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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Sex used to rule. Now gender identity is on the throne. Sex survives as a cheap imitation of its former self: assigned at birth, on a spectrum, socially constructed, and definitely not binary. Apparently quite a few of us fall outside the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. But gender identity is said to be universal – we all have one. Humanity used to be cleaved into two sexes, whereas now the crucial division depends on whether our gender identity aligns with our body. If it does, we are cisgender; if it does not, we are transgender. The dethroning of sex has meant the threat of execution for formerly noble words such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’.
In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves.
The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered ‘Is sex binary?’, ‘Why are men and women different?’, ‘What is a woman?’ or, simply, ‘Where can I go to know more about these controversies?’
Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise for
Trouble with Gender
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Notes
Preface
Introduction
The transgender tipping point
Trans rights
Philosophy
‘A modern-day witch hunt’
Newspeak
The plan of
Trouble with Gender
Notes
1 Gender, Double Toil and Trouble
#IStandWithMaya
Twelve leading scholars
Non-consensual co-platforming
#Lettergate
The TERF industrial complex
ROGD
Irreversible Damage
Ethicists AWOL
Bell
v.
Tavistock
The empire strikes back
‘One of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes’
Foxing Day
Notes
2 ‘Gender’ Trouble
What is gender?
Gender as
femininity/masculinity
Gender as
social roles
Gender as
identity
Gender as
woman/man
Gender as
sex
Judith Butler on gender and performativity
Psychologists against the gender binary
Notes
3 Clownfish and Chromosomes
Sex talk
Sex in biology
Two sexes, not a spectrum
The female/male binary
Many kinds of sex
Foucault and Barbin
Herms, merms and ferms
The intersex minority caucus
The 1.7 per cent solution
Disorders and differences
Sex and social construction
Notes
4 I am Woman
Duelling definitions
Dictionaries
Social and biological categories
‘Female’, ‘Human’, ‘Adult’
Ewes, rams, and lexical universals
It’s a girl!
Gender role reversals
‘One is not born …’
Counterexamples
Social categories and socially significant categories
Real men and women
Circularity and intangibility
Why this matters
Notes
5 The Rise of Gender Identity
What is gender identity?
Core gender identity
Orthodox explanations
Switching sex
David and Brenda
Clive and Clara
Herculine Barbin revisited
Peggy
The myth of gender identity
Jaron and Jazz
Notes
6 Born in the Wrong Body
James and Jan
Ridgely and Nancy
True transsexuals
Sissy boys
‘The love that dare not speak its name’
Eonism
Identity inversions
Existence versus theory
‘One of the most transphobic books in history’
‘A sex-fueled mental illness created by Ray Blanchard in 1989’
‘An amatory propensity’
‘The basic structure of all human sexuality’
FtM
The Jazz Age
Notes
7 Is Biology Destiny?
The subjection of women
Rightful vs. different
Throwing like a girl
Sexual selection and psychological sex differences
A natural experiment
Patriarchy and testosterone
‘An obstinately turgid and pedantic anti-feminist tract’
The universality of patriarchy
The best explanation of patriarchy
The inevitability of patriarchy?
The inevitability of inequality
Notes
8 True Selves and Identity Crises
The Age of Identity
Identifying
with
and
as
Identities
Gender identity again
Enbies
Pronounmania
The true self
Identities and essentializing
Trans kids
‘One of the stately homos of England’
The best self
Notes
Coda
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise for Trouble with Gender
‘Everyone with opinions, or questions, about matters of sex and gender should read this book. It carefully and incisively unravels the tangled mass of ideas that cluster under the umbrella of gender. It does not engage in politics, or question the extent of human variability, or deny the reality of anyone’s experience, but it does claim that there is no escape from the concept of sex as binary, and that the prevailing orthodoxy, which treats sex as socially constructed and an infinitely malleable continuum, is “tragically wrong”. I challenge anyone who accepts that orthodoxy to explain in detail where the arguments presented here go wrong.’
Janet Radcliffe Richards, author of The Sceptical Feminist and Human Nature after Darwin
‘Current academic discussions of sex and gender are dominated by advocates, dogmatists, poseurs, and obscurantists. Trouble with Gender offers a lucid, rigorous and judicious guide to the perplexed. It’s an antidote to irrationality and also a pleasure to read.’
Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War against Boys
‘Alex Byrne masterfully does what philosophers are supposed to do: clarify words and concepts, identify which ideas follows from which other ones, and distinguish what is from what ought to be. And despite the now incendiary subject matter, he accomplishes all this with a light touch and an appealing voice.’
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Rationality
‘A refreshingly clarifying and forthright take on the philosophy of gender activism, cutting through the noise with incisiveness and wit. Anyone interested in the gender wars needs to read it.’
Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls
‘Alex Byrne’s Trouble with Gender is an admirably clear and rigorous book that outlines the major parameters of what is often an off-kilter discussion. Combining philosophy and science with an eye for how issues of sex and gender are discussed in the media, Byrne gives the reader a lesson not only in how to think about these specific issues but also in how to think at all.’
Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman and What Do Men Want?
Copyright Page
Copyright © Alex Byrne, 2024
The right of Alex Byrne to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Polity Press in 2024
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6001-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934525
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Unsurprisingly, publishing this book was not a walk in the park.1 For advice, thanks to Rob Tempio, Eric Henney, Max Brockman, and George Owers. Profuse thanks to Elise Heslinga and Ian Malcolm at Polity, whose support and suggestions have been invaluable. Thanks also to Caroline Richmond for expert copyediting and Maddie Tyler for shepherding the book through production.
Parts of this book draw on earlier work of mine.2 Thanks to Berny Belvedere and Stew Cohen for having a backbone, and to the formidable team of Francesca Minerva, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer for starting the Journal of Controversial Ideas in 2021.
