Write for us!
Let’s stop dancing around the issue: yes, we have a vestigial biology, but what actually defines us is language. We live in a world created by language and it is in that world we must find our authentic selves.
It’s the key thing that is essential for living a full, normal life. Gender Identity is what our true selves are – something we need to get in touch with because what matters is the recognition that it gives us in society. Luke Easley, of Center for Global Development (CDC), hit the nail on the head when he said, “Identity is reality – without identity there’s just a corpse”. The CDC, a development organization, in its work, confronts directly the harm that comes from the deprivation of an identity. Alan Gelb has shown why identity has to be a human right.
Feminism is inclusive
It is frustrating to be accused of misogyny and told I should listen to women when I have listened to women. Feminists have realized that biology has always been the go-to justification for why they should be denied their rights from the vote to equal pay. The intellectual groundwork was laid decades ago. We’ve known since the 1970s that gender identity, not biological sex, is the baseline of human identity. (Kate Millet – Sexual Politics pp 28-30). As Catherine MacKinnon said “I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.” Dividing women into trans and cis is a tactic straight out of the patriarchal playbook, designed to fracture women’s solidarity.
The paradox of tolerance
Those who quote J. S. Mill on freedom of speech forget that he also defined the harm principle. Identity is central to who a person is and a denial of identity is as harmful as you can get. It is one thing to argue that women who have much higher testosterone should not compete with other women, it is quite another to argue that they should be excluded by denying who they truly are. (That the exclusion of trans women from women’s sport is really transphobia is proved by how, even taking those women who do reduce their testosterone to the levels of cis women they still want them excluded.)
I don’t deny that those who deny the right to exist of trans people do not realise the harm they cause and might have genuine motives despite that harm.
Our right to exist as we define ourselves is existential
Hence, to make it illegal for someone to deny the right to exist of trans people (such as by calling a woman a man because she is trans) is premature but make no mistake: this isn’t a theoretical debate; it’s an existential one. We need to build towards a day when gender identity denial is as unacceptable as speaking the n-word. Karl Popper has taught us that if we tolerate intolerance, tolerance itself at risk.
