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The Guardian, transphobia and do lesbians get a day pass?

  
  

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ONLY NICE THINGS
20:44 / 15.02.04
It's not all bad news, however. The British Columbia supreme court in Vancouver recently overturned an earlier decision of the human rights tribunal that Vancouver Rape Relief had breached the human rights code when it refused to allow Kimberley Nixon, a male to female transsexual, to train as a counsellor of female rape victims. In 2002, Nixon had won $7,500, the highest amount ever awarded by the tribunal, for injury to "her dignity".

The arrogance is staggering: having not experienced life as a "woman" until middle age, Nixon assumed "she" would be suitable to counsel women who have chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences, not from a man in a dress! The Rape Relief sisters, who do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman, successfully challenged the ruling and, for now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.

The Equal Opportunities Commission, your best friend if you are a man wanting to get into nightclubs free on Ladies' Nights, has a lot to learn from this. Last summer, it supported the case of five male to female transsexuals, only one of whom had disposed of his meat and two veg, on the grounds of sex discrimination after a pub landlord objected to one of them using the women's toilets. The claim was rejected, with the judge stating that although he accepted the claimants' wish to regard themselves as women, a person's wish "doesn't determine what he is". Quite. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the one battle we feminists won fair and square was to convince at least those left of centre that gender roles are made up. They are not real. We play at them. We develop traditional masculine or feminine traits by being indoctrinated, not because we are biologically programmed to behave in those ways. [link]

As far as I can tell, the writer's position, obscured somewhat by some fairly serious failings as a writer, is that Judith Butler has taught us that gender is performative. As such, one's gender is unrelated to biology.

However, at the same time she is arguing that one cannot be a woman unless one was born a woman. This is a bit confusing, but I think she means that without the cultural experience of having grown up as a woman and having been treated as a woman at all points, one cannot realistically perform as a woman and would therefore, for example, not be fit to provide couselling to women on sexual abuse. Or use ladies' toilets. They'll just break them, or eat them or something.

So, being a woman is culturally defined, but quite closely culturally defined.

Now, by this logic, one cannot become a woman or a man, or at least not in such a way that one can be accepted as a woman or a man in situations involving sexual abuse or public toilets, and gender realignment surgery is therefore actually a cop-out - one should instead accept that one is one's biological gender as a result of the acculturation one received because of it, but then subvert it through performance. The extension of this belief - that gender realignment surgery, or as La Bindel rather charmingly puts it "to have their breasts sliced off and a penis made out of their beer bellies" is the easy option for those who do not want to be gay - appears to me comically naive, but then I am open to correction.

So, what of this argument - is there any wisdom in it? I seem to recall Deva saying in another place that it is the transpeople will continue to campaign to be allowed into gender-restricted space, and biomen and biowomen will continue to campaign for their exclusion, and this is probably how it has to be. Is this article an extension of that process, and is it admissable in that context?

The other issue arising from this article is the response it garnered. Many emails and letters were sent, largely critical, leading to this response. Of particular interest is the statement by the editor:

In this case, we thought that what Julie Bindel was writing was particularly interesting because it came from her - a lesbian activist for the rights of women and children. ... She is a rare kind of writer who puts her money where her mouth is.

Can anyone explain this, transexuals being in my experience not always women (by either the conventional or Bindelian standard) and children? I think the contention is that she is uniquely qualified to talk about the suitability of transwomen for positions in sexual assault counselling.

Anyway, I suppose I'm looking for two possible threads in this topic - one being the theories espoused by the article, the other being the thinking behind and the subsequent defence of its publication.
 
 
Cat Chant
21:45 / 15.02.04
I did think there was something almost endearingly stupid about writing an article about the lengthy and expensive legal battles faced by transsexuals in order to train for the jobs they want to do, and their being disbarred from using public toilets, and ending with the conclusion that these people have chosen an "easy way out".

But not very endearing. Particularly, perhaps, because I read this article (which I will be referring to in the "horrors and lies" thread once I summon the strength) on the same day I walked into college via a piece of graffiti saying "All college lasses are lezzbos and should be raped", and was thus not in the mood.

The idea that this ignorant, bigoted rubbish somehow has more validity because written by a lesbian presumably stems from the idea that, as a lesbian, her gender and sex are askew from one another in much the same way as a trans person's, but she has chosen a different solution to the same problem. In other words, sexuality is an expression of gender, which in turn is a causal expression of sex, and all non-heterosexuals are examples of a "deviation" from that norm. Lesbians now represent an acceptable deviation from that norm (because, really, you know, they're just like us, they love their partners and want to get married and have kids). Trans people do not.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:14 / 15.02.04
Something I was curious about - the use of quotation marks at the end of the Readers' Editor's piece. I couldn't work out if they were misplaced (that is, the entire para was a quote form the therapist, which seemed to make sense), or not (in which case the readers' editor was taking a astand at the end and actively criticising the decision of the editor of Weekend...

The question of freedom of speech is up here again, in a manner not unliek the Kilroy question. And I think my response is not unlike the Kilroy question - if people want to read that European legislation is somehow facilitating a plot by transexuals to infiltrate our toilets, there are plenty of places where they can do it, and I don't really see why I should be expected to pay for it in a notionally left-wing paper...
 
 
Cat Chant
07:34 / 16.02.04
Yes. I think my response is skewed by the fact I was exposed to this article by someone suggesting I use it to teach Judith Butler to eighteen-year-olds. The Reader's Editor's response suggests that most of the complaints were based on the tone of the piece ("man in a dress", refusal to use people's gender pronoun of choice, etc), which seems to me to be a freedom-of-speech issue - is it all right to use provocative language and terms deliberately aimed at undermining a particular group's identity rhetoric (to coin a pretty stupid phrase, but I haven't had my breakfast yet)?

