman”? What makes the role one is “living” the “as-woman” role as opposed to the “as-man” role? If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s much the same point as the one made when discussing the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill in Transgender and the Law 2. There we remarked the absurdity of legally determining what it would be to “live in” the role of a woman without descending into the sort of vacuous stereotyping that feminists introduced gender discourse to critique. Hearkening back to the parasitism we noted above, the moral is that we have very little idea what “lived-role-as-Z” means except in situations where we’re talking about Zs and that specification makes ineliminable reference to sexual difference. In the absence of some non-role specification of the role played the GSM-V definition reduces to the formula “Gender… denote[s]… gender”, which is unenlightening even by the standards of contemporary psychiatry!
If the above is correct then there is no way of “liberating” talk of gender from talk of sex by falling back on the idea of “roles”, lived or otherwise. But does that mean that what it is to be transgender is so indeterminate that it would be nonsense to talk about a group membership stable enough to be to the target of hostility and prejudice of a specific sort? Again, even if the answer here is “yes” that wouldn’t imply that some of the people who might previously have been allocated to that group aren’t themselves subject to disgraceful treatment and worse. But that wouldn’t be evidence for transphobia. However, in my next piece I’ll consider a way of thinking about gender which promises to be more fruitful.
[1] Cf. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/how-racism-made-its-way-into-dictionary-merriam-webster/615334/ for something on the recent ‘history’ of “racism”.