Last year, at a closed door tribunal, I met several very young transpersons from rural and urban working class communities. It was heartbreaking to see teenagers brutalised and evicted by family, surviving suicide attempts as well as persecution and violence on the streets. In the stormy debates on the ‘transgender question’, their voices remind me of what stakes are real.
This is not about western culture wars, or debates over sex, gender, or sports. It is about the rights of every human being to be recognised and respected as themselves; to never be asked to deny, disguise, or defend their self-hood in order to enjoy civil rights and equality.
Universal today but problems in the past
Principles of human rights that are today established as universal, were once treated as ‘questions’, ‘problems’ and ‘debates’. The slavery question. The woman question/problem. The (N-word) question/problem. The suffrage question. The segregation question. The untouchability question. The inter-racial/inter-caste marriage question. The age of consent question. The homosexual question/problem. The Jewish question/problem. These are all titles of writings by some of the best-known historical figures in the world, as well as letters to editors. Bathroom segregation was rationalised as necessary to protect white women from predatory black men on the prowl; police raids on bathrooms to arrest gay men were rationalised to keep boys safe. ‘Bathroom bills’ to keep transwomen from raping women in toilets are following a tired old script.
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It was a Nazi member of the International Olympic Committee who proposed a policy that “ladies taking part in the Games 1940 shall produce doctors’ certificates stating that they are women” — ironically, such a policy came into effect in 1948, after the Nazi defeat (at the London Games) — “Officials required female Olympians to submit an affidavit, signed by a doctor, certifying that they were women.”
What seemed to be legitimate ‘questions’ back then were in fact designed to deny civil rights. Today, it is only the far-right that seeks to make those questions “great again”, and unsurprisingly, it also derides trans rights. But it is ‘gender critical’ progressive intellectuals and activists who do what the openly bigoted far-right cannot: frame trans rights as a ‘question’ requiring reasonable debate. This allows trans rights activists to be accused of being an unreasonable mob that cancels critics through bullying and violence. Search the Internet though and one finds out that movements we celebrate today faced the same accusations. Having your realness ‘debated’ does make one angry. Black people, women, lesbians and gays were known to ‘riot’, smash windows, disrupt meetings, vandalise property, set buildings on fire, spit at the police and so on.
The gender-critical mantra is that ‘biological sex is real’. The corollary is that transgender identity is not real. Gender-critical progressives lobby for laws penalising or prohibiting the acceptance of trans personhood as real (by textbooks, toilets, schools, sports, hospitals). And the far-right works to enact such laws. In 2022-23, Republican members of the U.S. Congress introduced a Bill which, if passed, would prohibit federally-funded libraries and schools from keeping any material with information on sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex education. Predictably, these laws also penalise and prohibit the acceptance of homosexuality as real.
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Existence is not an abstract debate
Social scientists cannot be agnostic on the ‘question’ of trans ‘existence’ but claim to offer an objective and dispassionate ‘explanation’ of the ‘emergence’ of transpersons as a symptom of political philosophy or ideology. ‘Emergence’ implies that being trans is a trend, here today, gone tomorrow. Existence is not an abstract debate. Human beings can enjoy their rights only if their identity is affirmed as ‘real’ in law, not ‘lifestyle’. To say that trans persons are free to dress as they wish as long as their trans-identity is denied in law is no different from saying people are free to be gay in private, but must not ‘flaunt their lifestyle’ by demanding the legal right to marry as heterosexuals do.
The openly partisan far-right discourse declares transpersons and non-binary sexualities to be synthetic symptoms of ‘gender ideology’ just as gender-critical discourse does. But the latter pretends not to notice that the former declares human rights, multiculturalism, the delegitimisation of hierarchies of caste, race and gender; abortion, and homosexuality also to be symptoms of ‘liberal elite ideology’.
What is the relationship of sexual identity and gender to mind and body? Is it biologically self-evident that a woman (to quote author and leading gender-critical campaigner J.K. Rowling) is a “human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes (ova)”?
Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding was the opposite of Rowling’s; her iconic work, The Second Sex, begins by questioning the definition of ‘woman’ as ‘a womb, an ovary’. On the next page, she says the male/female binary is not as obvious as it seems: “the very meaning of division of the species into two sexes is not clear”.
Her famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is far more radical than a rejection of the notion that (biological) sex determines (social) gender. In fact, she does not see the sexed body as an abstract fixed ‘reality’ that is interpreted by the ‘mind’ as ‘gender’. Our consciousness of the body is inseparable from the way we experience it in our social life: “the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects”. The body (sex) does not determine the shape of gendered consciousness; but gendered consciousness too is not tied to a specific anatomical form. That is, “a consciousness without a body is inconceivable”, but “this body need not possess this or that particular structure”.
The Second Sex challenged the long-held status of the male/female sex binary as ‘universal truth’, and in doing so, built on the work of other philosophers who had challenged the Cartesian mind/body binary. The so-called ‘culture wars’ must not be dignified as a product of a uniquely bewildering disruption by transgenders of male/female, mind/body binaries. They are a garden variety reactionary backlash, seen every time a hitherto dehumanised and discriminated people forced the world to acknowledge their identity as entitled to the same dignity and civil liberties as those more privileged.
The issue of society’s character
Science fiction can sometimes clarify contemporary conflicts by placing them in ‘space’, outside the context of our own inherited prejudices. In an episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation (‘The Measure of a Man’) a judicial trial is held to decide if Data, an android and a beloved member of the crew, is the property of Star Fleet and can be dismantled for research against his will. A devastating demonstration argues that Data is not human, since a human being can dismember his limbs and shut down his body. In response, Captain Picard forces the court to look at Data as he sees himself: asserting his “right to choose”, and his “rights and status” as a “person” rather than “property”. What is on trial is the measure of humanity’s character, not the measure of Data’s personhood based on an examination of his parts. As Picard puts it: the verdict “will reveal the kind of a people we are”, and “could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom, expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others”. It is our society’s character, not the sexual and gender identity of transpersons, that is under ‘question’. Black bodies (especially their private parts) were once studied with the same air of scientific detachment as trans and intersex bodies are today, to assess the extent to which they were ‘real’ humans.
It is trans-sceptics, not transpersons, who are fragmenting the integral human self.
To ‘be’ trans or gay is to ‘be’ human; to study their parts to determine their ‘realness’ is always already a dehumanising exercise.
Kavita Krishnan is a feminist activist and writer
Published - September 14, 2024 12:16 am IST
