Feminist transphobia: the ivory tower.

Harriet Smith Hughes argues that Julie Burchill's transphobic rant highlights some of the broader problems facing modern feminism.

Harriet Smith Hughes on Tuesday 15th January 2013

Photograph: Becky Nye

“To have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women – above natural-born women, who don't know the meaning of suffering, apparently – is a bit like the old definition of chutzpah: the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency on the grounds he was an orphan.”

This is how Julie Burchill chose to characterise transsexual inequality in Sunday’s Observer. The piece was a follow-up to a fight between her long-standing friend and fellow journo, Suzanne Moore, and the “transsexual lobby”. In its deceptively plain and respectable typeface, the piece exemplifies the problem of populist feminist debate: introspective, self-referential, and happily couched within the gentility of leftist Comment sections, feminism is defined in the public consciousness by a small set of loudly proclaimed representatives. The debate is small and insular, and founded on the preservation of small and insular groups of interest. It’s reflective of a political sphere in which black women have their own distinct and separate niche, as though middle-ground feminism is effectively synonymous with a middleclass, white majority.

The recent history of feminism goes some way to explaining this state of affairs. Women in the media have, in the past few decades, admirably and doggedly kept women’s issues in the spotlight, and in referring to themselves as feminists, forwarded the idea of feminism as an integral element of daily politics. Yet as a result, the evolution of feminism as a public entity has been shaped largely in the discussions of a narrow media elite. The vast majority of the public aren’t interested enough, committed enough, or possessed of enough time to explore the happenings of global feminist activism, or youth feminist blogging, or intellectual feminist criticism. They get their feminism from the media, to the effect that the “ivory-tower” accusations so often levelled at leftist media come to colour the image of feminism; and feminism has plenty of that, without the Observer’s help. When “the issues” are referred to – rape conviction rates, the gender pay gap, or similar – the term “feminism” does not feature. It is used, instead, in pieces like Burchill’s, debating the internal politics of a self-defined world. As a result, feminism becomes easily separated from the issues, to the detriment of that great mass of activists who do their incredible and essential work under the unhappy banner of “feminism”.

Part of the problem is the nature of “feminism” as a political entity: neither disparate nor united; unsupported by a concrete agenda, or even common policies. The term means something different in every instance of its use. If a word is, in operation, defined largely by the way in which it is understood as opposed to the meaning intended, then “feminism” is almost always lost in reception. It’s paradoxical, then, that feminism has got a reputation for exclusivity partly because it is so diverse and universal. It’s impossible to find cohesion in an ideology that encompasses the interests of half the world’s population.

The answer is not to try. Cohesion isn’t necessary in feminism, any more than it is possible. Unity, community, must be maintained though, even where agreement is not. So often the “core principles” of feminism come down to debates between essentially compatible camps; which not only perpetuates a detrimental public image and detracts from the important interests of the warring parties, but also obfuscates the ideology of the movement as a whole.

Julie Burchill has made the feminist debate about herself and her cohort, pitting a false, generalised “us” against a false, generalised “them”. But the interests and opinions of transsexuals as individuals within a movement differ no more widely to the “average” feminist, than “average” feminist’s opinions differ to one another. A broad church must respect the individuality of its followers, and help unite the inevitable groupings it contains. Burchill, in attacking any interest that chooses to group beneath feminism’s banner, is guilty of defaming the larger, already embittered, company.

Feminism is founded on an immoveable principle of equality. If any element within the whole is seen to hold preference or primacy, or if any element is set below the rest, then the entire ideology is undermined.

Julie Burchill, transphobia and hostility towards the victims of oppression

The recent media furore over an article by Julie Burchill has brought to light prejudice against transgender individuals among people who should know better. But this tendency to demonise the victims of unfair treatment is a well established phenomenon

Lipstick: Safe for any and all genders to use. Photograph: Rui Faria/Guardian

There was a bit of outrage flying around online recently. You may not know about it, and I wasn't involved, but if you have any interest in online media it was impossible to miss, in the same way that any ships travelling near Bikini Atoll would struggle to not notice when the military were running a few little tests there. It culminated in a Julie Burchill piece for the Observer (which is a different publication to the Guardian … I've been blogging for them for months and I only found that out this weekend). Burchill's article was supposedly a defence of her friend Suzanne Moore and her recent dealings with trans people, but seems to be an all-out attack on trans people in general (which I won't be linking to here because the online version has been withdrawn and, even if it hadn't been, it has already had enough traffic thank-you very much).

