I just got back from a criminal lecture in sexual offences and I'm a bit stunned, so I have to rant a bit. The lecture started off well by discussing radical feminist views about consent- Dworkin and MacKinnon were referenced. The main theme was stressing that even in non-criminal sexual encounters women's sexual autonomy is often threatened - women don't yet have full sexual freedom. So far so good.
We then to get to sexual deception - cases where women are tricked into sex. We cover, in particular, the McNally case. In brief, McNally was a female who pretended to be male. She created a male persona and tricked a female friend into sex. The friend insisted that she believed she was having heterosexual sex with a boyfriend - she had no idea she was having sex with the female McNally. McNally was convicted of sex by deception.
After hearing a whole hour about how women's sexual autonomy is paramount, and a fundamental right that needs to be protected along comes the theories of Prof. Alex Sharpe (who has been mentioned here previously.) Alex thinks that the McNally case is a huge injustice because McNally was jailed despite having a 'male gender identity'. McNally wasn't 'posing' or 'pretending' to be a boy - she really was a male. The law does a great injustice to trans people by assuming that their gender identity isn't authentic - by assuming that McNally really was just committing identity fraud. McNally, the argument goes, was as male as any 'cis' male and so his identity should have been respected as genuine.
Immediately, two thoughts come to mind. Firstly, there's no evidence that McNally was really transgender, in the sense that she would be protected by the equality act. McNally completely presents as a woman, and has never denied she is a woman, and it's doubtful whether she really ever truly believed in the 'Kai' persona. So it's disturbing that Sharpe is calling McNally 'transgender'. Secondly, let's suppose that McNally really did have a genuine male gender identity - she really was a man, just in a 'differently configured body'. How is the law supposed to tell when someone is 'genuinely' a male on the inside, and when someone is just a fraudster? More importantly, how are sexual partners supposed to know this?
The lecturer told us more about Sharpe's 'theories' and I have to say that I began to get seriously angry. Sharpe thinks that there is 'too much emphasis' on sexual autonomy. Trans identities, and trans validation, is more important than people's rights to sexual freedom. When compared to this nuanced, fantastic feminist analysis this just seemed...well...anti-feminist. Sexual autonomy is overrated. Women just have too much of a say when it comes to sex!
Sharpe also thinks that if a victim is upset by being "deceived' then the law should take no heed of their 'bigoted' feelings. They only feel disgust, apparently, because they are transphobic. If they weren't transphobic they wouldn't be at all bothered by the "deception". Their disgust, in fact, should be treated as irrational - nothing to be taken seriously, and certainly nothing that should be considered in a court case. By this point I was raging.
Oh and to top it off, I asked the lecturer what we should think about a case where a lesbian, who by virtue of her sexual orientation desires to have sex with female bodied people, unwittingly consents to sex with a male bodied person who has a 'female gender identity'. I pointed out that in this case, both individuals have marginalised identities. The lecturer said that in this case the trans individual's identity is marginalised if we say the sex act was fraud. Apparently the lesbian's identity is not marginalised by having sex with a 'trans woman'. WTF. Oh, and this wasn't clarified, but presumably the lesbian who was upset about this was being 'irrational' and a transphobic bigot.
It's 2018 and this is what is being taught in criminal lectures.