Shon Faye: Trans liberation will free us all

why hello it is a very very big honor to have the one the only the sensational sean faye who is the author of a book all of you must don't order it now actually because you kind of need to either watch or listen to the interview depending on the medium but you do need to buy the transgender issue it's one of the most important books of our times that's not hyperbole it's just an accurate summation of a a book which i think in decades to come when they look back at the appalling period of going through in terms of transphobia they will go this was the definitive book that really summed up the struggle against the anti-trans backlash and summed up the aspirations and struggle of the trans rights movement sean it's an honor to see you thank you no pressure on that um history will remember this is the book that's a really it's a really lovely thing but also intensely pressurized so thanks for that yeah just yeah and also yeah i mean obviously you know don't mess up the interview because we need to so no further pressure i've really put you at ease i feel as i said yeah thanks yeah that was lovely yeah don't don't don't mess up the interview because you will pretty much wreck the cause for trans liberation in this country forever yeah okay i think it's michael braden's interview i think let's make a break for the global trans rights movement it isn't sean is um just quickly before i ask you questions it is it's really important to say this because i think a lot of people you know might not know any trans people they might not know much about trans rights they see all this stuff going on on social media and they might think about this book will i understand it is it for me it's so easy to read and understand it's so cogently and fluently and so if you feel i don't know where to begin with all of this this is where you start and on the spirit in the spirit of that my first question you say in the book you argue that trans liberation will not just liberate trans people but all of us what do you mean by that yeah it's an interesting one i wanted to frame yeah and i say that right that's the opening line of the book because the liberation of trans people would benefit everyone in our society and i really wanted to open with that quite bold statement um one because it's true and so i'll explain why i think it's true it's because in liberation politics uh if we look at people like any kind of society and we look at like minorities or people who are you know categories of people who are pushed to the margins and that's not just trans people obviously um if you look at the things that would remedy their marginalization they tend to be systemic big things that would remedy the marginalization of lots of other groups um so i discuss things like housing health care bodily autonomy um freedom from like state interference and violence in some cases and that's not just something that would help trans people that that would help so many vulnerable groups and then when you look at society as a whole and this is a common idea in many liberation movements um the suffragettes talked about it um like the liberation of women would basically benefit everyone um plenty of like black feminist collectives have always said the liberation of black women in particular would like liberate everyone it's because if you look at this kind of model where you start to uh reshift the distribution of power in society and you start to elevate um the groups that are force the margins or sometimes at the bottom in the most vulnerable cases you actually lift everyone up it's kind of the opposite of the glass ceiling idea where like the people at the top just smashed through um so yeah it's a pretty common idea and a lot of liberation movements and it's in a lot of manifestos of different groups um gay liberation front um yeah as i say very many black feminist socialist collectives and this right back to the suffragettes and probably before um and then the reason also strategically i put that right at the beginning of the book as as the opening sentence is because i think people are very used to hearing how trans people are a nuisance for everyone else and about how accommodating trans people even in the smallest ways is going to be a huge problem for them and is a complete nuisance to everyone and is um basically uh yeah that we are a small minority of people who are making unreasonable demands for the rest of everyone else and basically um subversive and difficult and actually i wanted to really completely reverse that message so i opened the book with almost the antithesis of what people are perhaps used to hearing from particularly the media which is actually no helping trans people would help you one of the uh you've got this big chapter which looks in great detail it the the experiences of of trans of young trans people and it's really fascinating because you meet these parents who are extremely supportive and affirmative and that makes a big difference because those who are who are uh either heterosexual or uh cis which for those who don't know what that means it means you're uh you are comfortable generally speaking with the gender identity you're assigned at birth and for those who aren't don't have affirmative parents that can be very very damaging for the rest of their lives as anyone who's lgbtq knows with their friends people have had terrible experiences which then leads to terrible consequences for the rest of their lives often but i'm interested in just talking about that in terms of because a lot of these parents they didn't know anything about trans people they didn't know about anything about trans rights and then their children are are trans and they have to go on this journey without necessarily often this you know this road map this level of support the lack of kind of cultural recognition of trans people that now gay people have so it's much easier and accessible for parents of gay children who are cisgender so i'm just interested in kind of talk a bit about the journey that those parents have to go on and what that tells us about the society in which we live and the support or lack thereof that exists for young trans people right yes so i think the thing is is that i you know this book i wrote about it like i wrote this book with the intention that it could be read by anyone who doesn't really know anything about trans people trans lives and was maybe a bit confused um by the debate they see maybe like a heated debate going on in social media and on in the mainstream media and i think it's really hard for people to relate particularly with young trans children is that um because it's such a rare experience that acute gender dysphoria that can manifest in childhood um in society as a whole let's say it's about i think approximately 0.44 of children perhaps um is the closest estimate we have and we don't have you know the most robust data but it's a good estimate it's easy i can see why it would be very easy to think but this is such a this is so bizarre because children can you know people do say things like children say all sorts children think my kid wanted to be a train you know and i can sort of understand where people aren't being facetious they think that um because they don't have a reference point for this very unique unusual experience although it is one that has existed throughout human history and i think what i wanted to kind of display by um yeah speaking to the families of trans children is that i think there can be this very um this fantasy that sorry i can hear like sirens going off outside my flashlight is the sound of the police yeah i don't know the difference between the different emergency sirens anyway um so yes i think it's very easy to think right so for kids socially transitioning seven or eight it's the parents that are driving this and i can sort of see why because it's hard to believe