How Big is the Women's Tent?

Val McDermid's good intentions have led her to a bad conclusion.

I can’t resist a cute little knob.

(You can watch or listen to me read this article here.)

The other day the Sunday Times ran an online poll which consisted of a single question, presented as a cute little interactive dial for you to drag with your mouse or your finger: “Do you think womanhood a big enough tent for natal-women & trans women?”

This was part of the packaging of an interview with the crime writer and lesbian Val McDermid, who said to the Times, “Womanhood is a big tent. It embraces me and Kim Kardashian. There is certainly room in that tent for the trans women I know.”

What an odd way of looking at womanhood — a big tent. I think McDermid’s missing the bigger picture.

You could argue that the modern transgender movement has roots in the "third genders" of other cultures¹. These were almost invariably conceived by men who believed that manhood is an exclusive tent not big enough to accommodate gay and feminine men. Here McDermid arrives at the same place despite coming at it with the opposite intention: she's a gay woman arguing from a position of inclusion. That's how the strange, binary math of gender works: if you invert all the variables you end up back at the same result. Include/exclude, straight/gay, male/female. Like a light bulb with switches at both ends of a hallway, if you flip one or the other switch, the light turns on or off, but flip the switches at both ends and the light just ends up back the way it started.

The definitions of male and female — of men and women — are clear, and they come from objective scientific observation, not subjective ideological advocacy. They apply to each of us in the same way they do to all the other mammals on the earth. We are each born under one of the two “tents.” Pressure to enlarge one tent is the result of pressure to shrink the other, and that pressure comes from somewhere: politics, culture, ideology. It's man-made — literally. "Trans women" were not born tent-less, adrift in some kind of sex purgatory until women like Val McDermid came along to finally give them a home. (This is equally true of people with DSDs — "intersex" conditions: once the boundaries even appear to get a little bit blurry, society has historically turned to politics & ideology, not biology, to step in and assign people to their "correct" tents.)

You can see where McDermid’s coming from, and how it’s led her to make a common mistake in the calculus of trans “inclusion”: lesbians and gays were not welcome in either biological tent until quite recently, and we did indeed feel at times like we were in sexual limbo. Thanks to social progress and increased tolerance, most of us gays & lesbians have become comfortable among the fellow men and women in our rightful biological tents, but it’s by no means a perfect integration. We still remember what that limbo felt like, and some of us now ascribe that feeling to everyone and anyone who today claims the label “trans” for him or herself. As McDermid said in the Times: “I can remember people saying: ‘You’re not a proper woman. I don’t want you in the same changing room as my wife.’ We are doing the same thing again.” I myself can remember, growing up as a feminine and petite gay man, how frightened I was of almost all straight men until I was well into adulthood; I stuck mostly to women & gay guys. If transwomen want to go into the women’s tent because they profess to feel as though they don’t belong in the men’s tent, then why shouldn’t women welcome them? What does it matter that it’s not their proper biological tent, so long as they can find a place to peaceably and comfortably exist?

Well, there’s a very big matter of course. I say "of course" because I harp on and on and on about it, because to me it's jaw-droppingly obvious, and it still surprises me that people like Val McDermid just can't bring themselves to see it. It's the factor that some men simply want to get into the women's tent, for a variety of reasons, one of them being the same reason a fox would want to get into a hen house. A lot of men are professing to be tent-less and in desperate need of shelter in the women’s tent, when in fact they’ve got a perfectly fine place in the men’s tent, which they’ve voluntarily abandoned to set out on the adventure of colonizing the women’s instead.

This is a man setting out on a kinky adventure to the women’s tent.

No, Val, I’m not saying that the feminine petite gay men like I used to be are all predators, I’m saying that not all men who label themselves ‘trans’ are feminine petite gay males or anything remotely comparable to us. Many men who label themselves ‘trans’ are autogynephiles, and for your sake, Val, if you’re reading this — because most everyone else who’s heard of me surely knows what the word autogynephile means by now — I’ll explain: these are men whose instinctive human desire to mate and pair-bond with females has inadvertently locked onto their own bodies as the target of their desire. Some of these men experience a deeply painful and distressing psychological dissonance, because their own sex is not that which their own sex-drive wants them to be, and in order to alleviate that distress they seek to emulate what they perceive to be more woman-like appearance and behaviour. Some of these men, however, revel in the sexual enjoyment of their cross-dressing, and they see free and unfettered access to spaces otherwise reserved exclusively for women as a part of their pursuit of sexual happiness.

There are of course also many decent men, some who identify as male-to-feminine transsexuals, some who don’t, who experience a lot of distress about their biological sex, and it’s an open question how best we as a society can accommodate these men. It’s laudable that women like Val publicly defend and express compassion and empathy for these men. But flinging open the “women’s tent” to anyone who asks would cause almost as many problems for them as it would for women. For example, what of the many feminine males who wouldn’t want to flee the men’s tent for the women’s? Surely it’s making things harder for them (us) to remain in their (our) natural biological tents alongside our fellow males when those males are being told that rather than learning to welcome and integrate us, they can just encourage us to go off to the women’s tent? That lands us gender variant men and boys right back where many other cultures have historically put us: like hijras and muxes and “ladyboys,” in social roles outside the men’s tent that are not entirely voluntary and are often marginalized. This is what many parents in the UK and elsewhere are now doing with their gender non-conforming sons. They’re doing the same to their gender nonconforming daughters. Nobody wins in the big women’s tent.

As I set out to write this, that Times poll had 84 percent of respondents saying no to redefining womanhood to include “trans women” (a term which, again, just means any male who says he’s trans, for any reason), and a mere 9 percent saying yes. Online polls are mostly meaningless marketing tools that don’t produce scientifically useful metrics, but results this skewed show that there must be a lot of women who understand the importance of keeping the “tents” of womanhood and manhood the same size that they already are.

So how big is the women’s tent? It’s exactly the same size as the population of females alive at this moment on the planet. (Contrary to popular belief, there are actually slightly more males than females born every year, but, presumably due to the risk-courting effects testosterone has on men’s behaviour, they’re more likely than females to die young, which leaves about 52% of the human race in the women’s tent.)

You could argue that I, as a man, have no business opining on the size of the women’s tent, but I disagree: like I said, this is a man-made problem. Men have a responsibility to take care of the people in our own tent.

h/t Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels

1. The hijras of the Indian subcontinent, the kathoey (“ladyboys”) of mainland Southeast Asia, the fa’afafine of the Pacific Islands, the khanith of the Middle East, the muxe of Central America, the travesti of South America, what were formerly known (derogatorily) as the berdache of indigenous North America (renamed as two-spirit during a 1990 conference in Winnipeg), and others.