Common sense on transgender = rank bigotry?
A defense of J.K. Rowling, and some brief thoughts on trans athletes and preteens going on hormones.
I recently agreed to take part in a medical study sponsored by the Mayo Clinic. There are no experimental drugs or procedures involved, just periodically filling in bubbles on questionnaires. I was struck by the wording of the instructions in the heading of one section:
Ten or fifteen years ago, when apparently we were all vicious bigots of the worst kind, virtually no one would have blinked at the wording here. Women have menstrual periods at some point in their lives; men do not. Basic commonsense biological categorization.
At some point advocates for trans rights started protesting that some women (who have transitioned from male to female) don’t get periods and never did. Also, some men (who have transitioned from female to male) do get periods. So to suggest otherwise, you see, is highly offensive.
Sigh.
I suppose it’s not really so strange to have people out there in the world with highly unusual and tendentious definitions of words which they insist everyone should honor. One byproduct of an affluent, free society is that you are going to get some of that—and we in the U.S. have gotten it for decades at the least.
But what’s different, and a tad alarming, about the current moment is that while I sense that the majority of people—even otherwise fairly progressive people—still have common sense about these things deep down, the noisy minority that screams about “transphobia”* has been able to exert a remarkable amount of power.
Probably the highest-profile example of this power has revolved around J.K. Rowling, the billionaire author of the Harry Potter books. If you read mainstream media articles about the controversy over Rowling’s remarks regarding transgender issues, it can often be hard to discern exactly what she said that was so offensive. But that she is a bigot is taken as a given, even in straight news sections of mainstream publications. Look for instance at this USA Today headline:
I mean, right from the start there she is being described the way someone like Mel Gibson was after his blatantly anti-Semitic rants. No ambiguity about it, she’s “transphobic”. But again: what did she actually say that was so bad? The article doesn’t quote her at all. It just characterizes her transgressions as:
multiple posts online voicing opinions on the trans community that conflated sex with gender and defended ideas suggesting that changing one's biological sex threatens her own gender identity.
Mmm…ok. So, wait: is it okay for us to talk about male and female sex, then, as long as we make it clear we are talking about sex rather than gender? How exactly do we do that? I’m sincerely asking, because if this is an actual compromise or solution, I’m all for it. I just don’t see evidence for this. My impression is that we’re just not supposed to talk about someone’s sex at all. Only their chosen “gender identity” or “gender expression”.
Maybe somewhere out there is a smoking gun of something truly hateful Rowling has said about transgender people that might actually justify the common complaint that words make them feel “unsafe”. But I really doubt it. From what I can see, she is a progressive, feminist woman who occasionally tweets snarky things like this, which enrage the trans-activist crowd:
But let’s note that minus the sarcasm, this is exactly what my Mayo Clinic questionnaire is implicitly asserting: “people who menstruate” = “women”, and “men” do not menstruate and can therefore skip that section. Daniel Radcliffe and many other actors from the Harry Potter movies have denounced Rowling. Can we expect leading lights in the medical community to do the same to Mayo for daring to suggest the same things in their questionnaire? (My intent in writing that sentence was sarcasm; but as soon as I wrote it, my heart sunk as I realized that all it would take is for some blue-checkmark type to tweet their outrage at the bigotry and “erasure” inherent in that page of the questionnaire, and almost certainly Mayo would issue an abject apology, bowing and scraping and sparing no expense to shred all extant copies of the questionnaire and print new ones that refer only to “people who menstruate”, “people who once menstruated but no longer do”, and “people who never menstruated”, regardless of how unwieldy and confusing that might be.)
Again, if we want to differentiate between gender and sex, I am cool with that. But we need compact words for the categories “people who menstruate”, “people who have testicles and penises”, etc. Give us some new words that we can all agree to use for those things, and you can keep “men” and “women” as malleable concepts that people can try on and discard as they see fit (not being snarky: I personally know a teenager who has done just this). But you know what will inevitably happen? Transgender people won’t be satisfied with using the old archaic terms “men” and “women” once everyone is using these newly invented terms which describe biological sex. They will insist on the right to be identified with those terms (in a reversal of how euphemism drift usually works), and we’ll be right back to square one.
I had intended in this post to more extensively get into the issues of giving preteens who express feelings of gender dysphoria pubertal blockers, as well as the controversy over transgender athletes. But this is already running pretty long, so I’ll just sum up my feelings on those issues as quickly as I can.
The pubertal blockers just seem like a bad idea in pretty much any scenario I can imagine. Kids are too easily caught up in fads and “phases” to be trusted to make that kind of major decision that will affect their bodies for life.
As for transgenderism in athletics, I don’t care a whit if someone wants to call themselves “non-gender-binary” and be referred to as “they” and continue to compete in the same sports division they otherwise would have—just as Canadian soccer player Quinn did in this summer’s Olympics.
The real issue is transwomen, who were born male, but wish to compete in women’s sports. They have a clear advantage against women and girls who were born biologically female, and letting them play against each other could destroy women’s sports—in which case we’d be left only with a single “open” category anyone of any sex or gender is theoretically allowed to compete in. What that would actually mean in practice is that people born biologically male would predominate. Not a good outcome for women athletes or anyone who loves women’s sports (as I do: I’m a tennis fanatic and watch as much women’s tennis as men’s, and am proud of the fact that it is the only major sport with pay equity for female competitors.)
I think the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group is on the right track in general, although I think they are a little too willing to allow for transwomen on testosterone-blocking drugs to compete against biologically female athletes, since research shows that transwomen retain a competitive physical advantage even after a year of such therapy, the current Olympic standard. (I can’t shake the weirdness of a competitive athlete voluntarily taking a drug that makes them lose strength and stamina, but hey: you do you, transwomen.)
Finally, a disclaimer: I am fully for gay rights across the board. And if someone wants to change their name, start wearing clothes traditionally associated with the opposite sex, and asks nicely that others start using a different pronoun to describe them, I think these are things we should all try our best to politely accommodate. But if some of us are ever-so-slightly rolling our eyes at some of this stuff, while not actually discriminating against transgender people in terms of employment or housing, it does not make us equivalent to the kind of hatemongers who scream about homosexuality being an abomination or who beat Matthew Shepard to death. Let’s please have some proportionality here and stop canceling people because they don’t aggressively advocate every jot and tittle of the woke agenda.
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*One tangential but irksome element of all this is the linguistic transformation of “phobia” into something else than an irrational fear: “hate”, I guess? I don’t think most of the people who sling around the epithets “transphobic” and “transphobia” really think the people they are accusing actually have some kind of deep-rooted psychological fear. They just think we are despicable bigots.