In the aftermath of a UK court ruling on the definition of woman as that defined by “biological sex”, one of the legal challenge’s funders, the author JK Rowling (who also writes under the name Robert Galbraith), posted a photograph to social media. For a good while now, Rowling’s antagonism on the issue of trans rights has inflamed a discourse that makes rational discussion difficult. She continued that behaviour with her post, which showed her posing with a cigar and a drink on a yacht somewhere around the Bahamas and the gloating caption, “I love it when a plan comes together”.
For me the photograph seemed the kind of thing Nigel Farage would do. Brexit itself is not an outrageous comparison. Both that movement and trans-exclusionary feminism are obsessed with borders: one of land and sea, and one of bodies. Both movements are paranoid and seek to deflect. Both “wins” – leaving the European Union, and this recent court ruling – are subject to the law of unintended consequences.
For generations, feminists have fought against biological determinism, but that, apparently, doesn’t matter to the people I think of as the Gender Brexiteers.
“It continues to astound that Kemi Badenoch remains the only UK political leader offering unequivocal solidarity to women defending their rights,” said Rowling.
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Will there ever be a follow-up thought? Something like: I wonder why one of the most awful figures in British politics, the Conservative Party leader, is on my side? However, that would require thinking that untangled itself from the cascade of disinformation that characterises British trans-exclusionary feminism.
Like all intellectually suspect rhetoric, it has its cliches, soundbites, canned phraseology, borrowed talking points and regurgitated slogans – all woven into a tapestry created from long-running ideological campaigns against LGBTQ+ people, and now used against trans people. Much of this is merely retrofitted homophobia. A lot of it is confused and superficial. But all of it is based on fear.
When trans people and the broader LGBTQ+ community ask for safety, protections, healthcare and equality, and point out the ludicrousness of arguments that deflect from the real threat of male violence – as though that didn’t exist before gender recognition acts – they are sometimes drowned out by the voices of those who don’t know what they’re talking about, or who are informed by online disinformation or personal grievances, or who have been influenced by the outlandish claims of British trans-exclusionary feminism.
Others, especially on the far right, are often explicitly transphobic and homophobic, and abhor diversity more generally. It’s a motley crew.
Few espousing this stuff appear interested in examining trans – or transphobic – histories. Unread go the books documenting the extreme aversion to Native American gender nonconformity by journaling colonisers in the 1500s. Overlooked are the raids on queer and trans bars, and burnings of LGBTQ+ documents in 1930s Berlin by Nazis.
That the Vatican popularised the term “gender ideology” in the 1990s is not considered. The brand of transphobia characteristic of 21st-century authoritarian movements is not called out. And the fact that, where LGBTQ+ rights are strengthened so too are women’s rights, and where they collapse, so too does authentic feminism, is dismissed.
Were the Gender Brexiteers to think beyond the haze they find themselves in, they would realise that in locking in a version of “biological sex” at birth as immovable – regardless of the person’s true identity – trans men could be entitled to fill the seats on boards allocated to women, access women’s refuges, and so on. Therefore, the trajectory of such policy invites men into women’s spaces, in the pursuit of excluding people they say are men (but who are women) from women’s spaces. How’s that for “taking back control”?
In Ireland, there are some voices citing the British example as something to follow. Last week, Michael McDowell wrote a column in this newspaper that used sensationalised phraseology. He referred to “trans ideologists”, “the trans ideological wave”, “the trans ideological train”, “imagined genders” and “trans ideological goals”. This is the standard rhetoric of the so-called “discourse” on trans rights. Michael McDowell does not speak for LGBTQ+ people.
The let’s-follow-the-UK-down-the-drain crew is essentially the Irexit wing of Gender Brexit. A key goal is to undermine the Gender Recognition Act here. But what the UK courts do is irrelevant to law in the Republic of Ireland on such matters (even more so now, considering actual Brexit preceded Gender Brexit).
More relevant to us is our law, obviously, and European law. Of note is the VP v Országos Idegenrendészeti Főigazgatóság judgement, as delivered by the Court of Justice of the European Union last month, which the lawyer Simon McGarr wrote about recently. It is related to an Iranian national who obtained refugee status in Hungary in 2014. The data refers to a person’s lived gender identity and not the identity assigned to them at birth. This, not the UK courts, is relevant to the Republic of Ireland, as it applies to all EU member states.
Our recent Easter commemorations are always a good reminder that the Republic of Ireland is not part of an extinct British Empire, and our feminism is also our own.
