Kathleen Stock OBE: Trans Women Aren't Women

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to so what you're saying is i'm peter whitford now the trans issue is one of the dominant issues and debates of our time but it generates a hell of a lot of noise and very very little light so i'm delighted today that my guest is professor kathleen stock who's just written this book material girls why reality matters for feminism it's been hugely well reviewed and she's with me now thank you very much kathleen for coming on at the beginning of the book you refer to yourself or having been described as a bit of a heretic uh what is the nature of your particular heresy i think i've got multiple uh heresies going on um i mean one is that i mean the main one is i suppose just to cut to the absolute chase is that i don't think it's literally true that trans women are women and trans men are men and that non-binary people are neither men nor women i mean of course that's not going to seem like a heresy to a large number of people listening it's going to seem like truism but there is a group of people for whom it is a heresy so that's that's one of them the other area in which i think i'm sort of i don't have heretical is the right word but i am a sort of outsider to the whole gender area and and in a way i think that's given me many advantages um in being able to try and work out for myself what's supposed to be going on in the book which i found extremely clarifying actually um but you know if you don't mind some of this might seem like you know various of nuts and bolts to you but i think that uh it will be very very helpful to people it certainly was to me listening um you make this basic distinction or rather should i say the main issue seems to be around this basic distinction between sex and gender doesn't it could you ex could you explain that difference okay well it's it as i say in the towards the beginning of the book um sex is understood by me and by many obviously in its traditional sense as a biological state um gender unfortunately is a word that has now been come to um mean various different things completely different things in some cases so when you get an argument about gender you quite often get people talking past each other i mean for some people gender is just a polite word for sex yes because they don't want to say the word sex and then in the in the original distinction as it was made in the mouths of um 70s feminists or 60s and 70s feminists last century gender was the social meanings around sex which seems to be a perfectly reasonable distinction to make there's the biological state and then there's how that biology kind of um it has causal effects in the social world so that would be masculinity and femininity and it can vary from culture to culture to some extent or to a radical extent depending on whether you think some things are hard-wired or not but you know pink being associated with femininity and blue being associated with masculinity that's culturally contingent but it would fall under gender the social associations stereotypes meanings of sex now um things have moved on since then so now there's two sort of significant developments for this argument i think one is a quite strange move made in some academic circles where they want to say that woman and womanhood and manhood are genders but in a understood in a social sense so now womanhood and manhood themselves are no longer biological states they no longer just sort of synonymously refer to adult human females and adult human males um they refer to a sort of social role probably associated with femininity or masculinity that's a weird move but it does get made and then um at the moment the big hot topic and the and really the um the the meaning of gender that's most common i think in policy making is gender identity and that's really the target of the book so this is the idea really i mean i try and go through several different accounts of gender identity to work out what that really is supposed to be but it's something psychological so it's an inner state it's not about your presentation what you've done to your body it's not about your biology it's not it's not about how other people see you even it's something inner the way you experience yourself in relation to manhood or womanhood maleness and femaleness and what we're seeing in the uk as you possibly know is um a really quite radical reorganization of social spaces and data collection and people's understanding of the self in terms of this thing gender identity so that's really the target of the book yes this gender identity what is the uh legal status of it at the moment kathleen in the sense that i do obviously know that uh gender reassignment uh was a protected characteristic was it not under the equality act 2010 um gender identity which is the new newest development is that does that have any legal status no well only derivatively so it's not specified in the equality act it's gender reassignment i.e a process it doesn't have to be a surgical process either i mean actually in the equality gender reassignment is rather loosely defined anyway um and in the gender recognition act the subject is gender reassignment there is um uh moves to make hate crime legislation um directed towards uh kind of offense against gender identity so it's in the air but there are our sort of main national lobbying groups ostensibly on behalf of gay and trans people for instance stonewall are very keen to see gender reassignment replaced with this idea of gender identity i see why are they actually counting if you take stonewall and if you take mermaid you actually what what you uh you go through in