Times- The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye and Trans by Helen Joyce review — two radical perspectives
The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye and Trans by Helen Joyce review — two radical perspectives
Two authors with very different views on the transgender issue
From the age of 11, Shon Faye was bullied for being a gay boy. On a school trip she woke to find a porn magazine open on her face. “I have had to learn,” she says at the end of this book, “to keep on going in a world which signalled to me at every turn that I was mad, bad, sick, deluded, disgusting, a pervert, a danger, unlovable.” These upsetting glimpses of her painful experience are among the few she offers in The Transgender Issue. However, she is utterly without self-pity. Her own experience as “a middle-class, white transwoman with a strong network of friends and family” is, she says, “wholly unrepresentative of the vast majority of trans people’s lives” and she does not want to be “pushed into memoir over analysis”. The bullied teenager is now a prominent trans activist and she wants to use her platform to “start a new conversation” about “the liberation of trans people” that will, she hopes, “improve the lives of everyone”.
It’s certainly a bold aspiration, and many people would agree that we need “a new conversation” because the present one has become so fraught. There are, Faye says, between 200,000 and 500,000 trans people in the UK. That’s between 0.3 and 0.75 per cent of the population. In the past few years that less-than-1-per-cent, or people claiming to speak for them, seem to have made an awful lot of noise.
Faye sets out to offer an analysis of the reality of trans lives in areas ranging from employment to housing, healthcare, education and the prison system. She speaks to people working in these sectors and to trans people about their experience of them and draws on wide-ranging research to make her arguments. Which, it turns out, are very radical indeed.
She thinks, for example, that prisons should be abolished. So should the police, because of their “complicity with white supremacy”. She objects to a “binary prison system based on genitalia” and thinks that “the neat binary” of male/female is, in any case, “a western way of thinking about gender variance”. She wants the complete decriminalisation of sex work. She is less enthusiastic about trans people working in the army because she finds it “difficult to accept that service in the military of a western power is inherently honourable”. Oh, and she wants to abolish capitalism. “There can,” she says, “be no trans liberation under capitalism.” However, the key target of her ire appears to be the “cis women” whose “transphobia” is related to “the whiteness and unexamined colonialism of mainstream UK feminism”. They need to understand that “being a woman is defined by political experience”. It is, in other words, entirely unrelated to biological sex.
It’s a strange experience to read a book like this and realise that many of these ideas are mainstream. Faye is highly intelligent and writes with compassion and clarity about marginalised groups that suffer a lot. What she doesn’t fully acknowledge is that some of the rights being demanded — access to single-sex spaces such as prisons, refuges, changing rooms, sports competitions — clash with the rights of the half of the population that has traditionally been oppressed.
And so thank goodness for Helen Joyce. An editor at The Economist, Joyce, like Faye, has had to muster huge courage. She has had to do this because to question the new orthodoxy of the transactivists is, in the present climate, to risk being “cancelled”, abused, even fired. What motivated her to write Trans, she says, was meeting “detransitioners” who are among “gender-identity ideology’s most poignant victims”. They are young people who believe that they were “manipulated and deceived” by adults into a process of transition that has left deep physical and mental scars. They are, she says, just part of the “collateral damage” of an ideology that’s demanding “a total rewrite of societal rules”.
Trans is a searing and at times devastating analysis of an ideological shift that has had a profound influence on many institutions in the West — its schools, workplaces, healthcare, universities and laws. It looks at the explosion in teenage girls deciding that they want to become men, and at the ways they have been actively encouraged down irrevocable surgical and hormonal paths. Echoing the arguments of the philosopher Kathleen Stock in Material Girls, it looks at how an idea Stock calls an “immersive fiction”, the idea that “people should count as men or women according to how they feel . . . instead of their biology”, has become a belief that everyone has to declare.
This, she argues, is a new departure. Other belief systems — religious, philosophical, metaphysical — are held privately. Gender self-identification is a demand that other people believe what you believe.
With the rigour of an investigative journalist, she looks at the history of the trans movement over the past century, starting with Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, played by Eddie Redmayne in the film The Danish Girl, who died after a womb transplant in 1931, and Harry Benjamin, a quack selling “turtle treatment” who started the foundation that is still the most influential organisation in the transgender field. She examines sport, where women have to compete against male-bodied athletes. She talks about the struggles of lesbians who are attacked, and even banned from dating apps, for stating they seek a “biological female”.
She keeps her cool but, boy, is it depressing. If you’re still allowed to use such a word. Actually, I think you are. Boys are fine. Men are fine. It’s the group now described, by governments, companies, charities and media outlets, as “people who menstruate”, “pregnant people” and “abortion seekers” who aren’t. Inclusion for the less-than-one-per-cent can come at quite a price.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye
Allen Lane £20 pp320
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce
Oneworld £16.99 pp320
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