About eight or nine years ago a new issue cropped up in my awareness. It was the fairly early stirrings of a brewing political feud between two ideologies and I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand the shape or nature of it. So I started to read relentlessly on either side of the debate. I wanted to understand not just the arguments but the tone and nature of the debate.
And that is why I have spent the best part of a decade not talking or writing about trans issues at all. I have had conversations in all directions and not only was there absolutely definitely no way to bridge the ideological gap, if I followed my usual approach in that circumstance (which would be to seek a negotiated compromise), I got monstered by both sides. I’m not here to solve unsolvable problems…
Now that we’re reaching some kind of end point I just want to draw some non-partisan conclusions which will, sadly, be interpreted as partisan no matter what I do. Oh well, I still think the world is better if we explore why things go wrong.
In that ten years I have written, in my head, an essay on my position so many times I could recite it verbatim. I have been for years friendly with trans people we knew tangentially and have my whole life tended to defend underdogs. I’m inclined that way. But I also studied the philosophy of knowledge systems (epistemology) and have some strong views about how we should develop knowledge. And I studied feminist theory at university. Plus I’m a political strategist.
All these aspects of my own philosophy are in conflict on this issue. I want people to live good, free, safe lives as who they are. But at the same time I was always opposed to all forms of extraneous gender stereotyping. I came from a school of feminist thinking (people like Julia Kristeva) which saw collapsing binary gender divides as key. It was about de-coupling concepts like femininity from female, and masculinity from male.
And then strategically I am acutely aware that societies work better when you find ways to accommodate everyone. Marginalising, isolating and discriminating against groups of people creates disharmony which is bad for all of us. People shouldn’t be isolated through law.
And then yet again I have, like I say, very strong views on what is ‘legitimate knowledge’. If you study the history of knowledge then you’ll find that it moves forward and for the better when it is built on verifiable data and stagnates or actually goes backwards if we ignore verifiable data. Something should be verifiably real if it is to be the foundation for a belief.
And yet again, verifiable certainty is only one aspect of knowledge. To function we then create a whole range of not-verifiable realities because that is how we want to live. You can go and look for verifiable data extant everywhere in the universe (fundamental knowledge) that proves murder is wrong – and you won’t find it. But there is verifiable data on ‘living’ and ‘dead’.
We had to be able to debate a human construct as a human construct, and we couldn’t
So for me this was always complicated – but not that complicated. If you resolve all of this it goes as follows: male and female are verifiable and a small number of exceptions to that rule don’t invalidate it because biology is based on random mutation so there will always be random outliers. That is absolutely verifiable and can’t be made not so using rhetoric.
(I lost faith with a lot of trans activism when I read an article by a trans woman claiming that ‘women didn’t exist until 1100 AD’. On reading it I realised she was deliberately mixing up ontology and etymology. The English word ‘woman’ emerged in around the early 12th century. So ‘women’ didn’t exist until 1100 AD – and there are no ‘women’ in France. This is disreputable thinking.)
That therefore has to be the base of knowledge. Men can’t become women, women can’t become men. That is not up for debate. But just as we behave as if murder is wrong because we want it to be, we behave as if lots of things are true which aren’t. Hell, the date of your birth is a completely manufactured human construct.
So we could have all accepted and behaved as if transwomen were women. The problem is that that countered the ideology of trans activists. That was where I split with that ideology. An ideology should never take precedence over verifiable data in my personal epistemology. We had to be able to debate a human construct as a human construct, and we couldn’t.
For what it’s worth (a) it’s really not my business where ‘as if’ should have been applied because it didn’t impact on me but on women so it wasn’t my debate and (b) I take a pretty liberal view of where ‘as if’ could have applied here – but not sport, not permanently for anyone under the age of 18, not services for women who have faced sexual or physical abuse by men, and probably not in circumstances which involved intimate personal hygiene.
I wanted to propose a Civic Assembly to look at this and make recommendations. I was pretty confident that it would take a very liberal view, but I doubted it would or should fully endorse trans ideology. That was the deal-breaker for many trans activists. It was therefore turned into a battle of winner-takes all. Socially speaking, that’s a disaster.
