{"id":1044,"date":"2020-11-02T10:00:16","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T10:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2020-10-30T16:26:38","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T16:26:38","slug":"getting-the-question-right-reflections-on-transgender-and-the-transgender-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/getting-the-question-right-reflections-on-transgender-and-the-transgender-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting the question right: reflections on transgender and \u201cthe transgender question\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

I: From \u201cthe transgender question\u201d to the transphobia question<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>There is no such thing as \u201cthe transgender question\u201d. No more than there was any such thing as \u201cthe Jewish question\u201d in Germany in the 1840s\u2014or 1930s. For Bruno Bauer, and for his interlocutor Karl Marx, the supposed question about Germany\u2019s Jews was how to integrate them, meaning how to make them invisible in civic society, meaning how to stop them being an offence to other Germans. The Nazis had an answer to that question too. But as Marx himself nearly sees at one point in Zur Judenfrage<\/em>, the problems lie in the question itself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not \u201cthe Jewish question\u201d, it\u2019s \u201cthe anti-semitism question\u201d. Likewise it\u2019s not \u201cthe transgender question\u201d, it\u2019s \u201cthe transphobia question\u201d. In any properly tolerant society there is simply no question or problem at all about the existence within it of a visible minority. (Or a supposedly<\/em> visible minority; actually, of course, only some Jewish are visibly Jewish, just as only some transgender people are visibly transgender; a point that makes a crucial difference in recent \u201cgate-keeping\u201d controversies.) Tolerance means accepting and protecting each other\u2019s freedom, respecting and valuing our differences (seen and unseen), listening to each other and being ready to think we might learn something by listening. None of this is a problem. <\/em>None of this is a question. <\/em><\/p>\n

The problem is not transgender people, it is those who enact hatred and suspicion and prejudice against transgender people. And in the UK today this happens all the time. In my own field, academia, it is mostly insidious\u2014people are usually smart enough not to leave any evidence\u2014but every now and then the mask slips dramatically. Other academics have called me a \u201ccultural Marxist\u201d and a source of ideological contagion, simply because I am a trans woman; I have been studiedly cold-shouldered, ignored, and misgendered at seminars by people who called themselves feminists; I have had a speaking invitation to a conference downgraded to an attendance invitation, the moment the organiser heard that I\u2019d transitioned; I have seen colleagues described as \u201cinsane\u201d and \u201cimpostors\u201d just for being transgender; I have seen friends\u2019 funding and job applications mysteriously go west, with no good explanation in the offing other than that the applications come from someone who is visibly transgender.<\/p>\n

Given that the rampant and toxic transphobia of British media\u2014both left and right\u2014is now causing serious and increasing amounts of distress, hate-crime, self-harm, and suicide among transgender people, you might have thought that what people would mean by \u201cthe transgender question\u201d would be how to win the battle against this prejudice. Strikingly, it isn\u2019t. At least for most journalists, apparently the number-one questions about transgender people are which prisons we should be in, which loos we\u2019re allowed, whether we brainwash schoolchildren, and whether we cheat at sport. Now never mind how to answer<\/em> these questions; we should take a step back from asking them in the first place. Britain\u2019s grimier tabloids have long understood how the insistent repetition of prejudicial questions can be used to frame a minority\u2014just by being asked, and never mind the answers (\u201cCould single mothers give the Royal Family AIDS?\u201d). If we want to defend transgender people from this sort of attack, the first thing we need to do is change the record.<\/p>\n

Change the record to what, though? So far from having something called a \u201cgender ideology\u201d, transgender people do not owe it to the world to explain themselves. <\/em>I can\u2019t be the only trans woman for whom one traumatic memory is trying to tell the truth about myself to a parent\u2014and failing miserably, because I was 4 years old and simply didn\u2019t have the words. Despite that kind of primal trauma, trans people\u2019s right to exist, just like cis people\u2019s right to exist, holds completely independently of our having any convincing story to tell about who we are and why.<\/p>\n

All the same, it isn\u2019t uncommon that other people, with the best will in the world, simply don\u2019t get transgender. So it can\u2019t hurt to raise the general level of understanding a bit. Nor can it hurt for trans women like me to try and get a better understanding of the problems that preoccupy some of the gender-critical feminists with whom we should be allies. In the front rank of these is the problem of male violence<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We live in a society and a culture that is structured and predicated upon the threat of violence against women, and always has been. As far back as Homer, one of the fundamental determinants of the shape of society has been the differential in power between the male body and the female body. Consider for instance this, from Book 1 of the Iliad<\/em> (1.431-450):<\/p>\n