that this child would have this profound sense that they are another gender and that it's not just a fleeting thing so it's oh no it must be the parents pushing it and i know that's what a lot of people think and i can sort of see why they think it um especially if they've never met families like this so the reason i featured yeah in particular i make a case study of one family with a very young trans daughter who had transitioned um by the time i'd interviewed her she was in late primary school but she had been socially transitioned since she was about four um and yeah like these these parents did not know anything about trans people either and what's interesting about it is that this child as so many trans children who are able to articulate at a young age and not all do some some realize it later you know this is not something that's fleeting oh i want to be a train this is everyday confusion distress like really not understanding like you know almost feeling like why aren't adults getting this going into nursery getting half the class to refer to you by the pronouns of a different gender from the one you've been assigned at birth and then you know being really confused and distressed when people are correcting you and saying no that's wrong and these parents were very open and really opened up to me and i'm really grateful to them because what they kind of expressed was that like obviously they thought well there's something we haven't taught her um you know that we're missing something here this is a boy who wants feminine things which again is what a lot of people think it's like a little boy puts on a dress and then like you know they think that they confuse that with being a girl and these parents really really thought that too because they didn't know anything about trans kids also like i think on some level you know they knew it's not going to be an easy journey and i think they've never heard of trans children and so what i really wanted to sort of chat is you know often the supportive parents don't immediately leap to that it comes from really trying everything else um until they start to like maybe think well i i can't have this distressed child anymore so i'm gonna have to look into this further and they go on if you like it's a bit of a cliche and try and stuff a journey but for one of a better word a journey and kind of um yeah start to come to a place of acceptance themselves uh and i and i speak in depth in the book to a family that went through that um and i speak to a young trans man as well who's 18 um when i speak to him in the book but you know his mother had done the same when he'd come out about 12 or 13. you know these parents often are like they come from a position of confusion um which so many parents of lg even accepting parents of lgbtq plus people i think people our age like a lot of people's parents who are who are accepting now it's you know like we probably have friends who like go their mums go with them to pride but like it probably didn't start off that way and so rather than it being uh something that parents are driving often lgbtq kids who have managed to get advocacy from their parents obviously is luck about who their parents are what resources are available to them but also yes it's usually that the fact that the child has had to really really advocate for themselves sometimes from a very young age and that can be intensely distressing i thought on that it was a really interesting piece written by someone called nora mulready who's the sister of molly malready he's a brilliant campaigner for trans rights her child is trans and noram already was someone who self-identified as gender critical which is i suppose respectable intellectual veneer for anti-trans uh talking points and wrote about how that dogma that she had collided with the reality and you know she fought it she was like i don't wanna and then eventually just all her talking points all her dogma her you know her anti-trans talking points dissolved in the face of reality and i'm interested in asking about that because some of the anti-trans talking points you get now are basically as you just alluded to trans kids are non-confort gender non-conforming people who have essentially been coerced into believing that they're the wrong gender when actually you know let boys be whatever they want to be just because boys like dolls or girls like football and that's how they present it so i'm just interested in that whole you know that's why now they're saying it's homophobic to support trans rights yeah which i find are very annoying and dissonant from for my even from i mean much of my personal experience isn't in this book it's not a memoir i use some anecdotal things from my own youth but not not huge amounts um but obviously yeah in my case i mean i i very much tried to be a gender non-conforming uh queer man um in my in my early 20s and late teens um and so yeah like actually everyone i mean yeah my own personal experience everyone would have preferred um i think to have had like a flamboyant gay friend son um sibling whatever you know it would it would have been a lot easier in many ways and and i i think there are obviously there's a spectrum i'm not going to say that every trans child is completely certain from the beginning they're not there will be some people in the middle who um perhaps are confused about where they might sit on the gender spectrum or they don't know if they're a gender non-conforming woman or perhaps they're non-binary and you know they they have to go on a kind of um soul-surgeon for that and i think you know these labels often are quite contingent i think there are people who the language we use now to sometimes describe identity is a bit different to what people a generation older than me would use to describe um their identity so you might get some people i would say who might use the term non-binary now but would have just called themselves a butch um maybe like 30 years ago um so there's a fluidity there but the reality is is that yeah i think i think it's really crucial to say that no one um being trans like all the statistics it's really great how things have improved um for cis lgb kids i mean it's not improved in schools as much as people perhaps think it has um but stonewall statistics for example for the over the last like 10 years since 2007 do show there's been a reduction in stuff like homophobic taunting homophobic language houston schools all the evidence points the fact that's not the case for transphobia and for trans kids um so like if you just think about it for a second there's no logical advantage or um incentive for anyone to be pushing for someone to be a trans kid over a cis gay kid gender not you know gender conforming i think sometimes people some you know some trans people will express the way that they talk about their gender in very cliched stereotypical ways because that's the language that makes sense to them and people can seize on that and be like see you're not you don't really identify as like female you just like femininity um but i just think it's like i don't know i just think those gotchas um are a bit are a bit kind of disingenuous and tend to find the face of the evidence that like you know without doing oppression olympics the evidence shows it's still significantly harder um to be a trans person in britain than it is to be a cis lgb person and by no means saying that it's easy to be a cis lgb person i mean linked to that what would you say the parallels and differences are between i suppose the anti-trans moral panic of today and the previous moral panics about cisgender lgb people in the 80s onwards not just the 80s onwards but that was like the heyday really it's an interesting question so i think there are obvious parallels particularly in the media treatment um so you know it's very easy to look at you know people have done this loads on twitter i do a little bit in