Trans Facts

Trans rights and women's rights hand in hand

Addressing some of the many common myths that you may have heard about trans people

Note: this document is available as audio here

Preamble: the “debate” is toxic.

This document is aimed at carefully refuting misinformation about trans issues. Resisting Transphobia in Edinburgh also has a much shorter zine debunking transphobic talking points.

These past few years have seen an extraordinary focus on trans people in the UK and US media, and in many other places around the world. Many major newspapers, notably the New York Times in the USA and every major UK-wide newspaper, have regularly run stories promoting fear about trans people, their legal rights, and their healthcare.

Victor Madrigal-Borloz, UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, recently visited the UK (where I am based) to assess the state of LGBTI+ rights. As he put it, “the current environment was uniformly described as toxic by stakeholders across the board, without exception” – nobody thinks the current situation is good, but opinions differ wildly on what exactly is wrong with it.

One aspect of this toxicity is the vitriol: there are scared and angry people on all sides, and sometimes they say unkind things. I think the core of the toxicity, though, is misinformation, and that is what I hope to address here. As Victor Madrigal-Borloz implores us: “keep calm. Examine the evidence. The evidence shows that there is nothing to fear in the existence of LGBT persons, and much to celebrate in the diversity that they bring to our common humanity.”

People often lash out when they are scared. Trans people are worried because of explicit threats to their access to public spaces and healthcare, and a well-documented rise in violence and hatred directed at them. Others are scared because they believe what they read in the news media about trans people, trans rights and healthcare, and lack the background knowledge to know when they are being misled.

My goal here is to provide information to reassure those in the latter group. I don’t expect to reach many committed anti-trans activists here, but that is not my aim: the anti-trans movement is as influential as it is because of all the people somewhere in the middle, who assume ‘both sides’ probably have a point and are worried, but not actually hateful. We need those people to understand the moral panic that is going on, and the lies that are put about as part of it.

There is usually little to be gained by engaging directly with people who are truly committed to a cause, and much to be lost: debating with such people tends to legitimise their position and expand their platform, and almost never wins them round. It is more constructive and less stressful (albeit less satisfying) to quietly and gently correct people who are not so invested: ‘I checked, and it turns out this is not true.’

This document is structured with a series of headings contradicting common anti-trans talking points. It was tempting to repeat the talking points in order to debunk them, but that would probably be a mistake. Note that I am focusing here on factual errors; there may well be genuine debates to be had once we clear all the untruths out of the way, but there is no point even trying to address them before that.

Sex is not binary.

This might seem an odd place to start, because on one level it has almost nothing to do with any real question about trans people. All the same, it comes up a lot, and that seems significant.

The other thing that’s odd about this one is that it’s so clearly wrong. The idea of sex being binary is incompatible with fairly basic knowledge of biological variability, and an uncontroversial understanding of the term ‘binary’.

There are multiple factors that are relevant to how we categorise a person’s sex. Each of them can vary independently, and few of them are binary in the sense of ‘existing in one of exactly two states’. For example, a lot of people have the idea that human chromosomes have two possible configurations, which uniquely determine a person’s sex: XX or XY. But it turns out that some people have XXY chromosomes, or just X; others have XY, but they’re ‘biologically female’ in almost every other sense.

It’s more-or-less true that there are two kinds of gamete, but not everyone produces either, and a small number of people produce both, so again, gamete-production is simply not a binary. More importantly, people who do produce one particular type of gamete can still belong to the sex not usually associated with that gamete, if you go by other features of their anatomy or physiology – which, of course, people usually do.

So if sex is not a binary thing – and it isn’t – why do people get so hung up on arguing that it is? I used to assume this was simply a way of derailing conversations and wasting time and energy, but I now think there is more to it. I suspect that the real reason people insist that sex is binary is because once you accept that it isn’t, you open the door to the proposition that sex is to some degree socially constructed. Once you accept that, a number of the ideas propping up popular anti-trans positions become untenable.

Something being a social construct does not mean that it’s not real, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It just means that the way people understand it doesn’t directly reflect measurable features of the external world.

Money is a social construct, for example. Race is a social construct. That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as coins and banknotes, or skin colour and hair; what it tells us is that the meaning we assign to those things is decided among people. Big piles of gold are not social constructs; the idea that people who sit on them are rich is.

Social construction is – sorry about this – not a binary thing. Categories are very often socially constructed, even if they reflect physical reality more or less directly. Height is something that can be measured directly, for example, but tallness is a social construct! It describes a physical property, but the way it describes it is very much a product of society. Standards for tallness have varied between societies and eras, and if other species have any ideas about tallness, they may be radically different from ours.

In the same sense, sex is – to some degree – socially constructed. There is no objective, scientifically valid, universal test for determining whether a given person is male or female in a biological sense. The history of non-consensual surgery on people who don’t fit neatly into either of those categories compels us to take this seriously. But this is very different from denying that sex is real.

Another observation that doesn’t entail denying that sex is real, is that gender can be usefully distinguished from sex, and that in many contexts it is more relevant. The word ‘gender’ is being used here to reflect a social category which is related to, but distinct from sex. It is also used in the context of ‘gender identity’, referring to how someone categorises their own gender. For some people, this stems from a deeply felt sense of who they are. It generally resists external influence.

These uses of these words are relatively recent, and it is not universally practised. It is not reflected, for example, in UK legislation regarding sex discrimination or trans rights: the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 states “Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).”

All the same, it is a distinction that many have found it useful to make. Like many categories, the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ conceal a great deal of subtlety. In practice, people are usually treated as male if they are seen as male, or as female if they are perceived as female. This is the main day-to-day basis of the type of discrimination usually known as ‘sexism’, but it is not universally correlated with any of the biological markers of ‘sex’.

Genitals are rarely on show in our society, so people mainly judge based on appearance and behaviour – on ‘gender presentation’. These things vary hugely within a sex, and can change through deliberate effort, especially when combined with medical interventions like hormone therapy or surgery.

When trans people ‘pass’ as the gender they present as, other people adjust their sexism accordingly.

Of course, many people – cis and trans – are also persecuted for not performing gender in quite the right way, or for having physical attributes that don’t quite match the standards of the society they live in. Gender is policed heavily, in ways that particularly hurt women, gay and bisexual people, ethnic minorities and disabled people, as well as trans people (who of course are very often members of those groups too).

The social construction and enforcement of gender make it a very real aspect of society, and a mechanism of material oppression.

This is not a dispute between scientists and trans activists.

One rhetorical strategy that some anti-trans activists enjoy is to suggest that they are on the side of science, and that ‘gender ideology’ involves the denial of science. This is incorrect.

Scientific experts in the field generally acknowledge the subtleties and complexities described above, both in terms of gender and sex. The idea that sex is important, while gender is irrelevant or made up, is not in any sense a scientific position. It is an ideological one, and its appeals to science are pure flim-flam.

There is overwhelming empirical evidence that some fraction of the population feels uncomfortable with the gender they are raised as. Many observations back this up, across many cultures, over a long period of time – indeed, a binary understanding of gender is often decried as an imperialist imposition.

Careful scientific studies have been conducted since the first half of the twentieth century to try to understand this sense of gender-incongruence, and what follows from it. Evidence-based medicine has been developed over the course of several decades, establishing ways to help people deal with the deep unhappiness that often comes with living as a gender that feels wrong.

Competent scientists understand that not everything can be fully understood through the lens of any one field. Understanding gender requires sociology and psychology, not just biology.

Feminism is fully compatible with trans inclusion.

Outside of the British context, it would be laughable to paint the ‘debate’ over trans rights as being mainly driven by feminists.

Proto-fascists from Putin to Orban to Trump have been among the loudest voices attacking trans people. In the USA, right-wing Christian fundamentalists The Heritage Foundation have poured huge amounts of money into the fight against trans acceptance. They correctly identified it as a ‘wedge issue’, dividing their opponents so that it is easier for them to make progress against gay rights, abortion rights and so on.

