Let The Right One In: Who Is — and Isn't — Trans?

“Trans,” in practice in the real world today, is an attribute that is literally impossible to measure.

Update: You can listen to or watch me read this article here!

One of the most common arguments I see in the trans debate is that “cis men” might pose a threat in women’s spaces but “trans women” don’t. J.K. Rowling set off a new round of debates about the “cis men”/“trans women” distinction when she wrote a trenchant and sarcastic tweet a couple weeks ago:

Amid all the fuss, prominent Australia-based feminist and author Jane Caro plunged in, retweeting posts that called Australian gender-critical feminists such as Katherine Deves, Sall Grover, and Holly Lawford-Smith “the toilet police” for their stance that trans-identifying males shouldn’t be allowed in women’s spaces.

Caro went on to call trans-identifying males “vulnerable minorities” and she posted a link to “the stats” that supposedly back this — specifically, a survey that gathered self-reports of crime victimhood in the U.S. six years ago.

She missed the point entirely.

One of the many problems with “trans” is that in the age of self-ID, it's impossible to collect stats that differentiate “trans” people from “cis” people because ultimately there's no longer anything of substance to differentiate them. “Trans,” as it has come to be defined in practice in the real world today, is an attribute that is literally impossible to measure.

Danielle Muscato self-identifies as a transwoman.

The supposed distinction between “cis men” and “trans women” (or lack thereof) comes into sharp focus at the exact moment right before a visibly male person steps into a women's changing room or bathroom or shelter: whether or not he “should” be welcome to cross that threshold ultimately comes down to whether or not he's experiencing a state of transness at that moment. Problem is: a state of transness is not visible or measurable in any way. By contrast, virtually every man’s sex is readily identifiable on sight with astonishing accuracy within a single microsecond — because sex distinctions evolved over aeons specifically for that purpose: it’s incredibly necessary for females’ survival to be able to detect the presence of males. But “transness”… there's no means to verify it; all you can do is assume that any male who commits the act of stepping into a women's space must be embodying such a sacred, spiritual state of honorary womanhood that he — “she,” if you must — is therefore welcome to be there. And you MUST assume that, because for a woman to verbally challenge someone on sight is to risk committing a most unforgivable act of prejudice against a vulnerable trans person. (And besides, she’d be unlikely to get an honest answer anyway.)

So in practice, then, in the age of de facto self-ID, all males are “trans women” the moment they cross the threshold into women’s spaces, and there is in practice no such thing as a “cis male in a women’s space,” forevermore.

It reminds me of the trope from folklore, that a vampire can’t come into your home unless you invite him in. Only imagine the rule had been changed so that vampires can now simply invite themselves in: this would render the purpose of the rule meaningless, and scary novels and films like Let The Right One In would make no sense.

A scene from the 2008 Swedish film Let The Right One In. Eli, a vampire, can’t enter Oskar’s home unless she’s invited in. But what if she could just self-identify as a non-vampire and invite herself in?

The specific study that Jane Caro cited, the one based on a survey of crime victimhood, distinguished the “trans” people from “cis” people surveyed by asking them their “sex assigned at birth” and their “current gender identity,” and then it assumed both were true and accurate responses. Already, that doesn't quite make sense — what is a gender identity? How is sex “assigned” at birth? — but more to the point: those are not criteria that can be applied at the doors to women’s spaces. You can’t stop every single visible male and ask him those two questions — sex “assigned” at birth; current “gender identity”; and even if you could, it’s just a convoluted form of self-declaration: you still can’t verify if his responses are true. So you have to stick with sex, not “gender identity,” because out of the two, only sex is readily observable.

The most basic attempted rebuttal to this is that some transgender males pass seamlessly as women, and we can’t just interrogate everyone at the door to every women’s space. So you see, some males are going to get into women’s spaces no matter what, therefore we must simply abandon sex distinction altogether! Well, firstly, fully-passing trans-identified males are really their own separate topic. By virtue of the fact that they go unnoticed as trans in their day-to-day interactions in the public, in practice they don’t really have anything to do with the vast majority of males, who are instantly clocked as male despite their hairstyle and clothing. And secondly, this is not an argument that distinguishes “cis men” from “trans women” at all: rather, it’s an argment for letting any males into female spaces — abandoning sex as a relevant criterion altogether, but not offering up anything in its place that can be practically used to distinguish men from women on sight — so we go right back to square one.

An even more basic problem with Jane Caro’s “stats” — her attempt to justify males in women’s spaces with the argument that “trans people” are at more risk of violence than “cis people” — is that it’s completely irrelevant. Last week, Kathryn Bromwich wrote a column for the Guardian that was entirely premised on the same argument — a bloated essay that was fatally flawed right from its foundation, because how likely anyone is to be a victim themself has no bearing on how likely others are to be victimized by them. I am a former data analyst/modeller/programmer, and in the parlance of data, these are two unrelated variables — separate pieces of information that cannot be fit into one column in an Excel spreadsheet; they must be collected in separate fields, because they are fundamentally separate things, as separate as, say, your date of birth and your place of birth.

Males are far more likely to be victims of assault from other males than females are. Same for murder. Same for virtually all violent crimes. Male-on-male violence is far more prevalent than male-on-female violence. That’s all you’re actually saying (albeit in disguise) when you say that “trans people” face more violence than “cis people.” What’s far less common and severe than both is female-on-female violence, and that’s all that matters here. Women’s spaces are for the safety and dignity of females; men’s conflicts among each other, no matter how those men identify, are a completely separate — though still extremely important — issue.

To put it bluntly: if a woman is being assaulted right now by a man, she isn’t going to be preoccupied with whether or not her assailant has himself been a victim of assault at some point in his past. It doesn’t mitigate the assault she’s experiencing right now in any way. This is the principle in a graphic nutshell.

A few decades ago, in a very different cultural landscape, “trans” meant transsexual. There was a lot more significance to the term; it actually carried with it a degree of meaning, that these were people who had undergone or were undergoing a material process, with medical oversight, gatekeeping, and significant impediments, both cultural and tangible, to prevent all but the most determined from undertaking it. I could almost — almost — come to see where people like Jane Caro and Kathryn Bromwich are coming from, if I imagine that they’re stuck in the past, that they don’t recognize that the very term “trans” has undergone scope creep, that by now it’s nothing but at best a fashion label and at worst an all-access pass for predators and charlatans. But even back when trans meant transsexual, the prerequisite process that came with the label didn’t actually change anyone’s sex — it didn’t change males into women. And the process didn’t prevent some violent, dangerous males from going through with it (though it certainly deterred many).

Ultimately, when it comes to women’s spaces, the only thing that really works is a division along sex lines. The only way to keep the vampires out is to uphold the rule that they can’t just invite themselves in.

h/t Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels.