by Pat Green

The ISO (International Socialist Organisation) is a university-based group with about 30 – 40 members nationwide. The success of Speak Up for Women has prompted one of the most fervent trans ideologues in the group (Romany Tasker Poland) to write an unhinged attack on the campaign. In an article Socialists Support Trans Rights she asserts that Speak Up are in league with the Catholic Church, Bolsanaro and Donald Trump.

Romany Tasker Poland: What gains have been made since 2008 in legal rights, access to healthcare, employment rights and positive representation in the media have been thanks to trans people’s own tireless organising and self-advocacy. Trans people have been their own advocates in the health and education systems, organising in their own defence, to counter, as one trans man submitting to the 2008 report put it, “headlines that display us as frauds and freaks.”

But what is at issue is a clause that was pushed through by the Green Party after public consultation had finished. The self-ID proposal was backed by a small handful of activists. Groups like SUFW are concerned about the potential consequences of self-ID for women and girls. They are not involved in a hate campaign. They don’t describe trans people as ‘frauds and freaks’. Also, not all trans people support the self-ID clause.

RTP: In reality, trans people are active across the political spectrum and have at least as broad a set of views on gender and sexuality as any other section of society.

Yes I agree. Trans people are not a monolithic entity. Some of them support SUFW.

RTP: But the struggle for trans rights, in challenging the institutions which enforce and maintained gender norms, throws up broader political questions. Socialists support this questioning and this struggle.

What are we talking about here exactly? “Trans rights” could be interpreted to mean ‘human rights for trans people’: rights to do with employment, housing and fair treatment. Bigots, presumably, would like to discriminate and withhold these sorts of rights from trans people. It’s also clear that trans people can enjoy these sorts of rights without any effects on the rights of other groups in society. It doesn’t hurt anyone else if a landlord allows a trans-identified person to sign a tenancy agreement, for example. Socialists should fully back these sorts of rights for trans people. But that’s not what is at stake here: the right to self-ID is a right fraught with difficult and thorny questions about its potential effects on other groups of people. So yes – this issue does ‘throw up broader political questions’. A whole heap of them.

That final sentence I also agree with: “Socialists support this questioning and this struggle.” We need to think about these difficult issues and engage with them honestly and critically. We need to foster democratic discussion about questions to do with topics such as changing rooms, prisons and sport. Which is what SUFW is all about: discussion and consultation.

RTP: The current hand-wringing about “trans ideology” represents, at its roots, a backlash from the right. It echoes 1980s homophobic scaremongering. It was the Catholic Church that led the anti-trans charge in 2004 and 2016, issuing warnings about the threat trans visibility posed to the gender ideology. Demagogues like Trump in the USA and Bolsonaro in Brazil have emboldened transphobic forces internationally. In New Zealand the most recent development is the emergence of the group “Speak up for Women” (SUFW). SUFW oppose the proposed Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill that would make it easier for people to change the sex on official documents. Their rhetoric is utterly reactionary. They are promoting these bigoted ideas vigorously.

This is simply unhinged and utterly nonsensical. Speak Up For Women has nothing to do with the Catholic Church, Trump or Bolsanaro. Most of the members of SUFW are left-wing women with strong feminist beliefs. One significant thing the campaign has focused on is the fact that the self-ID clause was added in to the Bill after consultation had finished. So there is a very clear and strong democratic motivation for questioning the self-ID issue. Please have a look at the SUFW site and see if you can find any evidence for ‘reactionary’, ‘bigoted’ or ‘transphobic’ content. The thing is there is no evidence for this.

So the ISO has to conjure up these ridiculous associations in order to smear SUFW. Notice how they completely avoid any sort of down-to-earth, factual discussion about the BDMRR Bill itself and the issues with self-ID. The writer invokes dark metaphysical ‘transphobic forces’ which travel across the ocean from Brazil and the US. These invisible spirits possess the souls of otherwise decent left-wing women and cause them to think about the potential effects of self-ID on women and girls. Then they do horrible things like ask questions and demand consultation. How despicably non-revolutionary! . . . Oh wait, what was that thing you said about socialists ‘supporting questioning’? Did you really mean that? It sounds pretty dishonest and disingenuous to me. . .

RTP: Reactionary transphobes think the state ought to be able to dictate what others do with their bodies. SUFW objects to the fact that with the proposed changes to legislation the state will no longer mandate certain medical procedures before an individual can change the details on their birth certificate. The right to bodily autonomy is a basic social tenet. Medical transition can be life-changing for trans individuals, but if, when and how they undertake it should be a matter of personal choice, not bureaucratic box-ticking.

OK, so let’s have a look at the ‘Demands’ section of the SUFW site. Here they are:

“1. The Government must put the self-ID proposal on hold until there is reasonable public consultation. Respectful, evidence-based public consultation must take place, including with women who are affected by the proposals.