I wouldn't dare to assume that I was qualified to comment on the issues and hardships facing trans people, or feminists for that matter. It is such a sensitive subject that odds are I've accidentally said a number of offensive things in that last paragraph alone and will continue to do so in the remainder of this piece. Sorry about that in advance, I promise it's not intentional, and feel free to point out my mistakes to me.

But leaving the political, sociological and ideological factors aside, I was amazed to discover the degree of hostility there is to trans people, particularly from those who are supposedly opposed to oppression and prejudice. Why would members of society who are persistently victimised in the worst possible ways still be vilified so?

Could it be the Just World Hypothesis? This dates back to research byMelvin Lerner which showed that subjects asked to evaluate someone undergoing painful electric shocks (they were fake, don't worry) tended to rate the victim far less favourably if they were told their suffering would continue. If they were told they'd be rewarded in the end, people rated the victim far more favourably. The worse the victim apparently suffered, the worse the subject's opinion of them was.

What's going on there? The Just World Hypothesis states that people have an inherent belief that the world is fair and just and that people's actions and behaviour is eventually met with the appropriate consequences, i.e. "you get what you deserve." When faced with evidence that suggests that this is bollocks, most people's first response is to rationalise it in a way that allows the illusion to continue. The most obvious example of this is victim blaming.

People see someone suffering, and think "either the world is a cruel and essentially random place where people can suffer for no reason, or this person is suffering because of something they did, so they deserve it."

Rarely is there any evidence for the latter conclusion, but it's the one people go for as it offers some form of psychological protection. "It happened to them because of something they did. I didn't do whatever they did, so it won't happen to me", that sort of thing. It's not nice, but it's the sort of logic that probably stops many people from constantly collapsing into a weeping heap.

People can go to extremes to find reasons to blame victims. That's how Japan can suffer a catastrophic natural disaster and some people can conclude it's because of Pearl Harbour.

This tendency to victim blame is everywhere and often exploited.Demonising the disabled? "Scroungers v strivers"? It is present even when it comes to official crime prevention, especially when it comes toanti-rape campaigns. Trans people are constantly victimised, so would likely be more prone to be on the receiving end of this just-world false rationalisation that they are in some way to blame. It is a cruel irony that an ingrained belief that the world is a fair place makes people behave in ways that ensure it isn't.

There's obviously more to it than that, though. Most people are hopefully intelligent enough to think beyond knee-jerk reactions in this way. And if anyone should be aware that the world isn't intrinsically fair, it's feminists and similar campaigners/activists, who wouldn't need to exist if it was. I don't know the ideologies nearly well enough to know if this is a valid statement, but it seems logical to me.

There's also the defensive attribution hypothesis, which is related. Simply put, people will interpret situations and behaviours that result in victimisation or unfortunate events in a way that protects their self-esteem, and makes it seem like they won't suffer similarly. If they see someone who is similar to them in some way suffer, they will instinctively focus on how they're actually different, ergo a similar fate won't befall them. This could and would inevitably lead to the demonising of trans people.

It can't be just that, though. Trans people and any similar groups must be victimised in the first place for any of the above to be applicable. There must be something about them that makes people more prone to behave negatively toward them (to put it mildly).

Some people may disagree with what other people do to their bodies, but as long as they're not forcing you to do it too, what's the issue? It's their body, what could be more theirs to do with as they please? A lot of people don't see it that way though, as we know. If what you do or want to do to yourself ends up involving some form of government funding, a lot of people feel entitled to a say in your life.

Gender is itself a far more complex concept than the simple binary system we typically adhere to. Those who go around challenging societal norms just by being there rarely get an easy ride. And the binary concept of gender is so entrenched in our collective psyche that anyone who deviates from it is likely to provoke strong and usually negative reactions, even from people like doctors, who logically should be the last people to behave in such ways.

But If I was going to try and explain all possible reasons for this animosity toward trans people, this blogpost would run into the terabytes. There are so many social, psychological and countless other factors in play, it would be like trying to untangle a ball of Christmas tree lights the size of the moon. I just offer the above rationalisations as possible explanations for illogical transphobia. Of course, some people are just bastards, let's not forget that.

I don't have any ideological or personal involvement with the whole debacle that occurred recently, and I'm certainly not making any expert pronouncements on what's happening. I'm a behavioural neuroscientist who works in mental health, and I just saw supposedly intelligent people behaving in ways that seemed illogical, even hypocritical, and I thought I'd offer a possible explanation as to why. But obviously things are a lot more complex.