the book um dig up you can dig up some headlines um from the 80s and 90s of the same newspapers you know the times the sun the mail and uh particularly about gay men but not just about gaming there you know there's one that i refer to it just sounds so ludicrous to modern ears and it's a it's a story yeah a new story and i can't remember it's one of the tabloids in the in the 90s and it's this um haringey council and this young girl was being given lessons in lesbianism by a gay teacher you know and that was you know just sounds completely ludicrous but actually this idea of like recruiting the young contagion the the group is growing and that yeah they're recruiting more members and they represent an existential threat to uh life to public health that you know like obviously the aids crisis was a particular way that that was fueled in anti-gay panic um and for trans people it's more about the idea of irreversible medical transition than say something like um hiv um but i do think yeah there are parallels about this idea of contagion and recruitment of the young and um and deviants too i mean like people say you know i think a lot of gender critical feminists say yeah but there's a difference because we're not there's no moral repugnance about um trans people we just don't believe that they're the you know that they can't identify as the opposite sex but actually i only have to look at my twitter mentions to know that there is a deep repugnance in much the same way as like a true homophobe has a complete revulsion of two gay men kissing it's just like a kind of you know like a kind of lizard-like response like oh um they have that about trans people they have that about like the way we dress the way we look you know it it is viscerally a disgust and they just find us gross i mean like that is where that is where a lot of this does come from and i'm not saying all people do um who identify as gender critical i think some do have more sort of sophisticated analyses but like i think i think there is a moral discussed there um i think some people just don't like the idea of men in dresses or whatever um and they see us as creepy and you know fetishistic and all that stuff and that and that's really similar to homophobia it's just the idea that we're perverts so there so there is an overlap where i would say that there's um a little bit of a difference is because i think there's a risk that we could say oh well trans people are just like gay people but on a 20-year time lag and in 20 years and i i'm optimistic i hope that in 20 years time things will be significantly different and i think social attitudes are improving but i sometimes think that the trans panic is a continue it's a it's a kind of stuff that didn't get resolved as gay people assimilating to society because quite a lot of what the anxiety around gay people has always been is that gay people are gender non-conforming they don't do gender correctly if you sleep with the wrong person if you're a man who sleeps with men or woman who sleeps with women or someone who sleeps with both you um you're not doing gender correctly like we're supposed our gender is supposed to be heterosexual versions of our gender and i think what happened is that like mainstream gay acceptance was often relying on like you know it's not like mass for mask uh gay thing it's like you know we're we're the same as you we want the same things we just want to get married we want to do all the same things and trans people are a deeper anxiety because we're saying you know some trans people do say that we want all the same things but we we're kind of a new iteration of the same anxiety about like gender variance in society and because we go like a few like a little bit further um in terms of how we reject the gender roles that are assigned to us i think yeah i think there's a deeper anxiety about trans people also i think we're less easily assimilated because so many things in society in public space are gendered you know like we obviously toilets are the obvious example but so many things about how we organize ourselves socially are done on binary gender lines and trans people do represent a real challenge to that so i think sometimes the anxiety does go a bit deeper with trans people the other difficulty that we have that gay people didn't is is less of us so gay men kind of managed to get on tv sort of become normalized and you know graham norton et cetera lilly savage all the people that i loved when i was younger um you know i think i think that kind of cultural change came a little bit quicker because there were more gay people around to maybe create that visibility in society and trans people do not have that advantage because we're so small i suppose another a difference which is well just not true is is that's often argued as well the difference is actually homophobia this was something which was associated exclusively with the british right but that wasn't true i mean you had trotsky's first start who would argue yeah nothing bourgeois deviation which would disappear with capitalism homosexuality that is equally um i mean i'm deeply petty bourgeois but also um here's an article which argued uh that the case for gay rights was being undermined by militant homosexuals because they made unreasonable demands for the rest of society such as asking newspapers not to call them posters i'm not quoting from the sun or the mail i'm quoting from the observer in 1990 so actually actually i mean it's just interesting how history's revised isn't it you know well there's this like liberal what i call a liberal amnesia right like we saw it with like it's a sin earlier this year with like um with our mutual friend oli alexander um and what fascinated me about the reaction to that i don't know if you felt the same but amongst a lot of straight people and i felt like you know yeah a lot of straight people perhaps on my timeline um yes there's liberal amnesia like people sort of like liking to like you know oh wasn't it awful it's like you were alive then like what was your attitude to gay people at the time were you the person that was like if you thought a gay person had drunk from the same mug as you were you like throwing the mug away and there will be those people and you know it's good that they've moved on i'm all for like not not if people have genuinely involved in their views i'm not one to kind of like shame them about an evolution in views um because that's that's not like i would have written a book if i wasn't trying to convince people out of transphobia but um but yeah there is a liberal amnesia about about gay stuff and i do think like you know if you read the some of the colonists in the times and they say oh gay people just wanted to get married and they just wanted you know that it didn't interfere with anyone else and it's like no if you look at um the campaign to equalize the age of consent um for men who have sex with men you know the language being used at the time was like why are they so vested in the idea of like why are these old men so vested in the idea of making it legal to have sex with 16 year old boys it's a paedophile's charter why are these why are they why are these adults campaigning for it you know all that innuendo in much the same way as like if um if i talk about trans young people uh anyone who advocates for like trans young people so why are you so keen on like transitioning these kids why are you so keen on arresting their puberty and it's all this like sort of like innuendo about predation and and yeah and it's and i think like the observer thing that you just quoted it just shows it wasn't it wasn't just the right wing and and maybe a lot of the people that write for places like the observer and the guardian et cetera like now like to think that though that those publications were always um you know their temperature was always right on these issues they they took the temperature