That takes me to the next learning point. Naturally as a political strategist I took interest in the (in)famous Denton report. For anyone who doesn’t know, a group of activists asked a political strategy consultancy to come up with a strategy for getting absolutist trans ideology adopted into law.
Denton’s report was good advice (if a little cynical). They concluded there wasn’t public support for this so it had to be done surreptitiously and offered plans for how to do that. Professionally-speaking, this was the best response possible to the brief – but they missed an important caveat.
The caveat is that ‘if you win in secret, you need to keep your victory secret too’. Corporations do this all the time; they lobby for big policy changes the public wouldn’t support, they do it in private and often they win. But – this is crucial – they don’t then organise marches with loud music to celebrate their victory. They pocket the money and move on. Quietly.
Trans ideology made startling gains remarkably quickly, entirely vindicating Dentons. There was even an effective public PR campaign which generated public sympathy for transwomen. Combined, this nearly led to victory-with-consent, at least in Scotland. But the truth was that the consent was rather illusory because it was obtained precisely by not providing crucial information
Society and identity are complicated and when you pretend they aren’t you will always create problems
That is a real-world reality which will become apparent. So to try and suppress that realisation there was the part that made me most uncomfortable with trans activism – a boycott and blacklisting campaign. This wasn’t civic and respectful like the boycott of Apartheid South Africa, this was aimed at destroying ordinary people in the manner of McCarthyism. The closest current comparator is actually Trump’s targetting of pro-Palestine activists.
But that still wasn’t going to prevent reality. I spoke to a senior SNP politician when the self-identification legislation passed and said ‘you know you’re now going to own the first rape of a woman in a woman’s prison – or whatever bad thing happens first’. He said ‘oh, I know’. It was only a matter of time.
And then reality hit, the public went ‘oh, hold on, when I said we should treat transwomen with respect, did that mean sexual abusers in women’s prisons?’. And so public consent melted away faster than I have ever seen public consent melt away for anything. And then the legal challenges started to come. And I’m afraid there was then only going to be one destination.
There are three giant learning points we should take from this. Well four if we include the reality that there really haven’t been any long-term winners out of this decade of unpleasantness. First, society and identity are complicated and when you pretend they aren’t you will always create problems. Far too much of the trans debate took place based on silly slogans that couldn’t be interrogated.
Second, you cannot – CANNOT – embed major social change through trickery and secrecy. I know it may seem daunting to have to fight longer campaigns to get where you want to go through persuasion rather than short campaigns run in secrecy and duplicity, but the former stick and the latter don’t. Social change doesn’t happen as fast as I’d like either – but that’s the speed at which it happens.
Third, we need better means of resolving contentious social debate than aggression, boycotts, blacklisting and exclusion. We can never again allow an issue like this to be placed on an ‘untouchable’ shelf somewhere above our heads in public debate. When we resolve a debate we legislate and then its not a debate unless its a debate about repeal. And it must all be done openly and honestly and inclusively. Faking it will fail sooner or later.
Honestly, I hate all of this. I hate that women have been targetted in their workplace. I hate that we seem to have substituted stereotypes for ‘womanliness’, reducing it to something you just ‘feel’. I hate that politics has become so distorted around this issue. I hate how it has pushed class-based politics completely off the agenda.
But I also hate that this whole affair has done nothing but make trans lives harder. I hate that politicians have weaponised this issue and used it for internal factional fighting at the expense of trans people. I hate the kinds of language that kicks around, I hate the way angry people talk about trans people now. I hate the backlash to the many people who were not combatants.
I hate the whole affair. I would hope that this would be a moment for reflection on both sides but I’m sure it won’t be. I have no doubt personally that the Supreme Court interpreted the law correctly. But I don’t think that needs to be the end of a debate, just that it is and always was the only viable starting point. And I certainly don’t think this is a reason to restart the toxic debate we’ve had.
I think a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves, and a surprisingly small number of them are in any way trans. And I’m certain that we need to learn from this whole, horrible affair. It is truly an ill wind that blows no-one any good. We, as a democratic system, have to do better. We, as a society, have to do better.