I think the use of the term biological sex may relate to the 1970 ruling on the April Ashley divorce (Corbet v Corbet). Here is an extract from the Wiki article on that case.
The court held that, for the purposes of marriage, sex was to be legally defined by three factors present at birth that the judge referred to as 'biological' – namely chromosomal, gonadal and genital. Any surgery or medical intervention was to be ignored, as were any psychological factors (which were in this case identified with Ashley's 'transsexualism').
I haven't checked the ruling to see if that is the case but I don't know if any other ruling which might be thought to have set the legal precedent. Outside of legal precedents, biological understanding has moved on in the last 55 years and no professional biologist would agree that biological sex was binary. So I think the 1970 ruling does not provide a proper basis for the current UK Supreme Court ruling.
I notice that psychological factors are ignored, see above. What is odd about this is in relation to identity, which presumably is judged externally. So my experience is ignored, how weird is this, but it has become standard in right wing discussion. Thus, I will define your identity, not you, and it will be in physical terms.
I think the use of the term biological sex may relate to the 1970 ruling on the April Ashley divorce (Corbet v Corbet). Here is an extract from the Wiki article on that case.
The court held that, for the purposes of marriage, sex was to be legally defined by three factors present at birth that the judge referred to as 'biological' – namely chromosomal, gonadal and genital. Any surgery or medical intervention was to be ignored, as were any psychological factors (which were in this case identified with Ashley's 'transsexualism').
I haven't checked the ruling to see if that is the case but I don't know if any other ruling which might be thought to have set the legal precedent. Outside of legal precedents, biological understanding has moved on in the last 55 years and no professional biologist would agree that biological sex was binary. So I think the 1970 ruling does not provide a proper basis for the current UK Supreme Court ruling.
Roz Kaveney [own voice on this] was saying related things on Bluesky
Thinking some more about the Hodge judgement and 'immutable binary biological sex'.
Clearly at the time of Corbett vs. Corbett part of Ormerod's judgement against April Ashley was based on that. She was referred to as 'an accomplished female impersonator' for example and her marriage as voidable.
It's not as if the ECHR and the Blair Government did not consider biological factors during Goodwin Vs UK, and the discussions that led to the GRA which, by allowing trans people heterosexual marriage clearly superceded Corbett Vs Corbett.
On the contrary the discussions accepted that scientific knowledge was inconclusive, that sex and gender were inconclusive, that sex and gender were complex and nuanced and scientific consensus nonexistent.
There was a consensus that it would be unjust to leave the rights of trans people floating in some third space void. That human rights could not wait for some improbable final resolution of scientific controversy.
Implicit in the GRA was that the change involved in gender reassignment was about civil status, the right to respect and the right to privacy and family life and did not depend on biology.
We have even less scientific certainty about 'biological sex' in 2025 than we did in 2004 which makes it an astonishingly shaky foundation for determining anyone's rights and civil status.
Hodge may lend the Court's authority to the conservative idea of sex as simplistically binary and immutable but that doesn't make that idea valid science and contradicts the post Goodwin Vs UK consensus that Ormerod was overturned.
Recognition of reassignment is recognition of change. From what to what? Hodge's position is that change is nonexistent but that position surely contradicts the ECHR position on trans rights.
( Bold mine)
Gemma Stone of transwrites was also weighing in about the kind of chilling effect I was mentioning
The wider concern from our community re bathrooms specifically is that businesses, prompted by bigoted guidance from EHRC and Sex Matters, will apply this new ruling over zealously.
That is to say rather than get sued by bigots they will choose to exclude trans people instead
in such cases trans women will now be viewed as men and so it's very easy for businesses to state they kick all men out of the women's room, not just trans women.
This effectively makes the protected character of gender reassignment redundant in its entirety.
any case, it wouldn't be me discriminating against you by peeing in the same bathroom or sharing a hospital ward.
It would be the business who have discriminated against you by having a single sex provision and then allowing it to become "mixed sex" via trans inclusion.
businesses aren't stupid and when they are they hire lawyers to not be stupid for them. they know who has the money, power and influence to make things difficult for them. And they know it isn't trans people.
we are up shit creek and the paddle we had just got robbed by SC.
