GUEST POST on the Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman
A trans voice gives his perspective on the debate
Last week I promised you a business-as-usual newsletter, but in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of a woman on 16th April, I’ve changed my mind.
On Friday evening the Equality and Human Rights Commission published updated guidance addressing single-sex spaces which said “trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, as this will mean that they are no longer single-sex facilities and must be open to all users of the opposite sex.”
The ruling - and the EHRC’s guidance - have big implications in a range of settings, from workplaces to healthcare providers, to hospitality, to sports, to schools.
The biggest implications, however, are for trans people.
I want the newsletter to address that, but I am far from the right person to do it.
In this post a friend of mine, a trans man, gives his perspective. He is a husband and a father, and so as well as his personal experience he also considers what these changes mean for his family.
He has chosen to remain anonymous, for reasons which will mostly be obvious but which he also addresses in the piece.
This is a debate which is far from over - the first challenge to the European Court of Human Rights is already planned - so I’d urge everyone to proceed with compassion and to (as my guest suggests) focus on evidence not opinion.
A few years ago, my dying female relative was the victim of particularly egregious domestic abuse, from a man with a pattern of relevant offences. As seems common in cases involving male abuse of women, the response from most authorities involved ranged from useless to enabling. A special dishonourable mention goes to the callousness of the Crown Prosecution Service.
It’s particularly frustrating to me, therefore, that such a tremendous amount of time and public money has recently been spent “protecting women” by preventing my community from using the toilet.
The recent Supreme Court ruling decrees that I’m a “biological woman” and it’s therefore unlawful for me to enter any male-only spaces. However, because of my masculine appearance – resulting from medical transition, the only clinically proven treatment for gender dysphoria - it’s also lawful to ban me from female-only spaces.
I’m hoping it’s naivete, not cruelty, that has caused this ruling to be reported widely as a compromise upholding the rights of both trans people and non-trans women. In reality, anti-trans activists consider the ruling an initial victory in an eradication campaign. As is obvious if we look overseas, “bathroom bans” and bans on trans healthcare for young people - also recently accomplished in the UK - pave the way for further erosion of our rights. Of course, the ruling will also serve to encourage violent vigilante gender policing; for the gender critical movement, that’s a feature, not a bug.
I’m on the autism spectrum - very common in trans men. (Endocrinologists have various interesting hypotheses; the gender critical argument is that we’re mentally deficient and have thus been tricked into transitioning). My autism does mean I struggle to let go of the idea that people will change their beliefs when pointed to better information. So, here’s some information I’d like everyone to know - no room to cite my sources here, so I’d like to urge you to explore this topic using peer-reviewed research and then ignore all opinion pieces, including mine.
Firstly: I can see that the basic assumption underlying the entire debate – that women are safer if no-one born male is permitted in women’s spaces – seems intuitive for anyone who hasn’t had much contact with trans people. The problem is that it’s fiction.
In reality, both trans men and trans women are wildly more likely to be victims of gendered abuse than we are perpetrators. A visible trans person is in far more danger of violence and sexual abuse than a non-trans woman. Additionally, “bathroom bans” provably make non-trans women less safe, enabling the harassment of any woman her attacker decides is too masculine. There’s no need for either group to compromise our rights, as our rights aren’t in conflict.
Another fiction from the Supreme Court, so anti-science as to have really alarmed the British Medical Association, is the assertion that there are only two biological sexes. It should be clear how the ruling will harm intersex people.
Secondly: while gender roles are socially constructed, there’s sufficient evidence to conclude that gender dysphoria isn’t a purely social phenomenon. (My personal interest in the biological origins of trans identities, and in overlap between the trans and intersex communities, is because my mysterious pre-transition hyperandrogenism was hidden rather than explained.)
Finally: despite its grip on even the left-wing media, the gender critical movement doesn’t represent British women or British feminists, who are generally supportive of our rights. The movement’s success isn’t organic, relying on the semi-hidden financial backing of the extreme right. Relatedly, attempts to divide the LGBT community in the UK have generally failed: non-trans lesbians, in particular, are generally fantastic trans allies.
However, I’ve had to learn that personal stories are more effective than bombardment with facts. The thing is, I’m relatively lucky; hormone treatment hit me hard and I wasn’t visibly trans for long. During those couple of months, being visibly trans lost me a job offer and gained me fairly constant low-level public harassment; additionally, as a victim of domestic violence myself during that period, I was treated with even more suspicion and contempt than if I had identified as a woman. I wouldn’t enjoy living that period for years or decades, as some of my friends must.
It’s the future, not the past, that’s keeping me awake at night. I became a father on the assumption that the UK’s relative tolerance would continue - on the assumption that I could live a relatively stable life with stable employment and with my medical needs met. That assumption was false, and contemplating the potential impact on my children is terrifying.
At the moment, the greatest risk to me is that I work with children, and I’m not naive enough to reveal my membership of a group widely smeared as perverts and groomers. You might recall the trans teacher harassed into suicide - it would take one comment to out me and wreak ruin on my life.
My remaining shred of optimism concerns our aforementioned allies. Thank you, in particular, to all the many non-trans people who turned out to support us at the Newcastle protest last Sunday. My more visibly trans friends consider Newcastle one of the safer cities – if you’ve played any part in that, thank you.
Postscript: I got my now-useless Gender Recognition Certificate back when the fee was £140. I’d quite like a refund.