The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
If biological sex is a myth, so is evolution
This philosophy don braved accusations of hate to publish a fearless, rigorous study of gender identity
ÌÌÌÌÌ
Nakedness has always, literally or metaphorically, epitomised stark, outrageous truth. Diogenes in the Athenian marketplace, King Lear on the stormy heath, 20th-century hippies: all were tearing off their clothes to reveal the “poor, bare, forked animal” that underlies pretension and pretence. But now nudity is not enough. We discern something yet more fundamental beneath the skin – gender identity.
This, or your inner sense of it, is what makes you male or female (or, perhaps, one of a range of other genders), irrespective of whether it tallies with the sex you were “assigned at birth”, and whether or not (if it doesn’t) you undergo surgical or hormonal adjustments. To do so is irrelevant to being transgender (“transsexual” is an outmoded, quasi-offensive term). The essential thing is how you self-identify. Any distinction between “natural” and “artificial” sex is arbitrary.
For contesting such views, Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, is accused of hating trans people. But, undeterred, she sets out in Material Girls to disentangle the confusions that have bemused so many politicians, institutions and young people into acquiescing – with what? They’re unsure, except that it seems to be the tide of progress.
“How did we get here?” asks Stock, and locates various stages along the way. In the 1960s, feminists, in their efforts to free women from constricting stereotypes, distinguished (socially constructed) “gender” from (biological) “sex”; clinicians dealing with sexual development disorders developed the idea of “gender identity”; Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and gender studies, claimed both that there were five sexes, and that sex was along a continuum. Other academics (Thomas Laqueur, Judith Butler and Monique Wittig respectively) contended that binary sex was invented in the 18th century, was socially constructed and merely “performative”, or was an artificial social division created by oppression.
But if so, “how exactly was the oppressive pattern supposed to start?” asks Stock. Often when sex is denied, it is simultaneously presupposed. “Gender” – which is taken to be identical, or different, to “sex”, as convenient – has (on her analysis) four distinct meanings, which helpfully slip into one another, or are inconsistently conflated.
The sexual continuum claim is buttressed by contentions that
1.7 per cent of the population is intersex – a figure, says Stock, which is inflated by including those with non-standard chromosomal and genital configurations: it should, more realistically, be 0.018 per cent. In any case, binary sex is a reality, for “the most obvious and basic reason” that, without it, humanity would have died out. Humans, if not male and female, would be unique among mammals; maybe not even animals at all. If biological sex is a myth, then so, too, is the theory of evolution.
To deny binary biological sex (even if admitting the existence of “non-prostate owners” and that babies come from “front holes”) ignores sex-based illnesses, and is dangerous for medical diagnosis and research. It skews crime figures and rewrites what it is to be gay. Stonewall (set up 30 years ago to defend gay rights) has, in its new trans-obsessed incarnation, defined homosexuality as an orientation “towards someone of the same gender”; hence trans women, with or without penises, can (and
Saturday 1 May 2021 The Daily Telegraph do) brand lesbians who refuse to sleep with them “transphobic”.
For, of course, since trans women (whatever their genitalia) “are just as much women as cis [natal] women are”, they, too, are obviously entitled to qualify as lesbian; as they are to compete as sportswomen, vie for women’s jobs and prizes, inhabit women’s jails, and use women-only changing rooms. Trans men are unlikely to make equivalent demands, so pose no threat to cis men. But women’s hard-won rights are jeopardised, and, potentially, their very safety.
The latter charge incurs outrage: how dare you imply that trans women could have evil intentions? Yet John Stuart Mill was right: “laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad”. Of course, any trans woman found to be a rapist is declared to never have really been a trans woman, after all. Then how, asks Stock, given the much-vaunted innerness and invisibility of gender, are trans women to be distinguished from cis men, and on what grounds can the identity of anyone, however bodied, be justifiably challenged, in bedroom or bathroom?
Oddly, the impetus for all this – rejecting sexual stereotypes that are falsely linked to biology – has, as Stock shows, come full circle. What, after all, is it to signal gender identity – to others, and even to yourself – if not being “manlike” or “womanlike”? Concepts once excoriated are now embraced. Girls who hate pink and like football, boys who squat to pee or play with dolls, are now potential candidates for being “truly trans” (a notion that hardly jibes with that of sexual diffuseness) and for puberty blockers and eventual transitioning.
Of course trans people require protective laws, says Stock. But that people can actually change sex is a fiction, often temporary or intermittent. It is one in which non-trans people would be courteous (though should not be legally coerced) to also engage. Not, however, to the extent of declaring it fact, or pretending that trans women are suited to filling any female role: rape counsellor, say, or refuge adviser. Material Girls exposes “The Emperor’s New Dress”. It is a brave, enlightening, closely argued book, by a fearless woman.