No publication has done more to pour oil over the fire at the heart of the debate over trans rights than the New Statesman, and last night it issued its latest incendiary broadside: an anonymous article purporting to explain the debate and condemn people like Mary Beard and Peter Tatchell for not wanting to be associated with people they consider to be Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs.
Generally speaking, any writer who dredges up Joe McCarthy and George Orwell to attack their opponents should not be viewed uncritically; those are pretty clear red flags. I’m not intending to go through a line-by-line rebuttal of the whole article, suffice to say that much of it is grossly misrepresentative.
At its heart though, it is just blatantly misleading. The argument is not about whether trans women are biologically identical to cis women, or even whether trans women have different life experiences than cis women. The argument is about whether that should matter. The argument is whether cis feminists should extend the hand of solidarity out to trans women. To argue that all feminists do is blatantly wrong.
It seems strange to be even having to rebut this. If a major national political magazine were to publish an article arguing that white women are biologically different to women of colour, and that women of colour just have to accept this, the outcry would be near universal. The fact that this article is seemingly being approvingly quoted by people who otherwise consider themselves to be progressive and unprejudiced, shows us that this is a civil rights struggle over which there is still much work to do.
There’s a particularly revealing part of this article, in which the author states – with not inconsiderable alarm – that “in some circles it is considered transphobic for women to question the presence of people with openly displayed male sexual organs in spaces like communal female changing rooms” (my emphasis).
I can well understand that some cis women might be uncomfortable about this. The question is where those people, who a non-TERF would call women (simples!), should get changed. Is the discomfort of cis women so inviolable that the minority, trans women, should have to get changed with men? Or perhaps they should be allocated their own broom cupboard? Again, the analogy with skin colour is hard to avoid: 50 years ago, this was a big deal. Fortunately, we’ve moved on. Maybe your discomfort at getting changed in a room with someone who looks different to you is your problem.
I repeat: this is a civil rights movement. All successful civil rights movements have got in people’s faces, upset them, made them uncomfortable and, yes, occasionally crossed the line and made mistakes. They have to; that’s how they win. If you can applaud a film like Selma, or Pride*, and somehow consider that New Statesman article to be legitimate journalism, then you need to be aware that you are part of the problem.
* Actually, I had a number of issues with that film, but I’m not getting into that here.
