In the nineteen-nineties, there was a small chain of shops devoted to men who wished to be, or seem to be (both were catered for), women.
I discovered this after reading the autobiography of the transgender owner, part of an exploration that was very important in my life. Visiting the shop in London blew my mind.
There’s no doubt in my mind that if things then had been like they have been in the twenty-twenties, I would have gone the whole way down the gender reassignment road, the sheer inevitability carrying me. As it was, I got as far as taking delivery of black market hormones (were they? I don’t know) before having a very serious think about what I wanted from life.
Anyway, I know from personal experience that transgender life is not a new thing, and it wasn’t impossible long before it became a battlefield. In some ways it might have been easier then.
What we’ve lost, I think, is any acceptance of grey areas. And human life becomes close to impossible if we refuse to allow grey areas. Something that might be thought to be obvious in a discussion point that makes a big deal of the non-binary.
The lack of grey area leads us inevitably to the point where we need legal judgements to tell us the definition of the word “woman”.
And legal judgements can’t really do that, any more than they can define pi, except by specifying very tightly what they mean and when it applies.
Definitions, and their discontents
Words are slippery things, and we often don’t notice.
Language exists to exchange ideas, to put, say, a thought I have into your head, as though by magic. We’re pretty good at it … to an extent. The closer you look, though, the more true it is that “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”. Mostly, we think we think the same because we don’t examine the detail. It’s close enough.
Until it isn’t.
Defining things is difficult, and the reason for that is that nothing exists without its context.
Something as simple as “cup” or “chair” becomes annoying once you find the edge cases. Is a bowl a cup? Is a fallen log a chair? Is a cup with the bottom drilled out still a cup, or a chair with no seat a chair? And that’s before we start on universal abstract concepts like “happiness” or “art”. Or “agreement”.
The answer is that almost every word we use has blurred edges, and in most communication we handle that in the rest of what we exchange and notice about the situation. There is a central chunk of meaning where little effort is needed and almost everybody will agree, and as we venture out into the fuzzier parts we have to be more explicit about the boundaries within which our agreement can work.
If I gave you an open-ended cylinder and asked you if it was a cup, you’d probably say no. If I told you it had been produced by cutting the bottom off a cup and removing the handle, you’d probably still maintain that it’s not a cup any more. If I said that we were talking strictly about items that had originally been made for a specific purpose, then we could probably agree that within that very precise context it was a cup, but we need to both know and agree that extra information.
We don’t think about doing this most of the time. We handle it implicitly, which is elegant, and when we fail we argue often without realising why we disagree. Scientists, philosophers and lawyers get used to being pedantic about definitions and the limitations within which they apply, and the rest of us tend towards “oh, you know what I mean”, which is the human way.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Bill Clinton got a lot of stick at one point for saying an answer depending on the definition of “is”. But he wasn’t wrong.
We like to assume things have an “essence” that lets us say what they are. “Is” sounds very final. What we usually mean, though, is that we have decided to treat something as belonging to a category, which is a much more workable proposition. As we see in the case of the cup that can’t be used as a cup and doesn’t have the features of a cup.
And this was the way things worked for transgender people thirty years ago.
Everything, back then, came down to one thing – “passing”. Could this person, born male, “pass” as female? In other words, in any given situation, would they be treated as a woman, or would there be pushback?
That was stark and unfair in some ways, but it went with the grain of how the world works and fitted what (sticking to my knowledge and experience) male-to-female trans people actually wanted, which wasn’t special treatment but simply to fit in. They dreamed of “being” a woman, yes, but practically the aim was simply to be treated as a woman. Treated as a woman by others, but also by themselves, which is where the question of “is” looms very large.
When the overriding concern is being treated as a woman, though, leaving aside any definable essence, it becomes clear that it’s situational.
In a pantomine, stereotypical clothes and mannerisms, plus an agreed suspension of disbelief, are enough to “pass”. In a public street feminine cues and not drawing attention will do the trick. In close conversation it becomes increaingly important that the characteristics match other people’s conception of what categorises a woman (which also allows us to note that these change over time and depending on the people and situation). In a relationship, it’s likely that the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are what’s expected. For science and medicine, literally microscopic invisible features may remain vital. “Passing” depends as much on circumstances as the person themselves.
So, for me personally, when I sat with a bottle of pills in my hand, I had to consider how far I could go, and whether the point I could reach would be acceptable to me.
For reasons I won’t go into and aren’t relevant, it became clear to me that I would not be satisfied. That my personal internal definition of “woman” was beyond what was achieveable, and I would remain unhappy and stuck in the trap of “seeming” something either way. I could have “passed”, probably, in most situations of life, but not to myself.
How we handle these things
That, of course, was and is personal, and has no bearing at all on gender issues in a general sense.
Why bring it in? Well, being scrupulously honest, part is that I know this is sensitive ground, and I know readers take it differently from someone with at least some personal experience, whether or not mine counts.
But more to the point, the personal nature of it highlights the problem.
Clearly, someone else in my position could have reached the opposite conclusion. I might have reached the opposite conclusion if I had been in that position now rather than then. And neither is right or wrong. It’s firmly in the grey area that we can’t pretend doesn’t exist.
