Are We Seeing the Limits of Gender Identity?
A conversation between Riki Wilchins for Assigned Media and Philosopher Rowan Bell.
by Riki Wilchins
Rowan Bell is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and the co-author of Much Ado About Nothing: Unmotivating ‘Gender Identity, a paper discussing the philosophical contradictions embedded in the notion of gender identity.
Riki Wilchins: In the recent Hecox v Little argument before the Supreme Court, there were a number of questions about whether the trans girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson, identifying as a girl was sufficient to grant her access to the girls’ team. But her lawyers didn’t seem to lean very hard into the fact that it was clearly more than her just identifying as a girl that was at issue. BPJ had undergone a female puberty, had breasts and a visibly a female body, lived her entire social existence as a girl, etc.
In the nineties, for better or worse, trans rights started out mostly about transsexuals whose assertions of rights to full recognition of their gender were also anchored the visible reality of physical and social changes.
Rowan Bell: So there's been this huge expansion of what it means to be trans. There are what some call the old school transsexuals but now also people who just have genders that don't match the sex they were assigned at birth. And that's become a really broad category. I think the gender identity paradigm was responsive to this very binary, very physical transition-oriented way of understanding gender.
Wilchins: I agree. With the advent of genderfluid, agender, genderqueer, and nonbinary people, trans rights has morphed over the years from securing civil rights for people who undergo pretty binary physical and social transformations to something closer to a right to announce one’s gender and freedom from all gender boundaries. That is a very different project from where we started. I think it accounts for some of the losses we’re experiencing now and I’m not sure the arguments on which we base our civil rights have really kept up. The category has become broader and we’ve jettison physical changes and social reality as a support for civil rights leaving gender identity as the main hook.
Bell: I think one of the problems here is that we're used to understanding gender for trans purposes as being about individuals. Here are these trans individuals, they don't fit, and we need to fit them in. I'm interested in how people build gender together and what values underwrite that, like authenticity, self-expression, and equality. Gender is a social construct we build together. So there are alternative ways of doing gender that come out of these social practices which aren’t so binary and restrictive.
Wilchins: Obviously, I agree with that but unfortunately, we grant many civil rights based on invariable, immutable characteristics like race or sex can't be voluntarily changed. I don’t think that works with this kind of argument for gender identity. Particularly when we add that gender identity can also be fluid and changeable. It feels like the academic and civil rights/legal communities are pulling in two different directions: The ethical argument from the former declares that gender is this open-ended social practice but the practical argument from the latter argues that it’s also fixed and essentialized.
Bell: I think that's often true. And I should say that in arguing that it’s time to give up gender identity as this idealized, authentic essence that came from the theoretical perspective. I think gender identity is super useful in legal and medical contexts where it’s this nice little portable phrase we can appeal to: I don't need to do any more explaining—I have a gender identity and it justifies my right to medical care, legal recognition, etc. That’s all very important work which that term is doing.
Wilchins: But I would argue that it’s doing it decreasingly well. We’re trying to use it to explain both fixedness and fluidity, adults and children, transsexuals, and nonbinary, and I don’t think it or any single concept can bear all that weight. Meanwhile the Christian Right has effectively weaponized our broader stance by asserting we want to allow “biological males” to say, ‘Oh, I'm a woman for today’ and be granted access to girls’ spaces, girls’ sports, and so on. It may be a fictive and shitty argument but there’s no debating that we don’t yet have an easy quick response to it.
Bell: Philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher was recently saying to me that we need to be working on multiple channels. There are multiple kinds of things that we need to be saying, because cis ways of understanding the world don't really have room for transness or even gender variance. Wherever there's gender and sex roles, there's always going to be variance, border crossing, fluidity. And trying to cram these into understanding gender as fixed and consistent just misdescribed the way that people’s genders actually work. So there will always be this tension between the systems the world tries to fit us in, and what trans people actually are and trying to build new ways of doing gender.
Wilchins: Yet we still have to explain ourselves within those systems which demand socially legible men and women even as the physical realities of what it means to be a woman or a man has almost completely evaporated from trans discourse. Which is a kind of progress, of course. But it makes our job much more difficult.
Bell: I think there's a really deep divide that can't be bridged. I see echoes of this in some of Jules Gill-Peterson's recent work on transgender liberalism and how this appeal to self-fulfillment which appeals to only the trans people who have certain kinds of access and privileges, I'm not sure she's entirely right but there's something really important in what she's saying. .
Wilchins: No question about it that the old 1990s gender identity/transsexual messaging platform of trans rights was centered on mainly white, middle-class people who could afford to pursue binary transitions. But ironically, this is also the most socially digestible part of the community and the place where we’re at our strongest in demanding civil rights and the Christian Right is its weakest. But understandably, it’s not the argument we want to make. It’s the perpetual irony of inclusion: the more diverse you become, the more diffuse rights-based arguments tend to become. Right now it feels like they’re really good at picking the court cases where we are weakest, and we’re not so good at bringing the court cases where we’re strongest.