correctly you know they clearly didn't i mean you also get this kind of oh you're gonna win about the red wall with this sort of chat as though and all red wall people are biggest but as example in 1987 neil kinnick's press secretary patricia hewitt wrote the looney le labor left is now taking its toll the gay and lesbians issue was costing us dear amongst the pensioners but now those those same people saying that about trans people now they would go oh well obviously that was horrible they you know we could never you know because obviously gay rights are sacred but they they wouldn't apply the same logic today that you stand and fight for the rights of a minority even if you're even even even if lots of people are resistant to that yeah absolutely well that's why again in the book i write about um there's a chapter called class struggle right because precisely to address that is that is that the kind of left-wing strain of or yeah like like so you're not gonna win the red wall back and it's this idea that like trans people are somehow materially different from them from it's like a liberal bourgeois these people like it's an ideology that basically is like set up by a big pharma it wants to trap all these people into getting all this cosmetic surgery to realize their inner cells it's individualist it's libertarian and so one most trans people are begging for basic health healthcare on gofundme even in britain and certainly in the us like if it's this huge big pharma lobby that's trying to make us life long paying thousands of pounds where are we getting the thousands of pounds from because people are literally begging um for basic health care um two all of the kind of like you know hormones and stuff that trans people take are made for cis people like we're not the market for it like i take the same hormones that the if i open the label of my hormones it's all about women who are going through menopause like no one's thinking about me when they when they when they manufacture those hormones it's just just a complete fantasy but i think all of that stuff it ties into this like yeah idea that trans stuff is like this kind of bourgeois liberal um individualist anti-leftist not really um yeah not a socialist concern and i was really keen the book is very socialist for this reason um and it makes a really socialist argument the book is very social that sounds very vapid like it it makes a specifically socialist argument because um yeah because trans people like struggle so much to get employment like um you know all this again all the statistics show that one in three trans like one in three employers in the uk wouldn't knowingly hire a trans person like half of trans people who are employed have to hide the fact they're trans at work trans people as workers if you want to talk like socialism are like often in very precarious poor working conditions the vast majority um and and that's often not seen right like people see people like me in the media a middle class privileged trans person and that's the way that these things often go is that the people that have the time to be writing books and stuff like that are the privileged ones which is why i wanted to kind of amplify the voices of people who whose experience isn't like mine and uh and yeah so like most trans people are workers so this idea that like trans people don't form part of the working class they absolutely do trans people are always overrepresented in the leftist organizing if you go to any demo like there's always trans people there like um trans people have always been like part of the left even when the left hasn't treated them very well and that's because trans people frankly need the left um because of the precarity with which many of them lead their lives both in housing like many of them move their lives in housing healthcare and and the workplace i mean on that you know the class politics of trans rights i think is is really interesting because again as you say it's often misportrayed as this identitarian issue and all the rest of it when actually and again obviously in the same way that uh a cis woman who is a cleaner and a cis woman who is the ceo of a bank they have different lived experiences and they have but they also suffer for example sexual harassment in the streets male violence in different ways so just tell me about that the class politics of of trans rights and the kind of economic and social demands that are absolutely critical in order to ensure that trans people actually achieve genuine liberation rather as well as the issues of street level you know abuse that they suffer in in tandem right well the thing is like the first thing to say is that like um probably just a very basic point right is that uh the degree to which as you like the comparison with cis women the degree to which you experience transphobia is really bound up with your class position right like i you know i know firsthand as someone that like you know when i first started transitioning i was actually on job seekers allowance and now obviously um you know i have like a kind of very full career and stuff like that and have a bit more means and the sunday behind his best-selling book yes true is there are so many forms of transphobia that you can simply pay to escape like i you know like if i had been able in the early days where i perhaps didn't blend in as well and i was getting street harassment to like you know even if you can get a cab home you can afford that that makes your life and your mental health and everything else very very different and then we get into things like do you have secure housing um do you have a job is your job respectful of your identity is it a job that you know if you're if you're a job that's a stonewall diversity champion they've done the training they've provided the gender neutral toilet you know that's very different to working on a zero hours contract where like everyone makes fun of you you could basically like you're worried all the time that like they might just think oh i'm not going to give you any more work because you're a freak or you know all that stuff and i've met trans people that's their reality there's a very very different position right and also um as i said about health care i referred to people begging a minute ago is that you know there's a uh you know and again i have a chapter on health care in the book is um yeah we have the nhs and trans people can access certain types of care not all the not all the care really that they would need in many cases on the nhs but the waiting lists are now so abysmal the entire system is broken it's been exacerbated by covid you're waiting perhaps three four years on the nhs for a first appointment you're certainly not going to get like any hormones to be starting your transition our first appointment and so like you know again if you can go private with healthcare and start you know your transition area you can you know if you're trans woman you can start getting laser hair removal i mean these things sound a bit like but you know there's a huge difference between yeah perhaps if you can blend in a bit more of society and ironically you're more likely to get a job if you blend in like there's this kind of catch-22 where like the more that you kind of work meet society's agreeable standards of gender conformity which you can only sometimes access through healthcare the more you're likely to walk into a job interview and they're not going to like see you as a freak and the more likely they are to hire you so there's this so this is kind of huge bind for like working class trans people and i would say the majority of trans people are working class just as the majority of people are working class like obviously there will be the odd example that like people will always point to i mean people point to me right like i'm always very open about the fact i got a scholarship to a public school then i went