Trans rights will be durable only if campaigners respect women's concerns

By KRISTINA HARRISON

This is part of a two-week discussion on trans issues. Kristina Harrison's previous essay is here. All other essays in the series are here.

Reading all four of last week’s essays in favour, either explicitly or implicitly, of gender self-declaration, I’m struck by the lack of acknowledgement of the elephant in the room. The same omission was evident in the responses from sections of the trans movement to an open letter published by the Guardian on May 4th from a group of transsexuals (including me) opposed to self-identification. The “elephant” is the principal reason that there is no controversy about trans men accessing men’s spaces, but an almighty row about self-identified trans women accessing women’s spaces. It is the systematic discrimination, sexism and misogyny that women and girls suffer from birth, from a male-dominated political system and at the hands of individual males, the sex into which trans women are born and (usually) socialised.

We are not going to get very far unless it is acknowledged that women and girls, as a sex, are vulnerable to males, who are on average bigger, stronger, more assertive and more violent. It is women’s experience of sexism and misogyny, and their struggle against them, not bigotry, that overwhelmingly motivates opposition to the trans movement’s current agenda. Women are concerned with their own protections from abuse, violence, discrimination and their right to single-sex provision enshrined in the Equality Act (2010), not with needlessly making life hard for trans people. Quite the contrary: many women opposed to gender self-identification are also deeply concerned about the lives, well-being and rights of trans friends, colleagues and family members.

I’m not arguing that trans women per se are any particular danger to women. There is little evidence to suggest that. However, I am horrified by the number of trans women threatening extreme, misogynistic violence. I see, almost daily, violent threats on social media aimed at women demonised as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Last September a 60-year-old woman in London was punched by a six-foot-tall trans woman (pictured above) more than three decades younger. The woman, Maria MacLachlan, was there simply to attend a meeting to discuss the self-identification proposals. An art exhibition in April in San Francisco featured T-shirts printed with “I punch TERFs” and smeared with fake blood, and baseball bats, axes and sledgehammers painted in the colours of the trans flag. (These exhibits were removed after protests.) By contrast, I’ve yet to see one instance of women threatening to physically attack trans people. It raises a question: is the biological and socialised sex of trans women relevant and more predictive of some individuals’ behaviour than gender identity? It certainly seems to be for some people. Is it entirely unreasonable for women to pause and question whether they want to share vulnerable spaces with what looks like a significant number of trans women who threaten them with violence?

Yet, a bigger issue for many women is the potential for predatory men to abuse self-identification to gain access to women’s spaces. Vic Valentine writes that “the process whereby you can update the gender on your birth certificate to reflect your identity should be based on statutory declaration. This is a legal oath, and it would be a criminal offence to make a false declaration deliberately.” Such a declaration would be false if, for example, a trans woman was “not living permanently as a woman”.

This is not very reassuring at all. There will be no one checking up on people who make gender declarations. Even if there was, how do you prove that someone is not living “as a woman”, when a core tenet of trans activists’ beliefs is that a deep inner feeling of identification as a woman is enough to make you one? How can you prove or disprove what is happening in someone’s head? No one managing a single-sex space is going to be asking for people’s gender self-identification documents in any event. The fear of many women is that natal males who say they identify as women will have to be accepted at face value, even if they have a full beard, like trans woman Alex Drummond, and even if they dress, act, look and sound like ordinary men, because to challenge their declaration could be construed as a hate crime. In practice that could mean women losing their ability to challenge any men who enter women-only spaces.

We need a mutually respectful way forward that protects women’s single-sex spaces and autonomy—but also trans people’s rights, too. As Charlie Kiss rightly says, “being trans is not easy”, and for some, transition to living as if a member of the other sex is hugely life-affirming, even life-saving. He continues: “Nowadays trans men can work out much earlier that they are trans men, rather than having to conform to a woman’s lifestyle, whether lesbian or heterosexual.” I understand all too painfully the opposite scenario, trying to follow a male lifestyle, a social role that negated so much of who I was as an individual. My life has been transformed through the pragmatic individual solution of transition.

So as well as challenging these constraining and outmoded gender roles it’s important to protect and support the ability to transition for those who need it. But in the final analysis trans people’s rights rest on our relationship with society. They will not be meaningful and lasting if they are won by disrespecting, demonising and intimidating women, or by driving through proposals without proper debate and consent. That would only produce bitterness and backlash. We should proceed through honesty, peaceful campaigning and respectful debate.