the book first of all you know that the government uh parts of our bureaucracy would have seemed to be very much enthralled to these groups and um but they use a lot of hyperbole do they not yes they do they do well why i mean in answer to your question why are they so focused on gender identity i think there's a sort of pseudological reason and then there's a kind of more so more um a reason more connected to their motives but you know the pseudological reason is if you say okay um trans people being trans is not just a matter of having surgery because lots and lots of trans people these days don't and some of them have no i mean some are on waiting lists but somehow them don't want to make massive changes to their bodies um so you say okay so it can't be surgery and perhaps it's not even dressed because you get sort of non-conforming trans people who don't want to fit into the one or other category you know and sometimes you could have a day off and you don't feel like dressing a certain way and so so there's now hunting around for something well what is it that makes you trans oh it must be this inner state that's persistent whether you dress a certain way or move your body you know um change your body a certain way so there's a kind of weird stripping back to what they assume is the kind of essential property of transness now i don't think that works philosophically you know in terms of motives why are they so focused on gender identity well i mean arguably they've done everything they could do stonewall in terms of gay rights and on a legal level so they need a new revenue stream so i mean that's the most cynical excellent it always comes down to money yeah i mean it's given them a huge boost in terms of profile in terms of projects all over the place because of course if you're going to try and reconstruct um any area where sex was formerly relevant as a distinction you know so which would include public spaces data collection um health education if you're going to try you know that's a massive project to replace any talk of sex with gender identity it's going to keep you going for years so would it be uh would it be a caricature to say that you're that your view is similar for example to jermaine grier's person i mean in in the in this essential feature that i learned at the beginning i would say yes i mean jermaine is being i don't know jermaine in the summertime i'm calling her jermaine but you know i'll talk as if i do know her um she's been uh vilified for making exactly the same point in a more colorful manner um so has julie bindle uh various other people have two and i think that's outrageous i mean i think there is they are essentially um stating what they believe they have reasons for it i think they're right um and why shouldn't they express it in a colorful way um it may not be that respectful but it's they certainly don't um deserve the kind of hounding that they've had and i think this connects in with another aspect of the book which is when i go into the nature of the fiction involved i think it's a fiction that um trans women are literally women and i think therefore there can be a whole lot of outrage around exposing that as a fiction because that's something to do with the nature of fiction we don't want to know that it's not true so that is actually your background uh discipline isn't it uh it's not actually it hasn't been this area has it no no i mean i've spent most of my philosophical life um writing about imagination fiction and pretence in a sort of literary context or artistic context but um it seems to me and it has always seemed to me really clear that when people say i have changed sex or you know i used to be a man and now i'm a woman or i was never a man you know even when before i transitioned i was really a woman now some of them believe those statements literally but not all of them do and i think they're engaged in a perfectly reasonable and understandable human practice which is immersing yourself in a fiction for various purposes you might have none of them need be sinister i mean i think we get involved in fictions all the time as humans so i try to explain what i think the value of that might be but also what some of the pitfalls might be as well we're hearing uh at the moment quite a few uh instances where they're pretty much always in the news about uh changing rooms and and and things like this on on an everyday basis but um there are particular ways in which this really affects women aren't there i mean could you explain to us obviously we know you know we have had examples of a man who identified as a woman being put in a woman's jail and then assaulting women this sort of thing um and also what i what is extraordinary to me is that we've got we're getting cases now for example there's a student in dundee recently who we just happened to say in fact i would say what you say which is that it's a biological fact um and uh apparently has been virtually cancelled at least in the confines of the university uh women are becoming the victim victims of this very thing are they not yes and so i think those are different issues but related so if i take the space issue first um you know women are overwhelmingly the uh victims of sexual assault it's just a basic statistic and it's derived from partly from the fact that men are on average bigger and stronger than women and have had many of them have a heterosexual interest in women and therefore it's obviously beneficial to women to have spaces where you know as a as a rule of thumb anyone who looks male entering can be um called out and said no sorry you're in the wrong place because that's a way we can't police you know