What’s more, my opinion is one of many. Practically, my wish to “pass” doesn’t depend only on me, but on everybody I interact with, and what they bring to their definitions and categorisations is beyond my control. Transgender people have always had to face this, and deal with people whose position is not, to put it mildly, comfortable. They are a minority, I think it’s fair to say, or were in the past, but the further out into the grey area we go, the more likely we are to encounter them.
All the time this was non-topical as an issue, there was an obvious way of dealing with it, as a transgender person – stay, as much as possible, within the bounds that don’t test the definitions. As a male-to-female transsexual, don’t do things like sports that draw attention to size and strength differences. Don’t risk pushing into spaces where femaleness becomes of heightened importance. Blend in, don’t stand out. Stay in contexts where “passing” is easiest. Don’t put the bottomless cup on a tray to be used for drinks at a party.
Was this fair? No. And in the current culture we are, where identity and diversity are so significant, it sounds like terrible advice. But it was practical.
Pieces of paper
I’m trying very hard to steer away from saying that things were better in the old days, here. OK, it wasn’t the hell for trans people that modern activists would like to suggest, but it’s never been an easy life. Anything which lays a person open to prejudice has dangers, compromises and discomfort. Opting to live other than as society thinks is normal for whatever hand we’ve been dealt … is, and was, tough.
And here we are, in a world where well-meaning people have tried very hard to change that, and make being trans accepted. Which is a good thing.
But, as I say, something has been lost. The push has come with polarisation, and polarisation tends to extremes, and extremes are the enemy of grey areas. So we are stuck on definitions, to everybody’s disadvantage.
If the answer to a question of what something is, is that it’s the holder of an official certificate, you’re asking the wrong question. Likewise if you have to go to the highest court to decide a definition. These can only be binary decisions, and any binary decision falls somewhere in the grey area, obliterating any adjustment based on context.
This polarisation is, for one thing, the reason why I don’t write about this subject, despite having had strong personal feelings about it for a very long time. There is nothing I can say that won’t make some group or other very angry, and that doesn’t help. There are many people who refuse to accept that the word “woman” can’t mean anything we choose, and many others who grimly hang on to the tightest and most unchangeable meaning they can find. Both want to fight anyone who says otherwise, and both feel all ethics and morality is on their side.
Neither is sustainable. Neither is human.
The world I would like to have seen
Sometimes I wistfully imagine how things might have gone without trans rights and identity politics.
In this vision, nobody ever tried to define what a woman is, knowing that if we impose a universal definition, somebody, some group, must lose out.
Instead, we slowly formalised the grey areas as it seemed necessary. Discreetly, without fuss, as culture and science develop, much as we now know more about rare biological cases where gender isn’t clear than we did, and can decide accordingly. Balancing benefit and harm not in some impossible absolute sense, but case by case.
I may be too rosy in my view of human nature, but it feels to me as though this is what the average person wants too. Even many of those who now take an absolutist position have been driven there from distaste of the opposite absolute, and most people would much prefer a live-and-let-live reality if that was possible.
The question, always, being: what conditions do we apply to who qualifies to be treated as a woman in this particular situation so as the balance of benefit and disadvantage is fair? Recognising that there will be disagreement, probably, but compromise will be possible in a way that it isn’t for a universal decision. It’s messy, but practical, and has the advantage of fitting with human instinct for the most part.
After all, the argument about single-sex spaces, for example, isn’t about abstract ideas and definitions, not really. It’s about safety, basically. And neither a birth certificate or any other legal document is a guarantee of that in itself, for anyone involved. A rational discussion would focus on what is the best line to draw where sexual safety is concerned, and how far the rights go in insisting on it. Is a biological male after surgery and hormones more dangerous than a biological woman could be? Most people would say no. Could the line be drawn scientifically between that biological male and an intersex person assigned female at birth? Tricky. What happens to those difficult cases if they’re excluded from female spaces? Nothing pleasant for them. Yet, at the other extreme, if biological males can self-ID as female with little or no qualification, is the essential reason for single-sex spaces even achievable? Arguably no.
Ironically, the old system in which a gender recognition had rigorous gatekeeping worked better in this respect, because it involved expert judgement.
Similarly with sports and administrative equality. The purpose of a single-sex category should be the important thing, and judgement made on the basis of what achieves that end. Which, I get the impression, is the instinct of the average person.
When it comes to medicine and science, biology is supreme, whatever. If a life-saving drug had radically different results based on chromosomes, I doubt even the most radical trans advocate would insist on treatment based on their preferred gender. That, to me, also strengthens the argument for maintaining data on individuals according to biology, not just preferred category, however much they might wish to forget where they came from.
Everybody and nobody
In this world I imagine, we let convention do the heavy lifting where we can, and regulate where there is risk of important boundaries being crossed.
Nobody stops someone using a changing room for looking a bit wrong, let alone if they are unnoticeably different from other users but somebody objects to their history. But those users also have the right to exclude those who could be a danger, even if there’s no proof.
Nobody minds how anyone presents in public, but we keep our statistical data factual according to its purpose.
Nobody goes to court to define what shouldn’t need legal definition, because nobody thinks they can win that way.
We embrace diversity and the variety of humanity without trying to put it into binary boxes and force others to think the same. We accept that human life has a lot of grey areas, and we live and let live.