These kind of chilling effects are very very real - people and small businesses can't afford to get sued even if they would win the case. Large ones can be very risk averse. The trans people haters and persecutors have money and use it to wage war on trans people and allies who they know can't afford legal cases.
So while it's a useful exercise to look at what the judgement says, trans people are right that its effects will be wider and more pernicious.
And also Hodge's concept of 'biological sex' is just old fashioned anti-scientific bigotry dressed up in a 'sciency' sounding word. It's not scientific - it's using the word 'biological' to pretend it is when it isn't.
(It's like the way 'intelligent design' pretended to be science too. When it comes to biology the persecutors of trans people are basically an equivalent to creationists and intelligent designers. And they're similar too in that creationism was used to attack LGBTQ+ people and women by underpinning rigid and harmful gender roles from Genesis and making Genesis out as infallible and unchangeable. This lot pretend they're doing it from science like the intelligent design crowd - hence stuff like the academically-discredited Cass Review and throwing around the word 'biological' when biology actually contradicts them.)
No doubt everyone here is aware of the views of Richard Dawkins that sex (as opposed to gender) is binary. And that as a result of these views he has been accused of being a transphobe. Which seems, to me, to be unfair because being against trans people in any way is bad.
“Pretty damn binary” (Dawkins’ phrase) is a phrase allowing for the fact that sex is non binary. The percentage of intersex birth varies between 1.7% and 0.02% depending on what chromosomal variations one includes.
Even using the lowest factor that is still many thousands of folks in the UK.
Biological sex, even by restrictive standards of measurement, is non binary.
And there is also a mutability argument dependent on physical development.
Thanks Louise. One paragraph of Roz Kaveney's stood out for me:
Implicit in the GRA was that the change involved in gender reassignment was about civil status, the right to respect and the right to privacy and family life and did not depend on biology.
The chapter on "TERFs and British Matters of Sex" in Judith Butler's book Who's Afraid of Gender? is pertinent, to the ruling and the circumstances in which it came about.
Two points come to mind, particularly in relation to quetzacoatl's point:
I notice that psychological factors are ignored, see above. What is odd about this is in relation to identity, which presumably is judged externally. So my experience is ignored, how weird is this, but it has become standard in right wing discussion. Thus, I will define your identity, not you, and it will be in physical terms.
From the above-mentioned chapter:
Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognise you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones [at] which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are. Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their own existence known, denies the use of the categories that let many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.
And the following quote conveys something of the danger of the incoherent attitudes underlying the ruling, not just to trans people - those most immediately and directly threatened - but also to many of those who called for the ruling and see it as some kind of victory.
[TERFs] seem not to understand that they are calling into question the very existence of those with whom they argue. This is not the same as simply having a different viewpoint and a reasonable disagreement, since the TERF stance is nullifying the claims that trans people make about their lives, their bodies, and their very existence. Their arguments establish a perhaps unwitting alliance with right-wing groups that would actually shut down abortion clinics, eradicate feminism, censor critical race theory and ethnic studies, and restrict LGBTQIA+ rights. In the context of trans people, TERFs oppose basic claims of self-determination, freedom and autonomy, rights to be protected from violence, and rights of access to public space and to health care without discrimination, all of which are rights that they, as feminists, fight for and depend on otherwise. No wonder those who confront this attempted existential nullification are sometimes screaming.
...
Precisely because [“gender-critical” feminists] are not thinking about coalitions, and are not concerned with the best way to fight the rise of the Right, they retreat into identitarian claims and proliferate baseless fears, contributing to the anti-gender phantasm.
Dawkins has done far far more than that - but citing him makes my point for me because he's exactly like the creationists he used to fight with on this point. It would be funny and ironic if it wasn't about hating and hurting people
For decades, the renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins urged his readers to use science and reason to counter religious misinformation. Now Dawkins is abandoning both to spread anti-transgender rhetoric embraced by religious conservatives...
I'm leaving a couple of Scientific American links here so people can see something of how far out he is
Richard Dawkins hasn't been someone I take seriously for a while now. I think he shifted from real science to ideology years ago and it has not been good for his output. So, the fact that he said something doesn't carry much weight.