It is true that concerns about women’s safety have featured prominently in many anti-trans campaigns, but this is true of all sorts of movements against marginalised minorities. Worries about women’s safety do not automatically make something feminist, as anyone will know who has a passing familiarity with the historic moral panic against lesbians.

It is also true that trans-exclusionary feminists exist, at least if we accept people’s self-identification as feminists. Some of them are even radical feminists, hence the term ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ or TERF – now widely misapplied to people who are not feminists at all, and certainly not radical ones. There has long been a minority of feminists who are vocally opposed to the idea that trans women are women, like Janice Raymond (author of ‘The Transsexual Empire’) and Julie Bindel (former Guardian columnist).

However, even in Britain, where the supposedly left-leaning Guardian newspaper has done so much to stoke trans panic, many of the most prominent figures in the anti-trans movement are not feminists. For example Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker) is perfectly clear about not being a feminist. Graham Linehan has said that he is a feminist, but he also wrote a series where the female character was largely defined by her love of shoes and inability to understand computers, and literally turned into a demon when she got her period.

One interesting exercise is to look at how prominent anti-trans figures have responded to major setbacks in the fight for women’s liberation that are unrelated to trans people, like the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in the USA on 2022-06-24. Most often, the answer is ‘not at all’.

Interestingly, established feminist organisations are almost universally in favour of trans rights; and statistically, women in Britain are even more likely to support trans rights than men (who are also generally in favour, even after several years into this moral panic).

Trans people do more to undermine gender stereotypes than to reinforce them.

Some feminists express concern about trans people seeming to play up to stereotypical ideas of what men and women are. Similar concerns are expressed about drag, which is largely very separate from everyday trans experience, although there are overlaps and parallels. Drag is a sort of extravagant and playful performance of gender, but everybody performs gender to some degree. That is, we all behave and present ourselves in ways that are associated with one gender or another, whether consciously or unconsciously: we live in societies where gender norms are inescapable.

We start teaching children to perform a gender from an early age, and gender norms are often heavily policed at school, at work and in public places. The results are especially restrictive for girls and women, and also make boys and men unable to express their emotions and make meaningful connections – the phenomenon known as ‘toxic masculinity’.

People who can’t or won’t perform gender in a sufficiently conforming way are regularly punished for it. Besides trans people, that includes a high proportion of gay, bi and lesbian people, many disabled people, and often people of minority ethnicities and cultures.

This is the context in which trans people have to exist. They often grow up feeling unable to conform to the gender they’ve been designated, and uncomfortable trying. After transition, they know that they will face stigma and discrimination if they don’t perform their target gender in a way that allows them to ‘pass’, and to do so without visible non-conformity. Gender clinics and other medical gatekeepers have historically reinforced this, insisting that patients show a commitment to presenting unambiguously as male or female.

One of the major priorities for feminism has always been to fight against the enforcement of gender norms. People should be allowed to be whatever they want to be, without being held back by stereotypes about what it means to be female (or male).

Nobody is being silenced for saying sex is biological.

Literally every single time I have seen anyone claim this – and there have been many – I have discovered on inspection that they weren’t being silenced, and whatever mild consequences they faced were not for saying that sex is biological.

It generally only takes a quick google and a cursory glance at coverage of events to establish that this framing bears very little relation to what actually happened.

For example, they might have argued that ”sexism” is based purely on biological sex, despite all the evidence to the contrary; or that ‘sex-based rights’ are overwhelmingly important.

In many cases, they turn out to have waged extended campaigns of outright bullying against trans people. It is uncontroversial that sex is biological, but as discussed above, sex is also fairly complex and not actually the point.

Similarly, nobody anywhere is being jailed for accidentally misgendering anyone, or using their pre-transition names (‘deadnaming’). However, misgendering people and using the wrong names for them can clearly be a form of harassment, whether or not the target is trans.

Nobody is taking away hard-won ‘sex-based rights’.

The concept of ‘sex-based rights’ is a remarkably new one. It’s not something anybody was talking about a decade ago. Feminists have historically focused on equal rights – rights that people are entitled to by virtue of being human.