But because I was reading it in an academic/teaching context, I wasn't so much paying attention to freedom-of-speech issues, in the sense of "everyone being entitled to an opinion" and "isn't it refreshing to see someone speaking hir** mind". The issues that are central to me here are questions of whether a newspaper should publish garbled, incoherent arguments passing off inaccurate stereotypes about specific cultures or sub-cultures as "truths". (Or, in short, lies.)

Some reasons I thought the article was unacceptable, even on its own terms:

1. The confused basis of the argument: "It's okay for 'men' to act like 'women' up to a point, that point being the door of the pub toilets, but I'm not going to explain why I'm drawing the line there, even though my whole argument relies on it".

2. The internal contradictions: she says she objects to surgery being carried out on healthy bodies, but at one point she seems to resent a transsexual who hasn't "even" had genital surgery trying to use a women's toilet.

3. The confusion about biology - "hormonally grown breasts don't make you a woman"? How does she think her breasts grew? The gender-assignation fairy?

4. The out-and-out inaccuracies - all transsexuals conform to heterosexist stereotypes of "feminine" women and "masculine" men - which could have been cleared up with even the minimal and shallow awareness of trans cultures that I have - and I've never even read any Judith Halberstam, let alone My Gender Workbook...

On a different level, back when I was a butchy (straight) 18yo young womon, I was once hit across the shins by a little old lady's walking stick in order to prevent me using the women's toilets in a bus station. It's not just on the basis of genital appearance that straight culture polices access to spaces in terms of gender conformity, and I think it's fucked up that dykes and non-feminine straight women - or, indeed, anyone - should dissociate their struggles from trans people's, because they can base their claim to be a "real" woman on an anatomical definition of gender conformity.

If Julie Bindel has read Judith Butler, she has completely and utterly misunderstood her and is, in fact, doing exactly what Judith Butler is trying to undo. My favourite quote from "Gender Trouble" on the arbitrariness of the distinction between "gender" and "sex" that Bindel works so hard to reify:

Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature: gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or 'a natural sex' is produced and established as 'prediscursive', prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts... one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain.

By, for example, insisting that a MTF transsexual is a "man in a dress".

(Incidentally, I feel really weird typing "transsexual" as a noun so many times - sort of like saying "Jew" instead of "Jewish person". Anyone know if there's an etiquette around that terminology, so I can stand corrected?)

**Sorry, Julie, her, because you are a woman and presumably have a medical certificate to prove it.
 
 
Ex
10:50 / 16.02.04
Post lost once, so hopefully not garbled too far in the retelling:

but I'm not going to explain why I'm drawing the line there, even though my whole argument relies on it".

Absolutely. What I find annoying is precisely that it is unclear what she means. Which means that to argue against it you have to extrapolate quite heavily. I don't think the fact that this is a querky opinion piece is an excuse - Riki Wilchins can stuff more gender theory into three jokes and an anecdote than Butler can scrape into tne pages, and it's possible to be readable, accessible and clear.

Maybe it's a rhetorical strategy to be vague. To refuse to take on any of the debate around transexuality in the last ten years. I'd say it's a deliberate step back to an early, simpler argument - either that or very very sloppy research and writing. It propells me into an absurd situation, where I’m thinking “I could have written a better anti-trans article than that!”. Because I keep brushed up on the opposition - I could suggest that her indifference is a sign that she is in the absolutely normative position and thus doesn’t, at heart, feel the need to address opposing viewpoints, but that would be a cheap shot at bad psychology. But if she really feels the world has gone transcrazy, you’d think she’d appreciate the chance to knock down the translobby’s arguments in a high-circulation newspaper.

Anyway, I took out of her argument this:

Their attitude was, we're comfortable in our own skin, let's be women but subvert what that means.

(Incidentally, I love the "I used to persecute butch-femme couples - ah, I miss those simple happy days...")

So - I think she's doing a clever bait and switch on traditional anti-trans arguments.
Usually, people argue that transwomen can’t be real women because womanhood comes from within. Evidence for this is that transwomen all dress like stereotypical women - they’re “copies”. (That assertion also angers me enormously, I may rant below).
Now, in a post-Butler twist, Bidnell seems to be arguing that womanhood comes from without, that gender is full of learnt roles, and that there is no fixed connection between the body and gender. Amazingly, in this scenario, transwomen still get it in the fucking neck, because they’ve taken the connection between bodily sex and cultural gender too seriously. In evidence, the fact that they get surgery to have the physical form of stereotypical women (I saw a Tamsin Wilton paper where she asserted something very similar).
So it’s turned from “You’re so naive, womanhood is an intrinsic quality and you don’t have the right body” to “You’re so naive, womanhood is a cultural imperative and you don’t have the right training.”

I find both these arguments insulting in different ways. Both of them assume that the transwoman’s relationship to gender is infinitely more simplistic and less nuanced than the arguer’s. And that their motives are exactly what the onlooker says they are, and nothing more (in the first instance, that they are prematurely anti-essentialist, in the latter that they are over-literal simpletons invested in the flesh when we’ve all grown out of that). And that the medical and social apperatus that surrounds transgender is absolutely dictated by transpeople and they are responsible for the whole shebang. And that non-transwomen have the absolute right to tell transwomen how to behave in relation to gender, and if they don’t do it to the nontranswomen’s satisfaction, they have the right to withhold recognition from them.

So, Bindell’s argument - perplexing. If a transwoman’s efforts to bring her body into line with normative ideas of what a woman’s body should look like is regressive and anti-feminist, then presumably all non-transexual people are even more regressive - they’ve settled with the gender assigned them at birth based on bodily evidence with barely a backward glance. In fact, everyone except butches, femmes, sissy-boys and other hard-core genderfuckers are in the wrong, here. Every woman who dresses and behaves in a traditional manner is wrong. With all these candidates for a good slapping, why does Bindel go at the transwomen? Because her previous source of bile ("What's the point of being a lesbian if you're going to behave like that?") has run down, and she’s found she can segue into a totally different frame of reference without switching targets. She’s absorbed the rudiments of a post-Butler feminism and seen immediately that she can carry on picking on transwomen.