I've also thought the point of folks like him, if you get into "selfish genome" is that the universe is a free space. We're all free to figure ourselves out. If you're an atheist, it's a huge canvas upon which we can project our fancies, or study the fine grain of its weft and weave. If you're a theist, God put us here to be free.
Either way, I simply cannot understand the virtue in expending so much effort in fixating on the genitalia of a very small number of generally harmless humans.
Dawkins and his ilk always seemed to resent the religious tendency to try to enforce arbitrary and capricious limits on human behavior, as if we were playing God with our neighbors. I think that was always the better side of their movement. If they lost that, that's a shame.
Dawkins and his ilk want to play, and indeed be, God. That's their real beef with religion - they don't get to make it up themselves. Through his academic status, he has arrogated to himself the right to make up reality in his own image, fraudulently dignified with the word "science".
Much appreciated Louise. I knew biology had moved on from simplistic XX/XY understandings. I was behind in my understanding of just how far. The natural world is complex and counterintuitive, full of unexpected variety. Boxing understanding into categories we feel more comfortable with is a denial of this real world complexity. And can lead to bigotry and cruelty. As we are now seeing.
And so the strangely virulent form that TERFism takes in Britain today, and its influence within the British establishment, requires its own separate, and multipronged, explanation.
Ms. Parker and Ms. Long may not know it, but they’re likely influenced by the legacy of the British “Skepticism” movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, which mobilized against the perceived spread of postmodernism in English universities as well as homeopathy and so-called “junk science.” Hence, the impulse among TERFs to proclaim their “no-nonsense” character; witness the billboard Ms. Parker paid to have put up last fall dryly defining a woman as an “adult human female.” Such a posture positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British.
It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)
That's an interesting quote by Lewis. I've thought that the anti-trans movement in UK is proud of its behaviourism, facts dominate over feelings, etc. The external matters, not the internal. No doubt this can be linked to British empiricism, and so on.
My impression having read some of the radical feminists who later became TERFs is that some at least had been stung by ostensibly well-meaning male allies entering the feminist movement and taking up leadership roles, which kind of defeated the point, and were therefore extremely suspicious of anyone who had been socialised as an assigned male talking about women's experience.
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
I'm not an advocate for Richard Dawkins but I wasn't impressed by the first of the 2 Scientific American articles linked above by @Louise . Agustin Fuentes says ' Given what we know about biology across animals and humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but about trying to restrict who counts a full human'. (Bold added by me).
Who said anything about being 'a full human'?
Or, in the same article, 'that legal rights and social possibilities should flow from (a binary gamete divide).' - pretty sure Dawkins wasn't intimating that view. Of course 'body systems overlap' and worms and some fish can change sex sometimes -this is probably known by anyone who has studied biology at school.
So called radical frminists seem to me often totally committed to female as an essential category superior to any other on the planet. Looking at some of the blue sky posts I've seen from groups in Brighton and elsewhere, and a lot of stuff I have read over the years. They appear terrified of having the sisterhood polluted and will latch on to anything that will prevent this dreadful occurrence.
Given what we know about biology across animals and humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but about trying to restrict who counts a full human'. (Bold added by me).
Who said anything about being 'a full human'?
This fails to engage with the argument in the piece; namely that systems where some have rights and some don't are always justified by dehumanisation, simply because they can't sit alongside a universal conception of rights.
It’s not uncommon for victims of one form of prejudice to retain others.
I think The UK TERF movement has prospered because of the help of some prominent wealthy supporters and a lot of transphobic messaging from particular sections of the press. In the process it has targeted a very small section of the public as potentially harmful. Wider human rights considerations seem to have been set aside.
I don’t know how unusual the UK is in this respect. EU law would seem to be an obstacle to aggressive attacks on the human rights of minorities but unfortunately we are no longer in the EU.
Personally I do not understand why TERFs cannot see the wider human rights issue.
It’s not uncommon for victims of one form of prejudice to retain others.
I think The UK TERF movement has prospered because of the help of some prominent wealthy supporters and a lot of transphobic messaging from particular sections of the press. In the process it has targeted a very small section of the public as potentially harmful. Wider human rights considerations seem to have been set aside.
I don’t know how unusual the UK is in this respect. EU law would seem to be an obstacle to aggressive attacks on the human rights of minorities but unfortunately we are no longer in the EU.
