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J - Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be looking at the current debate about sex and gender, terms which have been used interchangeably by many of us. Some feminists say that sex is simple biological fact and that gender roles is a social construct imposing restrictions and demands on women and girls. Increasingly, there are more voices – including transgender voices – that say it’s more complicated and more nuanced than that.
This is the start of the whole series of conversations.
What are sex and gender?
S – Sex I would argue is a very complex mix of chromosomes, hormones and genitals. So we are talking about biological factors, but we’re not talking about anything at all which is straightforward. We’re talking about a complex mix of factors which is specially in the West have often been seen through a binary framework so sex …
J – Hang on: binary?
S – so sex is believed to divide people into two categories of male and female. And gender is the way in which people understand or experience these sex differences. Again in the west, sex has largely been understood in terms of a binary framework – so male and female.
J – so these understandings are less understood, or more widely challenged? How would you define it?
S – I think when it comes to sex that many scientists are arguing that the binary framework is a very simplistic and quite a reductive way of understanding quite a complex procedure. Similarly, the way gender has been understood in contemporary society has broadened out and young people especially are experiencing and understanding their gender as more diverse than a binary male-female framework allows for.
J – when a baby is born, the first thing that happens is that you find out is its biological sex
S – yep, I think the term ‘assigned female or male at birth’ rather than male or female at birth is a really useful way of looking at the ways in which sex is something social. So what that’s doing is arguing that someone is making a decision – a presumption – about what sex that baby is. And as we’ve seen with intersex, that’s clearly not always the case.
J – [big sigh]. Okay, well I suspect that some people will take issue, including I suspect, Kathryn.
K – Well I agree that we’re increasingly good at understanding intersex variations and a very, very small number of those are atypical chromosomally, so you might get an XY male with a feminised genitalia or you might get an XX female with virilised genitalia. But that’s not the 1.7 we’re always being told about. That’s a very, very small number something like 1 in 20,000 I think for CAH. But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it – that a doctor looks at a neonate and says ‘I’m going to assign a sex’. What they do is that they carry out genetic testing and blood testing and work out .. there’s a standard. The vast majority of intersex children, there’s an absolutely standard route ..
J – but as you say, this isn’t a common problem is it?
K – no it’s not but in the rhetoric of sex as a spectrum and the assigning of sex as a social decision on the part of the doctor is to gloss over the medical procedures that are pretty well understood now and result in predictable outcomes, whether the child is male or female.
S – (with a laugh) Okay, well neither I nor Kathleen are scientists and there are many scientists however who are pointing to the rather simplistic understanding of sex in the way that Kathleen has just talked about. And this has also been long understood in many non-western cultures who have understood that people are not simply male or female. And just to say that it doesn’t affect many people or it’s a minority problem or disorder, that’s ignoring the way that lots of young people are now experiencing their lives and their sense of gender as something that is non-binary, that is something that is neither female nor male.
J – Okay well I can see you’re struggling with that Kathleen.
K – (laughs) Well Sally’s moved there from talking about a medical issue to a social issue and if you’re non-binary or not, that’s got nothing to do with intersex – those two things are completely distinct.
S – I’m not talking particularly about intersex …
K – well you were originally
S – well I used it as an example of how sex itself can be diverse.
J – yes, well I appreciate you both feel very strongly about this but I worry we’re getting up a cul de sac up which our audience travel down in their real lives. What we do know is that the lives of women on the whole are more restricted and women can feel more vulnerable than their born male counterparts. That is simple fact isn’t it?
S – [pause, deep breath] it depends who you’re including in the category of women. Are you saying that transwomen are not women? Women? Cis women, okay?
J – cis women – a lot of people won’t know what you mean by that, can you explain?
S – so cis women are women who were assigned female at birth, women who haven’t transitioned, okay. Arguing for trans rights and arguing that transwomen are women doesn’t take away that we live in a patriarchal society.
K – I’m very happy to agree that we live in a patriarchal society and since we do I think we need to retain categories and sub-categories that do important explanatory work and one of those is women; natal females. You can call them what you like. But if cis is taken to mean happy with the gender stereotypes as soon as they are born then most women don’t feel cis. If you mean some really strong feeling of being a woman, then most women don’t feel like that. They just are. So it’s really, really difficult in these discussions to find some commonality that all transwomen and all natal women share and can explain that they are members of the same group. And more radically, as claimed by you Sally, that there’s no underlying difference between the two groups in terms of social treatment. It’s my view that being female, being viewed as a woman, imposes a significant causal predictor on you to be the subject of all sorts of discrimination. We see this in the sexual violence statistics, we see this in the pay gap – it’s not a gender pay gap, it’s a sex pay gap – it’s to do with reproduction.
S – I fundamentally disagree. I think transwomen also, if not more so, suffer harassment, suffer violence, suffer sexual disadvantage in society. And for me, regulating the category of woman, arguing around who can and who can’t belong to that category based on an idea of gendered authenticity or realness is not the way forward.
J – yes well again, we’ve got to make this conversation relevant to our listeners and many of our listeners have had tough lives for one reason or another and that they may now – still – be facilitating the lives of others. Possibly they’ve done nothing but that for the last 50 years. And it’s hardly surprising that some of those women are feeling that their hard won rights are somewhat vulnerable at the moment Sally to the progress of some other – for example – transwomen.
S – (scoffing) I completely disagree. Gender and progressive politics can’t be based on a hierarchy of difference in this way and we’ve seen this before and it’s very, very dangerous. We’ve seen this before in relation to the position of black women, we’ve seen it before in relation to the position of working class women. As feminists we’ve got to move away from a politics which is based around perceptions of realness. And that white cis women – such as myself, such as Kathleen – have got to give up some privilege here.
K – I am exactly here to fight for the interests of black and working class women. It is them that bear disproportionately the brunt of society and if we lose the ability to name those people as such and talk about the causal factors that lead to their predicament then we won’t be able to fight for them and so it’s dangerous the kind of rhetoric that’s coming out of gender politics.
J – sally can I just ask that if it were why do we not hear as much from transmen as we do from transwomen?
S – [deep breath. Looooong pause] I think trans men are often ignored. They are not seen to be such a threat by feminism as trans women are. There has been a critique by second wave feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys who have argued that they are women who are trying to get male privilege. So they have been attacked by feminism. But in the culture we’re living in at the moment, in contemporary times, it is transwomen who have become the bodies of fear to some feminists.
J – okay. Last word to you Kathleen.
K – transwomen are not inherently dangerous and no one on my side of the debate thinks that. But we recognise that they are male biologically and socialised as males and that makes it more likely – statistically – that some of them will be violent, more violent to females.
S – I completely disagree.
K – I know you do but the stats bear it out
S – transwomen are women
K – well you can keep saying that but I’m not talking about that. But I’m talking about how this is practically resolved within society.