That is what equality legislation has tended to focus on, too; the UK’s Equality Act 2010, for example, prohibits discrimination against men, as well as against women. Obviously that doesn’t come up much, because men are rarely discriminated against in any legally relevant way, but the laws are there all the same.

About the only context where ‘sex-based rights’ could be said to be a thing is when people want to have a right to organise single-sex spaces. It is widely agreed that female-only spaces should be allowed to exist, in a society as sexist as this. Recall, however, that UK law currently makes no distinction between sex and gender; by default, female-only spaces very much include trans women. It is possible to make spaces which are female-only and exclude trans women, if you can show that this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate end, but interestingly this almost never happens.

The UK’s domestic violence shelters and rape crisis support services, which often exclude men for very understandable reasons, typically include trans women – and they have been doing so, almost entirely without incident, for upwards of a decade.

Trans people’s rights are definitely under threat.

Many US states are banning trans healthcare to varying degrees, presumably on the basis that Republican politicians are better placed to make medical decisions than medical specialists, patients and professional bodies. Many ‘bathroom bills’ have been passed in an attempt to exclude trans people from using appropriate public toilets.

This is part of an international backlash against trans rights and trans healthcare.

The UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has argued explicitly for the law to be changed so that trans people are excluded by default from ‘single-sex’ spaces. If their proposal were to be passed, trans women could legally be excluded from any space intended for women, including book clubs. Women’s toilets would exclude trans women by default, although there is no evidence that trans women in toilets pose any threat to cis women; and there is plenty of evidence that trans women are at risk from violence perpetrated by cis men. Incidentally, this law would also mean trans men are included in spaces meant for women, however obviously male they might be seen as.

Trans people have had various legal protections, uneventfully, for many years. At this point, all of these are under threat, as is the ability to access evidence-based healthcare. Arguably even more fundamental than these is the right to simply exist, without fearing for one’s personal safety, and over the last few years, the anti-trans movement has made sure that few trans people can enjoy this right any more. Physical attacks have escalated, and widespread anti-trans propaganda is preventing many from feeling any sense of psychological safety.

This also ties back to the exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces, because in many cases there is nowhere else for them to go. If a trans woman can’t use public toilets for women, for example, they will be risking their safety by trying to access men’s toilets. One solution would be for all toilets to be unisex (as they usually are in houses, trains, and planes) but the anti-trans lobby is opposed to this, too.

The suggestion of providing separate gender-neutral services for trans and nonbinary people is plausible but inefficient in the context of large buildings with many toilets. It is downright fantastical when it comes to things like support for victims of domestic and sexual violence, where existing services are already stretched thin. Excluding men from these services might be justified by the high rates of male perpetrators of these crimes, even though it means male victims are often under-supported; excluding trans women is a whole other thing, with dire consequences and flimsy justifications.

The category of ‘woman’ is not being erased.

Nobody is being prevented from describing themselves as women. The term ‘women’ is still very widely used.

Usually this complaint comes up in the context of healthcare, where providers sometimes use biologically precise language, rather than vague gender signifiers, to indicate who they are targeting.

‘People who menstruate’, for example, is not synonymous with ‘women’. Historically, some have insisted that a girl becomes a woman the moment she first gets a period, even if she’s 10 years old, but many now see this as old-fashioned; almost nobody would claim that womanhood ends at menopause.

In spite of this, people sometimes do say ‘women’ when they really mean people who menstruate. This sort of sloppiness becomes much more of a problem in a world where many trans men and nonbinary people also menstruate, and are at risk of being excluded from services they need because it is assumed that only women would need them. On the other hand, there is a danger that technically accurate, biology-based language might exclude some who lack the vocabulary for it.

One way to get around all of this without causing too much confusion is to explicitly talk about women and all those who menstruate. This is what the sexual health charity Brook calls ‘additive language’. It is often better to erroneously include people than to thoughtlessly exclude them: in this case, the language used would include some women and girls who don’t menstruate (both cis and trans) but they can probably work out easily that the message is not for them.