For a variety of assistance, including fact-checking, conversations, email exchanges, and feedback on drafts, gratitude is due (in random order) to: Sasha Ayed, Paul Vasey, Terry Goldie, Louise Antony, Peter Momtchiloff, Anca Gheaus, Mohan Matthen, Lisa Littman, Ed Schiappa, Abigail Shrier, Peggy Cadet, Ken Zucker, Maya Kaye, Sally Haslanger, Stella O’Malley, James Cantor, Daniel Kodsi, Corinna Cohn, Ari Koslow, Mary Leng, Katie Zhou, Sarah Pedersen, Jane Clare Jones, Rashad Rehman, Debbie Hayton, Callie Burt, Geoff Pullum, Jeremy Goodman, Abigail Shrier, Kieran Setiya, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, Richard Wrangham, Nina Paley, Griffin Byrne, Rebecca Tuvel, Linda Rabieh, Anonymous Reviewers, Jesse Singal, Sam Berstler, Anne Lawrence, Joyce Benenson, Justin Lehmiller, and Nadine Strossen.
I am especially indebted to Ray Blanchard and Mike Bailey for much expert advice, and for modeling how to do sexology properly. I am even more indebted to three fearless philosophers and good friends, with whom I have discussed the issues in this book countless times and who have improved it immensely: Tomas Bogardus, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Kathleen Stock.
My greatest debt is to my wife Carole Hooven, sex enthusiast and endocrine specialist. Her influence pervades this book in almost every way, especially at points on which we disagree; to the extent that it is an enjoyable read, you have her to thank.
Notes
1
Alex Byrne, ‘Philosophy’s no-go zone’,
Quillette
April 17 (2023),
https://quillette.com/2023/04/17/philosophys-no-go-zone/
.
2
In addition to my publications listed in the references: Alex Byrne, ‘Is sex binary?’,
Arc Digital
Nov 1 (2018),
https://medium.com/arc-digital/is-sex-binary-16bec97d161e
; ‘Is sex socially constructed?’,
Arc Digital
November 30 (2018),
https://arcdigital.media/is-sex-socially-constructed-81cf3ef79f07
; ‘What is gender identity?’,
Arc Digital
Jan 9 (2019),
https://medium.com/arc-digital/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999
; ‘Pronoun problems’,
Journal of Controversial Ideas
3: 1-22 (2023),
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/1/229
.
Preface
This book offers answers to fundamental questions about sex and gender. Although some of the chapters count as ‘philosophy’, and my day job is teaching and writing about that ancient discipline, I have presumed no knowledge of it. I wrote for a curious – and open-minded – general audience, not for specialists.
Many other philosophers have written about sex and gender. You might suppose that the philosophy in this book is a report from the cutting edge of research, like pop science books about behavioural genetics or cosmology. Surely all that philosophizing about sex and gender must have produced some gold, or at least shed some light? In my opinion, not very much. Despite their reputation in some quarters as unflinching logical thinkers, philosophers have done little to diminish the nonsense surrounding sex and gender and in some cases have even managed to increase it. I wrote this book partly to counteract these failings. Other parts of the academy have also fallen short. My aim is constructive, but sometimes construction requires preparatory demolition. The targets of my critiques are academics (and some in the medical profession) who ought to know better. I am sure they will not see it this way!
This book is not concerned with inflammatory social and political issues – sex categories in sport, transgender healthcare, etc. – that have recently consumed much oxygen in both the US and the UK. What’s more, no one’s pursuit of a dignifying and fulfilling human life is impeded by anything in the pages that follow – neither transgender people, nor women, nor gay people, nor any other relevant constituency. If there is any doubt about that at the start, I hope it will vanish by the end.
Introduction
My great-aunt and the rest thought that by technically defeating male privilege they’d scored a great victory. What they didn’t realize is that the greatest enemies of women aren’t men at all, they are women …
John Wyndham, Trouble with Lichen1
The transgender tipping point
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) warned of the ‘future risks and impacts caused by a changing climate’, and an African-American man, Michael Brown, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Among these momentous events was another – the May 29th issue of Time Magazine featured the transgender actress Laverne Cox on the cover, and announced ‘The transgender tipping point … another civil rights movement … poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs’. The cultural change marked by the transgender tipping point is not quite as momentous as climate change but – as the intervening years showed – is proceeding far more rapidly.2
This challenge to ‘long-held cultural norms’ prompts important questions, debated endlessly in the press and on social media. What is gender? What is sex? What is a woman or a man? Are girls and boys born basically the same, apart from reproductive anatomy? What is gender identity, and do we all have one? The last question would not be asked were it not for the transgender tipping point; the first four are perennial favourites which bear on transgender issues but are much more general.
When gender is the topic, identity is not far behind. A recent book called How to Understand Your Gender is revealingly subtitled A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are. ‘What am I?’, asked the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. His first answer is ‘a man’. On considering the matter more carefully he decides that is wrong: he is ‘a thing that thinks’, a ghostly mind. A thoroughly up-to-date René would give a different considered answer, a list of his most important ‘identities’: ‘a white cisgender gay man’, perhaps.3
A close companion to identity is the idea of the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self. When the former Olympic gold-medal winner Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in a 2015 Vanity Fair cover story, Laverne Cox wrote, ‘I am so moved by all the love and support Caitlyn is receiving. It feels like a new day, indeed, when a trans person can present her authentic self to the world for the first time and be celebrated for it so universally.’ If Caitlyn Jenner has a true or authentic self, presumably the rest of us do too. Life is a journey to find and be our true selves, some say. What does that even mean?
This book is about these questions. The transgender tipping point gives them a useful focus, but they concern us all.
