Though it’s become a fetish of the right, the great “Canadian waxing scandal” is too good to pass up.
For those who’ve missed it, British Columbia-based trans woman Jessica Yaniv has successively taken a group of beauty waxers to the province’s human rights commission after they refused to give her a Brazilian wax. Sixteen (cis) female beauticians have been taken to the BC HRC so far, and after featuring in Canadian meeja the case has raced around the world, being taken up as a stunning assault on our freedoms, slip the dogs of war, etc etc.
It isn’t of course. It’s an annoying, grandstanding case, more like the plot of a John Waters film than… (Rundle, remember to find second part of analogy before sending copy to editors). But it has not been without impact, with allegations that the HRC complaint has driven several of the immigrant beauticians out of business, and also suggestions that Yaniv has an online history of racist remarks.
But it’s often the most ridiculous cases that raise the standard, so to speak, and the Yaniv case, though scarce likely to be a precedent-setter, may be the harbinger of a series of confrontations around these issues won’t be able to be avoided for long. As the identity concept of gender becomes part of mainstream values, at least of certain social classes, the legal and cultural contradictions are going to mount up until a more complex rendering of sex and gender becomes inevitable.
Many in the progressive classes are desperate to avoid these questions, or the acknowledgement of contradictions, for fear of what sort of wider questions they open. For many progressives, the ’60s notion — that all claims to liberation from an inherited conservative order are valid — remains primary. As the 50th anniversary of Woodstock approaches, the Woodstock settings remain in place. That demand for continuity has started to produce absurdities in many areas — free speech, for example, where the right of one activist to call on us to “burn Australia down” is upheld, and that of another to preach old-skool fire and brimstone Christianity is to be banned.
But nothing is more likely to rule off the ’60s era more decisively than the sex/gender question, whose competing demands can now not be squared off (nor can the puns really be switched off).
The global sixties revolution was bodily, material and historical; joining “third world” (as then was) liberation to black power, women’s lib, gay lib struggles in the west. Such struggles have to be at least about the given body that is prior to consciousness. The materiality of freedom is what separates the left from the right. The classical liberal right believes that starving to death under the protection of the first amendment constitutes freedom and all that a society can strive for. The left believes that certain enabling conditions are necessary, and they are related to the needs that arise from embodiment.
Thus, in the US at the moment, low-income type 1 diabetics are dying — actually dying — from lack of insulin because the price of this easily manufactured chemical has been jacked up to a thousand dollars a month by its private providers. If you’re on the left, you believe, or should do, that this constitutes a crime against humanity. A classical liberal would see human embodiment as irrelevant to the question of freedom or right — for such, the citizen is essentially a subject, purely by speech and writing (including law or property).
It’s in that context that the legitimate demand of trans people to have the reality of their identity recognised has become the means by which the body has been “dematerialised” on the left. This has come about as a conjunction of historical factors: the shift from industrial to information/knowledge economies, and thus disembodiment of large numbers of people in everyday life; the class split between workers and the knowledge class, sundering the old left alliance; and the search for new heroic and transgressive narratives for the left, after substantial equalities — at least in principle — had been achieved.
Thus the shift from the argument that trans selfhood is real, to the wider argument that birth-given, embodied sex plays no factor in the social determination of “man” and “woman”.
This has already started to tie progressives up in knots. The huge battles in the UK between radical trans activists and radical feminists, drawing on materialist conceptions of sex, has seen veteran feminists physically assaulted by activists defined as trans women, but with the force/aggression capacity of a male body. Campaigns around violence against women have been stymied by an inability to talk plainly about the overwhelming ratio of violence that is male, and grounded in the particularity of the birth-given male body.
The access and “space-sovereignty” of women’s refuges, women’s health clinics, women’s prisons and many more institutions are all in question from a refusal to acknowledge a contradiction in progressive politics. The Victorian government — of course — is leading the way here, proposing one of the most blithely oversimplified laws on gender self-definition yet on offer.