Personally I do not understand why TERFs cannot see the wider human rights issue.
I think it's a bit like the "equality" that opponents of equal marriage would cite - gay and straight people are both equally entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex.
TERFs appear to take the view that trans women are men and have the same human rights as other men.
TERFs are a red herring. The most prominent persecutors of trans people in the world are Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. They're not feminists but extreme misogynists. The group most hostile to trans people are older men.
It suits this group of the far right and religious conservatives to hide behind female persecutors to try to frame this toxic and retrograde persecution as 'feminism' and thus cloud the role of the religious and far right. They'd like to frame it as women v trans people when many trans people are women. We should reject this framing.
(Not the least as a woman I don't want to be associated with female persecutors of trans people or to have anyone think they speak for me - they don't. And the gender policing the persecutors are so enthusiastic about endangers women and other genders - so not in my name )
I have come across this logic among some feminists to the extent that it rules gay men out of existence. The biological fundamental argument has it that women are those people who have wombs and the associated hormone system and have children. Some also exclude lesbians by saying that each sex is determined by its relationship with the other. Even some lesbians still define men by reference to reproduction, with gay men being bicycles to the ultimate degree (cf. The famous phrase). The obsession with reproduction is what they have in common with other members of the bigoted billionaires club, and with defining women through reproduction. Sorry if I am mansplaining, but as I say I have been ruled out of humanity by these arguments.
I feel that Labour is the least worse option electorally at the moment, but I find Starmer's statement on transwomen deeply disappointing. I consider it a failure of leadership that massively over interpreted the ruling of the supreme court.
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
Thanks Louise. Yes - pointing the finger at TERFs isn't helpful.
However, I think it's important to pay attention to feminist critiques of what happened - how and why some feminists came to align themselves with anti-feminist ideologies.
Judith Butler again:
Strangely, the attacks on gender in the United Kingdom are often undertaken by feminists who disassociate from LGBTQIA+ alliances or wish to break them up where they do exist (worrying that lesbians suffer by participating in coalitions, for instance). They wish not only to debunk the very idea of gender but also to separate feminist studies from gender studies. Fearful of effacement and expropriation, they refuse alliances, imagining them as new opportunities for masculinist hierarchies to prevail.
Although trans-exclusionary feminists offer separate grounds for their critique from their counterparts on the Right, the do share certain presuppositions. However much they may wish to separate from gender studies, or prove its presuppositions wrong, TERFs are effectively grouped together with gender studies by forces of the growing anti-gender ideology movement. TERFs unwittingly affiliate with right-wing politics, some of which are overtly fascist, that contributes to the psychological fantasy of "gender" and yet, as feminists, they are also under attack by right-wing politics for the ways that feminist views on reproduction and kinship have challenged the patriarchal family. At some point, they will have to decide whether or not to join with others who are similarly targeted or deepen the divisions among those whose scholarly and political lives are at risk of suffering discrimination, violence and extreme censorship.
The question for feminists such as Judith Butler is how to form new coalitions and whether feminism can "join in an alliance against the forces of destruction rather than become a destructive force allied with other such forces". But maybe that's beyond the scope of this forum.
I wish you were right about the red herring but I’m not sure you are. Of course I accept entirely your point about powerful old male misogynists. But watching the celebrations outside the UK Supreme Court made it very clear that the women’s groups concerned saw it as a victory for them. The linkage with far right misogyny may be inadvertent and unfortunate, but it is clearly there.
It was in part my point that victims of one form of prejudice may nevertheless be blind to other forms.
One question that occurs to me is where the particular and peculiarly British anti-trans focus on "biology" comes from.
It is not peculiarly British. It is standard fare for American anti-trans rhetoric to include 'biological' arguments.
And it's all a pretext. They don't actually care about biology (otherwise they'd engage with the ways that biology is more complicated than their middle-school level understanding). They're not interested in science - they're interested in slogans.
It is very appaling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans exclusionary feminists have allied with the right-wing on gender. The anti-gender ideology movement is not opposing a specific gender but seeking to eradicate “gender” as a concept or discourse, a field study, an approach to social power. Sometimes they claim that “sex” alone has scientific standing, but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and difference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.
The terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and so-called gender-critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, E M Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling), in favour of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of a coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.
