Sheila Jeffreys

This book will explore the harms created by the ideology and practice of transgenderism, a phenomenon that developed in the mid to late twentieth century.

Transgenderism has only been an accepted disorder for which the treatment of choice is the administration of hormones, and perhaps amputation or other surgery, for a comparatively short time.

In the 1990s, partly as a result of the potential for networking created by the Internet, a political movement of transgender activism was created to campaign for transgender ‘rights’. Considerable social, political and legal changes are occurring in response, and there is increasing acceptance by governments and many other organisations and actors of the legitimacy of such rights. These changes have ramifications for lesbian and gay existence and the lesbian and gay community; for the health and life chances of transgenders themselves; for the possibilities of women’s equality

the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination

But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.

Gallus Mag from GenderTrender (GenderTrender, n.d.b), and Dirt from the blog, The Dirt from Dirt, Change your World, Not your Body (Dirt from Dirt, n.d.)

Feminist critics argue that the concept of ‘gender identity’ is founded upon stereotypes of gender, and, in international law, gender stereotypes are recognised as being in contradiction to the interests of women

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (1979) was drawn up before the language of gender and the idea of ‘gender identity’ came to dominate international law discourse and to stand in for women as a sex category. It spoke instead of ‘stereotyped roles’ and recognised these stereotypes as the basis for discrimination against women.

(CEDAW, 1979: Article 5)

The idea of ‘gender identity’ relies on stereotypes for its meaning and is in direct confl ict with the understanding in CEDAW that such stereotypes are profoundly harmful to women.

The term ‘gender’ itself is problematic. It was first used in a sense that was not simply about grammar by sexologists – the scientists of sex such as John Money in the 1950s and 1960s – who were involved in normalising intersex infants. They used the term to mean the behavioural characteristics they considered most appropriate for persons of one or other biological sex. They applied the concept of gender when deciding upon the sex category into which those infants who did not have clear physical indications of one biological sex or another should be placed (Hausman, 1995). Their purpose was not progressive. These were conservative men who believed that there should be clear differences between the sexes and sought to create distinct sex categories through their projects of social engineering. Unfortunately, the term was adopted by some feminist theorists in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s was commonly used in academic feminism to indicate the difference between biological sex and those characteristics that derived from politics and not biology, which they called ‘gender’