Like all such laws, it will eventually put progressive governments on the wrong side: sooner or later, responsible workers at women’s spaces will have to refuse access to male-embodied persons, out of responsibility to its female-embodied clients, and as a judgement based on the particular character of bodies. The rather absurd Jessica Yaniv case will have its more real and urgent counterpart.
Nevertheless, such incidents will remain relatively uncommon. The real concern for the left remains the dematerialisation of politics. For if the body has no particularity in politics, the implicit drift of that politics will be to the liberal right in economic matters, and to denialism in terms of the biosphere crisis.
Without an insistence that we are specifically embodied, in numerous aspects, given by our being, and prior to self-consciousness and mental autonomy, there is no politics of what was once called radical human liberation, and is now simply human survival. The contradictions must be confronted. Or, to put it in exemplary gender-neutral terms, we simply have to have the balls to face it.
It’s worth noting that to say as you do that ‘activists defined as trans women’ have male bodies is conventionally regarded as unforgiveable transphobia.
What strikes me about this whole affair is how defenceless progressive politics has turned out to be to a particular kind of opportunistic subversion. Yaniv is a narcissistic sex pest. He’s certainly not the only one. Somehow these people have managed to inhabit and subvert a branch of progressive politics into an engine whose sole aim is their gratification.
The Yaniv case is about womens’ sexual boundaries. Lesbians being shamed as bigots for categorically refusing to consider sexual activity with men is another example. But people with progressive politics are almost hypnotically vulnerable to the thought-terminating cliché ‘transphobia’. How did it come to this?
I take your point about the alliance of liberalism – individual self-definitions and privatisation. However, having just spent some time teaching in the USA, I encountered the issue of “Mis-pronouning” first hand. I was sceptical at first about “they, them, theirs”, but after a while this proved to be a kind of civility that opened up dialogue, rather than close it down. Maybe this won’t translate to Australia, but it can work in ideal circumstances.
Rundle says that at some point progressives will have to acknowledge that ‘responsible workers at women’s spaces will have to refuse access to male-embodied persons, out of responsibility to its female-embodied clients’. However, as we now know, male and female do not exhaust the possibilities of birth-given sex, and even for the majority of us who do fit into one of these categories, the diversity within the category is mostly greater than that between them. 1970s feminists resisted social pressure from restrictive gender stereotypes by fighting to change the stereotypes, and fought against women being expected to change their bodies. Given the fact of non dualistic sexual embodiment, a materialist response would involve acceptance of our biological diversity, and a rejection of individualist neo-liberal responses which expect biologically diverse bodies to change those bodies to comply with restrictive ‘male or female’. That doesn’t resolve how we provide services to those whose biological sex is ambiguous, but recognising biological diversity gives us a different place to start than if we treat sexual identity as purely a cultural epiphenomenon
The notion of biological diversity/continuum, rather than an overwhelming dualism, is vastly overplayed, to get that result. Sooner or later questions of the access of the male body, with its inherent ‘power attributes’ – to spaces, organisations etc – will become real and urgent, for social, health etc workers. At that point, in a legal regime of self-defined gender, they would have both the moral and industrial right to break the law.
Saying there are biological differences, and that not everyone can be straight forwardly categorised as either male or as female is not at all the same as arguing for self assigned gender. While the majority of us cluster around either prototypically female or prototypically female, there is not some one property possession of which determines which category you fit in. Biology is messier than our gender categories, which is why some cultures have more than two. The fact that power is organised around a gender dualism here, doesn’t mean biology is as neat. What I’m saying is that modifying your body to fit into and ‘choose’ your place in the cultural gender dualism reinforces the dualistic power structure rather than challenges it.
The dualistic structure isn’t something I would regard as a cultural construct, but as a natural real, with a small proportion of intersex variations, which some cultures give a third gender status too (though third genders are often a social-cultural role). A materialist left approach means proceeding from what’s given to the most just (or least unjust) social arrangement possible.
I agree, Guy, but the problem may be broader.
In an attempt to produce a common secular morality spanning nations and cultures, we’ve enshrined a notion of personhood to which rights attach as inviolable assets from inception.
