The Times- Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, review — a controversial look at transgender issues
Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, review — a controversial look at transgender issues
This author fights back against the modern orthodoxy of gender theory
In 2018 the LGBT charity Stonewall came up with a slogan that was a rallying cry for a revolution. “Trans women are women,” it declared. “Get over it.” It was punchy. It was clear. It was slightly aggressive. It was also a statement of a new orthodoxy, one in which sex gives way to feeling, and feeling trumps facts. This is the central argument of Kathleen Stock’s controversial new book and, boy, does she pack a punch.
In 2004, she tells us in the introduction, “it was estimated there were about 2,000–5,000 trans people in the UK”. That was the year the UK government introduced the Gender Recognition Act, which allowed trans people to apply for a gender recognition certificate and start the legal process towards their “acquired gender”.
Applicants had to have a medical diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” and have lived in their preferred gender for two years. Since then only about 5,000 people have received a gender recognition certificate, but the “best estimate” of the trans population in the UK now, according to Stonewall, is “about 600,000”. And it isn’t just adults. From 2009 to 2019 the number of boys seeking help from the NHS Gender Identity Development Service for children went up by 1,460 per cent and the number of girls by 5,337 per cent. In 2018 the youngest patient was three.
Many of the children have been prescribed “puberty blockers”, drugs licensed for prostate cancer and endometriosis, Stock explains, but not for children with gender dysphoria, and most of those have gone on to take cross-sex hormone treatment. But as children set out to make permanent changes to their bodies, trans adults increasingly don’t. Trans activist organisations have lobbied against the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and for a system of “self-ID”. Pick your gender. No need to pander to stereotypes and change your body. Get over it.
Material Girls shows how far we have rushed to do just that. Politicians of all the big parties, celebrities, charity leaders, business leaders, doctors and many of our national institutions have signed up to the new reality. So have public health bodies, which have swapped words like “women”, “girls” and “vagina” for “menstruators”, “cervix-havers” and “front hole”. As the period tracker app Clue explained in 2016, “using the word ‘female’ or ‘female-bodied’ is offensive to some”. Sex, it seems, is so last century. It is, says Stonewall, “a person’s innate sense of their own gender” that makes them a man or woman. It is, in other words, Stock says, “an inner feeling”. We have, she explains, changed our language, and some of our laws and institutions, on the basis of a new theory called “gender identity”. The trouble is, says Stock, the theory doesn’t stack up.
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Stock is an analytic philosopher. She’s also a lesbian and “a transphobe”. She’s “a transphobe” because if you don’t subscribe to the theory of gender identity, that’s what you are. Stonewall’s definition of transphobia includes “denying” someone’s “gender identity or refusing to accept it”. Even, as Stock points out, if you have “reflected on the intellectual background” and “find it lacking”.
Stock has indeed “reflected on the intellectual background”. She has studied the theories that led to this sea change in public thinking and written and spoken about them. Like many women who have dared to question them, she has been “no platformed” and has faced abuse. She continues to speak out, she says, because she thinks women, girls and, yes, trans people deserve much better.
She starts her inquisition with a survey of the philosophical ideas that have led to this point, from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” to Anne Fausto-Sterling’s view that biological sex is “a continuum” (a view that may have contributed to Facebook’s present offer of 71 gender options) and Judith Butler’s view, developed from poststructural philosophy, that it’s language that creates biological reality and not the other way round. This ingenious theory is the heart and soul of the new world view. Unfortunately it presents all kinds of complications when it comes to healthcare, work, data collection, the criminal justice system, conflicting rights of different groups of vulnerable people, policy and sport.
Some of Stock’s argument is pretty technical. Don’t expect a barrel of laughs. You won’t find any stories, or much in the way of anecdote. What you will find is a methodical dismantling of weak, misleading and false arguments. Stock is scathing, for example, about some trans activist groups’ misrepresentation of statistics on suicide, murder and assault. Stonewall, she points out, recommends that organisations hold an annual Transgender Remembrance Day, in which victims’ names are read aloud. In fact, she shows, the murder rate for transgender people is much lower (at around one a year in the UK) than for the general population as a whole.
The trans activists have, she explains, hit the bedroom too. A trans woman with an unchanged male body may now “self-identify” as a lesbian. She (to use her preferred pronoun, which Stock politely does throughout) may want to have sex with lesbians. But lesbians, Stock tells us, are sexually attracted to adults with a female body. Campaigners call this the “cotton ceiling” and run workshops on how to overcome it.
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What this all amounts to, Stock concludes, is “an immersive fiction”. And it isn’t optional. Male and female bodies have different body strengths, different sexual characteristics and are vulnerable to different diseases, but to point out these differences is to break a taboo. “In my opinion,” she says, “immersion in a fiction about sex change is being coercively required of people.” It’s one thing to choose to do that out of a kind of courtesy, she says, but quite another to “indicate that these things are literally true”.
Material Girls lacks the narrative drive and lively prose of Abigail Shrier’s recent book about the trans trend in children, Irreversible Damage. But what Stock lacks in journalistic elan she makes up in rigour. And, of course, in courage. That tells its own story. Her book is a call for cool heads at a time of great heat and a vital reminder that revolutions don’t always end well.
Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock
Fleet £16.99 pp320
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