Trans flag

Trigger warning: transphobia

Emilia Carter

According to popular discourse, to be “gender-critical” is to be sceptical of the ideology that views gender as a social construct rather than something that is directly based on biological sex. Those that subscribe to these ideas accept “biological sex” as determinate.

On the other hand, to be trans-inclusive is to be critical of gender in a more meaningful sense. We investigate and reject our presumed knowledge of gender. We are critical of the ideological reproduction of gender norms that are based on the subordination and dehumanisation of women and the dominance of men.

“Once you recieve Rishi Sunak’s support on Twitter, it must become much harder to identify as counter-cultural.”

Those who brand themselves as gender-critical feminists argue that self-identification is part of a gender ideology, a term used to tarnish trans people and allies, to politicise us. Trans-inclusivity is not political. It is merely the acceptance of people’s bodily and social autonomy. Trans-inclusive feminists are not demanding anything more than freedom: the freedom to be the most authentic version of yourself.

The politicised gender-critical camp wants you to conform to their sanctified ideology of gender,  which derives from a high school biology textbook and unquestioned historical accounts that have compounded socially inequitable truths.

Their rhetorical inversion comes with a fantastical societal inversion, too. They suggest that trans-inclusive sentiments constitute the hegemonic truth. If you watch or read their online content, you’ll recognise that they treat themselves like soothsayers, or even worse, a counterculture.

Once you receive Rishi Sunak’s support on Twitter, it must become much harder to identify as counter-cultural. Rather, you are merely a cog in the media machine intent on provoking trans-hatred to distract us from political and environmental disasters.

Gender critical thought in the media

People like Kathleen Stock smile down at you from sensationalist television shows like Gender Wars, inviting you to think they’re a maverick, saying the things others are too scared to say. This is an absurd idea, particularly when every major mainstream news source and social media platform is filled with these ideas.

The idea that there are two genders is hardly ground-breaking. Gender-critical views are not only mainstream, they are interconnected with all of the workings of our society. Gender and race, as ways of categorising people, facilitate the economic workings of our world through the unfair distribution of labour. Even the supposedly impartial BBC reports on trans issues in a way that centres gender-critical voices, while The Guardian is also guilty of stirring up trans panic.

These platforms reiterate the gender norms that our neoliberal society needs in order to maintain power structures and the social division of labour.

Gender critical ideology and the expression of self

You have to wonder, fundamentally, why Kathleen Stock cares so much about trans people. What is it about the notion of people doing what they want with their own bodies that makes her so upset? She claims it’s about safeguarding women, but why not re-direct this energy towards deconstructing rape culture?

It’s not like being trans even dismantles naturalised biological norms. Being trans is ultimately just the expression of an authentic self.

Kathleen Stock patronising protestors

Kathleen Stock recently made the news when speaking at the Oxford Union, often seen as a playground of sorts for privately educated extroverts who want to be Prime Minister. Yet, according to her article in the online magazine Unherd, she had a great time and was unfazed by the “meek” protestors at the event.

“Those who are gender-critical tend to paint the trans-inclusive side as overly emotional.”

The message is simple and unmistakable. Stock must be aware of the hate crimes faced by trans people every day, and their high suicide rates. Her dismissal of protestors as “meek” and ineffectual speaks towards a distinct inhumanity. Gender critical discourse re-orients victimisation to the extent that trans people’s humanity is eclipsed.

Those who are gender-critical tend to paint the trans-inclusive side as overly emotional. According to Stock, we have “unhealthy emotional attachments” to the ongoing culture wars. If Stock is a feminist, why is she replicating retro hysteria-bashing misogyny? She sounds like an early 20th-century newspaper reporting on the Suffragettes.

I recently attended a talk about the hatred of trans people in the media. It was a calm, collected discussion on how to navigate mediated moral panics in a journalistic landscape that favours sensationalism over people’s lives. Even though the trans speakers’ lives are being continually dismissed, they remained logical and calm in their discourse.

Protecting gender categories instead of human lives

“Categorising people is a way of rationalising violence, hatred and inequality.”

Stock explains in her documentary, that the gender critical argument isn’t about individual trans people, it’s about “categories.” Since when are categories something to protect? Categorising people is a way of rationalising violence, hatred and inequality.

Stock claims that the central question in this debate is: “Do trans women count as women?” Well, I think she just answered her own question. Trans women do not claim they are cisgender women. They are trans women. Stock’s obsession with supposed biological truth appears to neglect discursive reality.

She argues that sex is a matter of biological fact, as though biology isn’t something that we constructed ourselves. As though science isn’t a naturalised set of categorisations, built in a human-centric language, to describe the phenomenon of existence – a phenomenon that cannot be delimited by language. Not only that, but Stock seems to lack an awareness of the flexibility of scientific truths, which can and do change as we learn more about the world.

We don’t need gender

We should be free to be whatever we feel we are. Our bodies are just collections of atoms in a serendipitous arrangement that allow us to breathe, live and love. We don’t need gender ideology to live authentically. We need gender ideology to live within a neoliberal, colonial, repressive social system. To be critical of gender is to interrogate our associations. Does penis mean man? Does vagina mean woman? Does rationality mean man? Do hysteria and emotion mean woman?

Notions of “man” and “woman” are historical and contextual. We don’t need them.

So, to Kathleen Stock and the gender-critical camp: stop worrying about people’s genitals, and all the diverse and individual forms that such genitals might take. Instead, just try and relax.

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Featured image courtesy of Alexander Grey via Unsplash. No changes were made to this image. Image license found here.

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