Yet ‘person’ can’t be defined only physically; the definition is psychosocial by design, and thus admits all manner of contradictions and contrived constructions. For example, when does personhood properly begin, why does it begin there, who can say what elements of identity attach, and who has the authority to nominate them? What offenses against personhood should there be, and why only those?
And our definitions themselves are loose and circular: a person is an entity to whom rights attach; rights are any entitlements attaching to a person; secular morality is all about upholding the rights of persons; yet who has the authority to alter these definitions, and grant or bestow their legitimacy? The authority to bestow is also the authority to withhold, so should anyone even have that authority?
I wonder whether the blithe belief that this would all be viable doesn’t come to us from Enlightenment Deism, built as it was on the now-debunked notion that the world was the construction of a wise and morally-ordered Creator, and thus, if you studied it long enough, a viable, fixed and supreme morality (the ‘ought’) would become apparent from design (the ‘is’.)
Yet we know better than that now: any hope of a morally-ordered creation was refuted by our growing understanding of thermodynamics, biology and quantum mechanics. There is no universal destiny; no master template: we’re making it up as we go along and trying to survive for as long and as well as we can in a universe loaded against us. Thus any morality we construct can only be built from observation, discussion and shared interests, and at best it’s constantly emergent.
So do we really need to ground our morality in the static, victim-centric paradigm of persons with rights? Are there kinder, wiser, more self-responsible and constructive ways to discuss our shared needs? In the shrill world of identitarian rightfighting and political correctness scalp-hunting, have we even the courage and humility to explore them?
This article is a disgrace. It is poorly researched and presents a number of false anti trans tropes as fact.
But let’s start with Yanev. Although this is oversharing it is relevant in that I know what I am talking about. When I had male genitalia I had them waxed. It is quite easy to find people to do it. Quite often men have them waxed. There are people happy to do it.
It is much easier post op in that more people are happy to wax down there.
Yanev, rather than simply using people that are happy to provide that service, is trying to legally force people who do not wish to provide this service to do so.
I think this is a disgrace. It makes me angry. Yanev is not doing the trans and gender diverse communities any favours. This is all to do with Yanev and no one else. I am sure they could find someone to do it if they wanted to look.
But back to the article. Particularly this paragraph. It could have been taken directly from the radical feminist cookbook. A group of women so peaceful that other lesbians once asked “Where are your crowbars?” after a previous altercation. Not to say crowbars are commonly wielded in modern times but yes, this happened.
“This has already started to tie progressives up in knots. The huge battles in the UK between radical trans activists and radical feminists, drawing on materialist conceptions of sex, has seen veteran feminists physically assaulted by activists defined as trans women, but with the force/aggression capacity of a male body. Campaigns around violence against women have been stymied by an inability to talk plainly about the overwhelming ratio of violence that is male, and grounded in the particularity of the birth-given male body.“
All these assaults. I haven’t heard of and I usually do. What usually happens is that radical feminists go out of their way to confront trans women ( never trans men) and when one of the trans women fires back they use it as evidence of male violence because trans women are really men. This is their philosophy and it appears that the author has fallen for it.
In reality transwomen don’t go around assaulting people with ‘male violence’ . It doesn’t happen. Transwomen are no more violent than any other women. The implications that transwomen retain male aggression is totally false. They just want to go on living their lives doing what everyone else does. This upsets radical feminists who find the very idea of transwomen offensive.
And this thing about male strength. If the author had done even the slightest minutest amount of research they would know that transwomen do not retain male strength in any degree. It takes time to dissipate but dissipate it does. Completely. Utterly. For me it is ‘will someone help me open this jar’ level.
And another. How many women have been assaulted by ‘male acting’ transwomen in women’s refuges? The answer is somewhere approaching nil. Another fake trope.
Transwomen need protection from men sometimes like any woman needs protection from men sometimes, given the murder rate perhaps even more so.
These tropes of transwomen being violent male bodied threats to other women are straight out of radical feminist literature and they are false. They believe it, surely, but some people believe the earth is flat. It is not true.
