What is a woman anyway?

[Music] my name is Ella Whelan I am a columnist at the online magazine spiked and I'm also producer at the battle of ideas Academy of ideas I'm hosting this strand it's called identity Wars feminism posts me too and I have to admit this is the debate that I centered the strand on what is a woman anyway because I am infinitely fascinated by the discussion about women women womanhood many people will have seen the news about the warm xn scandal or fury or mess or whatever you want to call it in relation to the Wellcome Trust not least discussions about the gender recognition act what defines a woman how women can be defined whether or not women sees women should be able to set the definition for what women are all of that is in relation to the trans discussion is so infinitely fascinating and I'm really delighted that we're going to have this I don't use the word safe space ever really but I'm saying that this is going to be a relatively safe space to talk about some of those interesting and difficult ideas but also also not just in relation to trans I think the discussion about women what it means to be a woman what it means to be a good woman today is also interesting so you have discussions within feminism about what it means to be a good feminist and therefore a good woman it means shunning things like page three and it means celebrating things like free the nipple there's weird contradictions within what constitutes being a woman and discussions about sex woman's role in the workplace women's role in the home all of this seems to be sort of up for grabs and at speaking as a woman which is also something I necessarily like saying and I have to admit that I've never really thought about this before in my 26 years and suddenly I'm being forced to confront what I think it means to be a woman and I'm not sure that I either have the answer I want to give an answer but I certainly want to talk about it and I have a fantastic panel today to help me do so first to speak will be Heather Bruns galavan's he was an academic and a writer and as co-editor of transgender children and young people and many of you will know that Heather has run into let's say some obstacles in talking about this subject has been barred from speaking at many meetings we certainly wanted to get her to give her opinion on what it means to be a woman today next up will be Krissy dance who is a schoolteacher a cabaret performer and an author on transgender and gender variant identity next we'll be Kathy Gardner ginger there we go ginger who is the co-editor of the conservative woman writes a lot about womanhood feminism abortion lots of issues in relation to that and last but not least is Johanna Williams who's the head of education and culture at the Policy Exchange and the author of the very influential book women vs feminism she's also the associate editor at spiked so we're going to do this in the sort of traditional bi format we will have introductions from our speakers and then we're going to go straight out to you guys for contributions and questions so without further ado Heather can you kick me off okay and I've just got a very strict seven minutes which I'm going to find it very difficult to comply with I just want to say that for the first time I've actually come to a meeting where there hasn't been a group of trans activists outside attempting to stop me from going in and shouting at me trans women are women trans women are women so I think that a woman when we you throughout history the woman question has always been asked and it's always been asked in relation to men and what are women in relation to men and it's usually that men tell women who they are and have been doing so since the beginning of recorded history and I'm putting the trans men uh who identify as women shouting at me that trans women are women into the category of men who continually who continue the tradition of telling women who they are how they should think about their bodies etc so just a little bit of brief academic stuff because I can't resist it men have attributed to themselves the prototype of what it is to be human positioning themselves positioning women as their inferior other religion evolutionary biology and medicine have all attributed women's inferior status to her defective body or biology rather than to the political organization of women as a sex class so notable women throughout the centuries have dared to resist this masculist definition of women's bodies and they've argued that gender identity is a product of culture not of nature and they've separated biological sex from social gender when you do that when you separate out gender and sex instead of using them as interchangeable concepts then gender is a social product and the politics of gender identity become much more clear so this women have done this as I said through the centuries it's an epistemological and a political move there's an attempt to reframe theories models of sex gender and human nature indeed now this move was not intended to dispense with material reality but in the nineteen broadly speaking than that the 1980s perhaps increasing in strength during the 1990s post structuralism and peasant ISM and queer theory developed the idea of social constructionism beyond the point at which we could look at the social construction of the body and began to dispense with any notion of the body whatsoever so they developed it far more than a feminist materialist intention and transgender ideology is the casualty of this ironically transgender ideology dispensed with biological essentialism but in fact it Raya Phi's it it simply reverses the order so that gender identity becomes inherent and fixed and unmovable and somehow binary sex categorization is allegedly socially constructed this has no scientific basis whatsoever and compels a kind of religious faith belief in things like the pink brain the blue brain don't tell me how much longer I've got okay and this idea of inherent gender identity is the very thing that has policed women through the centuries so strangely in the era when we celebrate the centenary of women's vote we actively silenced women from defining their own bodies so when the dictionary definition of woman is put on tiny stickers or a statement uttered that human beings in possession of penises are male the police investigate women who save such things for hate speech and and do far worse things to them actually women are threatened and indeed men too who support the feminist argument threatened in their jobs and so on but I don't need to explain that to people here so I answer the question a woman is sex female our sex was not assigned at birth it was empirically observed my body is a material reality through which I have loved given birth four times fed babies and have had some sexual pleasure you please know me too I thought I would give a positive introduction of my own materiality rather than a negative for and which okay I'll answer questions about that later no doubt not too many personal ones please okay so to end I want to say thank you Ellen is it possible for us to be grown-up and hold in our minds two ideas namely that instead of the dichotomy nature or nurture we can think of the body as both a material reality but one inevitably lived through cultural constructions and power relations thank you very much okay I want to start by talking a little bit about the experience of trans people which we do hear a lot about we could go through a whole list of hardships that are suffered physical sexual assaults family rejection religious persecution homelessness discrimination and various forms of self-harm now it is to begin with awkward I wasn't looking for some statistics to possibly bring along but it's very difficult because a lot of it is self reporting and it is quite also very difficult to disentangle where the cause of particular hardships might come from so for instance it is true I think that in most of those areas trans people are at a disadvantage socially but how much of that is to do with the fact that they have to invest time effort and money into going through transition that sort of thing but what I would like to say is that whatever these the hardships that trans people suffer and I think a lot of it is social so it's certainly historically there was a lot of antagonism towards such people but I don't think any of it has got anything to do with how they say that they are so in other words I was listening to an interview with Paris Li's yesterday and she seemed absolutely lovely and she was talking about her childhood and all of the abuse all of the the self-doubt that she suffered from throughout that and at the end of it I thought you know she would have gone through exactly