to oxford then i became a lawyer and obviously people always point that out i'm like it's true you know i've been very lucky i'm not representative and i say that i'm at pains to say that in the book um and but the reality is actually i'm the rarity um and the trouble is it's much like pointing to like a very well-off you know it's like when people would say i point to i don't know rich black people in the media and apply that just because there are some black people living in great style and comfort you know celebrities that doesn't mean racism and racialized poverty doesn't exist i mean it's just nonsense so yeah class class really distinctly shapes your experience of being trans and then obviously yeah like uh trans trans rights a big part of his workers workers rights i think the trouble is with the gender recognition act reform in recent years which was obviously a touted reform now shelved by boris johnson of course um about reforming the gender recognition processes because of the huge backlash to that it became this huge big fight in the media and i feel like it's become almost like a drain on energy because i think what would actually help most trans people more is like proper workers rights proper protections obviously they have protection under the equality act you can't technically legally fire someone for being trans in the uk unlike some states in america but of course we know like workers rights are very poor you we know that like people can circumvent the law we also know that trans people you know legal aid has been cut through austerity most trans people don't have any money and if they do they're certainly not going to be able to be able to spend it on solicitors to take things to tribunal we're not all gender critical feminists who can raise hundreds of thousands of pounds to take our kind of like lux litigation to the supreme court you know like in reality is that even if you your legal rights have been violated as a trans person your recourse is probably non-existent in practical effect your book in terms of your your arguments and favorite translation are very much bound up with a very profound critique of capitalism and uh you know you you very much link together the struggle for trans liberation with with i suppose a socialist struggle and if i was going to be in neo-liberal devil's advocate i'm saying which is obviously my de facto starting point anyway um a lot of radical gay actors said in the 1980s that the struggle for gay liberation couldn't happen until capitalism was superseded and obviously then what happened is lots of legal rights were won the anti-gay laws were removed um and social acceptance which has still got a long way to go but it's obviously much better than it was i mean not hugely better than it was in the 1980s um and in fact now you get pink washing you get companies which will wrap themselves in the pride flag for commercial reasons because they know younger audiences think lgbtq rights is a good thing to be associated with and they might buy products off the back of it so isn't that potentially the case just again with trans rights that actually trans rights it might not be ideal but a transfer could be won under capitalism yeah well it depends like rights for who right so even if we use your example about gay people let's say gay cisgender gay men right so which cisgender gay men because like yeah if you're like yeah fine if you went to a you know if you went to a russell group university and then you moved to london and you're a white middle class gay man and then you're right sorry and then you're like you know you find your people and like yeah you can go to pride and like you know uh go to gay late when you're like you know in your early 20 all that stuff like yeah that's a degree of um acceptance that certainly like gay men did not have 30 years ago but like let's have a look at like you know in london just in london like the housing crisis how many like you know the the issues in the in the in the gay community amongst like still with hiv still with um the fact that like uh gay men's sexual health isn't treated as like a proper public health issue um issues with drugs and alcohol on the scene um and yeah with the housing crisis i mean like there are people you know sofa surfing doing casual sex work even in london even among that demographic right there there are still plenty of like um gay people and then if we add in like if we say which gay people what about the gay men who are in immigration removal centers across britain who are still like you know who are basically our government locks up when they have come to britain seeking asylum um you know and yeah we're marching with pride and then like um i don't know the airlines that deport them back to like assist our government to deport them back to places that face extreme violence potentially you know we're marching alongside those those companies all those arms dealers all those you know so the reality is it's only been partial under capitalism it really depends again on your class position um so yeah like obviously like i mean i'm doing all right you know what i mean under campuses and i can't i can't i can't pretend that i'm materially oppressed in the way that most people are um in the trans community but that what the argument i'm making is that yeah like it will only ever be partial and the reality is that like yeah it's certainly not where cisgender lgb people are but but yeah under socialism well i still don't think gay liberation has been achieved i agree with the liberation socialists of like you know of the early gay liberation front um and i still i still yeah i still agree with them and i think with trans rights i think it's that if i'm making a sort of like ground zero argument like let's build up let's build up um considering that there wasn't necessarily a political book like this in britain about trans liberation then obviously i'm going to be like well we have you know if we were thinking you in a utopian um progressive way we'd be starting to think well we have to you know we have to stop making an argument that's going to include everyone um but i i don't i don't know how much in reality like there are obviously the temptation to assimilate into capitalism and particularly when you're perhaps at the you know in the class position where you might be welcomed in a bit more is very very tempting for you know people from all minority groups um but i don't think we should take that as a sign that just because we can see those people may be thriving under capitalism that um that socialism can be just sort of put in the bin and just to avoid some very tedious social media interactions as a white middle-class oxford graduate i was asking the devil's advocate question everyone so just don't even try it um we we have spoken before on this show about i suppose what could be called the british strain of transphobia uh it's not the case obviously that transphobia is specific to this country obviously it's everywhere um but obviously you know there are some quite specific characteristics in this country the way it's evolved and the sort of institutions it's really colonized so i'm just interested in that in terms of i do think the radicalization of many of those elements has gone up a notch to be honest and it keeps going up a notch and i do think this will wind them up if they're watching and listening but i do think there are some parallels actually with anti-vaxxer um conspiracism in it's the same kind of you know scientific conspiracy go coming for our children often quite vulnerable people without being overly sympathetic who are who go down online rabbit holes i mean what is your understanding of i suppose the modern what they call themselves the gender critical movement where it's come from the sorts of people it's attracting you've got the lgb alliance which is basically an astroturf campaign but you know but