Bell: One way I've seen this addressed is that instead of talking about people's right to authenticity and self-expression, we should be talking about the value of minding your own business.
Wilchins: While I agree with the privacy argument, it’s a two-edged sword when they counter that cis women and girls have a right to privacy from “biological males.” For 20 years we talked about “transsexual women.” But as we moved away from physical transition and social reality to gender identity, the Christian Right has done a good job of replacing “trans woman” with “biological male.” Asking the average american “Should trans girls play girls’ sports” gets a very different answer from asking “Should biological males play girls’ sports.”
Bell: One of the problems with promoting gender identity as something special internal and unknowable inside of us is it can be weaponized against us in lots of ways—like that transphobic internet meme, I define as an attack helicopter. Using declared gender identity only opens the door to the counterargument, What if I'm a girl tomorrow or I say I’m a boy tomorrow. So I agree with you that it's ineffective. But it's been the strategy that we've been leaning on for 20 or 30 years, and like you I also think it's done. I think it's cooked. So one move is to go back to social reality, like here's a trans man, he has a beard, a deep voice, a chest full of hair, in almost every way you would call him a man. I think in the current rhetorical climate, that's probably a good starting point. So that's one strategy that might address the immediate legal crisis. But as I said, we need to be on multiple tracks because that route also risks closing off important possibilities.
Wilchins: Your article makes the point that gender identity did not even originate with us, but with cisgender sexologists in the 1960s to justify the medical gatekeeping model for transsexuals that followed. Gender identity was never intended to be our friend.
Bell: You had these sexologists studying the sexed body and trying to preserve their assumption that sex is a very binary and there are only these two genders, men and women. But the more they look, the less binary things appear. When you start looking at the actual population, the binary doesn’t work. So these sexologists panic. If you read the work of Harry Benjamin and John Money, their goal was producing socially legible heterosexual men and women. So then what do they do with all these edge cases? They put forth gender identity to restabilize the sex binary and you get the Harry Benjamin scale, where the only people who count as true transsexuals have played with certain gendered toys, dressed a certain way, had a strictly heterosexual orientation, and so on. In fact, if you go back even further, their original concept of gender identity was that it could be altered through therapy. One of the ways it shifted over time was the move to promote it was fixed, which I'm not sure has been entirely helpful.
Wilchins: In the 1990 and early aughts, we were saying it was fixed too, as we followed the success of gay rights with a fixed sexual orientation. But then we shifted to saying it’s not fixed. Florence Ashley in her paper “What Is It Like to Have A Gender Identity” says it’s an ongoing process through which we make and remake ourselves. Judith Butler is arguing in her book “Gender Trouble” that gender is not something we are, it’s something we do. Katharine Jenkins argues in her paper “Towards an Account of Gender Identity” that this is all circular: So your say you have the gender identity of a woman. But what is a woman? It’s someone who has a woman’s gender identity. If after six decades our best minds still can’t agree on exactly what gender identity it is, maybe it’s permanent troubles. Maybe there’s no there there. Which is the argument your paper makes. We use it mainly to explain ourselves to cis people, but otherwise we don’t seem to have much need for it because it really doesn’t do anything we need.
Bell: If you read the work of Noah Ben Asher, who I think is someone that you pointed me towards, you see this narrative that the last 20 years gender identity has been what trans people used to secure rights. And it was effective. But I think our strategies need to be shifting because our enemy's strategies are shifting.
Wilchins: Absolutely. And in large part, that’s because the population for whom we are demanding rights has also shifted and exposed new vulnerabilities our language and concepts haven’t entirely caught up with.
Bell: And the Right has used these narratives of a shifting internal sense of gender to argue that trans kids don't need medical care; Oh, if my sense of myself can change and be separate from how my body is perceived, why would I need affirming care? So I think here's this evolving conversation where the anti-trans strategies are changing and we need to be changing ours too. I think we're at a crisis point where the existing strategy that we've been using, which works for certain purposes, is disintegrating under a new onslaught which feels like it's coming from all directions. .
Wilchins: I agree. I lie awake nights wondering what that should be. I feel like the Christian Right is on their version 2.0 while we're still stuck with our version 1.0—which was developed around the figure of a post-op transsexual who no longer grounds the argument for trans civil rights. And they took advantage of that, but we haven’t responded in kind. Part of the reason I find your paper so revelatory was it argues directly and plainly that gender identity can no longer do all the different things we’re asking it to in these different contexts and with these new bodies. Back in the ‘nineties we tried gender expression for a while, but that just gets you to the First amendment and freedom of expression, which is pretty limited. I think we're stuck in a cul-de-sac with gender identity where we’re boxed in. And that's kind of what your paper left me with: we know gender identity no longer works, but we don’t know yet what the alternative—if any—might be.