That’s more bad psychology, isn’t it? Sorry.
Anyway, I have a basic leap of faith gap between the idea that “woman” is an unstable set of cultural norms that varies between locations, social groups and time periods, and the assertion that if you’re born with a penis you can’t be a woman. My upbringing is wildly different from the average woman from Afghanistan, and probably has a lot more in common with the average middle-class British transwoman. I could expand on this a bit, but this post is already insanely long - I’ve been brooding...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:08 / 16.02.04
To deal with a slightly different aspect of Haus' original post, namely the issue of "why was this published where it was published?" - I think the thing that disturbs me most, more so than any of the content of this article itself, is that there seems to be a pattern of active transphobia in Britain's supposedly most liberal/progressive daily newspaper, when you combine the Bindel piece with this one and the several transphobic comments made by Julie Burchill, Bindel's predecessor in that particular section of the Weekend magazine. I suspect Deva is on the money about acceptable variations from the norm here, and this is bloody depressing (off-topic, but I find myself reminded of the way that derogatory class-based terms are ever more popular amongst otherwise "progressive" young middle class people: everybody needs somebody to sneer at).

Actually, the more I think about it the more I think the fact that this piece was written in the column formerly held by Burchill gives you a big clue as to how to answer the question "what is the Guardian playing at?". Burchill got away with all kinds of homophobic and racist remarks too (amongst other things), and this was to a large extent what she was paid for. That is to say, person or persons at Guardian editorial level clearly wanted Burchill to not only escape censure but to continue cranking that stuff out (I assume Haus is taking the piss when he refers to a "loving degree of subediting"?), despite neither agreeing with such viewpoints themselves or believing they would find favour with their readers.

In other words, if we give the editorial team the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not interested in propogating transphobia themselves (which is partly the basis of the defence offered in the link above) here are three possible explanations for this as far as I can see:

a) because they are under the impression that a counter to the notional liberal/progresive bias of the rest of the paper is required within its own pages, for the sake of internal 'balance' - this is pretty much stated in the link: "we are not looking for consensus",

b) because they are under the illusion that printing something with which a large proportion of your readers may strongly disagree has merit in and of itself, that indeed it is Good For your readers, because it is "thought-provoking", no matter how poorly reasoned or expressed,

c) because they are aware that printing something with which a large proportion of your readers may strongly disagree generates controversy which in turn may generate profit. Burchill certainly pulled in the "love to hate her" readers, now they're looking for a suitably "thought-provoking" replacement, and dream candidate Richard Littlejohn won't take their calls*...

I suspect the first two explanations are over-generous to the editors involved, but they're the defences usually offered. The problem with both of these being I'm not convinced that the Guardian's done much to positively educate its readers about trans issues any time in the recent past (I don't read it every day, so maybe someone can correct me), nor do I think it's safe to assume that its readers will not already be predisposed to transphobia. Sadly, I think c) hits closer to the mark: sensationalism has never been the sole province of the red tops, after all.

*I'm being ridiculous of course, since the defence offered makes it clear that as with Burchill's "aha, but I'm a feminist communist bisexual, so I can't be racist, can I?" standpoint, some kind of get-out clause is required: she's a lesbian activist, so she can't be in any way bigotted ever ever ever, do you see?
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:48 / 16.02.04
I think thats largely right, Flyboy, except that I would be a touch more generous to the editors. For a start, although the Guardian is a left wing paper, its political positioning in UK journalism says more about the opposition as the paper itself. Which is to say that the version of the Left that the Guardian wants to promote may be quite ambivalent about trans issues.

In that sense also, Julie Bindel is a good choice. This is a person who describes themselves as left wing and has a record of being an activist herself. So her transphobia, in as much as it can be identified as part of a broader attitude, is firmly part of the Left.
(In many ways, this is just a positive spin on Burchill's 'bisexual communists can't be racist'. But it is still worth addressing.)


Also, a controversial and intolerant column may serve the paper in more ways than attracting an outraged readership. I mean, we have a climate in the UK where the BBC is often described as a liberal/left biased media institution. How much more must the Guardian be dismissed and attacked for its (actually rather modest) politics? I think that having a column expressing "diverse" views might be a useful way to deflect a certain kind of criticism, without overly compromising the paper.

I suppose what I am saying is that it is a mistake to think of the Guardian as a radically left wing paper. It just happens to be more left wing than the rest of the press. I like it, but I tend to approach with the expectation that it will largely conform to mainstream bias - though through systematic selection rather than overt censorship.
 
 
wicker woman
05:28 / 17.02.04
As a m-f transsexual, I would have some interesting positions on this, except that they've mostly been covered already. Bindell's attitude, however, is no more perplexing to me (and possibly even reinforced) by these programs that teach transwomen how to behave 'like a woman'; how to bend and pick something up properly, how to 'hold' yourself, etc. If transgenderism is at least on some levels about being yourself, why are some of us so obsessed with having others tell us how to behave?
 