‘Women’ remains a valid category, but it’s not a simple one. It’s certainly not being erased, but people are being asked to think a bit more carefully about what it means and how it is used.

https://www.brook.org.uk/about-brook/our-beliefs/#gender-terminology

It is not too easy for kids to access trans healthcare.

You might get the impression, from reading media coverage of this, that it is terribly easy for children to access medical interventions for trans people.

This does not seem to be true anywhere, and it is certainly not true in the UK or the USA.For better or worse, this kind of healthcare is rigorously gatekept. Waiting lists are long. Nobody accesses any medical interventions without thinking about it for a long time first, and convincing multiple medical professionals that they are really sure it’s what they want. Nobody here accesses irreversible medical interventions until they are legally adults.

Kids are not ‘being transed’.

Being trans is not something that is being imposed on children.

Nobody is being pushed towards being trans as a way to avoid discrimination for being gay. Trans people are very heavily discriminated against, partly because people believe so many lies about them.

Many children experiment with gender nonconformity when they realise this is a possibility. Some try out new names, some try out different pronouns. All of these are easily reversible things that kids do of their own volition. Sometimes these things stick, sometimes they don’t. Nobody is being rushed into medical transition because of any of this.

Nobody is being rushed into medical transition at all.

Social transition – wearing different clothes, asking to be addressed by a different name, and so on – should not be a source of alarm for anyone who is not also horrified when kids think they might be gay. Going beyond social transition will happen slowly and cautiously, if it happens at all.

Worries about children ‘being transed’ are often coupled with fears about autistic children in particular. It is true that a strikingly high proportion of trans teenagers are autistic – adults, too, including many who realise it much later in life. Autistic people are also less likely to identify as straight than the rest of the population. Nobody knows exactly why, but there has been some very interesting research about this, and much discussion within autistic communities. One theory is that autistic people are no more likely than other people to be trans and/or queer, but are simply less likely to deny it, to themselves or others. Further research is required. Meanwhile, research has consistently found that autistic people are typically less susceptible to peer pressure than their non-autistic peers.

There is a long history of non-autistic people speaking over autistic people, believing erroneously that they know what is best for us. Anyone who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of possibly-trans autistic people will be sure to seek out the views and experiences of autistic trans people on this; a number of books have been written on the topic.

Puberty blockers are largely reversible, and have been used and tested for decades.

Puberty blockers have been used for decades to treat ‘precocious puberty’, and for a long time now to treat trans teenagers. They can delay puberty indefinitely, but in the absence of ‘cross-sex hormones’, puberty simply resumes when treatment is stopped.

There is very little evidence of harmful side effects in cases like this, where puberty is merely delayed for a few years.

There is very limited evidence of harmful effects when someone’s default puberty is prevented outright, which is the desired outcome when someone takes puberty blockers until they are old enough to proceed to cross-sex hormones, which is after they reach the age of majority. This scenario has been tested less thoroughly than the temporary use of puberty blockers to delay puberty, and there are signs that this combination may be associated with slightly reduced bone density and height, but it is still very much in the realm of evidence-based medicine.

All of this evidence must be seen in the context of extensive evidence of the harmful effects of gender dysphoria, compounded by the avoidable development of secondary sexual characteristics. Many medical treatments come with possible side effects, and we usually trust doctors and adult patients to weigh these up together. It is unclear why a different standard would apply to trans healthcare.

Puberty blockers are not the same thing as cross-sex hormone treatments.

Since teenagers usually have to wait a long time to access puberty blockers, and be very sure they really don’t want the puberty they would otherwise be heading for, not many people who start taking puberty blockers ever change their minds and stop – but they could.

This is not an irreversible intervention, it is just one that is rarely reversed, which is a completely different thing.

In this context, the overwhelming majority of people taking puberty blockers eventually proceed to cross-sex hormones, but that clearly does not mean that this progression is inevitable, or that the two cannot be separated – a legal argument used in the Tavistock vs. Bell case, which should have been summarily dismissed.

Puberty, on the other hand, is largely irreversible, and secondary sexual characteristics are strongly associated with gender dysphoria.

There has never been a gay or queer liberation movement without trans people.