the same experience if she had come out at the end of that and decided to be a gay man as as as she did anyway also there are certain senses in which the new definition an ideology of what transgender means actually end up excluding people who would otherwise be considered as transgender most obvious examples Glasgow pride which 2015 and this year have excluded drag queens from taking part in that other pride events have sort of relegated drag queens and you can be within the trans umbrella if you identify as a woman once every Tuesday or every other Tuesday that's fine well you have to buy into the three bits of the philosophy basically that feeling that you are a woman means you are one other people have to accept that if they don't accept that or even if they just question that they are accused then of trying to make you not a person which I don't think follows at all along okay so to answer the question are trans women women I want to think about four ways in which we can think about how to get to the truth of that matter the one will be the law now generally speaking I think that it is best when the law just as little as possible specifically especially in terms of deciding what isn't what isn't true but when we when we take this this particular question before 1970 it was the law had no opinion on it there were men who had transitioned who'd become women who live as women they could get married they could informally go or go about having documents changed that sort of things in 1970 in Britain April Ashley brought well it wasn't her actually her husband brought the case to the law courts wanted to get the marriage annulled and the judge decided that actually a man cannot become a woman so the law then said from 1970 a man cannot be a woman and all transsexual women were men according to the law till 1990 till 2004 the gender recognition Act changed all that but it didn't just mean that transsexual women who did everything that they could to be as women to blend in and and live as women the law as it currently stands does state that as long as you fulfil the criteria you show that you intend to live the rest of your life you go through two years etc etc that at the end of that you can be legally classified as a woman without actually having anything without actually demonstrating that in any ways at all which give brings us an interesting anomaly where Paris Lee's who has transitioned fully who would be easily mistaken as a woman isn't a woman legally because she hasn't got gender recognition act whereas someone like Alex Drummond who initially went through that process and then decided it's just going to where as full beard a little bit of eye makeup pearls but he is legally a woman okay I think that causes a lot of confusion for ordinary people the second way of deciding the truth is science so biology and they wonder spend too much this is a huge subject but I just want to pick up on a couple of things first of all there are anomalies sex is not doesn't have sharp edges there are some anomalies there are people born with male chromosomes and testes but to all appearances our women are brought up as women sometimes they do have ambiguous traits sometimes those change during adolescence but that doesn't mean as many people say that we have a gender spectrum spectrum looks like that there's stages going from blue to pink the biological fats looks more like that there's a little strip down the middle okay so biologically speaking that's what it that's what that amounts to also the brain there is no such thing as a female brain brains all are mosaics and hence I'll have to speed up and got much time yeah I'll just get that one and come back to it two other ways of deciding the truth again I'm just going to mention them because I'm only out of time personal conviction but I think that runs throughout the whole of this discussion so I don't need to say more on that specifically and common experience how we normally experience things and I think there is an enormous amount of goodwill in society that if someone demonstrates that they want to live this way most of us most of the time are completely fine with that and don't have a problem so to conclude then I think there has to be a bottom line and this is but because of what feminism managed to achieve in the 1970s I think one of the greatest things that feminism did was that it's established that you as a woman can do anything you like you can dress how you want you can go after any sort of job behaviors you want you can be lesbian none of that makes you any less a woman that was not the case before that time for that time if you behaved in a less feminine way you were considered less of a woman if you take that logic which is a victory as I say I think it's empowered women if you take that logic and apply that to trans women you logically you end up with someone that just says well actually I think I I am a woman and and that doesn't fit it basically that's that's anomalous with common sense with the and it it it undermines the Asian and the goodwill which have been built up hitherto also one final point is that there is a similarity I think in this argument that what I say is the truth with the I believe her hashtag in other words it is no longer the case or that's the threat no longer the case that we interrogate find out the truth through looking at evidence through arguing debating and and even coming into conflict we just simply have to take it on trust and then it depends who it is that you trust because how otherwise are you supposed to work out contending claims Cathy good afternoon and thank you Ella for inviting me to take part in the debate trying to catch the eye of somebody my age in the audience but don't you wish it was still the 1970s when life was fun and all we thought about was sex no we do thanks to about gender now this is the age of grievance politics and we're living in a society in the grip of an epidemic of narcissism and of narrowing horizons very narrow gender horizons I find that quite sad historians will surely look back in wonder and ask how is it that we could be thinking about enacting a law that allows us to deny biological reality on a whim to deny what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman now in case anyone needs and reminding a woman is born with two chromosomes an X and an X a man is born with a Y and an X these are now facts that the government and some very energetic lobbies like Stonewall would have us believe can be a matter of choice not birth and that's exactly why we've been asked what is a woman anyway is there anything worth defending and womanhood yes they're questions we should think about before we sign away our sex for good they're chilling they sound pretty dismissive of generations of womankind so how did we get into this position well I blame feminism the feminist legacy that all we're left with as a woman is a body based identity up for grabs for anyone to appropriate at will after the pain risk and death of thousands of years of childbirth we couldn't have asked such questions 50 years ago when mothers matrons and matriarchs were still respected the linchpins of their families in the community but women's lib put paid to that radical feminists weren't just disinterested in the family and women's roles there they were positively hostile to it the more they could make women like men the closer they thought they'd be to equality it was an idea destined to fail but it's an idea that shaped everything since all this matters since is the public sphere and the only status that matters for women is work women's commitment to relationships to family to child-rearing have been subordinated to the male obsession work sexual differences have had to be denied or suppressed it was only when I gave birth and had my babies that the full force of this craziness came upon me and I realized that the urgency of what I needed and wanted to do had no status that role that I wanted and that I'd become a second-class citizen motherhood was a stigmatized role since then the direction of travel has been one way to work and nothing now less than parity absolute paraty will do and mrs. Mae is very on board with enforcing this that's the changes to family life have been quite revolutionary huge numbers are met but led by state dependent single mothers outsource child care is the norm and it's hidden costs completely ignored now more calamities Lou there's mihail alienation there are a lot of men going their own way there's a widening chasm between the sexes most young girls must realize this and for more and more young woman single and childless futures await them and that's a fact it's a statistical fact this is the mess that fanatical feminism has got us into