(Please don’t trot out a single episode on the entire planet and extrapolate or I will conclude from studying Tilly Devine that women are a danger to the public)
Once again someone is writing about us without even the slightest attempt to talk with us. It drives me personally nuts. Particularly when fake tropes about transwomen retaining male aggression and strength are stated as fact. It is fake news.
Yanev on the other hand, yes, call it for what it is. Narcissistic, misogynist troublemaking of the worst kind. Just leave the rest of us out of it.
Gwen
In your reply you say that male-body physical strength dissipates in the trans process. But are you identifying transform with those who’ve undertaken hormonal alteration – or that the very process of redefinition dissipates male-body strength per se? If the latter, I’d suggest that is questionable. If the former, then isn’t that limiting the trans- category, in ways that the upcoming Victorian legislation would not? Yes, I agree that outlier cases should not be overwritten or relied upon. But the current cultural imperative of ‘safety’ has a very expanded idea of risk, etc. Sooner or later those contradictions will require regular adjudication by institutions, workers and users/clients.
But my wider point was one about materiality and the left – the general principle that self-defenition, in any field, dematerialisation the body in ways more conducive to market liberalism than to a radical left politics of material equality.
Clearly I refer to hormonal transition. Can you call yourself trans without it? I have met one person in my life that referred to themselves as non hormone, non operation, trans and believe it or not, yes I have no doubt in my mind that they were female. You could just tell. Yes, they would have retained their strength. And would never have been a threat to anyone. Again you can tell.
Many take hormones but retain male genitalia either though absence of desire to change, medically unable to change or financially unable to change. They all lose their strength. Statistically they have never posed a threat.
Then there are the gender diverse. Maybe hormones, maybe not. Those that are not on hormones retain strength obviously but again statistically at least do not appear to be a threat to anyone.
But it is the transwomen the radical feminists claim are male bodied aggressors (with male strength) and it is you who are publishing their claims without researching the facts.
Are you concerned that someone can just say “I’m a woman now” do nothing and that’s just it? In my experience this just doesn’t happen. Yes, someone probably has somewhere but in general it just doesn’t happen. It’s another trope.
It can appear that way but it’s usually after a lifetime of agonising over it. The observer and the participant have totally different experiences of the process. And then again usually with medical support. Psychological and hormonal.
The bottom line is statistically speaking none of these groups are a threat to women in any way.
Gwen
But that’s the point I’m making about the new Victorian laws, and other similar around the world. They do assert that gender is a matter of self-definition, without any further conditions. That’s where the social and institutional contradictions would start to arise.
I was born in Victoria. I amended my gender under the existing regime, which required me to be permanently and irreversibly surgical sterilised before I could be legally recognised as the gender that everyone in my life perceives me to be (my transgender status is a closely kept secret).
Surgery cost me $50,000, was excrutiatingly painful, carried considerable risk, required six months off work to recover, and requires lifelong maintenance. I also had to ‘prove’ that I had been sterilised. This involved subjecting my body to examination in the gynecologist’s chair to two independent doctors who had to write statutory declarations.
The most significant factor however is that I will never be able to have children.
Ever.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur against Torture, UN Women, UNDP, the Human Rights Council, the European Court of Human Rights, PACE, and pretty much every human rights body in the world has said that laws that coerce transgender people into unwanted sterilisation surgeries are cruel and inhumane. It’s modern eugenics.
Victoria is clearly behind in the evolution of law reform. Laws that impose eugenic sterilisations upon transgender people have been struck down or repealed already in Tasmania, ACT, NT, South Australia, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finalnd, Portugal, Sapin, Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Botswana, South Africa, Chile, Malta, Argentina, Columbia, France, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Greece, New Zealand, Moldova, Peru, Canada, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania, Croatia, Romania, South Korea, Netherlands and Serbia.
I’m really sad to see Crikey publishing articles that sustain acts of eugenics against people who don’t conform.
Being trans is self reported. And self identified.
Since many would have no idea of the typical process associated with transitioning as an adult let me describe it. In no way does this description apply to any particular individual. There is much variation.
After ( almost always) years of cross gender behaviour, often in private feelings that something of a crisis in gender indentification is happening causes someone to seek counselling.