Bell: Our paper made a pretty negative argument and didn’t provide a lot of positive suggestions on how to proceed. On an anecdotal level, I've had some success talking to vaguely transphobic family members about the way that people live and the things that people need. Instead of making it about my gender, I make it about what I actually need in the world to get along. I don't want to go full Marxist here, but trans people are statistically less likely to have access to wealth, to material goods, and so on. So we can unite as a class around the material things that trans people actually need, without using all the metaphysics of gender identity to justify our genders. I think what we need is like people living their lives and trying to make sense of themselves and trying to get the things that they need.
Wilchins: I'm going to disagree gently. I think that may have a point with adults. I’m not sure it works with kids. For them, I think at this point it has to be gender identity. It’s the only way I think we can legitimate trans kids’ needs that cis world is going to understand. The problem is, they’ve argued very effectively that kids can’t know their own minds. As a Trump-voting cousin I no longer speak with asked, “Are you telling me a child who isn’t old enough to get a driver’s license or buy a drink is old enough to medically change their body?” My answer was that of course they were: She was making an apples-to-oranges comparison.
But I acknowledge it’s still a powerful argument. And my answer only hangs together to the extent that I point out that by age three or four, trans and cis kids already know their gender or sexual orientation, and these are not going to change. The moment I add, “But for some, their gender identity will be a life-long process which is fluid and can change over time as they remake themselves” all the air goes out of my tires.
Bell: Again, I think we need multiple strategies for multiple audiences. I definitely find that gender identity can help explain the experiences of lots of trans kids. You can say, Look, here's all this evidence that trans kids who want puberty blockers benefit from getting them. They have lower rates of suicidality and depression. This is something that they need. I think you can put that in a language of gender identity and it can be really powerful. But you can’t talk to liberals who are still receptive to gender identity and fascists who are trying to fight any form of trans rights the same ways because they're working from completely different epistemic frameworks.
Wilchins: This was part of the strategy used by the gay movement and they did it very successfully with sexual orientation. And they were the template for early trans rights.
Bell: So why doesn't gender identity work the way sexual orientation did?
Wilchins: Because we're asking for a different universe of rights. You don’t need a lot of social rights to be gay. Marriage and adoption rights aside, you can love whoever you want in private. But gender is very social: you need the right to medical care, to public bathrooms, to change your government-issued ID or name, to have your co-workers or your teacher use the right pronoun, etc. There’s this extensive sphere of social behaviors and rights that we ask when we demand recognition for our genders. And for kids, we’re probably going to have to ground it in a fixed and essential gender identity.
Bell: I totally agree with you that gender identity is a thing that can capture a lot of that and when it comes to kids. Gender identity can do a lot of that work. So if it’s really useful for that purpose, I don't have any qualms with using it for those purposes. Tools are what they're for. And when we start using one for everything, they break. It’s like we have a hammer, so we’ve started hitting everything with it. But there are other tools we might use for different jobs in legal, medical, and policy battles. For instance, there’s also the efficacy argument I referred to earlier where we have a ton of data showing that gender affirming care for kids leads to better health outcomes, less suicidal ideation, and so on. This gives us tangible metrics so we don't always have to appeal to gender identity.
Wilchins: I would again gently push back. I just finished a book on the Cass Review and the problem is, the research is not entirely compelling yet. Yes, it's good and it's getting better and the researchers are finally catching up to building a knowledge base that will refute the attacks against us, but I think it could still fairly be described as a work in progress.
But even allowing that I’m wrong, I have mixed feelings about this strategy when I think of Hil Malatino’s book On Feeling Bad and Being Trans. The fact is, having gender dysphoria sucks; being trans in cisworld sucks; being rejected by your family or by a potential lover sucks. And despite the way transition is presented, it’s not this big bright rainbow arc with a big golden pot of passing-as-cis-and-finally-happy at the end.
Trans people, including trans kids, should have the right to feel bad. We shouldn't have to be smiling, happy campers just to get access to meds. We shouldn’t have to do a demeaning mental health tap--dance just to prove we should be allowed the same meds and procedures freely given to cis kids. Like them, we should have access to meds because we need them. But I know that’s a discussion for another day. But back to your point about different tools, Gayle Rubin once said, “I am skeptical of all universal tools. A tool may do one job brilliantly and be less helpful for another.”
So I’d like to close with your wonderful point that gender identity is one tool for one job and now that we are a bigger community fighting bigger attacks, we can also think about building a bigger toolbox.
Bell: Yes! Thank you.
Wilchins: And thank you.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.