“2. The Government must review how the proposed changes will affect data gathering, reporting and the integrity of records for things such as crime, health and monitoring sex-based discrimination such as the pay gap.

“3. The Government must review how the proposed changes will impact the protected category of “sex,” intended to protect women from discrimination under the Human Rights Act.”

I guess we have to scrutinise these demands very carefully and take a more metaphysical approach. If you stand on your head, squint your eyes and chant ‘transwomen are women’ three times, the words “We are reactionary transphobes who think the state ought to be able to dictate what people do with their own bodies” will magically appear as subtext. People in the ISO are well trained to spot such elusive and rarefied hidden messages. They read Judith Butler.

RTP: Contrary to popular myth, children are not routinely being prescribed HRT. Transition for children usually means being referred to by their chosen name and pronouns, and allowed to dress as they wish. Children under 16 will sometimes be given puberty blockers, a treatment commonly used in cases of precocious puberty. This simply delays the onset of puberty and is reversible. For adults, access to HRT treatment has become easier in recent years but is still uneven. Other procedures are still difficult to obtain and rarely publicly funded. Surgery referrals for genital gender affirmation surgery have jumped five-fold since a cap was lifted in October last year, but waiting times are still too long. People wanting these treatments often have to seek them overseas at their own expense. “Trans Health Care Now“ is a slogan the movement is embracing.

There is a difficult and complex debate here concerning the medicalisation of gender non-conformity. Although most people involved in SUFW are critical of this, especially when children and teenagers are involved, the campaign around the BDMRR Bill makes no demands on the medical establishment or the state as far as this issue is concerned. If the campaign provokes discussion about this issue, surely we should welcome it. As socialists we are all about ‘supporting questioning’ after all.

We may well have reasonable concerns about the negative physical effects of medical transition: impeded sexual function, infertility, and osteoporosis are three which come to mind, just off the top of my head. We might also learn to be a bit wary about claims such as the one about puberty blockers being ‘fully reversible’. Yes, in principle, a child could stop taking them and their natal puberty would resume as normal. No, in practice this almost never happens: children who start taking puberty blockers typically continue down the medical pathway of hormones and surgery.

People who are concerned about things like puberty blockers are not ‘reactionary transphobes’. They are parents of children with gender dysphoria, they are working class lesbian women, they are people who have de-transitioned. Some of them are also socialists with a profound and deep concern for the liberation of all people from oppressive gender norms.

RTP: The most hateful transphobic rhetoric is that which paints trans people as a danger to women. SUFW promotes this, working hard to link transgender women to sexual violence. This is cruelly ironic: trans individuals are in fact far more at risk of being victims of sexual violence.

Google ‘Karen White’.

This one has been done to death. No, we don’t think transwomen are all predators. Yes, we recognise that transwomen are male, and that they retain the same rates of male pattern violence against women and girls as non-transitioned males. Yes we think that women should have the right to sex-segregated spaces free from people with penises. If you want to talk about this like a socialist, you need to drop the smears and lies. Stop making shit up about our motivations: we are motivated by concern for women not hatred of trans people. Start looking at the reality of violence done to women and girls by trans-identified males. Stop endorsing rape culture, that’s not a socialist principle.

RTP: Some of those opposing trans rights identify as feminists. Yet, by reducing gender oppression to some innate biological difference between men and women, this feminism reproduces mainstream justifications for women’s oppression. SUFW’s website is full of this illogic, with its myriad references to “male biology” and “male pattern violence.” Biological essentialism offers absolutely no way forward in the fight for sexual liberation and women’s equality. In fact, the proponents of this ideology make it very clear that this is the case. Because sexism is rooted in biology, it is intractable. Rather than universal human rights and the elimination of sexual violence from our society, the best we can hope for is something called “sex-based rights” and the shelter of state-enforced sexual segregation. Trans and gender-nonconforming people can expect nothing better than a strictly-policed existence at the margins of society, if they are permitted to exist at all.

This is a very headache-inducing paragraph. I don’t know of any feminist involved in the SUFW campaign who ‘reduces gender oppression’ to biology, or who thinks that sexism is an impossible-to-solve problem because biology says so. So once again: No, you are talking lies. Please do your homework and actually read what we say and engage in good faith.

That said, I think I can translate a couple of things for the sake of clarity. Romany puts scare quotes around “male biology” and “male pattern violence” because she buys into the Butlerian idea that sex is socially constructed. People in SUFW on the other hand believe that males exist – and that they are physically different from females. They also believe that these differences are significant: females tend to be smaller, not as physically strong, able to become pregnant, etc. This set of differences is the foundation, the set of facts about ourselves and the world, which makes sex-based oppression possible. If we want to abolish sex-based oppression – things like male violence and rape and patriarchal laws – we need to “see” the reality of sex. That’s it. Take your ‘biological essentialism’ and put it back into your study folder.