A gender counsellor will attempt to draw out and get the person to examine their own feelings and motivations. At some stage in this process ( a very angsty emotional process) some people make find that their place on the gender spectrum is opposite to their birth or somewhere near that. Or somewhere else. At that stage the counsellor will assist the person to come to some decisions on what they might want to do about it. That might be nothing. It might be to live part time in another gender, or to become a bit more androgynous in appearance. It might be to transition.
It is the person who ultimately drives the process, both in self identification and in any action to be taken.
All the counsellor does is to enable the person to find their true self whatever that might be.
As such it is the person who comes to the self knowledge of who they are in terms of gender.
In other words it is a process of self identification.
As part of the process it is also the job of the counsellor to make sure that these cross gender feelings are not the product of some kind of mental disturbance.
I don’t know personally anyone who has not changed gender without some kind of interaction in this process.
It might appear that someone suddenly announces their gender is not what it was in some way but it is almost always at the end of long process of self evaluation.
This mythical person who suddenly changes gender overnight is yet another Trope you are coming up with.
Can someone bypass this process? Well anything is possible but they would present as a rare statistical outlier. Not something you should use to deny a much larger group their rights just in case ‘something’ happens. The likelihood of ‘something’ happening is low enough to be neglected. In other words, in general, it never happens.
And in any event. Let’s say this mythical person exists and becomes a sex pest. This is illegal. Quite rightly lock them up. You don’t have to frock up to assault women. Men do it all the time. You don’t have to pretend you are a woman to do it.
Transwomen are not a threat to other women period.
Gwen, I appreciate your contributions, however I think you are talking about only one part of the question Guy has raised. Understandably, it’s the part you’re most concerned about — gender identity: getting people to recognise and respect the way you feel.
However, another part Guy is talking about is gender [i]dentification[/i]: deciding for ourselves how to treat someone based on appearance, demeanour, and our customary responsibilities toward one another. At core is the question whether our responsibilities hinge on something objective (Guy says ‘material’), or must be locked up in subjective self-perceptions and entitlements — and if so, where that will take us.
Historically, we only have sexual differentiation at all because of sexual reproduction: an objective need. All mating species have to work out with whom they can reproduce and when, or they waste a lot of energy.
However, because we also developed specialised social roles, we now have this nuanced cultural concept called gender. And the more we’ve separated sexual and social interaction from reproduction (they’re now nearly completely separate), the less grounded subjective feelings are in objective function.
I believe Guy has argued that this ‘dematerialisation’ of identity is increasingly an expression of strident individualism, whose natural end Guy has argued is neoliberal inequity, where the privileged get to express whatever identity they have the power to assert, while the underprivileged have no identity at all beyond some meagre economic function.
You’ve argued that genuine transgender people aren’t going to exploit such an opportunity, and let’s agree that that’s so. Yet Guy is also saying that the more social power one has, the less one’s subjective identitarian claims need be legitimised by anything objective (Guy says ‘material’, but the transitioning processes you describe are objective, even if they have not resulted in material change.) So he’s saying it’s exploitable regardless of genuine need, and that he can see no end to its capacity to distract and create conflict among other and perhaps more pressing progressive issues.
But if so, then gender identity isn’t the only example. Religious identity is another topical one too — because it also begins with subjective self-perception. Or we could add class identity too (as opposed to economic role.)
And meanwhile, I’m wondering how much we need a consumer-focused notion of identity and a victim-centric notion of rights at all, and whether we aren’t trapped by our own language.
Put another way, if I commit myself to upholding your safety, agency and dignity, I’m wondering why what clothes you wear, what hormone balance you have, what fatty tissue and/or silicone you might or might not possess, and what genitals you do or don’t sport are any of my business — or why you have any right to demand that I concern myself with them.
I understand that they may be a central part of how you choose to live and see yourself, but I wonder whether it’s your identity or your character and agency that should most concern me, and whether it would not be overstepping to demand more from my concern than that.
Does that change things at all for you?
