My primary feeling at the UK Supreme Court decision is unreliable and probably misguided: it is relief. The modern form movement of trans civil rights activism is a movement that, in its modern form, goes back to Compton’s Cafeteria, from there to “Urning” activism of the late nineteenth century, and in more inchoate form can be traced to a set of legal disputes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century legal battles in the West. There are, of course, indigenous and anti-colonial practices of transition that long predate and prevail against the dominant colonial forms of rights-based articulation, but (without, of course, claiming any particular expertise in any) it isn’t clear to me that they share much legal interest with the dominant, Stonewall-and-HRC-led species of civil rights activism, which is the species that marks another serious defeat this week. It’s easy (and rarely wrong) to blame liberals, though, so let’s set our sights a little higher for a response to this moment, and try to figure out what we can and cannot do.
It is shocking to me—a matter of serious collective failure from a generation of journalists and institutionalized center-leftists—that the gender critical argument has prevailed so completely in British public discourse. It has almost no dissenters who are not themselves trans people or intimately tied into our communities. It is a shockingly stupid argument. The GC argument goes like this: (1) the word “woman” is conventionally used to refer to adult people who are members of the sex class that produces large immotile gametes. (2) With a very small number of exceptions, it is obvious at a glance which individuals’ bodies are members of the sex class that produces large immotile gametes. (3) Ergo, the word “woman” should in all cases be appended to those (and only those) whose bodies appear to be members of the sex class that produces large immotile gametes. Now, as it happens, (1) is false, and its falsity is the basis of feminist thought as such: the term “woman,” feminists argue, has been applied on a prescriptive basis in order to assign social roles to individuals—passive sexual position, and reproductive economic role.
That’s admittedly a tricky history to grasp, and if one were a certain kind of idiot—a very rich idiot, for example, who made billions of pounds from writing silly books about private school for special wizards—you might not feel like learning any of it, when you can just yell “are you trying to tell actual women what it means to be a woman????” as though the reply bore some resemblance to reality. The affront of the wealthy has been a useful political tool for the GCs. But—but!—there is simply no excuse for the collective failure to call out (2), the falsity of which is immediately apparent on a moment’s contemplation. “We can always tell,” they say, and when one asks for clarification, they ask whether you think Eddie Izzard “looks like [a member of the sex class that produces large immotile gametes]?” Of course not, we can respond—Eddie Izzard is very famous, and we’ve all been very familiar with her body for decades. The question is whether the body of the woman sitting next to you on the bus, or in the bathroom, or at the rape crisis center, looks like it produces large immotile gametes. Go on, check. What’s your confidence interval? Maybe a little too downy on the upper lip? That weight distribution across the torso—is that synthetic? Is the short haircut a giveaway, or a feint? I do not care what you think a woman is. I care that we foster, collectively, enough honesty and dignity to admit that our bodies are not, in fact, immediately transparent to each other, and that neither we as individual citizens, nor (crucially) the state, has any right to administer blood tests or genital inspections every time we are confused by someone’s gait.
The GC movement has established the notion that society should be run according to the routine assessment of bodily sexuation. It’s not going to take long for the sheer unpleasantness of that regime to become apparent, especially to the GCs themselves, who have been made fools by their own bizarre assertion that a person’s body’s class’s gamete size and motility is always (“almost,” they concede, “almost always”) self-evident. I bring my child to school, and introduce her as Mary. She joins the girls’ basketball team, but Joe’s mother thinks she’s a little tall. What now? Must Mary produce papers, submit to blood tests or invasive physical inspections? Should I have tattooed her at birth in order to prevent confusion later on? Will the tattoo be performed by a doctor? These ideas are very silly and it will not get this far, because not even the GCs really believe their own silly premises—they just hate femininity, regret that they were not given the opportunity to transition, and fear their generational obsolescence. All relatable conditions enough—they would have been quite likable if they had not become so cruel.
Hence, relief. Finally, they claim victory, clap each other on the back, and await the fruits of their labors. They will not like the taste of them. In the meantime, we get to ask ourselves how to rebuild—what mistakes did our movement make over the last decade? As we ask this, I would encourage us to really drill down, with courage and self-reflection, on one question: why are so many people who genuinely want to support trans civil rights so terrible at articulating a reason why trans people deserve civil rights? Why have they taken the worst arguments given to them by our opponents, and brandished them as though they were helping? What can we do to arm ourselves and our coalition with stronger tools when we come back—because, as everyone knows, this is a fight we’re going to win in the end. Sooner, I think, than we expect.
I’ve been hanging out with my beautiful baby Rocco today. The people celebrating the UK Supreme Court decision have accused me of having paedophilic designs on him. Because they are monsters. It hurts me, and it makes me angry. I don’t know how it will make him feel when he is old enough to know what strangers said about his family when they posted pictures of him online, when he was a beautiful baby. They’ve committed moral suicide already and their opinions are not worth considering any more. Everyone seeing this photo will know the gamete size and motility of my body; I’ve been extremely open about it over the last decade. But if you look at this image honestly, I think you can admit that, if you didn’t know already, you wouldn’t be sure. You might well suspect—maybe you’d be 80% sure I was a man. Or else, you could tell yourself I’ve face-tuned the image. (I haven’t—-tho sometimes I do.) But you could also act like a human being. Hey, I’m Grace. Let’s talk.