stripping us of our life and relationships women are becoming little more than economic cogs on a lonely work treadmill that's the prospect for their future now to top it all what's left of womanhood has been reduced to a victim status if you believe me too we now have no agency at all women like Ella Johanna me Heather it's embarrassing but it's terrible for men too because they've been branded as me too misogynist male rapists is ridiculous men are not like that as a class any more than women are nymphomaniacs as a class so where are we with feminism this happens to be the patriarchy victim narrative that's the basis for feminists resistance to transgender identification that their be assaulted fundamentally for decades they've been insisting that men and women were the same and interchangeable now the transgenders have taken them at their word now they say they're not well it's ground zero moment for feminism feminist chickens have come home to roost are we the same or aren't we you can't have it both ways and that's what comes in my view of devaluating devaluing motherhood feminists need not fear womanhood does not mean women can't work they always have all that women must have children but it does mean that the category of women as a whole must have children women do this in order for us to survive oh sorry I've nearly there it is the one thing that men can't do have children it's our trump card why would we throw it away why would we devalue it the feminist attempt to denigrate motherhood has denigrated women because most women still put a high value on relationships and having and raising children nearly half women give their primary identity as mother wife or partner over their occupation or their public role mothers want to be able to prioritize their role in the family ideally they want to work part time with that man working full time net mum survey just said a few years ago that feminism's biggest fight now was to reinstate the value of motherhood women like investing in relationships in loving and caring they're good at it they want and have to bring up children and woman and womanhood needs and society needs it so my final point is what better defense as women do we have against the fantasy that a man has the right to become a woman as a matter of choice than this our womanhood it's Johanna if somebody had said to me even ten years ago I would be taking part in a debate the title of which was what is a woman I would have been completely nonplussed I would have thought this is like the most bizarre thing why are we having a debate about what is a woman and I think I would have genuinely struggled to answer the question because when you move away from basic elements of biology and you don't resort to stereotypes in relation to dress and makeup and appearance and you try and think what does it feel like to be a woman it's actually I think impossible to answer that question there isn't a kind of essence of womanhood that comes from inside just as I don't think there's an essence of manhood that comes from inside so - to try and actually verbalize what it means to be a woman I think it's a very difficult thing to do but a bit you know in in a very short space of time then I would say in in the space of 10 years probably even five years not only has it become necessary to start answering these questions but as nobody in this room needs me to tell them it's actually become an incredibly controversial topic as well this time yesterday I was in Edinburgh in the Scottish Parliament and I was taking part in a debate on me - where next for me - and I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that in opposing me - in challenging the direction of the me - movement I was in a minority of one including everybody in the audience and everybody on the panel and you could see the more I was vocalizing criticisms with the direction of the meeting movement the more people were getting kind of a bit agitated and a bit cross with me but I actually only got a real audible horrified gasp at one thing and somebody in the audience asked the question what did I think about all-women shortlists for Parliament and I said ah you know actually I think all-women shortlists are a really bad idea and I gave my reasons but I said actually I'm really pleased that we're at least discussing or women shortlist because I'd far rather challenge or women shortlist politically the new road or women shortlist by redefining what it means to be a woman and by having men identify as women making their way on tours all-women shortlists and that was the point at which everybody completely erupted that's the boundaries that's what you're not allowed to say nowadays the whole conversation around what does it mean to be a woman I've got to confess really depresses me because on the one hand from transgender activists to be a woman is is literally nothing it's it's literally the word has been eroded it's reduced to insignificance it's it's erased it's reduced to a passing feeling as as people have said as Krissy said you know that you can have on some days not others and I think this is bad it's bad because it a Rhodes women from public life it I think it's a very conservative and I mean that with a small thing as Kathy's pointed out Teresa may and the Conservative Party are at the forefront of champion and much of its legislation but I think it's very conservative with a small C because I think it does reinforce an awful lot of gender stereotypes it entrenches the idea that to be female is to wear a dress and like makeup and behave in a very feminine manner when I was growing up you know I wanted to challenge all of that I didn't want to be that kind of stereotypical princessy kind of girl but I I can honestly say I didn't think challenging that feminine in fact that can very overt of feminine stereotype made me any any less of a girl I was fully away that I was female that I was a girl but I just wanted to wear trousers and do everything that boys did and and I think the transgender ideology is really in danger of entrenching some stereotypes so I think transgenderism as is essentially very conservative but it appears as if it's it's very liberal a very radical challenge to past assumptions yeah it's being reinforced as we see every day now through intimidation through censorship and ultimately even we've seen examples of it being reinforced through violence so I think it's an incredibly difficult and wanting to say the word problematic but okay shying away from that I think it's a movement with a lot of problems for those reasons but on the other hand the other reason why I find this whole debate a bit depressing and this is why I do agree with some of the latter points that Kathy was making was because a lot of the opposition to transgenderism I'm centers around this idea that to be a woman is to suffer to be a woman is to suffer at the hands of men it's to be subject to violence to abuse to discrimination and that women need to have defended women only spaces because men will be lurking on every street corner kind of out to to get us and you know obviously I'm not deny I'm not so completely naive as to deny I mean there have been some terrible examples of transgender men not transgender men sorry men becoming women who have transitioned to become women who are then in women-only prisons and we've seen what's happened there you know so I'm not saying we should just there's nothing here at all but I think a definition of womanhood that does Center victimhood first and foremost that does suggest that to be a woman is to be oppressed to need special treatment is a bad starting point for this debate so if I'm one minute left if I was going to answer this question what is a woman anyway I would start with biology I would definitely say that to be a woman is a lot more than a feeling but it's it's also more than biology itself because I think ultimately what a woman is is what what the woman herself makes it it's what she makes it to be so I don't think women are victims of men but neither do I think that women are victims of their home or a product of simply their hormones or their genetics either we should be able to wear what we want do what we want say what we want mix with whoever we want go wherever we want but that means seeing ourselves not as a product of simply our biology not as a victim of our circumstances a victim of men but an agent an agent who is in control of our own destiny who's able to override biology and override what we're told are the circumstances that we exist in to make our own way in the world and just very very fine a point at the end of the debate on me to that I was speaking in yesterday I have to confess a very tiny group of people came up to me at the end to