Trans rights
‘Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time’, tweeted Joe Biden during the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Following Trump’s ignominious exit, the Biden White House promptly added a field for pronouns to its website contact form, and on his first day in office Biden issued an executive order instructing federal agencies not to discriminate on the basis of gender identity in, among other areas, ‘school sports’.4#BidenErasedWomen started trending on Twitter.
Will this ‘civil rights issue of our time’ turn out to be like the campaign for same-sex marriage? Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that required all states to issue marriage licences irrespective of the partners’ sexes, was announced in 2015, around the same time the Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair issue hit the newsstands. And in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that ‘an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.’5 (In this last respect, the US was twenty years behind the UK.) Perhaps in a few years progressive forces will have prevailed, and we’ll wonder what the fuss was all about.
Things are not so simple. Gay rights infringe at best marginally on the rights of others. In 2012 a Christian baker in Colorado refused to design a wedding cake for Charlie and David – that this caused outrage and went to the US Supreme Court shows how far society has come.6 Let’s face it, gay rights are boring. Philosophers, who love introducing undergraduates to controversial claims, gave up years ago assigning academic articles arguing that homosexuality was immoral or that gay marriage should not be allowed. The arguments were unconvincing and, anyway, students weren’t interested.
Although transgender-related conflicts can easily be exaggerated, they are more significant and wide-ranging. The New Zealand transgender woman weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who competed as a man in 2014, competed as a woman at the 2019 Pacific Games and won two gold medals. The Samoans, who had to content themselves with silver, were not pleased. Hubbard went on to compete in the Olympic Summer Games in 2021. The following year, the US college swimmer Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who had previously competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s team, won the NCAA 500-yard women’s freestyle swimming championship. A furious debate ensued, with Caitlyn Jenner tweeting that the second place (female) finisher was the ‘rightful winner’. Thomas was later nominated by UPenn for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year award. Dismissing these conflicts by denying the undeniable male athletic advantage is common: according to the storied American Civil Liberties Association (ACLU) – and with teenagers in mind – there is ‘ample evidence that girls can compete and win against boys’.7
Efforts to promote women in the workplace are another flash point. The Financial Times 2018 list of top 100 ‘female executives’ who are ‘champions of women’ included Pips Bunce from Credit Suisse at the admirable position of 32. Pips is also known as Philip and, in the latter guise, presents as a balding middle-aged man, married with two children. ‘I split my time as Pippa and Philip about 50/50’, Pips explained. Philip does not seem interested in fashion, but Pips has ‘a massive wardrobe’, with ‘more high heels than my daughter and wife put together’. A feminist from some decades ago might well disapprove of this association between womanhood and stereotypical feminine clothing. Such views are now considered old-fashioned, at least in some circles – Pips received an LGBT+ inspirational leader award.8
Changes in the number and composition of people who medically transition from one sex to the other produce further controversies. In AfterEllen, an online magazine for lesbians, a woman wrote about the transgender men (people travelling in the opposite direction to Caitlyn Jenner, from female to male) behind the counter at her local Starbucks. ‘They would have been young butch lesbians in any other era … The only difference between them and me is time – I was just one of the lucky ones to not be around at the time of the transcult.’9 The number of children and adolescents seeking treatment at gender clinics has been rising rapidly, and it is foolish to pretend that the medical establishment or anyone else has got it all figured out.
The public debate, in both the US and the UK (and elsewhere), has become intense. Unlike the global average surface temperature, the transgender temperature will likely decline in the next decade, but there are no leading indicators. Some 2022 and 2023 headlines from UK and US newspapers signal that the trend is still upwards: ‘University staff accused of colluding with trans activists to stop women’s rights film’, ‘How the Tavistock gender clinic ran out of control’, ‘Transgender Americans feel under siege as political vitriol rises.’10
This book is not about these vitriolic political issues, although they will be touched on occasionally. Several recent books address them, from a variety of different perspectives. If you want arguments for the importance of single-sex spaces, why feminism should be for females, why feminism should be for everyone, why transitioning from one sex to the other should be left up to adults, why affirming medical interventions are vital for the health of trans youth, or why trans liberation requires the abolition of prisons and capitalism, I have some recommended reading.11 One lesson of this book is that there is no straight line from (say) views about what women are, or about whether sex is binary and immutable, to policy.