While sexuality and gender are separate, they have always been profoundly linked. To have a minority sexuality is to break gender norms: at the very least, heterosexual attraction has always been one of the most prominent traits associated with masculinity and femininity, so that same-sex attraction has always been seen as transgressive, by the same people who are invested in other gender norms.

For many gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer people, there is far more to it than that: butchness and effeminacy are legitimate parts of lesbian and gay culture. Some gay people obviously do otherwise conform with gender norms, but no serious movement for queer liberation would ever fight for rights and acceptance only for those who do! Queerphobic bullying (and policing) makes little distinction between gender-nonconformity associated with trans experience, or gender-nonconformity for any other reason. Notably, in addition to sexuality, those reasons can include race and various disabilities and medical conditions.

With all this in mind, it is hardly surprising that trans people have been prominent in the queer liberation movement for as long as it has existed – particularly trans people of colour. The claim that the trans rights movement is homophobic is deeply dishonest, and a passing familiarity with relevant statistics on identity and representation shows how bizarre it is to suggest that lesbians are ‘being erased’.

One anxiety that some lesbians have is that a lack of attraction to trans women will be interpreted as bigotry, but attraction is deeply personal, and nobody can force anyone to be attracted to anyone. For many people, attraction is more to do with gender expression than genitals; others would never want to get close to a particular kind of genitals. That is completely fine – the only potentially thorny areas are to do with how these preferences are expressed, and people who want to control how other people self-identify. There are very few words to do with sexuality or gender that have a single, universally agreed-upon definition, and that’s really okay.

‘Cis’ is not a slur.

‘Cis’ simply means ‘not trans’. It is used as a prefix in chemistry, for example, indicating that two atoms are on the same side of a double bond or similar structure.

In talking about gender, ‘cis’ plays very much the same role that ‘straight’ does when talking about sexuality, and ‘abled’ does when talking about disability. These terms imply a rejection of the assumption that there are normal people, and then there are those other people.

Some people get uncomfortable when others use language to describe features they would rather not question. Meat-eaters might feel like they’re not defined by what they eat, they’re just normal – but if you’re a vegetarian, you really need language to describe people who aren’t.

‘Cis’ is a similarly neutral, factual descriptor. If you’re not cis, it’s safe to assume you’re trans. If you feel like you’re not really either, well, okay – let’s just say you’re trans-ish, and hopefully in that case you can see why binary thinking can be restrictive.

‘Detransitioners’ are not being ignored.

Inevitably, some people regret going through medical transition. This is one part of the reason why this kind of healthcare is extraordinarily difficult to access, and more vigorously gatekept than perhaps any other family of medical procedures.

In light of such intensive gatekeeping, it is perhaps unsurprising that fewer than one person in a hundred regrets their transition – primarily thanks to the prejudice they face as trans people. That adds up to a small but significant number of people, whose experiences should be taken seriously – and are!

The experiences of ‘detransitioners’ are in fact reported remarkably widely, considering how unusual they are. For context, the regret rate for the average surgery is at least fourteen times as high. For some reason, though, there are far more stories about people regretting gender-affirming surgery than there are about the much greater number regretting hip replacement surgery.

For every medical intervention, doctors and patients weigh up risks and benefits together when possible – informed by research, professional experience, and the views of official bodies. Some of the effects of cross-sex hormones and surgery are irreversible, and the exceptional experiences of people who regret these treatments are rightly taken seriously by all concerned.

There is no evidence for ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’.

We can’t entirely rule out that some people suddenly feel out of place in the gender they have previously identified as, but the fact is that the one study which claimed to demonstrate the existence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) was based entirely on parental reports, and had other methodological flaws.

These findings can be far more simply explained by positing that the youths involved just didn’t tell their parents what was going on for them. If you have ever met a teenager, you will probably have noticed that this is a common occurrence.

The journal where the ROGD paper was published, PLOS ONE, has since retracted the original version of the paper and replaced it with one acknowledging up-front the limits of the methodology and hence the conclusions that can be drawn.