changing rooms and bathrooms on a national level we have to have social norms that allow women to say you don't belong here relatively firmly now what we have um in thanks to stonewall advising national organization organizations that gender identity is the sort of um kind of almost a moral reason why males with female gender identity should be allowed into women's spaces um the policies in many many organizations now say you can self-identify your way into whichever space feels to you the right one they you know they explicitly say this as part of their policies now that's a recipe for disaster i think in terms of the original purposes for which these spaces were set up the only reason we're not seeing more um malfeasance is because not that many people know about those policies and they're still going by the old rule of thumb but we are seeing some examples and we're also seeing and so i'm sorry i just want to be clear that's not a claim about the malfeasance of trans people particularly it's a claim about malfeasance of males whether or not they're trans that statistically some proportion of them will be uh will have you know sinister intentions so um what we're also seeing is fear anxiety a loss of privacy a you know a kind of um a real anti-democratic move to radically change these spaces and men are not going to notice this as much because it's not trans men you know identifying their way into male bathrooms or changing rooms half as much and the threat isn't there for for men you know they're not worried about what would happen if that did become commonplace so that's the space issue and then the free speech issue is related of course women are more worried about this they want to speak out about it more it's their category above all that seems to be shifting rather than a kind of stepwise um movement and and it's easier to tell women to shut up you know so both women and men do this i'm not saying it's men that are telling them to shut up i'm fairly sure that that abertay example you mentioned will be there'll be women involved in in monstering this poor woman but but it is easier if you've got a choice between um trying to shut down a man's speech in a woman's speech i would say strategically you might as well go for the woman's because society will help you in that i think as well people feel passionately you know when they are presented with the way in which the language is being changed particularly by the bureaucracy if you like in the way that now we talk we hear people with cervixes people who menstrual it's it's almost like women are being you know the whole idea of a woman is is somehow rather being reduced yeah i mean that that kind of shift so is purely based on this kind of fantasized projection on to trans people mainly by non-trans people that if they hear any reference at all to womanhood or manhood like you know any kind of general claim like women have periods they will you know trans men will feel affronted and maybe even trans women too you know because they can't have them so now we need to sort of change the language to to evolve avoid the affront and that's just a crazy practice because we need language for more purposes than avoiding a front we need clear communication and health for people that don't understand what cervix is but they do know what a woman or a female is for instance um it's an exceptionally sort of middle class university derived movement this and it's not really thinking about how these changes impact on people who don't understand this gender studies stuff but also it's just kind of profoundly stupid because people with the cervix is no less biological you know has a descriptor it's arguably more reductive and more dehumanizing um and certainly doesn't take you out of the biological realm so i just think the whole thing's preposterous yes one thing that was i found extraordinary in your book was the number of people who identify now as being trans having shot up i mean i think it's around about 2004 2000 to 500 2000 to 5000 something like that in the uk and i think in 2018 it is a catholic it was something like uh well stone will say six hundred thousand the government says up to five hundred thousand i mean you know what do we make of those figures is is that just simply because the argument and the terms of reference have changed or what it's it's partly that because originally um the numbers were based on assumptions about who would apply and get a gender gender recognition certificate um and it was assumed that there would be some meaningful what because meaningful social transition which you know i don't think changes your sex but it does may change your body surgically through injecting hormones over a long period of time or having your genitalia reconstructed and it would involve cross-dressing and things like that now again when the move the sort of activist focus became gender identity then it automatically expanded the category because you don't have to be doing those things anymore it's just a matter of how you feel how you describe yourself to others and it includes this new category not thought of i don't know by many 30 years ago which is non-binary people and it's a you know it's a a trend amongst younger people to describe themselves as non-binary they don't want she or he pronouns they want to be described as they or some other kind of made-up pronoun um and that's that's expanded the category enormously of course it suits stonewall to say that there has been a huge increase in trans people because then they can get some um credibility for their project there but um it's definitely this huge category now contains people of very different kinds you know