say thank you really enjoyed that one of whom was transgender a transgender man he said I thought that was absolutely fascinating really enjoyed it he said and it's just worth bearing in mind and I think this is a really important point that the transgender community is not a homogenous group and there's a lot of people from inside the transgender community who are actually very uncomfortable themselves about the direction in which this debate so often seems to head okay let's have your hands up for some contributions I'd like to question the fact that the and of a undervaluing of femininity is a product of feminism and I would say rather it dates back to kind of patriarchal times were actually women's nature was put down to you know ungodliness as a divine punishment you know the days of Christine de Pizan and the book of the city of ladies I'd say that it's actually feminism jobs to take back what it is to be a woman and to put value back on that rather than kind of as a reaction to Patriot patriarchy telling us that we don't have decent qualities thank you yep I work in reproductive medicine and genetics and I wanted to just look at the question if you want to define biologically what a woman is or what a female is and I know that's not the only way you can try and answer that question then then how would you go about it I think the most coherent answer to that question and keep in mind that on Thursday Chinese scientists for the first time created mammals with two parents of the same sex they were mice but the most coherent way to do it is not necessarily to talk about the chromosomes there there is a gene on one of the sex chromosomes that initiates a process of sex differentiation in males but it doesn't complete or conclude that process and although it does usually happen a certain way it doesn't always and that's what results in that admittedly narrow strip of people with ambiguous or anomalous sexual and genetic characteristics that were Krissy showed in the diagram the best way to do it and it sounds horribly clinical is to say that the female is is the person with the app an apparatus of biological apparatus functioning or otherwise with which a pregnancy could be born I think that is the most coherent biological definition of a female and it prompts a political question which is one of the things I do in my job is is sort of explore the law and the ethics and the politics of non-traditional family groups and how their interests might be served and whether or not they're legitimate and so on and so forth and it raises the question of when you have a non-traditional family former it's not necess Carolee the birth mother who is the parent or the automatic parent or the one of two parents who happens to be female does that leave people in a more vulnerable position women specifically perhaps in relation to the family as it's changing and evolving I you know I identify as a feminine person a woman and I think that by defining myself as a vagina and a womb is more derogatory than sis you know then people with male bodies defining themselves as feminine and I think that the fact that I think that there's always been a concept of being a trans woman if you will the Native American people they have the concept of two-spirit which is if you like kind of an older version of the lgbtq+ community where they identify with gender freely and isn't it restricted to a set of organs and to me I think that if people choose to define me is literally just a womb it's far more derogatory than anything that a trans woman could ever want to be defined us and typically with I think the point was brought up about trans women like wearing makeup and kind of like you know typically effeminate clothing it's because we we do live in a society where women are defined by that and that isn't their fault it isn't their problem they're just essentially just trying to fit with the main status quo of what women should look like so they're not penalized by everyone else hi I wonder how much this obsession with the transgender debate is part of a wider assault on masculinity if we regard gender as being on a spectrum and totally fluid then we can do away with what it means to be female what it means to be male and ultimately socialized man into becoming less masculine or less toxic some people see it just following on from what she said I think there's also a bit of a misunderstanding about the feminist movement because additionally to not defining women by their organs some women can't have children and that doesn't mean they're not women that's a lot of women so I don't I really don't understand that logic of defining a woman by having the apparatus to give that's not a lot of women can't have children and in certain communities where I'm from if a woman can't bear children it gives her husband the right to disregard her to disown her it strips out of any humanity and I feel like just exactly what you said if you define if that's the defining aspect of a woman that district that puts us at more risk and vulnerability of being subject to patriarchy in my opinion and then also feminism is about choice so if a woman wants to stay at home and look after her kids she can it's not about imposing for women to have to go to work it's given us the choice that we can go to work but we can also stay at home and raise a family and furthermore I wanted to point out the fact that the the current feminist debate it always talks about intersectionality and I think that it's really disappointing to see the panel not have any in tax authority in the sense that there are no woman of color being represented in this panel just firstly I believe that gentlemen the front actually said it was whether or not they had the capability to make children but that they had the the apparatus for making children but my actual question was what why do we not hear as much indignation about women becoming men I think the thing that I'm astounded by today that I find very difficult today is how many how much people want to say as a woman as a woman this as a woman I did this as a woman I feel that and I am a woman it's always just been a fact as far as I remember can't remember ever thinking about the fact that I am a woman particularly apart from when I was looking for a boyfriend but but I think it's it's it seems really backward to me that now rather than being getting on with life doing what we want to do they have to think about things as a woman I find that a backward step and then I also think the other side of this debate which I find really really difficult is how it forces us to it makes us tongue-tied so we now actually don't even know how to discuss many of these subjects we're not there's too many acronym too many things that it's hard to know you need a dictionary in front of you all the time and there's a constant concern that somehow or other whatever you say you're going to upset someone and I think that's a very dangerous part of this long discussion in a way thanks just before I come back to the panel I mean what one of the using my petitioners chair here but one of the things that made me want to do this debate was that on the one hand I've always liked some part of the transgender theory or thinking that was that gender was fluid its initial thinking anyway because I never liked the idea of being set in either one description or another I thought wouldn't it be nice to be a tomboy whatever kind of way you define yourself on the other hand and I completely share that the views that the biological determinism really does not sit well with me at all in relation to certainly defining women on the other hand the total disregard for that doesn't work either because then as some panelists have said you kind of completely disregard any even factual reality or fundamental sense of self within the sexes so there's somewhere in between there that perhaps our panelists can come get to Kathy pick up on just a few things only if you've got a minute or two to pick up on something it came from the back sorry is that there's this sort of rather weird feminist narrative that clearly young people are being taught at school in university about women have being whether it's victims or treated as sort of funny feminist objects or they've been shaped by men all their history it really doesn't they're sort of the evidence I mean whether it's Boudicca taking the Brit ancient Britons into war against Rome or whatever women have always been strong they've always been out there they've always defined themselves this is just an incredibly sort of self obsessional analysis that all we can talk about in the most affluent country virtually six most affluent country in the world the most privileged set of people that we all are and we're