The anti-gender movement circulates a spectre of “gender” as a force of destruction, but they never actually read any works in gender studies. Quick and fearful conclusions take the place of considered judgements. Yes, some work on gender is difficult, and not everyone can read it, so we have to do better in reaching a broader public. As important as it is, however, to make complex concepts available to a popular audience, it is equally important to encourage intellectual inquiry as part of public life. Unfortunately, we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalised.
One question that occurs to me is where the particular and peculiarly British anti-trans focus on "biology" comes from.
It is not peculiarly British. It is standard fare for American anti-trans rhetoric to include 'biological' arguments.
And it's all a pretext. They don't actually care about biology (otherwise they'd engage with the ways that biology is more complicated than their middle-school level understanding). They're not interested in science - they're interested in slogans.
The biology they care about, as far as I can tell, is the idea that females do not have penises.
My speculation is that for the women among them that’s rooted in a fear of potential rape from someone they would assume to be safe. I’d note that it’s been stated several times here that it’s reasonable for women to have that fear around all men based simply on the fact that they could do it - that is, in fact, a significant part of the justification for women-only spaces in the first place. Personally, I can understand the view that allowing people who have penises into those women-only spaces negates the very reason for their existence.
For the men among them, I think it’s rooted in the baser fear that they may inadvertently end up taking home a woman only to find that she has a penis, a fear that’s been expressed in popular culture at least as far back as The Kinks’ Lola (1970) and the movie The Crying Game (1992). While I can understand that fear on a visceral level, I find it much harder to sympathise with given how rooted it is in the misogynistic view of women as little more than potential sexual partners for men.
Trans men tend not to be regarded as as much of an issue, which I suspect is simply because they present as male and therefore would not be considered “safe” in the first place by either the women or the men described above.
One question that occurs to me is where the particular and peculiarly British anti-trans focus on "biology" comes from.
It is not peculiarly British. It is standard fare for American anti-trans rhetoric to include 'biological' arguments.
And it's all a pretext. They don't actually care about biology (otherwise they'd engage with the ways that biology is more complicated than their middle-school level understanding). They're not interested in science - they're interested in slogans.
The biology they care about, as far as I can tell, is the idea that females do not have penises.
My speculation is that for the women among them that’s rooted in a fear of potential rape from someone they would assume to be safe. I’d note that it’s been stated several times here that it’s reasonable for women to have that fear around all men based simply on the fact that they could do it - that is, in fact, a significant part of the justification for women-only spaces in the first place. Personally, I can understand the view that allowing people who have penises into those women-only spaces negates the very reason for their existence.
For the men among them, I think it’s rooted in the baser fear that they may inadvertently end up taking home a woman only to find that she has a penis, a fear that’s been expressed in popular culture at least as far back as The Kinks’ Lola (1970) and the movie The Crying Game (1992). While I can understand that fear on a visceral level, I find it much harder to sympathise with given how rooted it is in the misogynistic view of women as little more than potential sexual partners for men.
Trans men tend not to be regarded as as much of an issue, which I suspect is simply because they present as male and therefore would not be considered “safe” in the first place by either the women or the men described above.
Though in the case of “Lola,” the singer winds up perfectly happy with Lola, regardless of Lola’s gender, if I read the lyrics right.
And of course you are much more likely to be assaulted by a cisgender man of your acquaintance.
Not if you’re in a women-only space.
I don’t live in a toilet or a changing room though - and in a woman only space that permits trans women I’d still be more likely to be assaulted by a cisgender person than a trans person - because cisgender people have 5 times the crime rate.
(For that matter most women only spaces having little signs telling you they may be cleaned by male staff - so the idea that women only spaces don’t contain cisgender males is false. Likewise, if you stay on women’s hospital ward that doesn’t mean you won’t see a cismale doctor, cleaner, hca or nurse. And of course, a male receiving healthcare will often receive female nursing care.)
There is also no data suggesting trans women represent a significant sexual threat to ciswomen, more than other ciswomen. Female cisgender abusers exist.
One of the Scottish TERFs - a cisgender woman - followed by a number of big names in their movement recently got convicted of sexual abuse and violence against children over a period of years. But that can't have happened if she didn't have a penis! Someone tell the court!