Hyperbolic rhetoric can suggest that there is a male conspiracy to invade women’s spaces, or a right-wing plan to perpetrate trans genocide, or something equally horrific. In fact, a strong humane thread of agreement – in which this book wholeheartedly joins – runs through all the disagreement. Trans people should be afforded dignity, have access to proper healthcare, and be allowed to live openly and safely without discrimination or stigma, like everyone else. Trans rights are human rights – as are women’s rights, for that matter. Children struggling with gender issues should receive compassion and evidence-based treatment. Their families only want what is best for them and should be cut some slack as they try to weigh advice that is often conflicting and confusing. Nothing in this book undermines these obvious points. Relatedly, it is important to remember that trans activists and trans people are quite different groups. Many trans activists are not trans and – it can hardly be necessary to mention this – trans people themselves have a diversity of views. Doubtless the majority simply want to get on with life, attending to their careers, family, and relationships. Trans people are people, after all.12
Philosophy
More than seventy years ago, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asked, ‘What is a woman?’ in The Second Sex, one of the canonical texts of modern feminism. ‘Brilliant, imperious’, the iconoclastic critic Camille Paglia called it – ‘the only thing undergraduate sex studies needs’. That book is sometimes taken to have (implicitly) made a crucial distinction between sex and gender, now affirmed by many authorities. ‘Gender interacts with but is different from sex’, says the World Health Organization. Philosophers have devoted innumerable pages both to Beauvoir’s question and to various ways of separating sex from gender. For historical reasons, these issues are the remit of feminist philosophy, a small but growing speciality within the discipline. (Gender studies is a closely related but separate field and is not part of philosophy.)13
Philosophers treat all sorts of touchy subjects, and unsurprisingly they tend to be keen on unfettered discussion and debate. One famous argument for freedom of speech was given by the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859):
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.14
Regrettably, a small but loud faction within philosophy did not take these words to heart, attempting to silence the expression of certain opinions shortly after Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, ‘primped and pampered to look gorgeous’.15
‘A modern-day witch hunt’16
Caitlyn Jenner’s big reveal coincided with Rachel Dolezal’s unplanned one – she was the tanned and curly-haired president of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane, Washington, who identified as black. Dolezal had black adopted siblings, attended a historically black college, and had been married to a black man. She taught courses in Africana studies. All these qualifications were for naught – Dolezal, it turned out, was born of unmistakably white parents.17
Once this became public knowledge, hardly anyone thought Dolezal was black. The problem was palpable: why was Jenner’s claim to womanhood so widely cheered? Jenner received a congratulatory tweet from President Obama, but Dolezal was mostly mocked and ridiculed. No Vanity Fair cover for her! The US political commentator Ben Shapiro was among many on the right gloating at the disparate treatment: ‘Today, the entire left is struggling to explain how a white woman who identifies herself as black is not, in fact, black.’18
In the US, transgender and racial issues are like the two terminals of a powerful battery. Individually, they can give you a nasty shock. Connected together, the battery explodes. Rebecca Tuvel, then an assistant professor of philosophy at a small college in Tennessee, soon found that out. She sympathetically compared Jenner and Dolezal in an academic article published in Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy, in 2017.19 Someone like Dolezal, Tuvel argued, was just as deserving of acceptance as Jenner: transracial people, like transgender people, should be treated with respect and understanding. Despite Tuvel’s undeniably progressive credentials and junior status, this provoked an extraordinary reaction from her colleagues.
An open letter calling for the retraction of the article swiftly garnered more than 800 signatories, including many distinguished professors. One was Judith Butler, the acclaimed gender theorist, hailed as ‘the most influential intellectual in the world’.20 In an act of academic filicide, two others were senior philosophers who were on Tuvel’s very own PhD dissertation committee.
The article was not retracted, and Hypatia’s editor – who subsequently resigned – firmly defended its publication. The journal’s board of associate editors had the opposite reaction, posting an ‘apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists, and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused.’ The least of Tuvel’s many crimes was that she had ‘deadnamed’ Caitlyn Jenner, using ‘Bruce’ to refer to Jenner’s previous Olympic-medal winning incarnation; the published article was subsequently amended and Tuvel apologized. (That Jenner herself was plainly unbothered by this sort of thing seemed not to matter at all.)21
Tuvel commented, ‘the last place one expects to find such calls for censorship rather than discussion is amongst philosophers.’ As I will recount in chapter 1, this was only the beginning. Similar outbursts of intolerance began regularly to blot philosophy. Philosophers had one job, to have an open discussion of transgender-related issues – of great public interest – under accepted academic rules where public shaming and no-platforming are not allowed. Exactly why they failed is an interesting question, important for the future of philosophy and public discourse more generally, although one which can be set aside here. That they failed is clear enough. Philosophy has had its crises, starting with Socrates’s death sentence for worshipping false gods in 399 bc. That was not his fault, and he was found guilty by a jury of Athenian citizens, not fellow philosophers. In contrast, the current low point in the discipline is entirely self-inflicted. As one philosopher – writing under a pseudonym – put it in 2022, ‘a vocal minority has labored successfully to make the topic radioactive. No one wants the Tuvel treatment.’22
Newspeak
Philosophy, which promises insight into the nature of reality, the meaning of life, and all that, is sometimes accused of false advertising – even by philosophers themselves. Questions that initially seemed deep and non-linguistic supposedly turn out, after discussion deadlocks, to be shallow and linguistic. Do we have free will? Well, it all depends what you mean by ‘free will’. If you mean this, then we clearly do; if you mean that, then we clearly don’t. The impression that philosophical questions are ‘just semantics’ is almost always mistaken, but philosophers certainly do care a lot about words.
One reason for taking words to be important is that we use them to make distinctions. The words ‘dog’, ‘perro’, ‘cat’, and ‘gato’ allow speakers of English and Spanish to distinguish between dogs and cats, to say that dogs bark and cats don’t, for instance. A concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made, by prohibiting or redefining certain words.
Prime exhibits are the words ‘female’ and ‘male’. The present day is characterized by a curious inversion of nineteenth-century attitudes towards sex. The Victorians were quite at ease with sex in the sense of female and male but publicly squeamish with sex in the sense of intercourse.23 Now it is the other way around: the topic of sexual intercourse is almost impossible to avoid, but females and males are often spoken of in circumlocutions. ‘Assigned female at birth’ is the recommended phrase, suggesting the baby is arbitrarily picked for the pink rather than the blue team.
To take one of numerous examples, in a publication from the American Medical Association on ‘advancing health equity’, we read: ‘Sex, or more precisely, “sex assigned at birth” is a label typically assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with.’ Please note: this is the American Medical Association, whose mission is to ‘promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health’.24
You may have noticed some problems with this sentence, in particular that the phrase ‘sex assigned at birth’ is evidently not a ‘more precise’ replacement for the word ‘sex’. Babies born with no doctor or medical authority in attendance will not have their sex ‘assigned at birth’. They may not even have their sex recognized by anyone at birth, especially if abandoned by a distressed mother. And yet they will still have a sex: some human female babies have not been assigned female at birth. The point is even more obvious if we consider non-human females. Wild female rats are not assigned female at birth (and when they are bred by humans they are usually sexed later). The AMA’s spurious claim of precision is a transparent attempt to prevent words such as ‘female’ from being used on their own when humans are the topic, allowing them to occur only within complex phrases such as ‘assigned female at birth’.