it contains young same-sex attracted girls and boys who are now describing themselves as non-binary or as trans and they may be transitioning from completely different reasons to 50 year old heterosexual males who are married who continue to be married to a woman and who now cross-dress in public you know those are different demographics and i think we need different understanding of those but they're being pushed together in this big category and the common fact is supposed to be gender identity gender identity uh so basically with non-binary it's sort of what we used to call uh what bisexual or unisex or what no no no it's not about sexual orientation although that's um in there somewhere but um it's about feeling that you neither i i mean i use the words of the activists or stonewall's definitions but roughly um you neither identify as a woman or a man oh i see so you're you're androgynous or you identify with androgyny as a kind of ideal um psychologically uh you don't feel you fit firmly in one category or another you maybe you feel you fit in both so it's something like that isn't it it need have nothing to do with sexuality sexuality is another set of identities now that you can add on as it were but they can cross um cross-cut so basically somebody like sam smith recently calling himself non-binary and therefore he's referred to as they uh we're both gay people um there there are consequences too for gay people in this aren't there well absolutely because although i said you know bisexuality and non-binary this is not the same category conceptually it's um there are multiple effects that this is having on gay people um partly because the the group is now understood as the lgbt so um again the the relevant differences between those groups are not are just being completely ignored but the obvious difference is um that same-sex attracted people are precisely the clue is in the name attracted to people as of the same sex as themselves now that's a reference to sex twice your sex and the sex of the people that you are interested in as um trans activism tries to evacuate our language of reference to sex it wants to replace that with gender identity so now being gay is a matter of having a gender identity that's the same as the gender identity of the people you're attracted to which leaves us with the absurd conclusion that um a male who transitions who becomes a trans woman but who stays in in my terminology heterosexual that is stably attracted to females can count as a lesbian so right because they're they've got a female gender identity and the people they're attracted to allegedly have female gender identities so we have this new phenomenon of trans women describing themselves as lesbians and and so you know again we've lost the word to refer to the original phenomenon and this has practical negative consequences um in terms of protecting the rights of gay people as originally understood and also i think specifically in the area of young people because young people who are trying to get to grips with their own sexuality are now being told you know there's a possibility at least that they are trans they are in the wrong body maybe they're a boy in a girl's body or a girl in a boy's body and it turns out that this is more likely to happen or these feelings are more likely for you if you are gay right right so there's a high you know we're hearing from the tavistock gender identity service that one of the sort of predisposing factors to turning up in that clinic as a child or adolescent is if you are same-sex attracted so that's one obvious knock-on effect because and this has gone sorry cutting that's this has gone up usually too hasn't it young people presenting to the nhs uh i think it's gender development uh it's gone up for for girls particularly to fight by five thousand percent yes it's gone up hugely um again modern trans activist gives us no opportunity to ask why that's happening the story is unrelentingly positive they are they should be affirmed they are really boys or they are really not girls um and it turns out that again predisposing factors may be being gay or being autistic or having trauma a history of trauma so there's lots of complicated stuff going on there and they are not well served by an activism which um says that any discussion of that is bigotry that we must affirm these these kids um and we're seeing also the effects of this because there are now deep what are called detransitioners that is people at a relatively young age who made decisions to alter their bodies or at least to change their whole social persona and um the ones who took testosterone or who had their ovaries removed or their breasts removed or had full hysterectomies in their early twenties or teen late teens even um are profoundly distressed now that the mists have cleared and they've realized that this was just a phase for them and that nobody really told them that this would be a phase because the surrounding rhetoric is so affirmative and positive and anyone who disagrees with you is a hater and a bigot so this is just disastrous um particularly impacting on lesbians again who you know and butch lesbians in particular um and then another aspect of the impacts on gay people gay young people is this what i just mentioned that trans women describing themselves as lesbians there is a sort of really unpleasant aspect of activism which is saying your preferences for the same sex as you are transphobic so you should open your mind to the possibility if you're a lesbian you should open your mind to the possibility of sleeping with a trans woman who is also a lesbian like you even though they've got a penis and you know