Honestly this penis obsessed stuff! A male friend of ours kept going on about it. I don't want to know what someone has in their pants- I want to know if they're a controlling creep or a misogynist (there are plenty female misogynists - look at Trump voters). If we start saying someone who doesn't look like they have a penis is safe then that is helping people like Nicola Murray to get away with it - she was a domestic violence campaigner!
It’s not about the odds, any more than the idea that all men are potential rapists is about the odds of any given man being a genuine risk. It’s about being able to feel safe.
The last couple of posts seem to me to be arguing that penis-free spaces are neither effective nor safe, and can therefore be discarded in the name of trans inclusion regardless of what any women who find them valuable may think. I can understand why some women may be upset about that.
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Self-understanding is not arbitrary.
Whereas someone else imposing a gender identity on someone can be arbitrary. Which is why if we want to avoid arbitrary assignment of identity the only option is for self-identity to be the deciding factor.
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Self-understanding is not arbitrary.
It is if it’s not based on any reason, rationale or definition other than personal preference.
Whereas someone else imposing a gender identity on someone can be arbitrary.
Defining gender by which genitalia one has is the opposite of arbitrary, whether you agree with that definition or not.
If a man (for the sake of argument someone who has always identified themselves as a boy or man) has a nasty accident and his penis has to be removed, does that then mean he isn't a man? If someone has XY chromosomes but because certain chemical signals were not received during early development they failed to develop a penis, does that mean they're not male? If there is disagreement in the answer to those questions, and similar, then by definition decisions based on genitalia are arbitrary.
Defining gender by which genitalia one has is the opposite of arbitrary, whether you agree with that definition or not.
We can't tell or define from genitalia. It's not 'agree with it or not' it's whether we want to be wilful denialists in the service of harming trans+ people and intersex people or not.
Determination of biological sex is staggeringly complex, involving not only anatomy but an intricate choreography of genetic and chemical factors that unfolds over time.
And back to what I was saying about how this is like creationism - just because people want Adam and Eve to be literally true and it all to be nice and simple does not miraculously dissolve the evidence to the contrary.
God made things complex - sorry but She/He/They are terrible like that, it's so upsetting - and what is that thing with all the beetles? How come there's so many and marvellous varieties of them and they're not all in the Bible - oh I dunno- maybe we're meant to look at all the fascinating and multifarious complexity! And not ( to mix my metaphors) go around breaking butterflies on the wheel because we want to work in crude binaries and find the complexity of others upsetting and disturbing.
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Self-understanding is not arbitrary.
It is if it’s not based on any reason, rationale or definition other than personal preference.
Preference doesn't really come into it. That's like saying someone with aphantasia has a preference for not visualising things.
It is if it’s not based on any reason, rationale or definition other than personal preference.
I really think you should try to read some trans-people talking about this. Because personal preference implies that one has some choice in how one feels, and trans-people very much do not feel they have a choice.
(Mind you, there are questions I do not know the answer to and which I can't find trans-people talking about online and it's rude to badger people for answers. But any speculations that I supply in response to my question are not facts or evidence.)
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I haven't checked the ruling to see if that is the case but I don't know if any other ruling which might be thought to have set the legal precedent. Outside of legal precedents, biological understanding has moved on in the last 55 years and no professional biologist would agree that biological sex was binary. So I think the 1970 ruling does not provide a proper basis for the current UK Supreme Court ruling.
Roz Kaveney [own voice on this] was saying related things on Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/rozkaveney.bsky.social/post/3lncumgz4m227
( Bold mine)
Gemma Stone of transwrites was also weighing in about the kind of chilling effect I was mentioning
https://bsky.app/profile/gemma.transwrites.world/post/3lncwldf5hc24
These kind of chilling effects are very very real - people and small businesses can't afford to get sued even if they would win the case. Large ones can be very risk averse. The trans people haters and persecutors have money and use it to wage war on trans people and allies who they know can't afford legal cases.
So while it's a useful exercise to look at what the judgement says, trans people are right that its effects will be wider and more pernicious.
And also Hodge's concept of 'biological sex' is just old fashioned anti-scientific bigotry dressed up in a 'sciency' sounding word. It's not scientific - it's using the word 'biological' to pretend it is when it isn't.