 
Bomb The Past
16:52 / 17.02.04
MC 900ft Bjork, I'd be wary of attributing a desire to act 'like a woman' as simply a case of essentialism or conformism. I would imagine that for many TS people there are important pragmatic consequences of learning performative skills such as modified vocalisation and posturing etc. Firstly it can help to pass, which is quite useful when confronted with potentially irate publicans such as those mentioned in Burchill's (sorry, Bindel's...) article. Secondly, a TS person might genuinely value the sorts of skills or knowledge of ettiquette that such a program might offer. For understandable reasons, Mummy might never have taught you how to sit down gracefully and with decorum while wearing a skirt. Some people might regret missing out on chunks of the basics that most people take for granted.
 
 
diz
19:32 / 17.02.04
I think the thing that disturbs me most, more so than any of the content of this article itself, is that there seems to be a pattern of active transphobia in Britain's supposedly most liberal/progressive daily newspaper, when you combine the Bindel piece with this one and the several transphobic comments made by Julie Burchill, Bindel's predecessor in that particular section of the Weekend magazine.

i'm with you on this, Flyboy. i was strongly inclined to not make much of the previous article, which was juvenile and condescending but not nearly so full of real rancor, but now... this one's worse than the last, and the two of them together seem to suggest a nascent pattern which i'm not like the smell of.

in many respects, though, i don't find it surprising. i think transgenderism is one of a series of phenomena which are emerging as new hot button issues. this may seem odd, but i group transgender issues together with cloning/genetic experimentation/bioenhancement issues and the massive migrations of populations across national borders, because all three challenge long-held beliefs in a certain stability of some kind of essential personal identity. transgenderism, and, more threateningly to some, the possibility of a queer multigender mishmash culture where the strict binaries of female/male and straight/gay explode into a complex collection of sliding-scale spectra of biology, gender identity, and sexual preferences, really threatens the core of a lot of people's hard-earned senses of self-worth. similar senses of "identity vertigo" are looming in biology, culture, and politics.

the 20th century was all about the struggle between economic classes, nations, races, tribes, for independence or dominance, but the 21st is all about people who have a fluid sense of identity vs those whose senses of self are rooted in the 20th century paradigms which exalt the right and the need to assert the value of your fixed core identity. those divisions are not going to cut across traditional Left vs Right lines. we're starting to see a big reshuffling of political blocs, i think.

that sort of rambled. sorry.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:51 / 17.02.04
This is all true, although perhaps MC900ftB is asking why the emphasis lies in being convincing, rather than being oneself. To look at it from a slightly different level, one could ask whether the aim of performativity is comparable to the aims of performance - is the intention to deliver a *convincing* performance, or simply to perform as one feels right,. In either case, the question might be whether these courses are seen as vital in order to deliver a convincing performance or merely useful in order to feel that one's performance is the sort of performance you want to be giving...

On a bit of a tangent, one of Bindel's subsequent justifications for her position on the MTFs being disbarred from a women's toilet was that she did not want to see willies (sic). As a correspondent observed, that is why toilets have cubicles and people have pants. Presumably one could put enough faith in the performance not to assume that a pre- or a- surgery tranwoman would hike her penis out and urinate against a wall?

Which falls back into the basic incongruity that gender is performative but also fundamentally tied to physicality. As it happens, Bindel also disagrees with the idea of GRS in general - she believes it to be a surgical solution to a problem that we do not know requires surgical intervention (one might compare enthusiasts of homeopathic remedies). However, while saying that she is also condemning transexuals who have *not* sought surgical remedy, as their penes will hopelessly violate the safety of a space previously reserved for people both acculturated to be female and also given the commonly requested genitalia. Experience and acculturation are not decisive without the historical entitlement that can *only* come from being treated as a woman since birth, which generally comes from crude techniques of "genital profiling", as it were.

What one might do with somebody born with a penis but raised as a girl, Lord knows. But Kimberley Nixon's pronblem, as far as I can see, is that she thought that being a ictim of sexual abuse was sufficient qualification for a sexual abuse counselling service, whereas the group, and la Bindel, believe that the brief period of time spent as a woman (insofar as one can be a woman without the necessary briefing) disqualified her. It's a question of which identity you interview, perhaps... of course, her status as a victim of sexual abuse was not mentioned in the article, presumably because JB did not believe it to be relevant, as one's experience of sexual abuse is not a relevant metric to determine one's ability to counsel *wonen*. Apples and oranges.

(Oh, Flyboy - the loving sub-editing refers to the scurrilous rumour that Julie Burchill's articles for the Guardian were so badly written that subs had to pull up trees to make them conform to some of the less rigorous elements of the style guide.)
 
 
wicker woman
06:08 / 18.02.04
dead flower, that's why I'm not really heady about the subject. It can still be a dangerous world out there for tg's, and 'passing' certainly brings a level of comfort in not having to worry about being beat to death. But I would argue that there are distinct differences between something like vocalisation, where there are definite disparities between men and women across the board, and certain elements of posture, which I think it could be argued are more stereotypical expectations of female behavior.

Certainly I would agree though, that some things are learned rather than known; however, much of that can be gleaned through observation and common sense... no more would someone wearing pants sit around with the fly knowingly open than someone wearing a skirt let it ride up to neck level when sitting down.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:21 / 18.02.04
no more would someone wearing pants sit around with the fly knowingly open than someone wearing a skirt let it ride up to neck level when sitting down.

I was born a girl and I had to be explicitly taught how to wear a skirt when I was a teenager (how to keep my knees together, how to cross my legs without pulling a Sharon-Stone, etc). I guess I mean that non-trans people have to learn how to "pass" as what they "are", too: maybe that's why trans issues are so threatening (Judith Butler says that drag exposes heterosexuality as nothing more than drag: transpeople expose non-transpeople as nothing more than incoherent configurations of sex, gender, gendered behaviours, gendered/sexual desires. Maybe).
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
13:47 / 18.02.04
(Had to step away until I'd finished screaming)

Most of what I'd say has been more stylishly covered above, but a few points.

She doesn't specifically mention Butler, as far I can see, and probably wouldn't want admit to having read her. Hers is an extremely bastardised and crude reading of gender performativity.

It's *extremely* self-serving and selective. She manages to combine the notion that "those women were women, and hadn't gone to gender reassignment clinics to have their breasts sliced off and a penis made out of their beer bellies" with a an oh-so convenient grabbing of the one part of gender performatvity that might have any relevance, the notion that "gender roles are made up. They are not real."

In doing so she's conflating sex and gender, peformance and performativity, and generally creating a huge mess out of which she can produce a rant.