they they are now because now i get you know bombarded with people who are generally straight calling me homophobe homophobic they obviously relish doing that like we get to call the gays over there i know i get it i get it all the time and it's like do you know that like literally i don't think i like see or speak to anyone who isn't gay like from one end of the week to the next like like oh yeah i'm homophobic against gay men because i'm trying to recruit gay boys to be girl it's like this is like do you know how many gay men but yeah yeah and so yeah the gender critical movement um well i my my my personal theory on this is um yeah that that term which has risen in uh in recent years is their kind of self-designation because a lot of them didn't like the term turf it's interesting that like i think it's it that term gender critical is very useful because it's a kind of cover for a real motley crew of a lot of people that a lot of disparate types of people that don't have a lot in common apart from hating trans people and it doesn't like you know because turf used to be like when it was a specific strain of feminism it originally meant that but like you know you see like a lot of like people in their bios on twitter say gc man you know and they're not they're not even gay men they're straight men so it's not even like a it's not always just like a feminist movement now it's just a cover for like basically i don't i don't believe trans people about anything they say about themselves and i also don't really want them to have any rights um but it yes it's an odd motley crew so obviously you get the kind of respectable people who write the broadsheets who would be very angry with you comparing them to anti-vaxxers because they think their position is very reasonable and thought out um someone like i'm gonna i'll for example someone like jk rowling i believe thinks that well i mean she her position you know she's not a stupid woman it's that hers is her has come from a specific reflection on what she believes trans people are trying to argue for which i would disagree with but it's her belief on that and i think she's thought about i think she's probably given it far too much for what i would think for a woman of her means i literally you'd never hear from me again but um but like i think um so there's a difference between her right but then like what what i do see is there's this underbelly uh and i'm sure you see it too of on social media in forums let's say some parenting forums in the uk twitter and stuff like that it's people who are not using their own names the people who really say the vicious stuff to me who still have gender critical in their bios you know who this is that is it's conspiratorial some of the stuff is well like you know there's there's whenever i do anything on your show there's all i always see stuff in my mentions about how we're sleeping together that i'm seducing you into which by the way absolutely clear we've had a long running and obviously very intense and passionate sexual relationships so we can put that one to bed in a literal sense i know it's quite it's quite it's quite funny that like i think it's very funny that there's a conspiracy theory that i'm seducing gay men into trans rights considering that when i was living as one i wasn't so good at choosing um but yeah like but you know that that i gave that's like a fun example for the entertainment value of the show but um you know there are there is these delusional conspiracy theories i see all the time in my mentions and it is quite paranoid um and there is an underbelly of that um and i i do think in that that strain of it is and then you see also some women and i and i said this in an interview for the new statesman recently you know who are like a lot of women are drawn to feminism because they have been badly traumatized by men by cis men and my personal kind of view on that is like obviously i can completely empathize with that as as like so many trans women i know have too um and i actually don't know that much difference in the experiences of trans women i know and cis women i know in terms of domestic violence sexual assault etc like even in my personal acquaintance i would say the experiences are markedly similar um but like but yes so they so they have a very reason to be drawn to feminism but i think what can happen is that because of like and again this is where i tie it to the socialist argument is we've been living you know we've lived under 10 years of austerity it's like half of all refuge we don't talk about women's refuges which is a big site of this kind of debate if you like half of all refuge requests now are like turned down pretty much because there aren't enough spaces the you know the tories have been slashing women's services crisis services for decades and i think like it's a misdirected anger because there's the scarcity mentality i think there's a real pessimism feminism obviously did achieve a lot but like if you look at the feminists of the 70s who built refuges i think a lot of the kind of the more radical ones i think they built refuges yes to protect women from men's violence and to allow them space to heal and recover from the trauma of patriarchy but there was no that was never supposed to be the end goal the end goal was supposed to bring an end to patriarchy and perhaps you know to think about society in which men and boys are not raised to abuse women and unfortunately we haven't really there's been no diminishment of male violence of domestic violence if the violence that women and girls have to endure in their kind of most personal intimate lives um and so that i can understand a pessimism where it's like well it's unchangeable men are violent women are the people who are violated men oppressed women of the oppressed male female this very binary view and and a sense that yeah it's fixed really almost and that like it's fixed in our biology it's what it ultimately becomes like male female sex matters because a lot of gender critical feminists will say things like sex matters and so i guess i'm aware that our biology matters i'm aware that a woman's a cisgender woman's reproductive capacity is a source of oppression i'll never be able to understand and never experience and and it obviously is one a lot of the oppression of women is tied to their capacity to reproduce i i've always accepted that um but like yes i think so when they say sex matters i think what they often mean is sex is a determinant of like how we should order society and a predictor of your behavior and it's like when a gender is a predictive behavior how perhaps how people are raised how they're socialized et cetera is a predictor of their behavior but like it quite quickly slips into like biological essentialism and so then it becomes about defending womanhood defending the term female defending the barriers of that category and then it's suddenly it's like will trans women become the ultimate obsession and the ultimate enemy because we're seen as interlopers who are trying to enter that category and it is true that i do see some you know some women who who tweet far more about trans women than like you know other huge issues like you know the in-cell who killed those women kill people in plymouth you know like they'll still be tweeting about trans women and it's like you know are we really the problem um but you know i i have i have a degree of empathy for that but so i think there are some very hurt people particularly cisgender women in the gender critical movement i think there are some that come from a very old tradition of radical feminism but probably similarly um their feminism comes from that but i do think there are a lot of misogynist men who like abusing trans women for our appearance online some of the most sexually degrading comments i've ever had are from gender critical men and then i also think that there are a lot of um