Even using the lowest factor that is still many thousands of folks in the UK.
Biological sex, even by restrictive standards of measurement, is non binary.
And there is also a mutability argument dependent on physical development.
The chapter on "TERFs and British Matters of Sex" in Judith Butler's book Who's Afraid of Gender? is pertinent, to the ruling and the circumstances in which it came about.
Two points come to mind, particularly in relation to quetzacoatl's point: From the above-mentioned chapter:
And the following quote conveys something of the danger of the incoherent attitudes underlying the ruling, not just to trans people - those most immediately and directly threatened - but also to many of those who called for the ruling and see it as some kind of victory.
Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia
I'm leaving a couple of Scientific American links here so people can see something of how far out he is
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. The actual science gets ignored for stuff that sounds like science but isn't.
I've also thought the point of folks like him, if you get into "selfish genome" is that the universe is a free space. We're all free to figure ourselves out. If you're an atheist, it's a huge canvas upon which we can project our fancies, or study the fine grain of its weft and weave. If you're a theist, God put us here to be free.
Either way, I simply cannot understand the virtue in expending so much effort in fixating on the genitalia of a very small number of generally harmless humans.
Dawkins and his ilk always seemed to resent the religious tendency to try to enforce arbitrary and capricious limits on human behavior, as if we were playing God with our neighbors. I think that was always the better side of their movement. If they lost that, that's a shame.
In 2019, Sophie Lewis wrote in the New York Times article How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans:
Also, of course, many radical feminists really wanted to dismantle gender roles altogether, as opposed to modern gender-critical activists who seem only to be critical of gender roles when they don't match gender assigned at birth.
Who said anything about being 'a full human'?
Or, in the same article, 'that legal rights and social possibilities should flow from (a binary gamete divide).' - pretty sure Dawkins wasn't intimating that view. Of course 'body systems overlap' and worms and some fish can change sex sometimes -this is probably known by anyone who has studied biology at school.
This fails to engage with the argument in the piece; namely that systems where some have rights and some don't are always justified by dehumanisation, simply because they can't sit alongside a universal conception of rights.
I think The UK TERF movement has prospered because of the help of some prominent wealthy supporters and a lot of transphobic messaging from particular sections of the press. In the process it has targeted a very small section of the public as potentially harmful. Wider human rights considerations seem to have been set aside.
I don’t know how unusual the UK is in this respect. EU law would seem to be an obstacle to aggressive attacks on the human rights of minorities but unfortunately we are no longer in the EU.
Personally I do not understand why TERFs cannot see the wider human rights issue.
I think it's a bit like the "equality" that opponents of equal marriage would cite - gay and straight people are both equally entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex.
TERFs appear to take the view that trans women are men and have the same human rights as other men.
Trans men seem to bother them less.
It suits this group of the far right and religious conservatives to hide behind female persecutors to try to frame this toxic and retrograde persecution as 'feminism' and thus cloud the role of the religious and far right. They'd like to frame it as women v trans people when many trans people are women. We should reject this framing.
(Not the least as a woman I don't want to be associated with female persecutors of trans people or to have anyone think they speak for me - they don't. And the gender policing the persecutors are so enthusiastic about endangers women and other genders - so not in my name )
Gender roles and gender identity aren't the same thing. You can be a woman who likes to do "traditionally male" things whilst being completely certain that you are a woman.
However, I think it's important to pay attention to feminist critiques of what happened - how and why some feminists came to align themselves with anti-feminist ideologies.
Judith Butler again: The question for feminists such as Judith Butler is how to form new coalitions and whether feminism can "join in an alliance against the forces of destruction rather than become a destructive force allied with other such forces". But maybe that's beyond the scope of this forum.
It is not peculiarly British. It is standard fare for American anti-trans rhetoric to include 'biological' arguments.
I wish you were right about the red herring but I’m not sure you are. Of course I accept entirely your point about powerful old male misogynists. But watching the celebrations outside the UK Supreme Court made it very clear that the women’s groups concerned saw it as a victory for them. The linkage with far right misogyny may be inadvertent and unfortunate, but it is clearly there.
It was in part my point that victims of one form of prejudice may nevertheless be blind to other forms.