just talking about ourselves I sort of agree with that point when I grew up I had I had three sisters I've never once experienced discrimination I never I always did exactly what I wanted to achieve my two of my sisters a high-flying career woman without children that was their choice we all followed our choices I don't know what the fuss has been about and now we have this sort of narrative of women being put upon by men throughout history that I think is a it's it's a very very negative and and poorly evidence narrative I'm gonna begin by saying something that what people say to me hundreds of times a day and each time they say it to me it really makes me groan which is that there is a more type of feminism and I think intersectional feminism has really been at the heart of supporting the trans ideology and this idea that to be a woman is is just a feeling and a woman can identify as a man a man can identify as a woman actually radical feminists have I think being the people who have most defended the concept of what it is to be a woman nowadays and actually I salute them for that I'm not a radical feminist myself but I think they do need to be applauded for having been at the forefront of defending what it means to be a woman my favorite feminist is Simone de Beauvoir and she was the one who famously said one is not born but becomes a woman and you know if we're looking for why have we got to where we are with transgenderism nowadays I actually don't blame feminism for it I think it's because when we think of that phrase one is not born but becomes a woman I think over the course of the past 20 years in relation to both men and women we've lost our sense of what the word becoming means I've and again it comes back to this idea of individuals having some control over their own destiny being able to shape consciously their own identity to shape the becoming themselves so we nobody nowadays has any idea any concept of making themselves of doing or becoming themselves so either we're a product of our socialization yeah I am how I am because my mother curse her me into a pink baby Grove forty-four years ago you know and that explains the entire course of my life or I am what I am simply because of my hormones my genes my biology you know and and know we're in those too you know it was all the pink baby grow it's all my DNA and my hormones is there an opportunity for us to say no I've actually had some agency in shaping the course of my own life and it's not feminism it's because we've lost that becoming that capacity to define ourselves that I think we are where we are you know in this debate I always find myself with strange bedfellows so I probably most people and I'll have broadly similar view to transgenderism as me but I feel also that I want to distance myself from some of the other views expressed I I am a radical feminist and I want to explain what a radical feminist is briefly if I have the time to do it I to believe that women are agents in their own right I too believe that women are not victims as far as I'm concerned it's the feminist movement throughout history that has fought for this position so to say women can do whatever they want were my gender has never bound me to anything whether that is true or not it's probably up for debate in my view but even being able to express that is the result of the brave women who have fought for women to be agents in that way have fought for gender diversity who fought for not being constrained by femininity and for men not to be constrained by masculinity but there is something else going on it's simply not true that there is an evidence that women are not that men are not structurally men do commit violence towards women more than women commit violence towards men it is empirically evidence that there is sexual violence towards women so the women worried at the moment about the changes to the gender recognition Act are not worried are not people who am imagine that there are dangers around every single corner on the country they're very very brave women actually who dare to put their heads above the parapet and say there's something really going wrong in our society at the moment when a man can simply identify sign a piece of paper and say there's say that he is a woman the consequences of that I could go on about but I won't because I haven't got time in relation to the question that was just asked I think over here gentlemen over here which is why isn't there a similar response to women who identify as men and the answer to that is quite simple from my point of view I don't care whether women identify as men or men identify with women this isn't this isn't the issue here we live in a liberal democracy and hopefully we can define ourselves in whichever way we want the problem is once you embed that in the law once you start telling people how they can describe their bodies what they can say about their bodies and even how they can spell the term men or women the interesting thing is that women who identify as men don't ask that of men they don't ask men to deny the fact that they have penises that give them pleasure they don't deny the fact that they don't ask men to change their the term men they on the whole they want to get on with just identifying with men which is really cool as far as I'm concerned as this demonstrates the level of misogyny actually that runs throughout the transgender movement that men who identify as women are determined to tell women biological women that they can't talk about their bodies that they are equally women as me or anyone else and so what the transgender movement is doing at the moment with Cho or through trans women is demonstrating this terrible word patriarchy which is a very crude term and I dislike it myself because it's it's it's not subtle enough but in many ways it in its simplicity is does describe something so just let me say patriarchy for the moment it demonstrates the transgender movement at the moment demonstrates that all the Equality that we ever got has actually transforming itself with a backlash at the moment and that's why a feminism through individualism will never work because it will open itself to backlash is like this we have to have a collective structural analysis of what is going on and and that individualism is great it would be fantastic if you could just all do what we want to do but as far as I'm concerned it has a real naivety embedded within it okay I think we should all be able to talk about our own bodies and each other's bodies I don't think it's necessarily particularly interesting but we should have that that right only the point about transgender women or men with penises invading women's spaces I would like to err on the side of caution a little bit in suggesting that that is a danger of that distracting from the main issues here really because Germaine Greer I think said well I've got the quote ears she said we like to think oh the penis is a weapon no it isn't if you want to hurt a man try hurting him there so yeah the may I want to come back primarily though to this point question about what is the biological bottom line and coming back to Joanna's reference to Simone de Beauvoir I agree surround beaufort was a brilliant writer and think but i think the essence have heard her point that a woman is socially constructed i won't actually bore you with the exact quotes the most quoted thing in feminism but she was describing her society as it was in that time france in the 1940s when she wrote that book women couldn't even vote and she was described a situation in which you would you were deemed to become less a woman the less you accepted feminine roles less you accepted the constraints that were imposed on you so paradoxically the biological determinist argument that says everything about men and women and how they behave is all they're biologically in the genes in the brains and all of that that was a socially socially constructed agenda the biological bottom line however is absolutely minimal beyond the obvious we do have to figure out how we as a society as different societies how we organize reproduction but as suddenly on the front bench put it brilliantly I think it is a bottom line and it is not that you have to be fair trial if you can't get a few if you're not capable of having children that makes you less a woman that is exactly what the argument that I'm saying and what I think feminism did really well is saying exactly the opposite he's saying that it is how you are perceived to appear to have that equipment that is a bottom line and it doesn't need to go anywhere beyond where you want it to go and where the constraints of society also I'm not saying that we are all completely free to whatever we want we are free