The tangled politics of transgenderism
Biological women still have experiences that define them as a group
Kate Maltby
The Greeks and Romans knew all about the mystique of transgenderism. Readers of Ovid will remember Tiresias, the prophet who spent seven years of his life transformed into a woman. After his restoration, the god Jupiter asked Tiresias to settle a quarrel with his wife Juno: who had it better in the bedroom, men or women? Women, replied Tiresias. Juno, it is said, was furious — blinding the prophet who had just lost her the argument.
One has to feel for Juno. After enduring several millennia of marital infidelity, sexual discrimination in the Mount Olympus workplace and the ever-present threat of a thunderbolt from an abusive husband, here are a man and trans woman daring to tell her that women have it good.
Juno’s complaint isn’t far removed from present debates over sexuality. If there’s an Ovidian trope that continues in today’s battles over the status of transgender people, it is the competition for victimhood.
That struggle defines the aggressive debates continuing between some trans activists and some traditional feminists. (Female-to-male “trans men”, or trans people who embrace a “third sex” identity, are often marginalised: this is a fight about people born as men entering into women’s spaces.) Feminists point out that women’s subjugation is rooted in biological reality and that women must be allowed to talk freely about female bodies. (Consider the production of The Vagina Monologues cancelled by a US women’s college on the grounds it is transphobic to root women’s experiences in stories of vaginas and menstruation.) Trans people point out that they also experience regular discrimination — who would choose to transition, had they other options? Feminists teach that no one “cries rape” for fun; some should also acknowledge that no one transitions for fun.
This week, into this already toxic debate waded Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, with an announcement that the college, founded as New Hall, and a women’s only institution, will now consider all students who publicly identify as women. Many alumna are furious. And Germaine Greer — who opposed the admission of a trans scholar as a fellow of women-only Newnham College in 1997 — has predictably condemned the move.
Is this progress? Historically female colleges have always billed themselves as the most inclusive of Oxbridge institutions. Somerville College, Oxford, is as proud never to have imposed a religious entry test as it is of its feminist pioneers. Trans people are disproportionately targets for assault. So why shouldn’t Murray Edwards transform itself into a college that offers a particular welcome to transwomen?
Yet a statement given this week by Murray Edwards’ president, Dame Barbara Stocking, constitutes one of the most lightweight understandings of gender theory you’re likely to find outside the UK Independence party conference. Admitting women who don’t share a biologically female experience of childhood, she tells us, will in no way change the experience of Murray Hall as “a single-sex college”. Of course it will. One can make a case that it’s a good change — but a change it is.
Biological women still have experiences that define us as a group. We tend to show less confidence putting ourselves forward than people raised as boys. (There was outrage when St Hugh’s, Oxford, now co-ed, fielded an all-male men’s team on University Challenge this week.) We can get pregnant, we bear the brunt of contraception, most of us menstruate. Yet trans activists have recently targeted the provision of tampons in all-female spaces as transphobic. If Murray Edwards is to make a success of this change, it will need to foster much more empathy in junior common room discussions than has defined gender debate elsewhere.
It will also have to accept that some women will lose out. St Hilda’s, Oxford became co-ed in 2008. Until then it was popular with women from conservative Muslim households and other orthodox religious groups — single-sex accommodation can be vital in persuading ambivalent parents to allow their daughters to attend distant universities. Should Murray Edwards hold back on “progress” to appease religious parents? Perhaps not. But it is bad faith to pretend that there is no clash of rights here.
The truth is that in both Oxford and Cambridge, women’s colleges are out of fashion. Murray Edwards probably needs a selling point. It attracts fewer applicants per place than any undergraduate institution in Cambridge. By all means, Murray Edwards, reinvent yourself as an all-inclusive, sexually progressive college. But just don’t call yourself a women’s college while you do it.