And it's all a pretext. They don't actually care about biology (otherwise they'd engage with the ways that biology is more complicated than their middle-school level understanding). They're not interested in science - they're interested in slogans.
Translucent has the whole cut part here [there was a typo in it which I corrected] which I think is worth seeing
https://translucent.org.uk/the-censoring-off-judith-butler/
The biology they care about, as far as I can tell, is the idea that females do not have penises.
My speculation is that for the women among them that’s rooted in a fear of potential rape from someone they would assume to be safe. I’d note that it’s been stated several times here that it’s reasonable for women to have that fear around all men based simply on the fact that they could do it - that is, in fact, a significant part of the justification for women-only spaces in the first place. Personally, I can understand the view that allowing people who have penises into those women-only spaces negates the very reason for their existence.
For the men among them, I think it’s rooted in the baser fear that they may inadvertently end up taking home a woman only to find that she has a penis, a fear that’s been expressed in popular culture at least as far back as The Kinks’ Lola (1970) and the movie The Crying Game (1992). While I can understand that fear on a visceral level, I find it much harder to sympathise with given how rooted it is in the misogynistic view of women as little more than potential sexual partners for men.
Trans men tend not to be regarded as as much of an issue, which I suspect is simply because they present as male and therefore would not be considered “safe” in the first place by either the women or the men described above.
Though in the case of “Lola,” the singer winds up perfectly happy with Lola, regardless of Lola’s gender, if I read the lyrics right.
And of course you are much more likely to be assaulted by a cisgender man of your acquaintance.
Rates of offending in the cisgender population are just higher.
Not if you’re in a women-only space.
I don’t live in a toilet or a changing room though - and in a woman only space that permits trans women I’d still be more likely to be assaulted by a cisgender person than a trans person - because cisgender people have 5 times the crime rate.
(For that matter most women only spaces having little signs telling you they may be cleaned by male staff - so the idea that women only spaces don’t contain cisgender males is false. Likewise, if you stay on women’s hospital ward that doesn’t mean you won’t see a cismale doctor, cleaner, hca or nurse. And of course, a male receiving healthcare will often receive female nursing care.)
There is also no data suggesting trans women represent a significant sexual threat to ciswomen, more than other ciswomen. Female cisgender abusers exist.
Honestly this penis obsessed stuff! A male friend of ours kept going on about it. I don't want to know what someone has in their pants- I want to know if they're a controlling creep or a misogynist (there are plenty female misogynists - look at Trump voters). If we start saying someone who doesn't look like they have a penis is safe then that is helping people like Nicola Murray to get away with it - she was a domestic violence campaigner!
The last couple of posts seem to me to be arguing that penis-free spaces are neither effective nor safe, and can therefore be discarded in the name of trans inclusion regardless of what any women who find them valuable may think. I can understand why some women may be upset about that.
If gender roles can’t be used to define gender, and neither can biology or morphology, then what the heck can? Is it just inherently arbitrary, and therefore meaningless?
Self-understanding is not arbitrary.
It is if it’s not based on any reason, rationale or definition other than personal preference.
Defining gender by which genitalia one has is the opposite of arbitrary, whether you agree with that definition or not.
We can't tell or define from genitalia. It's not 'agree with it or not' it's whether we want to be wilful denialists in the service of harming trans+ people and intersex people or not.
Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination
Here's the graphic from the article
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/164FE5CE-FBA6-493F-B9EA84B04830354E_source.jpg
And back to what I was saying about how this is like creationism - just because people want Adam and Eve to be literally true and it all to be nice and simple does not miraculously dissolve the evidence to the contrary.
God made things complex - sorry but She/He/They are terrible like that, it's so upsetting - and what is that thing with all the beetles? How come there's so many and marvellous varieties of them and they're not all in the Bible - oh I dunno- maybe we're meant to look at all the fascinating and multifarious complexity! And not ( to mix my metaphors) go around breaking butterflies on the wheel because we want to work in crude binaries and find the complexity of others upsetting and disturbing.
Preference doesn't really come into it. That's like saying someone with aphantasia has a preference for not visualising things.
(Mind you, there are questions I do not know the answer to and which I can't find trans-people talking about online and it's rude to badger people for answers. But any speculations that I supply in response to my question are not facts or evidence.)