Transphobia, Slurs, and the Rights of Women III
Mutilating Concepts
1. Stonewalling
In Part II of “Transphobia, Slurs, and the Rights of Women” I identified what I called the “Transphobic Fallacy” whereby the “gender-absolutist” assumes that anyone who maintains that sexual differences are biological in nature holds a philosophical view that is definitive of being “transphobic”. Now, if someone is denounced as sexist or racist or homophobic the accused has a right to know on what grounds the accusation is made, and to challenge those grounds if they feel they are false or misrepresent them. Indeed, the “openness” of this process is essential to bringing about the changes in attitudes and behaviour that naming the prejudices in question aims at1. When we expose the “Transphobic Fallacy” and level the playing-field (or “stop at the entrance”), then, we do no more in the first instance than restore this sense of natural justice.
Although we have demonstrated that the gender absolutist’s elimination of sex in favour of “gender-identity” should be treated as a proposal rather than accepted as a presupposition that should shape our own views and the responses of others towards them, this does not mean that we should reject it outright. Since the “gender-absolutist” contends that their proposal ought to be accepted because it is better (morally) to do so, the work I have posted on Substack represents an open-minded attempt to evaluate the “reasonableness” of the proposed elimination. The conclusions I arrived at are that the proposed elimination is conceptually ill-founded and reactionary and are summarised here. However, reasonableness isn’t a matter of conceptual coherence thought of in a narrow sense. The appeal of the explication-elimination schema I’ve used to identity the gender-absolutist proposal for change is that it invites us to contemplate the broader societal effects of such a change. In my next piece I’ll take up the promised overview of the Employment Tribunal hearings that led to the “protection” of so-called “gender critical” beliefs. But in order to say more about those “broader societal effects” it’s helpful to remind ourselves that Maya Forstater’s case against her employer was ultimately successful because the Appeal Tribunal was convinced that “gender critical” beliefs met the guidelines established by case law for determining what conditions a (philosophical) belief must meet if it’s to be protected under the Equalities Act (2010). According the Equality and Human Rights Commission publication “Religion or Belief: A Guide to the Law” these ‘must:
be genuinely held
be a belief and not just an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available
be about a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour
attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance, and
be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not in conflict with fundamental rights of others.’ (p. 5)
Given their legal status, these guidelines provide a useful way of thinking about “reasonableness” in the broader sense referred to. And in doing so they prompt an obvious question: should gender-absolutist beliefs be considered “worthy of respect in a democratic society”? Of course, I’ve argued that the legal protection afforded “gender critical” beliefs would never have been required if the “Transphobic Fallacy” had been exposed at the outset. It may be a tad ironic, then, but if the analogous question can be asked with apparent seriousness of the commonsense-scientific belief that sex is immutable then what possible objection could there be to posing it to the gender absolutist, especially in the light of our now levelled playing-field?!
A sincere attempt to respond to this question requires a willingness to demonstrate that one’s beliefs are compatible with “human dignity” and are “not in conflict with the fundamental rights of others”. That could only take place through an open-minded engagement on the part of the gender-absolutist with those who hold different views. I’ve offered as the most plausible account of the gender-absolutist standpoint that it involves a commitment to a conceptual change that involves the elimination of women. If that is true, then how does the replacement of sexual difference with one that is indexed to “gender-identity” stand in relation to the rights of women? If it is false then how is one to think of the proposed revision? It’s time that those who hold such beliefs to stop “stonewalling” in response to questions like this by denouncing those who pose them as “transphobes” and to start to take seriously the need to attain to the required level of “cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance”. In the next section I’ll offer a further consideration in support of the view that this cannot be achieved.