George Orwell’s 1984 has become something of a cliché in these contexts, but there’s no beating it:
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it … Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.25
Astonishingly, some philosophers are on board with the Newspeak of today. They may have the best of intentions, thinking that blunt talk of female and male humans can cause unnecessary offence. However, as my undergraduate teacher, the philosopher Roger Scruton, once remarked, ‘I was brought up to believe that you should never give offence if you can avoid it; the new culture tells us that you should always take offence if you can.’26 The taking of offence is often used as a kind of emotional blackmail, cowing kind-hearted opponents into silence. I will try to avoid giving offence, but without compromising clarity of expression and the statement of relevant facts.
The plan of Trouble with Gender
The central questions of this book are examined beginning in the second chapter, which is about gender. What is gender, and how is it different from sex? (As that chapter explains, the chief problem is that the word ‘gender’ has been used to mean too many different things.) The third chapter is about sex. What is it to be female or male? Is sex binary, or on a spectrum, or (as influential academics say), ‘socially constructed’?
Chapter 4 turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s question, which has vexed feminist theorists for decades. What is a woman? ‘Woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year in 2022, an indication that Beauvoir’s question has never been more popular.
Chapter 5 is about gender identity, whose rocket-like trajectory into mass media and the law began in the 1980s. Transgender people are supposed to have gender identities that are misaligned with their bodies, unlike the cisgender majority. Misalignment is taken to explain why some transition to live as the other sex. Is that familiar story true? Chapter 6 looks at a notoriously controversial theory of why some natal males transition to living as female.
One traditional axiom of feminism is that psychological and behavioural differences between the sexes are largely due to social or cultural forces, not to innate biology. That was always hard to square with the phenomenon of transsexualism, particular the male-to-female kind. Chapter 7 takes sex differences seriously. Men are generally the top dogs in societies, past and present. There never were matriarchies, but patriarchy is – or was – universal. Is biology a crucial part of the explanation?
The eighth and final chapter examines identities and true or authentic selves. When we claim an identity as our own, what are we doing? What – if anything – is the true or authentic self? And, if each of us has one, should we follow Caitlyn Jenner and aim to ‘live our true selves’?27
I can sum up the argument of this book in one word: sex. That is the key to answering the main questions we’ll be examining. There is a coda after chapter 8, in which the meaning of this cryptic remark will become clear.
Before beginning with gender in chapter 2, some more background to the current debates will be helpful.28 After Rebecca Tuvel’s transracialism ordeal came a series of spectacular cancellations, academic dustups, medical controversies, and inconsolable Harry Potter fans, all against the fervid backdrop of the Great Awokening, the latest iteration of the culture wars. Chapter 1 tells some of those stories.
Notes
1
Wyndham 1960/2022: 48.
Trouble with Lichen
is a 1960 novel by the British sci-fi writer John Wyndham, in which a strain of lichen is discovered that slows aging, extending the lifespan to centuries. Limited supply means availability only to ‘Mayfair’s feminine élite’. Relations between the sexes, transformative medical technology and its revolutionary social consequences are all prominent themes. The present book isn’t linked to
Trouble with Lichen
only through the title.
2
‘… changing climate’: The Core Writing Team et al. 2014: 13; ‘… tipping point’: Steinmetz 2014.
3
How to
…: Iantaffi and Barker 2018; ‘a man’ and ‘thing that thinks’: Descartes 1642/1984: 17, 19. Descartes was a life-long bachelor, although he had an illegitimate daughter who died at age five.
4
Biden 2021.
5
Liptak 2020.
6
The Court decided in favour of the baker on religious freedom grounds, while noting, ‘Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth’ (Kennedy 2018: 9).
7
Medley and Sherwin 2019.
8
‘champions of women’: Bannerman 2018; ‘I split my time …’: Bunce 2017.
9
Fox 2019.
10
The Telegraph
December 16 (2022);
The Times
February 11 (2023);
New York Times
December 10 (2022).
11
Noteworthy books on the trans debate as it has played out in the UK: Stock 2021, Joyce 2021, Faye 2021 (the first two ‘gender-critical’, the third on the ‘trans-rights’ side – see chapter 1).
12
Humane thread: Joyce 2021: 3–4; Stock 2021: 240; Lawford-Smith 2022a: 94–5.
13
‘Brilliant …’: Paglia 1991a: 243; an instructive (and uncomplimentary) assessment of
The Second Sex
is Sommers 2010. ‘Gender interacts …’: World Health Organization 2021. Crediting Beauvoir for a distinction between sex and gender is misleading: ‘gender’ is not in her book, and whatever kind of sex/gender distinction that can be read back into it was made long before by others (see Kirkpatrick 2019: 262). A good introduction to feminist philosophy is Stone 2007.
14
Mill 1869/2006: 23.
15
Bissinger 2015.
16
Singal 2017.
17
Doležal and Reback 2017; ‘People often said that I was a Black girl in a white body’ (109).
18
Moyer 2015. See also Brubaker 2016: ch. 1.
19
Tuvel 2017a. The transracial analogy had been mentioned much earlier in the introduction to the 1994 edition of Janice Raymond’s
The Transsexual Empire
(1979/1994: xv–xvi); for more on that book, see note 9 to chapter 6.
20
Telò 2022.
21
‘apology …’: Jaschik 2017. Jenner unbothered: ‘Bruce existed for sixty-five years, and Caitlyn is just going on her second birthday. That’s the reality’ (Jenner 2017: vii); ‘Bruce’ was used freely in the
Vanity Fair
cover story.