I'm also a Guardian blogger though, and not even a serious one (I usually write about boobs or moustaches). But given that it was Burchill's article that caused so much offence, and the Guardian's perceived poor track record in this area, I felt it was necessary to have at least one piece published under the Guardian banner that presented transphobia as illogical and irrational, which it definitely is.

It may not be a just world, but that doesn't mean we can't at least make an effort to change that.

Dean Burnett is on Twitter (for now) @garwboy

Here is Julie Burchill's censored Observer article

By Toby Young Politics Last updated: January 14th, 2013

808 Comments Comment on this article

Julie Burchill has given me permission to reprint the article the Observer has seen fit to unpublish. This is the full text.

The brilliant writer Suzanne Moore and I go back a long way. I first met her when she was a young single mother living in a council flat; she took me out to interview me about my novel Ambition (re-published by Corvus Books this spring, since you ask) for dear dead City Limits magazine. "I’ve got an entertaining budget of £12.50!" she said proudly. "Sod that, we’re having lobster and champagne at Frederick’s, and I’m paying," I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: "Ooo, I could get to like this…’ And so she did.

I have observed her rise to the forefront of this country’s great polemicists with a whole lot of pride – and just a tiny bit of envy. I am godmother to her three brilliant, beautiful daughters. Though we differ on certain issues we will have each others backs till the sacred cows come home.

With this in mind, I was incredulous to read that my friend was being monstered on Twitter, to the extent that she had quit it, for supposedly picking on a minority – transsexuals. Though I imagine it to be something akin to being savaged by a dead sheep, as Denis Healey had it of Geoffrey Howe, I nevertheless felt indignant that a woman of such style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chick’s clothing.

To my mind – I have given cool-headed consideration to the matter – a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look. That rude and ridic.

Here’s what happened. In a book of essays called Red: The Waterstones Anthology, Suzanne contributed a piece about women’s anger. She wrote that, amongst other things, women were angry about "not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual". Rather than join her in decrying the idea that every broad should aim to look like an oven-ready porn star, the very vociferous transsexual lobby and their grim groupies picked on the messenger instead.

I must say that my only experience of the trans lobby thus far was hearing about the vile way they have persecuted another of my friends, the veteran women’s rights and anti-domestic violence activist Julie Bindel, picketing events where she is speaking about such minor issues as the rape of children and the trafficking of women just because she refuses to accept that their relationship with their phantom limb is the most pressing problem that women – real and imagined – are facing right now.

Similarly, Suzanne’s original piece was about the real horror of the bigger picture – how the savagery of a few old Etonians is having real, ruinous effects on the lives of the weakest members of our society, many of whom happen to be women. The reaction of the trans lobby reminded me very much of those wretched inner-city kids who shoot another inner-city kid dead in a fast-food shop for not showing him enough ‘respect’. Ignore the real enemy – they’re strong and will need real effort and organization to fight. How much easier to lash out at those who are conveniently close to hand!

But they’d rather argue over semantics. To be fair, after having one’s nuts taken off (see what I did there?)) by endless decades in academia, it’s all most of them are fit to do. Educated beyond all common sense and honesty, it was a hoot to see the screaming-mimis accuse Suze of white feminist privilege; it may have been this which made her finally respond in the subsequent salty language she employed to answer her Twitter critics: "People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them."

She, the other JB and I are part of the tiny minority of women of working-class origin to make it in what used to be called Fleet Street and I think this partly contributes to the stand-off with the trannies. (I know that’s a wrong word, but having recently discovered that their lot describe born women as ‘Cis’ – sounds like syph, cyst, cistern; all nasty stuff – they’re lucky I’m not calling them shemales. Or shims.) We know that everything we have, we got for ourselves. We have no family money, no safety net. And we are damned if we are going to be accused of being privileged by a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs.

It’s been noted before that cyberspace, though supposedly all new and shiny, is plagued by the age old boredom of men telling women not to talk, and threatening them will all kinds of nastiness if they persist in saying what they feel.

The trans lobby are now saying that it wasn’t so much the initial piece as Suzanne’s refusal to apologise when told to that "made" them drive her from Twitter. Presumably she is meant to do this in the name of solidarity and the "struggle" – though I find it very hard to imagine this mob struggling with anything apart from the English language and the concept of free speech.

To have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women – above natural-born women, who don’t know the meaning of suffering, apparently – is a bit like the old definition of chutzpah: the boy who killed his parents and then asked the jury for clemency on the grounds he was an orphan.

Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – don'tthreaten or bully we lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we’ve experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment, and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You really won’t like us when we’re angry.

The White Man's Daughter

Wednesday, January 16, 2013