cantankerous um slightly bitter um people in the lgbt community who perhaps maybe it's because i mean i wouldn't want to predict it but they you know i think the people well the lgb alliances for the lgb alliance it's full of a lot of straight people um but i do think like yeah there are a lot of gay people who perhaps you know again have struggled in their lives and then they sort of see this idea that everything's about trans now stonewall only talks about trans what about us and again it's that scarcity mentality i would say giving them the benefit of the doubt the other thing i would say about the lgbt alliance is yeah one is entirely run by straight people but as i discussed in the book the vast majority of trans people are bisexual anyway and technically according to them i'm a gay man so like why don't trans people run the lgb alliance when they're like we should we'll argue i'll be the i'll be the ceo lesbian gay and bisexual people well good because most trans people are bi so we all get to join although a lot of them aren't that keen on bisexual people i know they aren't of course um is there a kind of darkest is darkest before dawn interpretation of a lot of anti-trans backlash in that a lot of backlashes against the struggle of women and minorities happens when they're achieving greater visibility and greater justice so you saw with the civil rights movement in the united states you saw white lash which was very intense and had some and continues ugly manifestations anti-gay attitudes in the 1980s whilst gay people were achieving greater visibility and the movement was growing feminism the whole kind of feminazis aggressive women rather again you know the anti-woman backlash which accompanied the successes of feminism is there something in that is some of this actually not that as much comfort for trans people on the receiving end but is there something in that that actually some of this is it comes from the place of a side that knows they're going to lose and not just lose slightly but actually without being hubristic lose comprehensively in the end although i'm not saying women and minorities have won comprehensively there's not a long way to go but they have won certain rights and gains so is there something in that i mean it depends like i would i would probably disagree because i i don't tend to frame things as uh winning or losing i mean i i can kind of see why but i think it's because like i think liberation struggles aren't linear so like there's no point where you can go up we've won so that's why i i don't particularly use that language but taking your point i think yeah of course like um christine burns the trends campaigner um who was you know worked on the first gender recognition at in 2004 and was part for press for change which was the big trans organization that got us a lot of rights in terms of like protections under the equality act because if you know she said something i watched a documentary that fred mcconnell made i think um who appeared with me on the show last time um something about trans people committed to basically the ultimate crime for any minority which was starting to become more visible and i think that's true is that like when you are visible and you start to like you know like slightly have a sense of like well actually i'm entitled to be here which like i would you know this is the insane thing about like if you know when people say get out of our toilets or whatever it's like i'm i'm never gonna i really do believe i have a right to use whatever toilet i want like i mean you're just not gonna persuade me out of that and i think like you know as as generation like if you look at probably trans kids who who are coming up now their expectations of how society should treat them i would hope um would be a lot higher than mine were when i first transitioned and that's a good thing right like um and yeah for some people who are very invested in the status quo that's very threatening it seemed fine when we were in a time in history um perhaps 30 years ago where trans people would go off quietly to their doctor they'd be given some hormones and some surgery and they're expected to move away from where they've grown up change their name never tell anyone and blend in and disappear back into cis society and therefore the gender binary was still intact trans people carried all the burden for the rest of their lives of being trans and society didn't you know had to just accommodate them through giving them you know by pathologizing them and allowing psychiatrists to basically do as they wished with them and then like when when you start to get like yeah trans people who are actually like well no i don't have to i don't have to not look trans i don't have to pretend that i was assigned to the sex at birth i'm going to be vocal about this i'm going to talk about um stuff in the public sphere are right so you know i'm gonna sort of say i'm trans but i'm still a woman that's deeply threatening to people and i think i think that's what kicked off a lot and i think that's why the gender recognition act seemed so threatening to people was this idea suddenly people were like where did this come from the idea that suddenly trans people could legally say well i am this gender therefore i should be able to have documents in this gender and then this like thing about self-id and this is a very new idea it's like well no like what do you think trans is like say standing up and saying actually i'm not i'm not a boy i'm i'm a girl or i'm a woman that i mean that is self id that's what trans people have done throughout history i mean like this isn't a new idea it's just the fact that you're hearing about it for the first time and that perhaps we're giving we're giving some legal credence to it um so so yeah so i think so i think there is a backlash to that and i and i do think um yeah i think i think what i would say that i'm hopeful about in terms of um the advances that trans people are making is that yeah the backlash is mainly especially in britain is like within it's in there's a lot of people in the media and there's a lot of um perhaps people in certain institutions that can be scary for people like so in politics in the labour party um in you know in the broadsheets very vocal transphobia can be in those places but like culturally i mean like as you know the fact that my book has sold so well is is is encouragement to me and the people i've met even in like two weeks of it being out has really given me a lot of hope about like actually twitter's not real life yes there's like a very committed vanguard of anti-trans um activism in the uk but like actually culturally i do think a lot of trans people feel like winning the argument you know a lot of people just don't one don't really care good um like long as we're not harming them and two quite a lot of people are supportive and yeah the very fact like you know without digging up my book sales i the reason it's genuinely heartwarming is because what it suggests to me is that like people were thirsting for because there's been such a media consensus that there is a desire to read an alternative because the media despite its obsession with freedom of speech having the debate there like there isn't there's no there's no counterpoint ever like where like why is this book like answering a need it's because there isn't anyone actually making the pro trans case in the media they're always like let's have the debate it's like well where is the debate you like because actually there's a lot of people claiming to be silenced in the media but there aren't very many trans people um and when there are trans people there were people like me like paris leagues like junior dawson like freelancers not editors not people in positions of power um and so see the media debate and the cultural debate and the inroads that trans people are making in terms of actual acceptance in our