And that, to a degree is what I think is behind The Guardian's defence of ths column, JB is being used as a standard-bearer of how pluralist and challenging the Guardian is("ooh! see, no-one can accuse us of PC'ness now..."). She herself says she 'would have been more analytical elsewhere' It's meant to be a rant.

And no, she doesn't get a 'day pass' to intone on sex, gender and trans issues because she's a lesbian. She uses her position as someone who sees herself as representing various communities whose relationship to gender and sexuality she sees as problematic (women, lesbians, sufferers of sexual assualt and rape.) to get some kind of high ground. And that's vile. She does have a POV that is probably more problematised than the norm, but doesn't give her carte blanche.

There *are* interesting variations in trans identity and how trans people define themselves, which are worth looking at if its at all possible to take the heat out of differing gender identities. Ie if it can help to evolve dialogue whereby pluralism is actually validated, even by those for whom it's difficult. But this ain't that.


"Twenty years ago, when I worked on an advice line for lesbians..."

arghhhh. ok, stopped screaming now.

There are important and sensitive issues around trans-people and gender-specific welfare services. But this article is not at all representative of (in this case) womens' organisations. And doen't help that process at all, probably hinders it.

I've worked with two organisations for whom the notion of women's space was fundamental, and this has been a difficult issue for both. But has been/is being tackled and is an ongoing process. It's certainly a hell of a lot more complex, and *treated as such* by many organisations.

Working in these spaces, one of the most difficult tasks is maintaining a safe and therapeutic space, and this means constant balancing acts between the needs of users/workers, the individual/the group, the overall aims/specific needs. It's a difficult but in my opinion, worthwhile task.

And like Deva, this is rather topical, as I've recently been through some training on trans issues, provided to workers/volunteers by, uh, a womens' space. Will be taking this one into work, I think.

She's hijacking a very difficult area to score cheap points. If she worked on advice lines, did she lay down the law like this to the vulnerable people she was dealing with? Strong empowerment/enabling is pretty different this crap. I hope and pray she knew the difference.

She's also claiming 'right to speak' here. And she does have a right to speak, but not to claim she's speaking for others in these roles. There's a vast spectrum in agencies' attitudes to trans issues, and she's on one extreme end of it portraying it as an open/shut case.

All in all, it's trash. The one or two useful points it makes are made in such a way as to make further discussion pointless.
 
 
_pin
13:56 / 18.02.04
By far the weirdest thing about the Guardian's possition on transsexuals is that even the tabloid right seem better at it: as Burchill herself complained about, the Daily Mail often runs short reports around page 30 about MTFs who do, admitedly, conform to gender stereotypes in an, apparently, fiercely dogmatic way. Likewise, This Morning recently featured highly sterotypical examples of both directions (one MTF and one FTM apiece).

While these people do fit rather comfortably in to the traditional gender ideals, and likewise took the view that they suffered from genuine medical conditions requiring genuine medical treatment (am I correct in identifying that some transpeople do and some transpeople don't view it like this?), it seems remarkable that the Guardian can't even manage this, let alone more radical examples of gender-fucking.

Maybe the conservatism shown by MTFs who want to wear flowery dresses and view themselves as needing medical treatment is a lot more palitable to conservatives then it is to notionally left-wingers who would much rather women did all those manly things, and vice versa for men, while confronting transpeople with more of an eye for fucking with / reordering gender and sexuality along more fluid lines are just a bit to radical for them to cope with (much like what dizfactor was saying about C20/C21 views, with the entire media being C20, I guess).

Am I making a false dichotomy between different types of transpeople? I've largely only read about the stereotype-conforming kind, prwesumably because a shockingly large ammount of my reading on this comes from A Level Psychology, while I'm also aware of the other, more self-proclaimingly queer kind. This is just a plea for information, really.

And Haus; I can only remember an example of a boy who's penis was all but burnt clean off during a circumscision and whoes mother decided to raise him as a girl during the height of Behaviourist psychology. While this may not be what you were asking about, as he never knew he had a penis, I do remember him simply being incredably depressed, never feeling like he fitted in, wanting the train set and later becoming a man, wearing lumberjack shirts and cutting down trees. He looked a lot like Justin Timberlake, but there's not really connected to the issue...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:27 / 18.02.04
Sorry, still fuming. Pin, will come back to your very interesting questions later when I've calmed down, and stopped emailing various people.


The comment that "a world inhabited just by transsexuals ... would look like the set of Grease." is uncannily similar to the kind of reactionary 'dykes are all hairy, ugly and wearing dungarees' bullshit that Bindell probablly fought in her day. And that queer women still deal with today. A little hypocritical, no?

But I forgot, back in the (good? bad? who can tell?) old days, there were butches and femmes to be suspicious of/vilify but these days she "looks back on them with affection and, yes, nostalgia. "

So, if we wait twenty years, will Bindell get to grips with transwomen? (Probably not if they see her coming. Sorry, couldn't resist that.)

She defines feminism as "based on the premise that prescriptive gender roles are a cause of women's oppression. " but seems pretty happy to apply prescriptive gender roles in order to vilify another embattled (and in the UK at least I'd argue, significantly more endangered*) group.

* and that's endangered as in, 'it's dangerous to walk down the street'.
 
 
_Boboss
15:37 / 18.02.04
not seen a guardian defense of this article bip, have seen a pretty hands-up apology printed last saturday though.

this poor cow just can't not write like burchill now she's got her page it seems. the rest of the papers' staffers are glad she never visits the office bet.
 
 
james**
19:15 / 18.02.04
Can I just say, as someone who works in the media, I think you're being very naive if you expect the Guardian to be so enlightened. - Almost all its senior editors are white heterosexual Oxbridge/public school, with the very limited view that usually entails. They might like to to think they're liberal but frankly they don't have a clue.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:52 / 18.02.04
It has to be said though, that there are *some* liberal voices in the guardian. Compare it to the daily star, which would you rather read?

Of course it isn't perfect, and I'm not saying we should ignore this article (which has clearly offended people).
 
