Part 1: Trans: when reality meets ideology
"Gender identity" and the new battle against victimhood ideology.
The first in what will be a ten part series examining the rise of the “trans” phenomenon, “gender identity”, and “social justice” movements since 2010.
In an era of identity politics “trans” will be the first identity that will have to cease to exist. I expect that people will continue to modify their outward appearance to live socially as the opposite sex, “transsexual” people, however, the expectation, should be that they fully integrate and live privately within the norms of society.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Goodwin v. United Kingdom case saw two rights that were being violated for transsexual people: the right to marry, and the right to a private life.1 The right to marry was superseded by legislation that allowed same-sex couples to marry, leaving the one remaining right, the right to a private life.
In the UK, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) was created as a result of the Goodwin case. To provide the right to a private life, the act provides a mechanism through which transsexual people, under medical approval, can apply to have another copy of their birth certificate created, which would override their original birth certificate. This new birth certificate could be used to prevent the invasions of privacy identified in the Goodwin judgement, including those below:
In a number of instances, the applicant stated that she has had to choose between revealing her birth certificate and foregoing certain advantages which were conditional upon her producing her birth certificate. In particular, she has not followed through a loan conditional upon life insurance, a re-mortgage offer and an entitlement to winter fuel allowance from the DSS. Similarly, the applicant remains obliged to pay the higher motor insurance premiums applicable to men. Nor did she feel able to report a theft of 200 pounds sterling to the police, for fear that the investigation would require her to reveal her identity.
It is questionable how relevant the GRA remains to protect the privacy today. Many of the situations described, would no longer happen, as the push towards sex-equality has reduced the number of instances where sex matters in administrative issues: pension ages, for example, have been equalised between men and women.
Today, we could be talking about whether or not the GRA is still necessary, if we can further reduce the number of situations where it is necessary to provide a birth certificate. Maya Forstater suggests that in the remaining situations where it is necessary to provide a birth certificate, a short-form birth certificate could be used instead, that omits the owner’s sex.2
This would be to do the opposite of what is currently happening in Scotland, who are widening the scope from the GRA from applying to a very small number of individuals who have chosen to live socially as the opposite sex at a “great personal cost” to cite the Goodwin case, to anyone over the age of 16, willing to make a declaration that they are a man, or a woman.3 This widening of scope arguably has no justification within the context of the original Goodwin case that provided the reason for the GRA to begin with.
As the Scottish proposals note, there has never been a requirement to produce a birth certificate when applying for other forms of identification, such as a drivers’ licence. If a person is able to live unobserved socially as the opposite sex, there should be enough administrative ways to live privately, without the need for the GRA.
I expect that this will not be enough, however, from those who want to change the scope of the GRA, as they want to change the GRA from being a legal fiction to offer transsexual people privacy, to representing a proposed legal fact of the concept of “gender identity”, which is the belief that everyone has an inner male of female “gender identity”, and it is this is what determines your sex.
The theory of “gender identity”
It is difficult to speak clearly about what “gender identity” means. “Gender identity” once was only used within the context of “gender identity disorder”, a category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 4th edition.4 In this case, “gender” seems a polite synonym for “sex”.
In the DSM-5,5 a concept of “gender identity” was extracted from “Gender Identity Disorder” in the DSM-4. The DSM-5 defines “Gender identity” as “a category of social identity and refers to an individual's identification as male, female, or, occasionally, some category other than male or female.”
Prof. Ray Blanchard, a Canadian sexologist, and arguably the world authority on gender identity disorders, who worked on the sections in the DSM, wrote how the DSM-5 was influenced by “trans activists”:
The DSM-5 language was deliberately altered to be more agreeable to trans activists, while keeping GID in the DSM to enable 3rd-party insurance coverage. All members of the Subworkgroup were to varying degrees advocates for trans people, not cold-blooded clinical researchers.6
In the DSM-5 a new concept of “gender dysphoria” is also introduced, as the “the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one's experienced or expressed gender and one's assigned gender.”
The problem of “gender identity disorder” was therefore changed between the DSM-4 and DSM-5 from being an identity disorder, into an individual having a male or female “gender identity”, and the problem being placed instead with society’s incorrect “assignment” of the individual’s gender (sex) at birth.
“Gender identity” ideology puts forward that “gender identity” is just like any other component of “sex”: there is the phenotype, chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, then the “gender identity”. This “gender identity” should have equal, if not more, weighting as any of the other attributes of “sex”.
The theory of “gender identity” appears to be a re-appearance of what was called “feminine essence theory”,7 which holds that, in this case, male-to-female transsexuals, are “in some literal sense and not just in a figurative sense, women inside men’s bodies”, and conversely female-to-male transsexuals are literally men inside women’s bodies. “Gender identity” is presented as something as essential about the individual as their chromosomal sex.
Arguably the motivation of trans activists behind the changes made to the DSM was the wish to remove any safeguarding around medical interventions e.g. cross-sex hormones and surgery. The change from an individual having a “gender identity disorder” to having a “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria”, meant that clinicians were left unable to question the “gender identity”, but only able to treat the “gender dysphoria”.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the DSM-5 refers to “gender identity” as not only being identification as “male” or “female”, but “occasionally, some category other than male or female”, given that there are other people who have an interest in surgery on-demand, such as males with a castration paraphilia. It was inevitable that people would come to advocate for other “non-binary” “gender identities” such as “eunuch gender”.8
The proposal to make the GRA depend solely on self identification appears bizarre, but is understandable if one believes in a “gender identity”, as it is no longer a question of having a disorder, but rather about individual identity. In the same way there should be no medical safeguarding, there should be no legal safeguarding either, though it is obvious that this will be, and already has been, abused.
The word “recognition” in the term “Gender Recognition Certificate”, suggests that “gender identity” and self-identification was the intention all along: that transsexualism is not a question of reassignment, but rather affirmation and recognition of something that somebody always was from the beginning.
Not all transsexual people agree with the idea that transsexualism is explained by “gender identity” and do not believe they are in some way literally have the “gender identity” or “essence” of the opposite sex. Therefore rather than “trans activists”, these activists are perhaps better named as “gender identity” ideologues.
There is also the consideration that some transsexual people only advocate for “gender identity” ideology, not as an act of political strategy, but rather because they are mentally ill, having truly come to believe that they have a “gender identity” of the opposite sex.
Part two of this series looks at the rise of “gender identity”.
Goodwin v. United Kingdom, Application no. 28957/95, Council of Europe: European Court of Human Rights, 11 July 2002
“What reforms of the gender recognition regime could work?” Forstater, M. 9 Jul 2020.
“Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: more information” 23 March 2022
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.)
“Deconstructing the Feminine Essence Narrative”, Blanchard, R. PhD. Archives of Sex Behavior (2008) 37:434–438.
“Eunuch is a gender, says prominent pro-trans advocacy group” Ely, J. Daily Mail 19 September 2022