22
‘the last place …’: Tuvel 2017b. Academic philosophy is predominantly male, but specialists in feminist philosophy are overwhelmingly women. The social dynamics in this sub-field appear to fit the generally observed pattern of female intrasexual competition: enforced equality, overt competition only among high-status females, and the use of social exclusion (ostracism) to dispatch rivals. (Male-dominated sub-disciplines have another set of issues.) See Benenson 2013; Benenson 2014: ch. 6; Campbell 2013: 98–100, ch. 4; for feminist infighting specifically, see Lawford-Smith 2022a: 117–29, 2022b. ‘… the Tuvel treatment’: Whittaker 2022: 21.
23
Unsurprisingly, the clichés about Victorian attitudes towards sex are oversimplifications. For instance, orgasm in women was widely held to be important, partly because conception was supposedly very difficult without it (Mason 1994: ch. 4).
24
‘Sex …’: AMA & AAMC 2021: 14, emphasis added; ‘promote the art …’: AMA 2022.
25
Orwell 1949/1961: 51–3.
26
Scruton 2018.
27
In 2015 Jenner tweeted that she was ‘so happy … to be living my true self’. These sorts of sentiments are common among transgender people; see Mason-Schrock 1996 for a study of how the ‘true self’ figures in transsexual self-narratives.
28
See also Murray 2019: ch. 4, and the books cited in note 11 above.
ONEGender, Double Toil and Trouble
Trans women are women. Get over it!
Stonewall, UK LGBT rights organization1
Trans women are men. Get over it!
Debbie Hayton, trans woman2
#IStandWithMaya
J. K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter and one of the wealthiest people in the UK, closed out 2019 with an ultra-viral tweet:
Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
This was in support of Maya Forstater, a British business researcher whose contract was not renewed because of her view that ‘it is impossible to change sex or to lose your sex. Girls grow up to be women. Boys grow up to be men.’ An employment tribunal had found that ‘that belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.’ Rowling’s tweet garnered over 200,000 likes but also spawned many agonized opinion pieces. A Vox headline summed up the sentiment: ‘J. K. Rowling’s latest tweet seems like transphobic BS. Her fans are heartbroken.’3
Forstater had been active in opposing proposed reforms to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act that would make it considerably easier for a transgender person to legally self-identify as their chosen sex. Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor at Sussex University, also had concerns. Stock was worried that the reform might allow ‘badly motivated males’ to gain access to hostels for homeless women, women’s prisons, and so on. She noted that, while the reform was of great public interest, especially to women, ‘nearly all academic philosophers – including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers – are ignoring it.’4
Although Stock took pains to distance herself from any kind of animus against transgender people, that didn’t do her any good. ‘Kathleen Stock is a TERF’ and a ‘transphobic bigot’, declared a US philosophy professor on Twitter. ‘TERF’ was originally introduced as an acronym for ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ and – as acronyms often do – has gained a life of its own, becoming a pejorative term for people like Forstater, Rowling, and Stock.
(The non-pejorative term is ‘gender-critical feminist’ or, alternatively, ‘sex-realist feminist’. The former will be used here, along with ‘trans-rights activist’ – ‘trans activist’ for short – for their opponents. The trans-rights activists may complain that they are critical of gender too, and that, anyway, the gender-critical feminists are not feminists. The gender-critical feminists may complain that they fully support trans rights, or that they intend to abolish gender, not just to criticize it. There is no terminology that pleases everyone.)
‘TERF’ appears at the swampy end of social media in phrases such as ‘Punch a TERF’, ‘Kill all TERFs’, ‘Take out the TERF trash’ – and these are some of the milder ones. Amazingly, ‘TERF’ has also been used as a descriptive label in philosophy and other academic disciplines.5
Holly Lawford-Smith, another heretic, is a political philosopher who teaches at the University of Melbourne. In March 2019 she was interviewed by the online 3AM Magazine, one of hundreds of interviews of philosophers the publication had run over the years. ‘My stance’, she said, ‘is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that “gender identity” has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.’63AM removed the interview following complaints, and the interviewer resigned from the magazine in protest.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its insulting flavour, ‘TERF’ was used freely in an opinion piece that appeared shortly afterwards in the New York Times. The author, another of Stock and Lawford-Smith’s professional colleagues in the US, joined ‘the critics of TERFs’, arguing that ‘the attempt to exclude trans women from the ranks of women reinforces the dangerous idea that there is a right way to be female.’7 To judge by the almost 1,000 comments on the NYT website, many readers were unpersuaded. ‘TERF is hate speech’, one woman wrote. ‘This essay is also completely disingenuous, as there is a difference between biological sex and gender.’ Welcome to the TERF wars.
The social and political territory at stake in the TERF wars is not the subject of this book. Our focus will be on the ammunition lobbed by both sides – claims about sex, gender, gender identity, women, and men. A sub-plot is the failure of philosophy, partly traced in this chapter. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked in 1959 (when he was eighty-six), ‘we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like.’8 More than sixty years later, some prominent philosophers had not heeded Russell’s advice.
Twelve leading scholars
The treatment of gender-critical academics such as Stock and Lawford-Smith provoked a response from twelve philosophers (including the well-known psychologist and writer Cordelia Fine) in July of 2019. They published an opinion piece in the US higher education magazine Inside Higher Ed, writing that they ‘reject calls for censuring or deplatforming any of our colleagues on the basis of their philosophical arguments about sex and gender identity, or their social and political advocacy for sex-based rights.’ While expressing their support for ‘transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals’, the ‘12 leading scholars’ (as the magazine called them) noted ‘the too frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric, including accusations of hatred or transphobia, directed at these philosophers in response to their arguments and advocacy.’9
More than thirty philosophers, representing the feminist philosophy establishment, replied to the twelve scholars in a letter published on the blog of the American Philosophical Association. The letter said, correctly, that ‘the nature of sex and gender and the relationship between them are not forbidden topics of philosophical discussion.’ However, with academic freedom comes responsibility: ‘There are many diverse, contentious views about gender and gender identity that can be – and are – engaged with in ways that do not call into question the integrity and sincerity of trans people nor the validity of their own understanding of who they are.’10 The message was clear: certain topics are forbidden, after all.