Regardless of if it is true or not that transition makes someone ‘lose their strength’, there are plenty of examples in the news of young mtf transpeople successfully seeking and receiving treatment to block their male puberty. In that case, the secondary sex characteristics that contribute to the general statistically significant greater physical strength do not develop.
The possibility of that makes it pretty hard to generalize on the grounds that they may or may not have retained advantages that men enjoy. Nothing to retain.
Interesting thoughts there Gwen though hard to take it all seriously especially the dissipation of male strength. It’s arguable that feminists are simply thinking more deeply and speaking more loudly than others. Ordinary old blokes like me don’t mind you identifying as a bloke or whatever but when it comes to bossing others around about it, that’s where the line is crossed. You call it phobic. I call it my right to think as I see fit.
The inconsistency is readily observed with the nonsense of cis. It’s ok for a chick with a dick to demand to be recognized as a woman without caveat but somehow a natural born XY chromosome woman must have a cis attached. Get outta here.
The common theme seems to be what an opportunistic rat bag Yanev is and what do we do about it. Introduce a vexatious complaint test for all discrimination laws would be good start.
This will be resolved and lots of disinterested and innocent people will be needlessly involved and hurt on the way. And in ten or twenty years time it’ll be mostly forgotten and people will remind each other – hey remember all that trans carry on ? How did that happen ?
In the meantime it will stand as another reminder, endorsed by conservatives, that most people don’t really want equality despite their proclamations. Given the opportunity they’ll happily manipulate others downwards while maneuvering for position on the totem pole of oppression.
The dissipation of male strength is not a matter about which you can have a reasonable opinion. It’s fact.
Hormones affect every soft tissue in the body. Cross-sex hormone therapy affects muscle mass, fat deposition, eyeball curvature, body scent, urine smell, skin texture, hair texture, blood composition, lung capacity, brain shape. It affects every soft tissue in the body. That’s known fact.
There are loads of medical studies into the effects of cross-sex hormone therapy. The overwhelming consensus all show that the strength and stamina of transgender women migrate into the healthy female range during cross-sex hormone therapy.
All of these studies are basis of the participation critera of the IAAF, CAS and IOC for transwomen participating in elite sports competition. You can read them. There are thousands of pages on the topic by some of the world’s most eminent endocrinologists.
It’s fascinating that people are not believing me about the loss of male strength. It’s not supposition. It’s fact. It’s what happens. It’s what happened to me and others. It’s well known amongst those familiar with trans medicine.
Hormonal treatment is usually some form of estrogen and (as well) drugs to lower testosterone. Pre-op levels are reduced to female range. Post op, testosterone is undetectable. And you lose male strength. Pre-op and even more post-op. It’s fact. Not subject to argument being, in fact, a fact. But don’t let facts get in the way of your opinion…….
A few years ago, while staying in Sydney, I swam every day at an inner city public pool. On my first visit and on every subsequent one, I and a number of other women shared the change room with someone who was transitioning and still had some obvious male characteristics. None of us had a problem with each other. For me it was a great reassurance about the sanity of people who don’t have an axe to grind and can accept things as they are.
And that’s what this comes down to.
On one side is a law that imposes permanent surgical sterilisation upon an entire class of people. It’s a form of eugenics.
On the other side of the law is a group of people who have convinced themselves that penises are a threat to women’s safety…. rather than the possessors of those penises.
At some stage during my transition, I had to switch changerooms. It was a horribly uncomfortable time…. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I didn’t particularly want to be cleaning leaking breasts or changing nursing pads in front of men, and I didn’t particularly want to expose my genitals in front of women. I was isolated and vulnerable. I know women were gossiping about me, and I know they viewed by body as an object of their own sordid curiousity.
However, throughout all that, I managed to survive unscathed. I never had my pants off in a changeroom without a towel around my waist, I changed in the corner facing the wall, and left quickly. Thankfully, all I dealt with were some stares, no abuse or harrassment.
Five more years of hormones and two surgeries later, and I’m well adjusted to my new gender, new experience of emotions and new place in society. Very few people know about my history, and I’m not afraid of gendered spaces any more. No one would ever imagine that I once used the men’s changerooms.