My Japanese husband and I got into an argument at dinner the other night over Tokyo's transport system's decision to provide women commuters with women-only cars on the trains during rush hour. Not a new thing, but the topic of safe spaces for women came up when I shared the blog topic I'd been working on. My spousal unit insisted we should focus on getting men to stop molesting women. I tried to make the point that that's a long-term solution and I'm talking only about a short-term solution, but my husband is not yet fifty and is handicapped by limited powers of logic common to so many youth of today. When we first met, he was in Women's Studies and you might say we've switched places. More miso soup?
Given that men are, what, 100 times more likely to molest women than women men, I'm fully in support of creating safe spaces for women. I say this to establish my take on the transgender issue I've been trying to update my knowledge on the past few weeks. You may remember the story of Lia Thomas, who made women uncomfortable when she removed her pants and showed her male genitalia in a locker room in Kentucky last February.
And the story only gets better. Thomas beat out all the women on the team and got to take home a trophy that should have been shared with the woman filing the complaint because, she was told, they needed to get the right photo.
* * *
I remember my mother asking me once, when I was in high school, why I wanted to go to mass with my Catholic friends during lent. Religion was still important in those days, and I remember my father telling me that "we didn't believe all those things" the Catholics believed. "What do we believe, Daddy?" my little sister asked him.
The question was probably the first time I was exposed to the notion that belief was not an individual choice but a tribal one. We believed what our parents taught us to believe. And they believed what they were taught in Sunday School. And we lived in the U.S., a country where people lived side by side with people who believed different things. Some of them wrong. Because it was unacceptable to question the importance of religion, and people were encouraged to proclaim their faith and were looked up to when they did so, the ground was made fertile for the notion of multiple truths. Unfortunately, that freedom, along with the freedom to be stupid, has come back recently to bite a chunk out of our backsides.
It's called postmodernism. Once an academic topic for nerds, like the abstract notions of beauty and justice, we find ourselves engaged in a public debate over the way we define truth. "Show me and I'll believe you" people, grounded in the scientific method, want to limit it to the empirically verifiable; people captured by the postmodern notion du jour insist we have no way of establishing truth in the long run and must make do with the beliefs we have created to make sense of the universe, the "narratives." You know, if you're a Euro-American you're likely to believe that Columbus "discovered" America. If you're a native American, 1492 was the beginning of the end of your civilization. There is no neutral, objective place to stand to judge one of these narratives as superior to the other. You simply have to go along with what Kellyanne Conway, early on in the Trump administration, notoriously called "alternative facts." Wikipedia tells us that within four days of her public definition of truth, the sales of George Orwell's 1984 increased 95-fold.
Where once we looked to religious authority (or daddy) to tell us what to believe we now feel perfectly comfortable, many of us, creating our own truths. What is a woman? To most people on the political left, the kind of people who got behind the cause of gay liberation and rejected the right-wing rejection of gay people, this means getting behind trans people, as well. And that means adopting the postmodern notion that I get to follow any narrative I choose. I become a woman the moment I declare that I am a woman.
That's why Lia Thomas caused all this ruckus back in February. She got to use that women's changing room in Kentucky back then because Biden, our lefty (progressive) president, got behind the changes to Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, which changes would allow transgender female athletes equal access to women's spaces.
But now I find myself wondering how the hell I seem to have gotten in bed with right-wingers. I've made clear that I want to maintain the distinction between sex and gender, for the reasons I just outlined with the Lia Thomas story. This is, to me, not a trivial distinction. At the same time, I don't want to go on record as believing there is no such thing as trans people or that people should not have the right to change their sex and their gender. I just want them to wait until they have reached the age of maturity.
For years to come, we will be trying to explain why the issue of transgender is different from abortion and gay rights, why the left has been sucked into this postmodern nonsense, why when I go to my favorite blogs I find my friends at loggerheads. Richard Dawkins, for example, one of my favorite atheists, has come out strongly against this postmodern truth nonsense. But two other atheist bloggers, Stephen Woodford and Forrest Valkai, jump all over him for it, Valkai even taking the view that gender (meaning "sex") is an inner feeling that one discovers in time. And Woodford, was once himself bounced out of some organization for being "transphobic" before he was let back in. I won't leave links to these many discussions, because I want to not go off on even more tangents, and you can find them easily. J.K. Rowling, like Dawkins, has made strong statements in favor of old fashioned scientific definitions and against postmodern fuzziness, and she now needs bodyguards for her efforts.
In tracking down who's who on both sides - let's call them the distinction makers like Dawkins and Rowling on one side and the transactivist postmodernists on the other - I find myself over and over again in bed with what to me is definitely the wrong crowd. Matt Walsh, for example, a Tennessee conservative, ardently opposed to gay rights, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a "peddlar of fear and disinformation," has made a film entitled "What is a Woman?" I listen to him and find myself nodding in agreement on the trans issue. How did this happen?
Where this becomes a really important question is when it comes to the issue of "gender-affirming care." Until I started my recent reading, I would nod in agreement with any trans activist insisting that trans youngsters should get all the support they possibly can. They should not have to face hostile therapists trying to talk them out of their trans identities. But then I read of the Tavistock Center, Britain's only real support center for trans youth, being closed down because they were "too quick" to provide blockers and hormones, according to the National Health Service, and I have to push pause. Obviously, there's more to this story than what is found on the surface.
The radicals among the trans activists are no longer the predictable lefties of yesteryear. They line up with their postmodern "I am what I say I am" stance and label their opposition "TERFs" - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Bad guys, allegedly. But the more I learn about these bad guys, the more I identify with them. I'm talking about people like Posie Parker, aka Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshul, a British anti-transgender rights activist and founder of the organization Standing for Women. Her simple, once obvious, definition of a woman as an "adult human female" got her in trouble with the radical trans activists and secured her a place on Tucker Carlson (and how's that for disgusting bedfellows?)
Others in this group include Lisa Selin Davis, who had a daughter who was a tomboy. Pressured to come out as trans, the daughter had to convince her mother that she simply liked rough housing and was perfectly happy being a girl. That led to Davis' book Tomboy.
Another is Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and the title says it all, as does The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls by Kara Densky.
Another major text in this genre is Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.
This is not an exhaustive list. I had no idea at the start of all this that there was so much stuff to ponder, so many publications, so many nuanced views, and that it has been going on not for just the past couple of years, but for decades now. I'm a real johnny-come-lately to this party.
I don't know where the transgender debates are headed, whether progressives on the left will come to believe they've been duped, as I currently believe they are, at present. Whether I'll turn out to have thrown my lot in with the wrong crowd when I insist that kids should not be making decisions that involve medical alterations to healthy bodies.
I am no longer totally in the dark on this topic, but I've by no means reached the place where I have total confidence I've got a handle on it, either. There is much that I haven't taken up here, such as the fact we've been talking more about trans women, previously known as male-to-female people than about trans (female-to-male) men. And the fact that I've approached things more from a legalistic, or policy-making perspective and dwelt on the exceptional cases rather than the more common issues facing trans people. But I trust others will compensate for my lack of authority and adequacy of coverage.
This is, for me, a search for understanding in progress. Not finished by any means, but I've got to get on to other things.
Be kind to trans people. They've got a lot of shit to deal with.
No comments:
Post a Comment