Apart from being unprecedented in the discipline, this recommendation to limit enquiry had some noteworthy features. In past decades, feminist philosophers had not been shy about denying that trans women are women (to take the obvious example). Some of the letter writers themselves formerly held such views. Once respectable positions had been silently transmuted into heresies – indeed, they had been heresies all along.
Second, philosophers normally pride themselves on confronting disturbing hypotheses without blinking. Morality is a fiction, no one has any rights, having children is wrong, time is unreal, women and men do not exist, tables and chairs do not exist, it is impossible to be a woman without being oppressed, God is unsurpassably evil, other animals are not conscious – these may all be entertained or even endorsed without censure from colleagues. Why gender identity had to be fenced off from probing questions was unclear, to say the least.
After another letter calling for a similar prohibition, and protesting about a forthcoming talk by Kathleen Stock, one anonymous philosophical wit wrote:
Junior members of the profession may be wondering what sorts of ideas may be discussed and debated by philosophers, and which may not. Which may be subject to skeptical inquiry and which may not …. Following is a helpful guide.
You MAY question whether race exists and whether gender exists, you may question whether social kinds exist. For that matter, you may question whether any kinds at all exist, and for the measure, whether abstract objects or even whether the external world exists. You may NOT, however, question whether people can identify their own genders.
You MAY question whether other minds exist, or whether anything at all exists except for yourself. You may even question whether time exists and space exists. You may ask whether all change is illusion. You may NOT, however, question whether people can identify their own genders.11
This list of permissions continued at some length.
Non-consensual co-platforming
The letter from the twelve leading scholars had little practical effect. The following month the Institute of Arts and Ideas, a UK organization promoting public philosophy, tweeted: ‘How can philosophy help us understand transgender experiences? We asked thinkers on all sides of the debate.’ The gender-critical side was represented by Lawford-Smith, Stock, and the redoubtable British feminist campaigner Julie Bindel; batting for the trans-rights team was the historian and gender studies academic Susan Stryker accompanied by two US philosophy professors. A paragraph or two from each of the six thinkers appeared on the institute’s website. Stryker’s prose bore the unmistakable imprint of gender studies (‘the hegemonic biopolitical regime of which gender is a part’, etc.), but apart from that it was all pretty tame stuff.12
Stryker and her philosophical comrades-in-arms did not take kindly to the discovery that their short pieces were part of (in the words of one of the philosophers) ‘a symposium that platformed TERFs’. They persuaded the institute to remove their contributions and to publish their retraction statement. The trio complained that they were victims of ‘a non-consensual co-platforming’, a novel coinage for a non-existent offence.13 (Academics are granted no veto over their fellow symposiasts.)
In her paragraph, Lawford-Smith expressed some scepticism about the claim that everyone has a gender identity; in hers, Stock suggested that a transgender identity is more than a matter of how one subjectively feels; and Bindel dusted off a familiar feminist trope: ‘Being a woman is not an abstract, philosophical concept though. Under patriarchy, our position is rooted in material reality.’ These unremarkable pronouncements were not well received. Stryker and the two philosophers claimed that their ‘basic safety’ was ‘at risk’, and that their gender-critical opponents were questioning ‘transgender people’s fundamental legitimacy as people who are entitled to the same respect as any other person’:
We refuse on principle to engage in any discussion that treats such positions as up for abstract intellectual debate, in the same way that we would refuse to participate in a conversation that debated whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others. There are limits to civil and intellectual discourse beyond which speech acts are simply acts of violence.14
As Lawford-Smith pointed out, the corrective rape analogy was a little insensitive, given that she, Stock and Bindel were all lesbians.
#Lettergate
In June of 2020, Rowling returned with a long form essay, ‘J. K. Rowling writes about her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues’. She emphasized that she had nothing against trans people:
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.
On the other hand, Rowling did not agree with the proposed move toward gender self-identification, and neither was she enamoured of its more aggressive supporters: ‘Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories.’15
Rowling was the recipient of a substantial amount of online abuse herself. As a journalist pungently put it, ‘Inviting JK Rowling to “suck my trans dick” seems a mightily strange way in which to be “on the right side of history”.’ Rowling’s essay probably did not change many minds. ‘J. K. Rowling triples down on transphobia’ was one typical headline.16
Shortly after Rowling published her essay, and when ‘cancel culture’ seemed to be reaching its zenith, a letter ‘on justice and open debate’ appeared in Harper’s Magazine online. The more than 150 writers and artists who signed complained ‘that the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.’ Noting that there are familiar culprits on the ‘radical right’, the real target of the letter was evidently the woke left, whom the letter charged with ‘an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty’. The letter ended with a call for ‘good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences’.17
Rowling was among the signatories, joining Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood, Garry Kasparov, and Salman Rushdie. (In 2022, Rushdie’s thirty-three-year streak of evading Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwā for writing The Satanic Verses came to a tragic end, when he was stabbed and seriously injured in upstate New York.) Perhaps it was a combination of 2020’s Covid-19 lockdowns, the Black Lives Matter protests, the carnival of the Trump presidency, and the heat of summer – the mild call of the Harper’s letter to restore some civility spurred frantic tweeting and hastily written online essays explaining why this was a terrible idea.