 
Cat Chant
20:12 / 18.02.04
I think you're being very naive if you expect the Guardian to be so enlightened.

%Oh, well, fair enough then. The media tells lies, but we should just accept this without challenging or discussing the disinformation.%

Apologies for the sarcasm, but I don't understand what you're saying. I don't think anyone particularly expects the Guardian to be a beacon of trans-rights rhetoric, but, firstly, this sort of nonsense should be challenged and overturned wherever possible; secondly, it's helpful to people to have somewhere to rant where their position will be supported, rather than ridiculed: even if it doesn't change the Guardian's position, it limits the damage this article has done to us; and thirdly, it's important to keep track of the ways in which this kind of nonsense is legitimated in various contexts (here, the 'left-wing, liberal' mainstream media).

I also don't think the issue is "offence", as such, but it's 10pm and I haven't had my tea yet so I won't get into that just yet.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
21:25 / 18.02.04
Wolvy, where's the apology, in last Sats' Guardian?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:37 / 18.02.04
BiP: I think Wolverine is referring to the Reader's Editor piece of the 14 Feb, linked to in my first post, to which I repeat:


Something I was curious about - the use of quotation marks at the end of the Readers' Editor's piece. I couldn't work out if they were misplaced (that is, the entire para was a quote from the therapist, which seemed to make sense), or not (in which case the readers' editor was taking a stand at the end and actively criticising the decision of the editor of Weekend...

TBH, given that the editor of Weekend gets to defend hir position, and Julie Bindel gets to do likewise, this strikes me as a fairly key question. Question the second being whether this criticism, if it exists in a meaningful sense, has any actual impact on the editorial policy of the Guardian. Since Julie Bindel is back as of yesterday, and given that she is being lazy again (the classic crime passionalel is a man killing his wife after leaerning of her infidelity, not a woman killing her husband's lover), it seems not.

James - well. I know a fair few people who write for the Guardian or Observer, surprisingly few of who can tick all the boxes of straight, white, public school educated and Oxbridge. However, none of those occupied senior editorial positions, so I take your point - by definition, somebody who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge (or, indeed, anywhere ekse) 30 years ago is going to have to put in the hours to keep abreast of developments in non-normative identity construction (note, probably not quite the same as "liberal", which is in itself an awkward term). However, I don't think it's naive to expect the editors nonetheless to behave in a particular (decent? considerate? liberal?) way - naiveté presumes that we have to change the way we think, and not they. Given that I am white, publicly schooled and went to Oxbridge Academy, London (I don't think I'm exactly giving away any big secrets there, but hey, full disclosure), I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that I would not have paid Julie Bindel to contribute such an apalling (in terms of message and style) article. Shouldn't we be expecting *more* of people whose education has placed them fair to occupy such positions?

Which kind of dovetails with Deva's and Chris' points; just because we couldn't necessarily expect better really doesn't mean we *shouldn't* expect better, especially because, like it or not, the Guardian is the only daily mainstream newspaper aimed at the left-leaning middle classes, who are more likely to be onside on issues like trans identity (with a bit of constructive conversation) than, say, readers of the Daily Mail, who are living in a constant state of fear.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
01:29 / 19.02.04
"thirdly, it's important to keep track of the ways in which this kind of nonsense is legitimated in various contexts (here, the 'left-wing, liberal' mainstream media). "

Yes. This ties in with Haus' post neatly as there seems to be a feeling that it's worse when this stuff appears in the Guardian. As The G purports to be 'left-wing' and 'liberal'. And I'd have to put those in scare quotes as well. Perhaps it's that we know The Daily Mail, for example is 'The Enemy', whereas the G is meant to be 'on our side'?

Perhaps this might be a useful point to examine how the Guardian presents itself, and what that leads us to expect from it. (There might also a useful discussion to be had on 'liberalism'?)

My impression is that it's probably still the most left-leaning of of the UK newspapers, and likes to present itself as socially-aware and innovative. It's long been associated with creative and care professions. (of the broadsheets, its the one you'll look for jobs in either of these sectors (also the voluntary sector).

But, also increasingly (due to ratings/competition) seems to be positioning itself as the 'dangerously radical' broadsheet(a contradiction in terms??). Hence the justification of the Bindell piece as 'provocative'.(which to my mind is a pathetic excuse.)

However, it's stil a hugely establishment organism - and as such, it's notions of what constitute dangerously radical and provocative operate within that context.

And in trying to be provocative on issues it doesn't seem to have a great grasp on because it's mainstream, it often mistakes innovative/constructive provocation for shouty reactionary-ness(argh. sorry, but you know what i mean) (see JB the first.)

Talking with a friend about this, it struck me that were you to 'translate' this into an article on racial difference, by a non-white columnist, it wouldn't get past the editors/legal depts, 'provocative' or not. Whereas trans issues still seem to be an allowable *publishable* bigotry.

Hope this isn't gibberish...
 
 
Quireboy
12:01 / 19.02.04
It's not just on transsexualism. Consider Libby Brooks article, Without prejudice (Friday December 12, 2003), in which she considers whether Britain has "finally accepted homosexuality". Would a white writer have been commissioned to write a piece on whether Britain has finally accepted ethnic minorities - I doubt it.

It's a really superficial piece, based on there being more openly gay men on TV. Doesn't bother to consider the experience of gay men outside London in any real depth, or tackle increasing levels of homophobic assaults, homophobic bullying in school.

The Guardian's best known gay writers cover fashion (Charlie Porter), TV (Gareth McLean) and the media (Matt Wells). It'd be interesting to know how many are on home or international news. And Haus - are the people you know reporters or sub-editors? There's been a push for greater diversity among the latter, but not the former.