Methodological Critique of Littman’s (2018) Parental-Respondents Accounts of “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria”
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1453-2
A critical commentary on ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026120934693
Correction: Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214157
There is no evidence that rapid-onset gender dysphoria exists
https://psychcentral.com/lib/there-is-no-evidence-that-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-exists/

Being transgender is not a kink.

You may have heard of ‘autogynephilia’, sometimes abbreviated to ‘AGP’. This is essentially a word for when someone feels sexy as a woman.

As such, a high proportion of women – both cis and trans women – experience autogynephilia. It is generally considered completely normal and even healthy for cis women, but some people consider it aberrant when trans women experience the same feelings.

Research has found that while these feelings do occur, autogynephilia fails as an explanation of desires to transition on several fronts: among other things, a loss of sex drive does nothing to put trans women off transitioning. Many trans women do not experience anything resembling autogynephilia.

Treating basic aspects of a person’s identity as threateningly sexual is a trope that some will recognise from previous and ongoing moral panics against gay and bisexual people; it is also a recurring feature of various strains of racism.

Gender Dissonance
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J056v17n03_04
Blanchard’s Autogynephilia Theory: A Critique
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918369.2010.486241
A Further Assessment of Blanchard’s Typology of Homosexual Versus Non-Homosexual or Autogynephilic Gender Dysphoria
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894986
Autogynephilia, Junk Science, and Pseudoscience
https://medium.com/@juliaserano/autogynephilia-junk-science-and-pseudoscience-89c5f71c5752
Gender Dysphoria: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10615-013-0447-0

Self-ID does not mean allowing men into women’s spaces.

As with so much of this discourse, there is a lot of confusion about language, which may or may not have been spread deliberately. There is a general sense of the term ‘self-identification’ which simply refers to people being allowed to say who they are, with an implication that they should usually be believed. However, that is not the sense which is at stake in most of these discussions.

When we are talking about the law, self-identification generally refers to changes to make it easier for trans people to gain full legal recognition. In the UK, that means obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), as governed by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Specifically, self-identification here means being able to obtain a GRC without going through a process which, as the UK government’s 2018 consultation put it, many trans people see as “intrusive, humiliating and administratively burdensome”: the trans person “has to collect a range of personal documentation, including information about their medical history, finances and identity which they send to people who they do not meet who then make a decision about their gender identity.”

The administrative changes referred to as ‘self-identification’ amount to little more than removing the requirement for medical evidence and the approval of a Gender Recognition Panel, and reducing the time required for an applicant to have “lived in their acquired gender” from two years to three months. Similar changes have been implemented in many countries, with no threats to women’s spaces reported as a result.

Notably, a GRC has never been required in order to access women’s spaces. Obtaining a GRC allows an applicant to have their birth certificate and some other official documents, like death certificates, to reflect their gender, although it is not required for passports, bank accounts and so on. A GRC also confers a legal right to privacy regarding these changes. Obviously, no changing room or toilet requires official documentation, and when men have entered them with ill intent, they have never needed to fake being trans in order to do so. British services for victims of domestic violence are generally explicitly trans-inclusive, while prisons operate their own evaluations to determine where prisoners can be safely housed.

Under existing law, trans people are actually required to live in their ‘acquired gender’ for two years before they can obtain a GRC. In practice, this has meant a presumption in favour of women’s spaces being accessible to trans women, with or without a GRC. Many trans people are understandably anxious about accessing ‘single-sex’ spaces regardless – as are an increasing number of cis people who don’t conform tightly to gender norms, thanks to the anti-trans backlash.

Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: consideration prior to Stage 3
https://digitalpublications.parliament.scot/ResearchBriefings/Report/2022/12/15/88f68206-2fc4-43e3-9ac1-76d2d40c40c0#Conclusion
Gender Recognition Act reform: Consultation and outcome (UK)
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9079/CBP-9079.pdf
Ireland avoided ‘divisive’ debate on gender recognition law reform, MSPs told
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20230145.ireland-avoided-divisive-debate-gender-recognition-law-reform-msps-told/
UK government page on GRCs
https://www.gov.uk/apply-gender-recognition-certificate