Gender, identity politics
From 1980-2012, I was on the academic staff of the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato, where I developed New Zealand’s first courses on ‘women and education’ and ‘education and sexuality.’
Course content included (biological) sex, gender (its historical/cultural meanings) and the gendered and sexual identities felt or expressed by individuals. It is pleasing to see the Waikato Times engaging with global controversies about sex and gender.
On December 8, ‘Well and Good’ included an interview with a teenager experiencing ‘gender dysphoria:’ a distressing condition in which ‘a person experiences a mismatch between their gender and biological sex.’
On Dec 11, the paper reprinted The
Telegraph’s recent interview with JK Rowling, whose earlier warnings against ‘erasure of the concept of sex’ and its replacement with ‘gender identity’ had elicited vitriolic backlash.
Those who question fashionable ‘gender ideology,’ she says, have been silenced by threats, ‘deplatforming’ and ‘cancelling’ of their rights to speak publicly. Rowling’s interview follows Britain’s High Court decision in the case against the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the UK by ‘detransitioner’ Keira Bell.
An unhappy teenage girl, whose emerging identity didn’t align with gender stereotypes, Bell discovered transgender networks on social media.
Committed to ‘affirmation’ rather than ‘watchful waiting’ with psychotherapy, GIDS prescribed puberty blockers and male hormones, irreversibly masculinising Keira’s appearance, voice and possibly affecting fertility.
The court ruled that children under the age of 18 were unlikely to be capable of informed consent to medications with such lifelong health consequences. As the story of the young adult in ‘Well and Good’ illustrates, these are not decisions to be made lightly.
The New Zealand media have been almost silent on the Keira Bell case, which raises questions here in health, education, law and ethics. As does Rowling, I support transgender people’s human rights, and the protection of these in law.
And, like her, I appeal for an end to the ‘climate of fear’ inhibiting open and respectful discussion’ of reforms that favour the removal of ‘sex’ and its replacement with self-declared ‘gender identity:’ in Human Rights legislation, Statistics NZ data and so on.
Proposed ‘hate speech’ laws that include gender must be discussed openly and respectfully. Biological sex and gender identity are equally relevant.
Like Rowling’s, ‘my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it is hateful to say so.’
Sue Middleton (Emeritus Professor), Hamilton