Social media debates over the J. K. Rowling “transphobia” flare-up have encouraged me to formulate my own position on all of this. I’m still in the midst of that and would be happy for feedback (respectful, please).
In general, I see this as an example of what happens when two social movements move forward in partial tension with each other, and when the points of tension appear more visible than the points of connection. The movements in this case may be 1970s style feminism and transgender rights, but similar dynamics can be found in other situations. Social movements aren’t all equal and they call upon varying forms of engagement and evaluation, but social media, especially of the rapid-fire kind (like Twitter), tend to bring out the tensions rather than the potentials for synthesis. That’s where there might be a lesson in all of this.
The facts about Rowling’s writing on gender and transgenderism and the response to that writing can be read elsewhere (click on those links for a start). What the issue brings up for me is how we define terms like “sex” and “gender,” which are associated with others like “sexual orientation,” “marital status,” and related identity terms. For me, it seems important to maintain distinctions between these, while recognizing that defining each of them is difficult and that it should be up to each of us to articulate our own identities to the extent we feel it necessary or desirable.
“Sex” is more related to biology, “gender” to sociality and the social expression of sex, “orientation” to sexual behavior and preference, and “marital status” to both a state-sanctioned (mainly economic) status and an elective one (which suggests two categories rather than one, but that’s more complicated than I care to get into right now). As we move away from biological determinants, the open-endedness (and “freedom” or “optionality”) of these identifications increases. But none of these categories is entirely stable or free from historical construction and the conceptual binaries they bring with them, such as nature/culture, biology/sociality, religious beliefs and cosmological ideas (about male and female “principles” or functions), and so on.
So with respect to sex, a person could identify as a woman, a man, or something else (intersex, et al.); the latter category would be less common, but that shouldn’t mean anything beyond its statistical likelihood. With gender, a person could identify as female or male (or cis or natal female/male, which may put others on a more equal footing), as trans female or male (with the “trans” indicating a dynamism or change over time, which shouldn’t carry any value implications but is likely to be profoundly relevant to identity), or as non-binary, androgynous, genderqueer, non-gendered, or whatever else. With orientation, a person could identify as hetero, homo, bi, pan, et al. And with status, one could be single, paired/monogamous, or in some other kind of relationship that may be open, closed, variable, dynamic, et al. That the majority of people have likely identified as woman or man, male or female, need not disturb the fact that each of these manifests differently in different cultural contexts and that none are biologically mandatory except with respect to reproduction, which has heretofore required male and female genetic materials.
I mentioned above that “it should be up to each of us to articulate our own identities to the extent we feel it necessary or desirable.” That’s because any of these categories could be more or less important to our own public and/or private identities. Gender tends to be important for negotiating various societal standards (such as which box to fill out on a form or which public bathrooms to use, at least until there are fewer exclusively female and male bathrooms and more gender-neutral ones). Sexual orientation, on the other hand, seems less relevant for public use and more relevant for private sharing among potential sexual partners.
When there is an issue with any of these—such as public discrimination, shaming, or violence directed at any category of people—then it’s more important to address them by creating respectful space for the people/categories being discriminated against (which may involve changed policies, standards, and practices, such as recognition of equality before the law, same-sex marriage, gender-neutral bathrooms, and so on).
What all this implies is that slogans like “Trans women are women, trans men are men” can be strategically useful calls for addressing discrimination (similar in that respect to “Black Lives Matter”), but that they aren’t necessarily rooted in categorical “ultimates” (which means they aren’t “the final word”). This is because they risk conflating categories (sex and gender) that are overlapping but not exactly reducible to each other.
This irreducibility is important. Sex is and will remain important, if only because of its role in procreation (which remains central to what humans do and how we carry on from one generation to another) and because of its related consequences in people’s lives. Gender is and will remain important because of its arguably more profound consequences in people’s lives (though perhaps those consequences will get reduced over time). Orientation is important insofar as sexual expression and practice plays such an obvious role in people’s lives (fueled these days by consumer capitalism, perhaps, but no less real for that). And status is important insofar as it structures households, parental and other duties, and the like. Each of these has tended to affect the others and, in turn, to affect people’s capacities for agency in various dimensions of life, so they need to be treated as real in their own domains of social operation, even as we work to undo inequities surrounding them.
So there you have it. To summarize: sex, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual/marital status are all different. None is fully stable, predetermined once and for all, or reducible to any other. All are potentially important sources of identity as well as of contestation. For those of us who don’t “get” their relevance for others, they are opportunities for education.
What are the implications of this position for the Rowling debate? I think it’s a little mixed: she makes some valid points, but should be called out for supporting people who act like bigots. On the other side, her obnoxious Twitter critics may be awful people (yes, it’s easy to be awful on Twitter, and easy to get a sense of how awful people are by reading a selection of tweets), but they are less reflective of reasoned defenders of trans rights and are more reflective of social media scoundrels. In general, discussions about all of this need to be carried on in respectful spaces where people can develop their ideas and consider alternatives. Twitter is not such a space; it is the opposite.
Finally, for those of you who’d like to see some connection between these thoughts and the process-relational thinking that undergirds a lot of what comes out on this blog, that connection is pretty self-evident to me. These categories (sex, gender, et al.) are processes in motion, with histories that cannot be eliminated, but open to futures that cannot necessarily be imagined. Each of these categories is about how we relate to each other and to ourselves, including to our own bodies and to their social and biological expression.
The present time brings new challenges to them, as new opportunities for expression and creativity (in life, in art, in feeling) come up against inherited constraints, and it is our task to work through those challenges and to arrive at new syntheses. These syntheses won’t emerge through erasure or elimination of existing expressions, but only through novel forms of integration. So… let’s listen to what trans activists are saying, and to what women are saying (and to what other people are saying), and let’s not seek to subsume them into a single narrative. That means preserving the distinctiveness in our categories, even as we realize their overlapping and hybrid entanglements, and their ultimate open-endedness.
That’s where, for me, conservatism and liberalism meet. Genuine conservatism understands and values the past for what it is — which includes that it brought forth the present, but also that it is past. Genuine liberalism (in the sense that it’s a binary opposite of conservatism) understands the openness at the heart of reality, and the freedom that allows people to move into that openness with a sense of their own possibilities. Both of these can be applied to sex and gender, which have their own long-term cultural histories as well as their biographical histories shaping individual lives. Misunderstood, conservatism and liberalism can easily go awry, but understood correctly they give us a sense of how to move forward through the tensions between forward movements.
In a process-relational account, there is of course only forward movement. But it is shaped by the inheritance of the past and given life by the present with an eye to the future.