Re. Jame's point about naivete - as someone who's worked on several national papers, I've got the impression that older (white, male, etc) editors do tend to assume that if you're gay you're more interested in art, fashion and celebrities than "hard news". Yes, they need to change their attitudes - but don't hold your breath. Newspaper editors/managers (as elsewhere) tend to promote people like themselves. And good HR - which could promote that change of attitide - is virtually none existent on the nationals. Many posts, particularly senior ones, are not advertised externally, or publicised widely internally.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:01 / 19.02.04
Quireboy - in terms of the Guardian, mainly contributors. But I take your point, and a decent HR department is, as you say, key - there is no point in reading Edward Said if the hiring choices are dictated by who is likely to get on well with the editor.

Which leads back into BiP, who was not, in my opinion, talking gibberish but rather sweet reason. It does indeed seem unlikely that an article making the same criticisms of gay culture or ethnic minorities would be allowed in. So, it seems that by that logic the Guardian has a policy of not allowing articles, even controversial ones, that would infringe in certain areas, while allowing freedom of editorial conscience on other fairly major issues. Which is why the free speech idea seems a bit of a false trail - we are talking about how one goes about satisfying a market in an environment where freedom of speech is already in some ways circumscribed. My concern is that, since the Guardian is the only purportedly liberal newspaper in the UK (pace the Mirror), and seems to take that role quite seriously, it also has a part to play in defining what is and is not an acceptable liberal attitude set....
 
 
Lurid Archive
23:33 / 19.02.04
I'm not sure I entirely follow the discussion here. That the article is offensive and to be criticised seems fairly clear. But I fail to see the clear role the Guardian has to play.

Which is to say that, while I would prefer the Guardian to be rather more enlightened and rather more left wing than it is, I'm not sure that its failures are in any way at odds with its position as the main UK liberal paper. It is as much defined by as being formative of liberal opinion, isn't it? Couldn't a liberal editor with no strong views on trans issues see Julie Bindel as presenting an interesting liberal viewpoint? I suppose I'm making the case that, on a certain level, the comparisons with racism and homophobia don't quite work because the argument with transphobia hasn't been won amongst the public in the same way.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
02:38 / 20.02.04
well, this is again where i suspect an examination of Guardian-style liberalism might be useful. (ie what exactly is liberal in this context and why do we call this liberalism, how does it connect to liberal traditions, if at all??).

But it's too late for me (danced out/airheaded).

One point, though:

Agree totally on the Libby Brooks article, Quire(actually wrote an angry 'and i'm a woman' letter to the G about it. jeesus, I'm becoming 'disgusted of tunbridge wells')urgh, and that's v.interesting re gay journos on broadsheets.

I wish i could say it was surprising but I have a gay friend who is a hard news journo, (obsessed with jetting out to war zones/an adrenaline junkie/maniac), who is sick to death of editors assuming he's fashion, art or film.


"It's a really superficial piece, based on there being more openly gay men on TV. Doesn't bother to consider the experience of gay men outside London in any real depth, or tackle increasing levels of homophobic assaults, homophobic bullying in school. "

Yeah, that article was really icky, it was sooooo the worst/most stark example i've seen for ages of Guardianistas and their tiny blinkered world. Like, you only have to get half a mile away from soho for queerbashing to be really fucking common and unreported, let alone the rest of the country.
 
 
diz
08:00 / 20.02.04
Perhaps this might be a useful point to examine how the Guardian presents itself, and what that leads us to expect from it. (There might also a useful discussion to be had on 'liberalism'?)

My impression is that it's probably still the most left-leaning of of the UK newspapers...

just to jump in at this point: an interesting point in this discussion is where this positioning ends up situating the Guardian outside the UK.

here in the US, as you are probably aware, we are a bit hard up for left-leaning major mainstream media outlets. in that respect, the Guardian is something of a godsend, or at least it is for me personally. this makes me all the more offended by the emergence of a pattern of anti-trans BS, but at the same time, less eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater and condemn the Guardian as a monstrous tool of the reactionary right or something.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:38 / 20.02.04
on a certain level, the comparisons with racism and homophobia don't quite work because the argument with transphobia hasn't been won amongst the public in the same way.

I assumed that that was why the comparisons were being made, Lurid: to demonstrate that certain forms of expressions of transphobia are more acceptable than analogous expressions of racism and homophobia, and that this is connected (somehow - exactly how is part of what this thread is for, I suppose) to the fact that a 'liberal'/'left-wing' newspaper will print a virulently transphobic article where it would not print a racist or homophobic one: or at least its racism and/or homophobia will appear differently (more covertly, perhaps).

while I would prefer the Guardian to be rather more enlightened and rather more left wing than it is, I'm not sure that its failures are in any way at odds with its position as the main UK liberal paper. It is as much defined by as being formative of liberal opinion, isn't it?

Absolutely. I'm not sure, though, where your problem is with the foregoing discussion on the Guardian, as this seems to be more of a summary of the points/ assumptions made than a riposte to them: the discussion seems to me to be about what it means that the main UK liberal paper will present transphobia as "challenging and free-speaking opinion" where it will not present overt racism or homophobia as such. One of the ways to challenge the Guardian's take on 'liberalism' is to argue against it precisely in the name of liberalism. I don't think that means expecting the Guardian to be perfect or to say that its transphobia is at odds with its claim to be a left-wing paper: it's just putting pressure on a fault-line in its self-presentation ("You claim to be a left-wing paper and yet a substantial strand of left-wing opinion feels that...").

This is reminding me of something I thought of a while ago that always seems to crop up in arguments between the two of us, Lurid: have I mentioned it before? I get the feeling sometimes that, for you, terms like "white" or "liberal" have a definable real-world referent and that discussion of them is a question of coming up with a definition. (I kind of associate that with "science" - in scientific discourse, in order for words to work they have to mean specifically defined things: you know, you can't talk about an "atom" if one minute you mean one kind of small particle and another minute you mean another.) So that you can't argue against 'liberalism' in the name of other 'liberalisms'. Whereas I tend to think of these terms as being perpetually undefined, and functioning through the way that different people and/or groups have different relationships to the term. So that any groupings under the term "liberal" (or anything else) are always provisional and capable of fracturing or merging with other groups through different axes of relation to the term. (Which I associate more with literary language, where in order for words to work they have to be open to an affective or connotative dimension.)