they're male so that's that's really against the grain of their sexual orientation and that that's appalling too but again not being talked about so one thing that uh always struck me about this was that there's a very regressive nature to some of this because um you know there was a case recently it was it was in the papers and it was on on television of a a little girl who said she wanted to be a she was a boy 18 months old i think and the parents were being very affirmative about this but the fact is is that the the old position used to be why should girls just always like pink and why should boys always like blue and what if a boy wants to play with dolls anyway now the fact is you know now we sort of gone back to a kind of almost victorian idea that this must mean that therefore they are actually a boy who does that must therefore be a a girl in a boy's body and we've gone back to that situation which is one that gay people fought against yes you know yes it's tragic because um i don't think i saw i think you might be talking about a child that was on this morning and was also in the paper i think they were four i mean obviously far too early to take anything they say about this seriously i mean children are forming their concepts of the world at this point they um there's no reason to think at all that they have access stable access to womanhood and manhood and girlhood and boyhood such that they know that they are not that but so it's really just the projections of parents and educators at that age i think around a child um and possibly some anxiety about gender i would say sex non-conformity because i hate the word gender now is just so so confusing but um yes you're right ultimately when you um ask or read the narratives of trans people and i think there's nothing wrong with this they say you know how did you know that you were a woman in a man's body or how did you know you're a man and all his body it will be things like well like the man will say i liked makeup i always played with the barbies i felt at home with the girls rather than boys you know and that's i completely understand those feelings it's nothing to criticize those feelings but for the culture to say oh okay well in that case that's what makes you a woman is of course completely regressive um and i i think it's just tragic that parents like the parents of that child are taking this new religion on authority you know they're not we can't expect everyone to think this through for themselves you know would like to know if somebody tells them if schools and teachers tell that child you're a boy you know of course this sort of thing is going to happen you have had your fair share of people you know getting out you haven't you counting for the things that you have said and i mean what what is that what what form is that taken um well it's uh taken multiple forms i mean i i stress that i mention this because i think people who listening should take this as representative of what happens to anyone in british universities any woman in particular who tries to say the things i've said so it's not it's really an instructive tale and not i'm not just complaining but i have had um highly unusually virulent pushback to my relatively you know measured attempting at being as respectful as possible sort of arguments so um i've had open several open letters against me or against publications that have um published me i've had uh you know multiple forms of local harassment as it were to do with students or faculty in my own um university i've had um people withdrawing from uh academic events if they know i'm there or else no platforming me asking me to withdraw once it's discovered or um or as people go complain to the organizers about it um there's been a volume dropped by an academic publisher oxford uh partly on the basis that i would be in it you know so this all adds up over time and it's not good for the state of free discussion about these very i think important social issues that we are now facing that it takes you know quite a lot of nerve yeah to keep going yeah how is it sort of uh how do you do that actually personally i mean i know you were you were talking there about this kind of thing uh look on this channel you know we've talked to many different people who uh certainly in the academic world so what you're saying is is in fact very much what they've experienced in different ways um you know so i absolutely understand that but how do you uh keep going i mean you know you've written you've written this book here which i i think this is presumably doing well is it i hope it is it's doing really well yes so i mean at one point about five days after it was released it was number 11 in the hardback non-fiction chart for the uk so i think that's doing great that must be uh something actually that uh really does act as a boost um kathleen i mean thank you so much for coming and talking about it um and i i know that people will be very very interested we'll get a lot of feedback on on this i'm sure the the book is actually called say material girls why reality matters to feminism by kathleen stock i couldn't recommend it more highly um thanks very much kathleen and all the very best to you and keep it up thank you peter i will thank you very much uh that's it for so what you're saying is this week and uh we shall see you again next time thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: The New Culture Forum

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Keywords: New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle, So What You're Saying Is..., Culture Wars

Id: 2cnUzmQ4VVI

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021