2. What’s in a name?
I. What people used to call “transwomen” are really women*, and
II. What people used to call “transmen” are really men*.
These are just two of the expressions that are true only if we acknowledge the “reasonableness” of the gender-absolutist’s proposal for a right to self-ascribe gender-identity (the “*” terms). And as noted above, the “reasonableness” aims to capture the idea that affirming such a right must be seen as a beneficial change that will improve the life-chances/increase the autonomy of people—in the sense that, for example, acknowledging a right to marry someone irrespective of their sex increases the autonomy of people—in a way that adheres to the sort of guidelines offered in respect of “protected” beliefs. Necessarily, then, when evaluating “reasonableness” we must bear in mind that gender-identity is not here being employed as a term that that is unrelated to sex as it is commonsensically understood. When we accept as true (I) and (II) etc. we are accepting as true their correlates:
I'. There are no such things as women
II'. There are no such things as men
Where the “men” and “women” (“boys” and “girls”; “male” and “female”) are the now impugned terms once used to identify people’s sex. So, the elimination whose reasonableness we are evaluating can be expressed in following familiar way:
3. What people used to call “sex” is really gender-identity
3'. There is no such thing as someone’s sex
As noted above, I have argued in rather abstract terms about what we might now call the “cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance” of the gender-absolutist’s proposed elimination. I should however add that where my approach differs from that of a traditional “gender-critic” (like that of Kathleen Stock for example) is that as a pragmatist I hold that the proposed revision would not violate some law of nature or somehow fail to carve nature at its joints. If social practices determine that (i) people have first-person authority over something we call their “gender-identity”, and (ii) sex-terms have been eliminated in-favour of gender-identity terms then metaphysically speaking at least there is no higher court of appeal. But that isn’t any cause for apology, since progressive thinkers will embrace the fact that some conceptual reforms are progressive. To repeat the point, the very appeal of the eliminativist schema as I’ve outlined it is to draw attention to the large-scale shift in beliefs and other attitudes that must take place in order for an “in-favour” elimination to work, and to invite us to evaluate the “reasonableness” of such proposals in the light of potential losses as well as gains.
To make this less abstract consider the following:
What people used to call “female circumcision” is really female genital mutilation
“Circumcision” means the act of cutting round. In the context it means the ritual cutting off or removal of the foreskin. If “female circumcision” were a genuine analogy to “male circumcision” so defined then it would as the OED reminds us involve only ‘the removal of the prepuce (hood) of the clitoris’, which is not of course what the various practices once referred to as “female circumcision” involve.
The term “female circumcision” itself has been in circulation in English for at least 300 years. In his discussion of circumcision in A Conference with a Theist Part II, William Nicholls notes that ‘The Aegyptians had among them a sort of a Female Circumcision mentioned by Strabo2, a custom never dreamt of among the Jews’ (p. 259). It’s perhaps surprising to learn that the WHO continued to use the term until the mid-1990s (and UNICEF until 2013) largely for the same reasons Pat Caplan notes in her 1979 twin review of The Hosken report and Scilla McLean’s Female circumcision, excision and infibulation:
anthropologists who have written about “female circumcision” have been largely concerned to avoid ethnocentricity… [and] have preferred to steer clear of discussing the ethical and political issues which surround it. (p. 877)
What I have called the “in-favour” elimination of “female circumcision” by female genital mutilation is not simply a lexical change then. It impugns the suggestion that the appropriate method for classifying what happens to females is by analogy with what happens to males, implying as it does that the varieties of “circumcision” are not usefully distinguished by making essential reference to sex (because it happens generically “down there”) and that the female “variety” therefore doesn’t require any special consideration. It signifies instead that the phenomenon in question demands evaluation from a standpoint that makes essential reference to those “ethical and political issues”, indicating that calling things “customs” can blind us to what’s going on in other cultures just as it does at home (domestic violence; unsolicited attention; controlling behaviour) and that the fear of “imposing” Western values might rightly make us cautious but it isn’t a precept. Above all it is part of an evolving recognition of the myriad ways in which sex-based violence, discrimination and control can mask themselves.
Most people would regard this elimination as part of a progressive attempt to improve the health and status of girls and women. To repeat, this is not because we have simply given something a new name; rather, it’s because we have come to see that calling a practice “female circumcision” involved thinking about it in a way that although complex is not just anatomically misleading but obscures the fact that something described apparently neutrally as a custom can really involve sexually-specific forms of harm and control.
Now, there’s a crude point to be made here. If what it is to be a girl*, woman*, indeed female* are all to be matters of self-assignment then are we going to find ourselves in a position where we talk not of female genital mutilation but of the mutilation of those girls* or women* who just happen to have a certain variety of genitalia, as if it were but a combination of contingency and bad luck? Indeed, might not it be more natural given such a change to restore talk of “female circumcision” since that can apply indifferently to those girls who have a penis and those who don’t? Could that counter-reformation be defended as something that—to return to protected beliefs—is “not incompatible with human dignity and not in conflict with fundamental rights of others?