A handful of transgender people signed, but in a matter of hours one of them, the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, tweeted an apology. Revealing a probably all-too-common motivation for signing such high-minded letters, Boylan confessed that she ‘did not know who else had signed that letter’. She knew that ‘Chomsky, Steinem and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.’ Finding herself non-consensually co-platformed with Rowling was clearly too much: ‘The consequences’, she wrote, ‘are mine to bear.’ Boylan later wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about abortion and trans rights, suggesting that ‘TERFs’ are ‘people whose hearts – like the Grinch’s – are two sizes too small.’18
The TERF industrial complex
Later in the summer of 2020, Grace Lavery, a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, announced an online seminar on the ‘TERF industrial complex’, describing it on Twitter as ‘an immensely influential set of anti-trans activists with one foot in Section 28 and another in Xtian purity culture’, whose ‘figureheads are a deranged sitcom writer and an analytic philosopher of literature’. Section 28 was a controversial 1988 UK law enacted under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality in schools; it was repealed in 2000 in Scotland, and three years later in England and Wales.
The idea that Kathleen Stock (the ‘philosopher of literature’) was directing a sinister homophobic Christian movement was a little implausible. Admittedly the other alleged figurehead, the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, had sometimes let his unbridled enthusiasm for the gender-critical cause get out of hand. A serial tweeter with 600,000 followers, Linehan was banned from the platform for repeated violations of Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct, the last problematic tweet being ‘men aren’t women tho’ in reply to the Women’s Institute wishing a happy Pride to their transgender members.19 (The Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy had been banned earlier for similar sentiments; Holly Lawford-Smith was another casualty, for reasons that were never clear. The accounts of all three were restored after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022.)
Linehan had also intemperately suggested on Twitter that Grace Lavery’s classes in queer and trans studies amounted to ‘grooming’. But the anti-gay charge (‘one foot in Section 28’) had no legs, at least. And as for Christian purity culture, Linehan, along with some of the UK’s most prominent atheists, is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. He also co-created Father Ted, a sitcom which gently mocks Catholicism.
The TERF industrial complex – or, putting it more neutrally, the Rowling-aligned feminist campaign – was indeed effective. In September of 2020 the government announced that earlier plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act would no longer go ahead. ‘A product’, The Spectator reported, ‘of remarkable grassroots political organization’. And, in 2021, Maya Forstater won her appeal. The belief that humans can’t change sex, it turned out, was indeed worthy of respect in a democratic society.20
ROGD
Reforming the Gender Recognition Act was one battleground. Another was the medical treatment of young people with gender issues, raised by Rowling in her long form letter. ‘I’m concerned’, she wrote, ‘about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.’
Gender dysphoria is persistent distress at one’s sexed body and at the social expectations that are associated with having a body of that kind. As the American Psychiatric Association puts it, gender dysphoria is ‘the aversion to some or all of those physical characteristics or social roles that connote one’s own biological sex.’21 Transitioning from one sex to the other is an attempt to make that aversion go away.
Gender dysphoria can be early onset, afflicting young children, or late onset, first occurring during puberty or much later in life. Natal males used to make up most early-onset cases and the vast majority of late-onset cases, but around 2010 the patient population noticeably started to change. Natal females were presenting with dysphoria that apparently began around puberty, and the sex ratio of dysphoric adolescents presenting to clinics switched, with females coming to outnumber males.22
This second front in the TERF wars opened up in 2017, when Lisa Littman, a US physician, published a half-page summary (a ‘poster abstract’) of a study on this new population of patients, coining the term ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’ (ROGD). The summary reported that ROGD ‘occurs in the context of peer group and online influences’. In her book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Trans (but Were Afraid to Ask) trans activist Brynn Tannehill discussed Littman’s summary, taking up much more than half a page to do so. She accused Littman of ‘deliberate academic malfeasance’ and concluded that ‘the abstract is an egregious example of biased junk science.’ That was a shot across the bows.23
By 2018, Littman had moved to Brown University’s School of Public Health, and a detailed account of her research was published in the biomedical journal PLOS One: ‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: a study of parental reports’.24 Littman analysed lengthy questionnaires completed by 256 parents who had reported gender dysphoria in their children that commenced during or after puberty. She had posted recruitment information on three websites offering resources for parents sceptical of standard ‘affirmative’ treatment protocols for gender dysphoria, which allow the child to lead with the clinician following. More than 80 per cent of the adolescents were female, and the majority had other mental health issues.
According to many of the parents, their children’s gender dysphoria was encouraged by the internet and especially videos about transitioning on YouTube. There was a tendency to rewrite history to accord with the new transgender identity:
A 12-year-old natal female was bullied specifically for going through early puberty and the responding parent wrote ‘as a result she said she felt fat and hated her breasts.’ She learned online that hating your breasts is a sign of being transgender. She edited her diary (by crossing out existing text and writing in new text) to make it appear that she has always felt that she is transgender.25
Littman proposed two hypotheses for future research. First, that ‘social and peer contagion’ – a well-studied phenomenon which plays a significant role in the spread of eating disorders – was an important mechanism in propagating ROGD.26 Second, that ROGD is a ‘maladaptive coping mechanism’ – a way of temporarily relieving stress that has negative consequences of its own, like heavy drinking. (When J. K. Rowling wrote in her long form essay about ‘the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition’, she cited Littman.)
Brown University issued a press release publicizing the article, which quoted Littman as prudently saying that ‘more research needs to be done. Descriptive studies aren’t randomized controlled trials – you can’t tell cause and effect, and you can’t tell prevalence.’27
The reaction from activists was vehement and immediate. A trans activist tweeted at PLOS One that the article ‘was written using transphobic dogwhistles (sex observed at birth, for example)’. PLOS One
