conflated, concepts vanish. In George Orwell’s 1984 the Ministry of Truth wipes words from the state’s lexicon because “a heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable at least so far as thought is dependent upon words”. A raging debate over the definitions of “gender” and “sex” may sound dry, pedantic, obsessive or arcane. Yet in this war of words rests the very future of women’s rights. [..]
If sex and gender identity are the same, a male person does not just have the human right to live as a woman free from violence and discrimination, or be granted social and legal recognition as a woman. (Which most feminists wholeheartedly support.) What is now claimed is that such a male is biologically female. From this bizarre science-denial stem many absurdities: a penis is not necessarily a male organ, therefore a teenage male who identifies as a girl cannot be denied entry to female showers because, regardless of physical appearance, they are also “female”.
The problem for the world’s women is that biological sex is not some abstract idea or inner feeling. From menstruation to menopause, pregnancy to birth, abortion to rape, it is a vivid reality. That women’s oppression is “on the basis of sex” is why generations of feminists sought legislation for sex-based rights such as maternity leave and single-sex spaces such as rape crisis centres. In India, activists demand toilets for girls who are sexually assaulted while defecating in fields. Child brides in Afghanistan or female genital mutilation (FGM) victims in Somalia do not suffer because of a nebulous inner identity but the immutable sex of their bodies. […]
Terminology which erases women’s material reality is not only degrading but impairs our ability to protect existing rights. “A woman’s right to choose,” was a powerful 1970s slogan in the battle for legal abortion. Yet in October when Polish women marched against their government’s virtual banning of abortion, Amnesty International produced a baffling poster saying: “I stand with people in Poland.” But which people? The right-wing populist politicians? The Catholic clerics? Hog-tied by biological denial, Amnesty could not bring itself to utter the name of those who risk bleeding to death in the backstreet clinics of Gdansk: women. Moreover if reproductive rights are no longer women’s rights but “people’s rights”, “a woman’s right to choose” dissolves. It follows that “people” should determine the outcome of a pregnancy, including men.
Even campaigners against FGM are now accused of transphobia because under gender-neutral ideology the clitoris, which is sliced off little girls, cannot be categorised as an exclusively female organ. As the anti FGM-campaigner Nimco Ali tells me, “the idea womanhood doesn’t exist impacts the most vulnerable women in the world, and these happen to be women of colour”. Or as JK Rowling put it in a tweet which began her vilification across the globe: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased."
Bleeder, labourer, ovary-haver, birthing parent … is the entity which performs these disparate functions even fully human?
Will the outrage over this persuade Biden and co. to reconsider? The problem is now of course, having made this stand and signed the executive order, that any back-tracking will be seized on as evidence of transphobia. I can't see it happening. But we shall see.
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