within the society in which we live and we have to emphasize that freedom and that choice above all else seems to me that political naivete is demolishing the realism at the moment the way that ideologies work is they problematize whole areas of life so that the solutions to those problems can then be sold to us and so I think this is happening across a whole range of issues from me - which naturalizes male predatory sexual nature and makes it seems essential so that then we can sort of sell them in this idea that they need gender segregated spaces maybe train carriages maybe even modesty dress likewise - you know ubiquitous racism it's everywhere isn't it and yet doesn't that conflict with the fact that the taboo of racism is as colossal as it's ever been there are these realities or are these just myths that are being sold to us so that we will buy the solutions which give privileges to groups that don't presently have them that's the first thing secondly um I grew up in the 1970s and I came from a very conservative culture where television movies religion divided men and women is very separate stereotyped personalities not just sexes as a kid with the way I behaved if the diagnosis existed back then I would have been a trans kid I wanted to be a boy not a girl I wanted to play American football I wanted to do all the things that only little boys were meant to do my mom god bless her was a progressive liberal thinking person and she didn't think that because I wanted to do those things I must have a male brain in my body and I must really be a boy and therefore I need to be fixed no Society was what needed to be addressed a society that was too narrow but what a woman or a man could be thank God nowadays though if I were that kid I was basically I'm a lesbian but no I would do the non progressive solution instead of being a lesbian sleeping with women because women can do that too no I would be diagnosed with the disease but is it my disease or is a society's disease obviously the minute the UK and sort of globally as well is sort of suffering with a mental health crisis and whether this sort of in sort of indecisiveness about whether you identifies a man or a woman if that is cool if that is causing young people and people in general to sort of self-harm and commit suicide because they don't feel accepted so has this sort of question about what is a woman cause the mental health crisis in the Sun hello there hi I'm curious to know what the panel thinks about some of the influences of maybe the 20th century this century of the self as it's been called on younger generations people younger than myself thirty who are at the moment in a state of crisis about the self about identity about purpose in life and whether or not there's this sense that if you can just conceive of yourself as a persona or an identity frozen in time on which forces that are adverse to your existence are constantly acting then you can relieve yourself of the terrifying prospect of having to act first in life and practice and develop yourself before you know exactly what you are which is a very scary thing but there the narcissism that was mentioned at the beginning of the panel and some of the other phenomena that have been sort of you know I think encapsulated by the selfie this idea of just being and not having to act further and become something I'd like to know what the panel thinks about this yeah as the kind of question of socialization has started to come up in the course of its discussion I'd like to kind of straight-out ask the panel if they think there should be any kind of protections for children in relation to their gender identity because you know the question of conversion therapy how its applied how it might impact the development of someone's relationship to their gender I think is such a really important issue for society to be able to discuss in a open and complicated manner do you think that the value of women has been devalued so much that anybody can just decide today I'm going to be women and then tomorrow I'm going to be a man and then they can decide whether or not they're a man or woman then just having their own just being themselves rather than just identifying as a man or woman I'm very interested in the fact that the one thing that is sort of causing a quite a lot of tension in the comments is are those the issue of maternity and reproductive capacity the equipment is sandy kind of I'm not sure that but it is true that that reproduction which certainly objectively seems to be links to most women we all see some women can't and so on young lady up there says some people cannot have to have children so on but the reality is that in the West in the industrial world people are having less and less the experience of being productive or producing other human beings is becoming increasingly on you not unusual but certainly not as common and not as early for women as it was a generation ago in thirty two generations ago so that what is very apparent is there is very kind of clear confusion about subjective aspects of femininity and womanhood your identity which are partly arbitrary fluid self-determining and so on and more material debates around how society organizes what what was described as the sex class of being a woman now that's that's a social organization of being that sex class I mean Otzi if you had a society which was matriarchal and celebrated the having of children be very different society the reality is that if we have we think we have choice or women have choice about their how they run their lives but in the end the process of having children does impact on what then happens to you later because not because of your bad or good choice but because of the way society organizes the business of reproducing right I haven't heard enough well from the ban on those kinds of issues I'm wondering whether the panel think a similar discussion is going on amongst men so are men asking what it means to be a man do you think that men feel their masculinity in their sense of identity threatened by trans people who identify as men so is this just a problem that's partly caused by feminism is it a debate that's happening just among women or do man feel the same about this problem I just want to come back to the the thing about entrenching stereotypes because that is part of the problem when women if we focus on the idea that transgender women transsexual women are always about pulling the stereotypes over to its most feminine aspects we miss one of the more troubling developments which is that this I have to go back in a little bit into history here but when this started to become a big debate not in the mainstream but in in academia and in radical circles the argument that the radical feminists had was exactly that that these are men who are trying to teach women how to be women and that is repressing and oppressing us and the trans women came back to that argument and said actually no we're only doing what society says we have to do in order to fill fulfill our inner need to be women and in actual fact we would much rather just be women in this in the way that we choose to be would rather actually be women without having to wear all the makeup and the wigs and and all the surgery and all the rest of it which is where you then end up with the radical seeming argument the genderqueer argument that men who are exactly like men in every ordinary way of understanding it can actually be women and that is supposed to sort of be liberating and it's simply it isn't liberating for the main reason the primary primary reason that most common experience simply does not work like that it just it's just completely sort of antagonistic to ordinary people who experience life the way we do I think that there isn't a crisis of masculinity in relation to the challenge that trans men ie women who identify as men are making to men I think they're largely unconcerned about that I don't think a man is in the changing room is particularly bothered whether there's a female body person in there trying on male clothes I think that is a I don't know whether it's a crisis we were always talking about crises and I'm not sure whether it's the right word but I think men will be reflecting upon themselves at the moment but I think and that's fine and it's not something I particularly want I don't enjoy the idea that men are uncomfortable but this this discussion is in danger of doing what normally happens ie that men are in danger they're in crisis and that feminism is to blame this is such a crude way of understanding in my view what is going on in the culture at the moment so you know whilst I want to accept that men are possibly in crisis the word that I've use I certainly don't accept that it's