communities in um in the arts in like yeah so many great spheres of public life i think a really you know i think there's a real disparity there and it's good to focus on the stuff that's positive finally although do you put anything in the in in this response which you we haven't addressed or you think is really important to talk about in a world what would a world in which there was genuine total transliberation kind of hypothetical world what would it look like for trans people and what would it look like for everybody else what would that kind of in practical terms what kind of freedoms would exist and how would just life be different for trans people and for everybody else because you know i think about it sometimes with gay people in a world in which coming out doesn't exist as a thing kind of yeah what what do you say what what what does it look like but also just shoehorning anything well this is this is spicy right because a lot of trans people disagree with me on this because i have you know i i as i say i'm just one person trans people don't all have we're not the proponents of a single ideology that is like you know we're trying to get we're doing policy capture of the police and schools and governments with our one gender ideology that we all share turns out um is yeah i'm you know i i don't like you know i'm quite open about the fact that i don't really believe i mean i don't really care it's a bit like sexuality which is a gay gene i don't really believe gender identities are innate and people might be like but how can you think of and i'm like yeah i think a four-year-old can already have a profound sense of gender and where they want to sit in a gender spectrum enough for it to warrant adult attention because it interferes with their life and distresses them for it not to be acknowledged that doesn't mean that i think like i have a gendered soul um and so for me as someone that believes that actually gender is contextual like the word trans has only existed for like 100 years there have been people and i use a lot of historical examples but i don't call anyone before the term was invented trans i say they led a cross gender life or they were gender variant um and so like i think the language is constantly evolving and i would think in a truly liberated future i would not even need to call myself trans the category wouldn't exist like i'm here for like abolishing like unlike actual gender-critical people i think part means like an actual gender abolitionist i think in a truly liberated future perhaps the categories of man and woman wouldn't exist as we you know dwarkin said that and then i quote andrea dawkin who is beloved of many gender critical feminists who i don't think have read her um you know she said like perhaps you know the terms man and woman are only used male and female because there are as yet no others and i kind of agree with her i think in a truly liberated future it's the same thing like would we have queer and straight like straight is as much a term that we need to use now because like you know in a truly liberated future perhaps that would you know the term straight wouldn't exist nor would the term cis need to exist um and i know that's like that probably i'm probably losing people here because it sounds quite fantastical but to me it's like yeah the true true liberation isn't about clinging on i'm not all about clinging on to binaries and categories it's about using language as a political tool for political action so like i use the term woman because it politically can mean something it registers something to people it makes me legible to people around me but i would hope that i would not be replicate what a lot of anti-trans feminists do which is like clinging to the term for dear life is that i think in a truly liberated future we'd have to think much more expansively about those categories um and yeah of course like uh what it is like you know gender itself is shaped by capitalism like if we're talking socialism like the the need for women's reproductive labor to be kind of subjugated under patriarchy is because it you know in this time it serves it serves capitalism the nuclear family the way that we like raise our children the way that we raise boys and men the idea of work what's men's work and women's work the idea that like you know care work raising children is still you know even for middle class women like middle class women still expect to do most of the child care like you know there are there are many ways that like serve capitalism that um also serve patriarchy and serve the gender binary and so like yeah i i mean i can't give you a full answer of what a liberated future would look like but i'm interested in that i'm interested in actually how do we start dismantling these things and i hope that we will begin to because uh capitalism's in free fall in crisis and the climate crisis is uh gonna screw us if we don't we don't start to think radically about how we reorganize society there's the book for those listening to the podcast i have an extremely battered copy which sean suggested when i post using a shameless thirst trap i was just had some questionable shorts on on a beach and first tracks for socialism nothing wrong with that they were very they were very they were very heterosexual shorts people suggested my choice where i hate crime against gay people anyway although i'm actually secretly heterosexual it should be a big reveal i'm not i'm a massive raging homosexual but this is uh you suggest they look like i played volleyball with it anyway because it is battered but that is the sign of a loved bock i don't like looking at pristine books because it suggests that they're for show it is a brilliant book it is a masterful masterpiece it's just it's so insightful it answers so much it's one of those books where you read some sentences you go oh that just explains something in a way that really makes sense and resonates in a way that i've never read anywhere else before which is not i'm afraid the case with many books including my own so it is brilliant to have such an incredible book which everybody should read as i've said if you don't really understand this issue if you want to understand more whether you know trans people you don't know trans people and you just think this is something i've need to come to grips with this is the book and it links everything together which is great it's intersectional that's the that's the that's what so yeah exactly it went together different struggles for liberation because we're not free until we all are so it is a brilliant brilliant brilliant brilliant book and we're so just just to have you again as ever really to be honest yeah thank you for having me again thank you for promoting it and um yeah i'm sure i'm sure it will help sales you do have a big region oh yeah that's why i did it i didn't think about it yeah that was it she's got sean hates me actually very annoying irritating and but she went through this just for the sales no seriously do buy it and make sure everyone you know buys it what's up people bully them harangue them threaten them physically don't do that actually because you're gonna i know what's gonna happen now no don't say that people will basically say now that you've basically sent an army of people to threaten people owen didn't mean that everyone it was a it was a it was a joke it was a metaphor it was yeah that's what i meant all right and uh and sean has succeeded very high expectations for this interview they were already high well done you didn't let the side down thank you sean lots of love i do follow sean if you're not already on instagram and twitter where the content is always what's it love sean thanks

Channel: Owen Jones

Views: 5,323

Rating: 4.5299759 out of 5

Keywords: lgbt, lgbtq, socialism, socialist

Id: BlgH_NmOkEw

Length: 60min 5sec (3605 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021