If that sounds obtuse, consider that some anthropologists continue to feel that a term like “modification” is preferable to “mutilation”:
We purposefully avoid using the term “mutilation”… because we feel that it is unduly value-laden. Likewise, we feel that it is wrong to distance the practice of female genital modification from male genital modification (circumcision) because such an action seems to validate one type of unnecessary, non-consensual removal of genital tissue (common in “Western” culture), while stigmatizing a similar practice in other cultures. We use the more neutral term FGMo [female genital modification] to contextualize the practice within the wider anthropological scope of body modification. (fn. 1)
For reasons that will become clear, this is worth dwelling on. Firstly, the point of the in-favour elimination we’ve described was to make explicit the values that are really relevant to the situation and thus identity what the real object is. In what way, then, is mutilation-tall held to be unduly value-laden? One might imagine that the authors have in mind an expression that is perhaps a little less inflammatory than “mutilated”, but which might nevertheless be used to contrast what happens to females with what happens to males. But as the next sentence makes clear, that is not the case. The very attempt to draw such a contrast, they write, is to ‘stigmatiz[e] a similar practice in other cultures’. This desire not to want to distinguish the two, but to insist on seeing them as part of the ‘wider anthropological scope of body modification’ is made clearer with the choice of contrastive term: they do not chose “distinguish” to characterise the apparently unacceptable way of opposing female genital mutilation to male circumcision; rather, they talk of “distancing”. Since “distancing” implies that some ethical contrast is being drawn, the implication is that any attempt to distinguish is an attempt to distance and therefore to make an unwarranted value-judgement.
It’s important to remind ourselves at this point that it’s precisely because the cultural practice of male circumcision is not “similar” to (what is really) female genital mutilation that the “in-favour” explication was proposed in the first place. By warning against distancing they imply that the practices cannot be distinguished in a way that’s relevant to inquiry. But this simply presupposes that the natural way of thinking about female genital mutilation is indeed in relation to male circumcision, an association that was forged by the casual use of “circumcision” in connection with the genital mutilation of females in the first place. And the suspicion that the authors’ standpoint is little more than an apologia for the traditional way of viewing this is reinforced by their insistence that FGMo and MGMo are “similar practices”, and that both are to be brought under the “anthropological scope of body modification”. But in reducing female genital mutilation to a supposedly value-free datum in the name of scientific inquiry and—paradoxically—in the fear that to do otherwise would be to privilege “Western” culture, it assimilates it to a range of practices that would include ear-piercing and tattooing and in doing so deprives it of its status as a form of sexual violence perpetrated against young females.
In case my intention is misunderstood I should state why I’m using this example. In a positive mode it is intended to show how the elimination schema works, and how we might evaluate the sorts of changes proposed. But it is also intended to show (in the case of the anthropologists) how such a change might be resisted and what might motivate it. And the thought here is that eliminating considerations of sexual difference in the interest of a supposedly neutral “anthropological” gaze shares with the theorist of “gender-identity” a theoretical absolutism that blinds itself to the implications of its own recommendations. But that shared absolutism goes further—in the case of gender-absolutism, for example, it sees a woman having her breasts removed as a “modification” to align body with “gender-identity”, as if the latter is the absolute real and the former something with only an accidental relation to the authentic self. But surely we’ve learned that cosmetic changes etc. are not the true measure of authenticity, but just another way in which the body has been made to appear external to us—as something we can measure our “true” selves against—in the interests of commodification and control.
Now, one moral from this might be that it’s the “gender critics” that are the absolutists. According to Butler, ‘they think of their sex as property, something’ that can be ‘stolen from them’. But why if we insist on the metaphor should “owning” one’s sex be any less authentic than “owning” one’s gender identity, just because there are also objective criteria for the former3? Like a child’s version of idealism, this runs-together two different considerations, as if the only facts about me that should be relevant to me are the facts that I chose to constitute as such: that only “my” reality is real for me. But consider tallness. Someone can enjoy being tall (strut; walk “tall”) or be embarrassed by it. Some people are attracted to tall people and others threatened by them (and respond violently). Would we sanction surgically reducing people’s height if it was a source of unhappiness for them. Wouldn’t we rather encourage the view that someone’s height is just part of “who” they are?
Imagine that a committee was tasked to both define and punish instances of, say, racism but kept its deliberations secret and merely issued summary judgements. Or imagine an institution’s EDI policy being determined in part by a special-interest group like Stonewall…
Butler’s views are incoherent on this point as they are on many others. She writes ‘In denying the reality of trans lives, TERFs claim proprietary rights to gender categories, especially the category of women, yet gender categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives.’ At a quick scan: the category of “woman” isn’t a “gender category” and since no “category can be “owned” it’s a category mistake to be talking about “ownership” at all! Moreover, contrast the following: “In denying the reality of alien abductions, abducteephobes claim proprietary rights to abductee categories, especially the category of alien abductees, yet abductee categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Abductee categories precede and exceed our individual lives.” One can say lots of things about the “reality” of the lives of those who claim to have been abducted by aliens, but “they were abducted by aliens” is not one of them.