feminism that's done it think of the feminism which I identify with is very willing and wanting men not to be bound by rigid stereotypes it's the opposite in fact so to get back to the just oh no we need to move on just the birth thing obviously um how women give birth whether they should give birth whether they want to whether they can all of these aspects of it oh oh absolutely embedded in the culture there is no such thing as giving birth naturally as it way outside or having medical interventions all of these aspects of all of our biological lives are continuously lived within culture and that culture changes and will feel differently about - it depending on 50 years from now or 50 years backwards I just want to end this point by saying that I sincerely hope that people haven't heard me say anything that's biologically essential about women that was not my argument at all I ended by saying what we need to do is be grownups and think through the relationship between biology and culture and we haven't done enough of that Thank You Kathy yes very quickly yes men nobody talks about men we always talk about women women boron about women for bloody ever you know it gets a bit much out there there loads of men who've been providers and protectors who've got killed in wars who are now losing their jobs for being marginalized in society as female work rates go up that's not necessarily a bad thing I'd say but male rates have gone down the people whose suicide rates are going up the men nobody is interested in men and yes they are in a crisis and their big men's movements if any women bothered to look on the internet they'd find that the International men's conference no journalist bothered to attend do you think an International Women's Conference nobody had attend to go back I thought your point was very interesting about society and about children and about you you said you're at the ideology as problematizing something selling it as a myth so that will buy into the solutions or particular grievance good this is grievance politics or labor this is the hierarchy of victimhood you're right it's unhealthy it's bad now we want to find out why if society is unhealthy and to max our identity politics is unhealthy grievance politics are unhealthy resentment is unhealthy these are all mentally unhealthy what we've had is in place of religion in place of faith in place of the things that Christianity told us about altruism we have the religion of political correctness it's a poor substitute for our mental health it's very very quickly football on showed protections be in play should we ban conversion therapy or something like that I'm not going to argue in favor of anything like that but one thing that does concern me greatly is how the trans movement particularly in schools is actually undercutting the authority of parents and I that is a very dangerous and very troubling move and I think parents should be able to have a say over whether their children change their name or whatever it is during the school cost the school day secondly on the points that were made over here one thing I think is very very interesting is that you look at the statistics there's far more adolescent girls transitioning to become boys than the other way around and I said at the in my opening remarks I thought the category of woman was being erased and she think far more to the point the category of being a lesbian is being completely erased nowadays and it does strike me that you know as a child a girl when you grow up up until the age of kind of 10 12 being a tomboy can be quite an attractive thing to be but adolescence and then for a boy being a gay man can equally be kind of not attractive maybe the wrong word but there are certainly positive role models for being a gay man being a lesbian woman is something which I think is seen as being a much more challenging thing for young girls to take on board that identity and so transitioning them to become a boy actually seems like a far more straightforward option and which i think is deeply alarming I think you know final comment on this I agree with people who've been saying actually we need to move beyond gender you know we need to be able to experiment we need to free up and expand human potential not in this gender character categories and I know we've had a lot of trimming and frying about you know to what extent do we blame feminism is feminism not to the hospice feminism challenge this you know I do one thing I do blame feminism for it's because it bloody forces us to look at everything through the prism of gender you know pay jobs parenting everything we're told to look at it through this lens of gender and it's boring and it's meaningless nowadays and and yeah if I set my biology as either a man or a woman what should I then do in relation to developing my character should I be asking myself how can I be the best man I can be or should I be asking myself how can I be the best individual that I can be so I I get this sense that most the panel that we should move beyond gender but I just wonder I'm a school teacher about the sort of practicalities teaching is a limit to how limit for how education schools and institutions can actually kind of treat children equally so just could you comment on the practical what you think about the practicality so things like toilets for its teams in my school we have sort of interventions for boys who are underachieving that sort of thing just a very quick point I just want to take it away from biology and gender politics and just talk about role models and I think I grew up in the 90s where there was the ladder culture and you could you know you could basically act however you want it and I see now that the role models for young girls are the Kardashians it's you know it's Geordie Shore it's it's girls who are they don't have to achieve anything it's it's reality stars and I just wanted to make the point that what is a woman is is you know it's it's a media portrayal it's this drivings of that to what extent would you say that the modern idea that women are put upon by men is just another conspiracy theory for example I mean white supremacists in the US might say all the troubles we have in our lives as white men is caused by blacks Cubans and Jews and in a way when Serena Williams says all my troubles in tennis and people say my job prospects are hindered by men and they blamed this on men this might just be another conspiracy theory so I want to hear your views on that yeah so this come seems that least this comes down to what the law actually says rather than what we think which I think we're all agreed is bit impersonal the question really is is there anything specific or we think the law should distinguish between men and women so it's is touching upon what someone said on the panel area about how there is not a consensus among trans people and I agree with Heather actually that they result in misogyny and silencing of women around the trans issue and that a lot of trans people actually disagree with this and condemn this so we're kind of stuck in it between a rock and a hard place you know people like you who would have me in a men's prison and people in the trans community who would denigrate me for disagreeing with them and for saying that they're misogynist so where does it leave people like us who do you believe in equality do you believe in misogyny and feminism but are also trans and oppressed so it's quite difficult people like us so I haven't heard anyone mention like the term turf yeah and things like that I hear like like held a lot of people on either side of the argument you know like raise any questions and to me like debates like this are invaluable and I think that like those kind of terms are there like pejorative insults to people like and it can really close down debates do you think it does and if it does how can we like combat that this is actually a very practical point kind of reckoning echoing the teacher at the back and I work in women's mental health and I just what I would like to know what are the ramifications for these sorts of debates about women's space and safe spaces so one of the discussions about being about transgender people working in domestic violence services transgender people working in rape but I kind of want to see how this debate plays out and the kind of practicalities of life and where where we stand on that I was interested in the bit of the debate where we started to talk about the business of reproduction somebody down at the front right talked about the business of reproduction which has made me think and reflect on this the other word that we've had is narcissism and I'm just wondering is there any link do you think between all these different shades