Odysseus came to Chryse with his sacrifice.
\nOnce they were in the deep harbour, then his sailors
\ntook down the sail and stowed it within the black ship,
\nlowered the mast and rested it neat in its runner,
\nrowed their craft to the waiting anchorage.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 435<\/p>\n

And there they cast the anchors and made fast;
\nthen disembarked and walked ashore through the surf,
\nbringing the oxen to be offered to Apollo;
\nand out of the ship there also stepped Chryseis.
\nLed to the altar by Odysseus of the wiles,\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 440<\/p>\n

back in her father\u2019s hands, she heard him speak:
\n\u201cAgamemnon lord of men has sent me, Chryses,
\nto give you back your child, and to sacrifice
\na hundred oxen to appease Apollo,
\nto stop the wide-wept woes he\u2019s brought the Greeks.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 445<\/p>\n

He spoke and gave her up, and Chryses had back
\nhis daughter, his delight. Swift then for sacrifice
\nthey placed the beasts about the firm-built altar,
\nwith pure hands took the sacred barley up.
\nAnd Chryses raised his arms in prayer for them\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chryseis\u2014Cressida\u2014hears what is being done to her, just as the oxen do; but Chryseis has no more say in it and no more choice about it than those sacrificial beasts. The world she lives in is a world of war and violence; a world of religiously-sanctioned greed and grabbing and the fetishisation of possession and status. This is the patriarchy. The basis of it is the inequality in brute physical power between the (typical) male and (typical) female bodies, and the threat that that implies.<\/p>\n

I have not <\/em>just said that there is in nature such a thing as a distinctive feminine or masculine character type. There isn\u2019t, not in nature. But separating nature from culture is notoriously difficult. And what we tend to get is reversion to the patterns dictated by the forces of the human body. As in this passage from the Iliad<\/em>, where Chryseis is a piece of mute property, and the transaction that is going on is essentially one between Agamemnon and Achilles, two war-lords, neither of whom is even present.<\/p>\n

Homer\u2019s is a world (as Simone Weil so well sees in her famous essay) that is built upon the possibilities for violence that are present in the human body. And I agree with Weil, against Nietzsche, that this vision of the world as a terrible place of violence and oppression, a place where force turns its victim into a thing, is a vision which is to be wept over not (as Nietzsche thought) celebrated.<\/p>\n

[U]ne telle accumulation de violences serait froide sans un accent d\u2019 ingu\u00e9rissable amertume qui se fait continuellement sentir, bien qu\u2019 indiqu\u00e9 souvent par un seul mot, souvent m\u00eame par une coupe de vers, par un rejet. C\u2019 est par l\u00e0 que l\u2019 Iliade<\/em> est une chose unique, par cette amertume qui proc\u00e8de de la tendresse, et qui s\u2019 \u00e9tend sur tous les humains, \u00e9gale comme la clart\u00e9 du soleil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And one reason to weep is just this: that our world is like that too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Picture: Sophie-Grace climbing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I: From \u201cthe transgender question\u201d to the transphobia question \u00a0There is no such thing as \u201cthe transgender question\u201d. No more than there was any such thing as \u201cthe Jewish question\u201d […]","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":1049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The first instalment of \"Getting the question right: reflections on transgender and \u201cthe transgender question\u201d by Sophie Grace Chappell on Open for Debate","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[265,86,264],"custom_author":[263],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-for-debate","tag-prejudice","tag-questions","tag-transgender","custom_author-chappell-sophie-grace"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8KPlM-gQ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1060,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/iii-be-kind\/","url_meta":{"origin":1044,"position":0},"title":"III: Be kind","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"November 16, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I think there\u2019s something rude and unkind, or can be depending on the pragmatics, in the assertion that you often hear, that \u201cTrans women are men really.\u201d It\u2019s rude and unkind in the way that it\u2019s rude and unkind to say \u201cAn adoptive parent isn\u2019t a parent really\u201d\u2014or even more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/11\/sophie-grace-climbingBW-22528212_1862011984114877_2700895398703663270_n.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/11\/sophie-grace-climbingBW-22528212_1862011984114877_2700895398703663270_n.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/11\/sophie-grace-climbingBW-22528212_1862011984114877_2700895398703663270_n.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1064,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/is-jk-rowling-transphobic\/","url_meta":{"origin":1044,"position":1},"title":"Is JK Rowling transphobic?","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"November 30, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Is JK Rowling transphobic? 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