‘Women are in danger of fixating on trans women’
IN any other time, and I suspect to many even now, the poster that has been banned on Edinburgh buses would have seemed unremarkable, if not baffling. For the words it carried were nothing other than a dictionary definition of woman. “Woman. Noun. Adult human female.” What made it worth banning, though, is where it came from and the part it performed in a wider online message – which was anti-trans. This is often the case with contentious speech now.
It’s not about the words themselves, but the context.
The poster, in other words, was just the tip of an iceberg, floating in a sea of identity politics. Under that ocean’s surface was the larger mass of the politics of its creator, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull who has campaigned against genderneutral toilets and trans access to women’s spaces and said that trans women are not women. She had chosen Edinburgh buses for their display as a reaction to the recent Scottish Government bus poster: “Dear transphobes, Do you think it’s right to harass people in the street? Right to push transgender people around in clubs? ... Well we don’t.”
The fight over who counts as a woman and where they may count as such
– few, as yet, are really all that bothered about who counts as a man – is not one that is going to go away soon. There are good reasons for this, and I’m not going to deny they exist.
Among them is the fact cases have emerged of trans women sexually assaulting cis women (someone whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth), the most infamous of these being that of Karen White, who entered a female prison as transgender, though still legally male, and sexually assaulted two other inmates.
But awful as these stories are, the increasing ferocity of the feminist fight against trans people doesn’t seem, to me, to reflect the degree of risk. We can find shocking individual stories around all contentious issues. Women are in danger of fixating on trans women as if they were their chief threat – when really the biggest threat to women is, quite simply, men, who don’t need to wangle their way into toilets or prisons to find ways to abuse or assault. How to counter that wider problem is the far bigger issue to tackle. It should also be added that the biggest physical threat to trans women is men.
That feminists and trans activists have got caught up in a dirty war over gender identity is not really a reflection on the degree of threat trans women cause to women, but the intensity of the tribal culture that has emerged over recent years in identity politics.
It’s the way our heated culture now operates. As shocking as attacks by feminists on trans activists are, equally, if not more, shocking is the misogyny sometimes emitted by the trans community. Take a step back and it’s possible to see this as just one of many current tribal disputes in the world of identity politics – whether over race, gender or class. Women are defending their safe spaces.
Many do feel a real threat from trans women – and one that relates to their own experience of abuse or violence from men. But while we fixate on the threat, there is frequently insufficient empathy for the struggle of trans people – just as sometimes the trans community shows too little for the lived experience of those born and raised women. Do any of us really want to argue against the sentiments of that “Dear Transphobes” poster? And couldn’t we equally create a version that begins: “Dear Misogynists?”
It seems to me we need a wider, empathetic “We don’t”, that reaches beyond the pain of our own tribe. What worries me is that this trans panic is triggered mostly by a tribalist fear of those who are different.
We need to hold many things in our head as we search for answers – the need to protect girls, support for the women who feel or are unsafe, and empathy for the trans person whose journey I believe remains far harder than those of most gender-conforming women.
Sadly that’s not happening – for these are days of tribal rule.