of pink and blue all this self obsession with what shade we are today and narcissism and the fact that people are having less children now because with this level of narcissism we can't actually attend to the children coming i I just want to ask a question the panel the GRA consultation ends on Friday and two other rad Femmes have they lost the battle already why it's just a point of clarification really the business about the means of reproduction where it comes from historically is in fact it was plagiarized from Karl Marx by the radical feminist jeweler Wilma Firestone and various others and when it came down to is Karl Marx divided the world into societies ruling class and working class and said one has the means of production one controls it so the feminists just effectively plagiarized it and defined women for people with the means of reproduction or the business of reproduction if somebody likes instead effectively it's controlled by controlled by men and so effectively that's really all it came down to so it's it's it's a it's in some ways it's a biological purse you but because they claim that they're oppressed by the means of reproduction that's why they also claim that it's non biologically socialist ultimately it doesn't really stack up but you know so for example powerful women in society would be denied or in some ways as a woman if you turn around and accept the view that the women are off subordinated in society to men which is the radical feminist view yeah I just want to say that I think that yeah that the reforms to the gender recognition act are going to make various ethnic groups feel much more alienated from mainstream British society because the idea that women aren't women is going to be very very difficult from for people from other countries and it's not just you know it's not going to further integration in recent years a lot of children have chosen to become trans but do you think parents should allow this knowing that children are really indecisive as a young girl I was always I always had this metaphor oh you run like a girl you do this like a girl it's this common stereotype I think that women today face and I don't understand where the stereotype came from why this stereotype was developed at such a young age can I please hear your thoughts on this I think one of the things that really concerns me about the whole transgender and the women debate is what it's doing to language and we saw this or women with the X from the Wellcome collection this week but then there's also the issue with pronouns and as a linguist have a big problem with the whole Bay them pronoun situation I can't talk to someone seriously as a plural and you know I just wondered what it's always worrying to me when when a campaign has an effect on language and what we can and can't say and I just wanted to hear some of the panel's views on that I'm talking about the transgender issue and what it means to be transgender in relation to him I think that's very interesting observation to have in relation to this can we really still talk about womanhood if there is such a thing without getting hooked up in this debate but nevertheless okay I think the reason why feminists bang on as John said about gender so much is because gender has taken on so much significance in our society and I think it is self-indulgent I think it is narcissistic I think we've become obsessed with gender that's why feminists bang on about it because they don't want gender to be rigid in that way they want Jen they want fluidity they want to in fact get rid of the term gender it would be great if we could just get rid of this term gender identity and then we could be what we want to be without defining ourselves as running like a girl or behaving like boy oh that's really serious thing that's going on in our culture at the moment which I haven't touched upon and it's what I'm centrally concerned about is the issue of transgender in children I think it is extremely problematic I think it's child abuse children should be allowed to be and express themselves in whichever way they want to gender has become so rigid e-flite now more and more so now than ever I think in terms of pink for girls blue for boys what a boy should be on what a girl should be so my rallying cry would be let's look after the children let's free the children let's get rid of the notion of gender identity allow people to be the biological sex they are and realize that whatever biological sex you are you can be whoever you want to be on the the question why is it that we are getting so many more girls that want to become trans men than the other way around I'm not sure what the reason is but if it were the case if it were the case that these were girls who wanted to aspire to masculine values who wanted to be brave and courageous and rational and get to grips with rebuilding society and making us all much much better off then that would be great there would be something good within that but the point is and this is this really really does get to the the bottom of it is that these are not people who see masculinity and in that sort of old-fashioned positive way what I want is for that type of masculinity to be human aspirational identity I want us all to be what used to be called masculine real point of agreement what's happening with children is is near abuse it is abuse a children are not developed their brains aren't developed their bodies aren't developed being putting in children on hormone to to stop their maturity at puberty is Nayan wicked I don't know how it's happening go back to the schools I think one thing I feel very strongly about there should be girls and boys loose in schools I think I've been into schools where there's no no safes that's my safe space I don't believe in the safe space sir but boys and girls do need separate spaces so this you need you under thing in school I find offensive I don't like it and I think teaching children about gender from nursery school infant school upwards is quite ridiculous it shouldn't even be on their thoughts they should be just being allowed to be children which comes to the fact of why don't we spend more time at school and everywhere talking about what it is as a young gentleman said about what it is to be a person to be a good person and you were saying do he said as a Marilyn I was always taught it was me as a person how to be a good person the only time I gendered it or sexed it was how to be a good mother or how to be a good father but beyond the thing of my mature and my looking after children my moral code is how to be a decent person just three very quick points firstly on schools and practicalities I completely agree that adolescent girls should have changing rooms toilets that are single sex that are exclusive to girls my big concern Sheriff Cathy share with others on the panel is that schools are actually being used as a vehicle for socialization around gender when four-year-olds are asked to choose what gender they are I think that creates all kinds of problems and it again my big concern is that it actually overrides parental authority in this area somebody asked the question down here about well do do we need any gender specific laws I think some pretty paraphrasing the question very badly there but actually I do think we we do need some gender specific laws and I think women do need enshrined in law access to abortion in order to be able to take a full part in society I think the right to abortion the right to contraception on demand was a very important amount of the original feminist movement and I think it's still an important I think that needs to be defended today our final thought you know I've got three children I actually think it's sorry apologies to the one who's sitting in the room right now but I actually think it is the least interesting thing about me and I think sorry but but I think there's far more about me about me as a woman than simply the fact of motherhood and I really would think it would be rather tragic if we reduce being a woman to motherhood yes motherhood is important yes motherhood is a part of being a woman but that's it it's a part of and being a woman is about so much more on top and besides being a mother [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: worldwrite

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Keywords: WORLDwrite, WORLDbytes, video, Citizen TV, volunteers, politics, debate, Battle of Ideas, trans activists, feminism, gender, TERFs, sexism, Heather Brunskell-Evans, Chrissie Daz, Kathy Gyngell, Joanna Williams, Ella Whelan, Barbican, woman, women, transgender, motherhood, masculinity, biology

Id: V4esFiFRXVU

Length: 81min 17sec (4877 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 11 2019