But that has nothing to do with the case at hand, it was just something I was thinking of when I was trying to work out why we always seem to fight past each other, if you know what I mean.
 
 
illmatic
09:42 / 20.02.04

/rot

I can only remember an example of a boy who's penis was all but burnt clean off during a circumscision and whoes mother decided to raise him as a girl during the height of Behaviourist psychology.

There was a documentary about this guy on the Beeb last year. I can't remember his name, but someone more clued up than me may be able to post a link. The programme presented it as a case of contesting nature/nuture schools in psycholgy - the doctor was in touch with the family throughout childhood and consistently cited this case as proof that nuture was greater than nature that, we are all tablula rasa etc, and ignored/censored over the difficulties this person encountered - can't remember if these really started a puberty or before. The indvidual concerned looked very damaged by their experience, as one might expect.

/end rot.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
11:02 / 20.02.04
I think that having a column expressing "diverse" views might be a useful way to deflect a certain kind of criticism, without overly compromising the paper.

So... if nasty reactionary fucks say your paper is a load of lefty liberal pinko PC nonsense, the correct response is to "deflect" that criticism by printing nasty reactionary articles rather than, say, taking that criticism to pieces and exposing its invalidity or maybe even just ignoring it? Sorry, you've lost me.

I genuinely don't quite understand your position, Lurid. It strikes me that there are only two possible internally consistent positions one can take if one doesn't object to the article being published or think that it makes a mockery of the idea of the Guardian being a liberal/left-wing paper: either a) one believes that a liberal/left-wing paper should represent all possible positions, in which case the Guardian should also include homophobic, sexist, racist and anti-working class articles (I'd argue that it already does that plenty, but hey), or b) one doesn't see Bindels' article as being in any way an affront to liberal/left-wing values.

I'm not sure which position you're taking, but if it's b), well. As I'm sure you've heard/read from me before, just because people who call themselves liberal or left-wing have often expressed transphobia doesn't mean we should accept that transphobia belongs in a kind of canon of liberal/left-wing thought. I know we had a conversation a couple of months ago using Christianity as an analogy - what you're saying to me seems akin to "well, burning people at the stake can be said to be part of a Christian tradition, therefore it is inaccurate to describe it as an affront to real Christian values, therefore even though I am against burning people at the stake I am happy to include a call for a return to stake-burnings in our local parish newsletter." Do I really need to explain why I object to that stance?
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:44 / 20.02.04
I assumed that that was why the comparisons were being made, Lurid: to demonstrate that certain forms of expressions of transphobia are more acceptable than analogous expressions of racism and homophobia

Yeah, fair enough. Though it seemed to me that something more was going on. That the argument being implicitly made is that the analogies offered demonstrate the unnacceptability of transphobia. While I am convinced, there is the rather big assumption that the analogies hold.

I get the feeling sometimes that, for you, terms like "white" or "liberal" have a definable real-world referent and that discussion of them is a question of coming up with a definition.

This is frustrating, in a sense, because I often get the sense that I am ascribed certain, rather simplisitic, positions because opposition is most easily understood as coming from a specific stance one is opposed to. Hammers turning the world into nails.

For me these labels are a convenient shorthand for vaguely defined but useful concepts which are generalities that, by necessity, compress diversity in favour of simplification. Rather like talking about the policy of the Labour Party, despite being aware of the many different strands of opinion therein, I talk about "liberalism" while being fully aware of the diversity and changability of that set of positions. Labels are a fiction, but a rather indispensible one.

Talking about "liberalisms" is fair enough, of course, and isn't really at odds with my identifying a set of opinions and political sensitivities which I put under the label "liberalism". Much as you do in a speciifc case, Deva, in the quote at the top of this post.

So you can argue against liberalism from the position of other liberalisms, sure. I would call that arguing against liberalism from the Left, myself, because I think that bunch of shorthands conveys the same concept more accurately. But YMMV.

I suppose my point was that there are different flavours in Left wing thinking. Ironically, I am trying to highlight plurality rather than deny it. Because while I don't quite feel that anyone has said that being non-committal on trans issues is illegitimate or perhaps contradictory, for a liberal newspaper, I think the discussion has got close.
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:58 / 20.02.04
Flyboy: Its a modified (b). I think that liberalism and left wing politics, as I understand the usage of the terms, include a lot of thinking that I don't have very much time for. These terms are changeable and vague, but also constrained. Like the convention that Democrats are left wing in the US.

I don't think we have any choice but to accept that there are intolerant left wingers. Again, I'm relying on common usage which is open to debate but I think this is fairly robust.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:20 / 20.02.04
But the article wasn't "non-committal" on trans issues by anyone's standards, was it? And it seems I'm not alone in thinking that it is part of a trend on the part of the Guardian that isn't non-committal either. This is before we even get to the issue of what a "non-committal" stance on trans issue would actually look like (it would definitely NOT be the policy of just ignoring the issue or presenting it as some weird extreme fringe issue not as important as queer rights or racial equality, right?). If it helps, though, I think being non-committal on trans issues is illegitimate and contradictory, for a progressive newspaper. And I think being openly transphobic is illegitimate and contradictory for a liberal newspaper.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:13 / 20.02.04
This is frustrating, in a sense, because I often get the sense that I am ascribed certain, rather simplisitic, positions because opposition is most easily understood as coming from a specific stance one is opposed to

Yeah, and I'm sorry about that if/when I do it to you. I'm hoping that formulating it explicitly will be helpful, at least to me, because then I'll be able to check more easily whether I'm responding to a simplistic Lurid that I've made up.

Theadrot again, sorry.
 
  

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