Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 2022 – gender:hacked
I spent three hours walking across the city the other day and had some time to think about where I’ve changed my mind since I started seriously digging into gender identity in 2016.
- In civic life, your sex (and only your sex) matters. Your private beliefs about your sex don’t matter. Anyone is free to hold wacky beliefs about sex/gender but not to enforce those beliefs on others by, e.g., violating single-sex spaces or coercing ‘affirming’ speech. People should not be discriminated against for gender nonconformity or for holding wacky private beliefs about sex/gender (akin to religious beliefs) but that’s it.
I used to think that something like gender-recognition certificates — that don’t equate objective biological sex and subjective inner sense of gender identity — made sense. Now I don’t. The state should not participate in any fictions about sex/gender change. Being trans is just a belief about the self, no more or less. It’s a human experience, one we can have curiosity and compassion for, but it is not some separate experience that makes someone more or less male or female. A man identifying as a woman is having an exclusively male experience of his exclusively male idea of what it means to be a woman, and vice versa. No good comes of pretending otherwise. - Distress over sexed characteristics or sex-role expectations is real and serious and deserves compassionate support but hormones and surgeries are purely cosmetic and should not be provided in the name of medicine. Performing these interventions under the banner of medicine makes false promises to vulnerable patients and consumes scarce healthcare resources—both in the short term and over the long term (by sickening and injuring physically healthy people). National health services and insurers should not cover experimental treatments that sicken and injure healthy bodies in order to treat a mental pathology or to bring the body in line with a patient’s inner sense of identity. I used to think these interventions should be covered in a few rare, well-screened adult cases. But now I don’t think so. It’s not medicine. And it’s very hard to contain the use of such interventions once you mislabel them medicine and say they’re appropriate for some patients.
- In 2016, I would have uncomfortably laughed off the transhumanism stuff but now it seems obvious that this is where “embodiment goals” and “meatsuit” logic leads and where the extraordinary power behind this movement comes from.
I don’t think I’ve seen anybody put it as well as Mary Harrington: “What concerns me is how the wider field of medical science changes, when you reframe the bioplan itself as a medical problem.” There’s a conflict here that’s getting buried: what is medicine for? Is it to restore sick and injured people to health (as far as possible)? Or is medicine’s brief much, much bigger? - I realized there was no acceptable banner under which the people formerly known as women could organize that would be acceptable to trans activists. So no, no compromises on language. In 2016, I still used ‘transwoman’ outside of scare quotes. That’s long over. I used to think it was OK to share bathrooms. Now I don’t. Here’s why: Chipping away at women’s rights and spaces will never be enough to appease trans activists. I don’t have the right to give away single-sex spaces other women need. And I’ve realized any man who trespasses in a single-sex space has already shown he can’t be trusted to be there…